RAY-I (@Ray_McClimon) header
RAY-I (@Ray_McClimon) profile picture

Awesome Artist. Absolutely stunning when I was younger. Older now. But still magnetically alluring. Oh... I'm incredibly delusional as well. ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Estonia... ish ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง
Joined February 2025
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A collection of the last few weeks Clips to annoy and amuse... I think. ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿคฉ
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Government says, 'stock up on emergency necessities' . Water, Baked Beans, Tinned Torches with sausage, 50k Toilet Rolls. So, you do. But then... You need to do your monthly shop. But you're broke. Because you bought the necessities. ๐Ÿ˜ So. To survive... You eat the necessities.
Jรก comi todas as coisas do kit de sobrevivรชncia do apagฤo
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Sickening. ... The 'Why' is the question. Muslim % in UK armed forces. Does not make this an economic strategy. ... So what's it all about? ๐Ÿค”
A British Major General signed an Armed Forces Covenant with Tariq Halal Meats on Armistice Day and here he is tucking into his free Halal meat dinner. On ARMISTICE DAY. This is the UK and Europe's biggest halal meat supplier. And a senior British Army officer is there in uniform, at their headquarters, signing a pact on behalf of the British military. They're calling it support for veterans. Look after our veterans, absolutely. But why is this being done with a halal meat company, on the day we remember our war dead? Halal slaughter is a practice a lot of people in this country do not want. It is barbaric, it is medieval, and it should not be getting this kind of official seal from the British Army it stains the memories of our fallen soldiers. What do you make of this?
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This has upset and disgusted me in equal measure. Why would ANY young person want to join up to the U.K. armed forces when they are doing this. They have signed an agreement to go pretty much fully Halal on their meat proviso. Across all of the armed services. So the question has to be why? Maybe itโ€™s because of a big influx of Muslim personnel into the forcesโ€ฆ..NOPE, absolutely not. Less than 1000 Muslim staff out of a total of over 137,000. So approximately 0.7%. That means that 99.3% of armed forces personnel will be forced to eat Halal slaughtered meat, whether they object to it or not. This is wrong on every single level. Iโ€™d urge everyone to deluge @wesstreeting with compliant. Deluge the heads of the armed forces, boycott recruitment events. @RupertLowe10 @Nigel_Farage @ZiaYusufUK @KemiBadenoch what are your thoughts. This is more knee bending capitulation to Islam and it is absolutely 100% NOT acceptable.
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This is almost too incredible to believe. The government new energy bill suggests a policy of โ€œprogressivityโ€ and to enable that Energy companies will be given access to your HMRC tax records, your pension, your house value etc to see how wealthy you are, and then may adjust your energy bills accordingly. So if youโ€™re considered โ€œwell offโ€โ€ฆwith no definition of the boundaries, you will pay more for your electricity than someone less well paid. That is actual communism. There is no other word or description for it. It also surely breaches any right of privacy. Itโ€™s a disgrace.
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To understand a Military Veteran you must know: * We left home as teenagers or in our early twenties for an unknown adventure. * We loved our country enough to defend it and protect it with our own lives. * We said goodbye to friends and family and everything we knew. * We learned the basics and then we scattered in the wind to the far corners of the Earth. * We found new friends and new family. * We became brothers and sisters regardless of colour, race or creed. * We had plenty of good times, and plenty of bad times. * We didnโ€™t get enough sleep. * We smoked and drank too much. * We picked up both good and bad habits. * We worked hard and played harder. * We didnโ€™t earn a great wage. * We experienced the happiness of mail call and the sadness of missing important events. * We didnโ€™t know when, or even if, we were ever going to see home again. * We grew up fast, and yet somehow, we never grew up at all. * We fought for our freedom, as well as the freedom of others. * Some of us saw actual combat, and some of us didnโ€™t. * Some of us saw the world, and some of us didnโ€™t. * Some of us dealt with physical warfare, most of us dealt with psychological warfare. * We have seen and experienced and dealt with things that we canโ€™t fully describe or explain, as not all of our sacrifices were physical. * We participated in time honored ceremonies and rituals with each other, strengthening our bonds and camaraderie. * We counted on each other to get our job done and sometimes to survive it at all. * We have dealt with victory and tragedy. * We have celebrated and mourned. * We lost a few along the way. * When our adventure was over, some of us went back home, some of us started somewhere new and some of us never came home at all. * We have told amazing and hilarious stories of our exploits and adventures. * We share an unspoken bond with each other, that most people donโ€™t experience, and few will understand. * We speak highly of our own branch of service, and poke fun at the other branches. * We know however, that, if needed, we will be there for our brothers and sisters and stand together as one, in a heartbeat. * Being a Veteran is something that had to be earned, and it can never be taken away. * It has no monetary value, but at the same time it is a priceless gift.
