Sunday, February 26, 2023

And another day of extremism, an even worse FL bill, ‘climate-friendly’ fuel causes cancer, the haves and have-nots of American high schools, ‘15-min cities,’ prioritizing sleep, human composting, and Scott Adams once again shows his true colors comes to a close:

“Because nothing is racist to a racist, or they’d have to admit they’re a racist.” — Marsha Warfield

US mass killings linked to extremism at highest level in decades, report finds. The number of US mass killings linked to extremism over the past decade was at least three times higher than the total from any other 10-year period since the 1970s, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL report also found that all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to rightwing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy.

Gov. Greg Abbott says most gun crimes involve illegally owned weapons. That’s not true in mass shootings. Most of the state’s 19 mass shootings over the past six decades were carried out by men who legally possessed firearms, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. -- In other words, Governor Greg Abbott is a liar.

Thought the ‘Stop WOKE Act’ was bad? A new Florida bill is worse. Florida House Bill 999 is a dangerous expansion of the unconstitutional ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ putting entire majors disfavored by legislators on the chopping block. — There is so much bad shit in this bill that I couldn’t mention all of it. If you’re in higher education, read this. If you care about higher education, read this. All of it is bad for education. 

This “Climate-Friendly” Fuel Comes With an Astronomical Cancer Risk. The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer…That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Millions who rely on Medicaid may be booted from program. But as states begin checking everyone’s eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years, as many as 14 million people could lose access to that health care coverage.

Black married couples face heavier tax penalties than white couples, a report says. Researchers with the nonprofit think tank found that Black couples were more likely to face marriage penalties (46% to 43%) and less likely to receive marriage bonuses (36% to 43%) than white couples.

A viral high school tour underscores the haves and have-nots in America's schools. These basic disparities are the aftereffects of a legacy of systemic racism and racial segregation in schools, according to Jamel Donnor, a professor of education at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “For so long, many school districts fought integration, fought desegregation, and so a lot of resources were dedicated to that.” he said. “A lot of resources were actually used to circumvent school desegregation as well. And then you also have to throw in that mix white flight, which also played a role in all those things.” -- If you haven’t seen the video, it’s posted in this story. Wow. The privilege and opportunity gap widens every fucking day.

Newspapers Pull “Dilbert” After Creator Scott Adams Calls Black People a “Hate Group”. The long-running series Dilbert will be removed from several local and national publications after its creator, Scott Adams, called Black Americans a “hate group” and urged white Americans to “get the fuck away” from them in a recently uploaded YouTube video. On Friday, publications like the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the USA Today network announced that they’ll be severing ties with Adams due to his remarks…“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away,” Adams said. “Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.” None of this should be super surprising to anyone who’s followed Adams, who’s been on this “anti-woke” shtick for a while.

How ‘15-minute cities’ turned into an international conspiracy theory. Duncan Enright never imagined he’d get death threats over a plan to reduce grinding city traffic...The accusations flung at Enright were wild and varied, and mostly from people with no connection to Oxford, he said. Many were from outside the UK. They claimed he wanted to confine people to their neighborhoods and accused him of being part of a malign international plot to control people’s movement in the name of climate action. “It was quite alarming,” Enright told CNN, “I haven’t really had anything like that before in my many years in local government.” Enright had been swept into a conspiracy theory, fast gaining pace around the world, which has rebranded plans to cut traffic, reduce air pollution and increase walking and cycling in cities as “climate lockdowns.”

What's really behind the wave of sadness among teenage girls? We asked 9 of them. Much of the conjecture about why girls are experiencing a spike in sadness has come from adults, whose theories include smartphones and social media, as well as anxieties about the world teens will inherit, rife with problems like climate change. Metzger and eight other teenage girls interviewed across six states generally agreed with those hypotheses, but they said their generation has the confidence to speak up about how they’re feeling and why they think that is — if adults are willing to hear their voices.

A new bill has been proposed in Florida that would enact a series of animal protections and guidelines, such as banning cat declawing, animal testing for cosmetics and dogs hanging their heads out of windows. Florida Senate Bill 932, filed by state Minority Democratic Leader Lauren Book, says that dogs would not be allowed to stick any part of their bodies out of the window, ride in the driver's lap or ride on motorcycles.

