Immanuel Kant on the truth…
Author: HP McLovincraft
Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.
Irish Teacher Gets Jail Time After Refusing to Use a Transgender Student’s Preferred Pronouns
A teacher in the Republic of Ireland has been suspended from teaching and later jailed on contempt charges after he refused to address a transgender student by their preferred pronouns.
Enoch Burke was arrested on Monday for violating a court order that barred him from teaching at Wilson’s Hospital School in Westmeath, the news site RTE.ie reported. In addition to being barred from teaching, Burke is not allowed to set foot on the property, per the court order.
Judge Michael Quinn later found Burke guilty of violating the High Court’s mandate. He was then sent to Mountjoy Prison, where he will remain until either he purges his contempt, or the court gives further orders.
The teacher stood by his refusal even when faced with jail time, telling the judge that “it is insanity” that he would be arrested and taken to prison for refusing to violate his Christian beliefs. “I love my school, with its motto Res Non Verba, ‘Actions not words,’ but I am here today because I said I would not call a boy a girl,” Burke told the court.
The saga began when Burke, who teaches politics and German at the school in Multyfarnham, County Westmeath, refused to address a transgender pupil as “they” instead of “he.” He was soon placed on administrative leave by school officials pending the outcome of an investigation and disciplinary process.
Burke refused to stay away from campus, however. He continued to refuse despite an injunction that barred him from teaching or even setting foot on Wilson’s campus.
On Friday, the judge issued an order to arrest Burke after he was found sitting in an empty classroom at the school. He was arrested at the school on Monday and taken directly to court, where he told the judge that he would not comply with the injunction.
“I am a teacher and I don’t want to go to prison,” Burke told the court. “I want to be in my classroom today, that’s where I was this morning when I was arrested.”
“Transgenderism is against my Christian belief. It is contrary to the scriptures, contrary to the ethos of the Church of Ireland and of my school,” he added.
Synthetic Embryo With Brain and Heart Formed Without Using Eggs or Sperm.
Asynthetic embryo with cells capable of forming a brain and a beating heart was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge using mouse stem cells. EuroNews described the effort as “yet another success in the unfolding race to develop embryos from human and mouse stem cells.”
The team, led by Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, developed the embryo model without using any eggs or sperm. The researchers used stem cells, specifically three types found in early mammalian development.
“By inducing the expression of a particular set of genes and establishing a unique environment for their interactions, the researchers were able to get the stem cells to ‘talk’ to each other,” explains a summary of the work.
“The stem cells self-organised into structures that progressed through the successive developmental stages until they had beating hearts and the foundations of the brain, as well as the yolk sac where the embryo develops and gets nutrients from in its first weeks.”
The synthetic embryo model developed by the Cambridge team is unique, as it reached a record level of development where the entire brain, including the anterior portion, began to develop.
The findings, which took researchers over a decade of work, could potentially be useful in understanding why some pregnancies fail along with developing synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants.
The research also opens “new possibilities to study the mechanisms of neurodevelopment in an experimental model,” according to Zernicka-Goetz.
Destroy it!
An Opaque Web of Credit Reports Is Tracking Everything You Do
Liam Downey remembers the first time he heard about ChexSystems. It was December 2021, not long after he moved to Mancos, Colorado, a tiny mountain hamlet with a population under 1,500.
The only bank in town had just barred the 52-year-old flight paramedic from opening an account because his so-called ChexSystems score was too low. The teller gave him the contact information of the agency but not much else. He walked out of the bank perplexed.
ChexSystems, as Downey would soon find out, is a national consumer reporting agency — abbreviated CRA — that specializes in gathering data on how Americans use checks and bank accounts. It distills this information into a score similar to a credit score. Some 80% of banks rely on such information to screen people who want to open new accounts.
On a scale of 100 to 899, Downey’s ChexSystems score was 553. As far as the sole bank in Mancos was concerned, those three digits — regardless of his 15-year-long relationship with his current out-of-state bank — meant he was too risky to take on as a customer.
