'The WPATH Tapes'

It’s time we acknowledge another guitarist with an excellent repertoire of work. We are, of course, singling out one of the absolute best musicians in the world: the man known as “God,” and that man is Mr. Eric Clapton. Much like with Jimi Hendrix, there isn’t a whole lot that can be stated that hasn’t already been reiterated endless times before. Yes, Clapton is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He’s also acutely influential and has inspired millions of subsequent guitarists. Yes, he’s been in many successful and highly significant bands and has had a successful solo career. The post 11 Incredible Eric Clapton Guitar Solos appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Relying on a supercomputer and the people with talent enough to use it, NASA scientists have produced a video illustration of what it would be like to float into a black hole if you were somehow invincible. Being that within the event horizon of a black hole, the laws of general relativity break down, it’s […] The post NASA Visualizes What it Would Be Like to Plunge into a Black Hole – WATCH appeared first on Good News Network.

Spring has definitely sprung, and so has the allergy season. Help your dog enjoy the season and learn more about seasonal allergies in dogs here.

Trial Judge in NY Daughter Helped Run Campaign to Kick Trump Off Colorado Ballot

Did viruses play a role in the extinction of Neanderthals? That’s what researchers from the Federal University of São Paulo have been trying to figure out, and in doing so, ended up uncovering the oldest known human viruses in a set of Neanderthal bones from over 50,000 years ago.To make this finding, the team combed through the raw DNA sequencing data of two sets of Neanderthal remains recovered from Chagyrskaya cave in Russia. Within those raw sequences, they were looking for the remnants of the genomes – the entirety of an organism’s genetic information – of three types of DNA viruses: adenovirus, herpesvirus, and papillomavirus. And they found them – remnants of all three groups, in fact. This makes the viruses the oldest human viruses ever discovered, taking the title away from those found in 31,600-year-old Homo sapiens remains.This, the authors suggest in a preprint that’s yet to be peer-reviewed, demonstrated that not only was it feasible to identify bits of viral genomes in archaeological samples, but that Neanderthals could’ve been afflicted with the same viruses that affect humans today.Adenoviruses, for example, can cause a wide range of illnesses from the pain in the butt that is the common cold, to a nasty bout of acute gastroenteritis. The overwhelmingly prevalent Epstein-Barr virus that can trigger mononucleosis and multiple sclerosis belongs to the herpesviruses. Papillomaviruses are perhaps best known for their association with cervical cancer.It’s a possibility that Neanderthals may have been more susceptible to these three viruses and their effects.There’s one limitation that palaeogeneticists must consider, though – contamination. What might look like a groundbreaking discovery could actually be the result of someone forgetting to cover their mouth when they cough, or an inquisitive (or hungry) animal.Since they compared the ancient virus sequences with modern virus sequences to check for similarities and differences, this was most likely avoided.“Taken together, our data indicate that these viruses might represent viruses that really infected Neanderthals,” study author Marcelo Briones told New Scientist.That’s not to say that viruses alone may have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals, something the authors make clear in the paper, but it does at least add some weight to the theory of some scientists that viruses may have played some sort of role.“To support their provocative and interesting hypothesis, it would be necessary to prove that at least the genomes of these viruses can be found in Neanderthal remains,” said Briones. “That is what we did.”The study is available as a preprint on bioRxiv.[H/T: New Scientist]

Last week, a "portal" was opened between New York, USA, and Dublin, Republic of Ireland. Before even a week was up, the portal had to be closed again temporarily due to "inappropriate behavior" on the Dublin side. The idea behind the portals, a creation by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys, is pretty neat. Both cities – and potentially further cities in the future – livestream footage of their location to each other via a large circular screen."Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is - united and one," Gylys explained in a statement. “The livestream provides a window between distant locations, allowing people to meet outside of their social circles and cultures, transcend geographical boundaries, and embrace the beauty of global interconnectedness.”"I would encourage Dubliners and visitors to the city to come and interact with the sculpture," Lord Mayor of Dublin Daithí De Róiste added, "and extend an Irish welcome and kindness to cities all over the world."The portal was greeted with enthusiasm by many in both cities, with performances planned over the upcoming months on both sides of the livestream.             IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.But, of course, not everyone can be trusted with a camera pointed in their direction. Soon after the portal began streaming, videos of inappropriate behavior began circulating online. These include people in Dublin holding up images of the 9/11 attacks to the camera, swear words and other inappropriate images displayed on phone screens, and people mooning at New York.             IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.             IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.The portal was soon shut down temporarily, while Dublin City Council looked into "technical solutions" to the problem.             IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.According to the council, the portal was shut down due to "inappropriate behavior" by "a very small minority of people"."While we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this and these will go live in the next 24 hours," the council said in a statement seen by BBC News."We will continue to monitor the situation over the coming days with our partners in New York to ensure that portals continue to deliver a positive experience for both cities and the world."The technological solution, RTÉ reports, will involve blocking images held up to the portal's cameras from being displayed at the other end. While it might not end inappropriate behavior, it might at least up the difficulty level. 

