Scientists find 'oldest human ancestor'

Well, I guess that proves Trump is human, after all.

Who knew?




Scientists find 'oldest human ancestor'

If the UN invaded the USA and deposed Trump, would you....

1) Take up arms and repel them
2) Take up arms and join them
3) Praise God
4) Praise Allah
5) Praise Buddha
6) Sit back and enjoy the show

6 Cringe-Inducing Moments From Trump's First Week You Might Have Missed...

Amid the mounting horrors of Donald Trump’s first week in office was a stunning amount of boneheaded ridiculousness. The president's executive order banning Muslims and refugees from seven countries rivals Japanese internment camps for racism and spurred mass protests at airports Saturday. Mixed with this cruelty was Trump's ongoing tantrum about his inauguration crowd size and his popular vote loss. He and his puppeteer, Steve Bannon, declared the media the opposition party and picked an absurd fight with Mexico that Trump deservedly lost.

Deplorable firsts this week included a sitting vice president attending an anti-abortion rally, a president muzzling the agency designed to protect Americans from environmental toxins, Trump’s assertion that torture works against all known evidence, and a deliberate attempt to use his august office to perpetuate the debunked racist myth of mass voter fraud.

Some of the horror was downright laughable, like Kellyanne Conway’s Orwellian coinage of “alternate facts,” Sean Spicer’s (and apparently Trump’s) murky understanding of how tariffs actually work, and the president’s apparent belief that aerial photography, when it comes to the size of his inauguration crowd, is somehow unreliable...


1. Trump further blurred the line between the White House and his family business.
2. He obsessed over the size of his inaugural crowd to a mind-bogglingly absurd degree.
3. He appointed two 20-something right-wing nutjobs to head up Voice of America.
4. He showed a fourth-grade understanding of human rights, children's rights and women's rights. What, no spanking?
5. He proved on the world stage that he really does not get the whole free press thing.
6. He made it clear that the White House does not want to hear from you.

President Trump Celebrates Year of the Rooster

What do you hate most about Trump?

1) Grating voice when he's haranguing at a rally.
2) That whiny "nice" singsong voice when he thinks he's being nice.
3) The ridiculous hair bob.
4) That enraged chipmunk look he gets when he's yelling with upper and lower teeth displayed.
5) Those purty pursed lips when he thinks he's made some fine point.
6) The dainty teacup hold: thumb and middle finger forming a loop, with index finger extended.
7) The smug Mr. Froggy smile.

Please feel free to add to the list.

I have to stop now, I'm making myself ill.

9 Terrible Things Trump Has Done in Just a Week

It’s been just seven days since Donald Trump took office. While the media spent most of that time spilling digital ink over inauguration numbers, the new administration was diminishing women’s health and safety around the world, chipping away at health care for millions of Americans and pouring money that could feed and insure children into a useless garbage heap along the border. It was a bad week for politics and decency, which have always been on bad terms, but are now dead to each other.

There were other things, too. Trump threatened Chicago with martial law on what he thought was a double-dog dare from fellow racist Bill O’Reilly. He promised to install monitors—moles and glorified tattletales, really—to oversee federal agencies and report back to top brass at the White House. After again trotting out the lie about immigrants and dead people voting, Trump promised an investigation into the widely debunked issue of election fraud (though not on Russian election meddling), which should begin with his own family and staff. Speaking of Steve Bannon, the grand wizard of the so-called alt-right and White House senior adviser continued the Trump team’s cynical campaign to keep their base paranoid, uninformed and stupid by pretending their boss is a victim of the press. And as the final, delusional cherry on the poisonous cake, Trump compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.

Trump also signed a bunch of executive orders. Far more important than the background noise you hear is the crazy that Trump is codifying into law. These plans and policies will wreak irreparable havoc and damage, causing suffering and pain to millions, in the U.S. and beyond. This is just seven days' worth of destruction; imagine what will happen over the next four years.

1. Greenlights the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines.
2. Reinstates the anti-abortion global 'gag rule' that will increase the number of unsafe abortions around the world.
3. Scraps a money-saving fee cut for new homeowners.
4. Freezes federal hires.
5. Begins plans to build the big, stupid wall and other nods to his base of anti-immigrant hysterics.
6. Targets sanctuary cities.
7. Starts dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
8. Demands half-assed environmental reviews so development can proceed, consequences be damned.
9. Puts gag orders on multiple government agencies; removes vital internet content.

Free Radicals, pro and con

Apparently free radicals and oxidants are vital to cell health. In short, cellular defense systems respond to viral and bacterial infection by releasing free radicals to destroy the intruders. Additionally, oxidizers play a vital role in cell metabolism, key to many energy and synthesis pathways, to wit, the familiar redox equation of basic college chemistry. Not entirely coincidentally, these powerful elements or compounds are capable of damaging ells and components as well. They've been implicated in various types of inflammatory and cancer disorders. They also may accelerate or catalyze the degradation of nutrients, for example, the polymerization of polyunsaturated fats into viscous and probably unhealthy structures.

