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funnies - some even funny

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https://freedomherald.com/article2-9/

Hollywood Actress Event Standing For Israel Turns To Chaos, Brawls Breakout – VIDEO
By R. Kelly -November 9, 2023
Hollywood star Gal Gadot, a former IDF soldier and well-known for her role as “Wonder Woman,” decided to host a screening of the atrocities committed on October 7.


Gal Gadot Poses On Set As Wonder Woman
At the Museum of Tolerance on November 8, 2023, Gadot organized the 43-minute film “Bearing Witness,” which is a montage of the barbarism that took place on October 7 by terrorists.

On social media, threats were made against the actress, claiming that she was supporting genocide.

About 200 people attended the screening, including Hollywood executives, Israel’s UN ambassador, and an IDF official.

Police were forced to form a skirmish line after pro-Palestinian protestors began attacking people.

SO ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTORS FOUND OUT GAL GADOT WAS HELPING SCREEN THE VIDEO OF 10/7 ATROCITIES AT THE MUSEUM OF TOLERANCE IN LA TONIGHT.

THEY SHOWED UP AND ARE NOW APPARENTLY ATTACKING ISRAEL SUPPORTERS THERE. PIC.TWITTER.COM/FMUSEFK4JZ

— AG (@AGHAMILTON29) NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Gadot has been very vocal since the attack.

In several social media posts she’s stood with Israel and mourned those k**led in the attacks.

Mayor Karen Bass responded to the r**t, stating that the violence is “unacceptable.”

WE CANNOT ALLOW CURRENT WORLDWIDE TENSION TO DEVOLVE INTO THIS UNACCEPTABLE VIOLENCE IN OUR CITY.

THIS IS A TIME OF IMMENSE PAIN AND DISTRESS FOR THOUSANDS OF ANGELENOS. WE MUST STAND TOGETHER.

— MAYOR KAREN BASS (@MAYOROFLA) NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Actress Natalie Portman has also issued strong support for Israel.


Actress Natalie Portman
“My heart is shattered for the people of Israel,” on Instagram, adding, “I am in horror at these barbaric acts and my heart is pounding with love and prayer for the families of all affected.”

Portman has deep ties with Israel. She worked on a prominent book defending the Jewish state and wrote, directed, and starred in a Hebrew-language adaption of iraeli author Amos Oz’s memoir.

She’s even put pressure on the Red Cross.

“Dear International Red Cross, We, the undersigned, express our profound concerns regarding the current atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and other terrorist organizations within Israel. We respectfully urge the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to act in accordance to its mandate to prevent the ongoing breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL),” the Hollywood actress wrote.

'You all die and disappear': Bill Maher rips those who believe Palestinians can be trusted.
https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1735886698360586367

https://twitter.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1736326021517820183

You don't really expect l*****ts to be open-minded enough to read something that is contrary to their own indoctrination dogma and then comment on it with reason and logic.

No need to yell!

The question wasn't about the origin of Santa, but the popularization.

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/best-european-cities-for-expats?utm_source=recommendedreads.com

This Is the Best European City for Expats
Looking for a better quality of life? These European cities score high on affordability, walkability, and overall happiness rankings.
BY CONNOR STURGES

November 7, 2023
Nyhavn Copenhagen colorful house buildings facades and sky
Getty Images
Whether it’s in pursuit of a new community, better weather, or a new adventure, there are many reasons people pack up their lives and become expats. And it seems like the idea of moving to a new country is more appealing than ever—and gone are the days when it was reserved for retired people. With remote work becoming a more viable option for people of all ages experiencing wanderlust in their hearts, the possibility of the expat lifestyle is now more within reach than ever.

Ever thought about moving to Europe? Who hasn’t? But the challenge would be where to move. A recent Travel Far and Wide study might have the answer, having ranked key European cities by affordability, walkability, and happiness scores.


10. Zürich, Switzerland
Zürich secures 10th place and is the first of four Swiss cities to feature on the list. Happiness and walkability scored top marks, but the notoriously high cost of living let the city down. The average price of a one-bedroom apartment here costs $2,032.52, the most expensive of any top 10 destination. That said, the average monthly salary is a whooping $6,838.09, so pre-retirement expats should still have lots of spare change to experience all that Switzerland’s largest city offers.

Switzerland Basel houses at the Old Town
A street scene from Basel, Switzerland Getty Images
9. Basel, Switzerland
The second Swiss destination to make the top 10 is Basel, often regarded as the cultural capital of Switzerland. The art crowds descend on the city each year for Art Basel, and there’s no shortage of stunning architecture; marvel at the city’s intricate structures while sipping coffee on the banks of the Rhine. Rent is considerably cheaper in Basel than in Zürich at $1,268.75, although the city scored the lowest for nightlife at just two points.

