A vulture's stomach runs at a pH of around 1. That is roughly battery acid. It dissolves bone and sterilises the anthrax, botulism and cholera in a rotting carcass on the way down. The bird eats three-day-old roadkill for breakfast and feels nothing, because its gut is a furnace built to handle death.
Here comes the uncomfortable bit for the salad crowd.
Your stomach runs at about 1.5. Not quite vulture grade, but in the same brutal postcode. It is roughly level with a possum and a hawk. Meanwhile a gorilla, an actual dedicated plant-eater, sits far higher, up around 4 to 5, and a chimp, your nearest living cousin, has a gut noticeably gentler than yours.
You did not evolve that acid to break down spinach. Spinach does not fight back. That savage, flesh-melting pH is the calling card of an animal that ate meat, often meat well past its best, and needed to kill whatever was living in it first.
Scientists have a polite phrase for this. They reckon scavenging carcasses mattered far more in human evolution than the tidy nut-and-berry story admits, because only a viciously acidic gut lets you raid a kill and survive the bacteria that come with it.
So you wander about with the stomach of a scavenger and the dietary advice of a rabbit. The stomach was issued by two million years of evolution. The advice was issued by a committee in the seventies.
Προπαγανδα που απευθύνεται σε καθυστερημένους, αλλά εντελως καθυστερημένους, οχι απλά λίγο καθυστερημένους.
Για αρχη, η αοριστη γλώσσα. Επιιιιιστηηηημονες (ποιοι επιστήμονες;;;) εκτιμούν οτι τις τελευταίες δεκαετιες (πόσες δεκαετίες 2; 5; 10; δεν εχει σημασία ρε παιδι μου καποιες δεκαετιες ωχου τωρα ακριβεια θες; ως και το ενα τριτο.
Το ως και το ενα τριτο περιλαμβανει και το μηδεν βεβαια, αλλα ακουγεται πιο μπαμπατσικο.
Μετά, γιατι αυτες ειναι γενικες γνώσεις αναγνωσης και αξιολογησης ισχυρισμων, ειναι οι αγκυρες και ο βυθος.
Παιδια;;;;
ΞΕΡΕΤΕ ΠΟΣΟ ΜΕΓΑΛΗ ΕΙΝΑΙ Η ΘΑΛΑΣΣΑ; ΩΩΩΩ ΠΟΛΥ ΜΕΓΑΛΗ.
Κατω απο την θαλασσα είναι ο βυθοοοος.
Λοιπον, απο το συνολο του βυθου, που εχει ποσειδωνία ή οχι, τα πλοια, μπορουν να αγκυροβολησουν στο 0.00001% της επιφανειας του βυθου.
Κοινως, η ποσειδωνία, μπορεί ωραιοτατα να παει να κανει τα λιβαδια της στο 99,9999% της επιφανειας του βυθου οπου δεν ειναι εφικτο να αγκυροβολήσουν σκαφη.
Τα σκαφη, μπορουν να ριξουν αγκυρα *μονο* σε ενα πολυ μικρο μερος της θαλασσας, λογο των βαθους, της προστασίας και του τυπου του βυθου.
Τέλος, αν εχει φυκια κατω, τα σκαφη δεν αγκυροβολουν εκει παρα σπανια, γιατι δεν πιανει καλα η αγκυρα στον βυθο που εχει φυκια.
Το ολο θεμα είναι ενα made up bullshit κινδυνολογίας που ειναι αφορμη για μερικους μπιστημονες και δημοσιογραφους να φανε λεφτα και να πανε διακοπες με κοτερο.
Φυσικά, είναι μια ακόμα αφορμή, για το κρατος να επιβαλεί νεους περιορισμους στα ατομα.
Αυτό είναι το σημαντικό στην ιστορια. Η μασα και ο ελεγχος.
Θέλεις να οδηγησεις τα ιστιοφορα στην ακριβη μαρινα του φιλου σου;
Ξαφνου το αγκυροβολιο εχει ποσειδωνία και εσυ απαγορευεις την αγκυροβολία.
Μας ζαλίσατε τον παπαρο παιδια ημαρτον.
Ω τα πιγκουινακια, ω τα χαρτινα καλαμακια, ω τα φυκια.
Ολα αφορμη για μετρα, μασα και εξουσια.
Αφου καηκε ολη η χωρα για να μπουν ανεμογεννήτριες, τώρα το κρατος θα σωσει …. τα αορατα δαση του βυθου.
Και μπραβο τους, αφου βρισκουν κρετινους να τους πιστευουν ακομα…
Μας σωσαν απο την τρυπα του οζοντος θα μας σωσουν και απο την καταστροφη των φυκιων.
The year is 1949.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain.
