“Itchy Boots” is the online moniker of a Dutch woman named Noraly Schoenmaker who rides her motorcycle around the world and documents her travels. This episode shows us all a port of Canada that most people have not been to.

SDA regular Denise has written in with something relevant to our current times. The photo is of her and her friend, Cassandra, and her kids.

Forty years ago this month I left the comfort of Canada for the discomfort of West Africa. My remarkable Sierra Leonean host was a septuagenarian midwife named Cassandra Roques. With no electricity, Mama Cassan delivered babies by kerosene lantern and cooked our meals over an open fire. It had been years since water flowed from the government-supplied water tap in her yard, so she joked that it was a monument. A shower was a bucket of rainwater. When nature called there was a pit latrine. She was the embodiment of strength, resilience, and vitality in what was then ranked the planet’s poorest country on the UN Human Development Index. There was evidence of international aid: a barely begun hospital long abandoned; a paramount chief with an elaborate throne; government officials living the good life. Then, and now, aid flows into poor countries, but where does all that money go?

A decade after returning to Canada I met the granddaughter of Sierra Leonean ruler Siaka Stevens (1967-1985) when she was studying at London’s Western University. I said how sad I was that a horrific civil war was raging in her ancestral home, but she was nonplussed: she’d never been there. She was from Switzerland and had attended the best private schools that international aid money could buy. In The Crisis Caravan (2010), an exposé of the disturbing underbelly of humanitarian aid, Dutch journalist Linda Polman describes a festive gathering at a luxury hotel in the West African capital after the UN once again named Sierra Leone the world’s poorest country in 2001. The cream of Freetown society was jubilant: now even more aid money would flow into Sierra Leone and into the pockets of the elite and powerful.

For a more succinct and amusing assessment, husband James Frazer offers Worse Than Useless, a ska-influenced musical critique of the aid industry. In a nutshell: “The people stay poor and the Big Man gets fat. How can they think that they’ll end hunger by propping up kleptocrats?” To catch all the words, you can view the lyrics here.

Having had the great honour to twice meet our beloved SDA hostess, Kate, I must say that this hard working cattle rancher reminds me a whole lot of her:

New York Post- I thought my husband was constipated. Actually, he had a water bottle in his butt

If you ever get the chance to go have a beverage with an emergency room doctor don’t pass up the opportunity. They’ll tell you all sorts of interesting stories.

This would look great in Kate’s compound!

euronews- Euro sculpture in Frankfurt to be auctioned off amid vandalism and high maintenance costs

There is a food chain and we are on top of it. pic.twitter.com/TD6UoJPynH

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 21, 2022

James Lindsay-

Let’s do some more fun Marxist language codebreaking!

“Actual”

There are entire chapters of books in the Marxist and pre-Marxist literature working out what the word “actual” really means. Namely, Hegel writes on it extensively, and Marxists build on it.

Via MartyrMade

One part sermon, one part myths, add in some history, current events and some mass formation psychosis and you have a very unique and thoughtful perspective. You’ll have to listen to the whole thing for it to make sense.

Link fixed

NBC- Man told job not to celebrate his birthday. He was awarded $450K following unwanted party.

A scuba diver discovered a 900-year-old sword encrusted with seashells off the coast of Israel.

An Israeli scuba diver has salvaged an ancient sword off the country’s Mediterranean coast that experts say dates back to the Crusaders, according to Israel’s Antiquities Authority.

The diver was about 500 feet off the coast in 17-feet-deep water, which experts say is an area that is home to many archaeological treasures, some dating back 4,000 years, according to Israel’s Antiquities Authority.

The thing looks pretty cool.

There was nothing. Then some stuff happened.  Eventually Small Dead Animals came along…

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.