8. Vienna, Austria
The only Austrian city on the list is by no means the most affordable European city for the everyday traveller, but it’s a different story for expats in Vienna. The average cost to rent a one-bed apartment is $925.93—the cheapest on the list—while the estimated monthly cost of living is $3463.33.

WATCH


A Night Out in Riethalle, Bern

Stuttgart Germany
A vineyard in Stuttgart, Germany Getty Images
7. Stuttgart, Germany
The sixth-largest city in Germany is another popular destination for expats searching for a better quality of living. The city scores top marks for walkability and four out of five for happiness and nightlife. The south German city is notably cheaper than its Swiss counterparts, but it relatively has the worst safety index out of all the top 10 at 67.88.

Colorful Traditional Houses in Copenhagen old Town Nyhavn at Sunset
The colorful traditional Houses of Copenhagen at sunset Getty Images
6. Copenhagen, Denmark
The capital of Denmark is an increasingly popular travel destination—millions of tourists a year visit the beautiful gardens, historic palaces and fascinating museums each year. However, Copenhagen’s charm attracts more expats than ever, thanks to safe streets, a high happiness score, and high average wages ($5,112.89 a month).

5. Munich, Germany
Munich may have a reputation as Germany’s party town, thanks to the millions of tourists that descend each year to experience the raucous Oktoberfest celebrations. Still, the historic city is also a great place for folks looking to relocate. The safety index is a solid 80.65, while the average cost of a monthly travel pass is just $69 (nice). Naturally, Munich scores top marks for nightlife, while the happiness index is also five out of five.


Mala Strana and Nerudova Street in Prague Czech Republic
Mid-afternoon at Nerudova Street in Prague, Czech Republic Getty Images
4. Prague, Czech Republic
Forget everything you think you know about Prague. Yes, it does remain one of the most popular destinations in Europe for bachelor parties, but this plays into the city’s favor when it comes to nightlife (top marks, of course). Where Prague excels is in its affordability factor. It’s the cheapest city in the top ten to rent a one-bed apartment at an average of $1,057.61 a month, and the estimated monthly cost of living for an expat is just $2,231.10. Salaries are considerably less than in Switzerland and Austria, but this is all relative; monthly travel could set you back just $25.53.

Old Town Altstadt of Bern with the Untertorbrucke bridge over the Aare River Bern Canton Bern Switzerland
The Untertorbrucke Bridge over the Aare River, in Bern, Switzerland Getty Images
3. Bern, Switzerland
Switzerland’s capital is one of Europe’s key business hubs, so it’s little surprise this is where the most significant average salaries are found ($6,686.48). The average rent is almost half that of Zürich’s at $1,325.07, while the moderate travel and monthly living costs are also slightly cheaper. Bern is built around a crook along the Aare River, and some areas date back to the 12th century, making it a great place to settle for lovers of history and architecture.



The shore of Lake Geneva in Lausanne Switzerland with the Alps in the background
The shore of Lake Geneva in Lausanne, Switzerland, with the Alps in the background Pierre Longnus
2. Lausanne, Switzerland
If one thing’s evident from the Travel Far and Wide study, it’s that Switzerland could be Europe’s most livable country for expats in search of a better quality of life—even though this city just misses out on the top spot. Lausanne scores top marks for happiness, nightlife and walkability, while the safety index scores 73.86. Expats expect an average monthly salary of $5,718.46 and a cost of living clocking in at $3,917.70 a month.

Summer of Helsinki Finland.
Helsinki, FinlandGetty Images
1. Helsinki, Finland
Helsinki is officially Europe’s best city for expats, scoring a high 75.21 out of 100 for safety and perfect ratings for happiness, walkability and nightlife. Public t***sport costs are surprisingly reasonable, while the average one-bed rental costs an average of $1,061.50 a month—considerably less than many of the other contenders in the top ten. The monthly cost of living is around $2,850.92, while the average salary is $3,401.03, leaving lots of disposable income to explore all this beautiful city offers.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/14/book-lost-subways-north-america-jake-berman?utm_source=recommendedreads.com

‘Unique in the world’: why does America have such terrible public t***sit?
A new book looks back at the mass t***sit histories of 23 major cities in both the US and Canada, detailing the routes to where we are today

Veronica Esposito
Tue 14 Nov 2023 12.31 EST
“North America really is unique in the world in the lack of good public t***sit,” the author Jake Berman told me while discussing his new book, The Lost Subways of North America. The oversize, map-laden volume is a slickly designed deep dive into the mass t***sit stories of 23 major cities in the US and Canada. Packed with fascinating histories and tons of absorbing information – ever wonder why elevated trains went out of style, or why monorails just don’t work? – the book is a lively and compelling examination of how mass t***sit has succeeded and failed across the continent.

