Government won't commit to releasing names of MPs who allegedly conspired with foreign actors - "Senior cabinet ministers wouldn't say Tuesday if the government is prepared to release the names of parliamentarians who are alleged to have conspired with foreign governments and to have consciously shared sensitive information with their agents — conduct that one expert says could amount to treason... When asked if she could guarantee that the Liberals will eject from their caucus any parliamentarian found to have engaged in the activities cited in the report, Freeland would not make that commitment... the committee also found that foreign actors from India and the People's Republic of China allegedly interfered in more than one race for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada — claims the party said Monday it wasn't aware of before the NSCIOP report was released."
'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Producer Seth Rogen Says That If Media Critics Knew How Much Negative Criticisms "Hurt The People That Made The Things, They Would Second-Guess The Way They Write"
If you don't shut up and consume, you're a bad person
Sounds like movie and TV critics shouldn't have jobs, since products should only get positive reviews
As Critics Savage Movies, More Actors And Directors Strike Back - "Blame social media, the proliferation of news outlets, or our increasingly sensitive times when being a victim is the greatest status possible. Now, some creatives are lashing out when their work draws angry reviews from the expanding critical classes. Rotten Tomatoes, not only lets artists see a gaggle of reviews in one glance but offers a crisp summation of the critical community. Fresh … or rotten. And the artists are paying attention. It’s why actress Rachel Zegler cried foul (on Twitter) when “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” scored a meek 52% “rotten” score you-know-where... It’s worth noting Rogen can be pretty cruel himself, lashing out at conservatives and, more specifically, once demeaning former Rep. Paul Ryan in front of his children."
Montreal teens busted on child porn charges after allegedly peddling saved Snapchat nudes of underage friends - "Child pornography, peddled by children. That’s the serious accusation levelled at 10 adolescents arrested Thursday in the Montreal area. The boys allegedly coaxed their friends and girlfriends into posing for pictures they later shared among themselves. Aged between 13 and 15 years old, they were arrested in a sweep early Thursday in Laval, a suburb just north of Montreal."
Meme - Avi @avighnash: "Linkedin cannot be real"
Bryan Shankman: "I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. Here's what it taught me about B2B sales:"
Meme - One Arm Scissor @Boomer843: "If you don't know the difference between "there," "their" and "they're" your a idiot."
Well this is awkward"
Meme - "When you invite her to watch LOTR but she starts getting naked"
"I do not think that we should so ligjtly abandon the outer defenses"
Meme - *Black man in Milo-themed outfit and with Milo-themed props*
Meme - "The lord works in mysterious ways
When ya side chick wants to take a pic but you are protected by the lord God himself *black girl beside guy whose face is hidden by lens flare*"
Meme - "Nudes??"
"He asked hopefully..."
"Don't me shy!"
"He said creepily..."
"What do you mean??"
"He questioned stupidly..."
"You gonna send me nudes or what??"
"He continued moronically..."
"You fucking weird stupid bitch!"
"He declared angrily..."
"You can't message this account."
Meme - "I HAVE A PLEASURE ROOM. DO YOU WANT TO SEE? *couple sleeping with open pizza boxes with pizzas inside on top of them*"
Meme - "Hold on. time out. Stop the bike. Let me get this straight... The T800 sells drapes and goes by the name of Carl... and John Connor dies in the first 5 minutes? Who wrote this shit?"
"You did. 28 years from now you join forces with Tim Miller and six screenwriters to urinate all over your legacy"
"This is deep"
Deirdre Beecher's answer to As a Western European, do you feel 'culturally closer' to other Western Europeans or to Americans? - Quora - "Ireland looks to the USA for a lot, and I get the feeling that some Irish people would answer that they feel culturally closer to the USA than they do to an Austrian or a Greek.
I personally feel closer to other Western Europeans. I lived in Australia for a year and although I really enjoyed it. I remember being glad to be returning to Ireland. There is a density, depth and layering to European cultures, that I didn't realise I'd miss until I expirenced its lack. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. Its just different.
Its made up of war, religion, art, trade, philosophy, and the movement of ideas, all squeezed together under pressure. Its visiting Greece and discovering they they too have trees where they say a prayer, make a wish and tie a piece of cloth to the tree. (In Ireland they are called Fairy Trees.). Its going to Denmark and seeing bog bodies who died horriably, just like the ones in Ireland. Its like going to Mostar in Bosnia Herz and seeing the bullet marks in the wall, and beging able to understand how two peoples who lived next to each other for generations, could feel the need to rip each other apart."
