Conservative Party on X - "Justice Hogue’s decision to deny the Conservative Party full standing at the public inquiry into foreign interference ruins the credibility of the inquiry. Justin Trudeau will have government lawyers with full standing that represent his party’s interests. No other political party will have the same participation rights. The Conservative Party was the prime victim of foreign interference in the previous elections according to leaked documents. Excluding the Conservative Party from having full standing on the impact of foreign interference while allowing the Trudeau government to participate fully makes the result of the commission beyond repair."
The Time George Washington Prevented A Military Coup With His Glasses - "In 1780, Congress promised Continental Army officers a lifetime pension of half of their pay following their discharge. However, just two years later, the pay was stopped as a cost-saving measure and promised as future backpay... As ever, Congress was divided on the matter. The national treasury was depleted by the war and Congress lacked the power to draw funds from the states. A tax proposal was struck down for fear that it could be used by Congress to raise funds for itself. The members of Congress continued to deliberate, but could not reach an agreeable solution... he pulled out a letter from a member of Congress to read to the officers. However, Washington simply gazed upon the letter and fumbled with it. Then, he pulled out a new pair of glasses and said, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” In the 18th century, glasses were far less common than they are today, and the levels of healthcare and life expectancy were similarly lower. For Washington to produce his glasses before his officers, most of whom had never seen him with spectacles, was an admittance of age and weariness. This great hero of the American Revolution that they had followed for years reduced himself to an old man before their eyes. Washington’s display of vulnerability brought many of the officers to tears. Their gripes over pay were eclipsed by Washington’s own sacrifices and the conspiracy of a coup dissolved as he read the letter from behind his glasses... Washington delivered the anonymous letters to Congress which James Madison called “alarming intelligence”. A final agreement was reached for five years of full pay rather than the lifetime pension. Government bonds were issued and, though many were wary of their value, were redeemed in full by the new government in 1790. Congressional financier Robert Morris issued $800,000 worth of personal notes to soldiers upon the disbanding of the Continental Army in 1783."
Hope is the thing with feathers — memory-thought: machigaeru - "I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli
Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive
Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics
Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible
Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun
Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly"
Relive Wonder Woman's "history lesson" with this gorgeous artwork - "If you’ve seen Wonder Woman, you know that the audience is treated to a “history lesson” at the beginning of the movie which depicts the Amazon’s relationship with the Gods. Concept artist Houston Sharp and his team created some of the digital paintings that were brought to life in the movie, and he shared some of them on his ArtStation page."
Zannone: Italy's forbidden 'orgy island' - "“See that white colonial villa up high there?” says former fisherman Giorgio Aniello as he points a rough finger at a clifftop villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. “That’s where the Marquis Casati Stampa held lavish sex parties.” Aniello is a regular visitor to Zannone, taking tourists on boat trips to the wildest atoll among the Pontine archipelago off the west coast of Italy. The big attraction, aside from the island’s natural beauty, is its dark, sexy past, most of which centers around the Marquis and his wife, Anna Fallarino, a former actress. “He was a lewd man, a voyeur who liked to watch and photograph his starlet wife get kinky having sex with with other younger guys,” Aniello adds, enjoying spinning R-rated tales as he navigates a maze of reddish-yellow cliffs, old stone fisheries and sea stacks. “Then one day he got fed up of the threesome, shot the two lovers and killed himself.” During the 1960s, Zannone – translated as “big fang” in Italian – was a secret vacation retreat that the chic and sexually adventurous aristocratic couple had rented from the state. “The nobleman went hunting while his beautiful wife killed time doing different activities,” says Aniello. These, he adds, included skinny dipping in ancient Roman pools and entertaining herself on the beach with other men. The isle’s isolation made it a perfect place to host masked parties that would culminate in debauched scenes reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” And its exotic setting matched the provocative nude photographs of Anna taken by her husband... According to rumors, the villa also featured a “hidden mirror room” to spy on heavy sex sessions... “It’s what we call a Pulcinella’s secret,” he adds, meaning everyone knew. Then things ran out of control. The erotic games ended in bloodshed in 1970 when Anna fell in love with one of her many handsome lovers. In a fit of jealousy, her husband killed the pair, then shot himself in the head in their attic in Rome. Italian tabloids rushed to publish parts of the marquis’s secret “green velvet diary,” in which he had apparently written in detail about his wife’s love triangles. The hottest finds, though, were the 1,500 indecent photos locked up in his office drawers."
