During a June 28 campaign rally held in Raleigh, North Carolina, President Joe Biden claimed 2024 presumptive Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump referred to veterans as “suckers and losers.” President Biden: Did you see Trump last night? He sincerely set a new record for the most lies told in a single debate. He […]

'they don't think Biden can win'

When most fans hear the name Stealers Wheel, the song “Stuck In The Middle With You,” pops into their head. It’s just one of those songs from the 1970s that you heard all the time on the radio. “Stuck In The Middle With You” had a great groove, fantastic guitar playing, unbelievable vocals, and a memorable melody. And if time caused you to possibly forget the song as we all grew older into the 80s and 90s, good old Quentin Tarantino brought it right back out front using the song in one of his most twisted scenes in his directorial The post Top 10 Stealers Wheel songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Column SFF Bestiary Conflating Our Cryptids: The X-Files and the Jersey Devil By Judith Tarr | Published on July 8, 2024 Credit: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Fox Most of my original cryptid knowledge started with The X-Files. The show was must-see TV long before the likes of MonsterQuest and Expedition X. So of course I’ve kept my eye on the series to see if they did anything with various cryptids. I hadn’t found anything about Bigfoot, but right there at the beginning, in the fifth episode of Season 1, there it was, the cryptid of the moment: “Jersey Devil.” Season 1, which aired in 1993, is just an egg. It features a monster of the week, and introduces our protagonists, skeptical Scully and “I Want to Believe” Mulder. They are both so young and so fresh-faced and so… well, young. We haven’t run full-on into all the aliens and the conspiracies yet; we’re just figuring out what the X-Files are and how Mulder and Scully’s dynamic will work. In episode 5, Scully arrives for work to find Mulder in his basement, poring over yet another file of the weird. She has a case for him. A body has been found in New Jersey near Atlantic City, with signs of having been partially eaten. A postmortem has found that the teeth that chowed down on the homeless man were human. There’s plenty of story-business. Scully wants a life, which includes her godson’s birthday party and a date with one of the dads. Mulder doesn’t need a life, he already has one: obsessively tracking down the truth of the X-Files. Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the local cops do not welcome the intrusion of the FBI into their jurisdiction, but a local park ranger is happy to help with the hunt. What they’re hunting has been lurking in the Pine Barrens for a while. Not since the Revolutionary War, but at least since 1947, when a man on vacation with his family was dragged off while fixing a flat in the woods at night. He was found with his leg chewed off, but whatever killed him was never caught. Legend has it that he met the Jersey Devil. This is not the hooved, winged biped that we’ve been seeing in other versions of the story. The show has another agenda. And that’s where we find Bigfoot in the X-Files universe. The cryptid moved to New Jersey. There’s no interest in Mother Leeds’ thirteenth child, or in the long history of the creature in the area. This is about the nature of the human species, and a possible explanation for the Bigfoot legend. The episode distills it into a conversation between Mulder and Dr. Diamond, one of Scully’s old professors at the University of Maryland. Dr. Diamond studies the effect of humans on the natural world. It boils down quite simply to: We invade, we destroy. We’re aggressively territorial animals with a hereditary inability to get along with anyone or anything that isn’t part of our family unit. We’re the apex of apex predators, and, says Dr. Diamond, “barring the introduction of some alien life-form, we will live out our days as rulers of the world.” (This is foreshadowing, of course.) But, Mulder counters, what if there’s a predator above us? What if there’s one out there that has “reverted to its most animal instincts, a kind of carnivorous Neanderthal”? I think he means “cannibalistic,” but he gets his point across. The point is the one Dr. Diamond raises, which is the nearly universal