https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Not having friends has similar health impacts to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Making friends makes you physically and mentally healthier, gives connections that can help you out of rough patches in your life and into opportunities.

You ‘can’ live without them, but probably not as long as you would have otherwise.

I think people are getting their hopes too high expecting him to expire any day now. Actuarial tables for men give only like a 5-6% chance of death in a year for men his age. While he’s obviously not in peak condition, the average Americans those tables are based on certainly aren’t either and unlike most of them he does have the benefit of insane resources to throw at whatever medical challenge (ex. the experimental Covid therapy that saved his life when he got infected with that) and very regular scanning. Plus genetics is a factor and his dad lived to 93 while his mom got to 88.

She’d probably love playing Candy Crush at Assad’s gamer pad in Moscow

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

I would see the crab spider lurking in wait for about a solid month or so, so I think surely it must have been munching on something. But it’s been gone for a while now. It wasn’t the only spider either, some very tiny spiders are even bolder and set up spiderwebs inside the pitcher!

I think both are high risk strategies though, the pitchers sway around a lot when it gets windy here and if you loose your footing and tumble while you’re inside the tube of danger you’ll meet a grim end. Usually the spider would be on kind of like the back or the side of the lid but sometimes it was in the interior and you’d only need to slip up once…

Kingdom of Dragon Pass / Six Ages is pretty niche and the lore there basically has people larping so hard to re-enact divine stories that the divinity rubs off on them and gets them magic and neat stuff. Or terrible deaths.

Ex. head of the Orlanthi pantheon in myth slays a dragon to rescue a rain god inside it and end a drought:

The “We have that at home” version:

(They have even larped as cows… that one’s on the dangerous side though…)

Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were going for nvm

First game of real golf I ever played I got a hole-in-one… on the wrong hole. The course wrapped back around next to itself, so when I shot wildly off course it just so happened to land in one of the later holes which was actually immediately adjacent. Still felt nice since everything else I was doing was way over par.

Just a feint; he will be installed at U of M to return them to the glory days. The disgraceful stain of the Ohio regime shall be wiped off the map.

Clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry, the latter can open up deep fissures in it that act as channels for unfiltered water to flow down deeper than you may expect, leaving aside tectonic activity or other reasons that could cause such penetrations in the ground. The native plants also have impressively deep root systems that can provide similar gaps, and you may never know if it was there or not if the clay got wet again and sealed up the voids along with any presents washed down and absorbed into the clay matrix. It puts a lot of faith in Bo Taylor to break his back digging way way deep beyond the reaches of this above plus the necessary amount for scrubbing whatever waste may have gotten down that far… I agree it’s not especialy likely as far as bacterial infection alone, I just protest at the absolutely no risk formulation. There’s a reason bags of this stuff are sold as ‘novelty items’ rather than going through FDA approval.

How would you know that no animal had ever crapped over the clay deposit and had rain drift in durable, long-lasting bacterial spores from the waste whiøe the rain was on its way through the clay to join the groundwater? That a burrowing critter didn’t die just upstream in the ground of where you’re digging? It’s not terribly likely that those would get you sick maybe but ‘absolutely no risk’ is a high bar to clear.

Also there can be other sorts of non-obvious contamination like if there are trace amounts of heavy metals. Kaopectate got sued by California because the clay contained in their popular anti-diarrhea pills had traces of lead, such that the adult version pills would have fifty micrograms of lead a pop or six to twelve micrograms for children. For reference California currently mandates a warning slapped on if a product exposes you to half a microgram of lead per day. It’s difficult to know the provenance and full risks of stuff dug from a hole for a regular person. Even trained people with a lot on the line sometimes screw up and get people hurt.

I think you are thinking of Qatar which Israel struck nearly a year ago. Israel and the UAE are close partners who have similar goals for the region.

I was just freaking out from reading into the Nutty Putty Cave situation from many years back, how awful!

I’m flattered but I don’t know the first thing about modding and I’m just here to goof off so I don’t want to make it a chore, if that makes sense. I’ll certainly subscribe to that group, though.

