Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalThis Grandma's Dying Wish Was a Giant Dick on Her Grave
MEXICO CITY — Before her death, 99-year-old Catarina Orduña Pérez had one final wish: a giant statue of a dick on top of her grave.
Her family unveiled the completed monument — a five-and-a-half foot tall cock and balls weighing nearly 600 pounds — mounted on her tomb at a cemetery in Mexico this past weekend as a “recognition of her love and joy for life.”
“She wanted to break the paradigm of everything Mexican, where things are sometimes hidden because of not having an open mind,” her grandson Álvaro Mota Limón told VICE World News in an interview. “She was always very avant-garde, very forward thinking about things.”
Doña Cata, as she was lovingly known throughout the small town of Misantla in the eastern state of Veracruz, had a particular affinity for penises, and what she believed they represented.
“She always said, in the Mexican sense, that we were vergas,” said Mota Limón.
There are few words in Mexican slang as dynamic as “verga,” which is perhaps best translated in English as “cock” due to its general use as a profanity. Depending on how its phrased, “verga” can be a brutal insult, telling someone to go fuck themselves (vete a la verga) or that they’re not worth shit (vales verga). Or it can be a compliment, a badge of honor, that if something is “verga,” it is cool or badass.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnnqw/mexico-dick-tombstone
That's the kind of badass old lady I want to be!
Parade attack suspect indicted for murder, attempted murder
The man accused of opening fire on an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago has been indicted by a grand jury on 21 first-degree murder counts, 48 counts of attempted murder and 48 counts of aggravated battery, representing the seven people killed and dozens wounded in the attack on a beloved holiday event.
Prosecutors previously filed seven murder charges against Robert E. Crimo III. They announced the grand jury’s decision to indict him on 117 felony charges on Wednesday.
Attorneys for Crimo have not made a formal response yet to any of the charges he faces in the July Fourth shooting in downtown Highland Park, Illinois. A representative for the county public defenders office, which is representing Crimo, said Wednesday that it does not comment publicly on any cases.
Prosecutors have said Crimo, 21, admitted to the shooting when police arrested him following an hourslong search on July 4.
Under Illinois law, prosecutors can ask a grand jury to determine whether there is probable cause to proceed to trial. Grand jury proceedings aren’t open to the public and defense attorneys cannot cross-examine witnesses.
The multiple first-degree murder charges allege Crimo intended to kill, caused death or great bodily harm and took action with a strong probability of causing death or great bodily harm on the seven people who died.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-arrests-chicago-illinois-4e91e018ecb2e1ff26b4ec606a57dec0
What could be Florida Gov. DeSantis' undoing on the national stage? HBCUs.
By Nicholas Mitchell
Within higher education, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education reforms designed to combat what he considers “woke indoctrination” have rightfully generated a great deal of concern about the future of academic freedom in the state. This concern is shared nationally because of how entrenched the anti-critical race theory moral panic has become within social conservatism across the country.
But while the debate over “woke indoctrination” has been covered extensively, attention on the topic ignores a critical question: What happens if DeSantis — a 2024 Republican presidential favorite — accuses a historically Black college or university of woke indoctrination because he doesn’t like how it teaches Black history or ways of looking at society and the law?
If that happened, the damage would be significant. Indeed, the elephant in the lecture hall looming over DeSantis’ higher education initiatives can be summed up in four letters: HBCU.
Nationally, there are 101 HBCUs; 52 are public institutions, and 49 are private, nonprofit institutions. There are four HBCUs in Florida, including Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (widely known as FAMU), in the state capital, Tallahassee. HBCUs have historically been and remain repositories of knowledge that was denied by the predominantly white colleges and universities that dominate academia. Their graduates include such crucial figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Pauli Murray, Thurgood Marshall and Vice President Kamala Harris.
As a curriculum theorist and a Black Southerner, I’ve been struck by how HBCUs have been missing from the national discussions about how race should be taught on college campuses. I suspect that part of the reason for this glaring omission is that when people not from the South think about “higher education,” they automatically think of predominantly white colleges and universities like the University of Florida. However, in the South, higher education is more diverse than many people outside the region give it credit for.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/florida-gov-desantis-undoing-national-stage-hbcus-rcna39957
Why do some cats seem to get along with other cats? Their hormones offer a clue.
Despite a reputation for preferring to share space on their own terms, cats often live in groups. This behavior may seem contradictory, but new research suggests it’s a curious consequence of domestication — and biological factors can help explain why some felines may embrace their fellow cats more than others.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists link displays of cat behavior to hormones and the gut microbiome. These elements shape interactions among cats and may explain how they tolerate cohabitation despite their solitary nature.
