Maybe there was no big change: Believing that the dissolution of the soviet union in 1991 was a bad thing + believing that the way forward in 2026 is to align themselves with the eu, are not mutually exclusive beliefs. It’s like Moldova had a bad relation breakup, but after some time has passed, they accept that their old relation is done and never coming back, so it’s time to move on and start dating other people.
Bush W is one of them as well, he tried to use the biblical prophecy about that final war to convince France to support the Iraq war. Except they (the french president + his advisers) at first didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and once they did, they were dreaded by the knowledge that the USA was being governed by religious nut jobs. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush
I didn’t know what this was, so I looked it up: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/katie-britt-s-face-says-it-all-as-jack-smith-gotcha-moment-falls-apart/ar-AA2deUht
Gop vileness and incompetence on full display (again).
The 219 days is only when counting from when Italy first attacked, and Greece never surrendered to Italy afaik. After Germany invaded, the Greek army only held out 17 days before surrendering (to Germany). https://attentively.wiki.edu.gr/
Edit to add: Greece did worse than the Belgians. As a Belgian I consider this a pathetic performance ;-)
Headless chickens are a good example of this. If the chop leaves enough of the brain stem intact, then the now headless chicken can still run around and “live” for some time. Since “running around like a headless chicken” is a saying in several languages, this probably wasn’t an ultra rare occurrence.
I can see a few uses for a smart oven like that, for lazy cooking by inexperienced chefs.
For example different meats require different cooking temperatures. If the computer knows that it’s cooking beef and that you want it medium rare, then it should be able to calculate from the shape + weight + evolution of outside temperatures when the inside of the beef is at the right temperature. With a normal oven you’d have to guesstimate the time yourself (hard without experience) for when you should start probing the meat with a meat thermometer.
The added value for an experienced chef is probably nil. They know when the meat is ready by look and feel and they might probe it once to confirm that they were right.
Google would rather block potential competition than attempt to fix their own product.
So the Playstore sucks and it burns too many of their potential customers, resulting in churn instead of retention. Consequently it has seen very little growth since Covid: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ . The potential for growth was there though, as can be seen with the apple app store: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-app-store-statistics/
And as a cherry on top, Google has recently started billing cc chargeback fees to developers. I don’t know a single other large digital shop platform that does this. More costs and more administration for Devs, which will make the Playstore even less attractive for hobby Devs with a niche passion project.
The “all options are bad” voter discouragement has ramped back up for a while now. But also interesting is the absence of another kind of anti-democracy discourse: where are the “vote 3rd party” stooges that always become active before USA presidential elections?
If the stooges aren’t promoting 3rd party voting now, then does that mean that 3rd party voting is not actually a bad thing during USA congressional elections? I mean, if it were bad for democracy in the USA, then I’d expect the authoritarian bootlickers to be promoting it now as well. But it’s also possible that they are and that I’m just not watching the right places, since I don’t follow any state specific discussion forums.
An anecdote:
Many years ago I travelled from France to London and I witnessed some of the groundworks for the future high-speed rails on both sides of the channel. On a weekend day, so no actual work was going on.
On the French side the groundworks were almost finished. It was just a wide smooth expanse of gravel that went on and on. The transition from where the gravel was compacted + graded to where it still needed work was a clear line. The site fencing was continuous and intact everywhere. The large machines were neatly parked together in separately fenced off areas, near that transition line between finished/to do.
In England the works looked not even close to finished. The gravel looked like they had been making a BMX track for jeeps, several very bumpy narrow paths next to each other, with ridges in between, without any section of the trajectory looking finished. It looked like they were working everywhere at the same time. Fencing was a jumbled mess. The many more + much smaller machines were haphazardly parked around the gravel (weekend). Parked on one of the hills of the BMX track there was the tiniest bulldozer that I have ever seen on a construction site that wasn’t a renovation project, for such a massive project its prominent presence was hilarious imo.
With how the English worked on their part of the project, it was inevitable that they would be over budget, over time, and deliver with worse quality (with higher future costs for the client as a consequence).
“Noone loves a hooker with a dick under her dress more than a closeted republican.”
From an old Onion News video: https://youtu.be/simV1ZXFsxI
Autumn is mating season for spiders, it’s when a lot of them come out of hiding in search of some sexy times.
Relevant “The Dictator” clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYJ2w82WifU
This is an example of false equivalence, whataboutism and tribalism.
False equivalence:
Desantis is an elected republican politician. The Minnesota fraud was commited by unelected citizens.
Desantis hasn’t faced any consequences yet for his corruption. Several perpetrators of the Minnesota fraud are being prosecuted.
Whataboutism:
A republican commits corrupt acts and the argument used to defend it isn’t related to that corruption case at all, instead it’s “what about the DNC”.
Tribalism:
Corruption by people from my tribe (republicans) is fine and people outside my tribe aren’t allowed to call out crimes committed by people from my tribe. The moral point of view would have been that corruption is unacceptable irrespective of party affiliation.
Their own graph illustrates how bullshit their own argument is:
In the text they are comparing taxes without interest at “less than $200,000” (aka as $197.000 or “almost $200.000” if the author weren’t a ghoul) with benefits without interest at $730.000, without mentioning interest/inflation adjustment at all. Since taxes were paid decades before the benefits will be received, their accumulated interest is going to be much higher, which is illustrated well by the graph.
If the graph can be trusted, then with interest the break even point of contributions/benefits happens at 82 or 83 years of age. The usa life expectancy is 79 years. So according to their own data, the average boomer will have contributed more than they will receive. And that is with the current regressive taxation scheme, where high earners contribute less.
I think they are referring to the Powell Memo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum_(1971)
This video connects some more of the dots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgYkde3o2Xw
Yep, this has consistently been the message.
"After the European Council meeting, De Wever explained that too few member states had agreed to back a liquidity safety net to guarantee the value of the Russian assets, leaving Belgium holding the bag if Russian claims in court succeeded or if the assets had to be returned under a peace deal. " https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/28/belgium-hits-back-at-eu-plan-to-use-frozen-russian-assets-to-aid-ukraine
Every plan after that involving the Russian money had the same fundamental problem: no protection for Belgium. If Belgium would have to repay the entire sum on it’s own, then it would be about €16000 per citizen.
Increasingly? All that’s changed is that what many suspected for a long time is more and more coming out. That’s not an increase, that’s confirmation.
I suspect the catalyst for this international cooperation of the far right was Paul Manafort’s pro Russian lobby work prior to becoming involved in Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016. Manafort started working for Russia’s interests in Europe at least as early as 2004. During those years, politicians of far right EU parties started having meetings with Manafort, with Russian officials, “observing” sham elections for legitimization in Russia and Crimea, voting for Russia’s interests, … And now we have additional confirmation that they are being paid for their services, which we already knew in part since at least 2018 when Manafort was being investigated: https://www.dw.com/en/european-politicians-got-millions-to-lobby-for-pro-russian-government-in-ukraine/a-42721849
And we can thank Steve Bannon for why EU far right parties their social media presence is more advanced than that of centrist parties. He came to Europe in 2018 to kickstart this new form of campaigning amongst the eu far right parties: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/21/secret-rightwing-gathering-europe-steve-bannon Add in the support from Russia’s troll army and the complicity of CEOs like Zuckerberg/Musk/Huffman and it explains how popular social media became so hateful.