Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The same principal worked for low carb. It deletes a lot of junk. But somehow it became 22yo goons getting senior meds because all their meals were fatty red meats fried in lard.

poo poo Fuckasaurus posted:

No Carb Diet also gave my dad colon cancer (he followed it without breaks for 6 years, under the impression that's what Atkins is) so it's got lots of different bad outcomes you can do.

E: ugh it's been years since I got a snipe this bad, sorry

Zudgemud posted:

The real reason for it is that they would stop being dark skinned if they stuck around for long enough and stopped relying on organ meat in their diet. Because all the non white kids would die. But the latitude where it becomes really detrimental to have dark skin in terms of vitamin D deficiency is somewhere in the middle of Scandinavia if I recall correctly. However, dark skinned people are still able to survive there if they move further south during the dark winter months. And considering that they were evidently highly mobile from the archeological remains found, it makes sense for them to have lived there too.

Samovar posted:

Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-known killers of heads of state, but there are s number of other candidates and would-be's.

Alhazred posted:

Do you think that Norwegians with dark skin migrates to the south in the winter like loving birds?

Samovar posted:

Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-known killers of heads of state, but there are a number of other candidates and would-be's.

One of these who definitely deserves an A for effort, if not execution, was Giuseppe Marco Fieschi who, in 1835, attempted to assassinate Louise Phillipe I of France by gunshot.

However, what makes this attempt notable is the instrument used. Probably due to uncertainty to the accuracy of a single sniper with regards to the contemporary guns available (I would guess), Fieschi (and fellow.conspirators) decided to make a homemade gun - one that would make Tetsuya Yamagami say 'Jesus Christ, what the gently caress, dude'. For you see, he decided on making a volley gun that could fire off twenty five barrels in one go, later dubbed the 'infernal machine's.

So, the gun was set up to be used while the King was passing by on review, then let rip with barrage of up to 400 rounds in mere moments. Eighteen people died from the fusillade, with a further twenty plus severely injured... While the King himself suffered a minor graze.

Nessus posted:

I think the theory overlooks the prospect of dietary sources of vitamin D, which are certainly trivial now (I think they put it in milk?) and could well have been accomplished inadvertently in the past. I think the sources include cheese, eggs and fatty fish. These might have been much less reliable in prehistoric times, tho.

Like you might not be getting "as much as you need" but you might well get enough in the diet to prevent rickets.

Nessus posted:

I think the theory overlooks the prospect of dietary sources of vitamin D

Lobok posted:

I knew them Swedes were mutants!

Alhazred posted:

Do you think that Norwegians with dark skin migrates to the south in the winter like loving birds?

Lobok posted:

I knew them Swedes were mutants!

Philippe posted:

Some of us can shoot lasers out of our eyes, but we don't do it in company because it'd be uncouth.

Platystemon posted:

Imma let you finish, but Gavrilo Princip had one of the best assassinations of all time.

wikipedia posted:

The archduke's chamberlain, Baron Rumerskirch, proposed that the couple remain at the Town Hall until troops could be brought into the city to line the streets. Governor-General Oskar Potiorek vetoed this suggestion[82] on the grounds that soldiers coming straight from maneuvers would not have the dress uniforms appropriate for such duties. "Do you think that Sarajevo is full of assassins?" he concluded.[82]

Platystemon posted:

You also have to be in sunlight near noon, specifically.

Going on a topless walk in the evening gets you very little vitamin D, because the UV rays that are necessary for its formation are very strongly attenuated when the sun is low in the sky. Within thirty degrees of the horizon, it’s a fraction of a percent.

Nessus posted:

I think the theory overlooks the prospect of dietary sources of vitamin D, which are certainly trivial now (I think they put it in milk?) and could well have been accomplished inadvertently in the past. I think the sources include cheese, eggs and fatty fish. These might have been much less reliable in prehistoric times, tho.

Like you might not be getting "as much as you need" but you might well get enough in the diet to prevent rickets.

