dbreen retweeted
The latest ad from the Irish Government to the Irish people, who are the font of all problems in the country and desperately need to be stopped from their bad behaviour.
This time, it's hugging your grandkids.
dbreen retweeted
A lot of people are responding to this by saying that the French government should just use force to put down the riots, but I don't think it's realistic and I want to explain why.
Before you get angry at me and accuse me of being a pussy, you should know that I personally think a building such as Limoges's town hall is worth more than most human beings and certainly more than the brainless thugs who burnt it down, but it doesn't matter what I think.
We have let things rot for so long that, at this point, relying primarily on force to restore order would require a degree of violence far greater than what people realize and what is politically feasible.
It's possible to contain a riot using only moderate force when the number of police officers is high relative to the number of rioters, but when riots are so widespread and involve so many people because you have allowed this kind of things to happen for so long, that's just not possible and you have to use extreme violence to make up for the lack of manpower.
I know people on the Internet will say that it doesn't matter and that we should just do it, but the reality is that most of the people in charge are not prepared to use that kind of force and neither would most ordinary people if they saw videos of 16-year-old kids having their brains blown out by cops.
I doubt even Le Pen would do that and, if she tried, she would quickly backtrack because of the backlash it would inevitably generate.
When you start shooting rioters after years or even decades of letting them run amok with impunity, it will initially result in even more violence, because repression is no longer credible and they will assume that you will cave in the face of the outrage.
So it's not enough to shoot people once, you have to keep doing it until your credibility is restored and nobody will even want to test your resolve anymore, which in turn means that you have to kill a lot of people.
And you have to be confident that, as you do that, your subordinates and political allies won't get cold feet and desert you because they anticipate that you'll lose and will not want to be on the losing side, giving rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm sorry but that's just not going to happen. The Soviet hardliners didn't have the stomach for this kind of carnage in 1991, which is why the August coup failed almost immediately, so frankly the idea that French elites in 2027 will is just delusional. As I say below, there are things we can and should do, but we have our work cut out for us and it will take a long time.
As usual, people are looking for deep reasons, but I think there isn't any for the most part and the real explanation is much more boring.
There is a very high level of general dissatisfaction in France at the moment, mostly due to anemic economic growth and inflation, especially with the price of gas. In addition, Macron has been in power for almost 10 years and is very unpopular, which only adds to general dissatisfaction.
The high school protests, although they were already fizzling out, have provided motivation for the left by fueling the hope that it could ride out that wave to energize its own protests.
So there was a fertile ground for protests, which are pretty common in France after summer. Still, while the protests were large, they were hardly impressive by French standards. What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were.
Contrary to popular mythology, French protests are not generally violent. France has a very strong protest and strike culture, but the meme about how we riots all the time is overdone.
Traditionally, protests are traditionally organized by unions, which coordinate with the authorities beforehand and have a security service that takes care of troublemakers during the protest.
This is why the violence always starts toward the end of the protests, after the official demonstration has disbanded and people begin to scatter, because that's when it's harder for the police to control the situation.
Protests have increasingly led to violence in recent years because they have become more spontaneous and are more often organized by people on social media, but also and relatedly because increasingly far-left groups and children of immigrants opportunistically join them to cause mayhem and loot.
I keep seeing a lot of people who are depicting those kids as "Islamists" and ideologically motivated actors, but I think it's a complete misreading of the situation in my opinion. This isn't an "Islamist uprising" or whatever nonsense people are talking about.
Their actions are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in Black ghettos in the US, where anti-social behavior is totally normalized, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background.
This nihilism and their family background makes them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination, which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to religion, but most of them aren't ideologues and those who are don't loot stores.
As I explained before, the police often don't intervene because they are overwhelmed and they have instructions from the government not to, because politicians are terrified that if they do a kid will be killed and they will have full-blown race riots on their hands.
So what they do instead is contain the violence geographically and arrest the most violent participants later at home, when the risk that the cops will kill one of them is low, using video/photo evidence.
Eventually things will fizzle out, in part because the violence will discredit the movement and actually make it easier for the government to deal with it, but this tactic is very costly since we are effectively accepting that every now and then far-left activists and immigrant thugs will just burn and loot while the police watch.
