Category Archives: Food

Sunflower Supremacy: When an Art Historian Should Van Gogh F*ck Himself

I grew up around the pleasant sunflower. Perhaps I took it for granted, but Native American art presented thousands of years of expressing the variations of sunflower respect.

Never, ever did I consider any European impressions of a sunflower anything more than a footnote by late movers who never really quite understood or captured the proper context of the natural power flowing over endless prairie hills, which a sunflower could survive. You want to see strength? Crawl out of a tornado bunker after torrential rains to find a sunflower being baked by a blazing sun.

Sunflowers after a deadly EF-4 tornado went through Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Source: News on 6

The BBC thus has just achieved something remarkable by throwing away all basic history and instead publishing a tone-deaf article about a sunflower having symbolism that only begins in… 1568.

Unlike many other symbols in art history, the sunflower is relatively new. They are native to the Americas and were only introduced to the “Old World” following Columbus’s explorations and European colonisation in the 16th Century. When they were successfully cultivated and propagated in Europe, the fact that immature sunflowers move their faces to follow the sun (a phenomenon known as heliotropism) became the plants’ most compelling feature, which fundamentally shaped its symbolic meanings. In 1568, the botanist Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, linked the flower to an ancient mythological character…

What? It’s like reading a treatise on the law of gravity that says it didn’t exist before Galileo started playing with his balls. The structure of the short-sighted BBC argument is that “the history of sunflower symbolism” only started when the violence of European foreign extraction decided to pay attention to one of their imports. Next the BBC will opine how water wasn’t wet until King Charles decided to tax people for inland ships and someone complained any boat that doesn’t float isn’t a boat.

Oh British writers, where would we all be if we didn’t get to ready your peculiar form of intellectual provincialism whereby your own ignorance is presented and undeniable universal absence. Van Gogh’s paintings are as revolutionary as the English laying claim to have found tea, conveniently blind to traditions developing forever before him. This represents a category error of impressive scope. The conflation of “European discovery” with anything actually having a “beginning” produces the same logical fallacy as claiming that fire was invented when the first Tesla rolled off the assembly line and crashed into a tree burning everyone inside to death. Before that? Not a real fire, not expressionist enough.

What the BBC presents us is the disgusting “colonial solipsism” that should have been made illegal around the same time slavery was banned—the systematic inability to conceive that knowledge might exist independently of a particular race claiming the first observation. It is philosophy of the most impoverished sort: the mistake of one’s own limitations for the limits of reality itself. The inability to wonder. The cultural bankruptcy of the BBC article is to deny a thousand years of indigenous sunflower iconography from being acknowledged. Who knows why this can still happen in 2025? Is it too much to ask for the modest effort of learning something not already pre-masticated by self-congratulatory institutions of white superiority?

The BBC’s history isn’t just wrong; it’s a continuation of racist colonial scaffolding that undermines knowledge and should have been dismantled generations ago.

Real Life Wonder Woman: American Survived 13 Blizzards in 3 Weeks of Wilderness

Tiffany Slaton, a hiker who survived blinding whiteness of the High Sierra winter for three weeks after a dangerous avalanche fall, speaks during a press conference, Friday, May 16, 2025 in Fresno, Calif. (AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian)

Special forces around the world will be studying lessons learned in this story of one woman’s ingenuity and perseverance in extreme conditions.

Soon into her trek, Slaton recounted falling off a cliff and getting knocked unconscious. When she came to, she had to pop her knee back in and make a splint for her leg. Slaton said she couldn’t make it back to the road, blocked by the avalanche she determined she had been in, and attempts to call 911 failed. Her phone, however, could route her to Starbucks, the nearest one being 18 miles away.

“You can’t get me 911, you can’t get me GPS, but you can get me a Starbucks?” Slaton said. “… In doing so, I ended up on this very long, arduous journey that I journaled to try and keep sane.”

That’s an algorithm for you. Some clever programmer wrote her results to skew towards consumption patterns, regardless of inputs, probably because of ad revenue bias.

Sounds like 911 needs to start offering Starbucks in the ambulance, maybe put some Chipotle in there too, just so the American capitalist “what’s in it for me” system will bother to make its emergency services available.

When you dial, maybe it could offer “press 1 for a hot cup of fresh coffee, press 2 for a lovely burrito, press 3 for pancakes… and, if you are still there after 9 wonderful opportunities to buy something special for you or those around you, press 0 to state your emergency.”

Just think of those revenue possibilities from people desperate for help. See how being a Big Tech engineer works? No ethics required, unlike any other engineering field in the world.

