How many seats did Reform UK win - and why they don't match its vote share? - "Farage has seen his party win dozens fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats, despite winning a higher share of the national vote. By 9am, and with only a handful of seats left to declare, the picture of the election was already clear with the Lib Dems having secured 12% of the vote and 71 seats and Reform taking 14%, but only four seats. The Green Party also emerged with four MPs, despite having 7% of the total vote."
French leftists win most seats in elections, pollsters say. Lack of majority threatens turmoil - "The lack of majority for any single alliance threatened to plunge France into political and economic turmoil... Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally greatly increased the number of seats it holds, meanwhile, but fell far short of expectations... In a somber speech after the vote, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, denounced the political maneuvering that led the party to fall far short of expectations and blamed Macron for “pushing France into uncertainty and instability.” An unprecedented number of candidates who qualified for the runoff stepped aside to allow an opponent to go head-to-head with the National Rally candidate, increasing the chances of defeating them. “Tonight, by deliberately taking the responsibility to paralyze our institutions, Emmanuel Macron ... is consequently depriving the French people of any responses to their daily problems for many months to come,” Bardella said. A hung parliament with no single bloc coming close to getting the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority in the National Assembly, the more powerful of France’s two legislative chambers, would be unknown territory for modern France. Unlike other countries in Europe that are more accustomed to coalition governments, France doesn’t have a tradition of lawmakers from rival political camps coming together to form a working majority. The timing of France’s leap into the political unknown could hardly be worse: With the Paris Olympics opening in less than three weeks, the country will be grappling with domestic instability when the eyes of the world are upon it... Prolonged instability could increase suggestions from his opponents that Macron should cut short his second and last term. The French Constitution prevents him from dissolving parliament again in the next 12 months, barring that as a route to possibly give France greater clarity."
Why Marine Le Pen's rightwing National Rally lost France parliamentary election - "One key reason for the National Rally's defeat could be attributed to the strategic manoeuvring of centrist and leftist opponents, "who pulled out more than 200 candidates from three-way races to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote", according to a Reuters report. The National Rally's young president, Jordan Bardella, voiced his discontent with the outcome, accusing President Macron of steering France towards instability and aligning it with the so-called "extreme left". Bardella, National Rally's president, even denounced the "nexus" as an "unnatural alliance" on Sunday as the results started to pour in... The National Rally's overconfidence in projecting an absolute majority might have alienated voters too... In what could be an example of the National Rally (RN) digging its own grave, experts and reports pointed out internal flaws within the party, such as xenophobic remarks made by some candidates, casting doubt on the party's renewed outlook and efforts driven by Marine La Pen."
Weird. I thought winning the popular vote but not having the most seats showed that the system was broken
How France voted: Charts and maps - "the left bloc’s victory isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. The alliance between the radical France Unbowed, the Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communist Party held together for the national vote, but lacks coherence and a clear leader... The picture in the end is one of fragmentation, with no single group close to getting even 200 seats in the 577-seat legislature. The three main groups — the left, Maron’s centrists and the far right — will all struggle to assemble a stable majority, portending stalemate and paralysis in Paris. Macron may have prevented a Le Pen victory, but nobody really won."
When you literally vote for Communism
Aurélien Véron on X - "Quand ils perdent, ils saccagent pour exprimer leur déception. Quand ils gagnent, ils saccagent pour fêter ça. Les militants #LFI, on les reconnaît par leur constance"
Marguerite Stern on X - "Détruire les rues, détruire les corps, détruire les sexes, détruire notre civilisation, détruire le langage, détruire nos traditions, détruire nos institutions, détruire les hommes, détruire les femmes, détruire les enfants, détruire, détruire, détruire."
Harfang des Neiges on X - "en plus ils parlent jamais vraiment de ce qu'ils veulent construire après avoir tout détruit. pas mal sûr que Mélenchon veut construire une immense statue de lui-même (place Stalingrad?) mais à part ça je sais pas"
“Dr. Fruit” or “How Japan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Peel” - "my wife is not at all alone among Japanese people who refuse to eat the skins of certain fruits. However, in recent years, this trend has been changing according to a survey by Tropicana Japan and Dr. “Fruit” Motohashi. Tropicana surveyed 1,002 women about their fruit habits and among those who regularly ate fruit 87 percent responded that they would eat the peel of certain kinds of fruit. The other 12 percent said that they don’t eat the skin of fruit at all. And then there was one percent who said they eat the skin of all fruits who were clearly lying just to feel special. That first 87 percent was then asked what fruits they ate the skin of. Blueberries were the highest response with 76 percent of respondents eating the skins, apple came in second with 74 percent, and grape was third with only 69 percent of women not peeling. Dr. Motohashi believes this is a recent trend in Japan because people are becoming more aware of health issues and discovering that in addition to the flesh of the fruit, the skin is an excellent source of nutrition. He reminds people that eating peeled apples deprives them of antioxidants, potassium, calcium, vitamin C, and dietary fiber. We trust him because he looks really confident. He goes on to say that while this has only been recently studied in Japan, fruit skin nutrition has been well understood for decades in North America and Europe whose residents tend to eat it more."
