Theory might win the prize for the most commonly misunderstood word in science. In everyday usage, a theory is a hunch. A guess. Pure speculation. For example, I have a theory about why my cat yells (sings?) at night — he’s calling on the spirits of his ancestors to free him from the captivity of his luxurious life.
But in science speak, a theory is exactly the opposite — it’s a broad explanation for a wide range of phenomena that’s supported by a vast amount of evidence. As science progresses and evidence accumulates, related ideas are combined into a single, clear, and powerful explanation. Theories form the basis of our scientific knowledge and are used by scientists to make further predictions for testing. Examples include gravitational theory, plate tectonic theory, evolutionary theory, cell theory, germ theory, and atomic theory.
Understanding the natural world is the ultimate goal of science, and theories are about as close to the “truth” as we may ever get. So don’t be fooled when someone doubts science because “it’s just a theory.”
Learn more: How to speak science: thinkingispower.com/how-to-speak-science/
The social media platform once known as Twitter has reportedly started impeding users from accessing links to media organizations and online competitors that company owner Elon Musk personally “dislikes.”
The Washington Post conducted an analysis that documented a five-second load time delay occuring when X users click on links to certain websites like Facebook, Substack, Reuters, and The New York Times.
As usual, this evening NPR refers to Biden's son tax fraud, no mention what happened was he failed to file for several years, and has since paid the back taxes, then refers to Trump case of hush money w/o mentioning that case is about tax fraud, he recorded it as business expense.
The Republican Party uses right-wing media to knowingly spread lies, to according to an ex-Republican political adviser and researcher who spoke with Newsweek.
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Critics would say that the liberal echo chamber is CNN, MSNBC and mainstream media," he said. "I would say in response to that, that quite frankly it's b*******. "At the RNC all we had to do was repeat talking points and it would go on Fox News as is. Democrats don't do that, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] doesn't do it."
He added: "Also, I think an important thing about what differentiates the left and right and the media—the left has no similar echo chamber as evidenced by the lack of a left-wing freedom caucus."
A fast-moving wildfire on Hawaii's island of Maui has virtually destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, killing more than 50 people, and officials say the toll is expected to rise.
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President Biden has approved a federal disaster declaration for Maui, which makes federal funding available to aid the recovery.
If you want to donate to help those affected by the fires, here are some ways to do so:
If you’re paying more at the pump, extreme heat is partially to blame.
Multiple days of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees in the Southern states are affecting oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana, diminishing gas supplies and increasing prices.
Nationally, gas prices are up 13 cents compared with a week ago, according to the price-tracking website GasBuddy.
Swathes of northern China were submerged in filthy floodwater on Wednesday after days of historic rainfall battered the capital city of Beijing and surrounding areas.
Photos show farmland in the surrounding areas was left submerged stretching for miles.
It’s because of the Pollution Paradox, which I see as essential to understanding modern politics. The most damaging companies have the greatest incentive to invest money in politics. So politics, in our money-driven system, comes to be dominated by the most damaging companies.
I saw a post on Twitter today that I believe is on the mark. Seems to me they also do this thru movies & TV shows that normalize & even glorify, psychopathic behavior, like The Sopranos & Breaking BI concluded long ago that a factor in the decline of civilations is that in large populations, people like this can get away with it because people don't know what they really are, as they would in a smaller social group.
The Big Problem is that we sort all the psychopaths to the top.
Under-regulated capitalism has allowed a strain of raging psychopathy to take control of key sectors of life, including business and politics.
At the root of this dynamic is that our system rewards people who don’t care about others because they have an array of options that people with empathy don’t have. It’s hard to be competitive when your competition is willing to do inhumane things you would never be willing to do. So the people who are willing usually win.
In this way, we sort all the high-functioning sociopaths and psychopaths to the top of the pyramid—and reward them lavishly for it. And once they get there, those people want to surround themselves with others who have no interest in empathy either—so they replace anyone who won’t behave like a sociopath with someone who will.
That’s how you get Robert Mercer, David Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump and the entire GOP cult.
Now is the part it gets weird.
Since the goal of these psychopaths is to make people behave in ways that are counter to their own interests—so they can steal people’s money for themselves—they have devised systems to turn “normies” into empathy-free zombies.
Large swaths of our digital and media existence have been captured by psychopaths who intentionally created platforms and methodologies for brainwashing people into their own cruel worldviews.
Look around. Social media and disinformation has converted a large percentage of our citizens into people who do not care about anyone but themselves and their cult leaders. The sinking feeling we have is driven in large part by people we know behaving in ways that seem sadistic and alien. We see cruelty, chaos and hate—and it feels wrong.
It is wrong. At least a third of the country has joined or been influenced by a fascist death cult. The world is, in fact, going crazy. You, dear reader, are not.
We have given the keys to our future to psychopathic white men who have proven that they want nothing but our destruction so they can pick up the pieces for themselves. Worse, those same people have not only sold their own souls, they are trying to sell us to our enemies.
