Wednesday, July 20, 2022

My Thymus, Myself | Radiolab Podcast




If you ever wondered how your Immune System can 'remember' what viruses and bacteria to defend against, this is the how. Your Thymus kills off 95% of your T-cells, to create the killer cells that fight off infections. 

Sunday, July 17, 2022

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

 The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.[2][3] As of June 2022, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

Certain legal questions may affect implementation of the compact. Some legal observers believe that the compact will require explicit congressional consent under the Compact Clause of Article I, Section X of the U.S. Constitution, or that states have the plenary power to appoint presidential electors as prescribed by the compact under the Elections Clause of Article II, Section I. Other legal observers disagree that the power of states is broad enough to appoint their electors in accordance with the compact, and that the Electoral College cannot be altered to appoint presidential electors in accordance with the national popular vote except by a constitutional amendment.

Find out more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

No Special Duty

Listen to RADIOLAB episode NO SPECIAL DUTY - police are evil.

Since the massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, people across the world began to ask versions of one question: why did police wait outside the door instead of protecting the kids?

It's not the first time this question has come up. Two years ago, as she watched police respond to the protests that followed the death of George Floyd, Producer B.A. Parker wondered: what are police for? With the help of our Producer Sarah Qari, she found that the United States’ Supreme Court had given this a most consequential and bewildering answer.

We decided to re-air this episode to shed light on how a case from 2005 upended our assumptions about the role police are meant to play in our lives.

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Sunday, April 03, 2022

Pandora Papers: An unprecedented leak exposes the inner workings of worldwide corruption



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers
The Pandora Papers are 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published beginning on 3 October 2021.[1][2][3] The leak exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers, and heads of state as well as more than 100 billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders. 

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Ce...

CENSORSHIP: New Twitter CEO 'NOT BOUND' By First Amendment | Breaking Po...

Revelation. You guys bury the leads, all the time. 1) Krystal Ball just said that the job of the Press has changed. That it is no longer to tell the public audience the story, but because everyone now has a voice, and everyone has limited time & attention, the job is NOW to curate, and thus filter (censor), the nearly infinite amount of information, so that they we the audience can see only what is important, true, or necessary. That is huge. Both as a revelation and a value statement.
2) Saggar said that Engineers are "not equipped to make socio-economic decisions". (He also seems to support the 1st Amendment quite Passionately, which is weird coming from a 'conservative', since they don't want to lose the power they have conserved, but the 1st Amendment was designed to distribute power). This judgement against Engineers seems informed by perhaps biased. I see no evidence that smart people can NOT be smart in more than one area of life. There are strange examples of mistakes that smart people make, see Zuckerberg, but their raw intelligence and success seem to lead to the conclusion that they can learn, even if they make mistakes. The final revelation that Saggar mentioned is "BLUE SKY", stop burying the lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)

Monday, November 29, 2021

Tuesday, August 03, 2021

The Conversation - The Young Turks

 Don't be afraid to question authority. 
Watch/Listen to TYT (The Young Turks) Media 
see the Conversation

Money Corrupts Politics 

Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky

Monday, June 28, 2021

Common Dreams

Opinion Piece - by  ANDREW BACEVICH


When It Comes to War, Americans Remain Willfully and Incorrigibly Ignorant

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Krystal and Saagar: Tim Dillon Tells NYT Journo Writing Rogan Profile To...

Whistleblower Saves the World

  

Illustration by Anna Vignet

This week’s podcast: The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, leaks and lies

In 1971, a 22-year-old named Robert Rosenthal got a call from his boss at The New York Times. He was told to go to Room 1111 of the Hilton Hotel, bring enough clothes for at least a month and not tell anyone. Rosenthal was part of a team called in to publish the Pentagon Papers, an explosive history of the United States’ political and military actions in Vietnam that shattered the government’s narratives about the war. Former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the secret papers to the press. In this episode, we hear the experiences of both Ellsberg and Rosenthal.

At 90 years old, Daniel Ellsberg is still shaking things up

As Daniel Ellsberg recounts on this week’s podcast, in 1961, he was a young researcher helping the Kennedy administration plan America’s nuclear war strategy. At the time, it seemed like the United States or the Soviet Union were on the brink of launching nuclear weapons whenever tensions flared. Ellsberg wondered whether government officials had ever thought about how many lives would be lost if the U.S. actually carried out its “first strike” nuclear plan. Turns out, they had: A neatly typed report said the first nuclear strike would kill 600 million people. “I remember my reaction very, very well,” Ellsberg says. “This is the most evil plan that has existed in the history of the human species. This is an evil piece of paper. It shouldn’t exist.”

Ellsberg decided he had to keep the United States from ever launching a nuclear war. As the U.S. escalated the war in Vietnam, he made the decision to become a whistleblower. At night, he photocopied 7,000 pages of government reports that showed the grim reality of the war in Vietnam and exposed secret U.S. bombing campaigns. While Ellsberg faced charges under the Espionage Act, his revelations helped turn the tide of American opinion against the war. 

This week, at age 90, Ellsberg is still making headlines for holding the government accountable. A once-classified document he disclosed in recent years revealed that in 1958, the United States drew up plans to drop nuclear bombs on China. While he copied the report at the same time as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg decided to highlight it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan. As he told The New York Times: “As the possibility of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied about this very year, it seems very timely to me to encourage the public, Congress and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them.”

Listen to the episode: The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, leaks and lies