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.

Don't be afraid to change your mind

 

If you never change your mind, it shows you aren't learning

Abuse of corpse charge after miscarriage

 This kind of thing was predicted because it has happened at other times & places.

https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2023/11/womans-abuse-of-corpse-case-heads-to-grand-jury/

Nov. 4, 2023

Brittany Watts, 33, of Tod Avenue NW, faces a single charge of abuse of corpse, a fifth-degree felony. During an arraignment in Warren Municipal Court earlier this month, Watts pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said the police investigation found that Watts miscarried the baby while using the restroom and tried to plunge and flush the remains down the toilet, where it got stuck in the pipes

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The fetus was about 22 weeks old when the incident took place on Sept. 22

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Timko [her lawyer] argues that no law requires a mother suffering from a miscarriage of a non-viable fetus to bury or cremate the remains.

“Women miscarry into toilets everyday. If the state of Ohio expects these women to fish those remains from the toilet and deliver them to a hospital, funeral home or crematorium, the laws need changed,” Timko said, adding that “we aren’t there yet.”

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Experts give you permission to stop raking your leaves this fall

 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/to-rake-or-not-to-rake-expert-tips-for-eco-friendly-autumnal-lawn-care

Oct 20, 2023 5:15 PM EST

trustworthy journalism.

DONATE NOW

PBS NewsHour

• Live

By — 

Bella Isaacs-Thomas

Experts give you permission to stop raking your leaves this fall. Here’s why

Science Oct 20, 2023 5:15 PM EST

Autumn is in full swing in communities across the United States, making your sidewalk stroll or mountain hike a little more colorful.

But some view fallen foliage as a mess to be conquered rather than a source of crunchy delight.

READ MORE: The science behind the aroma of fall

Experts say the hallmark of autumnal lawn care — attempting to do away with each leaf that falls on a person’s property — comes with an ecological price.

“Leaves are often thrown out — they’re treated as trash,” said Matthew Shepherd, director of outreach and education at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. By raking and bagging them all up, “we are inadvertently impoverishing our landscapes.”

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there are plenty of ways to put an abundance of leaves to good use if homeowners opt to work with nature rather than against it, advocates say.

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As temperatures drop, fallen leaves and the soil underneath offer crucial habitat for all kinds of creatures, including salamanders, frogs and rodents. Shepherd noted that this shelter is especially important for the smallest animals, mainly insects and other invertebrates. That list includes cocooned moths and bumblebee queens, as well as those that might be less eye-catching to humans.

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Leaf litter is also a destination for non-migrating birds like cardinals, who hop around feasting on the sheltering bugs below.

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In Shepherd’s garden, he leaves flower stems and seed heads standing, providing both extra groundcover and food options for wildlife. He gets the benefit of watching the birds over the fall and winter, an entertaining show from the warm indoors.

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Dead leaves play a major role in infusing soil with new nutrients. The invertebrates that come along to munch on the leaves start the process of breaking them down before microbes help finish the job.

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Entitlements

 

Nov. 28, 2023

Irritating to see people saying social security is not an entitlement, as if that were bad.

https://www.britannica.com/money/entitlement

entitlement, generally, any government-provided or government-managed benefit or service to which some or all individuals are entitled by law. 

We need trees

 

Voting advice

 

Jerry Falwell Jr. lobs attacks that will 'will rock' Liberty U 'to its core'

 

https://www.rawstory.com/jerry-falwell-jr-2666333522/

Nov. 22, 2023

Axios reports that journalist Tim Alberta is coming out with a new book in which Falwell Jr. candidly admits that his late father, Jerry Falwell, Sr., founded the university solely to be an institutional arm of the Republican Party and not to be a Christian university aimed at spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Stand together

 

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-intended-for-delivery-the-texas-democratic-state-committee-the-municipal

“Let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause.” – JFK in an undelivered speech intended for Austin, Texas, 11/22/63 presidency.

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT SPENT NEARLY $1 MILLION AT TRUMP PROPERTIES FROM JULY 2017 TO NOVEMBER 2019

 

https://www.americanoversight.org/defense-department-spent-nearly-1-million-at-trump-properties-from-july-2017-to-november-2019-records-obtained-by-american-oversight-reveal

June 8, 2023

Records recently obtained by American Oversight and reported on by Forbes reveal that the Department of Defense spent nearly $1 million at properties owned by former President Donald Trump between July 2017 and November 2019. 

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As Everson noted in Forbes, “There’s no full public accounting of how much taxpayers shelled out to the Trump Organization during the Trump administration.”As Everson noted in Forbes, “There’s no full public accounting of how much taxpayers shelled out to the Trump Organization during the Trump administration.”

Climate change is hastening the demise of Pacific Northwest forests

https://apnews.com/article/trees-climate-environment-pacific-northwest-iconic-cedars-d1f58b79c5c92376f4fe835f6b433602 

By NATHAN GILLES, Columbia Insight

Nov. 16, 2023

Last year, Buhl and colleagues reported that red cedars were dying throughout the tree’s growing range not because of a fungus or insect attack, but due to the region’s “climate change-induced drought.”

Red cedars aren’t alone.

In recent years, at least 15 native Pacific Northwest tree species have experienced growth declines and die-offs, 10 of which have been linked to drought and warming temperatures, according to recent studies and reports.

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