The avalanche area she mentions is very familiar to me from my own time in those Sierras, above Huntington lake (where at least one crashed WWII B-24H Liberator has been preserved under icy waters). Mono Hot Springs (abandoned settlement) indeed is a very remote area, although tiny roads snake upwards towards… the odd empty cabin.

Slaton somehow made it past the hot springs on her own. She went farther northeast, up to Kaiser Peak at an elevation of more than 9,000 feet, and left her bike buried in the snow at a trailhead, according to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. Then, a blizzard hit the area.

“I only saw white upon white in that storm,” Slaton said. As she approached the cabin where she would be found, she saw a “pristine Christmas tree and a tiny house and it had markers like Santa’s sleigh, and I could not understand. I actually thought I was losing my mind at that point, that I had somehow managed to make it to the North Pole.”

Slaton was ultimately found the next morning about 40 miles, or a two-hour drive, farther east than where she was last seen at Shaver Lake.

The cabin owner said it took him a day just to hack his way in through the whiteness. When he opened the door did she say “how ice to see you”?

She had only been in the cabin about eight hours of her three week ordeal, so it’s notable that she glowingly credits the hut with her entire outdoor survival. I’m sure it felt that way, while she knows it isn’t true. Such clever modesty is duly noted, and most people will miss the point entirely: she used hope of a cabin as a step, a small mental tactic to maintain focus, not actually relegating responsibility.

But seriously this woman should be training people on survival. This is such a better story than almost all the others we are trained on. Her 3 Weeks over 40 miles wearing a splint, through 13 Blizzards, is an amazing inspiration to anyone whose job is to survive extremes.

She’s a trained forager and permaculturist, and leeks are both bountiful in the Sierra and nutritious. So nutritious that her bloodwork was in remarkable shape at the hospital, she said during a press conference on Friday. Her eyes, however, took some damage from an extended time in the blinding white snow, requiring sunglasses in the aftermath.

The important power of leeks. The danger of blinding whiteness. The latter is definitely is not to be underestimated. Both have a familiar ring to anyone working in national security.

I always find it interesting when Americans tell me they don’t know the history of the real Wonder Woman (Nieves Fernandez) who inspired the comic book superhero. I see some parallels here.

Also find it interesting how blizzards and deserts never made the English security phrases “white list” or “white box” a negative connotation. I’ve survived the most extreme conditions in both and I always reflect on blinding whiteness being highly undesirable if not deadly. Whiteness seems like death, in many cultural representations. Yet in tech we frequently hear about black list and black box as unfavored, rather than the more naturally preferred, state of being. Perhaps her story, far more grounded as a hiker than the usual remote summit story, also will help readjust security language and perceptions of danger from whiteness.

Food Disasters From Inefficiency Predicted With New FDA Travel Restrictions

The authoritarian regime in America is shifting food inspection travel to a brutally inefficient schedule under a strategy of ballooning overhead to undermine safety inspections.

…current and former FDA officials said they were perplexed by [the new travel policy], given the push for longer trips in the past had been an efficiency measure intended to result in the agency being able to complete more inspections. Instead of spending money and wearing down staff to fly in and out of a country to do each inspection, officials said, the agency would combine multiple inspections into a single trip. “So they’re going to double or triple the foreign inspection flight costs and keep my people in a perpetual state of jet lag,” one FDA official told CBS News.

Auditors know well that commuting is the least productive time of any inspection, and now they will be expected to triple transit times or even worse.

The objectives are anti-regulatory and anti-science, removing measurement of outcomes and replacing it with empty performances. The regime passively will prevent inspections getting done by running inspectors around constantly keeping them fatigued and distracted. Money will be wasted on the appearance of being busy while getting less and less done, exactly what the corrupt regime wants.

Killer Donuts: Eating Just One a Day Caused Over 100,000 Dead

Remember how the boss at work used to bring a pack of cigarettes and put it on the table to get everyone smoking? That’s what should be on your mind when the deadly donut box inevitably opens in a meeting room.

It’s estimated that as much as 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed.

“Two-thirds of the calories children consume in the US are ultraprocessed, while about 60% of adult diets are ultraprocessed,” Fang Fang Zhang, associate professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at Tufts University in Boston, told CNN in an earlier interview. Zhang was not involved in the new research.

[…]

The United States has the highest level of ultraprocessed food consumption in the world — nearly 55% of the average American’s diet, according to the study. Researchers estimated reducing the use of those ultraprocessed foods to zero would have prevented over 124,000 deaths in the US in 2017.

It’s a dire warning, under the headline “Every bite of ultraprocessed food will increase your chance of an early death”.

Every bite. Early death.

Do not eat the do nut.

This new science reminds me of the famous 1972 book and 1973 congressional testimony: