I switched radio stations and it was in the middle of playing the song that ﾐA彡 and I danced to for our first dance at our wedding reception.
‘Cause honey, your soul could never grow old, it’s evergreen
Which immediately got me contemplating the fact that both chlorophyll and heme have similar structures.
Imagine an updated version of “Fight Club” where instead of blowing up buildings, Tyler Durden merely creats a botnet that automatically creats hundreds of billions of fake accounts with emojis in their nicknames based off stolen identities, and Project Mayhem’s only responsibility is to answer phones and pretend to be the people whose identities were stolen… (I think I may have thought too hard about this….)
(crossposted on Facebook){: .metadata }
Banking tips pic.twitter.com/8Q90f056EZ
— Anna Marquardt (@ajlobster) May 24, 2016
Bill Cosby makes me think that the reason why some PoCs turn to respectability politics is that they’re secretly terrible—possibly quite monstrous—people who want to convince other PoCs that if they get called out, it will make the whole race look bad, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to never call them out.
(crossposted on Facebook) {: .metadata }
The American Dream is officially dead (which is probably for the best, to be honest.)
Historically, this is the typical living arrangement in most societies anyway. This lends credence to the notion that the nuclear family is a WEIRD aberration. Extended/multigenerational families are more typical.
(crossposted on Facebook){: .metadata }
More young adults live with parents than partners, a first • 2016 May 24 • Los Angeles Times
While I am not a parent, my job does require me to regularly counsel parents on how they treat their children, and I try to make recommendations based on the best available evidence….
New study says spanking doesn’t work, makes children’s behavior worse • 2016 Apr 28 • Heidi Stevens • Chicago Tribune
The Strong Evidence Against Spanking • 2016 Apr 27 • Julie Beck • The Atlantic
Also, capitalism:
Corporal punishment is banned in close to 50 countries, including Germany, Spain, Kenya, Denmark and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Why not here?
“It’s based on our history of treating children as property,” psychiatrist Paul Holinger, founder of Chicago’s Center for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, once told me.
Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.
— Miss O'Kistic (@missokistic) May 14, 2014
It’s not good business to instakill your customers.
My more nuanced script would be something like this: Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan go to a bar and drink methanol-contaminated alcohol because there are no regulations and it’s far cheaper to not to discard the heads and to cut the end product with methylated spirits. People don’t die right away anyway and most people can’t sue because it costs thousands of dollars to bring a case to court and the court can be bought if you have enough money.
Sure, there is a private regulatory agency not beholden to the government, but they charge exorbitant prices for memberships and inspections, and they actually don’t ensure that your alcohol isn’t contaminated. They simply pocket the money. Because they make sure everyone who goes into the bar signs an arbitration agreement, now you can’t sue even if you had the money to bring a case to court and bribe the court to rule in your favor. The arbitration board unsurprisingly always rules in the bar’s favor.
Over time, the three start going blind and insane. Everyone blames them personally for drinking methanol-tainted alcohol even though methanol-tainted alcohol is the only thing available. All the distilleries that discarded the methanol-tainted heads and did not adulterate their products with methylated spirits have gone out of business because their product is too expensive and while the superrich have ways of getting untainted product by unsavory means, quantities are very limited and very expensive, and they still end up drinking tainted alcohol at social gatherings.
Because they are blind and insane, they can no longer productively work. They lose their houses and are thrown out onto the street and die in a gutter from aspiration pneumonia which, while easily treatable, costs thousands of dollars that they no longer have, because health care is only sold as a consumer good for profit, and most pharmaceutical companies only bother selling antibiotics to Big Ag for improved meat production instead of to ERs and outpatient clinics which can’t afford the insanely high prices to stock them.
I remember apocryphal stories of pan-resistant E. coli at one of the ICUs I did my residency at. You had to wear outbreak suits to get in and out. I never figured out how they managed to end the quarantine. I can’t imagine that every patient in that unit died….
Scientists have just found a “nightmare superbug” in the US • 2016 May 26 • Julia Belluz • Science & Health • Vox
I think antibiotic resistance due to antibiotic misuse in livestock is a very good example for why we shouldn’t just use technology willy-nilly in order to increase yields.