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None of them are stupid. Stop saying it. Every country. Doing exactly the same 'stupid'. Why haven't we got past 'stupid'. ... What. Is everyone missing. ๐Ÿ˜
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35 years ago. Someone with some CDF, would've just gone out and Dec... Sorted the situation with this remedial Meatsack. ... Now it's fear and a phone, used as a useless safety guard. ๐Ÿ™„
This in Brent council building this morning
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Russell Brands victim paid to go and see his live show six months later What are we doing here?
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Court testimony in Russell Brand's trial shows the victim encountered him by chance while working at the Edinburgh Festival and left her shift; she did not pay to attend or see any of his shows there (initial meeting was at Hammersmith Apollo as a fan). independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/โ€ฆ flipnews.co.uk/celebrity/russโ€ฆ itv.com/news/2026-10-2โ€ฆ
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I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments. I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving. Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing. It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious. It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days. It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days. It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification. It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies. And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score. All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday. I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature. Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf. To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it. Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them. So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it. In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that. The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to. We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.
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๐ŸŽฏ ๐ŸŽฏ ๐ŸŽฏ ๐ŸŽฏ
England has existed for 1,099 years, but our leaders claim it is not an ethnicity. Pakistan has only existed for 79 years, yet it is an ethnicity. England is conventionally dated as a unified kingdom from 927 AD under ร†thelstan, the first king of all the English. Pakistan gained independence on 14 August 1947. In the UK census and official usage, โ€œPakistaniโ€ is routinely listed as an ethnic category, while Englishness is frequently treated as a civic or cultural identity open to anyone rather than a historic ethnicity tied to the long-settled people of England.
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The Government tells you to stock up on necessities. Water, Baked Beans, Tinned Torches with sausage, 50k Toilet Rolls. So, you do. But then, you need to do your monthly shop. But your broke. Because you bought the necessities. ๐Ÿ˜ ... So you survive on the necessities. ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿค”๐Ÿ˜•
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Humans are the only animal that drinks another animal's milk, says the person holding an oat flat white. Humans are the only animal that drinks another animal's milk. Ants have been milking aphids for millions of years, and gulls steal it straight off elephant seals. Humans are the only animal that soaks an oat, strains it, adds rapeseed oil and calls the result milk. Humans are the only animal that washes a seed in solvent to get the oil out. Humans are the only animal that chooses a diet it needs a vitamin tablet to survive. Humans are the only animal that ships an avocado 6,000 miles for breakfast. Humans are the only animal that reads the ingredients. Humans are the only animal that eats food with a mascot. Humans are the only animal that campaigns against its own food supply. Almost nothing people do with dinner is done by any other creature. Of everything on that list, milking a cow is the oldest by about eight thousand years, and the only one a calf would recognise. Natural is a strange hill to die on in a jacket made of oil.
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US air bases were comfortable being in Britain during the Cold War, but feel they cannot stay in Britain with a threat of home grown Islamist terror. Does this not speak volumes about how fast and firm the change in Britain has been?