“I think this is complete nonsense,” Downey says of the reporting system. “People don’t even recognize it exists. It’s not easy to interpret, it’s not easy to change, and it’s completely arbitrary.”
Critics of ChexSystems note the agency generally tracks only negative information like account closures and overdrafts, essentially making it a bank-account rap sheet. The company is just one of a large — and largely unknown — sum of CRAs that actively monitors the financial and nonfinancial behavior of more than 200 million Americans, including many children.
Sweden’s Psychological Defense Agency: Good disinformation is “basically true”
There is no doubt that Russia, like any other major – and minor – power uses some form of propaganda and disinformation to further its goals, especially in wartime.
What’s difficult to gauge, at least at this time, is how applicable that may be in the current crisis: is Russia really trying to “exploit polarization and sow division,” in countries like Sweden, for example?
But what the fear of Russian disinformation – or apparent fear of it – has clearly managed is to make some state bodies, like Sweden’s Psychological Defense Agency, part ways with basic logic – and not be afraid to admit it to the world.
Hence, some of what is labeled as “disinformation” by this agency whose goal is to bolster the Swedes’ “moral fortitude” includes information that “is actually not false” and is even, “basically true.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” Orwell wrote.
Body Found in Tennessee Confirmed as Missing Heiress Eliza Fletcher
Memphis police confirmed Tuesday that they found the remains of teacher Eliza “Liza” Fletcher, who was reportedly abducted last week
The police department wrote on Twitter that “the deceased victim that was located yesterday in the 1600 block of Victor [street] has been identified as 34-year-old Eliza Fletcher, a teacher who was also the heiress to the Orgill Inc. hardware fortune.
The development comes after Cleotha Abston, a 38-year-old male, was charged in connection to Fletcher’s kidnapping and with tampering with evidence. His DNA was found on a pair of sandals near her disappearance, police said.
Authorities wrote Tuesday that Abston now faces additional charges, including first-degree murder and first-degree murder in perpetration of kidnapping. Previously he was charged with aggravated kidnapping and evidence.
Watch it unfold in real time!
Prominent Investigative Reporter Who Spearheaded Coverage of 2017 Las Vegas Massacre Found Dead Outside His Home
Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German was found stabbed to death outside of his home over the weekend and his killer remains at large.
Newsroom colleagues mourned his passing.
“The Review-Journal family is devastated to lose Jeff,” Executive Editor Glenn Cook said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “He was the gold standard of the news business. It’s hard to imagine what Las Vegas would be like today without his many years of shining a bright light on dark places.”
German was noted for a wide range of investigative reports about crime in Las Vegas, and also took a lead role in the Review-Journal’s coverage of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
Police said they were devoting maximum resources to find a suspect in the German slaying.
The Ukraine Proxy War Has Been A Propaganda Win For Interventionists
Neocon erotica publication The Atlantic has a new article out titled “The Rise of the Liberal Hawks” which is infuriating as much for its sycophantic empire apologia as it is for the fact that much it is entirely correct.
“Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing — sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the ‘military-industrial complex,’” sneers the article’s author, Dominic Tierney. “The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.”
“Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” writes Tierney. “No foreign conflict since the Spanish Civil War has so captured the imagination of the left.”
“Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for,” Tierney adds. “Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that ‘the liberal idea’ has ‘outlived its purpose.’ Zelensky, in contrast, has built bridges with the global left. He addressed the Glastonbury music festival, in the U.K., where the revelers chanted his name to the tune of The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army.’ In Germany, the Green Party led the charge to supply weapons to Kyiv, overturning decades of German wariness about intervening in foreign wars. LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol. Ukrainian liberals—artists, translators, teachers, filmmakers—have joined the struggle. As one writer put it: ‘All our hipsters in Ukraine fight.’”
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