A woman complaining about her hips not being wide enough to touch a handsome man passing by.

From the Gāhā Sattasaī (c. 1st–3rd century CE), a collection of Prakrit poetry traditionally attributed to King Hāla.

Context: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/supercharged-ges-aviation-business-rose-ashes-world-war

Last weekend, the world remembered 100 years since the end of World War I, a conflict that changed the map of Europe and left an estimated 17 million people dead. But amid its devastation and disruption, the war also accelerated the rise of new industries like aviation.

The war was the first large military conflict that involved planes. In November 1917 — seven months after the U.S. entered the war alongside the U.K., France and Russia — GE President E.W. Rice received a note from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA. The U.S. government wanted to develop its own version of a turbosupercharger, a mechanical device designed to fill the cylinders of a piston engine with more air than it would typically ingest, and boost the performance of warplanes powered by the Liberty aircraft engine, which was central to America’s air combat effort.

The Liberty engine was rated 350 horsepower at sea level. But the problem was that its output dropped by half when it started sucking in thinner air at high altitudes, just like a climber struggling to catch their breath on a mountain peak. As a result, the planes equipped with the engine flew slower and were less nimble above 15,000 feet.

The military believed that supercharging the engine could fix the problem. Swiss engineer Alfred Buchi patented the turbosupercharger in 1910, but the device failed during flight testing in France. Although GE was at the time primarily focused on building turbines and other equipment for power plants, the government hoped to enlist the company’s help in developing the device for use by the American military. The task to lead the secret project fell to a GE gas turbine engineer named Sanford Moss.

Moss built a turbosupercharger that used the hot exhaust coming from the aircraft engine to spin a radial turbine of his design and squeeze the air entering the engine, making it as dense as air close to the ground and helping the plane recover its lost power.

In 1918, when he tested the device at 14,000 feet on top of Pikes Peak in Colorado, the engine delivered 352 horsepower, performing as it would close to the ground. This was also the moment GE entered the aviation business.

The first plane powered by a turbosupercharged Liberty engine was a Le Pere biplane. It took off for the first time on July 12, 1919, and later scored a record of reaching 137 mph at 18,400 feet, compared with 90 mph without a supercharger. Planes equipped with Moss’ design went on to set several world altitude records.

But WWI wasn’t the last time Moss’ engineering prowess helped fight the enemy. In 1937, as Hitler’s power was growing, GE received a large order from the Army Air Corps to build turbosuperchargers for Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 bombers, P-38 fighter planes, Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and other planes. GE opened a dedicated supercharger department in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1939, Moss even proposed to build one of the first turboprop engines. In 1976, he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

GE’s aviation business was just getting started. In 1941, the U.S. government asked GE to bring into production one of the first jet engines, developed in England by Sir Frank Whittle. (He was knighted for his feat.) A group of GE engineers called the Hush-Hush Boys designed new parts for the engine, redesigned others, tested the engine and delivered a top-secret working prototype called I-A. On Oct. 1, 1942, the first American jet plane, the Bell XP-59A, took off from Lake Muroc in California for a short flight. The jet age in the U.S. had begun.

technically neither is truly 'goth'. The subculture evolved from Gothic rock, which itself can take a part of its orgin to Gothic horror, of whom the name gothic comes from gothic architetcure heavily emphasised in gothic fiction, of which gothic architecture got its name from Italians blaming barbarians, a.k.a. the true goths who lived centuries earlier by the time, for the percivied 'disorder' in the style, a.k.a. a fashion style characterized by over-the-top monochromatic makeup, large suits/dresses, and an altogether very distinct asthetic now known as trad goth, short for traditional gothic. Mallgoth is, to explain it in the simplest fashion, a toned-down and more commerial version of trad goth, which is what the characters are depicted as since you can tel by the lack of heavy makeup other than lipstick and the spiked collar, a staple in mallgoth. On the bottom panel, the characters shown are visigoths, an offshoot of the goths, a germanic and eastern european tribe who was around in the latter part of the Roman empire, say A.D. 100, but split into the visigoths around Anno Domini 245, visigoths also took a large part in the fall of western rome and the introduction of the medieval dark ages. They also wore heavy steel armour and helmets compared to their earlier gothic forefathers, which you can clearly see in the panel above. So in short, the top 'goths' is a capitalist bastardization of the gothic rock/punk DIY subculture, and the bottom is an untrue offshoot of goths, who also plunged humanity into one of its darkest ages. Thusly it is the fault of the king and H.T. manager to not emphasize their wish to procure workers of a mallgoth or visigoth style, and the fact that they didn't even differentiate between the original gothic tribes or the 70s punk-rooted subculture. Shame on everybody involved.

