The day before auditioning for the biggest band in metal, Trujillo was up partying all night with Lars Ulrich

The windmill scams in the Northeast are failing as predicted. Biden-Harris continues to ignore predictions based on facts. At the same time, the administration is dismantling our current energy sector. They insist on making vainglorious statements about the future of offshore windmills even as they flop. Joe Biden just said wind power will power the […] The post Failed, Flopped, Doomed Offshore Windmill Farms Carry On appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Pat Sajak celebrated his final season of Wheel Of Fortune with his first Emmy win in 26 years. Pat earned the Outstanding Host for a Game Show award during the 2024 Creative Arts Emmys on Saturday, Sept. 7, beating out Weakest Link‘s Jane Lynch, Jeopardy‘s Ken Jennings, Celebrity Family Feud‘s Steve Harvey, and Password‘s Keke Palmer. While Pat Sajak has been one of television’s most iconic game show hosts since he joined Wheel of Fortune in 1981, he only won three previous Emmys in the category. The now 77-year-old was honored with the Outstanding Game Show Host award during the Daytime Emmys in 1993, 1997, and 1998. During his 43 years with the series, Pat was nominated for the coveted award 23 times. This year’s win marks Pat’s first Primetime Emmy win. The category moved in 2023. Pat Sajak also holds the special Lifetime Achievement Award, which he won during the 2011 Daytime Emmy Award alongside the late Alex Trebek. Pat Sajak To Make A “Wheel Of Fortune” Encore This Fall The legendary TV personality officially retired from Wheel of Fortune in June 2024 after announcing his exit one year earlier. “Well, the time has come. I’ve decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last,” he wrote on X. “It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months. Many thanks to you all. (If nothing else, it’ll keep the clickbait sites busy!)” Ryan Seacrest will be taking Pat Sajak’s place on Wheel of Fortune. But Pat will be giving an encore this fall. He will come hosting the upcoming season of Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, which kicks off on October 7. This story’s featured image is by Kathy Hutchins via Shutterstock. The post Pat Sajak Celebrates Major Career Achievement 3 Months After “Wheel Of Fortune” Retirement appeared first on InspireMore.

Five victims suffered ‘serious’ injuries, including one person who was shot in the face

‘It’s ground for impeachment immediately and removal from office,’ Trump said

Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart, known professionally as Fiona Apple, embarked on her music career in the mid-1990s and quickly became one of the most distinctive voices in the alternative music scene. Born on September 13, 1977, in Manhattan, New York, she is the daughter of actor Brandon Maggart and singer Diane McAfee. Apple’s deep, expressive contralto and pianistic talents set her apart in an era dominated by more conventional pop music. Her debut album, Tidal, was released in 1996 when she was just 19 years old. It was a commercial success, certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA, and included the hit The post Complete List Of Fiona Apple Albums And Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Dan Denis: Have you ever been drifting off to sleep, only to be jerked awake by the sound of a bomb going off inside your head? If you have, then you have most likely experienced exploding head syndrome, a mysterious and poorly understood sleep disorder. Exploding head syndrome (EHS) belongs to a family of sleep disorders known as parasomnias. Other parasomnias include sleep paralysis and hypnic jerks – the cause of that unpleasant feeling of falling we sometimes experience when drifting off to sleep. EHS has been known to medical professionals since at least 1876, and apparently the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes experienced it. Despite that, we know surprisingly little about the condition. A typical episode is characterised by the experience of an abrupt loud noise or a sense of an explosion inside the head that occurs during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. The sounds that are heard during EHS are variable, and include perceptions of gun shots, doors slamming, or nondescript screaming. Importantly, the sounds that are heard are always short (a few seconds or less), very loud and without any obvious external source in the environment. Alongside the sounds, some people experience accompanying brief visual hallucinations such as bright flashes. Others have also reported feelings of intense heat, or the sensation of electrical charge flowing through the upper body. It is hard to estimate exactly many people experience EHS. One reason for this is simply a lack of available data. Only a handful of studies have attempted to survey the prevalence of EHS in the general population. One early study found that 11% of otherwise healthy adults experienced EHS, while another study in undergraduate students found 17% of participants had experienced multiple episodes in their lifetime. In my own, more recent study, again in undergraduate students, my colleagues and I found that one-third of our sample had experienced at least one episode of EHS in their lifetime, with around 6% experiencing at least one episode a month. What these studies show is that EHS is a relatively common experience, at least in young adults. It does however appear to be less common than other parasomnias such as hypnic jerks, which occur in up to 