Bedankt, Rutte...

So there's three things going on:

1. Rutte's broken English means he didn't understand the nuances of "daddy" versus "papa" in Dutch, which doesn't carry the submissive undertones as much as the former.
2. In the Netherlands he's known for his very casual and informal personality ("he's the world leader that cycles to work!"). Dutch business culture is more relaxed, so here it works, but internationally it doesn't.
3. He's always been like this much of a bootlicker with Trump, even back during his first term. He really wants to be on good terms with the United States, so when Trump is in charge he always kisses the ring.

A few years ago, I learned that the official typeface used by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is called "Bandera".

Further confirmation that JDPON Don is a Maoist :sparrows: /s

I'm ace and while I do look at horny images from time to time, full-on pornography or sexually explicit talk still grosses me out, I sometimes feel prudish or childish about that as a result.

I feel in a weird place when all this talk is made about normalising sex while being sex-negative, I don't want to push my preferences on all of society, y'know?

Whenever I personally referenced the "volcel poIice" meme it was intended to be lighthearted, a friendly reminder that it got weird in a way that could give a chuckle.

I remember when the family separation/kids in cages story blew up during the first Trump administration, a woman defended her description of the detention centers as concentration camps by saying:

"Do we have to wait for an actual Holocaust to happen before we speak up?"

That stuck with me.

Bismuth-209 was long thought to have the heaviest stable nucleus of any element, but in 2003, a research team at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, discovered that 209Bi undergoes alpha decay with a half-life of 20.1 exayears (2.01×1019, or 20.1 quintillion years), over 109 times longer than the estimated age of the universe.

Due to its hugely long half-life, for all known medical and industrial applications, bismuth can be treated as stable.

The Mandarin-language videos are modeled on a series of videos the agency made in recent years asking Russians to spy for the United States, appeals that previous C.I.A. leaders said helped develop new sources.

Sure...

Last year the C.I.A. released instructions in Mandarin [on Youtube] about how people in China could safely use the dark web to contact the agency. The text-only instructional video was viewed 900,000 times. While the Chinese internet is locked down and censored, American officials believe that more sophisticated Chinese officials know how to work around those controls.

Aren't VPNs very common in China?

Here is how NYT described the videos:

Previous minimum price deals agreed by the EU have been for homogenous commodities, rather than complex products such as cars. The Commission has said it believes a single minimum price would not be adequate to counter injury caused by subsidies.

"Injury caused by subsidies" lmao

From what I can tell a lot of Israelis are anxious about having a "Jewish nose", so combine that with general social media toxicity and the bougie, superficial nature of Israeli society and you get a relatively high number of "nose jobs", though plastic surgery in general is prevalent too.

So they kind of become a representative of the superficial and toxic nature of Israeli society and its defeatist, ass-backwards approach to antisemitism.

As a history fact, Iranian Azerbaijan (which includes the provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan and Ardebil, sometimes Zanjan province is also included for being majority Azeri) is the OG Azerbaijan, with the modern country of Azerbaijan having historically referred to by other names:

The name Azerbaijan was first adopted for the area of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan by the government of Musavat in 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, when the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was established. Until then, the designation had been used exclusively to identify the adjacent region of contemporary northwestern Iran, while the area of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was formerly referred to as Arran and Shirvan. On that basis Iran protested the newly adopted country name.