Extra Credits
Published on 27 Apr 2019Nzinga didn’t start out as a queen — but when she saw how incompetently her brother was running affairs in Ndongo (what would become Angola), she took advantage of his decision to send her to negotiate with the Portuguese — much to his grief later. Nzinga established herself against colonial forces and did not budge.
Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms, a scion of the Mbundu people, will spend forty years standing between the Portuguese and their ambitions, using everything at her command — her cunning, her ruthless intellect, her military acumen, even the bodies of her people — whatever it takes to succeed.
Thanks again to Cassandra Khaw for guest-writing this mini-series!
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April 29, 2019
Queen Nzinga – Rise of a Legend – Extra History – #1
Cannabis stores struggling against cheaper black market weed outlets
In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:
How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?
How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?
Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.
It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.
So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.
Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.
You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.
It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.
The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.
“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.
System of a Nazi Terror – WW2 – WaH 002 – April 1940
World War Two
Published on 27 Apr 2019In April 1940 in Poland, if you are on the list of Nazi or Soviet non-desirables, there three options: run for your life, be shipped off to a camp, or face the execution squad… if you happen to be Jewish it’s likely to be the fourth option: the Ghetto.
Neurology of Hate Special: https://youtu.be/yeZ3_OtDa7E
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke KapteijnsArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
4 hours ago
Now… this is a tough episode. It’s also tough to illustrate with images. Many of the events we speak of were, for obvious reasons not documented at the time. As a result we have had to resort to using some imagery that is from later dates when similar events, or the aftereffects of these events were documented on film and photo. We have labeled these images as best we can when it is relevant. Last but not least… do please remember our rules, especially on an episode like this one. Respect the dead and never forget that the only way we can do them justice is to remember their loss and sacrifice.
Banning single-use plastics won’t make much (if any) difference
My local high school is suddenly all about the proposed ban on single-use plastics — where student-made posters used to proclaim their dedication to gender equality, they’re now all about the evils of plastics. It’s almost like it’s a co-ordinated campaign that originated somewhere else…
But despite the students’ new-found environmental awareness, the ban they favour would make little or no difference to plastic items ending up in the oceans, because the vast majority of the plastic there comes from only ten rivers, none of them in North America (this is from a World Economic Forum report). Jason Unrau reports on his trip up the Yangtze River in China twenty years ago that illustrates the breadth of the problem:
Beginning in Shanghai in the summer of 1999, I boarded a large flat-bottom boat with around 300 other passengers. It would be the first of about a dozen different vessels, that over two weeks ferried me 2500 kilometres to Chongqing.
After taking my first meal in the ferry’s mess hall, served in a Styrofoam box, I searched everywhere for a garbage can. There were none – passengers simply tossed their garbage overboard and without an alternative, I joined in the littering.
The banks of the Yangtze are home to more than 200 million Chinese who treat the waterway as commuter corridor and as I soon discovered, a dump. I took the trip to get a glimpse the fabled Three Gorges, before a hydro-electric project and dam would change the watershed forever. As my trip progressed, however, so did my treatment of this historic river as trash receptacle.
The closer I got to Chongqing, the narrower the river became and the smaller the ferries got. About 10 days into the trip, I exited the dining hall of a different vessel to engage in the daily ritual of reckless Styrofoam abandonment, but to my surprise there was a garbage bin.
Delighted at the prospect that my littering ways on the Yangtze were through, enthusiastically I added my box to a near overflowing bin. As if on cue a kitchenhand exited the dining hall, gathered up the bag and heaved the entire thing overboard.
Like I experienced and begrudgingly participated in creating, the World Economic Forum’s report describes “rivers of plastic” – its analyses of respective outputs and comparisons to garbage island and other samples, could be traced back to their source.
According to the economic forum eight of these rivers are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
Father of The Bride Speech – Rowan Atkinson
Ralph Lindberg
Published on 16 Jan 2010Looking for great father of the bride speech? How about this father of the bride speech from Rowan Atkinson aka Mr. Bean
QotD: Prostitution
I had a few patients who were prostitutes. I remember one well-dressed lady in her 40s, whose profession I asked in the course of my history-taking.
“Dominatrix,” she said.
She was obviously very good at it because she had an international clientele, including, for example, a judge in Alabama. She told me that she never went anywhere in her car without her kit, for she might receive an emergency call at any time from Hong Kong or South Africa. You might have thought that being whipped by one woman in black fishnet stockings was as good as being whipped by another, but apparently this was (and I presume still is) not so: It’s the words and gestures that go with the whipping that count as well.
This activity of hers gave her a very good living (her car was far better than mine); she was sending her daughter to private school. I admired her enterprise and thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Was she or the judge in Alabama to blame? Was either of them to blame at all?
Of course, she wasn’t typical of the profession, and hard cases, as they say, make bad law. But I am not at all sure that I saw the poor prostitutes in my street as merely victims, as the new French law would have them. Not everyone with their life history becomes a crack-taking prostitute. This does not mean that I did not pity them for what they had become. If we can truly sympathize only with those who have done nothing to contribute to their own fate, we shall have very restricted sympathies indeed.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Turning Tricks Into Sympathy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-04-09.
