The idea below is a bit misleading. Most spiders don’t favor garages — garages aren’t great environments for most flying insects. Orb weavers don’t care much for buildings, for instance.
Yes, I’m being overly pedantic.
They incinerated Uhura and Scotty!
Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke’s ashes were on board a private US lunar lander that, after a failed moonshot, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday and burned-up on the way down. The intention had been to leave the ashes, among those from around 70 individuals including actors James Doohan (aka Scotty) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), on the moon’s surface following a successful landing. Rodenberry’s ashes have previously been a part of other space missions.
Don’t worry — they were pre-incinerated. It was a PR stunt in the first place. Celestis, the company playing this game, launches one gram of cremains from a person willing to pay the price of $13,000 to splat a little bit of ash on the Moon (Bonus! Send 3 grams for only $26,000!). One of the bonuses of this grift is that they can launch bits of individuals in multiple expensive missions, like Gene Rodenberry’s. The poor guy’s ashes seem to be a staple to send in tiny doses to outer space.
Although to put the whole enterprise into the proper context of dignity and reverence, also lost on this failed mission was a sample of a powdered soft drink. Yes, a tiny bit of Arthur C. Clarke was mixed with a bit of Kool-Aid, set on fire, and spewed into the atmosphere. Breathe deep!
I hope it was cherry flavored author, that’s my favorite.
Trump is still bragging about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test — you know, that Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
bullshit he announced as a validation of his brilliance a while back. Only it’s not, and has never been, any kind of intelligence test. And worse, he gets it wrong, he had forgotten the words and order the day of the test, and in every retelling since he is changing the words and exaggerating the difficulty of the test. Now he claims that was asked to multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3
. Not only do I not believe it, I doubt that he could solve it himself.
But he almost certainly wasn’t asked to repeat Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.
But, much like the phantom whale, Nasreddine said the words in the cognitive testing sequence are supposed to be unrelated, so the MoCA would never have a pair of connected words like “woman” and “man,” or “camera” and “TV.”
Ooops. Flunked it.
It’s designed to be a trivial test to detect serious impairments. No one would celebrate passing it — it’s like expecting to be applauded when an examining doctor finds a heartbeat.
She [Dr Ganguli, an actual physician] added that she did not recall a patient who celebrated passing the test, let alone publicly proclaimed it. “It’s treated with gravitas,” Ganguli said. “If anything, I see the opposite — people disappointed with how they performed.”
Have you ever witnessed someone you love struggle to pass the MoCA test? I have. It’s heartbreaking. Yet here’s this colossal asshole, who my loved one was smart enough to never vote for, acting as if he’s King Shit and claiming he was amazing
at it. Even someone with incipient dementia can see right through him.
A quack found a gullible market.
A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.
Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the “Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program.”
The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).
Ms. Breen is a crook who deserves to have the book thrown at her — she has been fined $150,000, so I think she got off easy. I would point out, however, that you know the people who took the stupid pills knew exactly what they were doing, explicitly and knowingly avoiding giving their kids a real prophylactic, and that they ought to at least get a token slap. Their kids have been kicked out of school, punishing the victims, until the parents provide genuine proof of vaccination.
It must be a grisly Friday, because look at the story that just popped up in my newsfeed.
The gruesome discovery of 215 bodies buried in unmarked graves behind a jail outside of Jackson, Mississippi, has left a community in disbelief.
The families are angry their loved ones were buried in so-called pauper’s graves marked by just a metal rod and a number and families were never notified of their deaths. The startling revelation came months after the mother of 37-year-old Dexter Wade filed a missing persons report last March. It wasn’t until August when Bettersten Wade learned her son had been hit by a police car and killed, then buried in that same cemetery.
This takes ACAB to a whole new level. The Jackson, Mississippi police committed vehicular homicide, and then buried the body in a field behind the jail and didn’t bother to tell anyone? They’ve dug up the body since, and he had a wallet with full identification in his pocket, but no one was notified? And there are 215 bodies hidden in that field?
No, that last bit is wrong.
We know, based on the records from the coroner’s office, that, since 2016, in the last eight years, we can identify 215 individuals that were buried behind that jail, and their families have not been notified.
Furthermore, Mr. Wade was number 672. That means there are 671 other people buried behind that jail marked with only a number.
Hey. Hey! Remember? Remember when some of us were talking about disbanding police departments, and all the conservatives and centrists were talking down at us all for being so unrealistic, and others were flying “thin blue line” flags and getting indignant and insisting that civilization would crumble without the cops to protect us, and nothing happened?
Remember?
Fuck those people.