cultural myth of the Wild Man. He cites the Yeti and the Sasquatch as examples of an atavistic human fear of our own dual nature: we create life and we destroy it. It’s symbolic, but he says, but he’s all-in on the hunt for an actual, living example of the myth. It manifests in New Jersey as a lurker in the woods, a cannibalistic predator. A friendly park ranger has seen it. It’s a large, naked male, he recalls, that sniffed the air like a dog, and ran away with unnatural grace and speed. He once found a half-eaten rabbit with a human cuspid tooth embedded in it; he’s come across scat half-buried like a cat’s, but looking more human, and he’s seen deer bones sharpened into tools. The creature appears to be native to the woods, but it’s also an intruder into the urban landscape. It’s been seen dumpster-diving in an alley in Atlantic City, where the murdered homeless man happened to be living. Mulder stakes out the alley and scores. What he sees is a naked human form in very bad light. It sniffs like a dog, and it moves with unnatural grace and speed. He chases it, but it escapes. Now the hunt is up. The local cops are coming after it in force. Mulder, Scully, the ranger, and the professor want to capture the creature alive. By this time Mulder has reached the radical-for-1993 conclusion that the creature is female. His inspiration is an image that’s become much more familiar since, a line drawing of the iconic shot from the 1967 Patterson-Grimlin Bigfoot video. This version of the cryptid is visibly female—she has breasts. There’s no mention of the image’s source, or the fact that the video was filmed in California. It’s an X-File, wherever it comes from. It opens Mulder’s mind to the truth: that the large male the ranger saw, whose body has just now turned up—six to eight months dead and missing the same tooth that was found in the rabbit’s carcass—must have had a mate, and she’s been scavenging for food on the outskirts of Atlantic City. She escapes from the city and heads for the woods, but not before she nearly eviscerates Mulder. The ranger manages to dart her, but she eludes him and runs straight into the police cordon. There’s a single gunshot. The hunters arrive too late to save her. Mulder bends over her body and reverently closes her eyes. She’s fully human and model-beautiful, though dirty and with matted hair (but nicely manicured nails). A postmortem finds fragments of human bone in her digestive tract. Conclusion: She’s a Wild (Wo)Man, fully genetically human but completely reverted to a presumably atavistic state. I don’t see how she reads as an uber-apex predator. She’s a scavenger on the edge of human spaces. She eats anything she can catch, which includes helpless or inattentive humans. She’s a predator, therefore dangerous, but not any more so than a mountain lion or a bear. They’ll eat humans, too, if they’re desperate. The only connection with the actual Jersey Devil is the locale of the story, and the idea of a half-human, half-animal creature. It’s a “devil” in the sense of dangerous or evil and ultimately misunderstood. And like every other horror-story antagonist, killing it off doesn’t end it. At the end, just before the credits roll, a dad and his son are trekking through the woods. Dad is telling the story of the Jersey Devil, X-Files version: “a creature… lived out in there the woods. It was half man, half animal.” And he adds, “I used to believe.” And there in the shadows where they don’t see, directly under their feet, is a fresh young version of the dead woman. She had a child, the autopsy revealed. Here it is, lurking in the woods, just outside the limits of human perception. That’s a cryptid, when you come down to it. It’s a creature of the shadows, unseen and half-known. Sometimes it kills humans. More often, humans kill it. We don’t ask how its kind continue to survive, or where they came from originally, or how they’ve made it from 1947 to 1993 and managed to mate and produce offspring. That’s outside the range of the story. What’s left when it’s over is an X-File. Mulder lingers over it for a few moments. There are photos of the dead woman half-covered in leaves, with her pretty face and her nice nails. He tucks them away in the file. And so on to the next.[end-mark] The post Conflating Our Cryptids: <i>The X-Files</i> and the Jersey Devil appeared first on Reactor.

