Behind the prison bars lies a tragedy so absurd it seems fictional. Imagine a world where suicide attempts come with a bill, prisons are built on toxic waste dumps as if radiation were part of the sentence, and the government tells you that with a felony record you’re too dangerous to kill bugs professionally but could theoretically run the country. In “Seven Facts About Mass Incarceration That Sound Like April Fools’ Day Hoaxes, But Aren’t,” we journey through America’s justice system—a place where “inmate welfare funds” buy fitness trackers for guards, where the average pretrial detainee makes less annually than what’s required for bail, and where nearly half of all Americans have had an immediate family member incarcerated. Laugh to keep from crying as we explore a system so darkly comedic that reality has outdone satire. Because sometimes the cruelest jokes aren’t jokes at all—they’re policy.
For decades, physicists have explored the idea that consciousness causes the collapse of the wavefunction— the moment quantum particles cease being in strange superpositions of states. Esteemed anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, following his collaboration with Roger Penrose, proposes a different story: consciousness is the collapse itself. Hameroff discusses compelling experimental evidence suggesting the process occurs within microtubules in the brain. He also explores the non-computable nature of consciousness, the connections between his research and his spirituality, as well as insights into his research relating to psychedelics.
I had lunch at La Fondita 2 (3330 Center St NE, Salem, OR 97301) today at around 11 a.m.
A man I had barely met paid for my burrito. 🌯
He didn’t mention his name, and the restaurant staff didn’t know him either.
Apparently, I was the accidental beneficiary of a random act of kindness.
I’m not sure whether this has ever happened to me before. ♥️
The Director of The Centers For Disease Control’s (CDC) Oral Health Division, Casey Hannan, fumbles during a deposition for the TSCA Fluoride Lawsuit when asked to provide documentation of the studies CDC relies on to support its claim that fluoride reduces tooth decay when ingested.
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A medical consensus of public health authorities around the world has considered water fluoridation at appropriate levels as a safe and effective means to prevent cavities on a community-wide scale. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed the fluoridation of drinking water as one of the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century. There is little question that supplemental fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces decay, but at what cost?
The dangerous rift between open and classified research.
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By Kate Brown
In 1987, a year after the Chernobyl accident, the US Health Physics Society met in Columbia, Maryland. Health physicists are scientists who are responsible for radiological protection at nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons plants, and hospitals. They are called on in cases of nuclear accidents. The conference’s keynote speaker came from the Department of Energy (DOE); the title of his talk drew on a sports analogy: “Radiation: The Offense and the Defense.” Switching metaphors to geopolitics, the speaker announced to the hall of nuclear professionals that his talk amounted to “the party line.” The biggest threat to nuclear industries, he told the gathered professionals, was not more disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but lawsuits. After the address, lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) met in break-out groups with the health physicists to prepare them to serve as “expert witnesses” against claimants suing the US government for alleged health problems due to exposure from radioactivity issued in the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. That’s right: the DOE and the DOJ were preparing private citizens to defend the US government and its corporate contractors as they ostensibly served as “objective” scientific experts in US courts.
A message from ‘ice man’ Wim Hof, this spring on Instagram: ‘Don’t worry about your fears. Embrace them!’ In the video you see the 64-year-old wellness guru stepping into an apparently icy lake in front of a brown rock. His gray hair drips in wet strands over his shoulders. “The fear of cold is logical,” says Wim Hof’s voice in the voiceover, while on screen he blows out short bursts of air above the water surface. “But if you do the breathing first, you will see that the fear disappears.”
April 1, 2025