What a hunter-gatherer diet does to the body - "Mounting evidence suggests that the richer and more diverse the community of microbes in your gut the lower your risk of disease. Diet is key to maintaining diversity and was strikingly demonstrated when an undergrad student went on a McDonald’s diet for ten days and after just four days experienced a significant drop in the number of beneficial microbes... We tend to see the biggest diet-related shifts in microbes in people who are unhealthy with a low-diversity unstable microbiome. What we didn’t know is whether a healthy stable gut microbiome could be improved in just a few days. The chance to test this in an unusual way came when my colleague Jeff Leach invited me on a field trip to Tanzania, where he has been living and working among the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups in all of Africa. My microbiome is pretty healthy nowadays and, among the first hundred samples we tested as part of the MapMyGut project, I had the best gut diversity – our best overall measure of gut health, reflecting the number and richness of different species. High diversity is associated with a low risk of obesity and many diseases. The Hadza have a diversity that is one of the richest on the planet... The good news was my gut microbal diversity increased a stunning 20%, including some totally novel African microbes, such as those of the phylum Synergistetes. The bad news was, after a few days, my gut microbes had virtually returned to where they were before the trip"
Ulwaluko and other tribal traditions - "The San of South Africa, Botswana, Angola and Namibia are, according to some researchers, the world's oldest people. Their hunter-gatherer culture stretches back tens of thousands of years, and integral to it is the trance dance, also known as the healing dance. Historically an all-night affair, the practice brings the whole community together, led by healers and elders dancing around a fire, chanting and breathing deeply until they induce a trance state. It offers the chance to commune with ancestral spirits of the departed and for healers, cure sickness within other dancers. Lewis says that this tradition is under threat: "In some places in southern Africa the San now perform their traditional culture exclusively for tourists, because they've been forced out of all their territories as hunter-gatherers by conservationist organizations. This means that by extension... these performances are not the original initiations but a facsimile of them.""
Animals are more important than humans
British Culture - Communication - "It is best to make eye contact that breaks away now and again. Prolonged eye contact can make people feel uncomfortable, and staring is impolite."
50% of US beef is eaten by just 12% of Americans, mostly men : study - "People between the ages of 50 and 65 were also more likely to eat a heftier portion of beef."
Meet the Israelis Who Are Trying to Physically Block the Ethnic Cleansing Unfolding in the West Bank - Israel News - Haaretz.com
The right wing anti-Semites are going to be very surprised. And it's not like Haaretz doesn't publish this sort of thing all the time
I Am Mystified and Horrified By the Long Egg - "The so-called long egg is a log of boiled egg, slender and cylindrical in shape; tubular, like a poster sleeve. Imagine: Taking the ovum from a chicken and mutating it so strenuously, with such unforgiving force, that it suddenly resembles a yolk-filled PVC pipe. Mortifying... long eggs have been around since 1974, conceived for the mass market in Denmark by a company called Danæg, who sells the product to this day. It was once created with the aid of an instrument called the SANOVO 6-32. The long egg's use case is pretty clear if you dislodge yourself from the aggressive unpleasantness of its appearance: You can slice evenly sized coins from your boiled egg, rather than the variously sized slabs you'd get from a garden-variety ovular egg. Convenient!"
Senior BBC worker who called Jews an 'invader species' is finally sacked - as workers say it is a 'grim' and 'frightening' time to be Jewish at the corporation - "Dawn Queva, a BBC scheduler, shared a string of hateful messages on Facebook. She described the Holocaust as a 'holohoax'... speciality from southern denmark hard boiled One message claims the Ashkenazi Jews are 'a bunch of subcontinental European melanin recessive CaucAsian japhetic AshkeNazi who have no None zero zilch blood connection to the land of Palestine or Israel historically'. Another brands Jewish people an 'invader coloniser species'. Ms Queva also allegedly described white people as 'barbaric' and 'bloodthirsty'. In other posts, she referred to the UK as the 'UKKK' – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. Ms Queva, 55, a senior scheduler and playout planner for BBC Three, posted under the name Dawn Las Quevas-Allen. She previously worked in scheduling for A+E Networks, UKTV and Disney. She doubled down on her remarks after they came to light, challenging her critics to 'come at me... my shoulders are broad'... A Jewish worker said: 'Jewish colleagues are finding it really tough seeing everyone but our bosses condemning what we have seen.' They added: 'If the BBC is serious about standing up to anti-Semitism then it needs to practise what it keeps preaching and stand up to the hate crimes committed by one of its own staff.'"
