Yancy, Part II

I don't drink or smoke, this place is my vice.

[Yancy, Part II @yancypart2]

@BleacherReport @Pacers This looks like an AI image created by a racist 14 year old.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Karl’s Dad was cool

[The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 @TGTM_Official]

Submission from our follower:

“Pregnant woman in hospital begs me to buy her cola… I refused and later found out why.”

I was waiting in a Chinese hospital after queuing for a long time when a pregnant woman came up to me. She said she had low blood sugar and asked me to quickly buy her a bottle of cola.

It was finally my turn for my check-up, so I refused.

During my ultrasound, I overheard two doctors talking about her: she had an unstable fetal position and was at high risk of miscarriage. She had been approaching many people, asking them to buy her drinks — apparently looking for someone to pin the blame on if something went wrong with her pregnancy.

I was terrified afterward. Thank goodness I didn’t help her.

Moral of the story

When you’re out in public in China, always assume the worst intentions from strangers. If someone asks you for help, the safest reply is:

“Sorry, but I can call the police for you right now.”

The only thing you can safely trust from a random stranger is probably:

“They’re checking helmets up ahead.”

[Yancy, Part II @yancypart2]

@misaligned_agi @P_Kallioniemi Imagine thinking Americans shop at Aldi because it is "healthy and European."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The flags in this image have nothing to do with Blackbeard, Calico Jack, or any pirate Hollywood has ever put on screen.

Both surviving authentic pirate flags came from Barbary corsairs, the North African maritime raiders who operated out of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. One is at the Åland Maritime Museum in Finland, captured from a Barbary ship off the North African coast in the 1700s. The other was seized by the Royal Navy in 1780 and now sits in Portsmouth. Both are from a theater of piracy that Americans almost never think about.

The Golden Age of Caribbean piracy, 1650 to 1730, produced every image you have in your head: the skull and crossbones, the black flag, the romantic outlaw sailing the Atlantic. It produced zero surviving flags. Not one. Every "historical" Jolly Roger design you've ever seen, from Blackbeard's skeleton to Calico Jack's crossed swords, comes from a single book: Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724. No eyewitness drawings. No physical artifacts. Just one source that historians still argue about.

Owning a pirate flag was a capital offense. You didn't keep them. Courts burned them as evidence. Flags rotted on ships that sank or were captured and destroyed.

Meanwhile the Barbary corsairs, who enslaved somewhere between 800,000 and 1.25 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780, left behind the only two pieces of fabric that prove the Jolly Roger was real.

The entire visual language of piracy, the thing that sells $4 billion in Halloween costumes and theme park tickets annually, traces back to a mythology with no surviving physical evidence. And the two flags that survived belong to the story almost nobody in the West knows.

[Okie_Rancher @Okie_Rancher]

My friend’s Dad has a part time job.
He’s had it for 30 years.
He does nothing but go to the warehouse of a major distributor, and when the semi drivers arrive, he jumps into the truck and backs them into the loading docks.
He does it perfectly, every time, first time, no matter how tight the fit.
The company says his job saves them an insane amount of money in damages and delays every year, they can’t duplicate what he does at other sites, and they don’t want him to quit…
because no one else can do it.

This is peak masculinity.

[dank @cptdankkk]

Marlon Wayans says he had $700 in the bank and $900 rent before creating The Wayans Bros

“When we left In Living Color, I had $700 in the bank and $900 rent. I was broke and my brother Shawn was looking at me like, ‘What are we going to do now?’”

“Shawn was depressed. He'd sit in a dark room and play Christmas music because Christmas was a happy time for him”

“We always had a bottle of Diet Pepsi and I would sit there like we did on In Living Color”

“One day he came out of the room and said, ‘What are you doing, stupid?’”

“I said, ‘I'm working on our TV show’”

“The first thing he read was, ‘Interior. Outside’”

“He said, ‘Stupid, how do you have interior outside?’”

“And we sat down and created The Wayans Bros”

[Yancy, Part II @yancypart2]

@AllenBogarty @47fucb4r8c69323

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In England, you're allowed to clear about 20 metres of silt and rubbish out of a river on your own. Anything past that needs a permit from the Environment Agency. Paul Powlesland's volunteers cleared a 250-metre stretch of the River Roding with a hired digger, which is why a barrister who hauled out 200 bags of trash is now under criminal investigation.

The Roding runs through east London. Powlesland lives on a boat moored on it, and for years he and a group of volunteers have pulled out shopping trolleys, needles, old appliances, even weapons. Kingfishers, herons and dragonflies came back to water that used to be buried under junk. This one job took 10 days and a digger that cost £1,000 to hire.

The rule that caught him is oddly specific. Under England's water rules, scooping silt off the bottom of a river the agency officially manages counts as a "flood risk activity", and the law treats that the same as building a structure in the water. Do it without a permit and the offence carries up to two years in prison. The agency says it is also looking at waste the volunteers left on the floodplain. Powlesland is an environmental lawyer who has used these exact laws to protect rivers and trees, and a conviction could cost him his licence to practise.

The agency's reasoning isn't unreasonable. Dredging done badly can push flooding onto people downstream and wreck the habitat that protected animals need, which is what the permit is meant to prevent. The 20-metre allowance is there for small jobs. And no decision to prosecute has actually been made.

