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from this article, about health in the former soviet union. i dont really have a point here it just seems like a significant fact

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The National Ethnic Affairs Commission of China recently published their 2024 guidelines for ethnology research grant applications. Fascinating stuff:

Uphold the correct conception of Chinese ethnic history, and reject schools of thought including "Inner Asia History", "New Qing History", "Conquest Dynasty", and "Zomia", and incorrect conceptions of history such as "Austronesian languages"

Break the western theory of "it's universal law to evolve from empires to nation states" ... break the western theory of "diversity not integration" and "integration equals ethnic assimilation", and see "the order of China" in the "disorder of the west"

It's honestly impressive that they know all this stuff

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In my new report, I provide the first ever look inside of a US military program known as the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, which gives major government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing a way to influence senior military policymakers.

The program sends US military officers to work at major corporations for nearly a year; when they return, the fellows submit recommendations for reform of the Pentagon based on their observations of the private sector. 

We document numerous examples of companies using this program to pass along self-interested policy recommendations to US military leaders, including: more outsourcing, corporate subsidies, deregulation, less oversight, more political power to contractors, looser arms export rules, and more. We also analyzed a sample of former SDEF fellows and found that 43% of them go through the revolving door and work for military contractors after leaving the program. As such, the SDEF program uses government money to help subsidize the military-industrial complex, placing corporate interests above the public interest.

You can read my summary of the report here, along with coverage by The Lever here.

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i like when you delete a tumblr post and it says This post went to heaven. that is not where my post went

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Let us suppose that the "average" horse would have equal proportions of all these parts. The degree to which each part in this poll deviates from the "average" size (20% of total) will determine how large or small that part of our horse will be (i.e a horse with only 10% in Legs will have legs half the size of the average horse).

I will draw a picture of the horse we make!

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@yakourinka requested cat pictures

Smokey (first four images) and Kimmy (last three)

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This was shared as a "bad" joke but I was so charmed by it I've been thinking about it for days.

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the nuisance of our language is stunning

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I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

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(amazingly this has nothing to do with that humanpetguy post I just replied to)

one of my favorite fetish worldbuilding tropes, because of how fucking dumb and unreasonable it is, is the Federal Department of Kinky Shit.

It's the very specific thing that happens where it turns out in your setting, there's a Government Agency that does Kinky Shit.

Like you gotta go to the Big Testing Center when you turn 21 to find out if you're gonna be turned into a ponygirl, by the USDHA: The United States Department of Human Agriculture.

or maybe you get a letter in the mail, and oh no! your number has come up in the Slut Lottery. What's that mean? Why is there a slut lottery? NO TIME TO EXPLAIN, IT'S JUST HOW IT IS! GET TO SLUTTIN'

It kinda makes me want to write one of these stories just so I can try to write a backstory that explains WHY IN THE FUCK their world is like this and no one seems to complain.

It's basically the same trope as "medieval village sacrifices a maiden every year to The Dragon" but modernized. Now there's a Government Agency in charge of Feeding Virgins To Winged Reptiles, and everyone is just fine with that. Apparently the supreme court said it was okay, or we had a constitutional amendment to give the government the power to turn young adults into meals for wyverns. How did that get ratified, anyway? You seriously got 38 states to vote in favor of taking citizens and feeding them to a monster?

This would almost be a commentary on the heartlessness of the draft except they're clearly way too horny about it. It's like instead of saying "the draft is like a monster that eats our children and we just smile and wave the flag", they're saying "the draft is a monster that eats our children and I'm masturbating to it"

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I love the love between padme and anakin (dysfunctional as it is, im a sucker for this all-consuming brand of obsession and love and devotion). But i can NOT for the life of me understand narratively, in terms of her character, what it was that makes padme feel that way.

Maybe it's my lack of star wars Lore Knowledge. it's so clearcut why anakin would be so attached to padme. idrk why she's the same way? i trust your understanding of the characters n also u actually seem to like padme as a character and care about her characterization,, so i am hopeful you'll have some insight pretty please

i don't think you're alone, i get some variation of this ask about once a month or so. george lucas doesn't really favor subtle storytelling; if the characters don't blatantly vomit their feelings at some point, or if we're not hit with the symbolic anvil, those feelings really don't make it into the narrative, and this kind of leaves padme's story, her internal feelings and life, kind of grounds for speculation. lucas never really bothers with one of the primary aspects of his story - padme's feelings about anakin - in any in-depth way, because, let's just be honest here, icky when women have feelings, you know? i'll explain what i see.

first, the thing that i think gets underplayed or left out weirdly often is that anakin and padme a) meet in the context of him being enslaved, and b) by the end of their time together in the first episode, anakin is directly responsible for helping her end the blockade of naboo. this is often overlooked as context for their relationship because everything prior to AOTC is discounted due to the fact that anakin is a child, however i think it's important to remember that this history would change padme's perspective on anakin enormously. padme's position in TPM is agonizing; she's a queen forced to abandon her people and beg a slow, corrupt system for any help she can get, and it doesn't work. the galactic structures in place to help her are glacially slow and don't care about the suffering of the people she's directly responsible for. in a situation where padme must feel almost entirely alone, this random kid who has nothing is kind to her.

