I think the reasoning is that since Jews lacked foreskins but their neighbors the philistines had them, bringing the foreskins showed that it was not Jews you went out to kill. It's like if you wanted someone to kill 100 rattler snakes and as proof you bring 100 rattlers as that's their distinctive body part.

No that's not it at all. The proposal is to keep the same process but allow pesticides to be approved indefinitely until a law is passed banning it. Currently a pesticide is approved for a certain time and after that time the approval expires and the substance has to be proved to be safe and reevaluated once again. For most pesticides this period is around 3-5 years. What this means is that every 5 years or so every pesticide has to go through this enormous and very costly bureaucratic process once again. Some more niche pesticides have lost their approval because the cost of going through the process once again is larger than the pesticide is paying out in sales. This system also leads to some weird situations because every pesticide bottle has a date on it. What happens is that even when the pesticide is reapproved the old bottles are still made illegal once the date runs out. If a farmer has old bottles at home with the old date on it he has to order new labels for them. I know this process very well because I send out these new labels all the time.

Some however would say that this constant process of revaluation of every single pesticide 1-2 times every decade is good as the reevaluation can account for any new science that has come out but the fact is that it's also extremely expensive and limits what can cost effectively be put on the market, especially for niche crops. No one wants to release a quinoa specific pesticide for example because the cost of reapplying every 3-5 years (common time interval for niche pesticides) is too high compared to the amount of quinoa grown in the EU. Another example is triticale which is a very productive grain but in my own country it has very low adoption because no pesticides are approved for it and no one wants to release pesticides for it because the land area grown for triticale is today too low. Chicken and egg situation.

However I'm extremely biased here because I'm so damn sick of sending out new labels all the time.

Indeed. Many of the cases reported on in media are extreme. For example that woman who sued because glyphosate caused her to have a miscarriage. She dropped a whole container of roundup all over her body. That's an extremely different case than the parts per billion found in food at the grocery store. I like to compare it to household bleach. The one handling the bleach has to be very careful because it's dangerous in its raw form. But no one should have to be afraid of wearing clothes washed in bleach the correct way.

Many of the animal studies on glyphosate put either large amounts of it in their food or as one study did, literally sprayed it on the rats faces once per day. The only conclusion that can be drawn by that is that the one spraying it has to take caution not to spray it on themselves.

Why didn't god just smite only the people he thought were fucked up?

In the story sin was so widespread that Noah and his family were basically the only ones left that were free from sin. And if you see sin as a cancer spreading and rapidly taking over, it's easier to euthanize and begin anew. One could imagine that if the world was allowed to keep going then sin would only get worse and humanity would just keep getting more and more depraved and miserable. Now god as an omnipotent being should have been able to predict all of this, which is a giant plot hole in the story. But despite that I don't think it's too unreasonable. It's like if you built a rabbit house but it turns out all the rabbits (except a couple) get rabies and all start biting each other. Better to euthanize everyone and start over.

Why did he basically do the same shit twice (the first time being saving Lot's family and destroying Soddam and Gomorrah)?

Well there it was extremely clear that Sodom and Gomorrah did not have a single non sinner left. That's kind of the main plot point in that story. Abraham tries to save the cities by negotiating with god that if he finds just 50 righteous people god won't destroy the cities. This is negotiated down and down until god promises that he will save the cities if just 10 righteous persons are found. Abraham finds no one except for Lots family hence the cities are destroyed, after Lot and his family were rescued.

American Christians are insane. All the churches where I live (Sweden) are pro immigration and were a huge help during the 2015 immigration crisis. They point to the parable of the good Samaritan where Jesus meets a Samaritan who is not just a foreigner, he believes in a blasphemous religion to boot. But nevertheless Jesus helps him. If Jesus helped a foreigner of a rivalling religion then why shouldn't the modern day church help muslim syrians.