The New York Post last week featured on its front page a picture of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky just below one of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels. Once again, we are confronted with a now familiar tit-for-tat narrative. Republicans supposedly started the cycle of vengeance that’s overtaken Trump by impeaching Clinton. Now, that hubristic behavior is coming back to bite the party that got this nonsense started.The comparison is too far-fetched to be taken seriously. What Clinton did in his sex life was far more outrageous than anything that can be reasonably attributed to Trump. And it goes without saying that while the profoundly biased media did all that it could to hide or excuse the behavior of its pampered Democratic hero, it has shamelessly exaggerated Trump’s sexual misdeeds.Would the media have ferociously shielded Bill Clinton if he were a Republican? Of course, we all know the answer.Although something of a sexual nature may have taken place between Trump and Stormy Daniels 18 years ago, there is no evidence that Trump forced himself physically on the porn star. Unlike Clinton’s multiple sexual attacks on shocked or intimidated females, like Paula Jones and Juanita Broderick, Trump’s relationship with Stormy was entirely consensual, something that she has admitted in interviews.Moreover, unlike the efforts of the Clintons and their operatives to intimidate Bill’s sex victims, Trump paid off Stormy in a nondisclosure agreement. It was an arrangement that broke no laws and was amicably agreed on by both sides. Until recently, this was also Stormy’s account of what happened, while she has also explained that she always intended to make money out of her meeting with Trump.The dragging out of this erotic adventure to besmirch Trump’s reputation, which seems to be the point of Alvin Bragg’s phony criminal case against him, betrays the usual leftist double standard. The media smoothed over Bill Clinton’s serial scandals with exemplary diligence. Indeed, a simple Google search reveals multiple defenses of Clinton against his accusers. We are bombarded by these vindications on the internet even before we are allowed to find isolated defenses of women who claim that Bill abused them.I was amazed to see how Newsweek, for example, went after inconsistencies in the accusations of Kathleen Wiley, who claimed Clinton groped her in 1993, to discredit other far more consistent accounts of similar indecencies by our then-serving president.I was equally astonished by the number of “authorized” sources assuring me that Christine Blasey Ford’s charges against Brett Kavanaugh are entirely true, although there is no evidence to suggest that they are. Moreover, our slavish corporate press has never displayed much professional interest in Hunter Biden’s adventures with drugs and prostitutes, unlike its present feeding frenzy over Trump’s tryst 18 years ago.In the lawfare being waged against Trump in New York City, the media keeps assuring us that the Bad Orange Man sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll and did something really loathsome to Stormy. The evidence of misdeeds in these cases seems about as airtight as what the media told us about Kavanaugh’s sexual abuse of the lady he never met before. In an ill-advised impeachment trial that lasted from December 1998 to February 1999, Special Counsel Kenneth Starr went after Clinton for lying in a sworn deposition about having sex with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. As Ilya Somin, a jurist who often disagreed with Starr, has argued, Clinton’s prosecutor was legally and morally justified in going after the president because overwhelming evidence indicated that Clinton had perjured himself. Politically, however, the trial was a disaster because the media managed to turn Clinton into a national hero and interpreted his sexual exploitation of a young woman in his charge as a marvelous display of roguishness or even as a fantasy made up by Lewinsky.By the time the media was finished with its “contextualization,” Starr’s career was ruined, while Clinton was, in some bizarre sense, vindicated.The case, moreover, came in the wake of shocking revelations about Clinton’s earlier sexual escapades going back to his tenure as governor in Arkansas. Feminist organizations, which shriek against Trump as a sexist and worse, were generally silent about Clinton’s acts, just as they were when Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) manhandled women for decades.I also don’t remember feminists complaining very much when the national press went after one of Clinton’s assault victims, Paula Jones, as “trailer trash.” The Baltimore Sun crudely joked about how this poor, white Southerner was “giving bimbos a bad name.” At the time, socially proper people weren’t supposed to go after groping lechers who led the Democratic Party and who vocally backed abortion rights.It is impossible for me to see how Trump’s fleeting relationship with Stormy Daniels, which ended in satisfactory payment, bears the slightest resemblance to Clinton’s goat-like seduction of a vulnerable intern. Here we may ask a perpetually relevant question: Would the media have ferociously shielded Clinton if he were a Republican? Of course, we all know the answer.