It’s amazing how able he is to compartmentalize his disgust at Trump’s Syria policy with his zeal in defending Trump on impeachment, frankly. They’re two distinct matters, granted, but politicians use leverage they have over one matter to exact concessions on unrelated matters all the time. Pundits keep warning that Trump is playing with fire by antagonizing Senate Republicans on Syria at the very moment that they’re about to take his fate in their hands on impeachment, but is he really playing with fire? Graham is heartbroken about abandoning the Kurds and yet here he is on Fox trying to blow up the impeachment effort on the president’s behalf before it even reaches the Senate. With ass-kissing like this, why should Trump feel pressure to throw the Senate GOP a bone on foreign policy?
Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan Jenkins has been working the cattle cases and has gotten dozens of calls from all over offering tips and suggestions.Some history:
"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."
Back in the 1980s, one of Terry Anderson's mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. Standing at his ranch near Pendleton, Ore., Anderson points to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain.I would be a lot more convinced if there were good, clear photos of the "precision" cutting that could only have been done with a sharp instrument.
He remembers his cow lying dead, her udder removed with something razor sharp.
"And not one drop of blood anywhere," Anderson says.
He has never gotten over it.
"It's just left a really strange feeling with me since that day. You can't explain it," Anderson says. "And, you know, no one else has been able to explain it."
The communities of microorganisms that occupy specific regions of the body are often altered in cancer1, and these microbiomes — particularly their bacterial components — are a current focus of cancer research. One example is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), for which changes in the bacterial community occupying the pancreas have been documented2. This lethal disease often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages, and the prognosis is usually very poor3. Writing in Nature, Aykut et al.4 reveal that the fungal component of the pancreatic microbiome (known as the mycobiome) is also altered in PDA. In fact, an abundance of a specific fungal genus actually promotes the disease.I didn't even realise that fungi made up a significant part of our normal mycobiome, but apparently they do:
The mycobiome is a historically under-recognized player in human health and disease, but its role in both is essential. Harmless organisms called commensals, including fungi, inhabit mucosal surfaces such as the linings of the gut, nose and mouth, and can activate inflammatory processes as part of the immune system’s response to injury or infection. In some cases, changes in the biodiversity of fungal communities are linked to aggravated inflammatory-disease outcomes. For example, intestinal overgrowth of Candida albicans — a fungus that causes oral thrush in babies — has been associated with severe forms of intestinal ulcers5 and with mould-induced asthma6. Moreover, it is becoming apparent that there is a relationship between the gut mycobiome and human cancers, including colorectal and oesophageal cancer7.
The legendary Viking warriors known as berserkers were renowned for their ferocity in battle, purportedly fighting in a trancelike state of blind rage (berserkergang), howling like wild animals, biting their shields, and often unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the heat of battle. But historians know very little about the berserkers apart from scattered Old Norse myths and epic sagas. One intriguing hypothesis as to the source of their behavior is that the berserkers ingested a specific kind of mushroom with psychoactive properties. Now an ethnobotanist is challenging that hypothesis, suggesting in a recent paper in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that henbane is a more likely candidate.Henbane is a flowering weed that grows in Scandinavia, that had been used for some time:
It's been around since ancient Greece and has been used in various cultures throughout history as a narcotic, painkiller, cure for insomnia, and anesthetic. It's a common treatment for motion sickness and can produce short-term memory loss. It can knock out someone for 24 hours, and in rare cases henbane can lead to respiratory failure. It's also been investigated as a possible truth serum. Henbane even found its way into early European beers, gradually being replaced with hops after the passage of the Bavarian Purity Law in 1516.Those characteristics don't sound rage inducing, but who knows:
Fatur argues that while both the mushrooms and henbane could account for increases in strength, altered consciousness, delirium, jerking and twitching, and red face commonly associated with the berserkers, aggressive rage is not common with the mushroom. Fatur cites several cases involving angry behavior associated with plants related to henbane, containing the same alkaloids.All rather speculative.
...over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. Stephen Miller, Breitbart, and Fox News have all called the whistle-blower an agent of the “deep state”—a phrase, popularized by Alex Jones, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once likened this notion to believing in the tooth fairy.)
On its face, this descent into self-delusion isn’t surprising. In the Trump era, Republican conspiracy theorizing has grown omnipresent. Trump himself has suggested that Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Clintons may bear responsibility for the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and wind turbines cause cancer. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Trump supporters said Barack Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.”
But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.
That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.
In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you. ...
The best explanation is that even though a white male Christian Republican holds the presidency, many white Christian Republican men still feel persecuted by those in power. Trump and other top Republicans fan this belief constantly.Beinart goes on to argue that the white male Christian loss of power is largely fantasy, but:
...white male income has stagnated in recent decades, the country has grown more racially and religiously diverse, and gender norms have changed. And this has helped Republicans convince their supporters that they are America’s real victims. Republicans, according to polling this year by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to say that men face a lot of discrimination than they are to say women face a lot of discrimination. They’re more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination than to say blacks or Hispanics do. And they’re more likely to say evangelical Christians experience discrimination than Muslims do.All very interesting and all very plausible. Makes no mention of how the internet has (inadvertently) ramped up the ability of conspiracy belief to spread and be maintained. That is a huge part of the story.
This itself reflects a detachment from reality. And it has made many Republicans susceptible to the conspiratorial thinking that, in the past, was reserved for groups that really were on society’s margins.
Another major insurer, Axis Capital, has shunned the Adani Carmichael coal project and withdrawn a bid to underwrite the construction of the mine’s rail line.
The withdrawal, first reported by Reuters, follows announcements from 15 of the world’s leading insurers which say they either won’t support the Carmichael mine, or won’t insure thermal coal projects.
It also presents a clear opportunity to activist groups seeking to stop the construction of Carmichael. Those efforts have targeted companies – on their front pavement and in the boardroom – who might provide logistical or financial support to Adani...
John Quiggin, a professor of economics at the University of Queensland, has said the Carmichael project “can’t proceed” without insurance.So activists may not have to superglue themselves to the track, after all? Or read up on rail line demolition for amateurs. (I'm scared to Google the topic myself, just in case some it sets off some cyber alert in ASIO.)
“It’s really not that complicated: Eat a sensible amount of plain, ordinary food each day, and then we won’t have to do all these confusing studies and you won’t have to worry anymore,” said Blair Amundsen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who explained that Americans continually eat such large quantities of bad food—drinking 24-ounce mocha lattes in the morning, ordering pizza for lunch, making hot dogs for dinner—that it’s almost impossible to determine which bad things are hurting them the most. “We wouldn’t have to churn out all this goddamn research on red meat if you didn’t eat it three meals a day, okay? So maybe just try something normal like a sandwich—not the huge kind with so much meat you have to cut it into pieces before you can fit it into your mouth, but a regular, standard-sized sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and stuff on it. And don’t try to correct your weird, bad eating habits with a diet of nothing but salad for a month, because that’s weird and bad too. Please stop whatever you’re doing now and, for like a week, just eat normal. We’re every bit as exhausted as you are with all this food study shit.”Yeah, I have to say, some of those American deli sandwiches, with like 4 cm of sliced meats in them, are just over the top. Seinfeld was eating one of them in a recent episode, even though I doubt from his slim figure that it's not a regular part of his diet.
