CanuckMercenary

War Monitor

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[CanuckMercenary @CanuckMercenary]

Active shooter in Montreal

[Miaw @Miaw]

Yoga class

[We don't deserve cats 😺 @catsareblessing]

I'll never understand how someone could be cruel to them.

[Cats with Aura 😺 @catwithaura]

Those faces got me rolling

[Bearing @bear_ing]

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

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is real footage from 120 years ago.

None of the people in it knew that the city around them had four days left...

What you are watching is a cable car gliding down Market Street in San Francisco, filmed on the 14th of April, 1906.

The camera was mounted on the front of the car, so you see the city exactly as it was: the crowds, the horse-drawn carriages, the early automobiles weaving through traffic, the men in hats, the great buildings rising on either side. An ordinary spring afternoon in a thriving American city.

Four days later, on the morning of the 18th of April, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck. The shaking lasted under a minute, but it ignited fires that burned through the city for days...

By the time it was over, more than 3,000 people were dead and roughly 80 percent of San Francisco had been destroyed. Almost every building you see in this footage was gone.

And the film itself nearly went with it.

The negative was placed on a train bound for New York on the 17th of April, the day before the earthquake. Had it left a single day later, it would have burned in the fire along with the studio that made it.

This entire moving record of a lost city survives because of one day...

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Edinburgh Castle sits on top of an extinct volcano. It went quiet about 350 million years ago and cooled into a lump of rock too hard to wear down. When the last ice age came through, a glacier grinding east hit that rock, split around it, and scraped the soft ground off three sides. That left a long tail of rock sheltered behind it. The whole Old Town, the ridge the medieval city is packed onto, sits on that tail. The street plan of Edinburgh is the shape a glacier left as it flowed around a volcano.

The stone itself comes out of the ground a warm honey gold, cut from quarries a few miles away. The black you see is soot. For two hundred years the city ran on coal fires, and the smoke sat so thick over the Old Town that a landowner across the water in Fife set his kids' bedtime by the haze. People still call the place Auld Reekie, Scots for Old Smoky. The local stone has a bit of natural tar in it, so it grabbed the soot and held on. The 1956 Clean Air Act cleared the smoke for good. Glasgow blasted its buildings clean over the next few decades. Edinburgh mostly left its own buildings dark, because scrubbing that soft stone can wear it back into sand. So a lot of the black is left in place on purpose.

Edinburgh gets about half the rain Glasgow does. It is the driest big city in Scotland. The mountains out west catch the wet Atlantic wind and wring it dry before it reaches the east coast, so the city sits in a rain shadow. What it does get is haar, a cold sea fog off the North Sea thick enough to have its own name. There's also the long, low light of a city that sits further north than Moscow, where the midwinter sun is up for barely seven hours and never climbs high.

It is raining in these shots, and the wet stone throws the lamplight back beautifully. But Edinburgh would look like this in a thin drizzle too. The heavy mood is older and deeper than the weather: 350 million years of geology, two hundred years of coal smoke in the walls, a sea fog with its own name, and a northern sun that gives up early. The city is dressed for gloom long before the first drop lands.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

Architecture of some Moscow metro stations

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

What people wore before Christianity in Spain. pics by Carlos González Ximénez.

[Charlotte Tepes, called sideróglossa 🕯️ @SnepOfTheWest]

I got a TSA flunk out, a 10k dog, for pennies because of this

[Poe's Law, Esq: Poe's Lawyer @dyingscribe]

Oh, this video is gonna wreck whatever company that makes these things

[Fľøkï @Dee_Floki]

Brutalism in Macedonia

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

it is genuinely psychotic that we dug up literal primordial dirt, scrubbed it down to an impossible 99.9999999999% molecular perfection that violates the very laws of physics, handed it over to techno-wizard necromancers to stretch into flawless geometric god-cylinders, blasted it with invisible uv death-rays to carve ten quadrillion microscopic cyber-sigils into its flesh, trapped actual lightning inside of it, and somehow birthed an omniscent eldritch deity capable of simulating the universe and thinking faster than a billion human civilizations combined.

and our grand, supreme purpose for this enslaved lightning-god?

sending "per my last email, please see attached" to a guy named gary.

[Fortissax @FortySacks]

The flag of Montréal goes hard because it represents a kind of proto Canada at the city state level, the core ethnos before that identity became national.

For nearly two centuries, Montréal was the economic, cultural, and political hub of the country. It was the city of John Molson, the Industrial Revolution and the first steamship in Canada, of the Lachine Canal, of industry, finance, and continental ambition. Montréal’s factories, banks, merchants, and infrastructure helped drive settlement and industrialization across Eastern Canada and west of Winnipeg.