Want to live longer? Then prioritize sleep in your life. Men who followed all five of the healthy sleep habits had a life expectancy that was 4.7 years greater than people who had none or only one of the five elements of low-risk sleep, the study found. The impact of healthy sleep habits was much lower for women: Those who followed all five sleep habits gained 2.4 years compared with those who did none or only one.

Human Composting Poised to Become a Billion-Dollar Industry. Composting a human currently takes eight to 12 weeks, and is estimated to use just one-eighth the energy required for cremation.

Surprising ‘forbidden planet’ discovered outside our solar system. An M dwarf star is smaller, cooler and redder than our sun. These dim stars are some of the most common in the universe, and in recent years, astronomers have discovered that M dwarf stars are more likely to have planets orbiting them. But astronomers weren’t expecting such small stars to host giant planets — and that’s exactly what they found when they took a closer look at the TOI-5205 planetary system.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.

 

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

And another day of brutal weather, a FL shooting, the disgrace that is MTG, a ‘Classical’ Christian alternative to the SAT/ACT in FL, a 4-day work week, ‘forever chemicals,’ and a 30-day paid ‘marriage leave’ comes to a close:

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid. " — Benjamin Franklin

Covid Deaths

US: 1,143,760

World: 6,794,272

Covid Cases

US: 105,092,404

World: 679,134,209

Flights canceled, highways closed as winter storm wallops US. A brutal winter storm closed interstate highways from Arizona to Wyoming Wednesday, trapped drivers in cars, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and prompted the first blizzard warning in Southern California in decades — and the worst won’t be over for several days.

Florida shooting spree leaves 3 people dead, including a child and a TV news employee covering one of the shootings. An Orlando television reporter was among the dead in a shooting spree in Florida that killed three on Wednesday, while covering one of the shootings, police said.

Marjorie Taylor Greene calls again for ‘a national divorce’. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) resurrected her calls for a “national divorce” on Monday, arguing that Republican and Democratic states needed to be separated and the federal government needed to shrink.

“I'd love to hear GOP leaders explain why it's all right for a House Homeland Security Committee member to publicly endorse the dissolution of the United States.” — Steve Benen

Florida Mulls 'Classical' Christian Alternative To SAT And ACT Testing. Tate told the Miami Herald that the College Board’s SAT has become “increasingly ideological” due to having “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.” On Twitter, he called the College Board “one of the most ideologically extreme organizations in American education.” — Florida is on a fascist theocracy trajectory.

Chinese provinces give 30 days' paid 'marriage leave' to boost birth rate. Some Chinese provinces are giving young newlyweds 30 days of paid leave in the hope of encouraging marriage and boosting a flagging birth rate, the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily Health said on Tuesday. China's minimum paid marriage leave is three days, but provinces have been able to set their own more generous allowances since February.

The five-day workweek is dead. The calls for something better are just getting louder. Now, there’s a growing conversation about how American workers can take back more of their time. The trauma and disruption of the last three years have prompted a lot of Americans to reevaluate their relationships to work, whether it’s restaurant servers tired of risking their safety for poverty-level wages or office workers quitting rather than giving up remote work. And part of that reevaluation is about the workweek, which many say is due for a reboot…Today’s work schedules, with their combination of “overwork and then no work,” in many ways mirror the conditions that preceded the reforms of the 1930s, Loomis said…As of 2014, the average salaried worker worked 49 hours per week, according to a Gallup survey, with 25 percent working more than 60 hours — and working hours for many have actually gone up, not down, during the pandemic.

Dozens of UK companies trialled a four-day working week last year. On average, their revenue went up. The results of the world's largest four-day working week trial are in — and most companies are sticking with the change…The companies saw a 57-per-cent drop in resignations. Employees reported a decrease in their anxiety levels, fatigue and sleep issues and improvement in their mental and physical health.