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๋‘๋ฒˆ์งธ ์ƒ์กด๋ฒ•. ๊ฒจ์šธ์ฒ  ๋Œ€์ •์ „์ด๋‚˜ ๊ตญ๊ฐ€ ๋น„์ƒ์‚ฌํƒœ๊ฐ€ ํ„ฐ์กŒ์„ ๋•Œ, ์ง‘ ์•ˆ์—์„œ ์ €์ฒด์˜จ์ฆ์œผ๋กœ ์‚ฌ๋งํ•˜๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์˜ 90%๋Š” โ€˜๋ณด์ผ๋Ÿฌ๊ฐ€ ๊บผ์ ธ์„œโ€™ ์ฃฝ๋Š” ๊ฒŒ ์•„๋‹™๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‹ค๋“ค ํŒจ๋”ฉ์„ ์ž…๊ณ  ์นจ๋Œ€์— ๋ˆ„์šฐ๋ฉด ๋ฒ„ํ‹ธ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์„ ๊ฑฐ๋ผ ์ฐฉ๊ฐํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ, ๊ทธ ๋ฐฉ์‹์€ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ๋น ๋ฅด๊ฒŒ ์ฒด์˜จ์„ ๋นผ์•—๊ธฐ๋Š” ์ง€๋ฆ„๊ธธ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทนํ•œ์˜ ์ถ”์œ„ ์†์—์„œ ๋‚œ๋ฐฉ ์—†์ด 72์‹œ๊ฐ„์„ ์‚ด์•„๋‚จ๋Š” 5๊ฐ€์ง€ ์ ˆ๋Œ€ ์ƒ์กด ๋ฒ•์น™. ๐Ÿงต 1. ๊ฐ€์žฅ ์น˜๋ช…์ ์ธ ์‹ค์ˆ˜๋Š” ๊ฑฐ์‹ค์ด๋‚˜ ๋ฐฉ ์ „์ฒด๋ฅผ ์–ด๋–ป๊ฒŒ๋“  ๋ฒ„ํ‹ฐ๋ ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ณต๊ฐ„์ด ๋„“์„์ˆ˜๋ก ์‚ฌ๋žŒ ๋ชธ์˜ ๋ณต์‚ฌ์—ด์€ ํ—ˆ๊ณต์œผ๋กœ ํฉ์–ด์ง‘๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์‚ด์•„๋‚จ์œผ๋ ค๋ฉด ์ฆ‰์‹œ ์ง‘ ์ „์ฒด๋ฅผ ํฌ๊ธฐํ•˜๊ณ  ๊ณต๊ฐ„์„ ๊ทนํ•œ์œผ๋กœ ์ค„์—ฌ์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฑฐ์‹ค ํ•œ๊ฐ€์šด๋ฐ์— ์‹ค๋‚ด์šฉ ํ…ํŠธ๋ฅผ ์น˜๊ฑฐ๋‚˜, ์‹ํƒ ๋ฐ‘์— ๋‘๊บผ์šด ๋‹ด์š”์™€ ์•”๋ง‰ ์ปคํŠผ์„ ๋‘˜๋Ÿฌ '์ดˆ์†Œํ˜• ๊ฒฉ๋ฆฌ ๊ณต๊ฐ„(Microclimate)'์„ ๋งŒ๋“œ์„ธ์š”. ์‚ฌ๋žŒ 1~2๋ช…์˜ ์ฒด์˜จ๊ณผ ํ˜ธํก๋งŒ์œผ๋กœ๋„ 1ํ‰ ๋‚จ์ง“ํ•œ ๊ณต๊ฐ„์€ ๋ฐ”๊นฅ๋ณด๋‹ค 10~15โ„ƒ ์ด์ƒ ๋”ฐ๋œปํ•ด์ง‘๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. 2. ์–ผ์–ด ์ฃฝ๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์€ ๋Œ€๋ถ€๋ถ„ ์œ„์—์„œ ๋ฎ๋Š” ์ด๋ถˆ๋งŒ ์‹ ๊ฒฝ ์“ฐ๋‹ค, ๋ฐ”๋‹ฅ์˜ ์ „๋„ ๋ƒ‰๊ธฐ์— ์ฒด์˜จ์„ ๋‹ค ๋บ๊น๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋ถˆ์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์ด ๋ˆ•๋Š” ์ˆœ๊ฐ„ ์†œ์ด ๋ˆŒ๋ ค ๊ณต๊ธฐ์ธต์ด ์‚ฌ๋ผ์ง€๊ณ , ๋ฐ”๋‹ฅ์˜ ๋ƒ‰๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ๊ทธ๋Œ€๋กœ ๋นจ์•„๋“ค์ด๋Š” ์ฐจ๊ฐ€์šด ๋ŒํŒ์ด ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฐ”๋‹ฅ์—๋Š” ์ด๋ถˆ ๋Œ€์‹  ๋ฐ˜๋“œ์‹œ '๊ณจํŒ์ง€(ํƒ๋ฐฐ ๋ฐ•์Šค)'๋ฅผ 2~3๊ฒน ๊น”๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ์Šคํ‹ฐ๋กœํผ, ์•Œ๋ฃจ๋ฏธ๋Š„ ์€๋ฐ• ๋งคํŠธ๋ฅผ ๊น”์•„์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ณจํŒ์ง€ ๋‚ด๋ถ€์˜ ๊ณต๊ธฐ ๊ตฌ๋ฉ์ด ์ง€์—ด ๋ƒ‰๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ์ฐจ๋‹จํ•˜๋Š” ์ตœ๊ณ ์˜ ๋‹จ์—ด์žฌ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. 3. ์ถฅ๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ฐฝ๋ฌธ ํ‹ˆ์„ ๋น„๋‹๋กœ ์™„์ „ ๋ฐ€๋ด‰ํ•œ ์ฑ„, ์‹ค๋‚ด์—์„œ ๊ฐ€์Šค๋ฒ„๋„ˆ๋‚˜ ์ด›๋ถˆ์„ ์ผœ๋‘๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ์ž์‚ด ํ–‰์œ„์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋งค๋…„ ํ•œํŒŒ ์žฌ๋‚œ ๋•Œ๋งˆ๋‹ค ์–ผ์–ด ์ฃฝ๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋ณด๋‹ค ์ผ์‚ฐํ™”ํƒ„์†Œ์— ์ค‘๋…๋˜์–ด ์ž๋Š” ๋„์ค‘ ์‚ฌ๋งํ•˜๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์ด ํ›จ์”ฌ ๋งŽ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์—ฐ์†Œ ๊ธฐ๊ตฌ(๋‚œ๋กœ, ๋ฒ„๋„ˆ, ์ด›๋ถˆ)๋ฅผ ์‹ค๋‚ด์— ๋‘˜ ๋•Œ๋Š” ์ž ๋“ค๊ธฐ ์ „์— ๋ฌด์กฐ๊ฑด ๊บผ์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์•„๋ฌด๋ฆฌ ์ถ”์›Œ๋„ ๊ณต๊ธฐ๊ฐ€ ์ˆœํ™˜ํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋„๋ก ์†๊ฐ€๋ฝ ๊ตต๊ธฐ๋งŒ ํ•œ ํ™˜๊ธฐ ๊ตฌ๋ฉ์€ ๋ฐ˜๋“œ์‹œ ์—ด์–ด๋‘์–ด์•ผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. 