NPR took a hard right turn from impartial reporting years ago. Maybe some time around 2005. All studies show the main stream media has a right bias overall. But nothing but complete agreement with and capitulation to them will ever please republicans now. Also notice in all the talk of slashing government programs and services to save money none of the subsidies to corporations along with SpaceX and Tesla. Hugs
Dr. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the N.I.H. and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.
Trump just picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.In 2020, Bhattacharya pushed anti-COVID lockdown theories that were promptly dismissed as crankery — fringe policy prescriptions that would have led to millions of unnecessary deaths. http://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/u…
Fine resigned from the Florida Senate on Monday shortly after Trump posted an endorsement, urging him to run for the US House.
He has appeared here many times for his vicious anti-LGBTQ actions and threats of violence.
From my Saturday post…
Randy Fine, the sponsor of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, appeared here last month when he was held in contempt for flipping off a judge during a virtual hearing about an election lawsuit.
Before that he appeared here when DeSantis vetoed funding for a “woke zoo” because it wouldn’t host a fundraiser for Fine.
Fine also appeared on JMG in May 2022 when he tweeted what many interpreted as a threat to assassinate President Biden. That tweet remains online.
Before that, Fine appeared on JMG when he called for felony charges after Florida Democrats staged a sit-in over the racist US House map submitted by DeSantis.
And before that, he appeared here when he threatened to defund a Florida Special Olympics event and called a local school board member a “whore” because she’d been invited to its fundraiser gala and he was not.
Fine was a sponsor of the bill that stripped Disney’s self-governing status. His family owns annual passes to the “woke” theme park giant. In April 2023 he declared, “Damn right, we ought to erase” LGBTQs.
In 2022, he arranged for a Florida town to honor a war criminal who was convicted of executing four Iraqi prisoners.
Fine is also a sponsor of Florida’s bill criminalizing drag shows in view of minors. Of note, his wife runs a self-described “sultry” burlesque show that would violate her husband’s law.
President-elect Trump’s advisers are discussing how to unilaterally strip federal resources from Chicago and other Democratic-run cities if they refuse to participate in deportations of undocumented immigrants
Stretchy, self-healing lithium-ion batteries could be a viable power source for wearable mobile phones, soft robotics, and electronic skin, according to a new study.
The researchers have made small, stretching batteries that can power an LED light – but they say their work is shows “high promise” for building future stretchable and wearable electronics.
They’ve published their work in Supramolecular Materials.
While there are dozens of research prototypes for stretchable, flexible, and self-healing batteries, it’s not always as easy to combine the properties.
Lithium-ion batteries that are stretchable – that is, capable of lengthening or squeezing and then returning to its original shape – and self-healing have been particularly difficult to make.
“Our work provides a novel and viable strategy for the design of stretchable and self-healable energy storage devices, showing high promise for the application in stretchable and wearable electronics,” says senior author Professor Xiaokong Liu, a researcher at Jilin University, China.
Liu and colleagues made their battery out of long polymer molecules, connected to each other with nitrogen-carbon bonds called imine bonds.
These polymers could both bind the positive and negative electrodes of the battery together, and act as electrolytes, which allow charged particles to move between the electrodes.
Inside the self-healing lithium-ion battery: polymers can both connect the electrodes, and let the battery stretch and fix itself. Credit: Z. Li et al
The researchers used the polymers to build a tiny lithium-ion battery, using both lithium iron phosphate and lithium-titanate electrodes.
“Our achievement lies in the construction of a lithium-ion battery with all-in-one configuration, wherein the electrolyte and electrodes can be fused together at the interface through the exchange of the dynamic imine bonds existing in both the electrolyte and electrodes,” says Liu.
The battery could still provide power while being stretched, and after being cut in half and healed back together.
“This work provides a novel and viable strategy for the design of stretchable and self-healable energy storage devices,” write the researchers in their paper.