Discendo Vox posted:

I'll try to keep this all in one post, because while it's cool, it's really off-topic.

First a tiny bit of background. Margarine is a butter substitute invented in France in the 1870s. Originally derived primarily from beef tallow, margarine is now mostly made from vegetable oils. It's one of the earliest, biggest victories of food science manufacturing. Incredibly cheap to produce, modern margarine has no negative health effects (so long as it doesn't use trans fats), and has pretty much always been healthier than butter. Margarine can also be kosher (though I don't really know anything about that area- something to do with mixing meat and dairy?).

When margarine came to the states in the 1870s, it was viewed as a huge threat to the dairy industry. Dairy producers were right to be afraid; margarine was available much cheaper than butter, and in a void, likely would have largely cornered the market. The dairy industry took an all-out approach to manipulating public opinion of margarine - and bear in mind that the information ecosystem of the time makes today look positively healthy. State legislatures were bribed to ban margarine. Scientific reports were falsified to show that margarine caused...basically every serious negative health effect. Rumors were spread about the margarine manufacturing process involving dead cats, rubber, and other unsavory
substances. The federal government put massive taxes on margarine. Public figures gave live, barn-burning speeches about the threat of margarine to the American Way of Life. At every level, Americans were targets of a tide of misinformation about what they ate.

Here are some choice quotes from this NatGeo article:

Governor Lucius Hubbard of Minnesota bemoaned the fact that “the ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and its kindred abominations.” Senator Joseph Quarles of Wisconsin (the Dairy State) thundered that butter should come from the dairy, not the slaughterhouse. “I want butter that has the natural aroma of life and health. I decline to accept as a substitute caul fat, matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.”

Another legislative maneuver by Big Butter was coloration. Butter is normally a very pale yellow; it's dyed to look the way it does. Margarine looks even paler, but it's difficult to tell the difference, especially if it's also dyed yellow. Butter manufacturers came up with a great response: get state legislatures to require that it be dyed unappealing colors, like pink (which was used to imply there was blood in it- anti-margarine messaging tried to tie margarine to blood, death and decay). Some 30-odd states required pink margarine, and left the laws on the books when the Supreme Court overturned them in 1898.

Margarine was aggressively depicted as simultaneously, artificial, unnatural, unhealthy, foreign, unamerican, unpatriotic, and (in particular) a cheap product used by the lower classes. Even before the great depression, financial turbulence and class inequality meant butter was effectively a luxury good subject to shortages, and like any luxury good, organized crime became involved in controlling the supply. They would also manufacture fraudulent butter, sometimes by dying margarine (people do genuinely have trouble telling the difference). That's where that comic comes from! People were drowning in these messages, even in comic books.

Fake butter was the source of another big, big change in how food was regulated in the US. See, the dyes used in butter? The fake butter? Yeah, that stuff wasn't exactly harmless. At the time adulterants used to change food color and texture weren't regulated, and companies (and criminals) had a strong incentive to just use whatever made something look good on the shelf. This was an issue in many areas, with butter (and "butter") being a prominent one. A lot of people were getting sick or dying because the "margarine war", alongside other trade conflicts and the endless tide of harmful "patent medicines" and other quack remedies. In response, in 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA! The FDA regulated food, drugs, and other product categories. In particular, they set purity requirements for food (there's now an upper limit on how much rat poop can be in your flour) and require that all food ingredients be listed and certified by the government to be "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS). That means no more sawdust in your oatmeal . I am, to put it mildly, an FDA fan.

Something to emphasize about all of this is that the harmful, undesirable, unclean nature of the "artificial, chemical" margarine wasn't just something that the average American assumed. Messages about how bad it was were absolutely everywhere, like the air people breathed. People just...bought into it, and it became a part of culture. It may seem ironic now with our purple artificial berry flavor cheese spread, but margarine was an alien, foreign thing that people didn't grok- a weird artificial creation that was surely, surely harmful. You'd read somewhere it was bad, your friends thought it was bad...why doubt it?