Trump ally Nigel Farage gets doused with milkshake by OnlyFans model - "The protester was later identified as Victoria Thomas-Bowen, an OnlyFans model who supports left-wing former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn"
Why are left wingers so violent?
The U.K.’s unorthodox UnHerd: Leaving the mainstream media pack behind - "UnHerd was launched in 2017, as a response to what its founders saw as anti-Leave media bias in the deeply polarizing Brexit vote. It is owned by notable U.K. Conservative Party donor and one of the U.K.’s wealthiest hedge fund managers, Sir Paul Marshall. Not surprisingly, the site often publishes writings from right-wing political thinkers. But, what makes UnHerd unique today is its willingness to also entertain pitches from progressive thinkers from within and outside of the U.K. “I think they’re among the best in the business from that perspective. You’ve got leftists, centre-leftists, and numerous right-wing commentators all publishing there,” says Oliver Bateman, a Pittsburgh-based weekly columnist for UnHerd who considers himself to be centre-left. Bateman lauds UnHerd for its ability to attract talent from across the political spectrum. While celebrity right-of-centre journalists such as Douglas Murray have written for UnHerd, so too has Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek and literary critic Terry Eagleton. “Recognizing this “all are welcome” approach, Allsides.com—a website that tracks the political bias of media publications—changed UnHerd’s classification from “Lean Right” to “Centre” in the summer of 2023. Once written off by Vice as the “whining of the perfectly-well-represented,” UnHerd has seen its popularity skyrocket since its founding in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum—when many working-class, nominally left-wing voters pushed the “Yes” vote to a surprising victory. Editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers joined UnHerd in 2019... Many British celebrities had vocally opposed Brexit and the Conservatives in the 2019 election. UnHerd’s writers were not shy about critiquing them for being out of touch. One article ran under the headline “How Lefty luvvies lost the plot: The creative sector is now so woke and insular that it’s incapable even of recognising an oppositional voice.” Another was titled, “How I became ‘Tory scum’: The establishment’s reaction to the referendum result pushed me towards the Conservatives.” Sayers himself is not shy about the fact that he voted “Remain” in the referendum, and he says UnHerd opposes dogmatically dividing people based on their voting preferences... The publication gets more than two and a half times more online traffic than the New Statesman, which was founded prior to the First World War... Vice, which once derided UnHerd, filed for bankruptcy last year, fired hundreds of staff, and no longer publishes news on its own website. But UnHerd is going—and growing—strong... It may also be the only online-only publication that has gone into the restaurant business. In 2022, UnHerd says it had made enough money from subscriptions that it was able to branch out. They opened a restaurant and club in the middle of London’s fashionable and expensive Westminster neighbourhood. Located inside the private member’s UnHerd Club, the Old Queen Street Cafe is a spot where anyone can gather to discuss and debate new ideas. “We have all sorts of interesting people coming from around the world, and [the cafe] is always sold out,” says Sayers. “There’s no sense that you’re going to be censored or people are going to judge you, so I’m really proud of that, and that is now a big contributor to our bottom line.” Gavin Allen is interested in what it takes for online-only publications such as UnHerd to survive in today’s media landscape. He notes that while running a print publication comes with additional physical costs such as delivery, ink, and printers, online publications also have considerable expenses. “A web publication needs more tech [and] product people, for example. While digital advertising revenues are much smaller than print advertising revenues, which is why some print products endure despite falling circulations,” says Allen. Allen notes that the market for online news sites is international, and as such, it can be more difficult to make a name for yourself in the space without a specific niche. “Whether it’s online or print, what you need more than ever is a necessary product with a definable audience,” he says. “If you have a niche, there are likely more people willing to pay you to service that [is a] special interest for them than there are people willing to pay for mass-market generalism.” There’s also the fact that web audiences—which tend to skew younger than audiences for print publications—are generally less willing to pay for the products, such as magazines and newspapers, than older generations who bought as a matter of course. In this landscape, it can be a challenge for journalism outlets to build and maintain a legacy relationship with readers."
