Today I Learned

I couldn't fit this important detail in the title. It was a proposed joint US and Russia project. I already tried to reword the title to fit more information but I couldn't fit it with the character limit.

IP3 International (International Peace, Power and Prosperity)[1] is a nuclear technology company formed in June 2016. One project involved a plan to transfer nuclear technology from the United States to Saudi Arabia.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and subsequently, Trump aides Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner were engaged in promoting IP3 International's plan to transfer nuclear technology from the US to Saudi Arabia, for use in a proposed joint US-Russian project, in possible violation of the Atomic Energy Act.[2][3][4][5][6] In January 2017, Derek Harvey, a retired Army intelligence officer, former staffer for David Petraeus, and then-staffer of the National Security Council under Michael Flynn, advocated for the IP3 nuclear sales plan. Harvey continued to speak with Michael Flynn "every night" even after Flynn resigned.[7]

In February 2019, United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform chairman Elijah E. Cummings released a report on the matter, based in part upon testimony from whistleblowers within White House.[6][8][9][10][11][7][12][13] The House Oversight Committee released a second interim staff report and supporting documents in July 2019, highlighting the "gold standard" of nuclear proliferation. It also reported lobbying by Flynn and Barrack and briefings to White House members including President Trump, Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, Mike Pompeo, and Rick Perry.[14] [15] [16][17]

Derived from the Latin word “Alpinus,” it translates to “of the Alps” or “relating to the Alps.” The Alps, a significant European mountain range, serves as the cornerstone for this name’s meaning. The term itself has evolved from the Latin “Alpes,” which throughout history has primarily denoted the high mountain range stretching across eight countries in Europe.

"Under torture, Hamada was forced to confess to charges of being a terrorist, possessing weapons, and the murder of regime soldiers. When he refused to confess, agents were called to come and torture him. He was beaten and suspended by the wrists. To alleviate his suffering, he agreed to sign a forced confession, admitting that he possessed a weapon to protect the demonstrators, but he refused to admit having committed any crimes. He was then transferred to another interrogation room, where he was undressed and sexually abused. After this torture he signed all of the documents.

At the beginning of 2013, he was ill and taken to military hospital 601, nicknamed by other detainees as a "slaughterhouse". In transit to the hospital, Hamada was physically assaulted. He was told to forget his name, and was assigned the number "1858". There he saw detainees tortured to death, corpses piling up in the toilets and hospital staff beating patients to death. Hamada begged the doctor to be returned to detention."

Also, many peasants didn't even use bath houses they bathed in their home with more effort by heating up basins of water.

But excessive bathing wasn't really talking about bathing but going to public bath houses to meet and to ... other people.

If you read the article/post, it goes on to say that in later centuries, some medical professionals misinformed the public telling them not to bathe with warm water because the 'pores would open and let too much bacteria etc in.' I am thankful they eventually reconsidered.

So, a Greek guy in Canada made an Italian staple into something that he thought would represent a Hawaiian cuisine (even though it was just the can, many people naively believe it truly is a Hawaiian dish)

Once someone told me they thought that's how they ate their pizza over there. Lol.

Nevertheless, if I were in Canada at that time, I would have visited his restaurant and ordered one of the originals. It's not the best pizza topping but it is also not the worst. (I hate anchovies, fish of any kind or mushrooms on my pizza. Mushrooms are good in other dishes.)

"[The water] rushes with great impetuosity; the foaming surges dash through the rocks with terrific violence; no craft, either large or small, can venture there safely. During floods, this obstruction, or ledge of rocks, is covered with water, yet the passage of the narrows is not thereby improved."

The rapids, along with nearby Celilo Falls, were submerged in 1957 with the construction of a dam.

Because of course it is…

https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/mcrazor

This worked as of 21:30 Eastern time on 6 December 2024.

The true origin of candy canes is hazy, mixing recorded history with a good amount of legend. Hard candy has existed for thousands of years. The expense of sugar made it a rare treat, shared on special occasions and holidays or as a reward for children’s good behavior.

Church records show that in 1670, a choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral in Germany handed out white candy sticks to keep restless children quiet during Christmas services. The sweets took a long time to finish and kept little hands and mouths busy while they weren’t singing. Worried it might seem improper to give candy in church, he added the symbolic crook to recall the shepherds of the Nativity.

Chatham House Rule, anyone who comes to a meeting is free to use information from the discussion, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment.

Here's an interesting article about the same musician: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-07-21/why-woody-guthries-guitar-was-a-fascist-killer.html

Relevant paragraph:

Woody Guthrie’s guitar didn’t kill fascists because it fired bullets. It killed by neutralizing the fascists. Music, like culture, has the power to defeat right-wing extremists and their antidemocratic ideas rooted in xenophobia, racism, homophobia and sexism. Guthrie fought using ideas, language, music and the shared desire to build a better future together.