Unsurprising. Hezbollah was hard carrying Assad’s Syria while the big man was busy playing Candy Crush… now that the Assadists have nowhere else to go Hezbollah is the only option. The rest of Lebanon hates the Assadists for partially occupying Lebanon, Turkey hates them because they were also fighting each other in Syria, the neighboring mostly Sunni northwestern parts of Iraq generally also hate Assadists from Baathist era rivalries out to modern sectarian tensions, Jordan is extremely uninterested in bringing in controversial groups that could upset its relations with neighbors and the group had officially still been at war with Israel since 1967. Not many options left for those without the contacts to get to Assad’s gamer pad in Russia.

Hezb found the time in its schedule to shell Syria in March and recently Syria uncovered and liquidated some Hezbollah cells in the country that they say were intending to do some sabotage and assassionations. Not really sure why those are on the priority sheets at all while Israel is occupying their home turf.

Before WWI the Kurdish people were split between the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and a tiny number in the Russian Empire.

The Ottomans entered WWI when a faction within it pulled an ill-advised gamer move against Russia that pushed the whole state into the war. Persia under the Qajar dynasty was very weak and informally controlled in large areas by Russia and the British so although they were officially neutral basically nobody else respected that so they were a battleground also. The Entente basically surrounded the Ottomans except for in the European part and they also had powerful naval forces so there were many fronts to the war. The British got a foothold in Iraq and convinced the Arabs to rebel. The Ottomans were losing ground gradually, especially in the south but fortunately for them the Russians fell to pieces so from there they could rest or advance on the northern Persian and Caucasus fronts and got a really good set-up there. However later on the southern fronts in Syria and Iraq were going badly and Bulgaria sued for peace which then put their now-exposed capital in Europe at risk, so the Ottoman government situated there determined the war was unwinnable and signed an unfavorable armistice that had them retreat from their gains, have some areas to be occupied by Europeans while a peace treaty was hammered out and to demobilize the army. Many of the people and army were incensed at this and would keep fighting at small scale. During this time Ataturk put out a communication that said the country’s independence and integrity was in grave danger, that the government was compromised and that delegates from the provinces should hold congresses in the safest areas of Turkey away from outside influence to determine the path forward. These established a burgeoning rival government to the one in the capital which was hemorrhaging legitimacy since it was being pressured by forces stationed right there to be compliant. As part of the new order envisioned in the newly drafted Treaty of Sevres, in addition to the ceding of land and influence to the British and French, there were also to be cessions to Greece, Italy and Armenia as well as a Kurdish autonomy or independence.

By that point though control of the unoccupied areas had firmly shifted to the Ankara government which did not agree to the terms. It warred with Armenia over their disputed territory and won, then when the Bolsheviks took over Armenia shortly after Turkey series of treaties with them that basically established the current borders and friendly relations (both had similar enemies at the time and wanted some friendly borders which would continue until Stalin fumbled things later). So that border set as Turkish one side, Soviet on the other. There was a small Kurdish population that they would intermittently make an autonomy (“Red Kurdistan”) for when sweet-talking Kurdish groups and then dissolve later, but no intention of independence from the USSR. There had been some earlier instances of Kurds revolting in Armenia and Azerbaijan but that was all squished by the time the Soviets rolled in.