The year is 1956.
Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over.
The year is 1966.
A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots.
The year is 1979.
Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005.
The year is 1985.
Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning.
The year is 1992.
There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top.
Now it is today.
Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with.
So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now.
Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one.
It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.
This is what the UK spyware proposal means.
There must be government spyware on every mobile device. It shall watch everything that happens, including always watching the screen, looking for things the government disapproves of.
When anything is flagged by the software as something the government doesn't like, the software must block it from being sent or displayed (in realtime).
The user of the device must not be able to shut this watching and blocking off. The only way to shut it off would be to ask the government or its proxies to do so for you, at their discretion.
Therefore the whole device must be locked down. Administrator rights and the decision of what software or operating system to run or not to run must be taken from the owner/user and handed to the government and its proxies.
Apple and Google are themselves working hard to lock down the devices they are involved in to shut out competition and establish a duopoly.
The UK government says it is "working closely" with Apple and Google and currently they synchronise and coordinate their communication on this subject.
The UK government is now proposing to mandate what would otherwise be illegal anti-competitive practices.
@GrapheneOS on the Apple and Google duopoly:
https://t.co/rbRmcUDTRu
Statement from @signalapp
https://t.co/vJILcSrs4s
@ReclaimTheNetHQ on the state spyware:
https://t.co/3FCi06bP77
The government announcement:
https://t.co/ynYjR3DIRo
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p
Anonymous cash for Bitcoin Lightning at nearly all Polish ATMs.
And that’s not all—you can pay with Bitcoin Lightning literally everywhere in Poland!
No KYC, no registration, via the Nostr provider.
I love it when I come across new technology that gives (European) bureaucrats the middle finger, especially in a situation where they want to spy on and regulate you across the board.
Most recently, I was this excited about a non-KYC project for exchanging stablecoins for fiat via https://t.co/5Bdka5KM6w, which bypasses the dystopian centralized exchanges that have to do massive reporting due to EU regulations like DAC-8 and MiCA.
In the case of BITBLIK, just like with https://t.co/eOBJxn7Yu6, you’re doing decentralized P2P trading, so I assume no regulation applies to you (it doesn’t go through any intermediary).
Today I came across a great Polish app called BITBLIK https://t.co/nUSKPCNERY, which connects the widely available BLIK system in Poland with Bitcoin Lightning.
With Bitcoin Lightning, you can pay anonymously anywhere in Poland, withdraw cash anonymously from an ATM (which I just did!), or make online payments on Polish websites.
BLIK is widely accepted (it’s supported by a network of over 13,000 ATMs across Poland and hundreds of thousands of merchants; according to AI, there are 87,000 of them).
Install the https://t.co/nUSKPCNERY app, launch it—no registration required, no KYC—enter an offer for how much you want to pay in PLN or how much you want to withdraw from an ATM.
You’ll make a Bitcoin Lightning payment, which will be locked.
Wait a minute or two until someone accepts your offer (the other party who has BLIK and wants Bitcoin Lightning).
As soon as they do, a BLIK code will appear.
It’s valid for about two minutes, so enter it at an ATM or at a terminal in a store or restaurant.
After a successful payment, you confirm that you used the BLIK code, and the Lightning payment is credited to the recipient.
Limits for BLIK payments vary by Polish ATM. ING Bank Śląski has the highest limit: 10,000 PLN per day (2,356 EUR), while mBank has a limit of 5,000 PLN per day (1,178 EUR). PKO BP allows BLIK transactions up to 1,500 PLN, but you can make up to 20,000 PLN (4,722 EUR) worth of transactions per day.
And of course, those limits apply to the merchant. When various merchants accept your Lightning payments, you effectively have no limits—you’re only limited by the counterparty’s liquidity.
BLIK is 100% open-source, so it can’t be banned!
You can fork it and use it within your own closed community.
Brown rice is what you order when you want the waiter to know you have made peace with joylessness in exchange for health points. The arsenic is the twist nobody puts on the menu.
Rice has a problem unique among grains. It grows in flooded paddies, sitting in standing water for months, and it draws arsenic out of the soil roughly ten times more eagerly than wheat or barley. That arsenic concentrates in the bran, the grain's outer layer. White rice has the bran polished off. Brown rice keeps it, because the bran is where the fibre and minerals live. It is also, inconveniently, where the arsenic lives.
A 2025 analysis found brown rice carries around 24% more total arsenic and 40% more inorganic arsenic, the form classed as a known human carcinogen, than white. You upgraded to the wholegrain and quietly upgraded your carcinogen dose along with it.