70% of people. Triggers The exact cause of EHS is unknown. While many theories of the root cause of EHS have been put forward, the most popular implicates the natural brain processes that are ongoing in the transition from wakefulness to sleep. On a typical night, as we transition from wakefulness into sleep, activity within the reticular formation of the brain is reduced. The reticular formation is a set of brain structures located primarily in the brainstem and hypothalamus, that acts as an “on-off” switch for the brain. As reticular activity slows down in the transition to sleep, our sensory cortices that govern vision, sound, and motor movement start to shut down. It has been proposed that the experience of EHS is due to a disruption in this normal switching-off process, which gives rise to delayed and disjointed surge of neuronal activation to sensory networks in the absence of any external stimuli. These brief surges of activation are then perceived as the loud, nondescript sounds that characterise EHS. Although the exact neural basis of EHS remains speculative, we are starting to learn more about other factors that make an EHS episode more likely to happen. In one of the first studies to look at associated factors, my colleagues and I found that wellbeing variables such as life stress were associated with experiencing EHS. This relationship was mediated by symptoms of insomnia. In other words, life stress did not directly relate to EHS, but was related indirectly through first disrupting normal sleep patterns. Is EHS dangerous? Despite its provocative name, EHS is harmless. It is however important to distinguish an episode of EHS from other conditions, particularly from various types of headaches. EHS episodes are very short (several seconds) and usually there is no associated pain. If there is, it is mild and transient. In contrast, many headaches are longer-lasting and are associated with significantly higher levels of pain. This is not to say that EHS cannot be a scary experience. In a recent survey of over 3,000 participants who had experienced EHS, we found that 45% of respondents reported moderate to severe levels of fear associated with their EHS. A quarter of participants also reported high levels of distress in response to experiencing EHS, with increased levels of distress associated with more frequent episodes. Unfortunately, there have been no systematic studies investigating potential treatments and coping strategies for those struggling with distressing experiences of EHS. In our survey, participants reported that changing their sleeping position to avoid sleeping on their back, adjusting their sleep patterns and deploying mindfulness techniques were all effective strategies for preventing EHS. Whether any of these techniques prove to be effective in clinical trials remains to be seen. Encouragingly, simply learning that EHS is a common and harmless condition can go a long way. In a patient case study, it was reported that reassurance and education about the experience stopped the episodes from happening. For now at least, the best advice seems to be to try and realize these experiences are natural and they don’t indicate that anything is wrong. Simple techniques, such as improving sleep habits, may go a long way to preventing distressing episodes from occurring. Dan Denis, Lecturer in Psychology, University of York This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post Waking Up With a Bang? It Could Be “Exploding Head Syndrome” appeared first on Anomalien.com.

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump will debate Vice President Kamala Harris in their first direct encounter of the 2024 presidential election. Looking back at Trump’s three debates with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, expect the press to adore Harris’s performance, while deriding Trump as someone out of a “third world” “banana republic.” The media tone was established early, just minutes before the candidates met in their first (September 26, 2016) debate, as CNN’s Van Jones extolled Hillary’s supreme abilities. “She is the Michael Jordan of policy in multiple, multiple areas,” Jones crowed. “She’s like the valedictorian running against this crazy frat boy.” With NBC’s Lester Holt asking the questions, Hillary escaped scrutiny on her health (just days earlier, she’d collapsed at a 9/11 ceremony), foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, and her role in the debacle that led to the murder of a U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, Libya while she was Secretary of State. “I thought it was a shutout for Hillary,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews cheered during his network’s post-debate coverage. “She cleaned his clock tonight. It was a bit embarrassing for Trump. I thought a bit that I was watching A Few Good Men and she was Tom Cruise and he was Jack Nicholson. It was not close. It was over tonight. Very clear result: Hillary won big time. It was a shutout.” “I think that Hillary’s composure and her mastery of the detail was consistent throughout, and she was pleasant throughout,” assessed NBC’s Tom Brokaw, as he faulted Trump for resorting to “bombast.” Over on ABC, Cokie Roberts scolded the Republican nominee: “His facial expressions throughout were condescending and in ways just rude, and early in the debate he was also bullying, so, I think there are a variety of things here that did not work for him.” “This was the worst debate performance I have ever seen,” concluded the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman on MSNBC. “In every respect, it was awful. Hillary wiped the floor with him in this debate.” The front page of the next morning’s New York Times featured a one-sided “news analysis” trashing Trump’s “hurricane of factual distortion, taunting interruptions and blustery generalities.” “Mrs. Clinton’s challenge was evident from the moment she walked onto the stage at Hofstra University on Long Island,” political reporters Michael Barbaro and Matt Flegenheimer wrote. “How much respect should she show to a rival of unparalleled incivility, who misrepresents the truth with abandon, crassly rates women’s looks on a scale of 1 to 10 and casually denigrates entire ethnic groups — a man whose words Mrs. Clinton has described as racist, xenophobic and misogynistic?” “To call Trump a con man, as many have, is a disservice to the art of the con,” ex-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote on Facebook the day after the debate. “By its definition a con requires deceit. But Trump has not tried to hide his lies or the sheer unrealistic audacity of his cartoonish policy positions.” Thirteen days later (October 9), the pair met again for their second debate. The reviews sounded as if they could have been lifted from coverage of the first debate. “I just hope to God I don’t see another campaign like this one. America can do better than what we have seen here tonight. This was just disgraceful,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer grumped when it was over. “This was WrestleMania, this wasn’t about presidential politics.” “I can’t even recall a debate ever in the American history with that much venom between the two,” fretted NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. In an indication of just how far the media goalposts have shifted in eight years, journalists in 2016 found it completely objectionable that Trump floated the idea that Hillary belonged “in jail” for her mishandling of classified e-mails as Secretary of State. “Not to sound too corny, but what makes this country different from countries with dictators in Africa, or Stalin or Hitler, or any of those countries with dictators and totalitarian leaders, is that when they took over, they put their opponents in jail. To hear one presidential candidate, say — even if it was a flip comment, which it was — ‘you’re going to be in jail’ to another presidential candidate on the debate stage in the United States of America, stunning, just stunning,” griped CNN’s Dana Bash. “This is the kind of thing that they do in countries not like the United States, where you lock up and jail your political opponents,” CNN’s Jake Tapper agreed. “I mean this is what they do in banana republics,” groused Schieffer on CBS. Prior to the debate, Trump appeared with several women — Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey — who had been victimized by Bill Clinton before and during his presidency. The media didn’t like that, either. Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson wrote in The Guardian that Trump’s appearance with the women “resembled a Soviet show trial,” while the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan sneered the look of Trump sitting at a long table with the women “looked like a twisted version of ‘The Last Supper.’...Bringing the accusers into a presidential-debate town hall was nothing but hate-theater: a counterpunch to deflect criticism of Trump’s own shameful history with women.” “Only in a third world country, and only in the, sort of, the mind of some sort of movie writer of a third world democracy or dictatorship would you have a candidate publicly humiliate a former occupant of that office by parading all of these other people around,” NBC’s Chuck Todd blasted on MSNBC Live the next day. While the media derided Trump, there was yet more predictable praise for Hillary. “Everything about her was presidential tonight. Her poise, her speech delivery was confident, mellifluous, even. She has a beautiful voice,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews proclaimed. “She was very winning. She had winning personality again.” Ten days later (October 19), Clinton and Trump met for the final time. “This is a very sad night for the country. You can’t polish this turd,” CNN’s Van Jones mourned as he slammed Donald Trump’s performance. MSNBC’s coverage included the vehemently anti-Trump one-time Republican operative Steve Schmidt, who derided Trump as “incoherent....He was like an old man in the park feeding squirrels.” “There just wasn’t a moment that I saw in this debate where Donald Trump had an advantage over Hillary Clinton,” extolled The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell. “It was nothing but a romp by Hillary Clinton all the way through here.” “I’ve heard from Republicans tonight who also thought it was her best performance,” raved Nicolle Wallace. Over on ABC, political analyst Matthew Dowd agreed, arguing that Clinton’s strong showing meant that a Democratic victory was now all-but-assured: “This debate was a clear win for Hillary Clinton. She has the lead. She is actually in the process of running out the clock and unless some unknown event occurs, Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president of the United States.” Oops. The forthcoming Trump-Harris debate may or may not be a “shitshow,” as an irate media slammed the 2020 Trump-Biden debate. But it already seems a foregone conclusion that they’re going to declare Kamala Harris the winner, and blame Trump for any incivility that erupts.   For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here. 