She's going to blame her being fired on the Jews/the whites. The fact that she challenged critics to come at her suggests she thought she was invulnerable
Good vs Bad FANTASY Dialogue (Writing Advice) - YouTube - "There's six key markers of bad fantasy dialogue and the first one is that it is on the nose... when a character states exactly what he wants... there is no hidden meaning behind the words, no secret want, because everything is spelled out but most interesting people and certainly most interesting characters don't do this. Number two, bad dialogue has repeated beats. You want to avoid repeating the same statements or emotions. Instead each line of dialogue should aim to move your story forward. Number three: the as you know setup, when two characters explain things to each other that both of them already know. It feels fake and artificial. Number four: bad dialogue uses convoluted language. Sometimes in our efforts to produce memorable dialogue us writers can get carried away with complicated phrasing and extravagant word choice and this can again produce a fake feeling that yanks readers out of your fantasy world. Number five: bad dialogue uses contrived setups. This occurs when you make one character say something purely to give another character an opportunity to respond with this zinger or this one liner or some cool turn of phrase that you developed. Now this can be done well but oftentimes it creates a certain shattering of the reader's suspension of disbelief because it reminds them of the constructed and artificial nature of your story. And then lastly number six: bad fantasy dialogue uses info dumping. Particularly when writing fantasy novels, dialogue is a very tempting tool that you might want to reach for when it comes to describing your world, your magic, your politics, your setting, your history and all these other unique elements that you have created for your story. Now of course this can work but when over relied upon and used for the benefit of your reader rather than as a natural expression of what your characters would actually say to one another in that situation, it will again pull readers out of your story."
Meme - "The Love Rug strokes your bodies as you make love. Once you feel the sensuous delight of the furry Love Rug, you’ll never go back to an ordinary bed again. As you stroke, it strokes. The incredible soft, furlike fibers caress your bodies from head to toe. It’s almost like having another lover there with the two of you.The Love Rug is as beautiful to look at as it is to feel. Only another animal of its stripe could tell it wasn’t real fur. Only $150 in your favorite fur texture. Choose Mink, Lynx or Jaguar. But be sure to order now."
Meme - "Hooters 2024 *Men in wigs*"
Explainer-What is India's civil code and why does it anger Muslims? - "Uttarakhand, a small northern Indian state governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party, is set to pass a bill to replace religion-specific civil laws with a Uniform Civil Code, which could be used as a template by other states... many Muslims see it as curbing their religion, interfering with centuries-old practices such as polygamy... The constitution adopted in 1950 placed the code in a section that recommends laws for future governments. It encouraged the state to "endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory"... It bans polygamy, a practice allowed under Muslim laws that permit a man to have up to four wives. It sets minimum ages for men and women to marry. While Hindu and secular laws only allow men to marry at 21 and women at 18, there is no restriction for Muslims and other communities. It prohibits a person marrying relatives including cousins, uncles, aunts, which is allowed in many communities. It grants equal inheritance rights to sons and daughters... Muslim theologians see the new bill as a threat to Islamic law and religious practices such as polygamy. Muslims are India's largest minority, making up more than 14% of the population. A prominent Muslim body recently said that the proposed code goes against India's diversity. Some tribal groups have also opposed the code."
Why national flags appear backwards on planes - "Stephen Forshaw, Vice President Public Affairs of Singapore Airlines explains: “According to flag etiquette, which traces its origins back to shipping — and was reaffirmed in the earliest days of commercial aviation — a national flag should never be seen to be travelling backwards” Flag etiquette, Forshaw explains, dictates that flags should be displayed on planes as if they were physical objects, affected by the wind created by the plane’s momentum. Displaying them as we would normally recognize (i.e. with the American stars in the top left) would make it appear as if the plane is moving backwards... On both sides of the plane, the canton, or stars in America’s case, lead the way, as if the flag is attached to a flagpole on the fuselage. On the starboard side, the flag appears backwards, as above. On the port side, the flag appears ‘correct’, as below... While some adaptions occur, generally this convention is applied to any instance in which a national flag is printed on a moving object. A good example is the US army. The American flag is displayed ‘backwards’ on the soldier’s right soldier, with the stars leading as the soldier advances (into battle)."
