Press reports in April 2019 and December 2021 stated that China might be developing a YJ-18 launcher that can be packaged inside a standard commercial shipping container
{ The city of Lopburi is experiencing unprecedented violence between two monkey gangs [Thailand]. Local authorities successfully apprehended one of the gang leader, Ai Krao, using a tranquilizer gun. Upon his arrest, cries could be heard from his subordinates. A hierarchy chart has been published, showing Yellow as Krao’s group and Green as Yak’s group. A citywide monkey-hunt is underway to capture the remaining leaders. | Twitter | with videos | businesstoday.in }
The practice of foot binding began in the Sung dynasty (AD 960-1280) in China, reportedly to imitate an imperial concubine who was required to dance with her feet bound.’ By the 12th century, the practice was widespread and more severe: feet were bound so tightly and so early in life that women were unable to dance and had difficulty walking. When a girl was about 3 years old, all but the first toe on each foot were broken and the feet bound with cloth strips that were tightened over the course of 2 years to keep the feet shorter than 10 cm [~4 inches] and to bend the sole into extreme concavity. Foot binding ceased in the 20th century [banned in 1912] with the end of imperial dynasties and the increasing influence of Western fashion.
{ Public Health Briefs | PDF }
In Chinese culture, bound feet were considered highly erotic. When walking, women with bound feet were forced to bend their knees and balance on their heels; the resultant unsteady, swaying movement was attractive to many men. It was also believed that the gait of a woman with bound feet would strengthen her vaginal muscles.
Although Qing Dynasty sex manuals list 48 different ways of playing with womens’ bound feet, many men preferred not to see uncovered feet, so they were concealed within tiny, elaborately embroidered “lotus shoes” and wrappings. […] This concealment from the man’s eye was considered sexually appealing in itself, though it had the practical grounding that an uncovered foot would give off a foul odour due to chronic fungus infections and potential gangrene. […]
bound feet limited a woman’s mobility to such an extent that she was largely restricted to her home and could not venture far without the help of watchful servants. She was rendered almost totally dependent on her menfolk, which appealed to male fantasies of ownership. A woman with bound feet was also seen as a desirable wife because she was assumed to be obedient and uncomplaining.
{ Dance’s Historical Miscellany | Continue reading }
Confucius lived before the Christian Jesus is said to have been born […] Adeline Yen Mah asserts that, “every Chinese person wears a Confucian thinking cap … just as foot binding once bound women‟s feet, Confucian’s teachings have quietly and surely bound women’s lives for centuries.” Confucianism was at its peak centuries before Ming Dynasty rule; […] Confucianism revolved around the belief that a man was the leader and a woman‟s priority was to be obedient to that man […]
Females in Chinese society were regarded as menial entities; continually demoralized, degraded, humiliated, ignored—which created intrinsic silence. The silence was second nature and women simply accepted mistreatment because they did not know anything different. This was a paradoxical situation since women were a remarkably prevalent motif in Ming Dynasty paintings. A woman could speak eloquently, sing, and play music, as shown in paintings, yet their individuality was stripped away
{ The Callous Fate of Chinese Women During the Ming Dynasty (2011) | PDF }
{ Tod Papageorge, “The Beaches, Los Angeles” 1979 - 1982 | more }
{ In the summers of 1983 and 1984, Tod Papageorge, a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art, adopted a daily ritual in Athens. He would wake up each morning at the Zafolia Hotel and walk up the hill to the Acropolis to spend the day photographing the scene around the ancient citadel, sweating in the sun. | Tod Papageorge, The Acropolis }
“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see – or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email from Scavino reads, according to a transcript of Kushner’s testimony to the committee, which was released by the panel on Friday.
Two phrases were bolded in the email: “Save America PAC!” and “Rigged Election!”
Kushner forwarded the request and discussed it on an email chain that included Eric Trump, the president’s son; Alex Cannon, a Trump campaign lawyer; Sean Dollman, the chief financial officer of Trump’s 2020 campaign; and Justin Clark, a Trump campaign lawyer.
“Guys - can we do ASAP please?” Kushner wrote.
Eric Trump responded, saying: “Both web URLs are already registered. Save America PAC was registered October 23 of this year. Was that done by the campaign?”
Dollman responded: “‘Save America PAC’ is already taken/registered, just confirming that. But we can still file for ‘Save America.’”
Kushner’s response, according to the transcript, was: “Go.”
I stepped out of an East Side funeral home into the bright June sunshine. I examined the white plastic bucket containing my mother’s ashes, and then I raised my arm to hail a cab.
One pulled up, but something made me wave it on. I stuffed the bucket into my backpack, loaded the pack onto my back and started walking.
For the next hour or so, I took my mother on a tour of some of the monuments of our New York lives.
Past the old Drake Hotel, where we would duck in to grab a handful of mini-Swiss chocolate bars from the cavernous bowl in the lobby.
Past Saks Fifth Avenue, where we would squeeze into the tightly packed elevators operated by “elevator men” calling out the floors in deep baritones.
Past the MoMA sculpture garden, which my mother’s first New York apartment overlooked.
Past the Pierre Hotel, where my mother had conned the receptionist into giving her a room when she ran away from home as a teenager.
