HereAndGone
1mo ago
A quick read and that isn't even about principled opposition, it's about a guy with a local business (a microbrewery, looks like) who is trying to get petty revenge on the town fathers for their audacity in enforcing planning regulations on him. Don't they know he's a bold visionary increasing employment and helping sustainable business practices, how dare they require him to get a licence and build a parking lot! Also they fined him for after-hours drinking! And it seems like he's using the money to bankroll his own PAC because he's some kind of left-wing activist. He seems to have a record of ignoring the law and legal decisions against him, presumably on the basis that since he's a Good Guy he can never be wrong and whatever he does is always right.
So he wants to "peacefully" disrupt the town parade to get his own back. I do hope none of the local citizens in the parade accidentally run over him with a float or other terrible, unforeseeable, accident of that nature.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I genuinely think what will reduce meat eating is the price of meat and other animal products becoming ever more expensive, not vegan sermons about ethics and moralising about the monstrosity of liking roast chicken and burgers.
When we get back to the days of meat being a luxury item for the common man, then we'll all be eating more plants, pulses, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. It'll be interesting to see how agri-business responds to the need to grow more crops to feed the world - I think the vegans may not like the results of what is needed for mass industrial farming in order to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the West (monoculture, insecticide and pesticide reliance, GMOs, huge fields cleared to be easy to plant, sow, and harvest those crops meaning no hedgerows or ditches or habitats for birds or wild flowers/plants, otherwise known as 'weeds', the demands on water, the problems with pesticide and fertiliser and insecticide run-off into ground water, and a hell of a lot more).
There's seven billion people in the world. We won't feed ourselves on a few herbs grown at home in window boxes.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!
(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Obviously no, not unless it was two bees. Three? Absolute moral obligation or else you are a monster!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
It's the religious impulse turned in on itself. There are people who are naturally compassionate and charitable, and there are people who are naturally scrupulous and tormented by conscience, and there are people who like increasingly abstract thought experiments far divorced from any practical application.
And in the old days, their impulses would have led them to be like this man. There was an understood social framework around feeding the hungry, helping those in need, alms giving, and doing good works.
But that's gone by the wayside now, so what happens to those impulses that still persist but don't have the same socially cohesive and universal channels to divert them? If you get hung up on the likes of EA (sorry, EA, to always be kicking this philosophy but it does seem to get diverted very damn easily from 'cure the sick' to 'we must all network and get well-paying jobs so we can donate so that we can hold conferences about existential risk, sorry sick people but your present suffering is nothing compared to the potential suffering of potential future billions if we do the calculations right') and thus you need more extreme forms of do-gooding to satisfy your inflamed intellect. Ordinary "give to local church donations for the needy, help out in a soup kitchen", etc. actions are not good enough because any ignorant normie can do that, plus your philosophy has tidily proven that helping those you know near to you is racist and elitist and much less effective and efficient and not worth doing.
So you get hung up on shrimp and plants and 'suffering is bad' (which most people will agree on) 'hence we must wipe out all organic life, starting with every single wild animal, because their natural lives where we don't interfere with them are just horrible - nasty, brutish and short like the guy said' (which most people will think is freakin' extreme and slightly nuts).
HereAndGone
1mo ago
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering.
I keep quoting this and Chesterton meant it as rollicking satire, but somebody is always trying to make it come true:
Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.
There is research about plant reactions to stimuli, but there's always that one person who can't resist taking it further
František Baluška is also very good at making inconceivable connections. Baluška, a plant cell biologist at University of Bonn, has for some time now been of the opinion that plants are intelligent—after all, they can process information and make decisions. But do plants have consciousness? That takes the discussion to a whole different level. If we could prove that plants have consciousness, we would have to radically change the way we interact with them, because we’d find ourselves facing the same kinds of issues that we face with factory farming in conventional agriculture.
Baluška, together with colleagues from around the world, including Stefano Mancuso from the University of Florence, has come a little closer to answering the question about plant consciousness. Baluška and his colleagues sedated plants that feature moving parts, such as Venus flytraps. These plants catch their prey in a trap that snaps shut as soon as insects touch trigger hairs on the inner side of their double-lobed leaves. The two sides of the leaf fold together in a flash, capturing the insect between them, and the plant then digests its prey. The anesthetics the scientists used, which included some that are used on people, deactivated electric activity in the plants so that the traps no longer reacted when they were touched. Sedated peas showed similar changes in behavior. Their tendrils, which usually move in all directions as they slowly feel their way through their surroundings to find supporting structures to grow on, stopped searching and started to spiral on the spot. After the plants broke the narcotics down, they resumed their normal behavior.
Some kind-hearted people have now got as far as worrying about bees, and shrimp. Bacteria will indeed be next. Then plants. How can we be so speciesist and arrogant about our artificial hierarchy imposed on the natural world? And of course there is chatter about "are machines sentient, is AI self-aware or could become self-aware?" so we're working our way slowly but steadily towards "do rocks think?"