For example, the study found that cats with lower cortisol and testosterone levels were more tolerant of other cats and more willing to share food. Cats with higher levels of these hormones were less likely to interact with their fellow study participants. Meanwhile, cats with higher testosterone levels were also more likely to try to escape the room where they were observed.
Researchers at Azabu University in Japan conducted the study.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/cats-seem-get-cats-hormones-offer-clue-rcna39548
The Japanese are well-known cat lovers
Gun-makers tell Congress mass shootings are a 'local' problem not caused by 'inanimate' firearms
The chief executives of two leading gun manufacturers called mass shootings “local problems” that cannot be blamed on “inanimate” firearms when asked by a House panel Wednesday if they accept responsibility for selling the assault-style rifles used in most of the recent massacres.
The CEOs of Daniel Defense and Sturm, Ruger & Co. condemned the attacks in Buffalo, New York; Uvalde, Texas; and Highland Park, Illinois, while testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
They said such mass murders needed to stop but balked when they were asked whether their companies would stop selling assault-style rifles.
“I believe that these murders are local problems that have to be solved locally,” said Marty Daniel, CEO of Daniel Defense, the company that made the rifle used by the Uvalde gunman to kill 19 children and two teachers.
Asked by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the committee chair, whether Daniel will “accept personal responsibility” for his company’s role in that shooting, the CEO said the “murderers are responsible” before Maloney cut off the rest of his answer.
Christopher Killoy, CEO of Sturm, Ruger & Co., also deflected blame, saying the “firearm is an inanimate object.” Killoy said he does not consider his company’s “modern sporting rifles” to be “weapons of war.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gun-makers-tell-congress-mass-shootings-are-local-problem-not-caused-i-rcna40256
Worst buck-passing EVER!
The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi River
The creation story told by the Chitimacha people in Louisiana describes the world in its earliest days as a wide expanse of water. Then the Great Creator instructed crawfish to dive down and bring up a bit of mud. Geologists tell a similar tale, though their sculptor is the Mississippi River: For thousands of years, it dumped soils stolen off the continent into the Gulf of Mexico. Thus the river formed its delta, a vast and muddy and ever-changing landscape where the water once forked into many paths to the sea.
These days, though, the river is largely restricted to one channel. Imprisoned within artificial levees, it’s no longer able to deposit its mud according to hydrological whim; instead, the river spits its sediment into the abyss of the deep sea. The consequences are grim: The existing mudscape is sinking. The ocean is rising. Over the past nine decades, more than 5,000 square kilometers of delta land in Louisiana has disappeared.
Few places are going faster than Plaquemines Parish, which encompasses the muddy land along the river’s final 100 or so kilometers, where New Orleans’ exurbs give way to a smattering of rural communities. (A parish is the local equivalent of a county, a remnant of Louisiana’s French colonial history.) One morning last summer, as we weave in his skiff through the parish’s marshland, Richie Blink tells me that the federal government has recently deleted 30-odd names from local nautical maps. Fleur Pond, Dry Cypress Bayou, Tom Loor Pass, Skipjack Bay: All have become undifferentiated, unlabeled expanses of open ocean.
Now, the state government wants to open a gap in the levee to divert some of the river’s muddy water back into the marshes, allowing the river to resume its old task of construction. Work on the gap could begin in early 2023, assuming that the US Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees waterway infrastructure, grants its official approval later this year. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion—which is named for Barataria Bay, where the released river water will build a new “subdelta”—has been under discussion for years, but now, on the eve of destruction, it’s come under a firestorm of criticism from shrimpers worried about their livelihood; homeowners concerned about flooding; and environmentalists dismayed at the potential loss of bottlenose dolphins, a federally protected species. The diversion is intended to build new marshland, but it’s sometimes depicted as the latest assault on the region’s rural communities—which, according to critics, are about to be sacrificed again for the sake of nearby urban New Orleans.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-controversial-plan-to-unleash-the-mississippi-river/
Long, fascinating, and totally worth the read
Emu and chef help stop a driver fleeing hit-and-run crash site
England has two new, unexpected celebrities — a 42-year-old chef and a massive emu, who inadvertently teamed up to help catch a driver in a hit-and-run who fled a crash scene after narrowly missing pedestrians and causing extensive damage.
Dean Wade said he heard a loud “screeching noise” near his workplace in Wiltshire, southwest England, on Monday and raced out to see a jeep careening from side to side before smashing into the front of an empty shop close by.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Wade, who has been working at the Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury for only two weeks, said he could see the driver, who “appeared drunk,” was getting ready to back away from the scene. A female passenger had also left the vehicle.
“There’s no way you’re going anywhere,” Wade told the man, who he said was “swaying” and “staggering” all over the place. But the man, though unable to run fast due to his physical state, was determined to escape, heading off on foot.