anakin doesn't race in the boonta eve classic to free himself; he does it to help padme, qui-gon, and jar jar get off of tatooine. she watches people die horribly in violent explosions during the course of that race, knowing that this is a kid younger than she is (and she's incredibly young herself) with nothing to his name, not even his body. in a galaxy where the duly appointed leaders refuse to help her and alleviate the suffering of her people, this random nine year old does. in a galaxy where the senate as institution sits on its hands, anakin - with no training, experience, or skills - is critical to the end of the blockade. i can't emphasize enough that padme has been groomed into a political position, and her entire life has been about serving her people, and the suffering the blockade induced - i mean, there's mention of people being dragged into camps - would have affected her personally. we see glimpses of that in her anger, her determination, and in one of my literal favorite padme scenes ever, that time she's a really sulky fourteen year old and goes WELL THE QUEEN WOULDN'T LIKE THAT >:( at qui-gon while she's posing as a handmaiden. she's so cute, help.

the context they see each other again in AOTC isn't two near-strangers seeing each other again, it's padme seeing someone who, in a galaxy that seemed almost entirely against her, was in her corner. and not only in her corner, but was insanely vital to that effort. he helped her save a couple million people. it was a blockade of an entire planet. that would change how you think of someone; in the same way that anakin remembers padme for that quiet moment where she asked him if he missed his mother, padme remembers anakin as someone so willing to lay down his life to help her, he is actually casual about it. and as skeptical as she was (the queen wouldn't like that! god i love her!) he didn't fail her when seemingly everyone else did.

that's why i don't find it that unbelievable that padme would have a connection with him despite how unabashedly weird he is throughout AOTC. she has the best of assumptions. in such a context, anakin's unabashed weirdness - the fact that he argues with obi-wan, stammers about how pretty she is, babbles about how life is so unfair - becomes a kind of earnestness. padme lives a life where she's frequently lied to and is lying, and we see, at the very beginning of AOTC, the effect this deception has on her - corde dies in her arms, sobbing apologies for failing her. this is gutting, emotionally, and a critical piece of padme's mental landscape going into the rest of the film. critically, corde dies because she's posing as padme. it's a form of deception, although necessary. star wars also codes politics as being inherently shady; padme has, in fact, already been lied to and manipulated by palpatine. padme's life, as a person with power, is filled with people who will do anything to either crush it, take it, or exist close to it. in a life where these deceptions have such brutal consequences, anakin is genuine to the point of constantly embarrassing himself in front of her.

this is where i would argue that anakin's complete inability to be normal was the thing that actually mattered the most to padme, rather than being this roadblock she has to mentally overcome in order to take the plunge. everyone's been theorizing incorrectly about this the entire time. anakin, critically, does not get less weird; i think it's important that he demonstrably listens to her boundaries, like when she tells him to stop looking at her like that, he does. she initiates their kisses, not him. but he does very much go YOU'RE ASKING ME TO BE RATIONAL, AND THAT IS SOMETHING I KNOW I CANNOT DO!!!! he never loses that earnestness, to the point where i am convinced he actually has no idea how many social faux pas he's added to his social faux pas counter throughout the film. he has no idea he's being odd. he's just being anakin. but, again, earnestness is the point. anakin not lying to her is the point. this is what, to padme, would be new, and refreshing - her career is filled with profoundly good orators, people who have mastered manipulative speech, and this guy goes, "i don't like sand," and just leaves that on the table! no follow up. he just doesn't like sand, simple as.

there's another aspect of this; unfortunately for us all, anakin's doofus behavior is deeply funny. padme visibly enjoys it. he does stupid shit, like trying to surf on a space cow, and then fakes unconsciousness to mess with her. they have a goofy picnic where anakin's like i'm not teasing you but i'm also so teasing you. he uses the force to float a pear to show off. these are childish behaviors, but, critically, padme laughs at all of these. in every scene outside of anakin, padme is a deeply, deeply serious person - her voice is strict, her manner is strict, her manner isn't unkind but she isn't given to wanton joy. but in these scenes with anakin, at points she almost seems overwhelmed with humor - they literally frolic in a field of flowers. for padme, who just lost someone dear to her, whose life has become so stressful that it necessitates a wizard bodyguard, interacting with anakin must be a relief; he listens to her, says every thought in his damn head like a complete fool, and is fun to laugh with. with the background that he has with her - a tragic story she's deeply sympathetic towards, that he somehow overcame just when she needed it - and clear physical attraction (sorry, guys, "my, you've grown," is just as profoundly awkward as the beautiful for a senator bit, we just need to accept that) we're ready to light the theoretical match.