Right now I can afford to laugh at researchers solemnly "sedating peas" and checking do their little tendrils twitch then writing up the results, but some day in the not-too-distant future, it may be no laughing matter. We may have to try can we live on salt (until the "thinking rocks" set argue about "why should Salt suffer?")
HereAndGone
1mo ago
She looks ordinary, which fits because they got married back before he was "Jeff Bezos, insanely rich guy" and was just "Jeff Bezos, another guy with a plan to make it big". She's also that little bit taller than he is, at least in photos of them together, while I notice Sanchez is that little bit shorter than him. That might have something to do with the attractiveness of the new missus, as well 😁
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yeah, I get the impression they want to reduce headcount and salary costs, so the admin and management and sales will get the hit rather than the programmers, but there may well be an eye on "do we really need to hire some kid out of college at a high salary when we can just get our pet AI/five Indian coders to do it for us cheaper?"
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Ten years later, you have seasoned developers retiring and who is there to replace them?
I imagine the presumption is "by the time the old warhorses retire, we will have developed AI that is even better than they ever were, so we'll just go on pulling ourselves up by our bootlaces".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Of all the things I did not expect to see in a "J'Accuse!" post, composting would have been high on the list if I had ever contemplated the ethical and moral issues involved. In letting worms break down food scraps to create soil. Like they've been doing ever since the first worms crawled through soil breaking down humus.
When I read stuff like that (if your food scraps are already fly-infested, be sure to humanely kill the insects before disposing of your rubbish), I have to wonder are these people living in the world of nature at all? Like, they're writing as though they were all born and raised on a space station that never saw a crumb of non-metallic, non-artificial surfaces in all their born days.
I swear, I am getting N.I.C.E. vibes from this attitude of "nature, ugh, organic life is so gross and icky" about, well, every darn natural process in the world of animal life. From "That Hideous Strength":
...The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.
"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."
"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."
"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.
"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."
"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."
"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."
"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"
"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."
"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"
"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."
"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."
"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"
"Go on," said Winter.
"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."
"That's true."
"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."
"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."
"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."
..."There is a world for you, no?" said Filostrato. "There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling-point. You would die, yes? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end."
"Yes. A dead world," said Mark, gazing at the moon.
"No!" said Filostrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat-like whisper of a voice that is naturally high-pitched. "No. There is life there."
"Do we know that?" asked Mark.
"Oh, si. Intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic."
"But how----?"
"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with--a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."
"Do you mean that all that," Mark pointed to the mottled white globe of the moon, "is their own doing?"
"Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have no atmosphere, no water."
"But what was the purpose?"
"Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface-dwellers--savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests--yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers, and fierce wars, in the caves and galleries down below. But the great race press on. If you could see the other side you would see year by year the clean rock--like this side of the moon--encroaching: the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist, growing smaller. Like cleaning tarnished silver."
HereAndGone
1mo ago
If by "non-Hajnali" you mean "on the other side of the Hajnal line", you seem to be referring to this map where allegedly the blue line marks area which "did not conform to Western Europe's marriage pattern" i.e. late marriage and low fertility:
The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion (up to a third) of people who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married.
I'm... not particularly convinced by that map because I think there is a degree of cherry-picking going on (why the line around Finland, for instance?) but even if mediaeval Ireland wasn't in tune with mediaeval Britain (citation very definitely needed, because if this theory is going to emphasise the role of the Church then Ireland was and remained Catholic longer than the Brits), but say for the sake of argument we accept that.
You forget the role of the Famine. That steamrollered over traditional Irish culture and pushed for late marriage, higher age at marriage, lots of unmarried people, etc. because now the emphasis was on "marry for money, money is survival" - women needed dowries, men needed jobs or land which would be worth something for the bride's family. If the money and land in the family went to the eldest son and eldest daughter to get them married, then the younger siblings were disadvantaged. Working to earn enough money or waiting for parents to die off and let you inherit the land mean waiting until being older to marry.
And emigration solved the problem of our 'excess' population.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
So, is AI coming for the programmer jobs? There's a news story in my country about Microsoft seeking redundancies globally which probably means chopping jobs here as well, and one paragraph mentions AI:
Microsoft employs around 4,000 people in Ireland, with a further 2,000 people employed at its subsidiary, Linkedin, which has a base in Dublin.
The cuts are to be implemented across several divisions and geographical offices, according to the Seattle Times, reporting from Microsoft’s global headquarters.
The tech giant has said that the layoffs are part of a restructuring effort.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently disclosed that up to a third of programming at the tech company is now done by AI, with a higher percentage likely.
However, the current cuts are thought to be aimed across several job categories, including sales and middle-management.