You know honeybees make honey, but did you know they make bread too? And four other types of bees are also dedicated chefs! Alfalfa leafcutting bees take a punch from a flower for your ice cream. Blue orchard bees bring you almonds and sweet cherries. Plus, stingless bees protect their tasty honey in creative ways. And bindweed bees’ way of gathering pollen deserves a fashion award.
Just the weirdest-looking creature. Also there’s a puppet.
Good news for all you people still disappointed that “Growing Pains” went off the air: Kirk Cameron is coming back to TV!
Sort of. By TV we mean more likely streaming services, and by streaming services we mean probably Christian-themed services like Minno and YippeeTV. But if you are someone still reeling from Cameron being denied his rightful Oscar nod for one of the “Left Behind” movies, here is your chance to ease some of your pain.
Cameron is teaming up with Brave Books, presumably to do to children’s television what they have tried to do to children’s literature and book fairs. Namely, they want to make it suck.
Cameron stars in and produces a new show called “Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk,” which had its premiere in Nashville recently. He promises the show will “bring God into the forefront of children’s entertainment,” and will be a “tool” that can be used to “reach millions of children across America and spread the Gospel.” Just as soon as it finds distribution.
“Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk” is set in a treehouse inhabited by Mr. Kirk and Iggy the Iguana, where they do stuff like read the anti-abortion book “Little Lives Matter” (subtle!) and listen to Kirk explain that Iggy is perfect the way God made him. No cross-dressing iguanas in this treehouse!
Possibly not coincidentally, Iggy looks like a cross between Pepe the Frog and the alien-human hybrid baby from the original “V” miniseries. Seriously, look at this thing. What is this abomination? Did they Island of Dr. Moreau him out of discarded Muppets?
We mean the one on the right, in case there’s any confusion.
Right Wing Watch captured a clip of Cameron explaining himself to “FlashPoint,” a right-wing themed show on the Victory Channel:
“For a couple of years I’ve been reading wholesome Christian children’s books, contra the drag queen story hours, and hearing from parents that they don’t want woke indoctrination for their kids. They don’t want gay dinosaurs and trans ducks teaching their children morality.”
Trans ducks? We haven’t been forced by a tiny person to watch “Daniel the Tiger” in a while but it sounds as if its makers might have been busy introducing some cool new characters.
“They want kids books and TV shows that are going to reinforce the stuff that parents are trying to teach their kids at home about the sanctity of life, about forgiveness, about family, about the dangers of socialism.”
Our experience is that most parents would like kids’ shows they can sit through without wanting to claw out their eyeballs and pour molten lead into their ears. They wouldn’t give a shit if Peppa Pig showed up dressed like Mao and hollering about the good of the collective so long as it shuts their kids up for half an hour.
Cameron and Iggy are joined on their adventures by a mailman, a vulture named Culture (again, subtle!), and Leigh-Allyn Baker, an actress with a legit career who became one of those anti-vax right-wingers who stands up at school board meetings to scream her opposition to mask mandates because … well, we’ll let her tell you:
“I would never put them in a mask because their brain needs oxygen to grow, which the neurologists can confirm.”
We’re not neurologists, but we’re pretty sure that’s … what’s the term? … batshit stupid.
The trailer makes “Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk” sound like some sort of Bizarro Mr. Rogers that teaches about “wholesome values,” but Christianly. Cameron prefers to call it a “modernized Mr. Rogers,” which we take exception to. Mr. Rogers in this or any other era would preach tolerance and respect for everyone. He would reject demonizing anyone. Yes, even drag queens and liberals.
But what would Mr. Rogers know about Christianity, he was only an ordained Presbyterian minister.
