“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
—Anthony Bourdain, American chef, filmmaker, and author, who died on this day in 2018.
The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.
The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.
Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.
If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.
Le vieux du quartier m’a dit : « N’oublie pas que la boussole a été inventée avant l’horloge parce que la direction est plus importante que le temps. »
Gandalf, whose true name is Olórin, is a Maia of the Ainur; in essence, an immortal spirit. During his battle with the Balrog in Moria, his physical body, his old man guise as an Istar, was destroyed, meaning what we call “death” for him was only the end of his physical form. His spirit was cast beyond time and space, outside the bounds of Arda.
At this point, it is not the Valar who intervene. Gandalf’s mission is not yet complete, and his sacrifice triggers a higher authority that surpasses even the Valar’s jurisdiction: Eru Ilúvatar himself. Eru calls him back from the Timeless Halls and sends him once again to Middle-earth.
For a Maia, taking physical form again requires great sacrifice and power. In this rebirth, Gandalf does not merely return; he is restored with even greater strength and elevated to leadership among the Istari. Taking the place of the fallen Saruman, he becomes Gandalf the White, now endowed with higher authority to complete his task.
His spirit is returned naked to the peak of Zirakzigil, where he is reborn anew. He is then found and rescued by Gwaihir the Eagle and carried to Lothlórien, where he is fully healed. This transformation marks him as no longer just a guide, but one of the direct instruments of divine will in the war against Sauron.
Has Nukes
🇮🇷 No(0)
🇮🇱 Yes (200-500)
Signed The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty
🇮🇷 Yes
🇮🇱 No
Broke The Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty
🇮🇷 No
🇮🇱 Yes
Allows IAEA Inspections
🇮🇷 Yes
🇮🇱 No
Has engaged in nuclear blackmail against the US
🇮🇷 No
🇮🇱 Yes
Jürgen Klinsmann: “Había 70.000 personas, nosotros estábamos calentando seriamente. Mientras sonaba ‘Live Is Life’, Maradona empezó a hacer malabares con el balón. Dejamos de calentar, porque no había nada más que pudiéramos hacer aparte de mirarlo.” MAGIA!
Former #ManCity staff member on the 2018 Premier League title win: “Even though Pep wanted all these records we’d still go out. He’d be like ‘Right, Sunday, we’ve got a game but Monday, Tuesday we’ll go out’. It was every week. By the time we got to the actual parade my missus was like: ‘You can’t go out again, it’s getting beyond a joke! You’re out all the time.’ I’m like: ‘But Pep’s asking me to’.
"Anyway, we’re in the canteen having a few beers before we got on the parade bus and Pep says ‘Are you out tonight?’ I say: ‘I can’t. I think I’ll be left homeless if I go.’ So Pep goes: ‘Well, stay at my apartment if you want.’
'I can’t Pep, it’s my missus.’
‘You want me to ring her? Come on, ring your missus.’
"Everyone was around us. My missus answered. ‘Hello, this is Pep.’ She says: ‘Who?’ ‘It’s Pep Guardiola.’ She’s gone: ‘All right, yeah, go on?’ ‘Listen, I know we’ve been out a lot recently but we’ve just won the Premier League. I’ll have him home by 2AM.’ My missus just replies, ‘One’ and hits the red button. Everyone’s there howling..."
The real Pep Guardiola: Untold stories from a decade with City’s Pied Piper. Read @TelegraphDucker's full report on @TeleFootball. ⤵️
https://t.co/8RFRGvPHTD
Jewish-American orthopedic surgeon Mark Perlmutter, who worked in Gaza, said Israeli soldiers took two Palestinian children, tied their hands behind their backs, and buried them alive at Nasser Hospital — their cries muffled by the dirt poured over them.
WOW
A website is DOCUMENTING Israel’s crimes with GEOLOCATION, dates, categories of crimes, and footage of the incidents themselves.
One click and you can see EXACTLY what Israel did.
An enormous digital archive built for ACCOUNTABILITY.
Link: https://t.co/TWKgXJ41NC
Direct Link: https://t.co/qWkrhx1FT7
Since the liberation of Cuba in 1959 from US imperialism.
The USA has bombed 25 countries, invaded 13 countries and killed at least 20m people.
The 'evil' Cuba has bombed no one and invaded no one.
¡Viva Cuba!
In 2017, American comic book company DC Comics sued Spanish football club Valencia, claiming that the bat figure on their crest was taken from the Batman character.
Valencia's response to the comic book company was:
"While Valencia was founded and playing football with a bat logo on its chest, Americans were still chasing bison."
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
"We have indisputable evidence that Ghaddafi is giving his troops Viagra so they can mass rape girls and babies. We need to bomb them now!"
*few months later as Libya has been bombed*
"Yeah we made up that Viagra mass rape stuff. Anyway, Israel has the right to defend itself."