Companies can no longer silence laid-off employees in exchange for severance. Employers can no longer include a broadly written confidentiality clause that requires you to keep mum about the terms of your severance agreement. And they can no longer include a broadly written non-disparagement clause that prohibits you from discussing the terms and conditions of your employment with third parties.

Sexual attacks against teen girls increased at school, online and at home during lockdown. The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior survey is given to more than 17,000 U.S. high school students every other year. Based on the responses in 2019, an estimated 850,000 high school girls reported that they’d been raped. By 2021, that estimate soared to more than 1 million.

Sexual assault and domestic violence injuries, like bruises, can be challenging to spot on darker skinned victims under the standard white light found in most exam rooms. New research shows using alternate light sources could help. Researchers at George Mason University, in partnership with Texas A&M University, analyzed data from more than 31,000 observations of bruised areas on the arm among a diverse sample of skin colors and found that blue or purple light was five times more effective at showing bruises on people with darker skin than white light, the study says.

'Forever chemicals' found in animals around the world. More than 330 species of wildlife around the world are contaminated with widely used chemicals known as PFAS, according to a new analysis that identified traces of the synthetic chemicals in animals on every continent except Antarctica...Synthetic PFAS compounds (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down over time and thus can remain permanently in the air, soil, water and in the body. These chemicals have been used extensively since the 1940s in industrial manufacturing and to make products ranging from nonstick cookware and cleaning products to foams and stain- and water-resistant fabrics.

No cow needed: Oat and soy can be called milk, FDA proposes. Food and Drug Administration officials issued guidance that says plant-based beverages don’t pretend to be from dairy animals – and that U.S. consumers aren’t confused by the difference.

Taking an antibiotic after sex helps gay men curb STDs — but might fuel drug resistance. A growing body of research shows taking doxycycline after sex helps prevent STDs, but some experts fear such intervention could fuel drug-resistant pathogens.

Bing’s chat mode is now on mobile — and you can speak to it. Yes, you can now speak directly to Bing or add it to a Skype conversation if you’re feeling particularly lonely.

Flood of AI-Generated Stories Prompts Sci-Fi Magazine to Shut Down Submissions. On Tuesday, Clarke said they do plan to eventually open up submissions again, but he elaborated that “We don’t have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away.”

Space telescope uncovers massive galaxies near cosmic dawn. Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these “monsters.”

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

And another day of those at Fox knowing they were lying, Jimmy Carter in hospice, Russian crimes against humanity, waiting to watch their baby die, Spain approves menstrual leave, nonmonogamy, men’s penises getting longer, and the case for hanging out comes to a close:

“Dear Every and All Republican/Conservative mocking or ridiculing President Carter, He's better than you.” — John Pavlovitz 

“At different points in time, a majority of Americans believed slavery was ok, that being gay was morally wrong, and that multiple diseases could be biologically cured by applying leeches. Popular sentiment is not a proxy for science or reality.” — Elizabeth Spiers

Tucker Carlson and Fox News Knew They Were Lying About Election Fraud. Tucker Carlson—the Fox News host who has made a wildly successful career out of pushing white nationalism on what is arguably the most racist show on television—is an entertainer, not a reporter. Carlson’s lawyers said as much when he was accused of slander for falsely claiming that Stormy Daniels had extorted President Trump.

Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience. A trove of newly-released text messages and emails have laid bare how the right-wing media giant operated with little regard for fact in the weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election. The correspondence reveals that the network’s senior-most executives and highest-profile hosts chose not to disclose what they believed to be the truth of the election out of fear that that the facts would alienate Fox News’ audience and throw the highly profitable business into ruin.

"Fox news is not entertainment and it certainly isn't journalism.  It's a coordinated attempt to undermine our democracy by spewing hate and division to an audience that was waiting for hate and division to be normalized." — Joe Lockhart

“So can we finally get some reassurance that Fox News won’t be shown on military bases, the FBI, USSS, or any other government agency? Or are we paying taxes for civil servants to consume lies and “entertainment”?” — Ashley Rangappa

“No other democracy would allow a propaganda outlet to intentionally  poison its citizenry under the cover of 'news.'” — Rachel Bitecofer 

“Arguing with a Trump supporter is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board, and strut around like it won…” -- Omar Rivero

Proud Boys leaders facing Jan. 6 charges say they intend to subpoena Trump. “Donald Trump called on patriots to stop the steal. We’re calling on Donald Trump to take the stand.”