The Left Loses, It Riots; The Left Wins, It Riots

The JWST has detected the presence of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in the atmosphere of the planet HD 189733b, a nearby “hot Jupiter”. Already off the colonization list for being twice as hot as Venus and presumably having no solid surface to land on, HD 189733b can now add the smell of rotten eggs to its nope list. Nevertheless, the finding shows our models of planetary formation are getting good enough to make successful predictions.Large planets, and those that orbit close to their stars, are the easiest to detect. Consequently, when astronomers first started discovering planets outside the Solar System, it looked as though the galaxy was filled with “hot Jupiters”, gas giants with masses close to Jupiter’s or greater orbiting near enough to their star to be scorched.At 65 light-years away, HD 189733b is the closest of these known to transit in front of its star from our perspective, and therefore a natural priority for further investigation. At an estimated 920°C (1,700°F), it’s a truly extreme world, which models indicate has some of the fastest winds we know. However, the same things that make it so inhospitable, along with its relative closeness, also make it one of the easiest planets outside our own system to study, attracting the attention of the JWST.A study of HD 189733b’s spectrum led by Dr Guangwei Fu of Johns Hopkins University described HD 189733b as “the benchmark planet for atmospheric characterization.”The study collected light filtered through HD 189733b’s atmosphere during transits, and demonstrates the JWST’s capacity to detect molecules present in relatively small quantities, as well as vindicating astronomers’ models.“Hydrogen sulfide is a major molecule that we didn’t know was there. We predicted it would be, and we know it’s in Jupiter, but we hadn’t really detected it outside the Solar System,” Fu said in a statement. “We’re not looking for life on this planet because it’s way too hot, but finding hydrogen sulfide is a stepping stone for finding this molecule on other planets and gaining more understanding of how different types of planets form.”The team also detected water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide in HD 189733b’s atmosphere, but these are expected to be much more abundant, and two of them had been found before with less powerful instruments. On the other hand, no sign of methane was found down to a concentration of one part in 10 million, contrary to some previous reports. This also confirms models suggesting methane would not survive on a planet that hot.Besides demonstrating the capacity to detect hydrogen sulfide, the results increase confidence that sulfur is a common element on exoplanets. We might not like this particular sulfur compound, but Fu noted, “Sulfur is a vital element for building more complex molecules, and – like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphate – scientists need to study it more to fully understand how planets are made and what they’re made of.” “Say we study another 100 hot Jupiters and they're all sulfur enhanced. What does that mean about how they were born and how they form differently compared to our own Jupiter?” Fu added. A hundred might be an ambitious target given the demands on the JWST’s time, but Fu is working on studying several.Besides its association with eggs that have gone bad, hydrogen sulfide is common around volcanic vents, leading to the popular association of brimstone (an old word for sulfur) with hell. HD 189733b has sometimes been described as having a temperature of 3,000°C (5,432°F), but the truth is a more modest 920°C (1,700°F) – still a bit uncomfortable though. Other features predicted by models are winds of 8,700 kilometers an hour (5,400 mph) and rains of glass.The study is published in Nature. 

The rights of the Machángara River in Ecuador have been violated and measures to decontaminate it must be implemented right away, a court has ruled, after an action was filed in the hope of safeguarding the river and its sources against pollution. The river runs through the Metropolitan District of Quito, the country’s capital.The rights of nature are actually enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution: “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes. All persons, communities, peoples, and nations can call upon public authorities to enforce the rights of nature,” it states when translated into English. “The State shall give incentives to natural persons and legal entities and to communities to protect nature and to promote respect for all the elements comprising an ecosystem.”“This initiative responds to the serious violation of rights that directly affects the river and, indirectly, the 2.6 million inhabitants of the Ecuadorian capital and all the populations through which the river passes, as well as those that receive its waters downstream,” the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) said in a statement.They cite the dumping of industrial and domestic wastewater into the river, a low percentage of dissolved oxygen in the water, plus the presence of “tons of garbage” as concerns. “The degradation of the Machángara River not only contributes to environmental insecurity, but also directly impacts the quality of life of citizens,” they state. “The Machángara River has lost its identity, it is no longer a symbol of pride that accompanied the history of the city and that was part of the life of its inhabitants.”The Machángara River was represented by social movements and the Kitu Kara People, with the action being delivered to the Constitutional Judge of Pichincha in the Northern Judicial Complex, GARN stated on May 28.On July 5, they posted an update declaring that the Machángara River has “been declared a subject of rights” and that the judge has ordered plans for decontamination to be implemented immediately, although they state that the municipality of Quito has filed an appeal against the decision.“This is historic because the river runs right through Quito, and because of its influence, people live very close to it,” Darío Iza of the Kitu Kara said, AP News reports.On July 7, it was announced that Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Agua Potable y Saneamiento de Quito “has the green light to move forward with the studies, designs, and search for financing for the construction of three large Wastewater Treatment Plants.” One, named PTAR Quito, will serve the Machángara River basin and treat a flow of 4.38 cubic meters per second (154.68 cubic feet per second)."The idea is that we can start the program, which could take 17 years, with an investment of around 900 million dollars," said the mayor of the city, Pabel Muñoz.“Decontaminating the river is not only a responsibility of the local government, but an imperative need to guarantee a sustainable future for all,” GARN explained.