4. ๊ตฐ์‚ฌ ์ƒ์กดํ•™์˜ ์ œ1์ฒ ์น™: "Sweat Kills (๋•€์€ ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์„ ์ฃฝ์ธ๋‹ค)." ์ถ”์œ„๋ฅผ ๋ง‰๊ฒ ๋‹ค๊ณ  ์˜ท์„ ์ž”๋œฉ ๊ปด์ž…๊ณ  ์›€์ง์ด๋‹ค ๋•€์„ ํ˜๋ฆฌ๋Š” ์ˆœ๊ฐ„ ๋์žฅ๋‚ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํŠนํžˆ ๋ฉด(Cotton) ์†Œ์žฌ ๋‚ด์˜๋Š” ๋•€์„ ํก์ˆ˜ํ•œ ์ฑ„ ๋งˆ๋ฅด์ง€ ์•Š์•„, ๋ช‡ ์‹œ๊ฐ„ ๋’ค ์–ผ์Œ์žฅ ๊ฐ™์€ ๋ƒ‰๊ฐํŒฉ์œผ๋กœ ๋Œ๋ณ€ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํด๋ฆฌ์—์Šคํ„ฐ, ํ”Œ๋ฆฌ์Šค, ์šธ(์–‘๋ชจ) ์†Œ์žฌ๋ฅผ ํ—๋ ํ•˜๊ฒŒ ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ ๊ฒน ์ž…๊ณ , ๋ชธ์— ์กฐ๊ธˆ์ด๋ผ๋„ ์—ด์ด ์˜ค๋ฅด๋ฉด ์ง€ํผ๋ฅผ ์—ด๊ฑฐ๋‚˜ ๊ฒ‰์˜ท์„ ๋ฒ—์–ด '์ ˆ๋Œ€ ๋•€์„ ํ˜๋ฆฌ์ง€ ์•Š๋Š” ์ƒํƒœ'๋ฅผ ์œ ์ง€ํ•˜์„ธ์š”. 5. ์ฒด์˜จ์ด ๊ธ‰๊ฒฉํžˆ ๋–จ์–ด์งˆ ๋•Œ ํ•ซํŒฉ์ด๋‚˜ ์˜จ์ˆ˜๋ณ‘์„ ์†๋ฐœ ๋์— ๋‘๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์€ ๋‚ญ๋น„์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์†๋ฐœ์€ ํ˜ˆ๊ด€์ด ์ˆ˜์ถ•ํ•ด ์žˆ์–ด ์˜จ๋ชธ์œผ๋กœ ์—ด์ด ๋Œ์ง€ ๋ชปํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฐ˜๋“œ์‹œ '๊ฒฝ๋™๋งฅ(๋ชฉ ๋’ค)', '์•ก์™€๋™๋งฅ(๊ฒจ๋“œ๋ž‘์ด)', '๋Œ€ํ‡ด๋™๋งฅ(์‚ฌํƒ€๊ตฌ๋‹ˆ)' ๋“ฑ ์‹ฌ์žฅ์—์„œ ๋ฟœ์–ด์ ธ ๋‚˜์˜ค๋Š” ๊ตต์€ ํ˜ˆ๊ด€ ๋ถ€์œ„์— ์—ด์›์„ ๋Œ€์•ผ ๋”ฐ๋œปํ•œ ํ”ผ๊ฐ€ ์ „์‹ ์„ ๋•๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ๋ฌผ์„ ๋งˆ์‹œ์ง€ ์•Š์œผ๋ฉด ํƒˆ์ˆ˜๋กœ ํ˜ˆ์•ก์ˆœํ™˜์ด ๋ฉˆ์ถฅ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฏธ์˜จ์ˆ˜๋ฅผ ๋งˆ์‹œ๊ณ , ๋‹จ๋ฐฑ์งˆ ๋Œ€์‹  '์ง€๋ฐฉ(๋ฒ„ํ„ฐ, ๋•…์ฝฉ๋ฒ„ํ„ฐ, ์ดˆ์ฝœ๋ฆฟ, ๊ฒฌ๊ณผ๋ฅ˜)'์„ ๋“œ์„ธ์š”. ์ง€๋ฐฉ์€ ๋ชธ ์•ˆ์—์„œ ๊ฐ€์žฅ ์˜ค๋ž˜ ํƒ€์˜ค๋ฅด๋Š” ์ตœ๊ณ ์˜ ์ƒ์ฒด ๋‚œ๋กœ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฒจ์šธ์ฒ  ์ƒ์กด์˜ ํ•ต์‹ฌ์€ '์—ด์„ ๋งŒ๋“œ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ'์ด ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ผ '์ฒด์˜จ์„ ๋บ๊ธฐ์ง€ ์•Š๋Š” ๊ฒƒ'์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฐ€์กฑ์„ ์œ„ํ•ด ์ด ํƒ€๋ž˜๋ฅผ ๋ถ๋งˆํฌํ•ด ๋‘์„ธ์š”. ๐Ÿ“Œ
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Another couple of days and should be finished. If my hands hold out. ๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚
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What a beautiful imagine from yesterday. So, so special โค๏ธ