During the Korean War, Canadian soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, alongside Australian and other UN forces, helped repel a major Chinese offensive into South Korea during the Battle of Kapyong. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Canadians held Hill 677 against repeated assaults by the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, even calling artillery fire dangerously close to their own positions to avoid being overrun. Their defence helped halt the Chinese advance and earned the battalion a United States Presidential Unit Citation.

*The message known as the Göring telegram was sent by Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler's designated successor as leader of Nazi Germany, to Hitler that asked for permission to assume leadership of the crumbling regime on 23 April 1945. The telegram caused an infuriated Hitler to immediately strip Göring of power and to appoint new successors, Joseph Goebbels and Karl Dönitz, as chancellor and head of state), respectively.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göring_telegram

Context: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5432783/

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious, infectious disease, due to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MT), which usually lasts throughout the life course and determines the formation of tubercles in different parts of the body [1]. MT has very ancient origins: it has survived over 70,000 years and it currently infects nearly 2 billion people worldwide [2]; with around 10.4 million new cases of TB each year, almost one third of the world's population are carriers of the TB bacillus and are at risk for developing active disease [3].

TB has always been associated with a high mortality rate over the centuries, and also nowadays, it is estimated to be responsible for 1.4 million TB deaths, among infectious diseases after human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) [3].

Due to its infectious nature, complex immunological response, chronic progression and the need for long-term treatment, TB has always been a major health burden; in more recent years, the appearance of multi-drug resistant forms and the current TB-HIV epidemic, associated with its severe social implications, treating and preventing TB have represented a permanent challenge over the course of human history [4, 5].

It has been hypothesized that the genus Mycobacterium originated more than 150 million years ago. Mycobacterium ulcerans, causing infections since ancient times, requires specific environmental conditions as reflected nowadays in its distribution worldwide [6].

Three million years ago, an early progenitor of MT might have infected early hominids in East Africa [7] and 20.000-15.000 years ago, for the first time, the common ancestor of modern strains of MT might have appeared [8, 9].

Egyptian mummies, dating back to 2400 BC, reveal skeletal deformities typical of tuberculosis; characteristic Pott's lesions are reported and similar abnormalities are clearly illustrated in early Egyptian art [10, 11].

Nevertheless, no evidence about TB lesions is reported in Egyptian papyri. The first written documents describing TB, dating back to 3300 and 2300 years ago, were found in India and in China respectively [12, 13].

Other written documents connected to TB are related to the Hebraism. The ancient Hebrew word schachepheth is used in the Biblical books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus in order to describe TB [14]; in the same period, in the Andean region, archeological evidence of early TB, including Pott's deformities, was provided by Peruvian mummies, suggesting that the disease was present even before the colonization of the first European pioneers in South America [15-18].

In the Ancient Greece TB was well known and called Phtisis. Hippocrates described Phtisis as a fatal disease especially for young adults, accurately defining its symptoms and the characteristic tubercular lung lesions.

Excellent discoveries of the early scientists who studied TB were made in the same period: in Greece, Isocrates was the first author supposing that TB was an infectious disease, while Aristotle suggested the contagious nature of "king's evil" in pigs and oxes [19].

In Roman times, TB is mentioned by Celso, Aretaeus of Cappadocia and Caelius Aurelianus, but it is not recognized as sharing the same etiology of extrapulmonary manifestations such as scrofula, Pott's disease and TB lupus.

According to the Greek Clarissimus Galen, who became personal physician of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 174 AD, the symptoms of TB include fever, sweating, coughing and blood stained sputum; he recommended fresh air, milk and sea voyages as successful treatments for the disease [20-22].

