Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalThe 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
Tucker Carlson Says He Knows Why Sri Lanka Fell. Don't Believe Him.
In mid-July, Sri Lanka’s government fell, with former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa bolting the country on a pre-dawn flight while protesters frolicked in the pool of his lavish mansion. The island nation of 22 million people, once one of the most prosperous in South Asia, had plunged into a severe economic crisis, characterized by empty grocery shelves, days’ long lines for gasoline, planned electricity outages lasting up to seven hours, and mass protests against the government. What happened? According to one prominent theory, it was all the result of a fateful decree Rajapaksa made in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and force the nation’s farmers—prodigious producers of rice and tea, among other crops—to embrace organic agriculture.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal opinion page on July 14, Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society, summarized the case like this: “In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.”
Similar takes have emerged from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who characterized Rajapaksa’s push for organic agriculture as a disaster-inducing “green new deal,” equating it to the stalled, never-implemented proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) (even though their GND never included a fertilizer ban or an organic mandate); and from members of the “ecomodernist” movement—a crew, centered around the Breakthrough Institute think-tank, that favors technology-centered, nuclear-powered responses to environmental crises. In a July 9 post on his Substack blog, Michael Shellenberger, the Breakthrough Institute’s co-founder and former president, opined that the “underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture.”
Back in March, months before Rajapaksa’s inglorious exit, the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy ran a similar take on Sri Lanka’s then-already-mounting crisis. Co-authored by BTI executive director Ted Nordhaus and BTI food and farm analyst Saloni Shah, the article suggested that the “ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture” had triggered a range of ills—everything from a tumbling currency to rising inflation and poverty rates.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/tucker-carlson-says-he-knows-why-sri-lanka-fell-dont-believe-him/
Stupid is as stupid sez.
Why John Fetterman's Twitter trolling of Dr. Oz works so well
Months ago, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman was forced off the campaign trail in his race for the U.S. Senate after he had a stroke and underwent surgery to install a pacemaker. In place of the in-person politicking that he relied on to win his primary race, his team has been forced to get creative in the contest against the GOP candidate, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz.
There’s a lot of trolling in politics these days, and it often includes inflammatory statements focused on race or immigration status. In a marvelous subversion of those smear tactics, Fetterman’s team argues that Oz is an immigrant who doesn’t connect with the history and culture of Pennsylvanians and doesn’t understand the values of the people he seeks to represent. Not because Oz’s parents were born in Turkey. That’s not a problem. The problem is Oz is from New Jersey.
Oz as a New Jerseyan is a theme the Fetterman campaign and its supporters have hammered hard on the past few weeks. There was the video from “Jersey Shore” star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi wishing Oz luck on his move to Pennsylvania to “look for a new job.” There was the compilation of Oz’s mansions, not one of which is in Pennsylvania. And most recently, there was a video of Fetterman launching a petition to get Oz inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
“Where are you from?” can be a loaded question, but you’d think that by time candidates decide to begin begging a community for its support, they would be able to provide an answer. It’s almost always a mess when they aren’t, as we saw in New York when skepticism over mayoral candidate Eric Adams’ home address ran high. But Oz’s inability to provide a satisfying answer has left him vulnerable to the constant and cheerful hits Fetterman’s camp doles out.
In general, being a newcomer to a state may matter even less today than it did when Hillary Clinton won a New York Senate seat in 2000; still, Fetterman’s campaign accusing Oz of being an outsider has been deployed with tremendous skill against the Republican who was living in New Jersey as recently as 2020.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/why-john-fetterman-s-twitter-trolling-dr-oz-works-so-n1297452
It wasn't "months" ago like they make it sound. By my count it was 7 or 8 weeks.
Dozens walk out of U. of Michigan white coat ceremony to protest anti-abortion keynote speaker
Dozens of incoming medical students walked out of their University of Michigan white coat ceremony Sunday when the keynote speaker — a doctor with anti-abortion views — was introduced.
A tweet showing the medical students and some other attendees of the ceremony walk out as Kristin Collier approached the podium has gone viral. As of Monday afternoon, the tweet had been liked more than 540,000 times.
After it was announced that Collier would be the keynote speaker of the event, a petition for the university to choose a different speaker garnered signatures from 248 current students, 100 incoming students and 72 others, including alumni.
The petition cited instances in which Collier expressed her anti-abortion views in tweets and in interviews.
"holding on to a view of feminism where one fights for the rights of all women and girls, especially those who are most vulnerable. I can’t not lament the violence directed at my prenatal sisters in the act of abortion, done in the name of autonomy," she tweeted in May.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dozens-walk-university-michigan-white-coat-ceremony-protest-anti-abort-rcna39834
Good for them. I would have too.
The Four Stages of Republican Misinformation
Wajahat Ali
If a 10-year-old girl cannot escape the cruel machinery of the right-wing disinformation network, then there’s little hope for the rest of us trying to protect our freedom, dignity, and fragile democracy.
Conservatives’ attempts to minimize, and then weaponize, the horrific story of a 10-year-old rape victim highlights their tried-and-tested four-part strategy to manufacture lies and outrage to fuel their march toward fascism.
Ohio was one of 13 states with automatic “trigger bans” that went into effect immediately after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As a result, Ohio now has zero exceptions for rape and incest. A 10-year-old rape victim who missed the state’s new six-week deadline by three days was forced to travel to Indiana for her abortion. Earlier this month, the girl’s alleged rapist, Gershon Fuentes, was arrested and charged with felony first-degree rape.
One would assume this sordid story would force most Republicans to pause in horror and reflect on the brutal consequences unleashed by the Court taking away the constitutionally protected right to abortion.
How would they feel if this was their daughter or loved one? Would they want to force an innocent girl to endure unnecessary trauma by carrying her abuser’s child? Could they at least create exceptions for rape and incest, which are supported by 69 percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans?
At the very least, this story should open them up to empathize with this young girl’s dilemma, right?
Wrong.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-four-stages-of-republican-misinformation?ref=home
Neologisms for today's world
Outragion - A viral issue that causes great consternation within the body politic.
MetastaGIF - a meme that suddenly appears on every corner of the Internet. Ex: Josh Haulin'
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