Toronto is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,731,571 in 2016, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anchor of the Golden Horseshoe, an urban agglomeration of 9,245,438 people (as of 2016) surrounding the western end of Lake Ontario, while the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) proper had a 2016 population of 6,417,516. Toronto is an international center of business, finance, arts, and culture, and is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world.
Indigenous peoples have traveled through and inhabited the Toronto area, located on a broad sloping plateau interspersed with rivers, deep ravines, and urban forest, for more than 10,000 years. After the broadly disputed Toronto Purchase, when the Mississauga surrendered the area to the British Crown, the British established the town of York in 1793 and later designated it as the capital of Upper Canada. During the War of 1812, the town was the site of the Battle of York and suffered heavy damage by American troops. York was renamed and incorporated in 1834 as the city of Toronto. It was designated as the capital of the province of Ontario in 1867 during Canadian Confederation. The city proper has since expanded past its original borders through both annexation and amalgamation to its current area of 630.2 km2 (243.3 sq mi). Wikipedia
You’re catching up with your aunt when you look over to see your three-year-old grab a toy away from another child. After you send your toddler off for a time-out, a cousin pulls you aside and says, “I think you could have handled that better” and gives you a lesson in disciplining children.
How would you feel?
Odds are, you wouldn’t be grateful. No one likes to be lectured.
What’s ironic is even though we can all see that receiving this kind of unsolicited advice is a giant downer, most of us have done this. It’s common to give out advice when we see someone struggling.
Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.
Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 percent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 percent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.
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Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt Pink Sherbet Photography / Getty Images.
Boyeeghter Strand or Boyeeghter Bay, commonly known as Murder Hole Beach, is a beach situated on the Melmore head peninsula beside Downings in County Donegal, Ireland. It has cliffs, hills, dunes, and small caves. When the tide is in there are two beaches, which merge into one when the tide is out. There is a small tidal island roughly 15 meters from the shore, called Rough Island.
The area is undeveloped with no direct road access, and significant traffic issues reported during August 2020. Access to the beach is possible only via a route across private land, and an increase in visitors during 2018 reportedly prompted a local landowner to post a notice about access concerns. The beach is not suitable for swimming. Wikipedia
One of the quickest and least expensive ways to upgrade the looks of your home—indoors and out—is by adding a handsome planter box or two. These three designs shown here are built from redwood. California redwood is an excellent choice for planters. It boasts the unbeatable combination of natural beauty and good durability. Redwood is resistant to decay and to attack by insects.
To determine durability against such attack, redwood is graded by its color and other factors. The reddish-brown heartwood from the inner portion of the tree contains extractives, which render it durable. The cream-colored sapwood that develops in the outer growth layer of the tree, like most whitewoods, doesn’t have the same degree of resistance to decay and insects as the heartwood does.
When building a planter, choose one of the all-heartwood grades. There are also grades available containing some sapwood, which will be a bit cheaper.
The story of the American pandemic has unfolded in three chapters. The first began last January when the coronavirus emerged and the world was plunged into uncertainty about how COVID-19 could be treated, how the virus spread, and when it might be defeated. The second started on the morning of November 9, 2020, when Pfizer-BioNTech announced the extraordinary efficacy of its vaccine. Those results made clear that this pandemic would end not through infection but vaccination. Our goals shifted from merely slowing the spread to beginning immunization as quickly as possible. In America, much of the past half-year has been devoted to administering vaccines and gathering evidence on how well they work in the real world.
Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ushered in the American pandemic’s third chapter. The agency announced that vaccinated people could go without masks or social distancing indoors and outside, in crowds large and small. It carved out a few exceptions—for hospitals, public transportation, and the like—and noted that people still needed to obey federal and local laws. But the broad message was that vaccinated Americans could resume their pre-pandemic lives. The C.D.C. is an agency known for caution, and its new guidance shocked many public-health experts; just two weeks earlier, it had issued far more restrictive recommendations. During the same period, a survey of nearly six hundred epidemiologists found that more than three-quarters of them believed that indoor mask-wearing might remain necessary for another year or more. Still, immediately after the announcement, a number of states lifted their mask mandates. Others will surely follow, as the pressure to return to normal grows. America is now moving swiftly toward reopening.
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The pandemic’s final chapter will come to a close not through official decree but with a gradual realization that COVID-19 no longer dominates our lives. Illustration by Jeremy Leung
San Antonio, officially the City of San Antonio, is the seventh-most populous city in the United States, and the second-most populous city in Texas with 1,547,253 residents in 2019. Founded as a Spanish mission and colonial outpost in 1718, the city became the first chartered civil settlement in present-day Texas in 1731. The area was still part of the Spanish Empire, and later of the Mexican Republic. It is the state’s oldest municipality, having celebrated its 300th anniversary on May 1, 2018.
The city’s deep history is contrasted with its rapid growth over the past few decades. It was the fastest-growing of the top ten largest cities in the United States from 2000 to 2010, and the second from 1990 to 2000. Straddling the regional divide between South and Central Texas, San Antonio anchors the southwestern corner of an urban megaregion colloquially known as the Texas Triangle. The Greater San Antonio and Greater Austin areas are separated from each other by approximately 80 miles (129 km) along Interstate 35. Both metropolitan regions are expected to form a new metroplex similar to Dallas and Fort Worth.
The city of San Antonio serves as the seat of Bexar County; San Antonio is the center of the San Antonio–New Braunfels metropolitan statistical area. Commonly called Greater San Antonio, the metropolitan area had a population of 2,550,960 based on the 2019 U.S. census estimates, making it the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the United States and third-largest in Texas. Wikipedia
Most people have heard it by now: Our meat habit is bad for the world. Polling suggests that tens of millions of people are taking this message seriously: One in four Americans said they tried to cut back on meat in the last year, and half of those cited environmental concerns as a major reason. The popular food site Epicurious recently announced they’ve stopped publishing recipes with beef in them, because of beef’s climate impacts, setting off the latest round of discussion on meat’s effects on the environment.
Cutting meat consumption is as smart an idea as advertised. Industrial farming — the source of 99 percent of the meat Americans eat — provides the world with cheap meat, but it does so at a terrible environmental and moral cost.
Where it gets complicated is when people decide which meat, exactly, they’ll be cutting back on. Often, it’s beef that loses out in that calculus. And often, the messaging is that we can save the world by switching out our beef consumption for chicken.
Did Nazi scientists, eager to devise a weapon that could throwback advancing Allied armies, create a time-traveling UFO to win World War II? Almost certainly not. Nevertheless, the legend of “Die Glocke” (“The Bell”) persists in conspiracy and UFO circles.
A new video from military historian Mark Felton included below, explores the bell-shaped device that Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary organization purportedly developed. However, sci-fi writers and hoaxers may have actually concocted the machine, plying the postwar reputation of Nazi scientists being capable of almost any technological feat.
Even though the Nazis lost World War II, they emerged from the war with an almost mythical reputation for high-tech weapons. Nazi tanks were often technically superior to Allied tanks; the Luftwaffe flew fighter jets in combat before the Allies did; and the V (for Vengeance) series of terror weapons, including the V-1 cruise missile and V-2 ballistic missile, made for terrifying, though strategically questionable, weapons.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Toronto, ON, Canada
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James' World 2 