French election: Le Pen's party now dominant force in France - "Right now, the seat projections give the RN anything from 260 to 310. Given that 289 seats is an absolute majority, there is obviously a lot still to play for. To limit the damage to their cause, French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and the left-wing New Popular Front alliance will call on their supporters to vote tactically in round two on 7 July. Even if their own candidate has been knocked out, voters will be urged to choose whoever it is in their constituency that is up against the RN. But the trouble with this kind of party order is that fewer and fewer people listen to them anymore. The disappearance of the shame that used to attend a vote for the RN has been a long process, but it can now surely be declared to be complete."
Imtiaz Mahmood on X - "Marine Le Pen is set to humiliate Macron, the far-left and EU establishment. Turnout at 5 pm was 60% significantly higher than 47.5% in 2022. This is the highest turnout in last 25 years, indicating this election matters to the people. The French have had enough Islam. France is boarding up in preparation for far-left riots if and when Le Pen’s party wins. One week of rioting is expected."
Clear proof that the "far right" cause violence and they need to be banned and arrested to "protect democracy"
PeterSweden on X - "HUGE NEWS The leader of the Communist party in France LOST his seat as an MP to Marine Le Pen's right-wing party. The right-wing got 58% of the votes, massively defeating the Communist in his own seat."
PeterSweden on X - "Incredible bias from the BBC tonight. They are calling Marine Le Pen's party for "far-right". Meanwhile the Socialists/Communists are being called just "left-wing"."
Chris Rose on X - "Left wing protests have started in Paris following the National Rally's victory in the first round. Very striking that there are far more Palestine, Pride and Algeria flags then the French flag. A bit of a clue as to why Le Pen did well."
Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura on X - "I understand that Americans are freaking out and many are thinking about moving out of the States and I would genuinely recommend they do not do that. Fascism is on the rise literally everywhere, esp in Europe. You will not be saved by just moving away."
akhivae on X - "Fascism is rising almost nowhere in the West. They want fewer immigrants and an end to post-2010 progressive politics. There's very little desire to invade neighboring nations for lebensraum or start goose-stepping in military parades."
Macron warns voters against the far right and hard left ahead of crucial parliamentary elections - "French President Emmanuel Macron is warning voters against choosing the far right or the hard left, asserting that their divisive policies increase the risk of political “conflict and civil war”"
If elites push France to civil war because they cannot accept the public's rejection of them, it's the fault of the "far right"
Adam Pankratz: Macron stares into the abyss as French election run-off nears - "Macron gambled that French voters would rally to the presidential party following its poor European results. With his characteristic arrogance, he assumed the population would recognize its error and vote for the correct party: his. His gamble to dissolve the parliament has backfired in spectacular fashion... A unique twist of the French run-off is that more than two candidates can advance to the runoff stage if they receive over 12.5 per cent of the vote in Round 1. This is rare, but as a consequence of the very high turnout for this election, the initial number of second-round three- and four-way races exploded from seven in 2022 to 306 this year. Enormous pressure has been put on third-place candidates to stand down and indeed over 210 — 130 from LFI and 82 from the president’s party — already have . This massive movement to block the RN at any cost may look decent on paper, but Macron must know the fire he is playing with. In order to block the spectre of Bardella and Le Pen, Macron has been forced to make deals with Mélenchon and LFI. This is a man and party who in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks refused to condemn Hamas’s murderous rampage and blamed Israel . This is the scale of Macron’s desperation. The gamble is huge. No one can know for certain where the votes will actually go in the attempt to unify the left. And, even if it works to some degree in blunting the RN juggernaut, Macron has set the French parliament up for gridlock and dysfunction. Further, regardless of the deals made, it does seem a near certainty that the RN will be the largest party in parliament next week. Longer term, it’s hard to see the situation getting better for French voters who, fed up with government and presidential incompetence, may well return the RN a true majority next time around. The RN’s success has rocked French politics to its very core. Macronism is dead and a new era of uncertainty lays ahead. It remains an open question as to whether that new era will tear French society apart as extremists on the right and left take over. The only thing currently certain is that Macron is set to leave politics as he entered it: alone."
