In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.
...it’s remarkable that at this point, the political world just shrugs when one of the two major party nominees suggests that there is no legitimate way that our institutions can clear his political opponent of criminality. Either she is a criminal, or the FBI is corrupt to its core. That’s Trump’s actual argument, and it sometimes seems as if barely anyone raises an eyebrow anymore when he makes it.As many have observed, Trump has broken the media's outrage meter by the relentless weight of outrageous statements.
As the board’s popularity, and profit, increased, most of the early investors sought to highlight their role in the creation of the Ouija board. But Helen Peters wanted nothing more to do with it after the board caused serious damage to her family.
When some civil war family heirlooms went missing from Peters’ home, Peters asked the Ouija board who had taken them. According to Peters’ grandson, the board indicated a member of the family. “Half the family believed it and half the family said ‘bullshit’, including Helen,” said Murch. The event created a conflict that was never resolved, and tore the family apart.
After the fight, Peters sold all of her stock in the company. “Until her dying day, she’s telling everyone: don’t play the Ouija board because it lies,” Murch said.I'm also rather surprised to read that Mexico City did not have an actual Day of the Dead parade until the James Bond Spectre movie invented it. But now they do. How very odd.
Before Ouija boards were invented, spiritualists and other would-be ghost communicators used makeshift devices called “talking boards” that served a similar purpose. Talking boards first became popular in mid-19th-century America, when millions of people suddenly gained an interest in talking to the dead following the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War. The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to exploit grieving war families, meant scientists actually started studying the ideomotor effect in the mid-century, well before Ouija boards and planchettes were patented in 1890.I don't think I heard of "talking boards" before, but the internet knows all, and here's a very comprehensive (if not particularly well designed) website called The Museum of Talking Boards.
The effect might also make the Ouija board an effective tool to help you tap into your own subconscious. In one study published in 2012, scientists found that using the Ouija board allowed subjects to recall factual information with more accuracy than if they weren’t using the board. Participants were instructed to answer a series of yes/no questions and to rate whether they were confident in their answers or merely guessing. Later, they were subjected to another round of questions, but used a Ouija board to indicate “yes” or “no,” once again rating their confidence level in their answers. In cases where participants believed they didn’t know an answer, they were able to give more correct answers, more often, when using the Ouija board than when they believed they were only guessing on their own.
Well, I did post once before about ouija, and the subconscious, but it's worth following that last link for some further information.The researchers behind that study have gone on to speculate that using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge could lead to insights about the early onset of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.
One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas. Having had sex with patients from both California and New York, he seemed to connect the epidemic from coast to coast. As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a
U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
That was an unfortunate move. “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,” says Richard McKay, a medical historian at the University of Cambridge, who recently tracked down the details of the case. By the time the CDC study was published in 1984, Patient O had become Patient 0. In the paper’s sole diagram, Dugas sits at the center, like the spider in a web of disease.
Labels have power. As “Patient Zero,” with its connotations of ground zero, Dugas came across as not just the center of that particular AIDS cluster, but as the source of the entire U.S. epidemic. The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On. Shilts identified Dugas by name, and while he never specifically claimed that the man was the source of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, reviewers and media commentators weren’t so restrained.
The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
“Whether it’s explicit or not, there’s always a focus on the potential moral failings of the first recognized individual,” says McKay. But the concept of Patient Zero has been weakening for years, with several lines of evidence showing that HIV—the virus behind AIDS—likely arrived in the U.S. well before Dugas was ever infected.
Now, a new study exonerates Dugas once and for all. It combines McKay’s historical detective work with genetic evidence compiled by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
The lawyer for the man accused of killing a Brisbane bus driver on Friday morning has described his client as 'numb' during his appearance in court on Saturday morning.And from another report:
Anthony O'Donohue, 48, did not apply for bail when he briefly appeared in the Brisbane Arrest Court...
Outside court, Adam Magill described the matter as "very heinous" and said he did not expect his client to apply for bail.
"His major concern as far as I'm concerned at this point in time is his mental health, that needs to be assessed," he said.
“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office," he said.
He continued: "I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the DOJ are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understand. It is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected."