While investigators were knocking on a volunteer's door within a week of his cleanup, water companies discharged raw sewage into England's rivers and seas for a combined 3.6 million hours in 2024, more than 400 years of spilling packed into a single year. Only 14% of English rivers are in good health. Between 2015 and 2025, the Environment Agency investigated water companies for pollution 11,474 times. Fifty-eight of those ended in a prosecution. For serious pollution over the last five years, the number of water companies actually taken to court and convicted is zero.

So the message comes out backwards. Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.

[Matt Forney @mattforney]

Largely uncommented on is how Britain has become the new Italy: a dysfunctional state defined by political chaos where nobody can reign it in. They're now going to get their sixth prime minister in ten years:

Theresa May: three years
Boris Johnson: three years
Liz Truss: less than two months
Rishi Sunak: less than two years
Keir Starmer: two years

Constant leadership instability is a sign of systemic collapse, akin to how France was a revolving door of PMs both before and after WWII until De Gaulle put a stop to it.

[piercheney @LVpolitic]

This is a wild victory lap.

Step 1 - essentially legalize all drugs - overdose deaths skyrocket.
Step 2 - Criminalize illicit drugs again - overdose deaths drop by half.
Step 3 - take credit only for step 2.

[Æthelstan @TheHauskarl]

Thefts like this, a catalytic converter in this instance, are interesting in that they have a wildly disproportionate effect on society.

They represent not just a material loss - they represent the destruction of potentiality, of all the value that could've sprung forth had it not been stolen.

Phone theft is similar in that its loss is not merely the value of the device, but potentially a bank account and family photo albums as well.

The destruction of public infrastructure might also fall into this category, a few hundred pounds of copper at the expense of millions of pounds of damage and public inconvenience.

These crimes ought to be punished with the same wildly disproportionate harshness their impact has on their victims.

There's a lesson from history we have forgotten, just as all history is a war on forgetting, that Britain learnt long ago.

“Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”
— George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, from his essay “Of Punishment” in Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections, 1750.

[Jacob L @JacobL1994_]

I was *very* young when Columbine happened but I distinctly remember how everyone got their motivations wrong.

They weren’t bullied and they weren’t outcasts. Nothing to do with Marilyn Manson or violent video games. They weren’t lashing out at society. They were just evil.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold quite simply wanted to murder their classmates for fun.

The original plan was to place firebombs throughout the school, and then gun down the fleeing students. Their bombs failed, so they went to plan B: the less efficient method of entering the school and shooting who they could before taking their own lives.

After every tragedy, society likes to ask itself where it went wrong. In ancient times, idol worshippers would offer sacrifices to stave off floods, fire, and earthquakes. But sometimes people are just irredeemably evil beyond comprehension. In the diary of Anne Frank, people cling to that phrase of hers: “deep down, I believe everyone has good in them”, but just weeks after writing that, she and her family encountered some men who had no good in them at all.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Tom Petty’s cameo in THE POSTMAN (1997) gets funnier every time it’s brought up. He plays a man who may or may not actually be Tom Petty after civilization collapses, and the movie never seems interested in clearing it up.

[Brian Niemeier @BrianNiemeier]

Spielberg read a warning against science and greed run amok and decided the greedy mad scientists were the good guys.

While villifying the characters who understood and respected nature.

[Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms]

A new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan states that Vance in the White House tried to help Tucker Carlson land major interviews like arranging a Tucker interview with Ghislaine Maxwell to clear the president in the Epstein scandal.

[Inconspicuous CatShark @TheLynx_1]

So….

If Saul is the hero and David is the villain, does this mean this “pastor” believes that the patriarchal progenitor of our lord Christ is evil, and thus by extension Christ is evil?

It can certainly be argued that David fell, especially with the whole wife and soldier fiasco.

But Saul is not the hero here…

[SueD63 @suz34175]

@MeidasTouch Why can’t America have nice things ???

[Yancy, Part II @yancypart2]

@FAmmiranteTFJ As a God-fearing Conservative American I will give Canada the same energy Canada gives us.

[JJ McCarthyism @JJ_McCarthyism]

Then don't boo our shit🇺🇸🦅

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

Okay, since you asked, here’s my American opinion.

Soccer will never be as popular in America as football for 3 reasons:

1. The Fake Injuries

Players are incentivized to flop because the other team is more likely to get a penalty.

In football, it is the opposite. If a player has a real injury, play toughs it out and plays through it, it is seen as heroic.

Americans like toughness and grit.

2. Chance Goals

Many goals are scored by chance as opposed to skill. The chaos at the net when the ball is near is remarkable. Defenders blocking the goalie’s line of sight. The ball bouncing and ricocheting off of random body parts often determines if the ball goes in the net or out of bounds.

In football, there are some elements of chance, but because players are allowed to use their hands, the points are primarily scored based on skill. Less is left to chance.

Americans like control.

3. Low Scoring

In football, it is still challenging to score, but it happens much more often. Also, every play has a chance for gratification and excitement: a first down, a big catch, a big hit, a sack, an interception, etc

American like constant excitement.