Snowflake's Forum

Posted by Food4thought Since the UK left Hong Kong in 1997, China has been operating under the one country two systems policy. This allowed Hong Kong to maintain some of their autonomy while the rest of China is subjugated under Chinese Communist Party rule.   Several months ago, a new extradition bill was put forward to create a legal method for extracting Hong Kong citizens to mainland China for prosecution.  This law would effectively destroy any legal protections Hong Kong citizens have come to expect and so a massive protest ensued and the vestiges still go on to this day. This protest can't last forever and sooner or later either the state will give in, or the protest will be crushed by force.  I'm guessing the latter.....   and with all the political hay being made with Brexit and Impeachment hearings, China might see an opportunity to pull a sleight of hand while the west is distracted.

The Rattler Okay...what rattles your cage bars, time to have a good moan and maybe others can help you to 'ban the boggart'. In muggle words...that means to   If nothing gets to you...PLEASE help the rest of us to keep calm...we would like to know any coping strategies in this tumultuous world....xxx

Posted by Food4thought With the new impeachment looming, a lot of partisans are tossing accusations back and forth.  The facts are getting muddied by well spun narratives and it's making people who are normally rational latch onto their own interpretation of the truth with religious zeal.  I'm going to suggest that the Trump / Ukraine topic might actually be somewhat toxic to the group until we all cool down and collect more facts. 

Suleiman's father entrusted his son with the governorships of different regions within the Ottoman Empire from the age of 17. When Suleiman was 26 in 1520, Selim I died and Suleiman ascended the throne. Although he was of age, his mother served as co-regent. The new sultan immediately launched his program of military conquest and imperial expansion. In 1521, he put down a revolt by the governor of Damascus, Canberdi Gazali. Suleiman's father had conquered the area that is now  Syria  in 1516, using it as a wedge between the Mamluk sultanate and the Safavid Empire, where they had appointed Gazali as the governor. On January 27, 1521, Suleiman defeated Gazali, who died in battle. In July of the same year, the Sultan laid siege to Belgrade, a fortified city on the Danube River. He used both a land-based army and a flotilla of ships to blockade the city and prevent reinforcement. Belgrade, part of modern Serbia, belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary

I've posted a lot about politics, and while it used to be pretty even-sided, most of it lately has been lambasting the GOP and Trump and all associated peoples. Many have commented on this and challenged my moniker and my political ideology as a moderate. Most of them are far right trolls, so I take their criticism both as a compliment and with a mountain of salt, but I think the question does deserve to be asked of me: why do I think the GOP is a cult? Well, aside from meeting the absolute definition of a cult ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/27/cults-definition-religion ) the GOP did one thing in 2016 which erased their status as a political party and fully transformed it into a cult. This moment ensured that no longer could it act as a political instrument of the USA, but as the personal toy of one man. This moment made it impossible to treat them as even or equal, because they no longer qualified as a functional party. That moment was this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x49P_ZGeWq8 https://globalnews.ca/news/5959574/greta-thunberg-helpline-protests/ https://angermanagement.site/

For all those who were amazed at my picture of microscopic sand from yesterday: let me (and the Khan Academy) further blow your mind.   So worth watching this 13-ish minute video.   Gets better and better as it goes on.  You will not look at your world the same, afterwards. ;) https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/universe-scale-topic/scale-earth-galaxy-tutorial/v/scale-of-the-small   What do you think? And thanks for recommending! :)

PHOTOS: The Dead Live With Their Loved Ones On This Indonesian Island More of the article here^ As a host, 90-year-old Alfrida Lantong is somewhat passive. Lying resolutely on her back and gazing up through a pair of thick, dusty spectacles, she roundly ignores her son's murmured greeting as he enters the room, and she pays little heed to the gaggle of grandchildren clustered around her. But Alfrida can hardly be blamed for her unresponsiveness. After all, she has been dead for the last seven years. Grandchildren of Alfrida Lantong, who died in 2012, visit her in her coffin at the family's home near Rantepau, a town in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia. Tommy Trenchard and Aurélie Marrier d'Unienville  Alfrida belongs to the Toraja people of southern Sulawesi in Indonesia, for whom the line between life and death is not black and white. Though her heart stopped beating in 2012, as far as her family is concerned ,  she is only  "to macula,"  whi

When We Love Our Food So Much That It Goes Extinct An engraving dating from the 19th century depicts passenger pigeons, once one of the most common birds in North America but now extinct because of overhunting and deforestation. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty We humans love food to death — literally. From mammoths to passenger pigeons, we have driven our favorite meals to extinction through overhunting and habitat destruction. And globally, our tendency to  overharvest just a narrow range of crops  has limited the variety of foods we eat. "When it comes to fruits and vegetables, we have access to only a fraction of the diversity that existed a century ago," says Lenore Newman in her forthcoming  book ,  Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food  (out Oct. 8).   She is the Canada research chair in food security and environment at the University of the Fraser Valley, in British Columbia. In her book, Newman explores how

Journalists File Lawsuit To Force Feds To Release Medicare Advantage Audits Medicare Advantage health plans, mostly run by private insurance companies, have enrolled more than 22 million seniors and people with disabilities — more than 1 in 3 people who are on some sort of Medicare plan. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Kaiser Health News is suing the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to release dozens of audits that the agency says reveal hundreds of millions of dollars in overcharges by Medicare Advantage health plans. The  lawsuit filed late Thursday  in U.S. District Court in San Francisco under the Freedom of Information Act, seeks copies of 90 government audits of Medicare Advantage health plans that were conducted for 2011, 2012 and 2013 but never made public. CMS officials have said they expect to collect $650 million in overpayments from the audits. Although the agency has disclosed the  names  of the several dozen health plans under scrutiny, it has

An earthworm can grow only so long. A well-fed adult will depend on what kind of worm it is, how many segments it has, how old it is and how well fed it is. An  Lumbricus terrestris  will be from 90-300 millimeters long. A worm has no arms, legs or eyes. There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms. Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else. In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms. The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail. Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called aggregates. Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying earthworms more than 10