Instead of securing our water supply, the government plans to radically reduce home usage.
Body odour could soon be making a comeback. Why? Because the UK government is looking to impose stringent reductions on home water usage. The media have suggested that this might mean the end of power showers, but the limits being mooted in Whitehall will bear down on water use as a whole. This will affect showering, taking baths, hand washing, cleaning clothes, and more.
Peering into light from the early eons of our universe, when only 3% of its present age had elapsed—a time far closer to the Big Bang than we are—the James Webb space telescope in 2022 was faced with what was thought to be an impossibility: six massive galaxies, altogether more ancient than they should be.
Happy Easter.
‘The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World’ By Karl Schlögel
Is it possible to write a history of the Soviet Union without also writing a biography of Josef Stalin? Karl Schlögel devotes about 100 pages to Stalin and to Stalinism and its aftermath, but these pages hardly constitute a biography.
But then this is archeology, not biography, or even history. Stalin might as well be Ozymandias, a broken statue of a man who thought he was commanding an empire in perpetuity. His legacy is a ruin that is kind of rebuke to biography since, in the end, what he thought he had established has disintegrated.
Canada’s assisted-death law seems connected to the atomization of our society—as much a symptom of inhumanity as a cause.
Canadian law now permits something called “medical assistance in dying.” This practice, to be clear, is not palliative care. It does not refer to helping Canadians as they journey toward natural death by offering treatment to manage their pain and suffering. Medical assistance in dying—assisted death for short—is the deliberate act of ending a person’s life, typically through the administration of a lethal substance.
As delays go, it was a long way from leaves on the line. I’d been working in San Francisco for perhaps a year when a wild-looking man with a machete tried to board my bus. The driver objected, and we waited several tense minutes as he waved his blade and yelled things that made no sense before stalking off into the early evening crowds.
Encounters like this are, if not routine, unsurprising in what locals refer to as “the City”. When I first visited in 2016, I was stunned by the open squalor and sickness I saw all around me, beyond anything I’d known in Britain. Now, after nearly five years living in nearby Oakland, where tent villages sprawl for blocks through decrepit industrial districts, it is merely a grim but humdrum reminder of this region’s longstanding triple epidemic of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness.
When I was a child on camping trips I was always scared of bears. Young though I was, my zeal for a clean tent and procedural correctness with regards to bear contact avoidance knew few bounds. This did not mean I was afraid of animals generally. Far from it. I loved to collect snakes and spiders in my terrariums and, at the zoo, never feared having a boa wrapped around my neck or a tarantula crawl up my arm. Enormous bears were scary, tiny snakes and spiders were fine.
I'm not a great cook, but this seems like an easy enough recipe. I could make it. pic.twitter.com/krd5SexzyP
— 🍹 Princess Consuela Banana-Hammock (@kimmie_c_) April 9, 2023
H/T XC
A hacking group, under the guidance of Russia’s Federal Security Service, may have compromised the I.P. address of a Canadian gas pipeline company in February and caused damage to its infrastructure, according to leaked Pentagon documents.
If the attack by the cybercriminal group, Zarya, succeeded, the intelligence report said, “it would mark the first time” the United States intelligence community “has observed a pro-Russia-hacking group execute a disruptive attack against Western industrial control systems.”
Were you or your child harmed by gender medicine?
You are not alone.
We want to hear from you.#TransitionJustice #Trans #GenderDysphoria #TransMan #TransWoman #Detransition #NonBinary #DetransitionAwarenessDay #DetransAwarenessDay pic.twitter.com/VBvScszKSw
— Transition Justice (@TransJusticeOrg) March 13, 2023
Kyiv’s strategy is more likely to be to make its retention untenable
Crimea matters to Russians — whether they adore or abhor Vladimir Putin — in a way none of the other claimed or occupied Ukrainian territories do, and as such the peninsula’s fate will probably be central to any eventual resolution of the current war. That some Ukrainian sources are now talking about a military reconquest in the summer campaign season and others of diplomatic solutions suggests the possibility of movement.
#Ukraine: A low-flying Russian aircraft, apparently a Su-25 attack jet, was shot down by Ukrainian forces near Marinka, #Donetsk Oblast.
From the footage, it appears that the pilot managed to eject. pic.twitter.com/49b0bmixyP
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 7, 2023
For that, we have Harry Truman to thank.
After a GOP member of Congress publicly revealed a letter from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then commanding U.S. and UN forces in Korea, that stated, “There is no substitute for victory,” President Harry Truman on April 11, 1951, fired MacArthur for repeatedly voicing opinions that differed from Truman’s war policy. MacArthur, after China entered the war in October-November 1950, felt that he and his forces were unfairly and dangerously being restricted from waging successful war against Chinese forces. “Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field? I could not answer,” the general memorably told Congress after his removal from command. More U.S. troops died in Korea after than before MacArthur was fired. And the only way we ended the Korean War was to threaten, as MacArthur suggested, to widen the war and possibly use nuclear weapons — both Truman and Eisenhower did that. We didn’t win the Korean War. We lost the Vietnam War. We won the brief Gulf War in 1991, but lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In America’s wars, thanks to Harry Truman, there are always substitutes for victory.
Everyone seems to be worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Even technology leaders including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a public petition urging OpenAI, the makers of the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, to suspend development for six months so it can be “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.
Last year, Vitaly spent his 50th birthday in a jail cell.
The activist, from the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, was arrested and jailed on 24 February 2022, the day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The former Russian army officer had gone out to protest that day in clothes emblazoned with the words “No to Putin!” and “No to the war!”
China is a rival power. They are supplanting the United States on the global stage, both in terms of their economic capability and in terms of their military capability.
They also talk openly about wanting to reorient the world — to move it away from an American‑led Western coalition. They want to create something very different, and everybody essentially recognizes that, with the exception, it seems, of President Joe Biden.
Now, that is a pretty bold statement. If you look at Biden, what he has said publicly and some of the actions he has taken, he is on an island by himself.
No one believes doddering Joe is in charge.
The name George Soros has become synonymous with corruption, anti-Americanism, and radical leftism due to the causes and organizations the billionaire has spent decades funding. But George’s son Alexander is even more open about his support for the Democratic Party itself—which is perhaps how he scored at least 14 visits to the Biden White House in 2021 and 2022.