Once upon a time, all humans on Earth had brown eyes until a single person had a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene, perhaps as recently as 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. The chance mutation impacted the production of melanin pigment in the iris, giving rise to lighter shades of eyes, from amber and hazel to green and blue. It was previously believed that just a couple of genes simply controlled eye color, but scientists have since figured out it's linked to dozens and dozens of genes. Despite this complexity, there are clear trends in how eye color manifests across different parts of the world.The most common eye colorBrown eyes are the most common eye color of modern-day humans. However, the proportion of different eye colors varies massively from region to region, country to country.In the US, 45 percent of the population have brown eyes, 27 percent have blue eyes, 18 percent have hazel eyes, 9 percent have green eyes, and the remaining 1 percent have an eye color not listed above. That’s according to a 2014 survey of 2,000 people in the US by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.Elsewhere in the world, things are very different. Although few studies have looked into eye color in Africa, it’s apparent that brown is the predominant color, likewise in South Asia and East Asia. A 2019 study looked at data on eye color for some countries across Europe and Central Asia, breaking it down into "brown/hazel", "intermediate", and "blue". While countries like Armenia had over 80 percent brown eyes and 3 percent blue, Iceland had 9 percent brown eyes and 74 percent blue.Here’s how the rest of the results broke down: CountryBlue Eyes"Intermediate Eyes"Brown EyesArmenia3.05 %16.78 %80.15 %Denmark64.84 %20.45 %14.50 %Great Britain42.80 %25.46 %31.77 %France22 %44 %34 %Georgia7.51 %18.79 %73.68 %Germany39.6 %33.2 %27.2 %Kazakhstan3.33 %11.65 %85 %Ukraine (Crimea)25 %24.99 %50 %Uzbekistan3.44 %6.02 %90.51 %What's up with blue eyes?You might be wondering why Europe has more variation in eye color than the rest of the world, specifically in regard to blue eyes. Scientists aren’t totally sure about the answer, but they've put forward a few theories.One idea is the "vitamin D hypothesis", which suggests light-colored skin, hair, and eyes helped prehistoric humans adapt to the northern latitudes where light is less plentiful. Another idea is that it had something to do with Europeans having more Neanderthal genes. In reality, it’s likely to be a complex meddle of factors involving genetic drift, founder effects, relaxation of natural selection, and sexual selection.And no, there’s no evidence that blue eyes are falling to extinction. The genes that code for blue eyes are recessive, while brown eyes are dominant, meaning a person needs to inherit the genes for blue eyes from both parents to possess the characteristic. This has led to some erroneous claims that blue eyes might eventually become diluted out of the population (similar claims are often said about ginger hair too). However, blue eyes are very unlikely to die out in the foreseeable future simply because enough people carry the genes to keep the recessive traits in the human population.Just like redheads and attached earlobes, blue eyes are a recessive trait that are likely here to stay.