At the end of WW2 most of the world's major economies were in shambles, with a lot of international debt outstanding. Political leaders wanted to do something to handle that in order to head off what had happened after WW1, when international debts were defaulted on and countries started manipulating their markets to gain advantages over each other. The economic mess after WW1 had contributed to the making of WW2; being able to avoid any kind of a repeat was a priority.

So in 1944 economists and policymakers from 44 different nations, including every Allied nation, got together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to work out some kind of agreement about how the world economy would work after the war ended.

The agreement they came to was that all the nations would establish fixed exchange rates with each other, and all nations had to agree to maintain convertibility of their currency to U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars, in turn, would always be convertible to gold at a certain rate. The agreement also established the International Monetary Fund and (what became) the World Bank to maintain this system and to provide a means of cooperation between the countries.

The representative from the U.K. (Keynes) wanted the system to be based on a made-up currency, but the U.S. threw its weight around and made it the dollar.

The system worked because of the economic dominance of the United States. You could count on the dollar. But it also meant that the United States had to be putting money out into the world, so that other nations had dollars with which to trade. The United States had to maintain a "balance of payments" deficit with the world. One way to do that would be to buy a lot of stuff from other countries and thus make dollars flow out, but we didn't want to do that because we had a strong economy; we produced stuff here and didn't need to buy it elsewhere. So the U.S. decided to just start donating money to other nations. Here you go Europe: a blank check to help you rebuild from the war. Here you go Asia: money to help feed your poor. And so on. We were fine with that because that money bought influence. The U.S. gained some say over how other nations did things.

This all started to break down when our position drew us into Vietnam. We were financially supporting South Vietnam when the North Vietnamese started fighting it, and so we got involved. First under JFK, then LBJ, then Nixon. We ended up spending over $130 billion in Vietnam ($1 trillion in today's money). Add to that LBJ's Great Society, which increased domestic spending. This all added to America's debt, which began to impact the strength of the dollar and our ability to give money away to the rest of the world.

Here we are, printing money... but remember that we've agreed that dollars would always be convertible to gold at a certain fixed rate. The amount of dollars in existence was going up but the amount of gold was not. Or not as fast, anyway, and so it became harder and harder to keep that gold promise. France, having always been skeptical of America's dominance of the system, literally sent a warship to New York to retrieve its gold in August of 1971. They got it, but they were the last to do so. Nixon realized that the end was nigh for Bretton Woods and declared an end to the gold standard a few days later.

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When Nixon ended the gold standard in 1971 the dollar quickly devalued and it started a period of high inflation. OPEC embargoed the US starting in late 1973, in retaliation for American support of Israel. The embargo and reduced output from OPEC caused recessions in other parts of the world, leading to tension between the US and some of its allies, who faulted the US for provoking the embargo.

Enter: the "petrodollar".

Once the embargo ended the United States and Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest member, worked out a deal. The deal was that OPEC would export oil only in dollars, keeping our buck on top post-Bretton Woods, and in return the United States would provide weapons and military assistance to the Saudis.

It kept us on top. You have to have dollars if you want to buy oil, to this day, and you have to get dollars from the US, ultimately. In 2000 Saddam Hussein decided to start selling Iraqi oil in euros. By 2003 5% of the world's oil was produced by Iraq and was being sold in euros. Which... was right about the time a WMD mirage appeared somewhere in the Iraqi desert and the United States started shooting bullets its way. Maybe there was a connection.

The petrodollar is still the system today, though America's influence in the world seems to be changing, maybe even waning.

Some images not from the article:

The band issued only four tracks on two singles on Apple; both A-sides were covers: Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "Road to Nowhere", and Paul McCartney's "Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight"; although Trash's version was released a week before the Beatles' version on their forthcoming album Abbey Road.[1][2] The single "Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight" made the top 40, but the band disappeared shortly after. The single was included on the multi-artist compilation Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Trash_(Scottish_band)

Apparently they have been around since 1890, although I don't think they've been making shirts the whole time. I just wonder if they started mass-producing shirts before or after the Ralph Lauren brand.

Saw it when looking up Scrubs on the IMDB.

Bonus Scrubs fact: It was filmed in a real, but closed, hospital called the University Medical Center in North Hollywood. We lived in North Hollywood and drove by it all the time and, for years, thought it was the closest hospital to us. We didn't know it was where Scrubs was being filmed. You'd think they would have taken down the sign or put up a banner that said it was closed or something, but nope. We're just lucky we never thought there was an emergency and we didn't have time for an ambulance. I learned later that people had tried to get to their ER more than once later on.