meehawl

The fundamental organization of the reproductive part of the vertebrate urogenital tract is straightforward: it’s a tube with a funnel at one end that captures eggs released by the ovary, and conducts them to an external orifice. Along the way, cells lining the tube secrete useful products like albumin and yolk, and deposit a shell, and may act to temporarily store the egg before its final release. Marsupial and placental mammals have dispensed with most of those functions, and expanded on others. One part of the oviduct has acquired a richly vascularized epithelium and specializations for investing and nurturing a resident embryo, becoming a uterus. That’s an amazing and innovative function in itself, but in addition, it has formed a new, separate channel, the vagina. The vagina is an entirely new structure, which has no homolog in amphibians or reptiles.

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There is no straight path from the renunciation of meat to a politics of virtue. Nazi vegetarianism raises obvious problems in this regard … Hitler’s strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was largely medical: “Throughout his life, Hitler continued to believe that abstaining from meat alleviated his chronic flatulence, constipation, sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and the stomach cramps that convinced him he was dying of cancer.” The Nazi leadership, however, sought to extrapolate ideologies of wider application from the Führer’s dietary choices. Himmler praised the constitutional virtues of vegetable consumption; he wanted the Waffen S.S. to go vegetarian and thought that once the Germans had dietetically cleansed themselves they would undoubtedly rule the world. Göring arrived at a twisted version of the humanitarian argument, threatening “those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property” with the concentration camp … during the extreme food shortages at the beginning of the Third Reich, Göring inveighed against farmers who gave grain to animals which should have been used to feed Germans.

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Most drugs are developed by Big Pharma–Brobdingnagian corporations with vast teams of scientists who have, to date, failed to cure the common cold. Airborne’s creator is “Knight-McDowell Labs”–Victoria Knight-McDowell is a schoolteacher and her husband, Rider McDowell, is a scriptwriter … As for real scientific evidence on Airborne, the Web page used to provide a link to “clinical results” (no longer there) … the company CEO, Elise Donahue, told ABC News: “We found that it confused consumers. Consumers are really not scientifically minded enough to be able to understand a clinical study.” ABC News looked into the clinical trial and discovered that it was conducted by GNG Pharmaceutical Services, “a two-man operation started up just to do the Airborne study. There was no clinic, no scientists and no doctors. The man who ran things said he had lots of clinical trial experience. He added that he had a degree from Indiana University, but the school says he never graduated.”

Original Airborne-Is-Shite Article.

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The low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire … Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the Nordic countries and just 17 percent of GDP in the English-speaking countries … On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.

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How is [Hugh Hefner] who’s 78 years old able to have sex with that many women?
He doesn’t really do anything. He just lies there with his Viagra erection. It’s just a fake erection, and each girl gets on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background try to keep him excited. They’ll yell things like, “F-k her daddy, f-k her daddaddy!” There’s a lot of cheerleader going on!
After the two minutes are up what happens?
The main girlfriend wipes off his penis. She’s the girl who actually shares the bed with him. She sleeps there all night. She’s around 22 years old. He uses all the same girls. She’s been there for three years now.

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What the ancient Mayans relished was not solid chocolate as we now know it. Rather, it was a thick, gritty, generally unsweetened frothy beverage composed of ground cacao beans, water, and other spices and flavorings, frequently including vanilla, ground mamey pits, ear flower, chiles, and/or nixtamalized maize (i.e., masa).

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People’s incomes are swinging wildly—like winnings in a casino. In 1970, a [US] family in any given year had a one-in-fourteen chance of its income dropping by half; today, the chance is one in six.

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One-third of U.S. patients with health problems reported experiencing medical mistakes, medication errors, or inaccurate or delayed lab results—the highest rate of any of the six nations surveyed [Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, UK, USA]. While sicker patients in all countries reported safety risks, poor care coordination, and inadequate chronic care treatment, with no country deemed best or worst overall, the United States stood out for high error rates, inefficient coordination of care, and high out-of-pocket costs resulting in forgone care.

The United States also stands out for its patient cost burdens, with consequences for access. U.S. physician visit rates are already low by OECD standards … Contrasts between the United States and Germany, in particular, indicate that it is possible to organize care and insurance to achieve timely access without queues, while ensuring that care is affordable at the point of service. There are clear opportunities for the United States to learn from other countries’ insurance systems.

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The latest [US] BLS employment situation report states 4.5% unemployment, and 167,000 jobs created in December … the headline “unemployment” number we see every month isn’t the unemployment number — it’s one of many, in a creative hierarchy introduced circa 1995.

What if we were to actually count [criminal justice inductees] as unemployed?

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It will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here … They could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

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