The Aquarian Review

I went off protocol and ate meat. While traveling in Australia, I tried to fit in with social norms and ate animal protein for the first time in six years. Here’s what happened… It changed my gut microbiome: + good bacteria dropped 61% (the fiber-eating kind… Roseburia and Agathobacter) + fat handling, bile tolerant bacteria jumped 2.5x (+154%) It made for a good experiment. To be clear, I am not against meat. Plenty of omnivores have perfectly healthy microbiomes too. This only shows that in me, after six years of legumes, pea protein, hemp protein, vegetables, extra virgin olive oil, berries, nuts, seeds and collagen peptides, one week of animal food left this unfavorable signature. The scientific details of what we learned: 1) Gut bacteria digest fiber to make butyrate and SCFAs, which repair your gut lining and turn down inflammation. I had 61% less which means my gut wall was possibly more vulnerable and I had less protection against inflammation. 2) The animal food sources had my body generate more bile which acts a bit like a detergent, killing off sensitive good bacteria and enabling tougher, tolerant ones to take over. There's some early evidence these shifts can happen within a day of eating animal food. TO BE CLEAR: you eat what you want. I support you. I am not trying to get you to eat what I eat. I’m sharing experiment results from measuring my body.

Reading a book in public is only performative to people that don’t read books

Want to recreate the experience of perusing Reddit? Go get a set of books you really want to read. Tear out and throw away the last couple of chapters in each book. Then attempt to read what’s left while someone randomly snatches each book from your hand.

🇪🇸 Residents in Barcelona are installing barbed wire along their balconies to protect their homes from burglaries and squatters.

Official trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's critically-acclaimed samurai thriller THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER Coming exclusively to theaters July 31

A.J.P. Taylor, ‘The First World War: An Illustrated History’ (1963) This is not an account of the war from the POV of the soldiers in the trenches, but a bird’s eye view, seen as it were from a spy plane or zeppelin, and as such is even more tragic and absurd. When someone threatened to tell the Austro-Hungarian Emperor that Berchtold, the foreign minister who had blundered into the war, was incompetent, Berchtold replied: ‘Oh, do tell him…I tell him every day, and he does not believe me!’ France’s motive for bringing Italy into the war as an ally wasn’t to strengthen their own cause, but to weaken Italy. Sideshows like Gallipoli were known as ‘cigar butt strategy’ because Churchill or someone would point at a spot on a map of Europe with the end of his cigar and say ‘Let us go there,’ ignorant even of the fact that Gallipoli had steep cliffs. The ineptitude of the generals (with a few exceptions like Pétain) was staggering. Unlike earlier wars (or WW2), generals led comfortable lives well behind the lines; the only major figure on either side to die violently was Kitchener (when a ship he was travelling on hit a mine). Haig was especially destructive, his vanity and pig-headedness costing milions of lives. When plans went wrong the response of the generals was to try the same thing, again and again. Ironically the most successful campaign of the war, Brusilov’s against the Austrians, was completely ad libbed. The Somme valley was chosen for an offensive merely for political reasons (because it enabled the British and French to contribute equal numbers), no matter that it was strategically worthless and surrounded by German-filled hills. Over a million died there. Verdun, too, (half a million dead) had historical/cultural significance, but was strategically worthless. Lloyd George had one sound idea: using convoys to beat the German U-boats. This was resisted bitterly by the admirals, who resorted to using false statistics to try and bamboozle him. When implemented in spite of them it was a complete success. At the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian army was literally fighting for an empire that no longer existed. Germany made the mistake of agreeing to an Armistice under Wilson’s Fourteen Points, grasping at it to avert revolution and mutiny. As we all know, this led to trouble later on. It’s difficulty to imagine the immensity of the Armistice now, but in London celebrations turned into a three day riot, with total strangers copulating in the streets. I can’t imagine that happening at the end of any other war, either before or since.

Imagine you bought Ford Motors. Then you told everyone Henry Ford was a piece of sh*t and so was his Model T, but you build better cars (even though they look terrible and are missing parts.) Then you publicly celebrate his birthday and thank him for his legacy. Right.

ARGENTINA - WORLD LEADER IN THE STUPIDEST TATTOOS AWARDS? 🇦🇷 A lot of people from a lot of countries have stupid tattoos today, stupid tattoos are ‘fairly normal’ thing now - but have noticed being in Argentina that of all the countries I’ve been to Argentina *seems* to have the highest density of stupid tattoos. Can’t empirically quantify this obviously, (so this is purely anecdotal feel free to disagree,) but it’s the impression I get. Have seen some real screamers, some really bad ones on the women especially. Worst one I saw was a moderately attractive woman with the gremlins from ‘Gremlins’ (1984) on her arm as an entire arm sleeve. Not Gizmo either, the scaly lizard gremlins. She was only about 25 too, she wasn’t some old auntie who watched the movie growing up. Why would you get this on your body? Have also seen, variously, a woman with a tattoo of a naked woman pressing down on a man’s head as he ‘eats out’ her ‘pussy’, a woman with a tattoo of Captain Jack Sparrow urinating against a wall that said ACAB on it, a woman with a tattoo of Jon Snow from ‘Game of Thrones’ (2011) waving a Palestine flag and a woman with a tattoo of her dead dog but the image isn’t of the dog alive it’s of the dog dead and rotting. Many other stupid smaller ones too I’ve been to about 140 countries at this point and even if it turns out Argentina is not strictly the world’s number one leader in stupid tattoos I still want to say (my very strong feeling from direct experience is) it is at least ‘up there’. With America, with Canada, with Australia, with the Yookay, with Spain, with Brazil etc. They can all be pretty bad but I can’t think of any worse countries for this kind of ‘stupidtattooism’ out of all those places than Argentina, at least in my personal experience. What is going on? Well - people have a lot of tattoos in Argentina to begin with, they’re everywhere, so you assume of those who get tattoos a certain portion of them are going to exhibit bad judgement. To what degree though? This is obviously not ‘Liberalism for 130IQ+ Anglos’ world, the scope has been broaden a bit to 105IQ quite attractive 4th generation Italian immigrant women with bangs and it turns out maybe a few more of them have not ‘as good taste’ as the ‘130IQ+ Anglo’ than you might assume. Sometimes it’s like… if a version of the ‘Dinergoth’ subculture except it’s ‘the equivalent of that but from 15 years ago instead’ took over an entire country, the taste you see exhibited occasionally Want to say, to qualify, I don’t have a particular issue with tattooos - I don’t mind them though I don’t have any myself. Not all Argentinians have bad tattoos obviously, most of them look fine or even occasionally good, but have felt like raising my eyebrows at some that I’ve seen ‘reasonably’ often. I like Argentina a lot - please note - but a lot of it reminds me of Spain, in the sense there’s a culture of guardrail-free hyperliberalism in places that, my impression is, apart from producing a lot of ‘shitlibs’ who love electing some version of Peronism whenever possible also makes them like to do things like ‘get stupid tattoos’. Could say, “oh maybe the people you met were just lower-class people who are more likely to get stupid tattoos anyway” - and maybe that’s true. But still it’s weird when you see quite attractive women with stupid tattoos, I do ‘reckon’ there must be ‘something going on’ in the culture maybe more than elsewhere To the broader point, I think it’s important to ‘be aware’ of the hyperliberalism streak in Argentinian culture if you want to go about understanding Argentina proper. Can be an asset insofar as it makes Argentina more European and ‘sophisticated’ than other Latin American countries in properly discerning hands, but also a curse insofar as (like in many other places in the west) it can lead people into stupid fads; cultural, political or otherwise