How China Fell in Love With Cantonese Cooking - "What makes a perfect plate of Cantonese stir-fried beef and rice noodles? The secret is the oil. Like any stir fry, the dish requires a lot of fat, but the mark of a good chef is that none of that oil is transferred to the plate: The final product should be flavorful but never greasy. This culinary tip comes not from a cookbook, but the recent hit drama “Blossoms Shanghai,” which is partially set in a high-end Cantonese restaurant that doubles as a parlor for backroom business deals during China’s go-go ’90s. According to Zhou Songfang, a scholar of Cantonese culinary culture and the author of several books on the subject, including “The Introduction of Cantonese Cuisine to the North,” the setting makes sense. Although Cantonese cooking emerged in the kitchens of the country’s far south, it was its embrace by Shanghai’s trend-setting upper middle class — first during the early 20th century, then again in the 1990s and ’00s — that helped turn it from regional cuisine to national phenomenon... As late as the end of the Qing, however, the most popular regional cuisines in Shanghai were still Fujianese and Sichuanese. Both were characterized by rich, strong flavors, while Cantonese cuisine was seen as blander, and it struggled to win over diners from China’s north and interior provinces. Guangdong natives might enjoy drinking things like cordyceps soup (a variety of fungi), but people from inland found it watery. Cantonese cuisine also favored the use of aquatic products, and its fishy taste was a cultural shock to some diners. The elevation of Cantonese cuisine’s status is closely tied to the upheaval of the early 20th century. First, popular perceptions of Guangdong, long considered a backward region, underwent a significant transformation after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, as people from the province made major contributions to the overthrowing of the Qing. Chinese realized that “big things cannot be accomplished without people from Guangdong,” and Cantonese cuisine became associated with a revolutionary spirit. Then came the Northern Expedition, an attempt by southern revolutionaries to defeat the warlords dominating China and salvage the newborn republic, which raised the status of Guangdong people to new heights and made Cantonese cuisine trendier than Fujianese or Sichuanese. The Guangdong-born Sun Yat-sen, sometimes called the “father of modern China,” once remarked that, “for food, look to Guangzhou; for clothes, look to Suzhou.” At the same time, Cantonese restaurants had become highly competitive. Cantonese restaurants in cities like Shanghai pioneered large-scale modern catering services. Many managers had experience overseas, and they introduced modern concepts and business methods into the domestic catering industry. For example, Chinese gatherings traditionally occurred at round tables, but Cantonese restaurants introduced private booths for a more intimate setting. They also were among the first to adopt modern hygiene standards and an emphasis on kitchen cleanliness. Another competitive edge of Cantonese restaurants was their hours. For instance, restaurants like Xing Hua Lou and Guan Sheng Yuan in Shanghai, even when they expanded beyond snack food, didn’t abandon their tradition of serving late-night meals. These meals were served until one or two in the morning; a few hours later, they’d reopen for dim sum. At the time, this approach was unique to Cantonese restaurants in Shanghai. Even local restaurants in Guangzhou couldn’t match it — Guangzhou’s dim sum shops and late-night eateries were separate entities."
Looking back: Australia's Emu Wars - "Early on the morning of 2 November 1932, the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery alighted at Campion, WA, on to a hot red-dirt landscape about halfway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. There they unpacked two Lewis automatic machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The unit’s intention? To open hostilities with the emus of Western Australia that were moving in from central Australia in search of water and, having stumbled on the region’s delicious wheat districts, had begun to ravage crops... the Australian military had vastly underestimated the emu. Cunning adversaries, the emus proved almost impossible to hit with machine-gun fire, and they seemed able to shrug off even serious injury from bullets without breaking stride... “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world… They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.” A few days into operations, a planned ambush by a dam failed miserably when one of the Lewis guns jammed. A later attempt to mount a machine-gun on a truck fell apart when it was made apparent that the vehicle could not keep up with the birds. Within a week of first contact the troops were recalled. Roughly 2500 rounds had been fired and killed somewhere between 50 and 200 emus. Meredith did note that his men had suffered no casualties. When the question was raised if a medal would be struck for the conflict, federal labor parliamentarian A.E. Green replied that any medals should go to the emus who had ‘won every round so far’. For his involvement in the deployment, Defence Minister George Pearce earned the unofficial title ‘Minister for the Emu War’. Although a second (slightly) more successful military operation was mounted against the emus only a few days after the initial retreat in November 1932, in the end it was the instituting of a bounty on emus that proved most effective. Between 1945 and 1960 around 284,700 emus were killed in WA. Australia’s emu population, however, remains stable to this day. Thankfully, they do not seem interested in resuming hostilities with the Australian government."
Meme - u/Sniff_Gregor: "Are there any cheap drones that can carry a lot of cargo?"
Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Homosexual black swans form temporary threesomes with females to obtain eggs and then drive them away.
EDITORIAL: A costly marriage of political opportunism - "New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh’s constant threats to bring down the government if it doesn’t cave to his expensive whims are becoming irritating. Voters didn’t give him a mandate to bully legislators to spending more of our hard-earned tax dollars on programs we can’t afford, such as a pharmacare. Voters didn’t give Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a mandate to implement them either. It’s only through his tax-and-spend marriage of convenience with the NDP that Canadians got programs for which they didn’t vote. This week, Singh said the Supply and Confidence agreement, which guarantees NDP support for the Liberals, will fall apart if the government doesn’t bring in a pharmacare plan. He didn’t rule out voting with the government on confidence votes, such as the budget, however. That makes his threat hollow. He won’t bring down the government. He’s full of bluster... The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates the incremental cost of a single-payer universal drug plan, federal and provincial, to be $11.2 billion in 2024, increasing to $13.4 billion in 2027-28. When Conservatives accused Singh of supporting the government long enough for him to qualify for a pension, Singh made this grandiose statement: “Canadians elected us in this minority parliament; that was not our choice. I would rather have been prime minister.” Well, he’s not the PM and is unlikely to be so any time soon. Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem warned the Commons Finance Committee last week that out-of-control government spending will further fuel higher interest rates and inflation — both of which are making life miserable for Canadians. “If there are large spending increases … that could start getting in the way of getting inflation back down to target on the timeline we’ve laid out,” Macklem said."
Why Tipping Etiquette Makes Absolutely No Sense - "A 2016 study from Cornell University, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, found that people are twice as likely to tip a grocery delivery person than a grocery store clerk, and roughly twice as likely to tip a waiter than a fast-food restaurant worker. Why is that? A paid job is a paid job, right? The grocery deliverer is paid to deliver and the grocery clerk is paid to clerk. So tipping one and not the other only makes sense in terms of what has become customary. More examples from the study: Party clowns get tipped more often than dental hygienists—even though the latter bravely confront the malodorous insides of our mouths. Limousine drivers get rewarded more often than fishing guides. And nobody can work out the reasons for these differences; don’t fishing guides go the extra mile, too? All this is compounded by a phenomenon called “tip creep,” which coincides with the proliferation of portable pay machines that feature automatic tip prompts... Good luck with any consistency if you’re tipping in Europe. Research across seven European countries in 2020 found that Germans and Swedes are more likely to tip in restaurants than the Spanish or Swiss, while only 40 percent of French consumers offer a gratuity. Norwegians are the least likely to tip: fewer than 15 percent leave a little extra on the table. As for the size of the tip, it’s lowest in France and Norway (less than two percent of the bill), and highest in Germany (7.5 percent) and Sweden (nine percent). “From a service worker’s viewpoint,” lead study author Stefan Gössling of Sweden’s Lund University notes, “the most desirable tipping culture is probably in Germany, where minimum wages are high, tipping is a norm and tip percentages are high and mostly paid in cash.” In Spain, by contrast, “the situation for service workers is the least favourable; the minimum wage is low, as are tip percentages.”... No one expects a tip in much of Southeast Asia (for example, Thailand or Vietnam) or Australia, beyond saying “keep the change.” In Taiwan and Hong Kong, a 10 percent gratuity is added at most restaurants. Sometimes, that too can feel nerve-wracking. “Even when the server tells you about it up front, it’s awkward,” one friend who encountered this custom said. “Do you tip more if they were really good? What if they weren’t good?”"
Ethnic Differences in Tipping: Evidence, Explanations, and Implications - "Anecdotal evidence suggests that many waiters and waitresses deliver poor service to ethnic minorities because they believe that ethnic minorities are poor tippers. How managers should deal with this problem depends in part on whether or not ethnic minorities really do tip less than Whites and (if they do) on when and why this occurs. This paper reports on 2 studies that address these issues. The results indicate that Asians tip less than do Whites in comparisons across (but not within) restaurants and that Blacks tip less than do Whites in comparisons both across and within restaurants. Various explanations for these ethnic differences are tested, and the managerial implications of the results are discussed."
Equality under the law is Islamophobic. Banning polygyny is racist because under the progressive stack, Muslims are more oppressed than women
"Is there any security when driving into Times Square?"
"What place in the USA has the most people gathered?"
"Are the Australian bulldog ants hard to breed?"
"What is the most aggressive and venomous wasp?"
Same-sex sexual behavior in birds: expression is related to social mating system and state of development at hatching