You might have missed the invocation on the first day of the Democratic National Convention last month. Chicago’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, prayed for peace, hope, and love in vague and non-Christian terms.The problem wasn’t the prayer so much as the context, which was a veritable pro-abortion carnival. Outside the convention, mobile clinics offered free abortions and vasectomies. Ever more bizarre, pro-abortion activists paraded, cosplayed as white mifepristone pills, and set up a massive 18-foot-tall inflatable intrauterine device.Is it necessary for a cardinal of the Catholic Church to remain mute about the destruction of millions of preborn lives to support other moral issues?Several speakers praised abortion and in vitro fertilization but barely mentioned the struggles of the working class or the broader plight of the oppressed — issues that Democrats were once known for championing.But the Democratic Party’s behavior outside the DNC carnival has been even worse. During Joe Biden’s term in office, the Department of Justice has been conducting a persecution campaign against pro-life activists, often throwing them in jail for peacefully protesting outside clinics where mothers are about to abort their unborn children. The latest person to be targeted is 89-year-old Eva Edl, who survived a communist death camp as a child in Yugoslavia before fleeing to America.Considering all this, how could Chicago’s archbishop justify — even to himself — blessing such an obviously immoral and anti-religious event?Cupich likely would claim that was not endorsing the Democrats’ pro-abortion plank but rather all those other planks that align with Christian teaching, such as caring for the marginalized, championing social justice, and welcoming the stranger. After all, according to the “consistent life ethic,” also known as the “seamless garment” theory, there are different ways to be pro-life, and all of them are equally valid. If traditional Catholics interpret the prohibition on murder to include opposing abortion, progressives can interpret it as providing welfare entitlements to illegal aliens.Cupich might argue that he is following Pope Francis’ example by avoiding an overemphasis on issues like abortion and homosexuality. Accordingly, Christians should view abortion as a complex issue within an increasingly complicated world. The moment calls for more listening and dialogue and less judgment and action.The political dimension complicates matters. While the Catholic Church should not align itself with any political party, it is expected to work within various political systems and serve the community. Therefore, even if a presidential campaign backs the most anti-Catholic candidate in recent memory, Cupich believes he should still engage with the nearly half of the country that supports Kamala Harris.Besides, isn’t it simply prudent for an esteemed member of the clergy to add his voice to encourage a political party that might come into power? By accepting the invitation, isn’t the archbishop making it more likely that Christians will have a seat at the table?Moral equivocationWith all due respect to Cupich, these arguments fall flat and only serve to harm Christian communities. All it amounts to is a rhetorical sleight of hand that turns Christianity, evangelization, and progressive politics into their opposites.An invocation is not some politically benign, neutral act. Under the circumstances, it is a virtual endorsement. Therefore, applying “seamless garment” thinking in this case just excuses moral equivocation.The seamless garment should affirm an ethical framework that is consistent and total, not one that is zero-sum, relative, and utilitarian. That means being pro-life in one way (e.g., protecting the unborn) should not impede being pro-life in another way (e.g., protecting the poor and marginalized.) The two positions are entirely compatible with one another in practice and should be upheld in theory as well.Cupich’s presence at the DNC suggests that the Catholic Church has made a trade-off: to support those on the margins, it must accept a political party that advocates the legality of killing the unborn at any stage of pregnancy — even after birth. Instead of maintaining a seamless ethical stance, these compromises tear at certain partisan litmus tests.Consequently, he put himself in the position of ignoring the Democrats’ virtual idolatry of abortion and contraception. But is it necessary for a cardinal of the Catholic Church to remain mute about the destruction of millions of preborn lives to support other moral issues? If the Democrats and their progressive allies hadn’t made an idol out of baby-killing, Christians might have sided with them without compromising their faith.As for the political argument of trying to forge ties with the potential ruling party in an attempt to influence them, this nearly always backfires: The church becomes more worldly and corrupt while the state continues to become less Christian.A signal of surrenderAs historian Tom Holland details in his masterpiece “Dominion,” beginning with Pope Gregory VII’s rejection of lay investiture (the appointment of clergy by secular leadership) in the 11th century, the Catholic Church traditionally operates best when it does so on its own terms and challenges political authorities to follow or be shunned (i.e., excommunicated). Consequently, those in government would at least pay lip service to Christian teachings or show the Church a fair degree of tolerance.When the Catholic Church’s teachings are compromised to satisfy political ideologies, it inevitably loses life and ceases to be a public presence. One only needs to look at Western Europe, where churches are currently dwindling or being subsumed by government authorities.Cupich’s invocation sends a clear signal of surrender to secular modernity, the culture of death, and the supremacy of the state. This act represents an unforgivable and irredeemable concession to the enemies of Christ. Experience and common sense reveal that Cupich and other like-minded progressives are actually “casting pearls before swine,” who will trample them and turn to tear faithful Christians to pieces.