Meme - "Mexico fucking nailed it with food man they were just like here's a tortilla, meat, & cheese. the tortilla's open. u like that? uh oh, remix, now it's closed. still delicious. unreal"
Crémieux on X - "In large families, there's usually someone sick with a viral infection, symptomatic or otherwise. The culprit looks to be young kids. In this cohort, people younger than age five were sick about half of the time."
Meme - Kelly Hobson: "Senior Leader I Cock Sucker I Sustainability I Content Strategy I In...
Morning all, my account has not been hacked. I posted to admit I've been having an affair for the last 9 months to a year and it came to a head (pardon the pun) yesterday when my husband noticed the photo is sent of me with two fingers up my vagina to Gareth Megson of SoftCat (Leeds), to which he responded to with a picture of his lenisnout on a desk. I'd flashed up on Instagram and my husband saw it. I have moved out of the family home which I have wrecked, having previously shared it with me 3 children, and am currently setting up temporary home in a friends spare room. Due to the issues being experienced I am not working for the reminder of the week but will be back in full flow (work wise) next week. Thank you all for your concern, but it really is not necessary. I am a big beliver in living by your decisions and owning them, regardless of their type."
Yang on X - "Great article here about the stark decline in educational standards over time. Idiocracy is becoming less like a dystopian comedy and more like a documentary."
Is This the End of Reading? - "In short, professors say students are coming into college with a host of new and alarming learning challenges, including fragmented and distracted thinking, along with sharper limits on what they are willing or able to do. What do you do when students don’t — or can’t — do the work? I t seems like professors have always complained about students not doing the reading or not reading in depth. And they have often been right. One study published in 2000 found that just 20 percent of students normally did their class reading in 1997 — down from 80 percent in 1981. Another study, published in 2013, found that research papers written by first-year students largely used sources superficially, often quoting from the first or second page and citing just a couple of sentences. But in a widely read essay for Slate magazine published in February, Adam Kotsko argued that the literacy crisis he has seen among his students is different. He describes it as a “conspiracy without conspirators.” No one deliberately set out to design a system in which students were not taught the skills they need to become effective readers, critical thinkers, and cogent writers, he believes. But that is the result... Melissa Rich, a freshman at Stevens Institute of Technology, says she felt the effects of lowered expectations in her own high-school classes during the pandemic... For years, Spier has asked his first-semester composition students to write a personal literacy narrative. They used to tell stories of parents reading to them at night or taking them to the library or reading a newspaper at the table. Now those narratives describe how students read posts on Twitter or Instagram or comments on TikTok... Stephanie Stama, assistant director of community education and outreach in the department of counseling and psychological services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, points to a study that documents notable changes in people’s personality traits during the height of the pandemic. Through surveys, researchers measured traits such as neuroticism, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Among younger adults, neuroticism increased, while agreeableness and conscientiousness decreased. The degree of change was something that would normally take place over the span of 10 years, she says, “but seen in a short time frame.” According to Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health, which tracks students who seek counseling on their campuses, rates of generalized anxiety and social anxiety have moved steadily upward since 2010. So, while the pandemic certainly exacerbated students’ anxiety, those trend lines were climbing before it hit. Brett Scofield, executive director of the center, noted that social media may contribute to this dynamic by encouraging students to constantly compare themselves to the people they see on their screens... Americans are increasingly isolated and losing social connections"
Clearly, pushing for more of the population to go into higher education is the way to go, because everyone is equally capable. Signalling is totally not a thing
The article admits that equitable grading may be to blame. I'm surprised they could publish that
If you opposed school closures during covid, you were a heartless monster who wanted grandma to die
Stefan Schubert on X - "Study found that professors teaching quantitative courses received worse student evaluations An implication is that they are "far more likely not to receive tenure, promotion, and/or merit pay when their performance is evaluated against common standards""
Sven Etienne Peterson on X - "The EU produces less technological innovation than Japan, an older society about a quarter of its size."
Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 on X - "Making this per capita, it yields:
USA: 14.63 world-class patents in advanced digital technology per 100,000 people
South Korea: 11.62
Japan: 9.68
EU: 2.23
China: 1.99"
The cope will be that patents are unrelated to innovation
Can Europe’s economy ever hope to rival the US again? - "Europe’s economic underperformance has long worried policymakers. But it has surged to the top of their agenda now that the growth gap with the US has become even wider following the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine... Even the head of Norway’s oil fund, one of the world’s biggest investors, says it is “worrisome” how much more hard-working, ambitious and lightly regulated US companies and workers are than those in Europe... Average per capita income levels in purchasing-power-parity terms in Europe have fallen to around one-third below those in the US, according to the IMF. What’s more, per capita income in the US has overtaken all the major advanced economies of the EU and the fund forecasts this gap will only widen further over the rest of this decade... Isabel Schnabel, an ECB executive, says the Eurozone has lost about 20 per cent of productivity relative to the US since the mid-1990s, attributing this to the continent’s “failure to reap the benefits of digital technology developments” such as cloud computing and software applications. “It is not that this technological knowledge is not distributed across countries, but it is only a very small share of firms within countries that make efficient use of it,” she says. Schnabel adds that many European companies are too small and constrained by regulation to fully exploit new technology. Companies with more than 250 employees account for almost 60 per cent of private sector jobs in the US, but in the EU this falls to between 12 per cent in Greece and 37 per cent in Germany. “Larger firms invest more and are more productive,” she says... US productivity was boosted by the temporary surge in unemployment after the pandemic hit in 2020, which reshuffled people into new and more productive roles once activity picked back up. Europe instead chose to protect jobs with massive furlough schemes. “We froze our labour market,” says Boata at Allianz, adding that this resulted in “zombified jobs”."
Nick Huber on X - "I quit alcohol for 6 weeks. I noticed nothing. Only less time with friends, laughter, less vibrant conversation. Went home earlier. Said no to more social things. Started drinking casually again. All those things returned."
🌥️sydney on X - "Harry Potter pulls an unrealistically low number of bitches considering his exorbitant fortune and worldwide fame"
Bachman on X - "The 1976 Soweto student uprising is mythologized as an early noble skirmish in the fight against Apartheid. But the commencing act of violence was a student stabbing a female teacher with a screwdriver because he didn't want to learn Afrikaans."
Razib 🥥 Khan 🧬 📘✍️📱 on X - "Under the skin https://razibkhan.com/p/under-the-skin?r=u0rd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web In the 2004 satirical South Park episode “Goobacks,” humans from a poor, overcrowded future time travel to the present, and begin to compete with native Coloradans for jobs. The episode is notable for its durable memes about a working-class fixation on “muh jerbs.” But it also reflects a widespread vision of the future of humanity. The refugees looked very similar to each other, all with a skin of a light red-brown shade. After hundreds of generations of racial intermarriage, the presumption is that salient physical differences will have disappeared through blending, producing a uniform and homogenous future population. This view is even anticipated in the shorter term in mainstream US media, with phrases such as “the browning of America” cropping up in the public discourse. This idea’s roots go back to the 19th and 20th centuries, due to eugenic concerns on the part of white Europeans and Americans about the integrity of their race. Racist works like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy reflected an alarmist fear of being swamped out and assimilated. A world of white supremacy giving way to monotonous brownness. Today this beige future is viewed more positively. But both visions are rooted in the simple fact that skin color is the most socially significant marker of human identity after sex. Skin is the largest organ, and our complexions signal both age and health. Our species cares a great deal about what skin looks like for evolutionarily significant reasons. But skin color has also become wrapped up in fraught dynamics in recent epochs of world history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously hoped his children would not be judged by “the color of their skin.” Whereas in Europe ethnic distinctions are rooted in history, and reflect nuances of language, nationality and geography, like the difference between the French and Germans, in America the two traditionally dominant racial groups are denoted starkly by skin color, white and black. As a society, we have color on the brain, so most think they have some grasp of how the characteristic is inherited. But the intuition derived from blending-inheritance models that future human populations will be overwhelmingly brown is false. Genetics does not blend but rearranges variation, so while the average person in the future is more likely to have a brown shade, white and black extremes will never disappear. Skin color clearly varies, with populations in the far north and far south having lighter complexions than ones around the equator. But so much remains to be understood about the origin and persistence of variation in color. In the last few decades, genetics has uncovered that these characteristics evolved incredibly recently in the sweep of human history, and continue evolving into the present. Whether your complexion is light or dark is not a deep-time characteristic, but often a quite recent development. No clear model exists for why humans grow pale in some geographical regions, and not in others. Only with new technologies such as ancient DNA have we come to realize that Northern Europeans 3,000 years ago were darker than they are today. And these surprises go back to the root of our lineage; even Neanderthals varied in complexion."
Men evaluate the axillary (i.e., armpit) sweat of sexually aroused women as more attractive, compared to the scent of the same women when not sexually aroused. Exposure to these sexual chemosignals increases men’s own sexual arousal. : r/psychologyofsex
Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence that Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal
Sainsbury's staff beat up shoplifter after dragging him into back room - "The man appears distressed and is heard shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, Arabic for God is Greatest and ‘I’m sorry’."
