Unreal. The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to make protecting the Communist Chinese their primary mission. The WHO decided to skip the next letter of the Greek Alphabet in naming the latest COVID-19 Variant. “Xi” may be embarrassing to China. So they skipped Xi and named it Omicron. Wow.
Strange & Weird
A Maori tribe has told anti-vaccine protesters in New Zealand to stop the use of a famous haka “immediately”. The Ka Mate haka is hugely popular as it is performed by national rugby team the All Blacks before every match. The Ngati Toa tribe, which has legal guardianship of the haka, issued a strong notice after protestors performed the war dance during demonstrations last week. The notice comes as vaccination rates among the Maori people have been low. Just 61% of eligible Maori people are fully vaccinated and 77% have received their first dose. This is short of New Zealand’s targeted rate of 90% among its eligible population. “Ngati Toa condemns the use of the Ka Mate haka to push and promote anti-Covid-19 vaccination messages,” said its chief executive officer Helmut Modlik in a statement. “Many of our tupuna [ancestors] lost their lives in previous pandemics… we are absolutely clear that the COVID-19 vaccine is the best protection we have available to us, and we are committed to supporting our whānau [family] to get vaccinated as soon as possible.”
Kamala Harris panned for using ‘French accent’ to French scientists while touring Parisian lab. Vice President Kamala Harris went viral following her visit to a COVID-19 lab in Paris for appearing to use what critics described as a “French accent. During her overseas trip to France, Harris toured the Institut Pasteur and spoke alongside a group of scientists about the U.S.-France alliance on scientific research. She also made comments about how politicians should operate more like scientists. Harris then pivoted to what politicians do, mocking how they always stick to “The Plan” they campaigned on — but repeatedly appeared to change her dialect whenever she used that phrase. “In government, we campaign with ‘The Plan,’” Harris said. “Uppercase T, uppercase P, ‘The Plan!’ And then the environment is such we’re expected to defend ‘The Plan’ even when the first time we roll it out there may be some glitches and it’s time to reevaluate and then do it again.” The vice president’s remarks were panned as “cringe” on social media. Harris has been widely seen as the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party in 2024 if President Biden does not run for a second term, but polls have her viewed even more negatively than her boss.
Vice President Kamala Harris asked NASA if it could use its satellites to track trees “by race” in various neighborhoods as part of “environmental justice” during a recent display on climate change, leading many to ridicule the vice president online and even giving rise to a “Black Trees Matter” hashtag. Harris, who serves as chair of the National Space Council, visited Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday “to see vital climate science work.” As she met with scientists and engineers and received a firsthand look at how the climate is studied by the space program as well as how it provides data concerning planetary changes and their impacts, the vice president declared, “I truly believe space activity is climate action.” In a clip originally shared by Deputy Director of Rapid Response at Republican National Committee (RNC) Jake Schneider, Harris is seen interrupting a presentation in order to share her “woke” inquiry. “Can you measure trees — part of that data that you are referring to, [and it’s an issue of] EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhoods where people live?”
This might come as a surprise, but not everything that comes out of an elephant’s ass has to taste like it came out of an elephant’s ass. And while flavor might not be the first thing most of us think of when we see elephant dung, that’s not necessarily true for everybody. Blake Dinkin was thinking about both flavor and texture when he started Black Ivory Coffee in 2012. You won’t be paying peanuts for it, either. At roughly $1,000 per pound, it has since become the most expensive coffee in the world, only available roasted to order or at some of the world’s most exclusive resorts and hotels. Making Black Ivory Coffee is a process similar to the once popular but now controversial kopi luwak coffee. Somewhere in Indonesia, someone figured out Asian palm civets choose the best coffee cherries and eat them whole. When the catlike creature defecates, it leaves whole-bean coffee in its fecal matter. Then someone else had the idea that these whole beans could be roasted (presumably after an intensive cleaning process), ground, and served. The civets’ digestive processes are said to cut down on the proteins that cause bitterness in the taste, allegedly producing a very smooth cup.
In a lengthy piece exploring the ever-expanding movement of fluid sexual identities, a report claims that lesbians are facing criticism from transgender activists for not wanting to have relationships with biological men who consider themselves “transgender women.” “There’s a common argument that they try and use that goes ‘What if you met a woman in a bar and she’s really beautiful and you got on really well and you went home and you discovered that she has a penis? Would you just not be interested?’” a woman identified in a BBC report as Jennie said. “Yes, because even if someone seems attractive at first you can go off them. I just don’t possess the capacity to be sexually attracted to people who are biologically male, regardless of how they identify,” Jennie said. The author of the BBC piece said, “Several people got in touch with me to say there was a ‘huge problem’ for lesbians, who were being pressured to ‘accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ.’” Apparently, this is unacceptable to transgender individuals and the people who advocate for their mainstream acceptance.