The scientific definition of a berry is a fleshy fruit that came from a single ovary in the flower. Thats it. I don't even know why they used the name berry on this term because it makes no sense and I tell you this as someone studying botany. Like none of the nuts you know are true nuts either. If a nuts shell opens on its own it's not a nut so peanuts, walnuts and almonds are not nuts because if you plant these in fresh soil they will sprout and the shell opens. However if you plant a fresh hazelnut the shell stays on while the plant germinates from the seed, hence it's a true nut. So stupid I know. This has use in botany but these botanical definitions have no use for normal people. That's why we talk about "botanical definitions" and "culinary definitions". In the common culinary definition a berry is a small freshy fruit which is the definition you know.

Bonus: in botany everything from a flower is a fruit. That means wheat is a fruit, rice is a fruit, beans are fruits, peas are fruits, all nuts are fruits, every seed is a fruit, a pine cone is a fruit, and it just goes on. But no one in their right mind would make a fruit asket with pine cones right? The botanical definition is useless outside the field of botany.

Modern native European genetics can be roughly said to derive from 3 main sources. One is western Hunter gatherer (WHG). These were not the first people in Europe but were the first to populate Europe after the latest ice age ended. By analysing their genome we think they were dark skinned, black haired and had blue eyes. The light skin adaptation didn't actually develop in Europe but in the middle east. Here is where the second group comes from.

Early European Farmer (EEF) originally came from Anatolia and were the ones spreading farming around Europe. Interestingly the spread of farming was not spread by knowledge transfer but by the migration and expansion of EEFs. The EEFs and the WHGs would coexist for hundreds of years with little admixture, living completely different lifestyles. The early European farmers, whose genetics derive from Neolithic Anatolia, were light skinned, brown eyed and relatively short. Modern groups with the most genetic similarity to EEFs are modern day Sicilians so you can imagine that. Overtime the EEFs and the WHGs would eventually mix however.

The third group are the yamnaya, also called steppe Ancestry. The yamnaya were a people group in modern day Romania and Ukraine who just so happened to invent the concept of riding a horse and after they did so they steamrolled about all of Europe in aggressive conquest. The Indo European languages derived from them and their expansion vastly changed the genetics of the continent. And all Europeans derive at least part of their genetics from them, of course in different amounts depending on the region. They were believed to be quite tall and have blond hair and are the "Aryans" that the Nazis talked about.

All modern Europeans are a mixture of these 3 groups, in different proportions. So returning to the pictures in the OP it makes sense for the cheddar man would be dark skinned as he would be 100% WHG as he lives way before any of these groups moved in. This does not mean however that the guy on the right is not a direct ancestor, he very well may be. But since he is also a result of the later migrants, the EEFs and the Indo European expansion, he will of course look vastly different.

It sounds highly implausible that Argentina would export horse meat as beef to the US. Argentina is a huge beef producer and while they do produce some horse meat it's exported to the EU where there is an actual demand for horse meat and there it's labeled correctly as horse. Why would they export it to the US as mislabeled beef? I have a hard time believing this without evidence. Have I missed something or is this just an unsubstantiated rumour?

Edit: Apparently snopes did an article about this. They found no evidence of it being true https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/26/trump-ground-beef-wild-horses/

I wish more people understood that there are good Christians out there. I'm not christian myself but one of my best friends is. And not one of those who just say they are but don't follow any of it. He goes to church every week, waited until marriage and spent one year after high school studying theology full time. And he is one of the nicest people I know. One of his best friends is a trans woman who lives in a polycule and he has no problem with it.

The worst Christians are the ones who don't listen to their own scripture. It litteraly says right in the new testament, dozens of times, that you shouldn't judge. Judgment is a sin.

Grass is much broader than most people think. Corn is my go to example of a grass that doesn't really look like grass. Bamboo and the reeds next to the lake are also grass. So is wheat, barley, oats, rye and rice. I currently live in a region that's too cold for legumes and canola so all that's commonly grown is barley, wheat, oats and ley (grass for cows). I sometimes joke that all they grow up here is grass. Well except for potatoes, they do grow those up here, but quite sparsely.