The problem from the government's point of view is that, if they use repression by telling the cops to break skulls, they will kill some of the kids and this will result in a massive backlash, leading to more protests and probably even more violence.
I think we need to hand out serious prison time to protesters who are caught engaging in violence to deter this kind of shit, but the government has a very limited ability to do so, because justice is independent, courts are full of left-wing judges who refuse to do that, they are already overwhelmed with cases, prisons are full and we are broke.
So there isn't one single explanation, it's just a combination of factors, including random stuff that nobody could predict. The context explains why something like that *can* happen, but it doesn't explain why it happens when it does. Again it's probably random for the most part.
It would take years to solve the problem even if we started now, which we won't because our politics is completely broken, because it would require getting our budget in order, implementing reasonable economic policies, fixing our immigration and justice system, etc. We are cooked to be honest.
dbreen retweeted
Nothing disgusts me more than seeing American "missionaries" go to Catholic and Orthodox countries to "spread the Gospel."
Like y'all, they already have the Gospel. Their Churches predate your denomination's founding by hundreds of years.
Have some balls: go to a Muslim country. Go to uncontacted tribes. Go deep into Hindu country, or into Communist China. Those people actually need the Gospel and very well may be unfamiliar with it...
Going to a place where the Gospel's already been for hundreds of years to "show them the truth?" It's truly absurd -- and the fact they raise money for this is disgusting.
If anything, they'd be better to go to such countries asking what THEY can learn from the Christians who've been there for centuries already...
dbreen retweeted
Top 1% enables the bottom 1%. They are used as bio weapons.
By every conceivable metric, the bottom 1% is orders of magnitude worse than the top 1%
Yet all we ever hear about are the supposed sins of the successful, the capable, and the well-adjusted
For politics to be worried about the top rather than dealing with the violent, criminal underclass is a sign of the massive subversion that has gone on for far too long
dbreen retweeted
We wonder why Irish nurses are leaving:
Yet since 2020 the HSE has taken over 20 thousand employment permits.
dbreen retweeted
Fortunately, all of this is only happening to the French...and Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Italians & Swedes...because they are not great craic.
This will never happen in Ireland because we most definitely are great craic.
It is far right to disagree. Worse, you're a dryballs.
dbreen retweeted
Does anyone know what "Shur, the health services would collapse without 'em" is in French?
🇫🇷🔴 JUST IN: French high school students knock out a police officer and begin kicking his head with full force in the city of Belfort.
The health status of the officer remains unknown.
This is a developing story.
Follow: @RMXnews
dbreen retweeted
Good point. Indians are big on buying up properties (4 person mortgages) and renting rooms/beds exclusively to other Indians. So €20k for boomers and Indians. No benefit to the actual renter.
Housing supports or subsidies don't actually help the ordinary Irish buyer or renter. With "Help to Buy" for example, the developer naturally just tacks it onto the house price. So it's really just a taxpayer subsidy to Fidelity/Blackrock via Glenveagh/Ciarn via Indians.
dbreen retweeted
Es gracioso como los negros viven llorando y pidiendo respeto, pero nunca respetan nada, ni siquiera al país que les abrió las puertas. Ustedes sigan bancando a estas lacras
🇪🇸🇲🇦 #URGENTE | El vídeo donde se ve a Mbappé y a Vinicius colocándose mal la camiseta de apoyo a Ceuta y quitándosela antes de tiempo.
Seguir: @elalcazar_es
dbreen retweeted
Ovarian aging was thought to be irreversible cellular decline. Turns out a large part of it is tissue stiffening driven by one signal, and when researchers blocked that signal in aged animals, ovarian function recovered.
A new Nature Aging study identified interleukin-11 (IL-11), an inflammatory molecule, as the driver of ovarian stiffening across mice, rats, and humans. When researchers blocked IL-11 in middle-aged animals that had already aged, ovarian tissue softened, follicle development recovered, fertility improved, and egg quality matched younger animals.
What is IL-11? It's a signaling molecule that activates fibroblasts, the cells responsible for building the extracellular matrix, the scaffolding that surrounds every cell and gives tissue its physical structure. With age, IL-11 levels rise and fibroblasts become overactive, laying down too much collagen and cross-linking it into rigid, dense tissue.