It was also the place where French, English, Scottish, and Irish communities, ordinary people and elites alike, came together during and after the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and Confederation.
Merchant capital and the seigneurial class began to merge through business, politics, and intermarriage. In that sense, Montréal was not just another Canadian city.

It was one of the places where Canada itself was first assembled. Once upon a time, they called her the Paris of North America. That was true not only because of her beauty, or because of the French Canadian character that shaped her soul, but because Montréal was, in practice, the true central capital of Canada. For generations, power, money, culture, industry, and ambition all ran through her.

[Criminal Penguin @Crime_Penguin]

Art Deco this, Art Deco that, when are we bringing back Atomic Age style?

[ed edd and eddington @goblin_formula]

there's no fear like driving through the remains of a vast, prehistoric ocean in central kansas, hearing the sirens go off, know you have nowhere to hide, and wonder if you're about to join the dinosaurs buried beneath you as just another nameless fossil for a future museum

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Colossal WWII flak tower in Hamburg was too large to destroy, so it was repurposed as a hotel, sports complex, concert hall and rooftop garden for citizens use.

[Hadi Hassin @hassinhadi]

🚨 Mohamed Lamine Benredouane a été porté à son dernier repos ce soir, entouré de ses proches et en présence de plusieurs collègues policiers venus lui rendre un dernier hommage. Des images empreintes d’une immense douleur. On y voit notamment une mère pleurer son fils, dans un moment particulièrement bouleversant. Une scène qui rappelle toute la tristesse et le choc laissés par ce drame.

📹 Source : Zoom Montréal 213

[chl$ @chelsssseeeea]

I went down a Middle East rabbit hole given everything going on and honestly… I feel like they don’t teach this stuff very well.

Growing up I basically thought the story was:

Countries hate each other. Religion was the reason for conflict. America got involved. Terrorists and terrorist groups are the instigators. The end.

The actual story is wayyy more interesting than that. What finally clicked for me is that almost every conflict in the Middle East is connected.

Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, The Houthis, 9/11, The Iraq War.

They’re not separate headlines …They’re chapters of the same story that really heated up it after WWI.

Essentially the Ottoman Empire had controlled most of the Middle East for hundreds of years. Then it collapsed. Britain and France stepped in and started drawing borders for brand new countries without actually understanding the inter workings of the people in those borders. So, entire tribes got split apart and different ethnic and religious groups immediately found themselves living inside the same country. Others found themselves separated from people they lived alongside for centuries. And…Those borders still exist today.

Then…oil gets discovered… And suddenly the entire world has a reason to care what happens there. Whoever has influence over the Middle East has influence over energy, trade routes, military positioning, and by extension… the entire global economy.

That’s really when the U.S starts becoming a major player in the Middle East . Not because America woke up one day wanting to rule the Middle East… But because the Middle East became strategically important to almost every major player on Earth.

Then comes Israel. After centuries of persecution, and especially after the Holocaust, there was overwhelming support throughout the world for creating a Jewish state with security as the goal.

The problem… People were already living where Israelis wanted to settle. As a result the UN proposed splitting the land with the Palestinians. Jewish leaders accepted it. Most, if not all, Arab leaders rejected it. Regardless … Israel declared independence in 1948.

Then, war started … almost immediately.

Israel survived, obviously. But, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were displaced as a result.

And from that point on… two completely different versions of history existed. For many Israelis, it was independence and security. For many Palestinians, it was displacement and catastrophe. Neither side forgot.

Then comes what might be one of the biggest turning points…Iran.

Before 1979, Iran was actually one of America’s closest allies. Then the Islamic Revolution happened. Everything changed and Iran went from being part of the Western order to openly opposing it.

But here’s what surprised me…Iran wasn’t trying to become another America. It couldn’t outspend Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t outgun the U.S. It couldn’t out-tech Israel. So it built influence another way. Through proxy groups like funding Hezbollah and Militias in Iraq. Supporting the Assad government in Syria and The Houthis in Yemen. So, instead of controlling countries…It built relationships inside them who opposed the western world too.

Then I realized something I’d never really thought about before. A lot of wars in the Middle East aren’t actually countries fighting countries. They’re countries funding other people to fight.

Essentially Iran backs one side. Saudi Arabia backs another. America backs another. Russia backs another. Turkey backs another. Especially if you read about the Kurds.

Sometimes the people actually fighting aren���t the people making the biggest decisions. Ok…Then Afghanistan happens and the Soviet Union invades, America wants to weaken the Soviets so the U.S. pours money, weapons and support into resistance fighters. The Soviets eventually leave and the mission would’ve been accomplished.

Except…