"You have nothing to lose but your sandboxes!"

Didn't know about this bit of history:

veteran U.S. activist S. Brian Willson, who lost both legs in 1987 after being run over by a Navy ammunition train while protesting the shipment of arms to the Contras, and whom the Ronald Reagan administration once labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

2 years before "tank man", is so fucking propagandized

Jules Reidy makes song cycles which abstractly deal with devotional love, transcendence, and death of the self. They use materials such as guitars, voice, percussion and found sounds, deconstructing and augmenting them through non-standard tuning systems, polyrhythmic structures, electronic processing and spatialisation. They aim to express and invoke states of uncanniness, dissociation, dys/euphoria, imagination, and void.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sheik

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=chic%2C+sheik&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

e: found some more solid evidence of the 20s crossover

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a10095/the-history-of-chic/

1925: During the height of the jazz age in America, being chic was all the rage in fashion circles. Anita Loos's novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (originally published as a series of essays in Harper's BAZAAR) follows blonde Lorelei Lee as she documents her life, diary-style, with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes retained. She writes, "the French use the word 'sheik' for everything, while we only seem to use it for gentlemen when they seem to resemble Rudolf Valentino." (Rudolf Valentino was an Italian-American actor who appeared in the film The Sheik.)

https://thefashionandstyleofthetwenties.weebly.com/flappers-and-sheiks.html

Sheiks were the fashionable young men. They wore suits, fedoras, and large raccoon coats. Their hair was slicked back and their ties were fun and trendy. At first though that wasn't quite true. In the early twenties, suits became more fitted, especially around the waist and many men wore knickers. Knickers were short pants that were gathered at the knee. As time passed however, suits eventually became sleeker and more fashionable into what is seen in the picture to the left. Now they were ready to go dancing with a few flappers.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/13/uss-abraham-lincoln-deaths-brawl/

According to U.S. Central Command, however, "These reports are false."

"As we have continuously seen, Iran continues to spread lies and false information," Emma Thompson, Central Command spokesperson, said in an email to Snopes.

We have not rated this claim because we don't have additional details about this rumor. Iranian media included very little concrete information, including the date of the alleged incident, making it more difficult to independently disprove the claim.

Still, there's no evidence that Central Command's statement is incorrect. Given reported communication between those aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and their families — and heightened media scrutiny — it seems unlikely that the military could hide the deaths of seven service members due to a knife brawl.

I wasn't expecting much from SNW final season, but this episode just does some stuff that seemed very uncharacteristic for Star Trek in my recollection (I've not watch TOS, so maybe there's something similar in there). Anyone else seen it and had weird vibes about it?

Trying to avoid spoilers, but will probably get into spoilers in the comments if anyone else has seen it too. About to restart/watch DS9 with my partner (trying to get them into it), so I might not reply for a bit).

sometimes the world of sports and world events just align in such a way that's almost surreal

So there's been some talk about China's massive decrease in oil imports starting in March. There was no official explanation offered by them, but estimates have been made that China has strategic reserves that could last at least 1 year, more than all other strategic reserves combined. Various theories have been floated about why they decided to do this. The most plausible one being that global economic disruption is not in their interests currently due to how much their economy is interconnected with global consumption of their goods.

There's some other implications from this move, but I think one that hasn't been discussed in any of the analysis I've seen is that China is strategically walking the capitalist world up to a oil energy cliff. By making this move without any fanfare, it has allowed capitalist markets to remain irrational and willingly oblivious to the approaching depletion of oil reserves. This baiting of capital markets is an interesting concept to consider. China remains the steady hand of the global markets over time while steepening the shock curve for their only "viable" economic rivals.

This is a pragmatic short-term play with an eventual snapback that accelerates their indispensable qualities across many sectors. If the US calmly walks off the cliff (as seems to be exceedingly likely by each day that passes), this can neutralize not only their economic power but also their military ability to function.

There's a lot of different angles that can be considered beyond this one, but I thought this was an interesting perspective to consider. What do my fellow hexbears think?