Turkey continued with wars against the occupying powers and after forcing back a Greek attempt to push for Ankara the French agreed to settle the border (some modication would occur later w.r.t. Hatay state) in exchange for Turkey recognizing Syria as French in a 1921 treaty. There was a small Kurdish population in Syria at the time but more would flee there from turmoil in southeastern Turkey later. That was great as far as the French were concerned and they encouraged that since they figured that would boost the economy and simultaneously weaken the issue of Arab nationalism plaguing them in Syria (the Terrier Plan) but they wanted to control Syria themselves, not to give it to the anyone. Neither did Syria later on though under Assad rule it did allow Kurdish separatist groups aimed at Turkey to use some areas as training grounds safely out of Turkish reach so it would have leverage to make demands on other matters. Way way later on the SDF was able to control a decent chunk of Syria in the chaos of the Syrian civil war but they recently saw much of their majority Arab territories swap over to the new Syrian government and with a really bad situation if it goes to military means again they are integrating now.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne officially canceled the Treaty of Sevres and confirmed the border Turkey had with French Syria but the border with British Iraq was more contentious and was left tbd since both sides wanted the Mosul area (which was expected to be rich in oil). It was referred to the League of Nations which settled in favor of the area belonging to Iraq in 1926. Turkey was miffed but the British agreed to give them a part of the oil revenue and some other sweet rights and benefits so the Turks signed a treaty with them on it. The British did not want an independent Kurdistan because the oil was necessary for their navy and King Faisal of Iraq (a Sunni Arab) wanted to be able to have a higher Sunni population to balance against the many Shia Arabs in his kingdom. The Barzanis especially tried many many many times to get Kurdish state off the ground. Such attempts have been helped out at times by Turkey, Iran, the US etc. whenever they wanted to tweak the British/Iraq and presently they have an autonomous region albeit smaller than it was before the failed independence referendum.

Anyway in the meantime relations between Turks and Kurds had gone way south. For some background Sunni Kurds had for centuries been favored by the Ottoman governments and granted many traditional rights (albeit eroded in the latest Ottoman modernization campaigns) in exchange for serving as the first line of defense against the Shia leaning Qizilbash Turks who were often aligned with the various Iranian dynasties. After Turkey won back control of Thrace and Istanbul it had ended the monarchy but maintained the role of the former sultan as Caliph. The Caliph went into exile and his cousin was subsequently elected as new Caliph but it was a powerless position. He asked for more money and foreign scholars asked for him to have more power, but aggressive secularist Ataturk (who does not want religious influence entering politics) seized on this potential channel for “foreign influence” as grounds to actually abolish the Caliphate as well and force the Caliph and his family out of the country. He made many secular reforms in an attempt to shift from religious based identity to a Turkish national identity and promoted the Turkish language in line with that nation-state model.

All of that was quite toxic to Sunni traditionalists, and to ones who were also Kurdish it was viewed as sundering the only link that tied them together so that was an extra twist of the knife. Sheikh Said called all Muslims to rise up but he was only really answered by Kurdish groups (though notably some Kurdish Qizilbash who had previous been a big pain for the Ottomans opposed Sheikh Said). They laid siege to Diyarbakir but ultimately the rebellion was crushed. It was very expensive and worrisome for the Turkish government which commissioned a report on what to do. The Report for Reform in the East made many extreme recommendations on what to do that kicked Turkification into overdrive, established martial law in eastern areas and so on and made life very difficult for Kurds. In my opinion it sowed the seeds of many future problems ex. Dersim massacre. But as of yet despite insurgencies and the like, no Kurdish autonomy or independent state has been allowed from Turkey.

Qajar Iran was kind of a doormat that everyone stepped on. Much of it was basically occupied by the British and Russians and at times in WWI the Ottomans were making serious incursions. The Ottomans and early Turkey supported a revolt by Simko Shikak in western Iran (who had earlier fought them) who was eventually put down and forced into exile in Iraq by the new Pahlavi dynasty. Later on as described before Kurdish relations had gotten worse and rebellions were becoming a problem in Turkey so Turkey and Iran agreed to delimit the border more strictly which set the modern borders (very similar to older ones excluding ex. loss of Iraq) in 1937. In WWII Iran got invaded by the British and Soviets accompanied by some revolts. At the end of the war the British and the Soviets were supposed to leave but pro Soviet governments were declared in Mahabad (Kurdish) and Tabriz (Azeri). Tribes in the British occupation zone were not interested though and these attempted states collapsed when the Soviets blinked under American pressure and withdrew to leave them to Iran’s mercies. Some support flowed from the USSR and even Saddam’s Iraq to Kurdish groups in Iran (which similarly meddled back in Iraq) with a big revolt after the Iranian Revolution. Of course as you’ll know this didn’t work though some Kurdish insurgent groups exist to this day.

