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Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 22:00

Greetings! If you’re reading this semi-legible note, it means that you’ve royally ticked off King Stenkill the Merciless, and you now find yourself falling at a maximum speed of two hundred miles per hour. As the self-elected mayor and official greeter of this bottomless pit, let me be the first to say welcome to your new home.

Rest assured that the legend is true: the pit is, in fact, bottomless. You need not worry about a quickly approaching dungeon floor on which you’ll pop and splatter like a cantaloupe. Nor will you ever arrive in China, the liquid magma core of the earth, or even hell. Let’s put it this way: if there is a bottom to this thing, we still haven’t found it.

I bet you’re probably a bit peckish. Panic-inducing adrenaline flooding your nervous system will do that. So, feel free to try and grab some of the pigweeds growing out of the walls. Don’t let the name fool you—they taste terrible. Still, pigweed can grow without sunlight, so… win?

But avoid touching the bricks if you want to keep all your fingers.

Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 22:00

Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian […]

The post The Trouble with Ancestry appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 21:59

Like many ’90s kids, I lusted after the panoply of colorful, sugary cereals that were marketed to us in a never-ending parade of cartoon mascots, box-top sweepstakes, and jingles so catchy that, to this day, I remember them more vividly than anything I learned in graduate school. But my mom wasn’t keen on me starting my days with enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma. In our house, both the desperate rabbit and the kids would have been called “silly” for thinking a bowl of Trix constituted a meal.

As an adult, I’ve tried to embrace the wholesome charms of oatmeal, chia seeds, and bran-based cereal, whose primary selling point is its power to induce regular bowel movements. Alas, my true love remains a piping-cold bowl of violently sweet breakfast-in-a-box.

Enter Trader Joe’s Tiny Fruity Cuties. Call it a moment of weakness. Call it an attempt at a middle ground between the hedonist pleasures of General Mills and the bland virtues of Bob’s Red Mill. Just don’t call it a comeback.

Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 18:34

My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of a myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little did she know that her reasonable hypothesis would, one day, become the climate change […]

The post What’s behind this summer’s unnaturally huge Greek forest fires – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 18:00
Julian Oakland Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are supposed to be simple and straightforward, and for the most part they are, but one group punches well above its weight when it comes to market impact. In this post, I show that leveraged and inverse (L&I) ETFs generate rebalancing flows that: (1) are always in the same direction … Continue reading Leveraged and inverse ETFs – the exotic side of exchange-traded funds
Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 09:30
New polling from Georgia: Most Republican voters in Georgia polled by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution say they still believe the 2020 presidential election was tainted by large-scale fraud — despite abundant evidence to the contrary. The poll of likely Republican Party primary voters shows that 61% of respondents said there was widespread fraud in the last presidential election, a distrust that has persisted for nearly three years as another race looms. So most of them think the election was stolen in Georgia. They believe Trump but not their state officials who claim that he is lying. And yet, a majority supports them too: Though many GOP voters retain their unproven suspicions about the 2020 election, they haven’t turned against Georgia Republican leaders who rejected Donald Trump’s unfounded claims. Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused Trump’s call for a special legislative session to question the election results, achieved an 80% approval rating. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a major Trump supporter, won approval from 44% of poll respondents, with 45% undecided.
Created
Thu, 31/08/2023 - 08:00
His defamation of Shay Moss and Ruby Freeman I dearly hope it sends him to the poorhouse. And it may. The judge in the case just brought the hammer down: A federal judge has ruled former New York mayor and Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani liable for defaming two Georgia election workers whom he falsely accused of tampering with the 2020 election results. Judge Beryl A. Howell entered a default judgment against him “as a straight-up sanction” for his failure to provide necessary documentation to the plaintiffs. Giuliani will still go to trial in D.C. federal court on the amount of monetary damages he owes to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. But Howell has already ordered Giuliani to pay roughly $132,000 in sanctions between his personal and business assets for his failures to hand over relevant information. And she said those failures, combined with Giuliani’s own admissions, compelled her to rule without a trial that he defamed both women, intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them as part of a civil conspiracy and owes punitive damages.