A lone commuter rides a normally packed, San Francisco-bound Bay Area Rapid T***sit (Bart) train in 2020. The subway and overground train service has struggled to rebound to pre-p******c levels, prompting fears of a financial death spiral.
The last stop: what happens when a US city’s subway starts to die?
Read more
“European cities never decided to build the kind of copy-and-paste suburbs that we built in North America,” said Berman, explaining why t***sit has fared so much better across the Atlantic. “The other part of that is, American cities do not make particularly good use of the land near their t***sit systems. For instance, many stops on [the Bay Area’s Bay Area Rapid T***sit] Bart is surrounded mostly by strip malls, or single-family homes or gigantic parking lots.”

While talking with Berman, the misuse of land around t***sit hubs was a recurrent topic, a common pitfall that undermined the design of subways, light rail and streetcars in many major cities. In one of multiple examples, Berman shared that Dallas’s many miles of light rail doesn’t necessary equal a valuable t***sit system. “It’s crazy to think that Dallas has about as many miles of rail as Barcelona,” he told me. “The difference is, there’s not a whole lot near Dallas’s rail stations, whereas in Barcelona there’s apartments, there’s stores, there’s businesses, there’s churches – basically everything that you need for daily life.”

Surprising winners emerged from Berman’s research for Lost Subways of North America. While Dallas may conform to stereotypes about gas-guzzling Texans and their lack of good mass t***sit, the neighboring city of Houston proved to be one of the locations that is doing t***sit right. As Berman explains, Houston’s light rail within the city’s core took advantage of reforms in laws reducing mandatory parking lots and increasing housing density – the result is that t***sit in the city’s core functions far better than similar light rail in places like Dallas and Los Angeles, which don’t give access to major infrastructure and employment hubs, and which don’t supply adequate housing.

In addition to commenting on contemporary situations, Berman’s book is also a rewarding look into the history that informs our contemporary t***sit mess. For instance, he does an apt job of retelling the oft-told defeat of Los Angeles’s streetcar system by freeway – including a strange moment in which an LA monorail almost took hold. This retelling makes for the perfect prologue to Berman’s discussion of LA’s decades-long pursuit of a viable light rail system, which continues to this day. The idea of such a venture took hold because of a rivalry with San Francisco’s Bart in the 1960s. “It really is an interesting thing seeing how municipal rivalries played out in the t***sit space,” he said. “LA put a subway system on the b****t in 68 because the Bay Area had approved Bart six years prior.”

LA’s light rail would remain a dream for decades, but eventually that city did come to develop about 110 miles of track (favorably comparing to the Bart’s current 131 miles). Unfortunately, Berman laments that all those Southland metro miles are for naught, as the city still conceives of itself as “a horizontal city, not a vertical one”. With the failure of LA to pursue high-rise housing developments around metro hubs, Berman argues the city’s mass t***sit system will remain unsuccessful.

While LA is widely talked about as a mass t***sit hard case, lesser known is Berman’s treatment of Rochester, New York, at 211,000 inhabitants the “smallest city to ever build a subway” and “the only city in the world to build and operate a full-blown subway system, then abandon it entirely”. Completed in 1927, the problem with Rochester’s subway was that, in the words of a city newspaper, “it starts nowhere and goes nowhere”. After some successful years, the system fell into insolvency after the second world war, eventually entering a ridership death spiral that saw it shut down in 1956, making way for freeways.

Whether it’s Rochester or Los Angeles, Berman argues that making a successful mass t***sit system isn’t overly complicated, as most successful systems are so for the same reasons. “There’s that line from Anna Karenina,” he said, “all happy families are alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And the adage definitely applies to t***sit. There are a whole lot of things that cities with good t***sit systems do correctly, and most of those things need to come into place for the system to work.” That would include building apartments and businesses around stations, as well as other kinds of amenities that people would be willing to ride t***sit to reach. “There’s been a sort of forgetting that t***sit doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he said.


If there are common factors in mass t***sit success, there is also at least one common factor in mass t***sit fails – bureaucracy, which often prevents the creation of t***sit routes, as well as the creation of the necessary amenities to make said routes thrive. Berman writes that in San Francisco, along the major t***sit corridor Geary Street, “it took from 2000 to 2011 to replace the bankrupt Coronet Theater with rent-controlled senior apartments … All the while, San Francisco keeps adding more jobs.” Berman argues that the continued creation of jobs throughout the Bay Area – without a similar rise in housing stock – is one of the key drivers of the homelessness crisis.