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The potato is being sold as a health food again, and the only healthy thing about it has ever been the fat poured over it. It is a nightshade. It is about 80% water, and the rest is starch that hits your blood faster than table sugar does. For 450 years it has been the thing beside the meat, and not one cuisine on earth has made it worth eating without animal fat. Chips in beef dripping. Roasties in goose fat. Mash beaten with half a pack of butter and hot cream. Dauphinoise, which is a pint of cream with some potato in it. Aligot, so heavy with cheese it stretches a yard off the spoon. Latkes in schmaltz, boxty in bacon fat, champ with a well of melted butter in the middle, and the jacket potato that nobody in history has ever eaten dry. Europe did not want it. It arrived from the Andes in the 1570s, grew underground, belonged to the same family as deadly nightshade, and spent the best part of two centuries as pig feed. Frederick the Great had to order Prussia to plant it in 1756, and Russian peasants rioted when they were made to. They had a point. The potato defends itself with solanine, a nerve toxin packed into the skin, the eyes, the sprouts and any patch gone green. In 1979, 78 schoolboys in south London were poisoned by a school dinner of potatoes that had been stored too long, and 17 of them ended up in hospital. The Irish labourer of the 1840s ate up to 14 pounds of potatoes a day and stood taller than the English recruits beside him in the army. The part always left out is the buttermilk he drank with them by the quart, and the butter whenever he could get it. It was the dairy doing the nourishing, with the potato as ballast. When the crop failed in 1845, a million people died while Irish cattle and butter went on being shipped to England. On its own, the starch in a medium jacket potato comes apart into roughly nine teaspoons' worth of glucose, and it starts doing so in your mouth. For a lean, active person with a steak in front of them, a potato roasted in dripping is a pleasant way to eat more dripping. For somebody carrying three stone they cannot shift, with a liver that has been fielding glucose since breakfast for thirty years, it is a sugar surge in a cardigan, and calling it a whole food is how they stay stuck. The potato was never the meal. It earned its seat at the table on the strength of what ran off the meat, and that is still the only seat it deserves.
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Russell Brand has just been given over ten years in prison. Can anyone tell me which court and on what date, the hundreds of Pakistani men who raped thousands of children over many years will be appearing?
614
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Siegfried Sassoon