An unexpected feature of the room students sit their exams in may have an impact on their results, new research has found: a high ceiling. Generally in school and higher education, students are taught in small rooms or lecture halls and study alone in normal-sized rooms. But come exam day, due to the high volume of people taking exams at the end of a year, students are placed in large rooms such as gymnasiums for their final tests.While this may make sense from a cost and logistics point of view, recent research has suggested that rooms with high ceilings can impact brain activity associated with concentration. Researchers from the University of South Australia and Deakin University looked into this effect by looking at real-world data, taken from 15,400 undergraduate students across three campuses at an Australian university between 2011 and 2019, and the ceiling height of the rooms where they took their exams.Accounting for factors such as coursework scores, students' age, the time of year, the subject studied, and whether the student had taken exams on it before, the team found that there was a notable difference in performance between students sitting in rooms with normal and high ceilings.“These spaces are often designed for purposes other than examinations, such as gymnasiums, exhibitions, events and performances,” Dr Isabella Bower, lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “The key point is that large rooms with high ceilings seem to disadvantage students and we need to understand what brain mechanisms are at play, and whether this affects all students to the same degree.”                    It is unclear from this research alone what caused the poorer performance of students in rooms with higher ceilings."A key constraint of this naturalistic retrospective study is that we are unable to probe whether the observed result is direct result of the design quality of scale, or if differences arise because of the indoor environmental parameters afforded by the scale," the team wrote in their paper. "For instance, as enlarged gymnasium spaces are often poorly insulated and are expensive to climate control, the observed effect may be due to lowered ambient temperature on the students, which has been shown to reduce cognitive function in young adults."Other factors could include unfamiliarity with the exam room, and the crowding of such rooms. Cognitive performance has been shown to decrease in crowded spaces, for example."Lastly, the smaller room scale may allow students more opportunities to cheat," the team continues. "While the proctor to student ratio is far higher, the student-to-student ratio is lower reducing peer surveillance and monitoring which may influence if a student cheats by smuggling in notes." However, though we do not know the mechanism, room size does appear to be a partial factor. Previous research by the team placed participants in VR environments which altered the size of the virtual "room" they were placed in, while electroencephalography (EEG) recorded the response in their brains, finding that brain activity involved in concentration on difficult tasks increased as participants sat in the larger virtual rooms. The research could lead to improvements in examinations and testing."In Australia, many universities and schools use large indoor spaces for exams to streamline logistics and costs. It's crucial to recognize the potential impact of the physical environment on student performance and make necessary adjustments to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to succeed," Bower added.“These findings will allow us to better design the buildings in which we live and work, so we can perform to the best of our ability.”The study is published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Now that it's increasingly possible that Democrats will push Joe Biden off the ticket and turn to Kamala Harris, the supportive scribes at the Associated Press sounded like the Associated Partisans on her behalf. Or should they just be the EP, for Editorializing Press? Our "objective" media insist it's now "racist and misogynist" to suggest Harris would end up as president in the next four years if the Democrats are re-elected.  The Republican who mostly boldly underlined the President Kamala narrative in the last year was Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. So apparently Haley is both racist and misogynist? Jill Colvin's editorial -- oops, "news story" -- began like this:  NEW YORK (AP) — For years it’s been a Republican scare tactic. A vote to reelect President Joe Biden, the GOP often charges, is really a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s an attack line sometimes tinged with racist and misogynist undertones and often macabre imagery. But after Biden’s dismal performance at last week’s presidential debate, which has sparked Democratic calls for him to step aside, what was once dismissed as a far-right conspiracy — Harris replacing Biden — could now have a chance of coming to pass. And Republicans, including Donald Trump, are ramping up their attacks. Colvin didn't offer anything "macabre" in this story, but she sounded scandalized that Team Trump was offering "derisive" nicknames for Harris, from "Laffin Kamala' to "Cackling Copilot." Sounds gentler than Trump is Hitler! Then there was a Truth Social post from the former president:  “She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco,” he wrote. ( Harris dated Brown in the mid-1990s.) AP linked to....an op-ed by Willie Brown asking "So what?" That's what Associated Partisans do. The liberal fact checkers have tried to downplay the Harris-Brown dating/mentorship angle. Watch for more of this to resurface if Biden is pushed out. Colvin added:  Trump also posted an expletive-laced video, which was first been reported by the Daily Beast, in which he was captured on the golf course calling Biden an “old broken down pile of crap” and declaring that he’d driven the president from the race.  AP turned to KJP for comment. (Maybe we should call them KJAP?) “I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing,” Jean-Pierre told reporters Friday aboard Air Force One. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected like any other vice president before her who was in that room. [??] It is appalling that, I’m going to be careful here, that a former president is saying that about a current vice president. And we should call that out — it is not OK.” The idea that vice presidents -- especially Republicans -- have been universally "respected" is obviously false. At least the AP story ended with Team Trump explaining how they could beat Harris just like Biden, since their policies are the same.