I’d long considered donating my body to science, once I’m done with it. Now I’m having second thoughts after learning about the Harvard morgue scandal.
I’m not at all concerned about the fact my body would be chopped up — I’d be dead, and the alternative is rotting or getting burned up — but what would bother me when signing the donation papers is that morbid ghouls like this bunch would be making tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars off my donation.
All told, prosecutors say tens of thousands of dollars changed hands in this gruesome years-long scheme: One indictment states that Pauley sent Taylor more than $40,000; Lampi paid Pauley more than $8,000; and Pauley paid Lampi more than $100,000. Sarah estimates that her ex made a couple hundred thousand dollars in total.
That money should go to the grieving dependents, not some random creep with a sick fetish!
On my walk to work this morning, I noticed these odd patterns in the snow and ice over the sidewalk. At first glance, I thought bird tracks or traces of squirrels rushing through the snow…but no, that makes no sense. They are variable in size and length and follow short meandering pathways, like this:
What’s your explanation? I don’t think it’s Cthulhu cultists leaving ritual markings around my house. My tentative explanation is that it’s an effect of salt — that we scatter salt on our sidewalk, which then generates the meandering scribbles as the sun rises and the warmth causes differential melt patterns in response to the local salt concentration.
Alternatively, I did initially try reading the markings. I couldn’t make sense of them, but maybe if I try harder the meaning will emerg…ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä! Iä!
Apparently, there’s a growing problem in the US.
Growing vaccine hesitancy is just a small part of a broader rejection of scientific expertise that could have consequences ranging from disease outbreaks to reduced funding for research that leads to new treatments. “The term ‘infodemic’ implies random junk, but that’s wrong,” said Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. “This is an organized political movement, and the health and science sectors don’t know what to do.”
Yes, yes, yes, I agree, there is a terrible strain of motivated ignorance running rampant in the nation. I rather resent the idea that this is an emerging problem — it’s been around as long as I’ve been alive, and longer. The focus shifts is all. The current focus in this article on vaccine disinformation is a symptom of the same old arrogance that fueled the anti-evolution movement. The people who promoted that nonsense are now the same people pushing climate change denial and COVID conspiracy theories — they’ve just expanded their Bible colleges and built conservative think tanks that are somehow regarded as reasonable sources of opinion, and they’ve set themselves up in institutions like the Federalist Society that have acquired the authority to corrupt the fabric of our government.
Don’t even try to imply that this is something new. We’ve let the seeds of decay incubate for many decades. Now news stories deplore this situation on one hand, while on another, in other news stories from the same organizations, they’ll blandly cite the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute or or the Cato Institute or, god help us, Republican Party figureheads as sources, never questioning ho they’re building up the reputations of these fallacious “authorities.” They don’t question. So when some Republican liar says a trivially recognizable lie, like the following, they just report it and don’t say what’s wrong with it.
As a result, many people felt betrayed when COVID vaccines only moderately reduced the risk of infection. “We were promised that the vaccine would stop transmission, only to find out that wasn’t completely true, and America noticed,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the Republican-led coronavirus subcommittee, at a July hearing.
No. No credible authority claims a vaccine will simply stop transmission with 100% certainty in its effectiveness. Brad Wenstrup is a liar and a fraud. Brad Wenstrup is an asshole. The media won’t say that, despite it’s truth, and so the infection spreads. Even in an article reporting on the deplorable state of critical thinking, a news source can’t bring itself to state the facts. They are still obligated to pander to the know-nothings who buy the crap they advertise.
They’ll never openly recognize the common fuel that drives this American problem: a fanatical religiosity. This problem will never go away as long as we continue to grant churches unwarranted privilege.
I must say how much Florida looks like Russia. Russian academicians are proposing that it is necessary to disembowel philosophy.
Professor of the Department of Humanities at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Dmitry Vinnik called for overcoming “the traits of comprador domestic philosophy.” To these features he included “the collective conviction that a philosopher must always be against the state and that a philosopher simply must be a pacifist,” “overt cosmopolitanism and intellectual snobbery.”
“Government assignments and curricula must be reviewed to ensure compliance with the values of our society and the interests of our state. All gender, feminist, postmodern and pacifist topics and courses should simply be abolished,” Vinnik noted.
Also, according to the professor, it is necessary to abolish “the courses of so-called critical thinking and fact-checking imposed abroad, which have nothing to do with philosophical skepticism or logic.” “In fact, this is a course in applied Russophobia,” says Vinnik.
I guess pacifism isn’t a legit philosophical position any more — philosophers must be militant and opposed to heresies like feminism. Also, critical thinking is anti-Russian…also, probably, anti-Floridian and anti-Texan.