Not entirely coincidentally, the potential for harm from free radicals and oxidants elicited a search for ways to defeat them, especially since lab experiments seemed to show a protective action of substances loosely grouped into the category of antioxidants seemed to counteract the oxidizing action. But the results to epidemiological studies have been mixed, which may actually be in part because free radicals and oxidizers are so vital to life - in the right places at the right times - to begin with. This conundrum should not be confused with "pseudoscience". Rather, it's indicative of a situation far more complex than a shotgun approach with attempted neutralizing modalities can effectively address.

'Resist': Activists Unfurl Massive Banner On Crane Behind White House

Source: NPR

On Wednesday morning, activists from Greenpeace unfurled a massive yellow and orange banner with the word "Resist" on a tall crane behind the White House.

"We climbed up the crane this morning, and occupied it and locked and chained ourselves in," the environmental group's board chairman Karen Topakian, 62, told The Two-Way.

We reached her as she was chained and locked high up on the construction crane with six other activists.

"I have a long, long history of fear of heights," she said. "As much as I have a fear of heights, I decided that I would do this because the risks are so great and so tremendous at this point with this administration."

Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511620048/resist-activists-unfurl-massive-banner-on-crane-behind-white-house?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

Trump Didnt Just Reinstate the Global Gag Rule. He Massively Expanded It.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump, surrounded by a group of smiling white men, signed an executive order banning foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive certain kinds of American aid from counseling health clients about abortion or advocating for abortion law liberalization. Supporters of international reproductive rights were disappointed but not surprised. Ronald Reagan first issued the so-called Mexico City policy in 1984, stripping U.S. family planning funds from groups involved with abortion, and ever since, every Republican president has reinstated it. By Monday’s end, however, people who work on global reproductive health and rights were reeling. Trump, it eventually emerged, hadn’t simply revived the so-called global gag rule. Quietly, with so little publicity that activists weren’t aware until someone saw the new language in a tweeted image, Trump had massively expanded the rule. Suzanne Ehlers, president and CEO of the global reproductive health organization PAI, says it’s the global gag rule “on steroids.”

In the past, the global gag rule meant that foreign NGOs must disavow any involvement with abortion in order to receive U.S. family planning funding. Trump’s version of the global gag rule expands the policy to all global health funding. According to Ehlers, the new rule means that rather than impacting $600 million in U.S. foreign aid, the global gag rule will affect $9.5 billion. Organizations working on AIDS, malaria, or maternal and child health will have to make sure that none of their programs involves so much as an abortion referral. Geeta Rao Gupta, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation who previously served as deputy executive director of UNICEF, gives the example of HIV/AIDS clinics that get U.S. funding to provide antiretrovirals: “If they’re giving advice to women on what to do if they’re pregnant and HIV positive, giving them all the options that exist, they cannot now receive money from the U.S.”

George W. Bush specifically exempted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, from the global gag rule because it was widely understood that the program couldn’t meet its prevention and treatment targets otherwise. Scott Evertz, who served as director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy under George W. Bush, tells me, “It would have been impossible to treat HIV/AIDS in the developing world as the emergency that PEPFAR said it was if the global gag rule were to be applied to the thousands of organizations with which those of us involved in PEPFAR would be working.” Evertz offers the example of a standalone health clinic in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. Would the U.S. have to certify that it never referred any of its patients to an abortion provider before enlisting it in the fight against AIDS? “The notion of applying the global gag rule to them would have made it impossible to implement the program,” he says.

Ann Starrs, president of the Guttmacher Institute, says her staff feared social conservatives on the Trump team might push to broaden the global gag rule. Others, however, are stunned at the move. “It wasn’t unexpected that they would reinstate the global gag rule, but the dramatic expansion of the scope of it is truly shocking,” says Gupta. Some in international reproductive and sexual health circles are speculating that the new policy is Trump’s way of lashing out at the millions of women who marched against him on Saturday. “I would not necessarily be surprised if it were a reaction to the women’s marches,” Evertz says. “Although applying the global gag rule to PEPFAR’s programs ill affects millions of men as well,” since HIV/AIDS programs that treat entire communities could face defunding.

Things Can Only Get Worse

A grim but accurate summation and prediction by Paul Krugman...

Things Can Only Get Worse

If America had a parliamentary system, Donald Trump — who spent his first full day in office having a temper tantrum, railing against accurate reports of small crowds at his inauguration — would already be facing a vote of no confidence. But we don’t; somehow we’re going to have to survive four years of this....

In his lurid, ghastly Inaugural Address, Mr. Trump portrayed a nation in dire straits — “American carnage.” The real America looks nothing like that; it has plenty of problems, but things could be worse. In fact, it’s likely that they will indeed get worse. How will a man who evidently can’t handle even the smallest blow to his ego deal with it?...

So how will Mr. Trump handle the bad news of rising unemployment, plunging health coverage, and little if any crime reduction? That’s obvious: He’ll deny reality, the way he always does when it threatens his narcissism. But will his supporters go along with his fantasy?

They might. After all, they blocked out the good news from the Obama era. Two-thirds of Trump voters believe, falsely, that the unemployment rate rose under Obama. (Three-quarters believe George Soros is paying people to protest Mr. Trump.) Only 17 percent of self-identified Republicans are aware that the number of uninsured is at a historic low. Most people thought crime was rising even when it was falling. So maybe they will block out bad news in the Trump years.