Vladimir Putin, a psychopathic sadist with KGB training, is the perfect ally in their project. They are not scared of Putin. They want him to ruin the world. They want World War III. They want the End Times.
Why? Because they believe it benefits them. And that’s all that matters.
The fact is that psychopathy, cruelty and chaos is not what the vast majority of humanity wants. Most of us want to raise our kids in a world that cares about human beings, that cares about equality, that wants to move towards peace, not violence.
The key thing we have to address is the control that psychopaths have over information people bathe in. Until we do that, we will continue to lose people to this indoctrination system. Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. are creating hundreds of millions more of themselves—except their clones are under control.
These men do not deserve our trust. They deserve nothing but prison. They have intentionally poisoned us—think tobacco industry but 100 times larger—to benefit themselves and our enemies.
Fascism is fundamentally psychopathic, it is not ideological. It cannot be negotiated with. It must be defeated.
For the ultrawealthy, donating valuables like artwork, real estate and stocks to their own charitable foundation is an alluring way to cut their tax bills. In exchange for generous tax breaks, they are supposed to use the assets to serve the public: Art might be put on display where people can see it, or stock sold to fund programs to fight child poverty. Across the U.S., such foundations hold over $1 trillion in assets.
But a ProPublica investigation reveals that some foundation donors have obtained millions of dollars in tax deductions without holding up their end of the bargain, and sometimes they personally benefit from donations that are supposed to be a boon to the public. A tech billionaire used his charitable foundation to buy his girlfriend’s house, then stayed there with her while he was going through a divorce. A real estate mogul keeps his nonprofit art museum in his guesthouse and told ProPublica that he hadn’t shown it to a member of the public since before the pandemic. And a venture capitalist couple’s foundation bought the multimillion dollar house next to their own without ever opening the property to the public.
Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
In a 2004 interview with @Harpers, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, admitted that the Nixon Administration invented the war on drugs in order to imprison Black-Americans and hippies, two groups he felt threatened by.
Ehrlichman in his own words :
https://harpers.org/archive/2016
[Couldn't copy the quote in a graphic on my phone, will do it later from laptop]
Russia is also working to sow division in our country, thru social media. I don't know whether they are doing things like this, wouldn't be surprising.
A Chinese marketing firm likely organized and promoted protests in Washington last year as part of a wide-rangingpro-Beijing influence campaign, according to new research.
The Chinese firm also used a network of over 70 fake news websites to promote pro-China content in an example of the more aggressive efforts by pro-China operatives to influence US political debate in recent years, according to security firm Mandiant, which analyzed the activity.
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The campaign backed by the Chinese firm, Shanghai Haixun Technology Co., Ltd., is “intended to sow discord in US society,” Ryan Serabian, a senior analyst at Mandiant, told CNN.
The findings? Days of extreme heat, extreme cold or high levels of fine particulate matter air pollution were all "significantly associated" with the risk of death from a heart attack — and the greatest risk was seen on days with a combination of both extreme heat and high air pollution levels. Results showed women and older adults were particularly at risk.
For those who are keeping track, we are now at 13 consecutive days with record global (60S-60N) temperatures, since satellite era measurements began in 1979, likely the 13 hottest days on a global scale over the last 100,000+ years.
And now temperatures are going back up again. 7:08 AM · Jul 16, 2023
The U.S. military warned years ago that global warming is causing security threats to our country. Why does the republican party want to weaken our country?
House Republicans on Friday muscled through the annual defense policy bill, including one provision that would block the Defense Department from implementing President Joe Biden’s climate orders.
A group of men who helped establish Fox News say they now believe the conservative broadcaster has become a “disinformation machine” that’s destabilising democracy.
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“Arguably the worst has been Fox’s role in promoting Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ about alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election and, in our opinion, Fox’s role in contributing to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that undermined our democracy,” the post continues. “In fact, the connection between Fox and the January 6 attack is so strong that multiple Jan 6 defendants have pleaded not guilty arguing they were suffering from ‘Foxitis’ — a disease caused by watching false news on Fox!”
For what little it may, or may not, be worth at this point, Preston Padden, Ken Solomon and Bill Reyner wish to express their deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel — the channel that prominently includes news that, in the words of Sidney Powell’s counsel, “no reasonable person would believe.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller said Wednesday that charging President Donald Trump with a crime was “not an option” because of federal rules, but he used his first public remarks on the Russia investigation to emphasize that he did not exonerate the president.
“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mu
That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.
No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.
Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.
Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.
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"An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”
The same phenomenon is sometimes called “generational amnesia,” the tendency of each generation to disregard what has come before and benchmark its own experience of nature as normal
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It’s not just intergenerationally that we forget, either. The Imperial College researchers also demonstrated the existence of another form of shifting baselines syndrome: personal amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs as individuals forget their own experience.”
Just as generations forget about ecological loss, so do individuals
It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.
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Just as we adjust emotionally, we adjust cognitively. We forget what came before; we simply don’t think about it. For the most part, only our recent experience is salient in defining our baselines, our sense of normal.