Allying with anti-Semites only makes you an anti-Semite if that pushes the left wing agenda
The French rejected Europe. Emmanuel Macron's humiliation is next - "For followers of European and French politics Macron’s marketing of the situation must be taken with a decent dose of incredulity. Has Emmanuel Macron — the most out of touch man in western politics, best known for his strident arrogance and derision of the unwashed masses — suddenly found religion and decided the people know best?... Either Macron has acted because he thinks the RN isn’t actually that strong and will lose his snap election, or he is playing the very long game and calling the RN’s bluff. By doing so, he hopes to force the RN into controlling parliament, where Macron would choose a prime minister from its ranks, with the hope that the party’s popularity will be dragged down by the realities of governing. That would eliminate Le Pen and the French right as a serious threat to him in the 2027 presidential elections. Either way, it is an enormous gamble by the French president... Under Le Pen the RN has managed to rebrand. Many French no longer consider her or her party to be a far-right threat. Though not by any means moderates, the RN is now considered a credible alternative in a country frustrated by out-of-control immigration, lack of public safety, a sluggish economy and a president whose instinct has generally been to dismiss anyone who raises these issues."
Meme - "When you find a username without having to add a number at the end
... FIRST OF HIS NAME"
Meme - ライオン Lion @LionBlogosphere: "I watched the first episode of 3 Body Problem. I can believe that the laws of physics have changed, but what I can't believe is that the two top physicists in the United Kingdom are a hot girl and a black guy. That's the real alternate-universe science-fiction thing.
This is what real-world top physicists look like:
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023, 2022, 2021
The Big Bang Theory may have been a show for stupid people, but at least the actors who played physicists looked like physicists. And the hot girl, Penny, was a ditz who worked as a waitress."
What’s Stopping Us From Curing Rare Diseases? - "Having the power to cure genetic diseases by editing the human genome is a dream come true for geneticists. But when it comes to using that power to help people, the story gets more complicated.
URNOV: Many a time, when parents of children with severe genetic disease send me a note saying, “Dr. Urnov, is there anything you can do?” If they are willing to share what the mutation is, I can load it into some software in my computer — which is available to all, I wanna be clear, not some proprietary U.C. Berkeley software — and you can basically engineer, if you know what you’re doing, a CRISPR to fix that mutation. For many diseases, that engineered CRISPR on my computer screen can become a vial with that CRISPR that we can pretty quickly test for whether it can repair the defect safely and effectively. Start to finish, if you know what you’re doing, it’ll take well under a year. So do I write back to the parents and say, “Hi, guess what?” No. And here’s why. Engineering the medicine is the first step of probably a four-year process to protect patients from faulty medicines. I wanna really emphasize, I’m not sitting here and saying, “Get rid of the laws to protect patients from faulty medicines.” But going through that four-year process just to get to the clinic takes anywhere between eight to $10 million for one disease. If the disease is relatively prevalent, like sickle cell disease, And then if they charge what is currently being charged for these types of medicines, which is 1 to 2 to $3 million a patient, I can see why a company would invest years and millions to build a medicine. Okay, now I get this email from somebody and they have two children, and both children have this change and it’s unclear that anybody else on planet Earth has that genetic change. So who exactly is going to spend four years and $10 million building a medicine that’s gonna be used to treat two kids? Many of these diseases are individually so rare that they do not form, a viable commercial proposition under the current system. We need to face the remarkable reality that our ability to engineer these CRISPR medicines has far outpaced how these medicines are actually built, tested, and put into human beings. We have never had a technology like CRISPR. We owe it to the patients and the families to aggressively build a new framework to provide these medicines to these individuals.
JENA: It scares me because it’s one thing to say to somebody that we don’t have a treatment because the biology doesn’t exist to provide that treatment. It’s another thing to say that we don’t have a treatment because there’s not sufficient commercial incentive to develop that treatment, to evaluate it, to test it, to market it, or that we have a set of regulatory policies that aren’t adept enough to recognize that there are some patients with some diseases who, you know, literally months matter in terms of getting access to care. We wanna get medicines to people faster, but we wanna make sure that we do so in a way that’s safe. And the F.D.A. is really tasked with managing that speed/safety tradeoff. But, of course, that trade-off should change when the parameters change, right? So if you have a new technology that will allow for personalized intervention in people with life-threatening diseases for which early treatment really does matter, we should be able to create a regulatory pathway that would allow for that. And then there’s the other bucket of alright, well, how do we pay for that? That commercialization issue is equally important."
