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Franz von Bayern, commonly known as the Duke of Bavaria, is the current head of the House of Wittelsbach. His family ruled Bavaria until the German Revolution of 1918. Were it not for the Act of Settlement 1701—which disqualified Catholics from inheriting the throne—Franz would be the rightful heir to the English crown, according to the Jacobite line of succession. He regards the matter as just a "charming historical curiosity."

The House of Wittelsbach opposed the Nazi regime in Germany. During the last years of World War II, Franz and his family were held captive as prisoners in concentration camps. About the experience, he stated: "We were prisoners, persecuted, but we were not victims of the Shoah. It wasn't up to us, who returned from exile to Bavaria and our old positions, to see ourselves as victims. But as contemporary witnesses dwindle, I realized it's important to talk about it." After the war, he studied business management at the University of Munich and became a passionate modern art collector.

Franz has been in a romantic relationship with Thomas Greinwald since 1980:

"We came from two different worlds, and the expectations placed on me meant that Thomas was often required to make sacrifices and allowances—much more so on his part than on mine. Especially in the earlier years, this often involved humiliation for him when he was not treated appropriately as my partner. Without his willingness to cope with this, my life and the fulfillment of my commitment would not have been possible."

The couple made their relationship public in 2023. Afterwards, Franz explained the move:

"Tolerance isn't enough. Without actually approving of it, one tolerates the way of life of others just because one is tolerant. That doesn't do justice to the situation; we want things to be a matter of course. Many people don't even dare to think about certain things because they're afraid of the consequences. If I had to define my life goal, it would be fearless thinking, essentially: freedom from fear."

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Some of the world’s lowest-income and most aid-dependent nations are paying millions to lobbyists with ties to US President Donald Trump as the country halts foreign assistance, a new Global Witness investigation has found.

Many of these countries are home to one or more armed conflicts and are offering access to valuable natural resources, including minerals or other strategic assets, in exchange for humanitarian or military support.

Since the US election in November 2024, 17 of the world’s Least Developed Countries and largest recipients of US aid – Angola, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Haiti, Honduras, India, Iraq (Kurdistan), Liberia, Moldova, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Somalia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen – have signed lobbying contracts with US firms worth more than $21 million in fees paid until end-2025.

What’s more, documents filed with the US Department of Justice reveal that firms with ties to Trump and his inner circle are cashing in.

They have negotiated contracts worth more than $17 million in fees due in 2025 in the six months since Trump was elected, records submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show...

While the revolving door between governments and lobbyists is nothing new, and countries seeking influence over US decisions that could significantly affect them is to be expected, Global Witness is concerned by the wider dynamics that are driving new deals.

“We’re seeing a dramatic cut in aid, combined with an explicit rush for critical minerals, and willingness by the Trump administration to secure deals in exchange for aid or military assistance,” said Emily Stewart, Head of Policy, Transition Minerals at Global Witness.

“These dynamics create a potential situation where dealmaking in Washington is more desperate, less favourable to low-income countries and more open to resource exploitation at the expense of impacted communities.”

Our analysis of lobbying documents reveals that of the 17 countries that have signed lobbying deals, eight are pitching new investment opportunities.

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start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret

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i keep thinking all the mars rovers are the size of a medium dog but i am wrong every single time

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The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the ‘nuclear’ list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist,” DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. “While it won’t catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see.

Left: AI filter is off Right: AI filter is on

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Funny how you scratch these organisations and you immediately find Christian fundamentalists.

Many of these groups rise to prominence because they have American-based backing.

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Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong

(gifs from the documentary Chasing The Moon, 2019)

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~ Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society, Including Social, Commercial and Legal Forms, Letter Writing, Invitations, &c., also valuable suggestions on Self Culture and Home Training, by Richard A. Wells, 1891

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you mentioned low dose naltrexone helps with dysautonomia I think but I can't find the post where you talked about it? no pressure to find it, I'm trying to help my partner who has POTS

I have made a lot of posts about LDN! but I also have no idea where they are. but the long story short here is, during the AIDS crisis, patients on naltrexone for drug use got less cancer. so researchers worked backwards from there and found out that at a very low dose (4.5mg vs 50-150mg), naltrexone turns off just a few opioid receptors. and this basically tricks the body into saying oh fuck! something is wrong! we have to heal better! and then that has some disease-modifying effects where it makes the body work Better. and that can mean less fatigue, less pain, less brain fog, all sorts of shit. people can throw LDN at anything but it has been pretty successful in dysautonomia, ME/CFS, long covid, etc.

the main side effects are weird dreams and headaches. but because this is a compounded medication, compound pharmacies often add in extra ingredients because 4.5mg naltrexone is so little Stuff, and most bad reactions are to those extra ingredients. so if someone has a bad reaction or is prone to having a bad reaction, they should ask for it to be compounded for someone with chemical sensitivities, without dyes/fillers/etc. some patients on LDN also need a slightly higher dose of opioids. LDN can be easily started and stopped without withdrawal for major surgeries, it just stops doing the good stuff.

and one very important note, LDN can take up to six months or more of taking it daily to work. so some people will not have much benefit until months in. when I first started it started working pretty quick though.

in many places naltrexone is over the counter so a lot of people just buy normal dose naltrexone and then use a mortar and pestle to dose it in an oral syringe in the fridge, which lasts about a week if I remember right. the other big one in the US at least is getting it through a company like agelessrx, where someone has a virtual appointment and then gets it shipped. but you can also ask around local support groups like dysautonomia international for recommendations of local doctors that are informed about LDN! ye average doctor can prescribe it. either way, if someone else compounds it, it goes through a compound pharmacy.

now the main barriers to LDN are lack of awareness/education, bias against drug users, and doctors who really want LDN to fail for one reason or another. because naltrexone is typically used for drug addiction. so doctors will see "naltrexone" and assume it is for drug use and be awful to a patient, which everything else aside about how fucked up that is, is a big part of why it needs to be referred to as low dose naltrexone or LDN. low dose naltrexone is great for chronic illness, regular naltrexone is great for addiction.

but yeah the absolute easiest things to do are go to agelessrx (in the US, or a similar site in other countries if they have), or to look for support groups like dysautonomia international support groups or even LDN specific support groups and ask who people see locally about LDN. a doctor good with LDN will be able to go over all the risks and benefits. but as far as things up to gain vs potential side effects, LDN is like a miracle. in my imo

and those are the basics of LDN! I do not remember the post you mean so I forget if I linked anything, but this information is from a medical presentation through dysautonomia international's medical conference a few years back. my internet is acting up and stopping me from looking for sources at the moment so if anyone has a good resource on LDN, please link it! also I really hope this posts. come on tumblr mobile

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I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

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I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

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when i first heard about the male loneliness epidemic i was like oh yeah close camaraderie and bonding between men is often discouraged in favor of competition or, if not discouraged, at least filtered through a lens of individualism that precludes deep connections. and then i learned what people meant by it (men arent getting laid) to which i say skill issue

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10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.

AAAND WE HAVE LIFTOFF!

HAPPY MOON LANDING DAY!!!