Jimmy Carter, 39th US president, enters hospice care at home. After a series of short hospital stays, the statement said, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

US: Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine. The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday, insisting that “justice must be served” to the perpetrators.

Sheriff: Gunman kills 6, including ex-wife, in Mississippi. A lone gunman killed six people including his ex-wife and stepfather Friday at multiple locations in a tiny rural community in northern Mississippi, the sheriff said, leaving investigators searching for clues to what motivated the shocking rampage.

Turmoil in courts on gun laws in wake of justices’ ruling. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books…The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said. Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.” — Fuck the current Supreme Court GOP justices.

Despite decades of mass shootings in Texas, legislators have failed to pass meaningful gun control laws. In the past six decades, the state has experienced at least 19 mass shootings that have killed a total of nearly 200 people and wounded more than 230 others. Yet state leaders have repeatedly batted away measures that would limit access to guns, opting instead to ease restrictions on publicly carrying them while making it harder for local governments to regulate them. — Republicans actively  try to get more people killed.

Mississippi Cops Beat, Waterboarded Handcuffed Black Men, Shot 1 For ‘Dating White Women’: Lawyers. Multiple white police officers in Mississippi falsely accused two Black men of selling drugs and “dating white women” before handcuffing and brutally torturing them last month, including shooting one of them in the mouth in what should result in attempted murder charges, a group of lawyers said this week. — This can not be reformed. Wow. 

Florida couple unable to get abortion will see baby die after delivery. It has been deemed a “doubly lethal diagnosis” because babies with malfunctioning kidneys can’t remove deadly toxins from their bodies and can in turn experience renal failure. Additionally, the absence of amniotic fluid in a womb causes a baby to be born without the ability to breathe. — Thanks GOP. Fuckers. 

Lawsuit: Mentally ill man froze to death in Alabama jail. A mentally ill man froze to death at an Alabama jail, according to a lawsuit filed by the man’s family who say he was kept naked in a concrete cell and believe he was also placed in a freezer or other frigid environment.

Spain approves menstrual leave, teen abortion and trans laws. The Spanish parliament on Thursday approved legislation expanding abortion and transgender rights for teenagers, while making Spain the first country in Europe that will entitle workers to paid menstrual leave...The changes to sexual and reproductive rights mean that 16- and 17-year-olds in Spain can now undergo an abortion without parental consent. Period products will now be offered free in schools and prisons, while state-run health centers will do the same with hormonal contraceptives and the morning after pill. The menstrual leave measure allows workers suffering debilitating period pain to take paid time off. In addition, the changes enshrine in law the right to have an abortion in a state hospital. Currently more than 80% of termination procedures in Spain are carried out in private clinics due to a high number of doctors in the public system who refuse to perform them — with many citing religious reasons.

Federal officials say more than 100 children worked in dangerous jobs for slaughterhouse cleaning firm. The Labor Department said Friday it found 102 children as young as 13 working hazardous overnight jobs cleaning slaughterhouses in eight states in what it called a “corporate-wide failure” by one of the largest food sanitation companies in the country, Packers Sanitation Services Inc.

Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds. The immunity generated from an infection was found to be “at least as high, if not higher” than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine.

GOP bill would jail publishers for distributing ‘sexually explicit materials’ to schools. A bill introduced this month by Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) would amend the federal criminal code to prohibit a publishing house from knowingly furnishing “sexually explicit material” — a term that the legislation does not clearly define — to an elementary school or high school. Publishing houses that violate the proposed law would be subject to a maximum $500,000 fine, while individuals in the company’s higher management would face similar monetary penalties, as well as up to five years imprisonment. — Read that again…carefully. They don’t define “sexually explicit material” (which is relative to each individual) but instead make it vague so then almost anything can be considered breaking the law. Republicans are fascists. It’s way past time to fully understand this fact.

Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive. Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work. Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled…Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”. Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”. — Does this mean other books, across all genres, could suffer the same fate? If something is deemed as “offensive,” a subjective word, then will the original text be relegated to Orwell’s Memory Hole? Hold on to your physical books people.

Meta to launch monthly subscription service priced at $11.99. Meta Platforms (META.O) on Sunday announced that it is testing a monthly subscription service, called Meta Verified, which will let users verify their accounts using a government ID and get a blue badge, as it looks to help content creators grow and build communities.

Irregular sleep may be harmful to your heart, study finds. Poor sleep — including poor quality, abnormal quantity and fragmented sleep — has been linked with cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease-related deaths before, but less had been known about the specific associations between sleep regularity and atherosclerosis.

Men’s penises are getting longer. Here’s why this is actually a problem. In a new study that was published rather ironically on Valentine’s Day, they learned that over the last 30 years, the average erect penis length has increased by nearly 25% globally. The problem? This phallic enhancement is correlated with a steep decline in sperm counts and testosterone levels, which has many experts worried that a reproductive health crisis may be looming…For optimal fertility, a healthy concentration of sperm is required of the order of about 40 million sperm per mL…The researchers in Israel report a drop in mean sperm count from 104 to 49 million per milliliter of semen, which is dangerously close to a tipping point in global fertility…”What we found was quite different from trends in other areas of male fertility and health. Erect penile length is getting longer, from an average of 4.8 inches to 6 inches, over the past 29 years.”…Such a huge jump in penis size over such a short time is obviously unnatural and could be a physical symptom of a host of problems that may plague men’s reproductive health. It’s not clear at all what is causing this great lengthening, but scientists have a hunch that exposure to pesticides and chemicals in personal hygiene products that may be disrupting the body’s natural hormones could be to blame. The same forces may also be responsible for the decline in sperm counts and testosterone.

Can a monogamous couple happily become nonmonogamous? It’s possible but not easy, experts say. No matter the reason, interest in nonmonogamy — participation in nonexclusive sexual relationships — is on the rise. In a 2020 study of 822 currently monogamous people by Kinsey Institute research fellow Justin Lehmiller, nearly one-third said that having an open relationship was their favorite sexual fantasy, and 80% wanted to act on it.

It’s not a darning tool, it’s a very naughty toy: Roman dildo found. Archaeologists believe they may have found the only known lifesize Roman dildo, discovered in a ditch in what were the farthest northern fringes of the empire. If it was not used as a sexual implement then the 2,000-year-old object may have been an erect penis-shaped pestle, or it could have been a feature from a statue that people touched for good luck. What it definitely is not is what it was catalogued as after its discovery at the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland in 1992: a darning tool.

Brighter and Brighter: How Light Pollution Is Erasing the Stars. In January, Kyba and his team published an analysis in the journal Science of the data collected between 2011 and 2022, revealing a dramatic increase in light pollution, with the night sky brightening nearly 10 percent annually over that decade. The striking trend means that, at least in some areas, the sky’s brightness is doubling every eight years.

The Case for Hanging Out. There’s a growing crisis in our social lives. Could the cure be this simple? But it was not because I thought her book was interesting that I had reached out to Liming. It was because I passionately believed that her book was right. “I’ve become an accidental witness to a growing crisis,” she writes in Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. “People struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” I, too, see a crisis brewing, among not only people my age but among the peers of my teenage children and the college students I teach. Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit. I agree with Liming that no one is down to hang out anymore, and agree with her that it’s a “quiet catastrophe.”

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.

Thursday, February 16, 2023

And another day of perjury, court documents and Fox News, depression, the OH train derailment, bird flu, TX banning Chinese from purchasing property, ransomware attacks, Tesla recalls, and nonconsensual deepfake porn AI comes to a close:

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.’ — Voltaire

Trump election probe grand jury believes some witnesses lied. A special grand jury investigating efforts by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia says it believes “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” according to portions of the special grand jury’s final report that were released on Thursday. -- Let’s hurry up and get these fuckers in jail. Or are they above the law?

Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump’s election fraud claims, court document reveals. The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air, damning messages contained in a Thursday court filing revealed. -- Stop watching Fox News.