To make a long story short, the folks altering the maps were generally looking to do so in their own favor. Kurdish independence was mostly something to support somewhere else that you didn’t plan on annexing yourself and that would cause a power you were concerned with to be distracted. These were largely very poor tribal areas so with a poor economy they don’t have much ‘oomph’ so to speak in a prolonged war themselves so they would need support… which is also hard to provide because as they’re landlocked a ways in from the water you need the backing of a neighbor to actually get arms and supplies to them. And all the countries currently with a large Kurdish population - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey - share an incentive to not actually want an independent Kurdish state that would may be ideologically inclined to provide a safe haven for their separatists to retreat to and strike back from. Plus Kurdish people are ideologically divided with constellations of parties with different objectives.

I got permabanned from Reddit for supporting terrorism because I posted an ISIS flag in a comment while pointing out how the part of it depicting Muhammad’s seal is based on a forgery some Europeans made as part of a fake relic to scam the Ottomans out of cash… which imo makes ISIS look like morons rather than somehow lending them support but apparently whoever reviews appeals can’t be bothered to read.

Pakistan is not allying with Iran. It is in an emerging block with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Egypt. Since Pakistan and Turkey border Iran they are very sensitive to destabilizing events in Iran that could spill out as massive refugee flows, separatists gaining power on their shared borders, damage to their linked economies and so on. So the block as a whole is advocating to ease tensions. Actually allying Iran would damage their relations with block members, particularly Saudi Arabia which supplies massive amounts of money and cheap oil to Pakistan, to say nothing of the US. All they would get is the military might of a bombed out country that does not border India and that’s a poor trade.

India on the other hand is in an emerging block with the UAE, Israel, Ethiopia and Greece. Of those Israel is obviously extremely against Iran and the UAE’s relations with Iran have crashed amidst the bombing. The crippling of the UAE’s exports other than what can bypass Hormuz is bad for India since they’d just recently struck a massive gas deal with the UAE. So certainly they will be positioning more aggressively against Iran but I would expect this to be a naval and sea affair and not involve Pakistan. If India ever presses Pakistan too hard they open themselves up for problems with China which does not want India to become too powerful as they have border disputes. China was recently confirmed to have provided Pakistan support in the earlier air fighting.

The Taliban were founded in Kandahar in 1994, their founder and many of the experienced fighters who joined them had previously been Afghan mujahideen though. There were a lot of factions that were fighting each other in the aftermath of the Soviet-supported government’s collapse since the broad group of Afghan mujahideen agreed on fighting the Soviets but not on all the other things.

Anything that triggers the reward pathways in your brain has at least some addictive potential and eating is no exception. Not all foods are created equal, either - adding ex. sugar boosts the reward and makes the food more addictive. Now many foods have huge amounts of added sugars for the sake of preserving shelf life and getting recurrent customers, that sort of thing increases the power of the reward. Over time you become habituated to it though so you can’t get quite the same good feeling with the same amount you ate before - you have to eat even more to get there.

It’s certainly a weaker effect than in drugs, but unlike them EVERYONE has to eat food to survive and over their entire life. There’s a lot of money to be made by enhancing the addictive potential of food so many efforts have been made towards that over time, plus as the obesity rate has risen and people eat more cultural expectations around food on portion size and the like have also been increasing. When I cut weight some years ago after getting overweight and almost at the edge of obesity some of my coworkers were wondering why I was bothering to do so because in their eyes I was a relatively skinny guy, even though I was 197 lbs.

Huge order sizes for military industries keeps the costs of production low in addition to exports bringing in cash from outside. So generally if a country wants a strong military but getting the money for it from taxes is problematic due to the political situation or state of the economy, they’ll try to export as widely as they can. Downside is that if someone you exported to does something nasty with those weapons then everyone who didn’t care for that will give you the side-eye