...The company has previously said that cuts would involve "streamlining the organisation, eliminating management layers”, with no further detail on the sectors to be targeted, other than that it intended to shrink expenses in “R&D, marketing, general and administrative” divisions.
Granted, that seems to be trimming jobs across management and admin rather than software engineers, but the little nugget about "up to a third of programming is now done by AI" does seem to be a straw in the wind. Yes? No? Just means they're not hiring new junior staff?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
That photo looks amazing 😁 I have no idea why you would get married at a particular hole on a golf course, but I'm sure it had some deep and significant meaning to the happy couple. Glad you had a blast at the wedding, and at least the Magerko groom's family didn't have to pay famous guests to attend, they invited people they actually knew!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Not that he married an age-appropriate woman. He blew up his marriage (and she blew up hers) because he fell for surgical sexiness (gosh, whyever would this lady be mysteriously attracted to a billionaire, you tell me?)
It's not even that, because hey high-profile divorces happen. It's the soap-opera low-class trashiness of it all that both fascinates and annoys. Here's a guy with a stable, functional marriage (as far as we can tell) and enough money to have his own real toy rocketships to play with, who goes through some kind of stereotypical midlife crisis in his late forties/early fifties. He starts working out, beefs up, shaves his head, and starts buying yachts and other toys.
Then he gets involved with a woman who has clearly traded on her good looks aided by artificial boosting, and indulges in a series of unfortunate choices (his fashion tastes clearly didn't improve, and she likes posing in skimpy revealing outfits a bit too much for a woman in her late forties/early fifties). This is mutton dressed as lamb, or rather undressed, and Bezos made a bit of a fool of himself as well in the early days of posing for photos with her clinging to him like a limpet.
There's no decorum going on for the multi-billionaire, and we plebs take full advantage of our right to mock our 'betters' when they behave like jackasses.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Oh, this is the new Gilded Age. New money and self-made men, and breaking into the upper classes (elite or not, hard to tell) by sheer shedloads of wonga. It's very funny - if these weren't the guys also steering the direction of the global economy and society which affects all the rest of us, and they've got the tastes and inclinations of when they were seventeen and that hot girl in high school didn't even look twice at them. Now Jeff is living the dream of having that hot girl finally on his arm and in his bed.
Forty years too late, maybe, but he went through a transformation in his early fifties so he can afford to buy more than a sports car to fit his new buff image, and the hottie girlfriend and megayacht is all part of that.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
compared to basically any non-obese 18 year old she looks awful
She's not bad for her age, but it's clear there's been a lot of work done and a lot of effort into looking like that, rather than going with her age and whatever natural assets she had. I'm not saying MacKenzie Bezos is a stunning beauty, but by comparison Sanchez really does look like "mid-life crisis girlfriend" (red carpet glamour shot MacKenzie here, Lauren here - that's the most restrained version I could find, there are more hotcha ones here and here at the White House).
That's the point of Tina Brown's barb: is Lauren Sanchez Bezos smart, funny, talented and great company? Well we don't know, but we do know she decided the road to a man's heart is load up on the lip filler, silicone, and a stint or two under the knife to freshen up the face, and that this works. Who needs brains when you have zeppelin boobs?
This may be very unfair to Sanchez herself, but she has also made the decision to go this road (very likely because she started out in the entertainment industry and that doesn't care if you're smart, it cares if you look pretty and don't show your age), so commentary based purely on her looks is the natural result of that.
And yes: men don't care if you're smart and fun (though that's nice), they care if you have the requisite sexy figure. Sorry guys if that treats you all as very shallow, but I do think male sexual and female sexual attraction work somewhat differently.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
High achieving is debatable. But without the bimboness, it would be less tacky. Huma Abedin married a guy ten years younger than her, but there were no affairs, nude selfies in the National Enquirer, and after putting up with Anthony "I sext fifteen year olds on our shared laptop where my wife keeps confidential work emails" Weiner as her first husband, it was a lot more graceful. By comparison with the Bezos bash, it was an intimate little gathering (for a scion of a billionaire dynasty).
And the bride's bosoms were never in any danger of slipping their moorings and floating over a sporting event.
The trashiness is the guilty pleasure. Here's a guy wealthy enough to have his own real rocket set to play with, and this is who and what he spends that money on.