Meme - "I'm pregnant!"
"No way. What are you going to do"
"I'm 27. And MARRIED"
"Oh. Right. Congratulations!!!"
Meme - "Websites when my adblock is on
umu pls deactivate adblock we need a little of money
Websites when my adblock is off
Hey, don't you want to play this Naruto game and fuck 6 girls, I bet you can't last 30 seconds you fucking virgin"
How to Permanently End Diseases - "The world officially became a slightly safer place in October, when the World Health Organization declared that polio’s type 3 strain had been eradicated. This strain — joining type 2, which was eradicated in 2015 — no longer exists anywhere in the world, outside of highly secure laboratories. (Type 1 is the only strain still at large.) Thanks to the hard work of thousands of dedicated individuals, these two strains will no longer cause devastating paralysis or death. While it was once just a dream, permanently ending diseases has been within our power since 1980, when smallpox was eradicated after an intense campaign. This victory has saved roughly 200 million people who would otherwise have succumbed to the disease since then. But other attempts to rid the world of diseases have not gone as smoothly. Doctors have been working on ending polio for 31 years, initially hoping it would be completely gone by 2000. Now, due to difficulties tracking the disease, the target eradication date for the remaining type 1 strain is 2023. Another pathogen nearing eradication is a parasite known as Guinea worm, but again, problems have complicated that campaign, and others as well... Fundamentally, if we want to get rid of a pathogen, we must have a way of stopping its transmission. Halt the spread, and you can isolate those infected without anyone else getting sick. Do a thorough enough job, and there won’t be any new cases anywhere in the world — the disease is eradicated. Theoretically, this process can take many forms. The deployment of an effective vaccine robs a disease of future hosts. Eliminating a key vector takes out the means of infection. And for a bacterial pathogen, antibiotic treatments can target the disease itself. But theory doesn’t always translate to practice in the real world. For a sense of what actually works, smallpox provides the perfect case study: It turns out to be almost ideally suited to eradication. First, it’s a virus that only affects people, not animals. Wipe it out in humans, and that’s it, you’re done. (We’re not actually sure why smallpox is so choosy, and we’re unlikely to find out anytime soon, since little research today involves the deadly pathogen — and even then, it focuses on treatments and vaccine research over fundamental biology.) Second, the disease makes its presence clearly and unambiguously known. It produces a rash that’s easy to identify and distinct from rashes caused by other diseases. And infections are not asymptomatic: You can’t be infected and contagious but still appear healthy. (Again, it’s not clear why this is.) These traits make it easier to track new cases and quickly stop outbreaks. Third, smallpox has a highly effective vaccine, made from a virus closely related to smallpox called the vaccinia virus. Because the vaccine contains a live virus, the immune system produces a rapid, strong and lasting response. The vaccine can even stop a smallpox infection in its tracks. “You can vaccinate somebody who is already developing smallpox up to six days after they have been infected,” said Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist and former WHO physician who took part in the smallpox eradication campaign. The vaccine made it easier to halt new transmissions and protect healthy people, even if responders arrived at a smallpox outbreak that was already underway. The fourth reason — and an increasingly relevant one — is not a biological consideration, but a psychological one: Smallpox was a feared disease. People knew it was deadly, and even survivors could be scarred for life. This translated to political support from world governments and local support among populations receiving the vaccination... if a disease is missing just one or two of these attributes, it can prove much harder to eradicate. Like smallpox, polio is a disease that only affects humans, and we have an effective vaccine for it. In fact, we have two. But neither is as good as the one for smallpox, and one of them — a live virus vaccine no longer used in the U.S. — has the potential to mutate and cause vaccine-derived polio. In fact, for the last several years, we’ve had more cases of vaccine-derived polio than wild polio infections... polio differs from smallpox in another crucial way. Approximately 95% of those infected either don’t display any symptoms or only display generic ones such as fever and headache. This means the type of disease tracking that officials used to detect smallpox epidemics is impossible for polio... Guinea worm eradication has grown more complex over the past five years as doctors have recognized that it’s not a human-specific infection, as had been assumed: Recent studies have demonstrated that dogs, frogs and fish can also transmit the pathogen. This will slow the eradication timeline since the animals can re-contaminate clean water supplies... while it’s a good candidate for eradication based solely on its biology, measles doesn’t share smallpox’s crucial psychological factor: People don’t fear it enough"