Meme - "r/OldSchoolCool
Marisa Tomei's yearbook from 1982.
MARISA TOMEI
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Goal: Actress"
Meme - Spike Cohen: ""For the greater good" almost always means "this will be bad for you". And it's almost always said by someone it will be good for. "Greater" just means them."
Meme - "Mount Touchmore"
Meme - True Discipline @TruueDiscipline: "Old poll, but shows pro-nationalist double standard that is the norm for most groups around the world:"
"The Right to Recieve Education In Mother Tongue According to Turkish Public
The Turkish children in Germany should recieve education in their native language *73% Strongly Agree / Agree, 8% Strongly Disagree or Disagree*
The Kurdish children in Turkey should recieve education in their native language *41% Strongly Agree / Agree, 41% Strongly Disagree or Disagree*"
Nothing to see here, since left wingers say it is right and proper that the West be judged by a higher standard. The soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again
Crémieux on X - "The web is undergoing constant decay, as webpages become inaccessible over time. Look back about a decade, over a third of webpages from the time are no longer accessible."
Meme - "This could be us but you won't do sex magic in the forest with me while praying to the ancient gods"
Ford government to employers: No more ghosting job-seekers - "A survey of more than 1,000 American managers by Clarify Capital late last year found 43 per cent admitted to posting “ghost jobs.” While 37 per cent said they did it to keep a pool of candidates in case a job became vacant, others said it was to “placate overworked employees.”"
'Anus-eating' virus that kills 30% of people is spreading – 'something has happened' - "A mystery flesh-eating disease that kills around 30% of people who become infected is spreading rapidly around Japan. In the first two months of 2024, some 378 cases of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) were detected in the country. Last year it is believed there were 941 cases, which has caused concern that this year is set to surpass that number by some distance. STSS is caused by a more severe form of the bacteria that causes Streptococcal A, the strep A throat infection common in children."
Beachgoers spot monster jellyfish and crab 'that can wipe out a town' as some boycott sea
Did the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic Ever Really End? - The Atlantic - "Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice. Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones would learn, was the collateral damage of the desktop-computer revolution. As Representative Tom Lantos of California put it at a congressional hearing in 1989, these were symptoms of what could be “the industrial disease of the information age.” By 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that the number of RSI cases had increased more than tenfold over the previous decade. Henriques believed her workplace injury might have had a more specific diagnosis, though: carpal tunnel syndrome... But the epidemic waned in the years that followed. The number of workplace-related RSIs recorded per year had already started on a long decline, and in the early 2000s, news reports on the modern plague all but disappeared. Two decades later, professionals are ensconced more deeply in the trappings of the information age than they’ve ever been before, and post-COVID, computer use has spread from offices to living rooms and kitchens. Yet if this work is causing widespread injury, the evidence remains obscure. The whole carpal tunnel crisis, and the millions it affected, now reads like a strange and temporary problem of the ancient past... Research showed that people whose work involves repetitive and forceful hand exertions for long periods are more prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, Rempel told me—but that association is not as strong for computer-based jobs. “If there is an elevated risk to white-collar workers, it’s not large,” he said. Computer use is clearly linked to RSIs in general, however... White-collar workers with hand pain and numbness might have naturally presumed they had carpal tunnel, thanks to news reports and the chatter at the water cooler; then, as they