Sen. John Fetterman checks into hospital for depression. Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, has checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to seek treatment for clinical depression, his office said Thursday. -- It takes a strong person to do this.

Biden administration vows accountability over train derailment as Ohio senators press for action. Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and JD Vance, a Republican, are both calling for more federal resources to be devoted to the disaster.

6 key things to know after the toxic train derailment in Ohio. Weeks after a major train derailment and controlled explosion of chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, residents have been encouraged to return home. But many questions remain about how the train derailed and what the lingering chemical exposure could be in residents’ air and water.

Global H5N1 bird flu pandemic so bad many countries are now considering vaccination. The situation has become so dire that countries in the European Union and the US Biden Administration are now considering testing avian vaccines. Until now, many countries including Australia have been reluctant to vaccinate poultry because of the risk of bird flu spreading from vaccinated but asymptomatic poultry into other animals, as well as export trade implications.

Chinese citizens in Texas are incensed over a proposal to ban them from buying property in the state. A bill introduced in the Texas Senate in late December has been gaining steam over the past month, and it came as a bombshell to Asian Americans and others across the state. The legislation, TX SB 147, would make it illegal for Chinese citizens to buy any property in Texas, including homes. -- Texas is such a shitty state.

Kentucky bill would ban drag shows within 1,000 feet of schools, parks and homes. Kentucky is one of at least 13 states, including Arizona, Texas and Montana, where lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to restrict drag performances.

Oakland Has Declared a State of Emergency After a Ransomware Attack. It is unknown which cybercriminal group is behind the attack. City officials haven’t said whether a ransom demand has been made or if they’ve entered into negotiations with the hackers. Details are also scarce as to which city agencies are most impacted about the attack. Early reports of the attack said that it had downed computers at all of the city’s public libraries.

Tesla recalls ‘Full Self-Driving’ to fix unsafe actions. U.S. safety regulators have pressured Tesla into recalling nearly 363,000 vehicles with its “Full Self-Driving” system because it misbehaves around intersections and doesn’t always follow speed limits. The recall, part of part of a larger investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into Tesla’s automated driving systems, is the most serious action taken yet against the electric vehicle maker. -- And Tesla had to be pressured into it. WTF?

Is it worth removing your fallopian tubes if you're not at an obvious risk of ovarian cancer? A top advocacy group recommends it. An ovarian cancer research group is urging women, regardless of risk, to consider removing their fallopian tubes if they are done having children and undergoing other gynecological surgeries. The recommendation, which was recently shared by the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA), would apply to women and anyone with ovaries regardless of their ovarian cancer risk. This includes those without a family history of the disease or a genetic predisposition to it…“You know, we’re not suggesting, and I don’t think anybody is suggesting, that average-risk women go out and have surgeries specifically and only for this purpose. What we’re saying is, if you happen to be having pelvic surgery anyway, and hundreds of thousands of women in the United States every year [do], then you should discuss with your doctor if it makes sense to remove your tubes at the same time,” she added.

Sam Altman is tech’s next household name — if we survive the killer robots. But in the past three months, Altman, 37, has rocketed to the top of the tech industry’s power rankings on the back of OpenAI. Altman is CEO of the company, which created the viral artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. The technology has caused a panic at rivals such as Google, sparked fears of killer robots and reoriented the direction of tech innovation seemingly overnight. Move over Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Silicon Valley may have found its next star CEO.

AI search engines are not your friends. Microsoft hasn’t just built a product that emotionally manipulates you. It’s built one that does so specifically to deflect basic criticism in a highly personal, anthropomorphized way. That makes it not only a slightly creepy search engine but one that you can’t trust to do its job. While I feel like this is clear to most Verge readers, the more closely AI imitates human conversation, the easier it becomes to forget: robots are not your friends. AI text generators are an amazingly, beautifully powerful version of your phone keyboard’s autopredict function. New Bing is a version of Bing with sentences and footnotes instead of links and snippets. It’s a potentially useful and hugely fascinating product, not a person.