Should be whole food and not organic. You can process organic food how much you want. You can buy organic ultra-processed pure white beet sugar if you want. Doesn't mean it's healthy or chemically different than regular white sugar. Organic only applies to how it's grown, not what happens to it after leaving the field.

There are sure to be tradeoffs which would explain why not every animal have evolved similar stomachs. It's probably expensive energy wise to maintain that acidity. It probably also makes it hard to maintain a healthy gut flora. Also imagine the burn if you vomit up stomach acid with pH 1.0

FYI caged hens are no longer common in large parts of the western world and even in the worst countries, like the US, the percentage of caged hens have dropped under 50%. For meat chickens it's even better with practically zero in cages.

Talking about lightning the EU mandates 6 hours of darkness. Don't know the US rules. I'm assuming it's much worse there as it usually is.

Considering that's a Holstein breed cow and therefore a milking cow, the nutritional demands are entirely different. Getting a cow to produce 40 liters of milk a day is no easy task and requires grass of the highest quality, combined with a generous dose of concentrate feed with grains and legumes/presscake. If a normal hobby horse was fed a diet like this they would turn obese almost instantly. In fact hobby horses usually require as poor quality feed as possible because it turns out that being ridden at walking speed for an hour 1-2 times a week is a very low amount of exercise for a horse. You have to intentionally grow as rough and low quality grass as possible for the horses not to get obese. That's why oats are no longer given to horses. A race horse or a working horse that's active for several hours a day can however be given oats or other concentrated feed and may be able to handle, or at least come close to handling, a dairy cow type diet. However these types of hard working horses are rare nowadays.

TLDR dairy cows and horses generally do NOT eat the same diet.

The Qing emperor's didn't have multiple wives. They had one wife who was the empress. The rest were mere concubines.

I don't think it's more complicated than that they accidentally killed the yeast. Some recipes call for you to add the yeast to lukewarm water. But what I did once when I was around 12 was put the yeast into boiling water then wait for the water to become lukewarm and then add the flour. Of course that kills the yeast so the bread I got was basically that picture.

It could even be an innocent mistake like leaving the yeast package in a really hot car which can also kill the yeast. Or who knows the yeast may have been dead already in the store and this person has done absolutely nothing wrong.

When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it's traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.

Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don't bring up the whole "animal proteins are subsidized" bit. I don't know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That's not the explanation.

I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.

Thank you for subscribing to barley facts.

Did you know that barley is the earliest maturing of the grains which made barley the historically most important grain in the northernmost parts Sweden and Finland where no other grain could mature in time. The earliest varieties were ripe after a mere 90 days despite the temperatures in summer seldom going above 20 Celsius. However some parts of northern inland Scandinavia were too cold for even barley and this climatic border also became the border between agrarian Finns/Swedes and the reindeer herding Sami.

Did you know that barley may have been domesticated for beer before it was used for bread. Yes that's a real theory that a group of real historians believe. The argument for this theory is that we have earlier evidence of beer brewing than we have of bread baking.

Did you know barley has a inedible hull covering every grain that makes it extremely annoying to process by hand. Because of this I don't recommend growing it in your garden. Making it edible with only your kitchen tools would include you having to sift it over and over again. If you're growing grain in your garden pick a hulless grain like wheat or rye.

Yeah thinking about it using the lightning rune twice is really sus. Very hard to defend that.

There was a time where both modern humans and Neanderthals lived together in Europe and it's likely they mixed. But this was before the last ice age. After the ice age the Neanderthals were already extinct globally and the first people to repopulate Europe were these WHGs who genetically had little to do with the pre ice age population. Therefore I would assume strictly European Neanderthals have little to no modern genetic impact in Europeans. The Neanderthals genes Europeans carry today would instead derive from middle eastern Neanderthals.