Melbourne in February would also be nicer than Minnesota at that time

Hey, this looks like a great atheist convention!

Of the names listed, 12 I’d like to see, 7 I don’t know and might be pleasantly surprised by, and only 2 whose talks I’d skip* — that’s a pretty good ratio. The only drawbacks are that it’s all the way off in Australia, and registration is a bit pricey (~$200-$500), which might explain why there’s some concern that the number of registrants is too low right now. Hey, if you’re somewhere near Melbourne, though, you ought to consider going.

Additional plus: I saw some conversation about it, and someone was complaining bitterly that it was too feminist for his taste.

*You’re just going to have to guess who’s who.

11 minute hero

I guess Donald Trump’s twitter account was suspended for a brief 11 minutes yesterday evening — a departing employee took a moment to give us a fleeting respite from the flatulence erupting from the White House. But of course, Twitter was quick to declare this a mistake and to switch the ass-trumpet back on, because they love their popular fascists.

Twitter took responsibility for the outage. In a tweeted statement, the company said Trump’s account was “inadvertently deactivated due to human error” by one of its employees. The account was unreachable for 11 minutes.

Twitter later said the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.”

That ex-employee deserves praise for doing what the Twitter management is incapable of doing.

Isn’t it about time we left Twitter en masse for a more responsible service?

The politics of resentment

Do you want to know how a corrupt, incompetent, sleazy plutocrat and reality TV show host became president of the United States? It’s not because he’s doing good things for some underclass, or because he’s representing the under-represented, or even because the Russians told people to vote for him. It’s actually because a lot of resentful white people felt like waving a middle finger at everyone. Here’s a beautiful example of that phenomenon, the ‘hobby’ of “rolling coal”, that is, tricking out your truck so you can make it spew dirty black clouds of smoke at people.

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention.

There’s no faux nostalgia involved. Unlike with, say, hunting, there’s no tale of rugged rural self-sufficiency to draw on. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition with which meddlesome elites want to interfere.

Rolling coal is new; it just caught on a few years ago. It does not improve the performance of a truck. It has no practical application or pragmatic purpose of any kind. It is purely aggressive, a raw expression of defiance: I can pollute your air, for no reason, and no one can stop me.

It makes sense. Donald Trump is the political equivalent of just vomiting disgusting sludge on people.

This is not rational. They’re spending thousands of dollars to modify their trucks to be less efficient, just to spite people.

But to diesel owners like Corey Blue of Roanoke, Ill., the very efforts to ban coal rolling represent the worst of government overreach and environmental activism. Your bill will not stop us! Mr. Blue wrote to Will Guzzardi, a state representative who has proposed a $5,000 fine on anyone who removes or alters emissions equipment.

Why don’t you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country, Mr. Blue wrote. I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars.

Remember this when they start babbling about freedom. It’s only freedom for them, and they’re not going to tolerate the freedom of others to drive a more efficient and ecologically sound vehicle, like a Prius…and some like to fog bicyclists as well.

But Hitler would be 128 years old!

The things that get said on Alex Jones’ demented ‘news’ show — pig-human chimeras, false flags, and now, according to Owen Shroyer, Hitler is still alive, a fact being covered up by The Government.

Welcome in to The Alex Jones Show folks. It’s amazing, here we are, so much news and the news is so big and the news is so frequent that the biggest news every day becomes a back-page story the next day. The Las Vegas massacre cover-up, nothing. The JFK files being declassified, Hitler still alive. All the history textbooks lied to us. I was lied to my entire life about JFK, knowingly, by my government. I was lied to my entire life about Hitler, knowingly, by my government. And that’s just a nonstory now because you’ve got another radical truck running people down in the streets.

Yes. Let us talk about Fake News. Who is subsidizing this lunatic?

Dodgy and getting dodgier

I read that story about two women being rescued after 5 months at sea, and it bugged me. Wasn’t it awfully convenient that they’d packed a year’s worth of supplies before taking off on a short trip? And gosh, but they looked in good shape for people stranded at sea for so long. Even the dog! Wouldn’t they have eaten the dog after the first month of living on ramen?