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“The reference point for normal conditions appears to be based on weather experienced between 2 and 8 years ago,” the study concluded.
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Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.
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It’s not just about documenting decline, either. There have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.
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Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Moore.
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Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.
And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies.
Decades of suppressing natural fires have allowed fuel for wildfires to accumulate to dangerously high levels. Humans are also heating up the planet, lifting sea levels, amplifying downpours, and exacerbating the conditions for massive blazes.
So when disasters do occur, they cause extraordinary damage to lives, livelihoods, and property. These threats have led insurance companies to drop existing policies or stop issuing new coverage. "It’s not just the risk of loss but the magnitude of loss when a California house burns down,” saidDave Jones, who served as California’s insurance commissioner from 2011 until 2018. “That trend has only gotten worse over time.”
If insurers priced their policies in line with growing risks, they’ll soon be too expensive for all but the wealthiest people, leaving the most vulnerable with no protection. If rates are capped too low, insurers may not have enough money to cover all their claims or stay in business. In California, some insurance companies ended up leaving the market or dropping their customers altogether.
Kristin Turner’s first few months as an Airbnb host had gone off without a hitch. She and her husband had purchased a home in Austin, Texas, in 2022 as a place to stay when they commuted into the city to work at a downtown trauma center, where they are both nurses.
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To make the constant travel more bearable, they started to look into buying a home in Austin proper, but found the housing prices too high for them to afford on their own.
“So we said, ‘Well, let's look into buying a house in Austin as a place that we can stay part time and rent out other times,’” she said.
In July, they closed on a three-bedroom home, planning to put it on short-term rental sites like Airbnb. One month later, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said recruiting more hosts was the company’s top priority as it tried to meet demand for rental properties and reduce nightly costs. The company regularly advertises the benefits of putting one’s home on the platform.
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Then, one night last October, Turner received an email that changed everything. It was from a member of the Airbnb team who identified herself only as “Eleanor,” saying that the company had decided to remove her from the platform not because of her own behavior, but because her account had been “closely associated with a person who isn’t allowed to use Airbnb.”
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Turner was shocked and devastated. Soon enough, all her home’s bookings had been deleted and she could not get into her account. The potential consequences were clear. She had purchased a home on the idea that she would rent it out to help cover the mortgage, and now the company that dominated the short-term rental market had suddenly and permanently banned her from doing so. Immediately, she began to fear that her family would face financial ruin. She didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
For a decade now, Airbnb has had background checks performed on its users in hopes of making the platform as safe as possible for both hosts and guests. The checks, which are carried out by a third-party service that claims to complete them on average in less than a second, have been criticized for their arbitrary nature as people fight bans for infractions as small as not keeping a dog leashed, or, in Turner’s case, knowing the wrong people.
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Hoping to overturn the ban, Turner wrote back to ask for additional information, but Eleanor replied only to say the company had given her “case and its details careful consideration” and was unwilling to reverse the decision or even offer “additional support.”
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Airbnb had not provided her with the association that had led to the ban, so she was left to try and piece together what had happened herself.
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Recently, she had tried to help her 70-year-old mother, Janet, and her mother’s partner, Carl, find a new place to stay after their landlord revealed plans to renovate the building and push renters out.
Janet, who lives on a fixed income and has a disability, was having trouble finding a new place. The week she had to leave, Turner suggested they look on Airbnb for a month-long rental. While at the hospital visiting a family member, Turner decided to set up an account for them. Because Janet didn’t have her ID on her, Turner set up the account under Carl’s name, using his phone, email, and ID information.
Shortly afterward, Carl received an email informing him that he was not allowed to be an Airbnb user because of information that had surfaced on a background check. The report, which Motherboard reviewed, showed that Carl had been convicted of two non-violent offenses in 2015 and 2016—theft and drug possession, which Turner said she had been unaware of.
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[Kristin was not able to contact a live human at Airbnb.]
Airbnb has told Motherboard in the past that it knows “no background check system is perfect,” and that it continually tries to make the system “as effective and thoughtful as possible,” including through the appeals process Turner was attempting to use.
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She only ever heard back by email, and the responses that she did receive felt automated and often repeated phrases word for word. Airbnb would not even say definitively who Turner had been associated with, only that it was enough to kick her off.
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For guests, a ban can be an inconvenience. But for hosts like Turner, the stakes can be much higher. Airbnb’s domination of the market means a robotic ban from the platform is essentially a ban from a large swath of the short-term rental market. Lost income is all but assured.
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It was only after Motherboard reached out for comment about the specifics of Turner’s situation that Airbnb decided to reverse its decision and reinstate Turner. Airbnb told Motherboard that it had revisited Turner’s case and determined her association with her mother’s partner was “not close enough” to justify a ban. No new information was obtained.
Such a series of events has become something of a pattern at Airbnb. A user is banned for a questionable and/or vague reason and then stifled by a customer service representative like “Eleanor” who offers a series of boilerplate explanations. Unable to reach a human with power, they are only reinstated after reaching out to a reporter or going public with their story.