The ovary depends on having the right stiffness in the right places. Dormant follicles need a stiff niche to stay dormant. Growing follicles need soft matrix to expand. Ovulation requires local softening to release the egg. When the entire ovary stiffens uniformly, this system jams.
Researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore measured IL-11 levels across aging ovaries in three species and found the same pattern: levels rise with age in mice, rats, and humans. This cross-species conservation, not previously reported, suggests the finding reflects fundamental biology rather than a species-specific quirk.
They tested the mechanism by deleting the IL-11 receptor in aged mice. The result: aged mice lacking the receptor maintained softer ovarian tissue, preserved more healthy follicles, produced higher estrogen and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH, a marker of ovarian reserve), and had greater ovulation rates compared to normal aged mice.
The preserved eggs were genuinely functional. They fertilized and developed into embryos at rates matching controls, meaning the intervention preserved egg quality rather than simply producing more low-quality eggs.
Then came the headline result. Rather than preventing aging from birth with genetic modification, the researchers reversed it in animals that had already aged. They used a nanoparticle-delivered siRNA to silence IL-11 in middle-aged mice and rats with established ovarian stiffening.
Ovarian stiffness dropped by roughly one third. Follicle development recovered. Fertility improved, with larger litters and higher pregnancy rates. All from a drug given in adulthood to animals that had already undergone reproductive decline.
Reversing decline in an already-aged animal is categorically different from preventing it in a genetically engineered one. This was intervention, not prevention.
The same mechanism drove stiffening across different insults. Blocking IL-11 signaling mitigated ovarian stiffening not just in normal aging but also in chemotherapy-induced ovarian failure and in a PCOS model, where it normalized the elevated testosterone that defines the condition. Three different insults converging on the same pathway suggests IL-11-driven stiffening is a common bottleneck.
IL-11 appears to be a systemic aging target, not just an ovarian one. A 2024 Nature study showed that inhibiting IL-11 extends both healthspan and lifespan in mice. Anti-IL-11 drugs are already in development for fibrosis of the heart, kidney, and lung, and some are in human trials. The ovarian finding fits into that larger program: IL-11 drives the fibrosis and inflammation that degrade multiple organs with age.
This connects to prior work on ovarian aging. Earlier research found reproductive aging driven from inside the egg by chronic mTOR signaling, which rapamycin can rebalance. This study adds a second driver operating outside the cell, in the stiffening matrix. Both may contribute independently, and addressing both together might preserve function better than either alone.
One important nuance: IL-11 is not simply harmful. Completely deleting it from birth causes infertility because the signal does necessary developmental work. The problem in aging is chronic excess. Partial reduction in adulthood, trimming overexpression back toward youthful levels, is different from lifelong elimination. This mirrors mTOR: essential in youth, damaging when chronically elevated in age.
Key takeaways:
• Ovarian aging involves active tissue stiffening driven by IL-11, not just passive cellular decline
• IL-11 levels rise with age in mouse, rat, and human ovaries
• Blocking IL-11 in already-aged animals reversed ovarian stiffening by roughly one third
• Fertility improved in treated animals: larger litters, higher pregnancy rates, preserved egg quality
• The same pathway drives stiffening in normal aging, chemotherapy damage, and PCOS
• IL-11 also stiffens heart, kidney, lung, and arterial tissue, making it a systemic aging target
• Anti-IL-11 drugs are already in human trials for fibrosis-related conditions
This is preclinical work with a strong rationale, not a treatment. The reversal was in mice and rats. Human data is correlational. Long-term safety is unstudied. Nothing here suggests seeking IL-11-blocking drugs for aging or fertility now. It is a direction worth serious scientific attention.
The framework matters though. If tissue stiffening is not passive wear but an actively maintained process driven by a specific signal, then a defining feature of aging, the slow hardening of organs, may be reversible. The ovary aged. The researchers switched off the signal driving that aging. Function came back.
dbreen retweeted
Add Thatcherism, chamber of commerce advocacy, MAGA, assorted crackpottery, performative cruelty, for some reason calling Irish people cunts and blaming younger generations for being homeless.
If it turns the stomach of the average Irish person it's on the menu!