The show is based off of Brave Books’ Freedom Island series. Like the company’s main catalogue, the Freedom Island books are written by such conservative luminaries as Ashley St. Clair, Dana Loesch, and Nazi Jack Posobiec. Loesch’s book is titled “Paws Off My Cannon,” and it not surprisingly preaches that everyone has the right to shoot things:
[F]ollow Bongo, a daring and hungry gorilla, who loves eating food, especially mushroom-shaped cupcakes. But one day, a villainous hyena shoots a coconut at Bongo and his friend Bonnie. Bonnie is so upset at this misuse of coconut cannons that she suggests the village ban all coconut cannons. Bongo thinks that the hyenas are the problem, not the coconut cannons.
We will very much look forward to the Very Special Episode of “Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk” in which Iggy kills Culture the Vulture with a coconut cannon and Mr. Kirk explains that God wrote the Second Amendment to give all iguanas the right to self-defense.
Enjoy the show!
I dare somebody to watch, but I haven’t watched it. The bit above looks as if it’s just creepy. To me. – A
Same with watching a pet hedgehog eat watermelon, which is also out there on YT somewhere. Meanwhile, this is right here. 17% lower is a good thing. Watch it 2x!
A global survey has found that shipping traffic overlaps with almost the entire range of all whale species but only 7% of the areas with the highest risk of whale-ship collisions have protection measures in place for the whales.
“Whale-ship collisions have typically only been studied at a local or regional level … and patterns of risk remain unknown for large areas,” says lead author Anna Nisi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington in the US. “Our study is an attempt to fill those knowledge gaps and understand the risk of ship strikes on a global level.”
Credit: Nisi AC et al. Science. Nov. 22, 2024 print edition. DOI: 10.1126/science.adp1950
The research, published in Science, focused on 4 species: blue, fin, humpback and sperm whales.
It found that the highest risk areas lay along the coasts of the Americas, southern Africa and parts of Asia.
The team found mandatory measures to reduce whale-ship collisions were very rare. These overlapped with just 0.54% of blue whale hotspots and 0.27% of humpback hotspots. Such measures had no overlap with any fin or sperm whale hotspots.
The findings are “timely” and “not surprising”, according to Vanessa Pirotta, a researcher at Sydney’s Macquarie University who was not involved in the study. (snip-MORE)
Desi Lydic unpacks the latest Capitol Hill news: Matt Gaetz withdraws as Trump’s pick for Attorney General, and Nancy Mace targets Congresswoman Sarah McBride with an anti-trans bathroom ban.
What the host did not point out is that Nancy Mace is a total publicity hound. She seeks the spotlight at all times. She demands her staff book her on some media at least once a week. She demands they video her like you see in the clips above so she can post them on X or other social media. She is like Marge Greene in that being famous and a celebrity is more important to them than governing. Being an influencer is more important than forming a more perfect union for everyone. Making a spectacle and being in the center of what everyone is talking about is what gives them the greatest joy. As you can see once defending trans people’s rights gave her clicks and views so she was all in for it. Then her cult switched to fear and hate regardless of the real truth and the denial of science in favor of religion. In a book written over thousands of years, edited and changed countless times, translated from language to language often by people with no idea how to speak the language they are translating, and then selectively edited by political leaders as to what should be in it and what should be removed … that book says god created them male and female. So that was written by people who did not understand germs or to wash their hands to prevent sickness, who believed different colored sticks would cause different colored livestock, and had no concept of modern science makes a claim that modern humans in 2024 place more authority in than all the education and medical science of all history. How is that rational? Yet these people are elected to the highest offices to run a country that once was respected as striving for enlightenment and civil rights for all, is now being drive to regress to a theocracy where our highest information will be limited to what people in the Bronze Age understood. We have seen this happen in other countries and we were aghast at it. Look at Afghanistan? Look at the Arab countries that turned their backs on science and instead used their holy writings as the way things must always be. That thinking allows no growth and a supreme denial of reality. Hugs
All the links are worthy; today I’m partial to both the one about a Trump-proof climate action Pres. Biden could take that would benefit the entire world, and the story about the “Indian peach”.
Scottie's Playtime 