Then the ecology, which nobody ever pins on rice, because rice looks so very innocent. Those flooded paddies are anaerobic, and the microbes thriving in them belch methane on an industrial scale. Rice cultivation produces something like 10% of all human methane emissions and roughly a fifth of agricultural methane. Cattle get filmed for documentaries about their burps. Rice quietly produces a tenth of the world's methane while flooding entire landscapes and hoarding arsenic, then takes its place in the salad bar wearing a wellness halo.
Cows are dragged through the climate courts every week. The rice paddy, doing serious damage of its own, sits in your grain bowl with the expression of something that has never done anything wrong in its life. Curious, isn't it, which foods we decide to interrogate.
Your sunscreen is a hormone disruptor that you pay £14 a bottle to rub into your largest organ.
The FDA tested six common active ingredients in 2019-2020. After one application, oxybenzone hit serum levels over 180 times their safety threshold. Six of the six were still above threshold weeks later.
The same ingredients are linked, in peer-reviewed studies, to thyroid disruption, lower testosterone in adolescent boys, hormone changes in men, shortened gestation, and altered birth weight. Oxybenzone shows up in 97% of US urine samples and 85% of Swiss breast milk samples.
Of 16 sunscreen ingredients the FDA has formally reviewed, only two have been declared safe. Zinc oxide. Titanium dioxide. The other 14 are still on the shelf because nobody has bothered to finish testing them.
Now the part you have not been told.
Your skin's vulnerability to UV is partly built from what you eat. Linoleic acid, the omega-6 PUFA that dominates sunflower, soybean, corn, and rapeseed oil, gets incorporated into your skin cell membranes. When UV hits the double bonds, they oxidise. The byproducts damage DNA and trigger the inflammation you call sunburn.
Historical populations had skin PUFA composition under 4%. Modern Westerners sit at 15-20%, because they eat the seed oils their great-grandparents had never heard of. Mouse studies are blunt. Diets high in seed oil produce more UV-induced tumours than diets high in saturated fat.
You eat the cow. The butter. The tallow. The cream. Your skin slowly rebuilds itself out of stable fat. The burning threshold rises. The tanning response improves. You stop needing an industrial chemistry set in a 50ml tube.
For the rest, you use mineral sunscreen, a hat, and shade between noon and three.
Picture the men who built the Hoover Dam in the Nevada sun. Shirtless. Twelve-hour shifts. 120 degrees on the canyon wall. Lard in the canteen. Beef stew for dinner. Not a tube of oxybenzone within a thousand miles.
They did not burn.
They were eating the cow.
A quick tour of the plant-based "milks" that were going to save you and the planet.
Almond milk. Ingredients: water, almonds (2%), calcium carbonate, sunflower lecithin, locust bean gum, gellan gum, potassium citrate, dipotassium phosphate, sea salt, natural flavour, vitamin mix. Each litre uses around 1,600 gallons of irrigated water in a state that has been in drought for a decade.
Oat milk. Ingredients: water, oats, rapeseed oil, dipotassium phosphate, calcium carbonate, tricalcium phosphate, sea salt, riboflavin, vitamin A, D2, B12. Hexane-extracted seed oil with a dusting of grain in it. Spikes your blood sugar like a can of Coke.
Soy milk. The soy was grown for the oil. The leftover meal, normally fed to pigs and chickens, is what you are drinking. The industrial by-product of seed oil production, sold to you as the ethical choice.
Coconut milk. Thickened with carrageenan, shown in studies to provoke gut inflammation. Driving deforestation across Southeast Asia. Some Thai producers still use chained monkey labour to harvest the coconuts.
Rice milk. Ingredients: water, rice, sunflower oil, calcium carbonate, sea salt, gellan gum, locust bean gum, vitamins. Sugar water with a faint memory of rice and another splash of seed oil for good measure.
Pea milk. Engineered in a lab in 2015. Ingredients: water, pea protein isolate, sunflower oil, cane sugar, calcium phosphate, sea salt, gellan gum, xanthan gum, sunflower lecithin, natural flavour. The contents of a chemistry set in a carton.
Hemp milk. Tastes like a barn floor. Still contains sunflower lecithin and gellan gum, because nothing in this aisle is allowed to exist without an emulsifier.
Cashew milk. The shells contain a chemical so caustic that the women in Vietnam who hand-process them routinely suffer permanent skin damage. The world's most exploitative latte.
Cow's milk. Ingredients: cow's milk.
Eight thousand years on the table. No marketing budget required.
Children sleep less than they did fifty years ago. We accept this.
Sperm counts in the developed world have halved since 1973. We accept this.
Testosterone in men has dropped roughly 1% per year for decades. We accept this.
Anxiety and depression in teenagers have tripled. We accept this.
Type 2 diabetes is now diagnosed in eight-year-olds. We accept this.
Autism diagnoses have risen by orders of magnitude. We accept this.