AOTC happens in the context of padme losing someone close to her because of their devotion to her, and bawling apologies to her with their literal last breath. AOTC is a movie where padme's guilt about that is the unspoken undercurrent; i truly think guilt burns her alive in this film, and when shmi, a woman who had opened her meager quarters to padme in the past, who explicitly suffered more because anakin went to specifically padme's aid, dies, i think padme's response is guilt. she is constantly in the position of being the person others are suffering for. (needless to say, anakin's actions in ROTS are the ultimate betrayal of padme in many ways.) the reason padme responds with empathy to anakin's confession is because she is currently living with the guilt of someone she loves dying because of her actions. i don't think she ever thinks anakin's actions were good or moral; i think padme believes it could never happen again, because there is simply no one else in the universe anakin loves more than his mother, and frankly, at that time, this was true. padme doesn't have foresight, and personally i think she's quick to discount her emotional importance to other people because her life simply doesn't allow for a lot of those personal connections - she doesn't know anakin will be similarly motivated to do some murders in her name, someday. we, the audience, project that onto her, assume that she should know that, but she doesn't and shouldn't.

this is why i also think padme's enthusiasm to go rescue obi-wan is as forceful as it is - anakin is all but confessing that he can't go save obi-wan because it would deviate from his current mission, but padme must be completely exhausted of people suffering in her name. she must be completely exhausted of simply being the witness. i think her emotions in AOTC build quietly into this tangled mess, and then geonosis, the fear of potentially losing anakin, too, really closes the deal on padme's end - she's officially willing to hold on no matter what, because anakin has proven to be special enough in her life that she wants to keep him in it. long story short padme is literally moronsexual.

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i’m going to kdxjdhdjhddjjdhs

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I never made a post about draft horses. :T They are the gentle giants of the horse world, sometimes growing as large as 20 hands and over 2000 lbs. The tallest horse in the world is an American-type Belgian horse named Big Jake (I think???).

A very big (but good) boy!

Despite their size, draft horses are known for their quiet, even temperaments, which make them good work horses. They were originally bred to pull wagons and plows, and they still do that. The most famous draft horses are probably the Budweiser Clydesdales, i.e. the horses in those Superbowl commercials that make us cry every goddamn year.

Draft horses can be ridden, and they are often crossed with lighter breeds, such as Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses, to create tall, sturdy-boned, quiet sport horses.

Such horses were a common sight during foxhunts, as “hotter” breeds, like Arabians and Thoroughbreds, tend to lose their minds a bit in the chaos of the hunt. Draft horses can also be crossed with Mammoth Jack donkeys to create draft mules, which are also used to pull plows for the Amish.

Mammoth Jack donkey:

Draft Mule:

There are a lot of draft breeds, some more common than others. Many of the common ones are easy to tell apart from the others, but they’re all large-boned and tall, except for the draft ponies, such as Halflingers and Norwegian Fjord horses.

The Belgian

There are two Belgian horses, one that’s popular in Europe and another that’s very common in the US.

This is the European-type “Brabant” Belgian, which tends to be very thick boned and roan in color.

This is the American-type Belgian, which is lighter-boned and always sorrel/palomino in color:

Here is a Brabant Belgian mare pulling some shit:

A lot of draft horses really do enjoy pulling stuff, as much as a horse CAN enjoy doing anything that’s not eating grass and farting. Horse pulls are a common sight in Middle America, often done using Belgian horses. Here’s one of a team pulling 9200 lbs. They pull for a very short period of time, often only a few seconds.

Next up is the Percheron, which has a similar body type to the Belgians but are always black or dapple. They can be slightly more spirited than Belgian horses, with some demonstrating high stepping action.

They are not to be confused with Friesians, who have much more “feathered” legs and feet (long hair around the lower legs) and are lighter-boned. Friesians also don’t come in dapple colors, like the horse at the top of this post.

Clydesdales

Clydesdales are recognizable because they are a) always bay colored and b) almost always have four white socks and a blaze on their faces. They also have much more feathering on their legs than Percherons or Belgians. Clydesdales are more common in parades and the like because they tend to be slightly lighter than Percheron and Belgians, and because of this, they’re more agile and “showy”. You probably would not want to plow with a Clydesdale. You could, but their feathering means their feet get dirty much easier than a Belgians might.

Shire Horse

Shires come in a variety of colors, usually black or bay, and they are probably the most “feathered” horses of the popular breeds. They’ve got lots of fur on their feet.

Gypsy Vanner Horses

Gypsy Vanner horses got their start pulling Roma wagons, but now they’re mostly used in fantasy photoshoots, and you can see why. They are beautiful horses, definitely not the type you’d want toiling in the muck. They are almost always paint colored, which distinguishes them from Shire horses.

These are the main, most popular and commonly seen full-sized draft breeds, at least in the US. However, there are also draft ponies, the most popular of which is the Halflinger, which resembles a shrunken Belgian horse. They are ALWAYS sorrel/palomino colored, but their frame can vary. Some Halflingers are lighter-boned and more suitable for riding. Others are thicker-boned and better for pulling.

The other unmistakable draft pony is the Norwegian Fjord, easily recognized by the black stripe in the center of its mane, like a reverse ice cream sandwich.

This can lead to some creative hair cuts

So there you go. That’s a somewhat comprehensive review of draft horse breeds. Here is a size comparison for funsies, with the average riding horse in the middle.