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court in March issued a shockingly bad decision in Catholic Charities Bureau v. State of Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission. The court held — I’m not making this up — that Catholic Charities is not operated primarily for religious purposes. How in the world did we get here?The case speaks volumes about the state of religion, law, and politics today. The ruling highlights the partisan state of modern courts — the Wisconsin Supreme Court flipped to a 4-3 liberal majority after last year’s election, and, of course, the 4-3 decision in this case fell along ideological lines. Judges often speak of a deep commitment to the rule of law that transcends partisanship, but it is hard to read cases like this and take seriously the notion that nothing other than a proper interpretation of the law motivated the four liberal justices.These charitable acts — known as the corporal works of mercy — are not optional. They are at the heart of Christian religion.Much could be said about the political hackery and the botched application of the law in this decision — including the majority’s total mishandling of the burden of proof in a constitutional challenge to a statute. But the real problem is the court’s effort to define “religious purpose” so narrowly that it nearly loses its meaning.The court in this case was interpreting a Wisconsin law that exempts religious organizations from paying unemployment tax. As the court rightly pointed out, this requires an examination of “both the motivations and the activities of the organization.” The organization’s motives are clear: Catholic Charities exists to carry out charitable works “to operationalize Catholic principles.”Anyone familiar with Catholic Charities understands what these works entail: The group works with the poor and disadvantaged, offering services for the aging, the disabled, children with special needs, the poor, and those in need of disaster relief. Practically, these services include everything from job training and placement to food services programs.It does not take a theologian to see the religious nature of these activities for a Christian organization. In Matthew 25, Jesus warns that those who claim to follow him will be judged on how they treated their neighbors. Those who are accepted into his Kingdom will be greeted this way:Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.Then the righteous will answer him and say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?”And the king will say to them in reply, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” These charitable acts — known as the corporal works of mercy — are not optional. They are at the heart of Christian religion. Christians are required to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and care for the sick.Wisconsin’s Labor and Industry Review Commission argued that Catholic Charities is not operated primarily for religious purposes “because their activities are secular.” It is hard to know whether the court and the commission speak from ignorance or anti-Christian malice.If accomplishing the charitable acts that a religion requires is not a “religious purpose” simply because secular persons or agencies might do the same things, religion becomes dangerously limited and confined.Is it a religious activity to engage in sidewalk preaching or counseling when secular teachers and activists also make speeches on the same sidewalk? Is the consecration of the body and blood of Christ at Mass or a communion service in a Protestant church an explicitly religious purpose, when secular people gather for a book club, reading uplifting books while eating crackers and drinking wine?Where does the logic end? With enough creativity, nearly any activity of a religious organization could be deemed “not organized primarily for a religious purpose.”When a court holds that Catholic Charities, an arm of the Catholic Church, is not operated primarily for religious purposes when its sole purpose is to perform the corporal works of mercy, we should be on high alert.For decades, American legal and political culture has shifted its understanding toward erecting a “wall of separation between church and state” — a statement found nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution but rather in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Since the 1940s, the courts have made a concerted effort to turn the practice of religion into nothing more than a matter of private belief and worship. Pray in your room and maybe in your church but keep it out of the public square. The regime wants religion to be no more than that.American public life needs to reclaim the proper place of religion. Living one’s faith in the public square is central to the meaning of religious exercise. When an organization seeks to live out the gospel by feeding the hungry and helping the sick, that is a religious purpose.It doesn’t matter if secular people or organizations do the same thing. To limit religious exercise to only that which has no secular counterpart is to attempt to place religious exercise into the confined box of private belief. That is unacceptable.We must fight to give religion its proper role in society. When religious people make hiring decisions based on their faith, when they perform charitable works for the sake of fulfilling God’s commands, they are exercising religion. We need to reclaim a bold and robust understanding of what religion is if we have any hope of protecting religious freedom in American public life.

Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, “How Nations Escape Poverty,” is nominally about Poland and Vietnam — two countries that were immiserated by socialism but recovered as they rejected socialism in favor of freer markets. But it’s also about America — and the poverty that awaits Americans — if this nation continues to repeat the mistakes Poland and Vietnam made and have taken great pains to correct. Poland suffered under the 180-proof version of socialism called communism from the end of World War II, when the yoke of national socialist Germany was replaced by the yoke of the Soviet Union’s rebranded version of the same thing. Both were economic and personal tyrannies, where no one was free to exchange goods and services at market prices or really much of anything else. The government planned everything. 'Only a society that allows people to become rich and have a positive attitude toward wealth can overcome poverty.' Personal, economic, and national stagnation ensued. It became rational in these planned economies to do the least amount of work because no matter how hard you worked, the party comrade who worked less (or not at all) received just as much. Which wasn’t much, regardless. Communism was effective at very little except spreading privation and misery. The United States spent 12 years fighting to prevent South Vietnam from falling to the communists who already controlled the north. More than 50,000 Americans gave their lives to prevent that fate from befalling the South Vietnamese. The effort ultimately failed, and all of Vietnam fell under the spell of the god that always fails, to paraphrase the title of a 1949 collection of essays about communism written by those who experienced it firsthand. Eventually, the Vietnamese and the Poles had experienced enough. Both nations began the process — very much still a work in progress — of resuscitating their economies and the economic lives of their people by abandoning doctrinaire socialist policies in favor of freer market alternatives. They have both prospered accordingly. Poland, Zitelmann writes, has been “beating out the rest of Europe and America in economic growth since the 1989 emancipation of Polish enterprise, with more than one million new private firms launched in four years and per capita GDP up 2.5 times by 2017.” And unlike the dark days of communism in Vietnam when children shared a single bowl of rice a day and ate meat maybe once or twice a year, people now have plenty of meat to eat. Zitelmann’s account of this transformation from the poverty of socialism to the prosperity of freedom begins with a hat tip to Adam Smith, who wrote the first book about the mechanics and morality of the market. Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” explains why some nations have wealth and others have less — or none. The book explains that poverty can only be cured by self-interest — including the desire to get rich — an insight that socialists have never understood or reject for reasons that can only be guessed at. A man wants to improve his situation, to better the lot of himself and his family. He realizes that the way to do that is by improving the situation of others. He creates something or he offers something of value to others, who are willing to pay something of value to him in exchange for the thing he offers that is of value to them. Everyone profits from this free exchange. It’s odd how socialists regard this general improvement of everyone’s situation with contempt. It’s even odder how no one profits under socialism — except those who wield power. They are improved at the expense of everyone else. When people are free to improve their situation, they will, for the same reason that many plants grow better in the sun than in the shade. And they’ll do so without diminishing the prospects of others in the process. Only the anvil of socialism — tied around everyone’s neck — can do that. As Zitelmann puts it: “Only a society that allows people to become rich and have a positive attitude toward wealth can overcome poverty.” In Vietnam, this change of mind began in 1986 when free-market reforms, called “Doi Moi,” were enacted by the communist government. Nearly 40 years later, Vietnam has become an economic powerhouse and home to one of the world’s largest privately owned conglomerates, VinGroup. Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s capital, bustles with economic activity and looks more vibrant and modern than New York, where “profit” and “private” have become dirty words to the socialists who run what was once America's greatest city. Poland has also embraced what America is rejecting — and it shows. Zitelmann observes that Poland’s economic growth and rising living standards are surpassing the stagnating United States, a nation that has forgotten what socialism costs because we have enjoyed the affluence that socialism invariably destroys. Ironically, as Zitelmann's book lays out, as socialism waned in Eastern Europe and Asia, it began to wax in the very country that spent blood and treasure trying to save the world from the immiseration of socialism. Several generations of Americans have grown up assuming the supermarkets will always be full of affordable food, that their homes will always have electricity and hot water, and that they can afford socialism. “How Nations Escape Poverty” is a reminder that they can’t — and they'd better remember before they regret forgetting.