Neanderthals were morning people

https://www.science.org/content/article/neanderthals-were-morning-people

15 DEC 2023 5:30 PM ET
BY PHIE JACOBS




Are you a morning person? If so, you might have inherited that trait from a Neanderthal ancestor, researchers report this week in Genome Biology and Evolution.

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Rationalizing

 

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Lead-tainted cinnamon fruit puree

I those who are against government regulations expect us all to test all of our own food.




https://apnews.com/article/apple-cinnamon-fruit-pouch-wanabana-lead-contamination-1927a5be53ba6d557ec8e17804e06d9f




U.S. food inspectors found “extremely high” levels of lead in cinnamon at a plant in Ecuador that made applesauce pouches tainted with the metal, the FDA said Monday. The recalled pouches have been linked to dozens of illnesses in U.S. kids.

Cinnamon tested from the plant had lead levels more than 2,000 times higher than a maximum level proposed by the FDA, officials said.

The samples came from ground or powdered cinnamon from Negasmart, an Ecuadorian company that supplied the spice to Austrofoods, which made the pouches. The applesauce pouches were sold under three brands — WanaBana, Schnucks and Weis.

FDA said lead has not been detected in WanaBana products made without cinnamon and sold in the U.S.

DOL looking for people owed back wages

 

The Dept of Labor has money for unclaimed wages from Investigations where they couldn't locate workers. After 3 yrs it is turned over to US Treasury. See their web site for directions on how to check if you are owed money.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/wow

Billionaires Are Bankrolling Judges’ Luxury Travel

And how many more didn't report their gifts, like some supreme court justices.

https://www.levernews.com/billionaires-are-bankrolling-judges-luxury-travel/

 

Dec 15, 2023

 In 2021 and 2022, two conservative, billionaire-funded legal interests sent more than 100 federal judges on 251 trips to conferences and seminars in cushy locations around the country and overseas, according to a Lever review of hundreds of federal financial disclosure forms. 

Alarms raised over missing classified Russian intel file last seen with Trump: report

 

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-russian-documents/

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/

 

Tom Boggioni
December 15, 2023 8:41AM ET

 

  According to a report from CNN, U.S. intelligence officials are searching for a missing file containing highly sensitive information about Russia as well as information about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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According to CNN, "The intelligence was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides with top-secret security clearances were able to review the material only at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where their work scrutinizing it was itself kept in a locked safe."

"The binder was last seen at the White House during Trump’s final days in office.

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10 Reasons Why Societies Fail to Respond to Their Greatest Threats

I suggest reading the whole article


https://www.okdoomer.io/you-arent-the-one-panicking-they-are/


Jessica Wildfire
Dec.7, 2023




Let's face it, we're a mess.


Most of us know we're not doing enough to deal with our greatest threats. Every day, we witness the dumbest behavior, things that seem to fly in the face of our most basic survival instincts.


We ask, "Why???"


The human brain evolved over millions of years. Most psychologists agree, it's good at responding to immediate threats.


It's terrible at responding to slow, gradual threats, even when they're far more important. As Brian Merchant writes in Vice, "Humans have, historically, proven absolutely awful, even incapable, of comprehending the large, looming... slow burn threats facing their societies." In Collapse, Jared Diamond chronicles how leaders of past civilizations failed to address clear dangers because it was easier to shrug them off and downplay them.


As it turns out, there's a lot wrong with the human brain. It's full of contradictory impulses that fight against our better reasoning.


Here's a list:


1) People don't take invisible threats seriously.


Our biggest threats now are invisible.


2) Everyone thinks, "It won't happen to me."


3) People get high off ignoring threats.



It feels good to blow off warnings.

For a lot of people, it delivers a dopamine boost. It gives them a sense of power and control, however fleeting it might be.




4) People shoot the messenger.




People tend to get punished for delivering bad news. Instead of being listened to, they're gaslit and pathologized. They're demonized.




5) People trust their gut too much.




6) People want to forget collective trauma.




7) People can adjust to almost anything.




8) People defend what they consider normal.




Once someone adjusts to a horrible normal, they prefer it.

Change scares them.




9) Most people just want to fit in.

Our desire for social acceptance often overrides our survival instincts, short-circuiting our normal threat response.




10) The elites always panic.

The super rich seem to grasp all of these glitches, at least on an intuitive level. They exploit them for their personal gain.

The corporate media has fallen into a predictable pattern over the last several years, downplaying and dismissing threats instead of giving the public reliable and accurate information. The super rich don't care about saving people. Instead, they obsess over protecting their property from looters and securing the most resources for themselves. They don't want ordinary people to take action, because that threatens their own interests.

Woman who spent life in iron lung dies at 61

 

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008/may/29/woman-who-spent-life-in-iron-lung-dies-at-61/

Woody Baird, AP

May 29, 2008

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Odell, 61, died Wednesday when a power failure shut off electricity and stopped the pump drawing air into her lungs.

Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence.

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Odell, who contracted polio when she was 3 years old, lived with her parents, Freeman and Geneva Odell, and their house was equipped with an emergency generator designed to fire up immediately in a power failure.

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Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/uob-rda071916.php

Public Release: 19-Jul-2016
Researchers discover altruism is favored by chance
Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate
University of Bath

•••••

An international team of researchers, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that altruism is favoured by random fluctuations in nature, offering an explanation to the mystery as to why this seemingly disadvantageous trait has evolved.

The researchers, from the Universities of Bath, Manchester and Princeton (USA), developed a mathematical model to predict the path of evolution when altruistic "cooperators" live alongside "cheats" who use up resources but do not themselves contribute.

•••••

"What we are lacking is an explanation of how these behaviours could have evolved in organisms as basic as yeast. Our research proposes a simple answer - it turns out that cooperation is favoured by chance."

The key insight is that the total size of population that can be supported depends on the proportion of cooperators: more cooperation means more food for all and a larger population. If, due to chance, there is a random increase in the number of cheats then there is not enough food to go around and total population size will decrease. Conversely, a random decrease in the number of cheats will allow the population to grow to a larger size, disproportionally benefitting the cooperators. In this way, the cooperators are favoured by chance, and are more likely to win in the long term.

Dr George Constable, soon to join the University of Bath from Princeton, uses the analogy of flipping a coin, where heads wins £20 but tails loses £10:

"Although the odds winning or losing are the same, winning is more good than losing is bad. Random fluctuations in cheat numbers are exploited by the cooperators, who benefit more then they lose out."

Santos expulsion

 Dec. 1, 2023

Does anybody else think it is warped that stealing donors' credit card info and stealing from them didn't get Santos expelled, but using campaign funds for personal use did. He is hardly the only one to use campaign funds for personal use, including Trump.