Anyway, now there’s a detailed breakdown of all the fishy stuff in their story. They had an emergency beacon that they didn’t even bother to turn on!

I’m looking forward to learning the true story behind this phony tale of survival at sea.

Deep fat fry the rich? Stuff ’em with greasy cheese? Gotta think about appropriate fates.

I had Papa John’s pizza once, long ago, and did not care for it at all, and haven’t had any since…which means a boycott by me isn’t going to change anything at all. But since “Papa John”, John Schnatter, is a terrible human being, sure, boycott the place. He’s an evangelical Christian/Republican who hates the poor except when he can suck the money out of their pockets for crappy pizzas. He’s now blaming the NFL for a major financial loss, because somehow the fact that he advertises heavily at games where players are now kneeling to protest racism means viewers buy less pizza? I don’t quite follow the logic, but OK.

Of course, no boycott is going to hurt Schnatter. He’s built a personal fortune of $800 million off his terrible pizza chain, so really, he could not sell a single pizza ever again and he’d still be living on the lap of luxury, praising Jesus and refusing to pay the hired help a decent wage. I guess I’ll have to add his name to the long list of Up Against the Wall nominees.

By the way, how did the boycott of Chik-Fil-A’s homophobic executives go? Nothing seems to get in between awful, exploitive fast food franchises and the American public.

No, your brain is not alive when you’re dead.
I feel stupider for having to write that.

Have you noticed this recent rash of truly stupid headlines?

I could show you many more, but that’s enough. None of that makes any sense! Some of the stories make it sound like your mind is trapped and screaming inside of your corpse after you’re dead, and none of it is true — it’s all an incredibly egregious distortion of what the paper actually says. I don’t know whether the ‘journalists’ were too stupid to comprehend the work, or they simply hadn’t read it so they were just making stuff up.

I read it, though. Here’s the summary:

Purpose of Review

Of the approximately 350,000 out-of-hospital, and 750,000 after in-hospital cardiac arrest (CA) events in the US annually approximately 5-9% and 20% respectively may achieve return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) after attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Up to 2/3 of these initial survivors may go on die in the subsequent 24-72 hours after ROSC due to a combination of (1) on-going cerebral injury, (2) myocardial dysfunction and (3) massive systemic inflammatory response. In order to successfully manage patients more effectively, monitoring methods are needed to aid clinicians in the detection and quantification of intra-cardiac arrest and post-resuscitation pathophysiological cerebral injury processes in the intensive care unit.

Recent Findings

Over the last few years many modalities have been used for cerebral monitoring during and after CA, these include quantitative pupillometry, transcranial doppler sonography, optic nerve sheath diameter measurements, microdialysis, tissue oxygenation monitoring, intra-cranial pressure monitoring, and electroencephalography. Current studies indicate that these modalities may be used for the purpose of neurological monitoring during cardiac arrest resuscitation as well as in the post-resuscitation period.

Summary

Multiple overlapping processes, including alterations in cerebral blood flow (CBF), raised intracerebralpressure, disorders of metabolism, imbalanced oxygen delivery and reperfusion injury contribute to cell death during the post-resuscitation period has led to the birth of post-resuscitation management strategies in the 21st century. This review provides a succinct overview of currently available bedside invasive and non-invasive neuro-monitoring methods after CA.

The rest of the paper consists of fairly detailed descriptions of various techniques of assessing the neurological state of dying patients. What it’s saying is that death isn’t like flipping off a light switch — there’s a progression of physiological changes over a short period of time, some of them irreversible, and many of them contributing to problems in prognosis if the patient is successfully resuscitated. None of this is surprising.

Unfortunately, the lead investigator, Sam Parnia, babbles somewhat outside of the content of the paper about near-death experiences and unconscious patients being able to witness what’s going on around them and the usual bullshit wrapped around confabulation. None of that is in the paper, though! It is kind of sleazy: say defensible, sober things inside a peer-reviewed paper, and then make up crap and pretend it’s supported by scientific research by association.

Niraj S, Parnia S (2017) Monitoring the Brain After Cardiac Arrest: a New Era. Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 17:62.