This thread is a foray into the cult called The Family International (formerly Teens for Christ and then Children of God), founded by David Berg in Huntington, California, in 1968. It now has dealings all over the world, including (worryingly) India.
Meredith Blake answering "26" is the most efficient villain introduction Disney ever wrote.
One number tells you everything. She is marrying a 44 year old winemaker with a daughter old enough to interrogate her, and she gets defensive about a question no polite person would ask, because being young is the whole pitch and she knows it.
Elaine Hendrix was actually 26 during filming, the same age as the character. The line still lands like a lie, because Meredith built all her leverage on being young and everyone in that scene can feel it.
What makes her the best 90s Disney villain is how little she actually does. She casts no spell and breaks no law. She is a publicist who wants to marry a rich man and ship his daughters to a Swiss boarding school so she can have him to herself. Normal human ambition, written as evil because the movie decided family was the moral high ground and self interest was the crime.
Then the twins drop her air mattress into the lake and feed her to the mosquitoes, and audiences cheered two kids torturing a grown woman whose only sin was wanting the life she was promised.
The "26" plays as a punchline. It was carrying an entire character study.
Look at this comment calling for women to cover up, liked by @kafkasbluebug. And look how he responds to an Iranian woman calling out his hypocrisy.
This is why I say they're receiving a script from somewhere else and are parrotting it. They're too dumb to know when to shut up.
The problem with hiring idiot yes-men for your propaganda(like Shrishti Khanna,kafkasbluebug & now these CJP troglodytes)is that they're adept enough at following a careful script but don't have the IQ to handle optics on their own.That's why they keep slipping up like this.
Kudos to @Geet_reports for a sharp, necessary line of questioning.
When asked why the 'Cockroach Janta Party' lacks female representation or followers, the spokesperson started with a valid point on safety: the brutal online abuse and trolling that deters women from public roles.
But then came the casual, disappointing pivot to lazy stereotyping.
To claim that women aren’t engaged in politics because "media and films have conditioned them to care only about makeup and shopping" is not just reductive, it is an insult to the very movement you claim to lead.
Let’s look at the facts: the NEET aspirants fighting for justice on the streets right now include thousands of fierce, articulate women.
They are fighting for their futures, enduring police crackdowns, and leading this struggle with absolute seriousness.
How dare you minimise their grit, intelligence, and political agency by reducing their entire gender to a patriarchal caricature of consumerism? You are actively erasing the labor of the very women standing on your frontlines.
How do you build an inclusive political movement while simultaneously generalising half the country's population as apolitical consumers?
If your platform wants to represent the people, it needs to treat women as political citizens, not products of cinematic conditioning.
Looking forward to seeing how they plan to dismantle these internal biases to actually create safe, representative spaces.
Every single ritual like this in our vast culture is geared towards taking care of our mental health in subtle and obvious ways. Closure, hope, reassurance, remembrance, solemnity, celebration, peace. Only a fool does not see the inherent value in ritual.
Folded towards you…I enjoyed the meal and thank you.
Folded away from you…traditionally associated with mourning meals in many South Indian customs.
What fascinates me isn’t the ritual itself, but the fact that even a folded banana leaf carries cultural memory. India hides philosophy in the smallest details.🙏
Instead of getting the Hungry Caterpillar for my children I got “A Butterfly is Patient”. Why? Because children deserve beauty rather than ugliness. It nourishes their spirit in a healthy way. Ugly art is junk food poison for your children. You were told to get Hungry Caterpillar by an insalubrious culture. Resist. Get your children books that depict nature in its true resplendent beauty in anatomically correct images that will help them identify things like caterpillars and butterflies in the real world. This is what they deserve. Let the blobby artists starve on their own egos.
Last night, I ordered a thali worth ₹482 from Zomato hoping for a peaceful dinner after a long day.
But the moment I opened the package after the delivery boy left, my entire mood was ruined.
The dal had leaked all over the bag, the curry was spilled everywhere, rotis were soaked, and the whole meal looked completely inedible.
I immediately contacted Zomato support, shared clear photos, and explained everything properly…
but instead of helping, they simply refused to give any refund or proper resolution.
So in the end, I lost both — my money and my dinner.
What’s disappointing is that customers pay extra for convenience, packaging, and service, yet when something goes wrong, responsibility somehow disappears.
Online food delivery is starting to feel more like a gamble than convenience. 😔
As a woman, I so want to say something, but on the contrary, I agree with this theory so much. My mother has always said this. She also said to find a guy's family where the father is the head of the family, and to follow the same rule when you build your own nuclear family. The dynamics are much better.
For most of human history, women have had about 100 periods in their lifetimes. Today's women have over 400. A Chinese biologist named Hongmei Wang thinks that gap is part of why women run out of eggs decades earlier than they have to.
Wang is 52. She runs a lab at the Institute of Zoology in Beijing that studies the cellular machinery of fertility. Her idea is simple. Bleed four times a year instead of twelve, save eggs, extend the fertile window. Mouse data so far backs her up.
Before birth control, women were pregnant or breastfeeding through most of their fertile years, and both pause periods. About 100 cycles in a lifetime. Now, with later marriages, fewer kids, and longer lives, the number sits above 400. Each cycle uses up eggs. Run out, menopause starts.
That cycle hypothesis is one of three threads in her lab. The second was a 2024 paper in the journal Cell Discovery. Her team grew lab stem cells, named them M-cells, and injected them into the ovaries of old monkeys past their fertile years. Damage in the tissue healed. Hormones came back. One treated monkey gave birth to a healthy baby. They tried it on 63 women whose ovaries had quit decades early, a condition called premature ovarian failure. Four had healthy children. The team patented the technique and licensed it to a private firm.
The third project is in Barcelona. Wang is partnering with biologist Alfonso Martínez Arias to grow fake human embryos from stem cells. Almost every country bans growing real ones in a lab past 14 days. The window from day 14 to day 28 is when the body's basic blueprint forms, the layers that turn into brain and heart and bone. Almost everything we know about it comes from animals, because the human version has been off-limits in labs for decades. The fake embryos are how Wang plans to look inside.
She does not oversell any of it. "When we stop ovulation, we save more eggs, but we also stop the body from making estrogen, and that molecule is absolutely vital for health," she told El País. Years of low estrogen weaken bones and wear down the heart. She is still working out how to keep the eggs without paying that price.
The backdrop is China. Last year, the country had 7.92 million babies, a 17% drop and the lowest birth rate since 1949. The population shrank by 3.4 million people in a single year. Wang knows her work will not arrive in time to fix those numbers. But the girls born this decade may grow up with a reproductive clock no woman has ever had before.
Look at this comment calling for women to cover up, liked by @kafkasbluebug. And look how he responds to an Iranian woman calling out his hypocrisy.
This is why I say they're receiving a script from somewhere else and are parrotting it. They're too dumb to know when to shut up.
Cue this rat playing victim by claiming he's being bullied, has no friends, is suicidal and is crying all the time (which is what he did after being called out for liking comments saying Iranian women only want freedom to start OnlyFans.) Classic narcissist.
This reptile looking influencer Prashant Pundir is encouraging his followers by liking a comment which says that a democratically elected MLA and possibly the future CM of West Bengal should be kiIIed.
Hello @KolkataPolice, he and his situationship partner regularly like such comments and encourage their followers to take harsh steps, such as planning a mvrder. Kindly look into it.
One of my favourite sub-genres of videos is small town Americans trying Indian food. Maybe because in a weird way they seem more human than the Americans who talk like they went to diplomacy school from age 2.