Fertility clinics are full. We accept this.
Childhood obesity affects one in four ten-year-olds. We accept this.
Every measure of human vitality, in every age group, in every developed country, has degraded simultaneously, in the same direction, in the same generation. Bones weaker. Brains foggier. Bodies fatter. Sleep shorter. Mood lower. Children sicker. Adults more medicated. The species visibly faltering inside a single lifetime.
We are told there is no common cause. We are told these are eight separate epidemics requiring eight separate research grants administered by eight separate committees funded by the eight separate industries that produced them.
We accept this.
A previous generation would have started asking questions a long time ago, and would not have stopped until somebody answered.
"Eating too much fat will give you gallstones."
Eating too little fat will give you gallstones.
The gallbladder exists for one reason: to release bile when you eat fat. No fat in, no bile out. The bile sits there, concentrates, and crystallises into the stones the low-fat diet was supposed to prevent.
A 1998 Italian study put obese subjects on two weight-loss diets, identical in calories, differing only in fat content. Higher-fat group: zero gallstones. Lower-fat group: 54.5 percent developed gallstones in twelve weeks.
The mechanism is not hidden. It is in the textbook. Harvard Health will tell you, in the same paragraph, that low-fat diets cause gallbladder stasis and that the recommended treatment for gallstones is a low-fat diet. The contradiction is presented as nutritional wisdom rather than a problem.
The hinge needs to move. The gallbladder needs to empty. Fat is the lever.
People who go high-fat low-carb sometimes pass small stones in the first few weeks and panic. The gallbladder is finally emptying after years of being told to sit still by people who did not understand what it was for.
Eat the fat.
Let's talk about the fat.
Not the lean bit. The fat. The white seam running through a ribeye that you've been told to cut off, trim away, render out, discard. The fat removed before the nutrition label is calculated so the numbers look better on the front of the pack. The fat that every chef from Escoffier to your nan knew was the point of the cut.
That fat is roughly half oleic acid, the same monounsaturated fat in olive oil. The fat with a Mediterranean diet named after it, a documentary made about it, and a PR campaign running since 1990.
That fat is largely stearic acid, which is neutral on LDL, raises HDL, and is so well-behaved that even the most nervous cardiologist can't pin anything on it.
That fat is the carrier for vitamins A, D, E, and K. The fat-soluble vitamins. Called fat-soluble because they require fat to be absorbed. Which makes choosing the lean cut and wondering why nothing's improving one of the great metabolic ironies of modern dietary advice.
The fat was never the problem.
The fat is the nutrition. The fat is the satiety. The fat is the flavour. The fat is the reason your great-grandfather worked all day on two meals while you need three and a snack drawer.
Stop cutting it off.
New version of Nostr VPN is out. Like tailscale, but no email addresses or 3rd party accounts, just public keys. New:
* native multiplatform user interfaces
* Nostr-based multihop routing (FIPS protocol) — very useful when NAT holepunching fails
* improved network management UX
Testosterone is made from cholesterol.
Oestrogen is made from cholesterol.
Cortisol is made from cholesterol.
Vitamin D is made from cholesterol.
Bile acids that digest fat are made from cholesterol.
Progesterone, which sustains pregnancy, is made from cholesterol.
Every cell membrane in your body contains cholesterol.
Every nerve is insulated by myelin, which is largely cholesterol.
Every memory you form requires cholesterol to build the synapse that holds it.
Your brain is 60% fat, mostly cholesterol.
Breast milk is rich in cholesterol because infant brains cannot develop without it.
Nature, given the job of designing the perfect first food, put cholesterol in it.
When you eat less of it, the liver makes more.
Because the body knows it cannot function without it.
We declared war on cholesterol in 1977.
Testosterone in men has dropped 25%.
Vitamin D deficiency is now endemic.
One in three adults over fifty is on a statin lowering the cholesterol the body is desperately trying to maintain.
Depression rates have tripled.
Infertility rates have doubled.
The war is going well.
Να προσεχετε την γιαγια και τον παππου
μην τους κολλησετε Χανταιο και πεθανουν
Καλυτερα να τους σκοτωσει η κυβερνηση στο νοσοκομειο
Εχει πειρα απο την εποχη του Κοβιντ.
1958: a British fishmonger had cod, haddock, plaice, sole, herring, mackerel, sprats, kippers, smoked haddock, eels, oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks, brown shrimp, and crab on his slab. All landed within the week. All from British waters.
2026: a British supermarket has tilapia from Vietnam, salmon from a Norwegian feedlot, and a tray of "white fish bites" of unspecified species.
The North Sea is still there. The boats are still in the harbour.
Somewhere between 1958 and now, the fish stopped reaching the customer.