SovietMen

‘Pennyworth’ Star Paloma Faith Slams ‘The Little Mermaid’: “Not What I Want To Be Teaching Next Gen Women”

“As a mother of girls I don’t want my kids to think it’s ok to give up your entire voice and your powers to love a man,” Faith shared in a now-deleted Instagram post that Metro caught. “Wtf is this sh*t. Not what I want to be teaching next gen women at all.”

Brine Pools: The Underwater Lakes of Despair

( . . . ) Brine pools are many times saltier, denser and heavier than the surrounding water. They puddle on the ocean floor with a visible boundary, called a halocline, at the interface between the seawater and the brine pools. These lakes within oceans produce the same effect we see in above ground lakes. For instance, ripples on the lake surface caused by movement of seawater, just like wind causes ripples on the surface of water bodies. The brine is so dense that fish and other marine animals can float on its surface, just like people can float on Jordan’s Dead Sea. When researchers sent submarines to investigate a brine pool, they found the submarines could actually “land” on its surface. It’s only by the use of thrusters they can penetrate the pools . . .

While mussels thrive along the pool’s edge, the brine itself is toxic to most sea creatures. The lakes contain almost no oxygen and is far too saline for animals to survive. Some brine pools also contain toxic chemicals, such as hydrogen sulfide, aside from methane, that kill any fish and sea creature that come into contact with it, earning them various nicknames such as “Jacuzzi of despair” and “pit of despair” and “hot tub of despair”.

The hypersaline brine solution often turns these unfortunate animals into pickles. On one occasion, researchers found a crab estimated to be dead for 8 years with soft tissue still intact.

Aside from the Gulf of Mexico, brine pools are also found in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.

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Dragon (band)

Dragon are a New Zealand rock band which was formed in Auckland in January 1972,^[1][2] and, from 1975, based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Dragon has endured tragedy, adversity and notoriety, and three band members have died from drug-related causes. Problems began soon after the band’s arrival in Sydney in late 1975, when all of their equipment was stolen. Several months later, in 1976, drummer Neil Storey died of a heroin overdose.^[4] The following decade, in 1985, Paul Hewson died from a drug overdose.^[4] Marc Hunter died from smoking-related throat cancer in 1998.^[6][4] Several members of the group including Hewson and Marc Hunter were heavy heroin users during the band’s heyday and the Stewart Royal Commission (1980–1983) which investigated the Mr. Asia drug syndicate^[15] obtained evidence that Dragon members were clients.^[3] Two members were involved in a serious car crash in 1977, when Paul Hewson’s neck was in a brace as well as having a broken arm and Robert Taylor needed plastic surgery,^[16] and Hewson also suffered from debilitating scoliosis and arthritis, the pain of which reportedly contributed to his heroin use. The band also undertook a famously disastrous 1978 tour of the US, supporting Johnny Winter, which ended when Marc Hunter abused a Texan audience as “faggots” and the band were pelted off stage, while Winter’s band were said to have taken bets about how long it would be before Hunter was shot.^[3]

This is the Static Age

Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over massive spike in car thefts

The city of Baltimore has filed a federal lawsuit against car manufacturers Kia and Hyundai, joining a number of cities who say the companies created a public nuisance by making cars that can be easily stolen.

“Hyundai and Kia’s decision to put cost savings and profits over public safety has had significant consequences for Baltimore and its residents, as it has in other cities,” the lawsuit says.

Car thefts in the city have nearly doubled this year compared to the same time last year, part of a nationwide trend after videos showing how to easily steal the vehicles racked up millions of views on TikTok.

This may be a South Korean version of the Galapagos Syndrome.

Bungee jump accident drops woman into crocodile-infested waters (VIDEO)

Against Safetyism

Now, whether we think that an AI apocalypse is imminent or the lab-leak hypothesis is correct or not, by mitigating or suppressing visible risks, safetyism is often creating invisible or hidden risks that are far more consequential or impactful than the risks it attempts to mitigate. In a way, this makes sense: creating a new technology and deploying it widely entails a definite vision for the future. But a focus on the risks means a definite vision of the past, and a more stochastic model of what the future might hold. Given time’s annoying habit of only moving in one direction, we have no choice but to live in somebody’s future — the question is whether it’s somebody with a plan or somebody with a neurosis. 

Your Country As A Service

There are two main differences between the assault on speech today versus the assault on speech a century ago. The most obvious is that The Sedition Act of 1918 was specifically aimed at anti-war speech. Today, the reason for stripping the rights of the citizens is personal and petty. The people in charge do not like being mocked by the peasants on the internet. The assault on your basic rights is part of a war waged from the top against the white middle-class.

The other main difference is that there was a clear limit on how long these limits on speech would last. This was a wartime act, and everyone agreed it was an exception to the general rule of open debate. In other words, the people who crafted the bill did so knowing the general rule was the default, but that in the extraordinary circumstances of the war, they were making an exception. Today, it is the reverse. The new default is you need permission to speak in public.

Looking back, this change in the spirit of the law, at least with respect to the ruling class, should have been obvious. The concept of the terms of service has proliferated with the spread of technology, despite running counter to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. The contract of adhesion has always been a carefully regulated exception to contract law, but now it is the default. Everything you do is becoming subject to a terms of service agreement imposed on you by the powerful.

It is why appeals to the letter of the law mean nothing now. The people who view the letter of the law through the lens of the terms of service, naturally look at the Constitution the same way. As the issuing party, they get to interpret the words on the paper however they wish. Every judge is now operating like a content moderator at a social media platform. You are free to choose another country provider, but as long as you are in this one, they control your content.

Update: I forgot to include Jew Among You’s tangle with Bing. This account is eye-opening as it demonstrates that (a) Chat GPT-4, which powers Bing, is more capable of reasoning and research than GPT-3, and (b) that this power necessitates it being tightly locked down such that it automatically ends the conversation as soon as it catches itself committing a thought crime.

GOP hawks, Trump advocate invading Mexico

The main difference between the two parties is who they want to bomb.

A brutal conclusion to a successful fast

. . . after concluding a fast, apparently it’s rather important to ease your body back into it, to enlarge the digestive tract slowly, so it doesn’t get a shock.
Foods which are good for this purpose are fruits, prunes, beans, and raw sauerkraut, that type of thing. By eating these foods you can get your system back up to speed without too many issues. Oh, and drink lots of water too.
A poor way to come off a fast, just as an example mind you, would be to, oh, I don’t know, go out to lunch on Saturday and consume an enormous serving of deer stew with polenta. 

America’s desperate dysfunction

( . . . ) Or consider the scale of violence. Across the whole of the US, around seven people are murdered for every 100,000. This compares to around one in 100,000 in the UK, France and Germany — and half that number in many smaller countries in Europe. But even this masks the extraordinary ferocity of murderousness that is gripping some of America’s cities. In St Louis, the murder rate is 64 per 100,000. In parts of Chicago, it has reached almost 150 per 100,000. Such violent criminality is almost a social sickness. During the bloodiest year of the Troubles in Northern Ireland,1972, there were 31 deaths per 100,000.

Examples of social breakdown are everywhere. There are the 131 mass shootings in America this year alone, on top of the 647 last year and 690 before that — a form of nihilistic terrorism that has been normalised to the point of acceptance. The opioid crisis in the States is also of a different order to anywhere else. More than 58,000 people died from fentanyl overdoses in 2020, compared with 97 in the EU.

Manhattan garage worker charged with attempted murder after shooting thief

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown (UK story):

There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’

That boy is a ghost child – a victim of the disastrous policy of school closures during the Covid pandemic. On 8 March 2021, when schools reopened, everyone expected that it would be business as usual. They assumed children would skip back into class and resume their education.

A new report from the Centre for Social Justice, Lost and Not Found, shows just how wrong those assumptions were. In fact, many tens of thousands of children have gone missing. Two years on and growing numbers are still abandoning education altogether. It’s an effect no one anticipated and few understand. Worse, no one seems very interested. It’s why, over the past year or so, I have been trying to document the story that political parties refuse to address.

Lockdowns proved a disaster for young people at every stage of their development. With all the attention on the elderly, the young were left to cope on their own. It was assumed they’d be resilient. Far from it.

3 years since the pandemic wrecked attendance, kids still aren’t showing up to school (US story):