Wearing his slip-resistant rubber kitchen clogs and chef’s overalls, Wade chased the driver for 15 to 20 minutes, through bushes, allotments and gardens before the pair ended up at an animal sanctuary.
This was when the real confrontation began.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/27/uk-emu-fleeing-driver-chef-hotel/?itid=hp_latest-headlines
It gets funnier from there......I am still mopping coffee from my keyboard 
We Might Be Treating Schizophrenia All Wrong
For more than 70 years, doctors treated the symptoms of schizophrenia—delusions, hallucinations, cognitive impairments—with antipsychotic medications. Prevailing theories suggest that elevated dopamine signaling in the brain leads to schizophrenia, so these antipsychotics provide relief by tempering dopamine activity. Yet, it has never been entirely clear how these drugs quiet dopamine activity. And due to their nature, these drugs impact other parts of the body and foster unwanted side effects including weight gain, constipation, and drowsiness. On top of that, more than nearly a third of patients don’t even respond to two or more common antipsychotic treatments.
What if there was a better way to treat the more than 24 million people around the world with schizophrenia? A new study run by researchers in Japan and published earlier this year in Cell Reports Medicine suggests that for at least a significant portion of patients, the immune system is mistakenly attacking a protein in the brain—which may be the real mechanism giving rise to schizophrenic symptoms in the first place.
This study is the tip of the iceberg too.
“We don’t know what causes schizophrenia,” Roger McIntyre, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto (who was unaffiliated with this work), told The Daily Beast. “Rigorous scientific studies that have been conducted and they have concluded that for some people, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia may be a consequence of a disturbance in the immune inflammatory system.”
This in turn, may open the door to an entirely new way of treating schizophrenia—one that’s unencumbered by the challenges holding back current antipsychotics.
The team behind the new study analyzed blood from about 200 patients with schizophrenia and compared it to blood samples from more than 200 healthy individuals. In about 6 percent of schizophrenia patients, the researchers found elevated levels of an antibody that targeted NCAM1, a protein crucial for cell communication in the brain. None of the healthy individuals enrolled in the study produced this antibody.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-might-be-treating-schizophrenia-all-wrong?ref=home
Holy crap, if this is true, so many lives could be saved!
We Might Be Treating Schizophrenia All Wrong
For more than 70 years, doctors treated the symptoms of schizophrenia—delusions, hallucinations, cognitive impairments—with antipsychotic medications. Prevailing theories suggest that elevated dopamine signaling in the brain leads to schizophrenia, so these antipsychotics provide relief by tempering dopamine activity. Yet, it has never been entirely clear how these drugs quiet dopamine activity. And due to their nature, these drugs impact other parts of the body and foster unwanted side effects including weight gain, constipation, and drowsiness. On top of that, more than nearly a third of patients don’t even respond to two or more common antipsychotic treatments.
What if there was a better way to treat the more than 24 million people around the world with schizophrenia? A new study run by researchers in Japan and published earlier this year in Cell Reports Medicine suggests that for at least a significant portion of patients, the immune system is mistakenly attacking a protein in the brain—which may be the real mechanism giving rise to schizophrenic symptoms in the first place.
This study is the tip of the iceberg too.
“We don’t know what causes schizophrenia,” Roger McIntyre, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto (who was unaffiliated with this work), told The Daily Beast. “Rigorous scientific studies that have been conducted and they have concluded that for some people, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia may be a consequence of a disturbance in the immune inflammatory system.”
This in turn, may open the door to an entirely new way of treating schizophrenia—one that’s unencumbered by the challenges holding back current antipsychotics.
The team behind the new study analyzed blood from about 200 patients with schizophrenia and compared it to blood samples from more than 200 healthy individuals. In about 6 percent of schizophrenia patients, the researchers found elevated levels of an antibody that targeted NCAM1, a protein crucial for cell communication in the brain. None of the healthy individuals enrolled in the study produced this antibody.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-might-be-treating-schizophrenia-all-wrong?ref=home
Holy crap, if this is true, so many lives could be saved!
Cause of mystery child hepatitis outbreak found
UK experts believe they have identified the cause of the recent spate of mysterious liver problems affecting young children around the world.
Investigations suggest two common viruses made a comeback after pandemic lockdowns ended - and triggered the rare but very serious hepatitis cases.
More than 1,000 children - many under the age of five - in 35 countries are thought to have been affected.
Some, including 12 in the UK, have needed a lifesaving liver transplant.
The two teams of researchers, from London and Glasgow, say infants exposed later than normal - because of Covid restrictions - missed out on some early immunity to:
adenovirus, which normally causes colds and stomach upsets
adeno-associated virus two, which normally causes no illness and requires a coinfecting "helper" virus - such as adenovirus - to replicate
That could explain why some developed the unusual and worrying liver complications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61269586
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