At presstime the White House had not responded to questions from Science about the reasons for the mass firings and any plans to appoint new members.

Authoritarians don’t feel they have to explain themselves.

Is there any value in redundancy?

Don’t forget the Stanford Prison Experiment. The problem is the CEOs aren’t like the psychologist running the experiment who brought it to an end when he realized it went too far.

The more money you have, the closer you are to god? That’s mammon worship. Shameless shills for people who already have more than their fair share.

Republicans have been huge supporters of the “State’s Rights” argument. In transpeople’s medical care, repubicans have ignored states rights to force their ideological agenda. Doublespeak.

Is there a lot of child abuse in Texas?

It’s kinda fascinating that the right wing has been one of the loudest screamers of “free speech”, and now a right wing state is showing us that censorship is what they mean by “free speech”. It’s almost confounding: Free speech for me but not for thee.

The Democratic ratchet and pawl clicks rightward.

There are serious differences between the two parties. Democrats withdraw support from a fellow democrat when credibly accused of sexual misconduct. But a GOP president who has been credibly accused of pedophilia can even start a serious war and the GOP refuses to check him.

I noted the other day that a page at CDC dot gov had a questionable source MBFC rating.

I can’t wait for the GOP to get their electoral whomping in the next few elections. They needed to think of the good of the country instead of their republican political club.

I wanted to highlight a couple paragraphs:

Usually, a complaint from a state or business triggers lengthy reviews before a God Squad hearing. But in this case, the fate of imperiled whales, sea turtles and other at-risk species was in the hands of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, who invoked “national security” for the exemption, the first such rationale given since the 1973 passage of the Endangered Species Act.

“When development in the gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country,” Hegseth said at the meeting. “Recent hostile action by the Iranian terror regime highlights yet again why robust domestic oil production is a national security imperative.”

What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.

Honestly I think this read-more tactic has gone too far. Install a word counter and start paying attention to how many words are in news articles. I have been doing that, we have a large number of articles around the 5000 word length, with some significantly more. This opinion piece is over 3100 words, shorter than many articles posted. Assuming a 250 words-per-minute reading speed, this article takes 12 minutes to read. We can easily spend the entire day reading the top news stories in their entireties. In the old days, news items almost always had a lede summarizing the article. Today, many stories keep you reading by not having a lede. When we are reading, we do not have time for activities such as going out and holding up a First Amendment grievance sign, or writing a grievance letter to our legislators. We can all too easily get caught up in stories about Ms. Leavitts supposedly-unflattering double-chin photo, a manufactured controversy, simply as a method of wasting our reading time to stories of little importance to our civics-assigned task of being informed citizens.