moist turtleneck posted:

Eat This Glob posted:

https://x.com/RichardDawkins/status/336048706853937152

moist turtleneck posted:

www.newyorker.com - Fri, 19 Jun 2020 posted:

Fiona was self-deprecating, awkward, and intelligent. The girls attended Bishop Barrington, a local school in a rough neighborhood. Angela, now an English teacher in Madrid, said that in school Fiona was bullied, sometimes physically: people called her “posh—even though she wasn’t posh—because she had different aspirations.” In 1983, Fiona’s final year of secondary school, she was chosen as head girl, and her teachers encouraged her to apply to Oxford. Interviewing at Hertford College, wearing an outfit her mother had made, she noticed the other girls in the waiting room whispering about her. One of them tripped her as she stood up and she fell into a doorframe. Hill recalled, “So I’m going into the interview while holding my nose, which is bleeding.” The professor conducting the interview told Hill that she would not be able to take Russian at Hertford, because she had not studied it in secondary school. He suggested that she apply instead to St. Andrews, in Scotland. Hill followed the advice and was admitted. In the summer before she began, she took a job as a cleaner at the hospital where her father worked. One day, a macerator—a machine that blended human waste and disposable bedpans—exploded. Some of her friends’ mothers worked at the hospital, too. Hill told me, “They were all, like, ‘You’re at university, eh? You too posh now to get poo poo off walls?’ And I was, like, ‘No. I can go do that.’ ”

At the end of her third year of university, Hill won a British government fellowship to study at the Maurice Thorez Institute, a language school in Moscow, before returning to St. Andrews. It was an era of shortages, and the general gloom in Moscow reminded her of the atmosphere in Roddymoor, the former coal-mining town where her grandparents had lived. Toward the end of her year abroad, Hill got a job as an assistant for NBC in Moscow, during Ronald Reagan’s historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. There, she met the political scientist Robert Legvold, who suggested that she study in the United States. The following year, Hill applied for a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard, to pursue her interest in U.S.-Soviet relations. At her interview, the judges had trouble understanding her accent, and, as she was leaving, she opened a door and stepped into a closet. She didn’t get the scholarship. A few weeks later, she interviewed for and was awarded a Frank Knox fellowship, and in the fall of 1989 she enrolled in a master’s program in Soviet studies at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Soon, she met a Soviet-studies student from Chicago named Kenneth Keen. They became friends and struck up a romance.

In the summer of 1991, Hill took a part-time job as a Russian translator at Graham Allison’s Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, which aimed to transform the Soviet Union, and, later, Russia, into a Western-style democracy. “We were trying to do something bold,” Allison told me. “Maybe, if you were criticizing it, you’d say romantic.” Hill arrived for her interview wearing a pair of ripped jeans and Doc Martens boots. Allison said, “Fiona was certainly, at best, a diamond in the rough, and there was a lot of rough. And her accent—it was like listening to one of those BBC radio shows where the people were speaking Scottish and you couldn’t figure out what the hell they were talking about.”

Milo and POTUS posted:

Christ Hitchens

zetamind2000 posted:

mitt romney quietly singing who let the dogs out when he was around black people at a campaign event

ben shapino posted:

Piss Christ

moist turtleneck posted:

Julian Castro got admonished for pointing out Biden was old, a thing that the Hillary camp did to Bernie in 2016 but that was OK

Bro Dad posted:

moist turtleneck posted:

raisin kane posted:

it’s the only way my wife can eat fajitas

HashtagGirlboss posted:

Your wife can’t eat fajitas without overcooked salmon and canned mixed veggies?

moist turtleneck posted:

god that picture is so drat good

the same people think they would be able to survive a red dawn event

moist turtleneck posted:

god that picture is so drat good

the same people think they would be able to survive a red dawn event

Milo and POTUS posted:

That's loving salmon?!

Milo and POTUS posted:

That's loving salmon?!

Xi gotta take the upper midwest first, then he can bargain for red state loyalty with cheese stipends

the milk machine posted:

hillary starting the obama birth certificate truthering

Eat This Glob posted:

first drop special forces into missouri to secure the 1.5 billion pounds of cheese the u.s. has in its reserve then strike northeast to wisconsin to capture the dairy fields with an occupying army.

with a firm grasp on the mississippi and great lakes waterways and the capitalist dogs' cheesy treats, victory will be assured

uber_stoat posted:

"native garb"

moist turtleneck posted:

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Oddly decent portion of veg on that plate.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

obama smokg crack and having gay sex

dr_rat posted:

Bland as hell, but yeah just heath wise not too bad.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

Swap the other piece of fish (is it fish?) for two potatoes, and half the veg for fresh, and it would please any nutritionist.