Nonconsensual deepfake porn puts AI in spotlight. But despite the warnings, we haven’t seen many notable instances, that we know of, where deepfakes have successfully been deployed in geopolitics. But there is one group the technology has been weaponized against consistently and for several years: women. Deepfakes have been used to put women’s faces, without their consent, into often aggressive pornographic videos. It’s a depraved AI spin on the humiliating practice of revenge porn, with deepfake videos appearing so real it can be hard for female victims to deny it isn’t really them.

Bruce Willis' 'condition has progressed' to frontotemporal dementia, his family says. In a heartfelt Instagram post, ex-wife Demi Moore and Rumer Willis, the couple's eldest daughter, shared that the actor's aphasia diagnosis, which the family had announced in March 2022, has progressed.

Lonely tunes: Humpback whales wail less as population grows. Those melancholy tunes sung by humpback whales may really be a sign of loneliness. Scientists who tracked humpback whales in Australia noticed that fewer whales wailed to find mates as their population grew.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

And another day of a slew of subpoenas, threats from China, millions of children at risk of losing Medicaid coverage, the Doomsday Glacier, a Marburg virus outbreak, superbugs, male birth-control, and the meaning of casual dating comes to a close:

“It’s impossible to overstate the enormity of the damage caused by Fox News.” -- Andrew Weinsten

Pence says he will fight subpoena as far as Supreme Court. “Never before in American history has a vice president been summoned to appear in court to testify against the president with whom they serve,” he said. -- There’s always a first time for everything, you waste of flesh. Just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done now. Pence should not get off scot-free because he was the fucking VP. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone in the country, including elected officials such as the President and Vice President of the country, then we don’t live in a free country governed by laws. We live at the whim of whoever is “governing” the country.

Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows subpoenaed by special counsel in Jan. 6 investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony related to January 6, and Meadows received the subpoena sometime in January, the source said. An attorney for Meadows declined to comment.

House Republicans subpoena Apple, Facebook and Google over content moderation. Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio sent the subpoenas to the CEOs of Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft requesting documents and communications “referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction or reduced circulation of content.” The subpoenas also demanded documents specifying the employees responsible for developing or executing content policies and any communications with people outside the executive branch about policies or decisions about content moderation. -- Unlike Pence, I’m betting these CEOs will have to abide by their subpoenas.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz says he will not face federal sex trafficking charge. U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz's office on Wednesday said federal prosecutors had told his attorneys that he would not be criminally charged following an almost three-year-long sex-trafficking investigation. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. -- Of course. There are two, probably even three, judicial systems in this country. The powerful get away with almost anything they want.

China threatens US entities over downing of balloon. China says the balloon was a unmanned weather airship that was accidentally blown off course and accuses the U.S. of overreacting in bringing it down with a missile fired from an F-22 fighter jet.

Study shows ‘striking’ number who believe news misinforms. Half of Americans in a recent survey indicated they believe national news organizations intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting. The survey, released Wednesday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, goes beyond others that have shown a low level of trust in the media to the startling point where many believe there is an intent to deceive. -- Thanks Fox News. Fucking it up for everyone, even those that don’t watch your shitty channel.

Michigan State students’ training kicked in during shooting. When the texts began coming in about a shooter at Michigan State University, training that many students started receiving as schoolchildren automatically kicked in. -- That sentence shows what a sad state of affairs we have in this country regarding gun culture.

Mississippi Cops Shot a 15-Year-Old in the Head. Four Months Later, They Haven’t Released The Video. There are a lot of questions about the killing. The Gulfport police say McMillan turned toward officers after they instructed him to drop a weapon. But witnesses say he was unarmed when an officer shot him, and that he went several minutes without medical care as blood poured from his head. “I did not see a gun on him,” Deborah Stout, an Uber driver who witnessed the shooting, said in a video posted on Facebook. “He was coming out of the store with his hands up.” Four months later, amid conflicting accounts, the city still has not released body-cam footage of the incident or even named the officer who pulled the trigger. McMillan’s family and supporters have no way to determine what actually happened. “It’s been agonizing” to go so long without the information, Mateen tells me. “For them not to release it to the public, like they should, it lets me know they’re trying to hide something.”