Past the long gone Auto Pub in the General Motors Building, where my parents threw the best birthday party of my life.
Past the old Rumpelmayer’s on Central Park South, where my mother would take me for vanilla ice cream sodas on special days.
Into Central Park and onto the park drive, which my mother hectored many a taxi driver into taking to “save time.”
And, finally, home to the empty apartment on the Upper West Side.
Thanks, Mom, for sharing these things with me. How pleased I was that day to return the favor.
While Vancouver is technically one of the warmest cities in Canada, this fact is greatly diminished when one learns that it is also one of the wettest places in the country. So, though a visitor may not encounter the frigid temperatures common in other parts of Canada during non-summer seasons, any outdoor experience will undoubtedly be damp and depressing.
Visitors will find many of the supposed must-see attractions pushed by other travel blogs quite lacklustre. The Granville Island Public Market for instance, often deemed an essential stop, offers nothing particularly exceptional beyond what can be found in many other cities around North America.
The same can be said about the city’s famed ‘Steam Clock’, which despite having been styled to appear as a relic from the 19th-century, was in fact only built in 1977.
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.
It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.
What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.
the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed, […] begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.
Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language. […]
Several bank representatives who fielded fraud claims directly from consumers estimated that WinRed cases, at their peak, represented as much as 1 to 3 percent of their workload. [..]
All the banking officials said they recalled only a negligible number of complaints against ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, although there are online review sites that feature heated complaints about unwanted charges and customer service. […]
Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.
Church membership in US via Gallup poll:
2000: 70%
2005: 64%
2010: 61%
2015: 55%
Now: 47%
{ @ryanstruyk via ny mag }
{ Trump and his party used their legislative majorities to redistribute income up the income ladder. Biden and his party are using theirs to distribute it down. | NY mag | full sotry }
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday revealed the most expensive budget in state history — a $227 billion spending plan highlighted by a $15 billion one-time surplus. How is it possible? […]
The Democratic governor and state lawmakers passed a budget last year with deep spending cuts to cover what they expected to be a $54.3 billion pandemic-induced shortfall. That estimate was wrong, as the recession was not as deep as they had anticipated […]
job losses have been concentrated among low-wage workers, who pay relatively little taxes […] wealthy residents have continued to make money and pay taxes, leading to much greater tax collections than officials predicted in early summer.
{ AP | Cal Matters }
photo { Sheron Rupp, Mansfiled, OH, 2001-2002 }
…large-scale heroin-packaging mill dismantled in Ridgewood, Queens. Approximately 39 kilograms of suspected heroin, with an estimated street value of $12 million, 1,000 fentanyl pills and $200,000 cash were recovered […]
A tabletop held approximately 100,000 individual dose glassine envelopes filled with heroin, as well as empty envelopes and stamps. Glassine envelopes bore various brand names, including “Red Scorpion,” “The Hulk,” “Universal,” “Hard Target,” “Last Dragon, “Dope” and “Venom.” All of the equipment necessary for processing and packaging heroin was also present in the bedroom, including digital scales, sifters and grinders. […]
More than 26 cellphones were also recovered from the apartment.
What Trump needed to do to make Television City a reality was to bring together different stakeholders: locals (like the late actor Paul Newman) who wanted parks and a less imposing development, and Ed Koch [mayor of New York City]. […]
Koch said Trump was “squealing like a stuck pig.” Trump said Koch’s New York had become a “cesspool of corruption and incompetence.” Koch said Trump was a “piggy, piggy, piggy.”
Trump said the mayor had “no talent and only moderate intelligence” and should be impeached. […]
Trump promised that he would eventually build Television City “with or without the current administration” in City Hall. But he never did.
Although New York developer William Zeckendorf Jr. offered Trump $550 million for the site in 1989 — which would have given him a handsome return on the $115 million in borrowed money he used to acquire the Yards four years earlier — he refused to sell.
In 1994, with the Yards bleeding about $23.5 million in annual carrying costs, and long after Koch had departed City Hall, Trump’s bankers forced him to give up control of the site. The property went to a group of Hong Kong investors, including New World Development, for $82 million and the assumption of about $250 million in debt Trump had amassed.
At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices. […]
Researchers have estimated that hundreds of thousands of people in China work part-time to post comments and share content that reinforces state ideology. Many of them are low-level employees at government departments and party organizations. Universities have recruited students and teachers for the task. Local governments have held training sessions for them. […]
Local officials turned to informants and trolls to control opinion […] “Mobilized the force of more than 1,500 cybersoldiers across the district to promptly report information about public opinion in WeChat groups and other semiprivate chat circles.”
related/audio { The Chinese Surveillance State | Part 1, Part 2 }
{ as coastal homeowners face rising sea levels brought on by climate change, the state is increasingly approving sandbags and other structures that are speeding the loss of its beaches | ProPublica | full story }
Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up
In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years. […]
Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface. […]
The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. […] Other permafrost microbes (methanotrophs) consume methane. The balance between these microbes plays a critical role in determining future climate warming. […] Others are known but have unpredictable behavior after release. […]
Permafrost thaw in Siberia led to a 2018 anthrax outbreak and the death of 200,000 reindeer and a child.
inkjet print and silkscreen ink on canvas { Richard Prince, Untitled (Cartoon), 2015 }
