tingilinde

the original antifa

and in France to celebrate D-Day.  That war the US right wing wanted to keep us out of.

tompson highway's massey lectures

Tompson is a Cree storyteller.  A few years ago CBC invited him to give a five lectures on his culture.  If you're curious about an indigenous people, these are terrific.

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As this year’s CBC Massey lecturer, the acclaimed Cree playwright and author explores some of the fundamental questions of human existence through the lens of Indigenous mythologies, and contrasts them with the ideas from ancient Greece and Christianity.

“Over the years have I come to believe that, through the course of much human movement across this planet, [these] three mythologies in particular have come to a meeting point, a kind of forum, here on our North American continent,” Highway writes in Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions, a book based on his lectures.

With his signature irreverence, Highway examines the themes of language, creation, sex and gender, humour, and death through these traditions.

He also introduces readers and listeners to one of the central figures in Indigenous mythology: the Trickster — zany, ridiculous, yet wise.

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truth

 

Compulsive liars shouldn't frighten you. They can harm no one if no one listens to them.
Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you.
Believers are the liars' enablers.
Nick Cohen

a tip of the hat to Greg

speaking efficiently

more xkcd goodness

 

on cwd in deer

Chronic wasting disease is spreading across the US.

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CWD is always fatal, has no treatment or vaccine, and is difficult to detect. “CWD-infected animals can excrete infectious prions before clinical signs appear,” said Brandon Munk, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife veterinarian who oversees the state’s CWD surveillance and response efforts. “These prions can persist in the environment for years, making it very difficult to prevent or control the spread once it has been introduced.”

There is a long list of unknowns about CWD, and there are several major efforts to understand the nature of the disease as it continues to spread. One of the chief concerns is that CWD prions will jump the species barrier into humans, similar to the way the AIDS virus moved from chimpanzees into humans. In humans the prions could cause a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease.

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a report from normandy, june 1944

The famous New Yorker piece

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Three days after the first Allied landing in France, I was in the wardroom of an LCIL (Landing Craft, Infantry, Large) that was bobbing in the lee of the French cruiser Montcalm off the Normandy coast. The word “large” in landing-craft designation is purely relative; the wardroom of the one I was on is seven by seven feet and contains two officers’ bunks and a table with four places at it. She carries a complement of four officers, but since one of them must always be on watch there is room for a guest at the wardroom table, which is how I fitted in. The Montcalm was loosing salvos, each of which rocked our ship; she was firing at a German pocket of resistance a couple of miles from the shoreline. The suave voice of a B.B.C. announcer came over the wardroom radio: “Next in our series of impressions from the front will be a recording of an artillery barrage.” The French ship loosed off again, drowning out the recording. It was this same announcer, I think—I’m not sure, because all B.B.C. announcers sound alike—who said, a little while later, “We are now in a position to say the landings came off with surprising ease. The Air Force and the big guns of the Navy smashed coastal defenses, and the Army occupied them.” Lieutenant Henry Rigg, United States Coast Guard Reserve, the skipper of our landing craft, looked at Long, her engineering officer, and they both began to laugh. Kavanaugh, the ship’s communications officer, said, “Now what do you think of that?” I called briefly upon God. Aboard the LCIL, D Day hadn’t seemed like that to us. There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective.

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worms

They may have kickstarted biodiversity 480 million years ago

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The digging and burrowing of prehistoric worms and other invertebrates along ocean bottoms sparked a chain of events that released oxygen into the ocean and atmosphere and helped kick-start what is known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, roughly 480 million years ago, according to new findings Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

 

“It’s really incredible to think how such small animals, ones that don’t even exist today, could alter the course of evolutionary history in such a profound way,” said senior author Maya Gomes, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “With this work, we’ll be able to examine the chemistry of early oceans and reinterpret parts of the geological record.”

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the most important weather forecast in history

hear me out

 

If Fani Willis had a conflict of interest because a man might have paid for a meal, imagine how serious it would be if Supreme Court justices heard cases related to an election their wives had tried to overturn.

 

american exceptionalism

The highest material death rate in high-income countries

a tip of the hat to Roland.