After the decline of the Roman Empire, TB was widespread in Europe in the VIII and XIX centuries, as witnessed by several archaeological findings [23].

The Byzantine doctors Aetius of Amida, Alexander of Tralles and Paul of Aegina described the pulmonary and glandular forms of TB [24], while in the Arabic Empire, Avicenna supposed the contagious nature of TB.

CONTEXT: Prior to Operation Barbarossa, Hitler and Stalin made serious overtures to one another for the Soviet Union to carve out spheres of influence between Germany, Japan, Italy and the USSR. In November 1940, Nazi Germany presented the USSR a proposal to join the Axis pending several conditions after a highly-public conference between Molotov and Ribbentopp in Germany to negotiate these terms

Stalin substantively accepted the proposal but provided a counter-proposal seeking additional conditions, among them including USSR spheres of influence in Azebaijan and Turkey. While Stalin did not envision the USSR actively joining the Axis in war operations, part of the agreement was for the USSR to stay out of the war.

However, by December 1940, Hitler had approved plans for Operation Barbarossa and did not respond to the USSR proposal; unlike the USSR, Germany did not seriously entertain the idea of peaceful co-existance with the USSR and launched Operation Barbarossa in summer 2941.

The substance of the negotiations were covered up after the war to the point that Stalin went lengths to edit and re-write "Falsifiers of History," a propaganda piece framing instead any pretense of collaboration with Hitler as just "testing" the nazis.

In historian Jon Lucaks 2006 book "Hitler and Stalin," Lucaks quotes Stalin's daughter saying that she remembers her father saying after the war: "Together with the Germans we would have been invincible".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Axis_talks

this is making fun of stupidity this is not a genuine endorsement of stalin

also this is mostly designed to make fun more of history discourse around ukraine in the ussr than the events themself

this is making fun of the arguments listed because they are dumb

With the Cold War coming to an end Swedish frozen foods company Dafgårds introduced the cheekily named "Gorbys" frozen pirogi and "Billys" frozen pan pizza in the early-to-mid 90s to capitalise on the "peace fever" felt at the time, but in spite of the superpowers becoming friendlier irl the company marketed their frozen fast foods as if they were bitter rival factions in a civil war.

(I much prefer Billys Original to any other flavour or Gorbys, as does 70+ percent of Swedes going off the marketing game "Billys vs Gorbys". P.S the large-format Billys sucks, do not buy it - buy a Tony's)

Sorry if the post does not fit the sub but this came to mind with recent events in One Day International (ODI) cricket. It is the 12^th of March 2006 at Wanderers, Johannesburg. The two teams are Australia, who were in 2006 the ODI world champions. Facing them are the South African men's cricket team, the Proteas. Australia win the toss and elect to bat first. They set a world record ODI score of 434 after 50 overs (300 legal balls). At the time, the highest ever chase from a team batting 2^nd happened the year prior with New Zealand chasing down 332 runs against Australia. Australia have beaten the world record run total (at the time 393) and set what seems to be a near impossible score to beat. Then comes the chase. The Proteas manage to chase down the Australian score in 299 balls ending with a run total of 438. It is considered one of, if not the greatest game of ODI cricket in history. To put into perspective of the magnitude of the chase, there have been only three times in ODI international cricket that a run total of 400+ have been chased down. Two of these games have happened in the last 30 days (India vs West Indies with India chasing 403 runs on the 30^th September 2026 and Sri Lanka vs England with Sri Lanka chasing 430 runs on the 22^nd October 2026). The Australian score of 434 remains the highest ever ODI score to be successfully chased down.

Context: The 2 primary European advisors to King Kamehameha I during his War of Unification were John Young and Isaac Davis.

They came into his service after being captured by the Kings forces after some incidents involving the ships they were on (ship John Young was on massacred natives and the one Davis was on the natives took their vengeance.

When brought before the King, they were offered a choice: Train his army in European weapons and strategy, and receive lands, wives, and high status, or be sacrificed to the Hawaiian Gods. They both chose the former