This hasn't changed. Right now, trade groups, companies and lobbyists are still putting out wave after wave of bullshit chemophobic beliefs about food. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, who do great work in other areas, are militantly opposed to the existence of food dyes. The FDA is chronically underfunded and its regulatory power has been limited by industrial interests. Rumors and (industry-funded) studies about non-caloric sweeteners and corn syrup and salt abound. There is now a massive marketing drive for "clean", "natural", "honest" food with "fewer, easy-to-read" ingredients (that cost more to produce and decay faster, but can be priced much higher). Green labels and cert marks and health claims are everywhere. "Organic" means everything and nothing.

Industry does this because it works, and it works on us. Pink Himalayan Sea Salt is a thing people actually purchase. Soylent exists. The Food Babe is real, and she has made more money than you ever will. Large numbers of people believe sugar is an addictive toxin, and that carbohydrates are the root of all cancer.

We are not materially smarter than the people of the 1870s. While the media may have changed, the quality of information isn't much better- and there's a hell of a lot more of it. We're still targets, and the tide continues to rise.

A couple sources I used to fortify and color my knowledge for this post:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/margarine-used-to-be-pink-and-more-colorful-tales-from-the-food-dye-industry
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0807.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1870s-dairy-lobby-turned-margarine-pink-so-people-would-buy-butter-180963328/

PS: I don't know whether or not there was an antisemitic element to the crossover between kosher margarine use and the use of blood imagery in anti-margarine messaging. While I wouldn't put it past the people involved, I don't know that kosher formulations of margarine were in use at the time.

PPS: about 1110 words. Right on target.

teen witch posted:

Not really a fun fact but I learned last night that women gained the right to vote at a federal level in Switzerland in 1971, with the last holdout on a canton-level until 1991.

Reminds me of the fact that the ADA was signed into law in 1990. Or the whole bonkers state-level recognition of MLK Day going into the 2000s.

teen witch posted:

Not really a fun fact but I learned last night that women gained the right to vote at a federal level in Switzerland in 1971, with the last holdout on a canton-level until 1991.

Reminds me of the fact that the ADA was signed into law in 1990. Or the whole bonkers state-level recognition of MLK Day going into the 2000s.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

NoiseAnnoys posted:

phoenix wright rear end lookin archduke franz ferdinand motherfucker.

Pookah posted:

And that last canton never actually voted to give women the right to vote, they were forced to by the Swiss supreme court.

wikipedia posted:

In 1991, following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, Appenzell Innerrhoden became the last Swiss canton to grant women the vote on local issues. It also was the canton with the strongest support (71%) for the minaret ban in the 2009 Swiss minaret referendum and the lowest support (51%) in the 2021 Swiss same-sex marriage referendum.

wikipedia posted:

Somewhat before the early 2000s, the idyllic countryside of Appenzell Innerrhoden apparently became popular with nudists, and at the 2009 Landsgemeinde the canton's residents voted to prohibit naked hiking. Violators would be fined. However nudists who appealed against their fines to the federal court have been reimbursed by the local authorities, as nudism is not a crime under Swiss federal law which takes precedence.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

poo poo I thought Québec granting women (not asian or indigenous) the right to vote till 1940 was bad

teen witch posted:

81 percent Roman Catholic population? You don’t say.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

That's meant to be Kaiser Wilhelm (although he looks more like Hitler than Hitler himself does). Franz Ferdinand is the tiny figure in the car.

teen witch posted:

Appenzell Innerrhoden

Samovar posted:

The Swiss are 81% Catholic?! I thought they were all psycho Calvinists?

Alhazred posted:

I think the theory overlooks that there's no mass death of people with dark skin in Northern Europe every winter.

Samovar posted:

The Swiss are 81% Catholic?! I thought they were all psycho Calvinists?

Zudgemud posted:

. Germany is historically the place for Protestant/Catholic bordergore,