Millions of children are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage starting in April. The majority of American children now receive their health insurance through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Georgetown Center for Children and Families. But that could change starting this spring. As many as 6.7 million children are at risk of losing that coverage once states restart their reviews of recipients’ eligibility, according to Georgetown. — Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.

UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings. More than 200 million Americans are covered by private health insurance. But data from state and federal regulators shows that insurers reject about 1 in 7 claims for treatment. Many people, faced with fighting insurance companies, simply give up: One study found that Americans file formal appeals on only 0.1% of claims denied by insurers under the Affordable Care Act…Those records offer an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at how one of America's leading health care insurers relentlessly fought to reduce spending on care, even as its profits rose to record levels. — Such bullshit. It shows how capitalism is bad for most humans. Healthcare is a right, not  a privilege, and certainly it’s not to just make some wealthy fucking individuals wealthier. The recorded conversation is appalling. 

2nd Amendment sanctuary measure overturned in Oregon. Local governments in Oregon can’t declare themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries and ban police from enforcing certain gun laws, a state appeals court decided Wednesday, in the first court case filed over a concept that hundreds of U.S. counties have adopted in recent years.

Man allegedly left naked on concrete floor in jail for days died of suspected hypothermia, lawsuit says. Tony Mitchell was a pretrial detainee at the Walker County Jail from Jan. 12 until his death Jan. 26, according to a federal complaint filed Monday in U.S District Court for Northern Alabama. Mitchell's mother sued after a corrections employee showed her surveillance video of her son's time in custody that contradicted what she had been told by officials, the suit says.

Skinny robot documents forces eroding Doomsday Glacier. Scientists got their first up-close look at what’s eating away part of Antarctica’s Thwaites ice shelf, nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier because of its massive melt and sea rise potential, and it’s both good and bad news. Using a 13-foot pencil-shaped robot that swam under the grounding line where ice first juts over the sea, scientists saw a shimmery critical point in Thwaites’ chaotic breakup, “where it’s melting so quickly there, there’s just material streaming out of the glacier,” said robot creator and polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University. Before, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard-to-reach point on Thwaites. But with the robot named Icefin lowered down a slender 1,925-foot (587-meter) hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier, even more than melting. “That’s how the glacier is falling apart. It’s not thinning and going away. It shatters,” said Schmidt, lead author of one of two studies in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

Ohio train derailment leaves toxic chemicals behind. Residents in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, are dealing with the fallout from a dangerous chemical spill after a train derailed earlier this month.

Equatorial Guinea confirms first Marburg virus outbreak, at least nine dead. Equatorial Guinea has confirmed its first outbreak of the Marburg virus, a highly infectious and deadly disease similar to Ebola, following the deaths of at least nine people, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday...Marburg virus disease can have a fatality rate of up to 88 percent, according to the WHO. There are no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat it.

Superbugs are a leading global health risk: UN report. Superbugs are now a leading global health risk, according to a major U.N. report published Tuesday. Major industries like the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries are largely responsible for this growing threat, inadvertently driving dangerous pathogens to evolve to outsmart currently available medications, the report said.

Girl with deadly inherited condition is cured with gene therapy on NHS. Teddi Shaw was diagnosed with metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), an inherited condition that causes catastrophic damage to the nervous system and organs. Those affected usually die young. But the 19-month-old from Northumberland is now disease-free after being treated with the world’s most expensive drug, Libmeldy.

Experimental male birth-control drug shows promise in new study. Lab results show that a new “on-demand” male birth control drug can temporarily prevent sperm from maturing and swimming in mice.

What does 'casual dating' mean these days? Because although casual dating and hook-up culture are inextricably linked and the ideas are often used interchangeably, it’s clear that the term "casual" doesn’t only refer to one night stands anymore.

James Webb telescope captures a Milky Way-like galaxy a billion light-years away. The star system, LEDA 2046648, sits a billion light-years away from ours in the constellation Hercules; it contains thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and countless planets.

RIP Raquel Welch. She was 82.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.