told their colleagues—and reporters—about their disabilities, they helped fuel a false-diagnosis feedback loop. It’s possible that well-intentioned shifts in workplace culture further exaggerated the scale of the epidemic. According to Fredric Gerr, a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, white-collar employees were encouraged during the 1990s to report even minor aches and pains, so they could be diagnosed—and treated—earlier. But Gerr told me that such awareness-raising efforts may have backfired, causing workers to view those minor aches as harbingers of a disabling, chronic disease. Clinicians and ergonomists, too, he said, began to lump any pain-addled worker into the same bin, regardless of their symptoms’ severity—a practice that may have artificially inflated the reported rates of RSIs and caused unnecessary anxiety... As it happens, a very similar story had played out on the other side of the world more than a decade earlier.Reporters in Australia began sounding the alarm about the booming rates of RSIs among computer users in 1983, right at the advent of the computer revolution"
Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses - The Atlantic - "Pepsi Co., facing a lawsuit from a man who claims to have found a mouse in his Mountain Dew can, has an especially creative, if disgusting, defense: their soda would have dissolved a dead mouse before the man could have found it... This seems like a winning-the-battle-while-surrendering-the-war kind of strategy that hinges on the argument that Pepsi's product is essentially a can of bright green/yellow battery acid"
Domino’s ‘Paving for Pizza’ Stunt Fills Potholes in American Cities - "For over two months now, pizza giant Domino’s has dipped its toes into the world of urban renewal. Back in June, the company announced it would help a handful of American cities and towns fix some of their chronic pothole problems: “We don’t want to lose any great-tasting pizza to a pothole, ruining a wonderful meal,” a press release fretted. In the “Paving for Pizza” program, Domino’s handed over cash to municipalities across America, cities arranged for workers to repair cracks and potholes, and a Domino’s logo was spray-painted onto some of the newly smoothed streets... All up, the promotion means cities get free money for repairs, and Domino’s quietly works in the background to get some goodwill and publicity out of it. The chain did not attach major strings to the money: a representative tells Eater that cities were completely free to choose which streets would be repaired, meaning the pizza chain did not ask them to repair streets around their own stores (some cities confirmed this). Plus, Domino’s did not require the cities to plaster its logo over the repaired streets, although stencils for this were supplied, and some, such as Bartonville, opted to do that. But beneath the surface, the willingness for cities to take this money is an indictment on the state of American infrastructure funding. Several mayors suggested that getting the money to keep streets in good condition was a major challenge, in some cases blaming a lack of funding from states, or the general difficulties of raising enough tax money to keep roads from falling apart."
120-Year-Old Harpoon Fragment Found Lodged In Bowhead Whale - "a 50-ton bowhead whale was found in Alaska with fragments of a 19th-century harpoon lodged in a shoulder bone. It’s quite a clue for biologists. The weapon was used more than a century ago by whalers from New Bedford, Massachusetts. This allowed researchers to estimate the bowhead whale to be at least 115 years old and supports their belief that bowhead whales are one of the longest-living mammals on earth, surviving up to 120 years... A biologist in Alaska was the one who noticed the fragments as they were being pulled from the whale’s blubber by the Eskimos that killed the whale. The biologist then sent them to Bockstoce, who identified them as part of an exploding lance made in New Bedford in the late 1800s. This happens to be the same time as when the city was known as the world’s whaling capital. When the hunters would spear the whale with this weapon, it would detonate once inside. Bockstoce and his colleagues believe the whale was shot sometime between 1885 and 1895."
Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? - The New York Times - "After World War II, the G.I. Bill flooded the American labor market with college diplomas, and for a few decades, the gap between the median income of high school graduates and that of college graduates remained pretty narrow; having a college degree produced an income boost of 30 percent or so. But in the early 1980s, the college wage premium began to rise steadily. In the early 2000s, it surpassed 60 percent, and ever since, it has hovered around 65 percent. In theory, today’s sky-high college wage premium should mean a surge of young people onto college campuses, not the opposite. But as a measure of the true value of higher education, the college wage premium has one important limitation. It can tell you how much college graduates earn, but it doesn’t take into account how much they owe — or how much they spent on college in the first place. For a long time, there were no good alternative measures to the college wage premium. But a few years ago, a group of economic researchers in St. Louis introduced a new one: the college wealth premium. Unlike the college wage premium, the college wealth premium looks at all your assets and all your debts: what you’ve got in the bank, whether you own a house, your student-loan balance. It addresses a simple but important question: How much net wealth does a typical college graduate accumulate over their life span, compared with that of a typical high school graduate? These three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons and Ana Hernández Kent — used the Fed’s survey of thousands of American households to consider the financial advantage that college graduates receive. When they analyzed the data through the lens of wealth, as opposed to income, the benefits to a college degree began to evaporate... When the researchers looked at young Americans who had gone on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was even more dire. “Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is ... indistinguishable from zero,” the authors concluded. “Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.” These are startling data, and they present a kind of paradox. Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. How can that be? Lowell Ricketts told me he had a pretty good idea of the cause, even though the group’s data couldn’t be conclusive on this point. The likely culprit, he said, was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it... On average, more education still means more income. What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill. It’s now more like going to a casino. It’s a gamble that can still sometimes produce a big windfall, but it can also bring financial disaster. A few years ago, Webber set out to try to make sense of that variability. For whom does college pay off, and for whom does it not? He analyzed the data by college major, by academic ability and by tuition costs, and was able to show in more detail exactly who was winning at the higher education casino and who was losing... If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip. In fact, if your degree is in the arts or humanities, you’re likely to lose the bet even if your annual college expenses are just $25,000... there is some objective data to substantiate the leftward lean of American college campuses. The Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A., which regularly surveys students, found last year that three times as many American college freshmen identified as liberal or far left as said they were conservative or far right. Among college faculty, the ratio is even more pronounced, and it has been growing more unbalanced over time, shifting from a 2-to-1 left-right ratio in the mid-1990s to a roughly 5-to-1 ratio in the early 2010s. Then there are the administrators. A separate poll from 2018 found that among student-facing university administrators, 12 times as many defined themselves as liberal as defined themselves as conservative. This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate... the children of the richest American families are twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with the same standardized test scores."
Why You Feel The Need To Poop When You Go To A Bookstore - "There's a name for this very common occurrence: the Mariko Aoki phenomenon. The name comes from a woman who mentioned it in a magazine article in 1985, but it quickly spiked into a TikTok trend... "In the colorectal world — where I spent most of my time at the University of California, San Francisco — it could be related to the person finally 'slowing down,'" Nurse Wong told BuzzFeed. "For instance, sitting to read a book, or perhaps the sitting position on the chair. This could stimulate someone to feel as if they needed to defecate. The calming environment probably was helpful too. Along with the possibility of having some other triggers — like having a cup of tea or coffee before going into the bookstore or during her visit to the bookstore."... Dr. Sameer Islam, MD, a Texas-based gastroenterologist, stated, "In a library or bookstore specifically, what's likely happening is the effect arises from feelings of nervous tension in the face of all the information represented on the bookshelves. This has more scientific support and evidence, at least. But we really have no idea." "The mere position of sitting, bending forward to read a book could have also stimulated and simulated the perfect setting for the gastrocolic reflex to react, hence having a bowel movement. People may have repeatedly experienced this and associated the 'bookstore' as the trigger, rather than all of the other factors that I have mentioned before." "
Florida Deputy Fabricated Story About Being Carjacked, Shot by Black Men After Accidentally Shooting Himself - "Dakotah Wood, 21, of Weeki Wachee, Florida, initially told deputies that the two men shot him in the leg and he returned fire. However, it was later revealed that he accidentally shot himself"
Does Health Insurance Make You Healthier? - "The RAND Health Insurance Experiment was conducted from 1971 to 1986 and directed by the economist Joe Newhouse. To this day, it’s the largest health policy study in U.S. history.
BAICKER: And what that studied was the effect of different patient copays or cost sharing on healthcare use and health outcomes. And they found that when patients have to pay more for healthcare, they use less of it. Now, for anyone who’s taken econ 101, higher prices mean lower demand. But it actually is surprising in healthcare because I don’t think that’s how most of us imagine consuming healthcare... it was surprising to a lot of people that patients were sensitive to prices in that way — even for drugs that are potentially life saving!... It turns out doctors are also sensitive to prices. When you pay doctors more for stuff, they do more stuff. Nobody thinks of physicians as making decisions based on those payments. But doctors are people too, and they also respond to the incentives that the system generates."
It's amazing how many people think that when it comes to healthcare, people don't respond to incentives