He contrasts the current failure to create housing in a timely manner to the can-do attitude that originally made San Francisco’s Muni bus system develop many key routes quickly and efficiently. “A lot of what I talk about in the book is related to very deep questions about t***sit planning and why cities can’t build infrastructure quickly,” Berman said. “The Geary Boulevard subway in San Francisco has been planned since the 1930s. It’s very hard to get things done these days like they could in the old days. When Muni built the Geary Boulevard streetcar in 1912, it took six months to do it. There is a lot to be talked about regarding making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

Although Berman sees much to critique in contemporary t***sit, he remains hopeful that a book demonstrating everything that was once done right – and those things that still are being done correctly – might inspire a t***sit turnaround. One of the reasons he wrote Lost Subways of North America is to share his belief that it’s not too late for cities across this continent to get with the program. “I would hope that people have a certain sense of optimism that we were able to do this once and we can do it again. Back in the day it was normal for people to build apartment buildings near train stations. We can do this. Providing perspective of the past is what I hope to give to the reader.”

(1) D

1. At the time of the first Christmas, Christians were a small, persecuted minority in the Roman Empire. But Christianity, in all its many iterations, is now the most popular religion in the world. Today, there are approximately 2 Billion Christians.

2. St. Nicholas of Myra, a bishop born in the 3rd century, was primarily known for gift giving. According to legend, he would anonymously throw bags of gold coins into the windows of the poor. The coins supposedly landed in the shoes or stockings that were drying by the fireplace. Thus, serving as the inspiration for the “stocking stuffer.” After Nicholas died and was declared a saint, his popularity and positive Christmas message spread across Europe.

3. Before he was president, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River with his troops on Christmas night 1776. After America declared independence from Great Britain, General Washington’s Continental Army was fighting the British, but they were losing. America only had a few thousand men still willing to fight for independence—while the British had tens of thousands of soldiers. America’s small army retreated to Pennsylvania, just west of the Delaware River. Washington knew he had to do something big to save the Revolution and inspire people to keep fighting for freedom. Washington decided to launch a daring attack by crossing the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776, in freezing temperatures during a severe winter storm. The surprise attack gave the Americans an easy victory the next morning, which is now considered by many to be what saved the American Revolution.

4. In 1931, Coca-Cola hired artist Haddon Sundblom to create a Christmas ad of Santa Claus (which is Dutch for St. Nicholas) drinking Coke. The jolly white-bearded fellow in a bright red suit remains the personification of Old St. Nick.

5. The tradition of decorating the Christmas tree can be traced back to 16th-century Germany. According to tradition, Protestant German reformer Martin Luther began putting candles in the branches of his Christmas tree as a way to replicate the sky above Bethlehem on the night of Christ's birth.

6. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby is not only the best-selling Christmas/holiday single in the United States, but also the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide.

7. Prior to the mid-19th century, Christmas celebrations had become quite rowdy with lots of drinking and debauchery. In 1843, the great British writer Charles Dickens published his short novel, “A Christmas Carol.” The story, with its messages of charity, family, and the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge, perfectly captured what we now refer to as “the Christmas spirit”: the idea that the holiday brings out the best in all of us.

No holiday has a richer and more varied tradition than Christmas. But how much do you know about this holiday that billions of people celebrate every year?

Take this short quiz, and let’s put your Christmas knowledge to the test!

Question 1 of 7:

Christmas is the day for Christians from around the world to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Approximately how many Christians are there in the world today?
A
100 Million
B
500 Million
C
1 Billion
D
2 Billion

Question 2 of 7:

St. Nicholas, the real-life inspiration for Santa Claus, was primarily known for doing this:
A
Making eggnog
B
Snow sledding
C
Caroling
D
Gift giving

Question 3 of 7:

Who led Continental Army troops across the Delaware River on Christmas night during America’s Revolutionary War?
A
Ulysses S. Grant
B
George Washington
C
Alexander Hamilton
D
Robert E. Lee

Question 4 of 7:

Which company helped to popularize the image of Santa, with his white beard and red suit, in their ads in 1931?
A
Coca-Cola
B
Macy’s
C
Walmart
D
Nike

Question 5 of 7:

The Christmas Tree is considered the most iconic symbol associated with Christmas. According to historians, where does the practice of celebrating the holiday by decorating a Christmas tree come from?
A
United States
B
England
C
Germany
D
Mexico

Question 6 of 7:

Every year around the holiday season, millions of Americans listen to their favorite Christmas music. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this artist has the best-selling Christmas song of all-time:
A
Bing Cosby
B
Dean Martin
C
Katy Perry
D
Taylor Swift

Question 7 of 7:

Who wrote the 1843 novel that helped revitalize the Christmas holiday, resulting in newfound popularity in America?
A
Mark Twain
B
C.S. Lewis
C
Charles Dickens
D
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Season's greetings.