Some various feel good and absurd stories ahead of the holiday turkey shoot:
• This is one of my favorite things about Bulgaria:
Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Painting Soviet Monuments To Look Like American Superheroes
Russia is demanding that Bulgaria try harder to prevent vandalism of Soviet monuments, after yet another monument to Soviet troops in Sofia was spray-painted, ITAR-Tass reported.
The Russian Embassy in Bulgaria has issued a note demanding that its former Soviet-era ally clean up the monument in Sofia’s Lozenets district, identify and punish those responsible, and take “exhaustive measures” to prevent similar attacks in the future, the news agency reported Monday. . .
The vandalism was the latest in a series of similar recent incidents in Bulgaria — each drawing angry criticism from Moscow…
• Another tale of idealism gone wrong:
American killed by an isolated tribe on remote Indian island
PORT BLAIR (Reuters) – A young American adventurer and evangelist visiting one of the islands in India’s remote cluster of Andaman and Nicobar has been killed by a tribe of hunter-gatherers who live there isolated from the outside world, police said on Wednesday.
The North Sentinel Island, which is out of bounds for visitors, is home to the Sentinelese community, believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world.
According to another news account, the “adventurer” was shot through with arrows. Reminds me of my favorite lines from the opening chapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop:
Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged to leave. They came as missionaries, ambassadors, tradesmen, prospectors, natural scientists. None returned. They were eaten, every one of them; some raw, others stewed and seasoned—according to local usage and the calendar (for the better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop).
I wonder how many trigger warnings you’d need if you assigned this in a college literature class?
• So apparently Sir David Attenborough is going to speak “for the people” at an upcoming UN Climate Summit. And just how did he come to speak on behalf of “the people”? Did he win some kind of popular election? A bit odd isn’t it that a supposed representative of “the people” would be someone referred to by a title of nobility. Who says noblesse oblige is dead?
Meanwhile, Trump is once again showing his trolling grandmaster chops:
Exclusive: At U.N. climate talks, Trump team plans sideshow on coal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration plans to set up a side-event promoting fossil fuels at the annual U.N. climate talks next month, repeating a strategy that infuriated global-warming activists during last year’s talks, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
As with the 2017 gathering in Bonn, Germany, the administration plans to highlight the benefits of technologies that more efficiently burn fuels including coal, the sources said.
• But but but. . . What about the infant girls who want boy’s milk, and vice-versa?
Baby boys and girls receive different nutrients in breast milk
Baby formula should be tailored for boys and girls to reflect the differences in milk that mothers produce depending on their baby’s sex, researchers say.
Tests on mothers’ milk in both monkeys and humans have showed that levels of fat, protein, vitamins, sugars, minerals and hormones vary enormously, but there is evidence that milk made for female and male babies is consistently different.
The make-up of the milk has a direct impact on the child’s growth, but also on his or her behaviour and temperament, which may last for the rest of their life. Scientists suspect that breast milk may be tailored by nature to meet the different growth needs of the sexes.
Those scientists who suggest that nature may actually exist are in a lot of trouble. Apparently “nature”* didn’t get the memo from the office of diversity and inclusion that gender is a social construct.
* I’m guessing that the old term “mother nature” is punishable by flogging these days.
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