I don't know enough of Sanchez' character to know if she's fun to be around. I think I took agin' her (a) for the busting up of her own and Bezos' marriage and (b) by the Wikipedia account, she does seem to have moved on from one guy to a better guy all through her public dating life; this may be purely coincidental but it can also, on an uncharitable reading, be planned - as soon as a better prospect heaves into view, dump the current one.
i - has relationship with American football player (I don't know enough about American sports to know how famous he is) while she's an entertainment reporter. They have a child in 2001 but the relationship ends sometime after that.
ii - gets married in 2005 to Hollywood agent and founder of a talent agency, I'm presuming he is at least as rich and successful as her former boyfriend. This also seems like a good move career-wise if you're in the entertainment/TV business, but what do I know? They have two children.
iii - as part of husband's business, they meet Jeff Bezos and become friendly. In 2018 possibly she and Bezos start an affair, which eventually comes to light and results in 2019 divorces for Bezos and Sanchez from their respective spouses. The affair becomes public knowledge after being leaked via a story in the National Enquirer involving Bezos' texts to Sanchez, as well as nude selfies (if there's anything I don't need to see, it's nude selfies of Jeff Bezos) and there's some hysteria on his part as he accuses everyone from the government on down of being out to get him. There's an investigation into who leaked, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere (though some speculate that 'friends of Sanchez' leaked it. If I'm being cynical, getting your 'friends' or arranging to have it leaked would be one way for Sanchez to motivate Bezos to dump MacKenzie and make her the new official squeeze). Another accusation was that her own brother leaked it, and had been paid to provide photos of the couple canoodling.
But just in September, Bezos and MacKenzie, who have four children, were spotted celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary at LIV nightclub in Miami.
“They were definitely still together,” said a source, adding that they looked happy as they snapped photos in the DJ booth and danced the night away.
By late October, the multibillionaire was seen at the private Casa Tua club with a different woman who looked a lot like Sanchez, sources say.
Bezos, 54, and Sanchez, 49 — who is also a helicopter pilot — got to know each other through her husband, an agent to stars including Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Kevin Costner and Hugh Jackman.
But sources say Sanchez became closer to Bezos after she and Whitesell separated in the fall.
“Patrick and Lauren have socialized with Jeff Bezos and his wife for a few years, because both [now former] couples have houses in Seattle,” a source said.
Not very edifying, however you slice it, not to mention whatever the effect of all this was on her three and his four children. However, now at last she is Mrs. Fourth Richest Man in the World, so it's all been worth it!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
That's why I'm surprised that she managed to keep him once she'd hooked him. She has now successfully landed the fish! I imagine if his lawyers had any say there's a hefty pre-nuptial, but even if this ends in divorce down the line, a few measly scraps of tens of millions may be just about enough to keep the wolf from the door for her.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Why is anyone paying attention to them?
3 day wedding, renting out Venice, and tons of money to throw at it. Not as elaborate as the big Indian wedding but then again you can't have a Getty wedding every day, either.
Mostly you'd be watching this for the fashion, but since I think her fashion sense is trashy, no. But it's Gilded Age conspicuous consumption wrapped up in environmental and philanthropic babble, so good gossip fodder.
Well, rich and high status men had mistresses alongside their wives, so Jeff could have gone that route. But clearly Lauren was bent on trading up so out with MacKenzie and in with Lauren, and she knew exactly what bait to dangle in front of him - sexy. Sure, some of us catty females would call her trashy, but Jeff is a man of simple tastes. Give him boobs, he's happy.
And many men would agree with him, the only surprising thing is that this is not twenty-five (instead of fifty-five) year old replacement Mrs. Bezos. Lauren really must have some charisma going on 😁
Kings had to turn schismatic or murderous before they could do what Bezos did there.
It's not exactly Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn, but the topic does invite comparison! The first marriage(s) ended in divorce in 2019 but it took until now, six years later, for the big wedding. So like Anne, she managed to hang on to her man through the years and get a ring on it eventually!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Oh, she's worked hard and is working hard to keep looking that toned. As you get older, muscles get saggy so to keep her arms from the dreaded bingo wings that's a lot of gym hours (maybe some discreet surgery as well, but since she's always showing off her arms and shoulders and there's no signs of scars, either it's very good work or she hasn't had to resort to it just yet).
So I give her credit for that. She's kinda wrecked her face (that trout pout!) but she hasn't done anything (yet) about the signs of crows' feet around the eyes, so she's being more subtle with what work she's having done. But those boobs are not all real as Nature provided them.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?
Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".
I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?
The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.
Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
I can't speak to the legal issues, but at this stage I have no problems with someone banning TikTok because of the actual real-world harm it is doing.
Seemingly some idiot "influencers" on the app got people to drink borax as a health cure.
Need I say this is not a good idea at all?
Now, the fools may be confusing borax and boron, not helped by the fact that a salt of borax, sodium borate, is sometimes touted as "it contains boron, your body needs boron, this is fine!"
It is not fine.
Now, your opinion may differ on whether it it a public duty to protect fools from their folly, but I think that we should have some discipline over a platform encouraging the public to poison themselves, and if it takes banning TikTok to make them kick the "influencers" off the platform, well gosh we'll just have to suffer on without a stupid social media platform (until a competitor leaps in to fill the gap).
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