Ffats

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

[News Now Yorkshire @NewsNowYorks]

Police in Leeds are now arresting people for insulting Muhammad

[Joo @JoosyJew]

Listen to what the police officer says is the reason for this man’s arrest. Did I mishear?

“Because you called Muhammed a r*pist and a kïller”

What is the specific law this man has allegedly broken, if that’s the reason for his arrest?

[Archie🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 @chud_shaker]

Wow an attractive woman with short hair and a flat chest im a gay ephebopile

[Auguste Prompt @augusteprompt]

That’s genuinely insane. My “favourite” UK-China comparison is Hinkley Point C vs the city of Shenzhen.

> 1980 Shenzhen SEZ announced
> 1981 Hinkley Point C announced

Today Hinkley Point C is still incomplete with yet more delays. Unit 1 expected to come online in 2030 (I highly doubt it).

In comparison Shenzhen went from a network of fishing villages with a GDP of $37 million to a mega city with a GDP of $557 billion. It has two operational nuclear power plants.

It is genuinely hard to describe the state of Britain if you have not visited newly developed parts of the world. Practically nothing has been built in Britain in the last 50 years, it isn’t just stagnating, it’s dying.

[Bearing @bear_ing]

Holy shit they’re doubling down, and asking that people do not share the footage. Insane.

[MILO @Nero]

This is a demon

[@redaction @redaction]

They shut off the extradimensional demon stargate. Your life will now tangibly improve for no apparent reason at all. You have until 2030.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

the best castle ever built is one most people have never heard of, and the proof of how good it was is that the greatest warrior of the age looked at it and decided not to bother.

it's called Krak des Chevaliers, sitting on a hill in Syria, built up by the Knights Hospitaller in the 1100s. it wasn't one wall, it was two, a fortress inside a fortress, with a sloped stone base so thick and steep that siege engines were basically useless against it. it could hold a garrison of two thousand men and enough supplies to wait out a siege for years.

Saladin, the man who took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders, the most feared commander of the entire era, rode through the area, sized the place up, and just kept walking. didn't even try. when Saladin decides your castle isn't worth the trouble, you have built something special.

it stood for over a century and shrugged off siege after siege. it only finally fell in 1271, and even then nobody actually beat it. the attackers reportedly got in by smuggling a forged letter to the defenders, supposedly from their own commander, ordering them to surrender. so they opened the gates. the castle was never conquered. it was tricked.

centuries later T.E. Lawrence, the real Lawrence of Arabia, stood in front of it and called it the most wholly admirable castle in the world. and he had seen a lot of castles.

so that's the bar. the best fortress ever made wasn't beaten by armies, catapults, or the most legendary general in history. it could only be taken by a lie slipped through the front gate.

[Into the Memory Hole @frogNscorpion]

>$25k
>Electric

Meanwhile Toyota's producing gas pickups for $10-15k that can be converted to a 7 seater but the US makes it illegal for you not to go into 100k of debt for a new pickup that will last 1/4 as long

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

For five years she spoke only in single syllables, and her family had quietly accepted that the woman they knew was no longer reachable. Then, 19 hours after a high dose of psilocybin, she woke at 3:30am and talked about her own life for four hours.

She was an 80-year-old Japanese-American woman, about ten years into advanced Alzheimer's. She couldn't dress herself, couldn't walk without help, and hadn't controlled her own bladder in years. The case was published this May in Frontiers in Neuroscience by a team of doctors in Sao Paulo.

What they actually think happened is stranger than a cure. They are not saying the mushrooms reversed the disease. Their read is that her memories and skills were never erased in the first place. They were locked behind brain wiring too damaged to reach, and the psilocybin pried open a temporary detour around the damage.

The detail that surprised them most was not the talking. It was the bladder. Regaining continence after five years takes some of the highest-level coordination the brain is capable of. If that switched back on, the circuit was never gone. It was offline.

There is a long precedent for this. For two centuries, doctors have recorded dementia patients who suddenly snap back into full clarity, talking and remembering, often in the final days before death. A recent US study across NYU Langone and Bellevue tracked these episodes in real time and found more than 60% of severe dementia patients had them. So the abilities coming back was never the real mystery. The new part is that someone may have triggered that return on purpose, with a drug, instead of waiting for it to arrive near the end.

The mechanism is still fuzzy. Psilocybin acts on a serotonin receptor spread across the thinking part of the brain, and a 2024 Nature paper showed it briefly desynchronizes the whole system, loosening its rigid, stuck firing patterns. In a damaged brain, that loosening may let nerve impulses find new routes. It touches none of the plaques that define Alzheimer's. It just reroutes around them, which is close to the opposite of how current drugs work.

The caution here is heavy, and the authors say it louder than anyone. One patient. No placebo, no brain scans, no formal cognitive testing. The effects were temporary. The dose set off a fever, drenching sweats, and a sleep so deep they suspected she was unconscious, and they cut it down the second time. Every expert attached to the story repeated the same warning: do not try this at home with a fragile elderly relative.

It leaves behind a harder question. In late-stage dementia, the person may still be in there, buried behind a wall we have never had a way to reach.

[Clown World Today @cwt_news]

Private jets are “green” but your AC is destroying the environment

[Dani - La SemiYA de la VERDAD @La_SemiYA_dl_VD]

El acero empieza a perder propiedades mecánicas a los 400º Centígrados

La propaganda funciona porque la masa es idiota

Y los que nos gobiernan lo saben

[Steven Mabbs @mabbsy88]

@PolitlcsUK Maybe they should put them in the hotels and give them free meals throughout the day, help them get jobs and eventually house them…. Oh wait.. never mind… we don’t look after our own in this country.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 BREAKING: Rough sleeping will be decriminalised tomorrow as the Government repeals the 1824 Vagrancy Act

It means police won’t be able to move on homeless people sleeping or begging on the streets

[LindyMan @PaulSkallas]

Fashion was never a male thing. Men have always wore a uniform. Here it was a suit for everyday life. Before that a tailcoat, a justaucorp, doublet, tunic. Or they wore a uniform for their occuptation.

The male uniform makes sense. It looks good in public. the top matches the bottom. It can be worn in any climate. It requires no cognitive energy to figure out what you're going to wear every day.

Now the uniform doesn't exist. We expect men to dress on their own. So 90 percent focus on comfort and dress badly. 10 percent are dandies who think about what to wear every day.

So it's an uglier world for all of us because the male uniform went away

[No Chance @MrNChance]

Celts will do blood and soil stunts like this and then go on to support their people being ethnic replaced by the third world.

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

A shop owner in my constituency was ignored by the police when he reported shoplifting.

But when he displayed pictures of the thieves, the police showed up - to tell him that those pictures violated GDPR.

Madness. A free run for criminals, while normal people get crushed.

[Melian Refugee @escapefrommelos]

employing female “teachers” under the age of 45 to “teach” in high schools is an insane post-modern innovation, totally without precedent and perhaps even crazier and more reckless than having female prison guards.

[Syd Steyerhart @SydSteyerhart]

The European world used to look like a painting, everywhere you went. It was the culmination of 3,000 years of aesthetic development and no one alive today has ever experienced it.