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In March 1942, a 22-year-old sat on the deck of a motor launch in the warm spring sunshine. He was preparing to sail to occupied France for the raid on St Nazaire. Or what has become known as โ€˜the Greatest Raid of Allโ€™. He was Lance Sergeant Bill Gibson of No. 2 Commando. He knew the mission to destroy this Nazi dry dock was likely a one-way trip. He wrote a letter to his father, only to be delivered in the event he never came back. "My dearest Dad, by the time you get this I shall be one of the many who have sacrificed their unimportant lives for what little ideals we may have - my own ideals I can thank you for." He calmly explained the mission was "virtually suicideโ€, but the magnitude of the results would make it worthwhile:ย  putting the German raiders out of action for at least six months, protecting the ships bringing vital food across the Atlantic , and saving the lives of his fellow servicemen. "The reason I am writing this at all, Dad, is just the thought that it might be a little better for you to get this rather than the dreaded telegram." He reflects on the friendships he made in life, telling his father: "you've been the best pal I've ever had." One can only be in awe of the character of a 22-year-old that went on: "It seems ever so peculiar to be writing this letter. We've just finished our tea and the sunshine is streaming through the portholes. We've been on deck sunbathing all day. With spring in the air and everything looking so beautiful we can only now appreciate how lovely everything is - almost like condemned criminals." He asks his dad to write to his Irish girlfriend, Anne, and let her know what has happened.ย  He asks him not to worry or be too unhappy, and reminds him of the advice his father always gave him: to keep his chin up. He lays out the reason for laying down his life: "the generations to come might in some way remember us." He closes: "In a time like this I turn to you, Dad, and God - I hope there will be peace for everyone soon. Give my love to everyone - I'll remember you. Your loving son, Bill." Neither Bill nor his friend Peter Harkness survived the night of 28 March. Their launch, ML 268, was devastated by enemy fire before they could even get ashore. However their mission, astonishingly, was a success. Bill was 22 years old, with a girl he loved, a family he adored, and his whole life ahead of him. He has no known grave; his name is on the Brookwood Memorial. On Remembrance Sunday, the sheer scale of the devastation of the war can be overwhelming. But Bill Gibson's letter illuminates the heart-wrenching reality of sacrifice: young men who loved life. Painfully aware of the beauty of the world they were giving up. Who went anyway for the sake of people they would never meet. We are the generations to come that you wrote about, Bill.ย  We have benefited from what you did. We remember you. And the many others who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. Lest we forget. We will remember them.
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