Meme - "Never gets easier saying good bye to an old friend. Ill miss you mr snuggles *guinea pig in coils of white python*"
Meme - Keyarts @Keyarts_: "I'm going insane"
My Beautiful Life ("w): "this ice cream looks delicious *man screaming*"
Meme - *For the Better, Right?* Anakin: "You know what I love about you?"
Padme: "It's my smile, right?"
Anakin:
Padme with big exposed breasts: "It's my smile, right?"
Meme - Fonda Lee: "This is what modern fantasy writers are up against. In my local B&N, most authors are lucky to find a copy of their book, super lucky if it's face out. There are 3.5 shelves for Tolkien. 1.5 for Jordan. Here's who we compete against for shelf space: not each other, but dead guys."
"NooOoO Why are old dead men more popular than meeeee"
"Write better books"
Twilight of the Wonks - "discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that. The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years... Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires. Leaders recruited from these ranks will rarely shine when crisis strikes. The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust... Access to higher education was significantly widened, but the gulf between those with bachelor’s and post-baccalaureate degrees and the rest of the population also widened. There was a day when most American lawyers had never studied in law school, and when many, like Abraham Lincoln, lacked even a high school degree. Today, entrance to the profession is much more highly controlled and those without the requisite degrees face nearly insuperable barriers. At the same time, the relationship between higher education and social leadership has largely broken down. In pre-modern times, university graduates were almost entirely recruited from the upper classes, and their university study was consciously intended to equip them for the exercise of real power and leadership. The pre-modern university was dedicated to the artisanal production of new generations of elite leaders in a handful of roles closely related to the survival of the state. The modern university produces scientists, bureaucrats, managers, and assorted functionaries on an industrial scale to provide governments and the private sector with a range of skilled professionals and knowledge workers, most of whom will spend their lives following orders rather than giving them. One measure of the change is to contrast the credentials of past generations with what is routinely expected of professionals today. Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10 years old. There were no economics departments or doctorates anywhere in the world when Alexander Hamilton, who was unable to complete his undergraduate studies at the then-Kings College of New York (now Columbia), designed the first central bank of the United States. None of the Founding Fathers were as well credentialed or thoroughly vetted as utterly mediocre, run-of-the-mill lawyers and political scientists are today... Neither Ulysses Grant nor Robert Lee held a doctorate or had any formal professional training after graduating from West Point. Their lack of credentials would ensure that neither, today, would be considered for senior command in any branch of the armed forces. Through most of the 19th century, American colleges and even elite universities did not require doctoral degrees of their faculty. Today, however, a person with George Washington’s educational credentials could not get a job teaching the third grade in any public school in the United States... “Medical knowledge is growing so rapidly that only 6 percent of what the average new physician is taught at medical school today will be relevant in ten years.” Not many people have the capacity to absorb and retain information at this pace through decades of active professional life... Today’s doctors are almost infinitely more scientifically educated than their 19th- and mid-20th-century predecessors, but they enjoy much less autonomy... in profession after profession, we see a similar loss of autonomy even as the degree of required technical skill increases... The central and privileged role that knowledge workers played in 20th-century economic life reshaped social hierarchies, political ideologies, cultural values, and the nature of power. The decline of the wonks will be as consequential as their rise... a bureaucracy is, from an information point of view, a primitive, costly, and slow method of applying algorithms (rules and regulations) to large masses of data. It seems likely that drastic reductions in the size of both public and private sector bureaucracies will be coming, along with major changes in the functions of the workers that survive the coming cuts. That must also lead to massive changes in the educational systems that prepare young people for careers... There is another force that is already undermining the ability of the learned and the credentialed to defend their places and privilege. It is one of the driving forces in modern history as a whole: the desire of ordinary people to rule themselves in their own way without the interference, well-intentioned or otherwise, of aristocrats, bishops, bureaucrats—or wonks."
The coherence of the left wing worldview is that it hates strength, success and "oppressors", while loving weakness, failure and the "oppressed"
Letters: May 16, 2024 - "Democracy is normally viewed as government for the people and by the people. Yet Jagmeet Singh, whose party won 25 seats and garnered only about 18% of the popular vote, is lecturing the official Opposition that won 119 seats and got almost 34% of the popular vote, the latter more than either Singh or Justin Trudeau. Singh needs to be reminded that not only did Canadians not vote for the socialist partnership he and Trudeau formed, but they also never voted to give him a mandate to implement dental and pharmacare plans. These plans will cost taxpayers billions annually. This bromance was formed solely so that Trudeau could stay in power until 2025 and Singh could get his wishlist filled for supporting him. Let’s hope that in 2025 Singh-Trudeau actually run as one socialist party and allow voters to decide if that is what they want governing them."