Koreans Banned from Entering Tsushima Shrine - "A shrine in Tsushima recently put up a sign saying Koreans are banned from entering following a string of complaints. A local priest has defended the controversial move, which has been labeled “discriminatory.” In Tokyo, it was a Chinese visitor making headlines. After he defaced a pillar at Yasukuni Shrine, a famous plastic surgeon offered a reward of ¥10 million for anyone who could find him... A picturesque island in Nagasaki Prefecture, Tsushima is a popular destination for tourists from South Korea as it is relatively nearby. One place on the island that Korean travelers won’t be allowed to visit from now on, though, is Watatsumi Shrine (also known as Watazumi Shrine). A sign at the entrance reads, “Koreans banned from entering,” written in Hangul. It’s a controversial measure that has been called discriminatory. However, the shrine, which has a history that dates back more than 1,000 years, felt it was necessary to combat ill-mannered visitors. A priest at the shrine posted a video on X of a man smoking and littering in front of a torii gate. Both actions are prohibited on the premises. The priest said that he confirmed that the man was Korean, adding that “90% of foreigners who visit Tsushima are Korean.” He also posted videos of a woman uttering the word “jjokbari,” an ethnic slur against Japanese people, and tourists singing and dancing on the back approach to the shrine, pre-COVID. A restaurant owner nearby commented, “I understand the sentiment, but banning Koreans only feels a bit excessive.”"
Meme - "Making my dog watch commercials of the homeless dogs so he knows how good he got it"
Tiana Halal Cat Food
Must we Feed Halal Certified Cat Food to Cat? : r/islam - "Prophet Solomon passed away a while ago and ain't nobody alive that we know that can talk to animals to confirm. This is probably more of an internal what if question that will lead you to some OCD type questions imo. Cats eat mice and rats. Animals that aren't halal even if you slaughter them correctly iirc. That should answer your question. Don't need a fatwa from a scholar on everything."
The Greek-Canadian Origins of the Hawaiian Pizza - "Most people over the age of about 75 can remember the first time they ever saw, heard of, or tasted pizza; the New York Times first introduced the dish to its readers back in 1944. But Sam Panopoulos*, 81, of London, Canada, a small city about halfway between Detroit and Toronto, can take it one step further. He can remember inventing what’s now one of the most popular pizzas in the world: the Hawaiian pizza. The Hawaiian pizza doesn’t come from anywhere near Hawai’i. It comes from Ontario, and was concocted in 1962 in a restaurant serving typical mid-century food without any particular focus. Since its creation, it has become a divisive and fiercely debated entry in the pizza lexicon; a reader-created post on BuzzFeed even called it “the most insulting and offensive pizza in the world... Pizza is a dish that is universally loved in the U.S. and Canada, but Hawaiian pizza is, very often, despised. Sam Panopoulos left Greece on a boat bound for Canada in 1954. His first exposure to pizza was in Naples, where the boat briefly stopped. Naples reigns as the worldwide birthplace of pizza, but even there, it’s a fairly recent creation. As the story goes, the cheese and tomato-laden version of the dish that we recognize today was first baked in 1889 to honor the Italian monarchs King Umberto and Princess Margherita, who were visiting the city. Enter the now-classic margherita pizza... When he got to Canada in 1954, he settled in the town of Chatham, an hour from the border with Michigan... “Pizza wasn’t known at all, actually,” says Panopoulos in a phone interview. “Even Toronto didn’t know anything about pizza in those days. The only place you could have pizza was in Detroit.” Soon, pizza landed in Windsor, a Canadian city just across the river from Detroit. However, thanks to the execution, it wasn’t especially popular there. “I visited Windsor, and the pizza in those days was three things: dough, sauce, cheese, and mushroom, bacon, or pepperoni. That was it,” says Panopoulos. “You had no choices; you could get one of the three [toppings] or more of them together.”... Without really knowing or caring much about any traditions regarding pizza, Panopoulos began throwing together combinations to see what worked. Some of his discoveries were simultaneously discovered by other like-minded pizza pioneers, like the addition of salty toppings like olives and anchovies. But the pineapple was something else entirely. Hawai’i had only become a state in 1959, and soldiers coming home from World War II brought back tales of an island paradise in the South Pacific. Tiki culture, epitomized by fruity cocktails like the mai tai, became hugely popular from the 1940s through the 1960s. Canada wasn’t immune to the charms of Hawai’i, either, and canned pineapple became a staple of every household, advertised by grocery stores relentlessly in newspapers throughout Ontario. “In those days, the only sweet and sour thing you would get is Chinese pork, you know, with the sweet and sour sauce,” says Panopoulos. “Otherwise there was no mix.” He was already serving Chinese food at the Satellite, and felt that people would connect to sweet and savory flavors together. So one day in 1962, he took down a can of pineapple, drained it, and threw the pieces of fruit on a pizza.”
Meme - "MODERN ARTISTS
*red canvas*
'I'M SO INTELLIGENT! THIS IS ART.'
RENAISSANCE ARTISTS
*Annunciation* "I HAVE OFFENDED GOD AND MANKIND BECAUSE MY WORK DID NOT REACH THE QUALITY IT SHOULD HAVE." -LEONARDO DA VINCI'S LAST WORDS"
Freeland says committee finding that some MPs aided foreign interference 'concerning' - "Freeland was pressed at a news conference Tuesday morning about why the names of those MPs are being kept secret and why no charges have been laid, given some of the actions could constitute treason."
A job seeker says she was invited to a work happy hour after an interview, but it turned out to be another hiring test - "the happy hour was full of other candidates, she said. Marlowe jokingly compared the process to the US reality TV show "The Bachelor" — with multiple candidates all vying for one job from the employer."
Excel Hell: A cautionary tale. - "The conventional wisdom in the software business is to do one thing well. In general that’s good advice, and that thinking has brought us some terrific, tightly-focused tools. So it seems a little crazy to talk about building a multipurpose SaaS product in this day and age. On the other hand, there’s clearly enormous demand for an extremely malleable general-purpose application. Exhibit A for that demand is Microsoft Excel. The reality of most teams, including mine, is this: We use purpose-built software for some stuff, and for the rest we use Excel. In most cases, Excel is not up to the demands we put on it — but that doesn’t stop us. There are other tools out there that might be more appropriate, but we don’t use them. Excel sucks and people love Excel. I think this is important. If we want to create something to replace Excel in that “stuff we need” white space, then we need to understand why Excel is so appealing in spite of its limitations... It goes without saying that Microsoft Excel is the world’s most-used spreadsheet software. What is surprising, and of interest to us, is that Microsoft Excel is the world’s most used database software as well. This isn’t what spreadsheets were made to do. This software category was introduced on the Apple II by VisiCalc — short for “Visible Calculator” — to do financial modeling. Bob Frankston, one of its creators, described it as “a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations”....
Realizing this, Microsoft belatedly started to add data-management features to Excel. The biggest single improvement was a feature tried in 2003 called, aptly, “Tables”. I suspect that 95% of Excel users don’t know it’s there. Microsoft is still retrofitting Excel with database functionality. Deep in the bowels of the “Data” tab you’ll find hardcore data manipulation tools that approximately no one has ever used... in the best-case scenario, you get around Excel’s two-dimensionality with multiple tables and VLOOKUP hacks. More likely, you limp along with error-prone, labor-intensive horror shows like the one shown above — with information duplicated all over the place, and maybe with repetitive sets of numbered columns to spice things up. Even if you’ve organized your data into strictly normalized relational tables, you’re very limited in terms of your ability to view the data. That’s because in Excel, data and presentation are hopelessly commingled. This leads to irreconcilable tensions between two worthy goals — keeping the data clean on the one hand, and presenting it in a way that is readable and clear on the other... The downside of Excel’s flexibility is that it’s really, really easy to do the wrong thing. You can enter text into a numeric column. You can type something that looks like a date but isn’t... As a result, the internet is littered with Excel horror stories, from the $25-million budget shortfall to the $6-billion trading loss to the incorrect policy advice that deepened a recession... why don’t more people use Access? It’s not because they’re too dumb to figure it out. My team includes four data scientists and five programmers. We can all write SQL in our sleep. We use spreadsheets a lot and we don’t use Access at all... One is a workspace for humans, the other is a store for programmatic manipulation... Excel is no good for data. Access is no good for humans."
How Trello is different - "Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like “if interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?” For example. Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel. We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the “number of injuries this week” spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility. Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed ten facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries). He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a three-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job. Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. (Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called “derivatives.” They used Excel to maximize the bankers’ bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year. Something about black swans. Probably just a floating point rounding error.)... Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc. Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages. PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images."
