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Dinosaur egg unearthed in perfect condition after 70M years— and it could hold genetic material

It was in egg-cellent condition.

Argentine paleontologists found a real diamond in the rough after happening across a perfectly preserved 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg during an excavation.

“It was a complete and utter surprise,” Gonzalo Leonel Muñoz, a Vertebrate paleontologist at the Bernardo Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, told National Geographic of the “spectacular” find. “‘It’s not uncommon to find dinosaur fossils, but the issue with eggs is that they are much less common.”

The team of paleontologists was reportedly conducting an excavation campaign in the fossil-rich region of Río Negro, when they stumbled across the primeval embryo.

While dinosaur eggs had been excavated in the area before, finding one this well-preserved was super rare.

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The GOP’s ‘Capitalism’ is Central Planning with MAGA Branding

When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) lashed out at last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies soon to arrive on Washington’s National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: “They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system.”

I am sure he’s correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader that stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order.

Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control. Take a look.

Recently, the Trump administration quietly converted CHIPS Act subsidies into an $8.9 billion equity purchase in Intel, making Washington a 10 percent owner of one of America’s largest technology companies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists “this is not socialism.” That’s semantics.

Socialism is government control of the means of production. When the government becomes your largest shareholder, that’s a strong first step.

The Intel case offends two basic economic truths. First, no group of officials can ever know enough to guide a complex industry better than millions of private investors, engineers, and consumers spending their own money. Second, the power to “partner” with business is the power to control it.

The more political capital the government invests, the more it demands in return. It’s only a matter of time until politically favored locations, suppliers, or hiring quotas shape Intel’s decisions. That isn’t capitalism.

The administration has taken shares in companies before, and it likely will again. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, considered the only fully operating rare-earth mine of scale in the U.S. The deal guarantees a 10-year price floor for MP output at nearly double the current market rate. MP competitors were rightly shocked.

Yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told CNBC that Washington will continue to “set price floors” and “forward-buy” commodities “across a range of industries” to encourage more investments into U.S. production and away from China.

While this may encourage more U.S. investments in the short term, guaranteeing an unfair advantage over competitors by setting a minimum price reduces American companies’ long-run incentives to innovate and produce better output. Economists have understood for more than a century what happens when the government fixes prices above their market level: Buyers purchase less, sellers produce more, surpluses pile up and waste follows. It’s the logic of failed farm-price support in the 1930s.

There are far better options than schemes like these. As for those rare-earth minerals, the U.S. sits on billions of dollars’ worth, yet MP is almost alone in extracting them. That’s in part because excessive regulation keeps the potential locked underground, deterring investment in innovative mining solutions, processing plants, magnet factories, and the skilled workforce needed to turn our geological abundance into economic value. Deregulation is the free-market way. Mimicking the Chinese model isn’t.

If that’s not enough, the administration has nationalized all but in name the company called U.S. Steel. To approve its market-driven purchase by Nippon Steel, Trump required a “golden share,” giving him veto power over plant closures, production levels, investments, even pricing. The White House effectively dictates how U.S. Steel can operate inside the United States.

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File on Bizarre Argentine UFO Event Deemed Classified for National Security Reasons

In an eyebrow-raising story out of Argentina, a police report concerning a recent UFO incident involving mesmerized cattle has been deemed classified for national security reasons by government officials. According to a local media outlet, the bizarre event occurred on August 14th in the village of Candioti when police received word that multiple residents had observed a “white light with violet flashes” floating over the community. An officer dispatched to investigate the UFO sighting was soon alerted to a strange commotion unfolding among the animals at a ranch along the way. Arriving at the location, he likely could not believe his eyes at the wondrous scene before him.

To the astonishment of the officer and other witnesses, the ranch’s cows were eerily walking in a circle beneath the mysterious ball of light hovering overhead. Meanwhile, the property’s horses were thrashing around in a manner suggesting that they were deeply disturbed by what was unfolding around them. After a few minutes, the UFO suddenly vanished. Its disappearance seemingly broke the spell cast over the animals as the horses immediately calmed down, and the cows stopped their ritualistic circling. Silence fell over the field, with the witnesses understandably wondering what they had just seen.

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The Rise and Mysterious Fall of Cahokia: Researchers Unearth New Secrets of America’s Greatest ‘Lost’ Ancient Megacity

For centuries, the sprawling earth mounds of Cahokia have stood as silent remnants of a massive, lost American city. Once the largest and most influential urban settlement north of Mexico, this pre-Columbian metropolis near modern-day St. Louis mysteriously flourished, and then vanished, hundreds of years before European colonists arrived. 

Now, a team of researchers has uncovered new clues about Cahokia’s rise and decline, thanks to a single massive wooden monument that once towered over the landscape.

In a study published in PLOS ONE, scientists from the University of Arizona and the University of Illinois used advanced tree-ring dating and isotope analysis to determine that a monumental wooden post known as the “Mitchell Log” was cut around 1124 CE, at the height of Cahokia’s power. 

The analysis also revealed something unexpected and fascinating. The enormous bald cypress tree was not local. It had been transported at least 110 miles (180 kilometers) to the site, likely from southern Illinois or even farther south along the Mississippi River.

This finding reshapes our understanding of Cahokia’s reach and organization. The massive log, originally part of a towering 60-foot (18-meter) ceremonial post, offers a rare and significant timestamp for when the city’s influence stretched across the Midwest and South.

“The date, provenance, and context of the Mitchell Log establish a historical datum for the peak influence of the Cahokia polity,” the researchers write. “[It also] prompts new questions about the long-distance transport of thousands of other such marker posts.”

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Ohio Health Agency Grants $400,000 To Fund Psychedelics Education And Training For First Responders, Doctors And More

An Ohio health agency is providing a state university with a $400,000 grant to educate first responders, law enforcement, emergency departments and behavioral specialists about how to deal with potential adverse psychedelic experiences as more people use the substances for medical or recreational purposes.

Amid the expanding psychedelics reform movement, there’s been increased attention to the possible health benefits of substances like psilocybin and ibogaine. But only a handful of states allow for the regulated use of certain psychedelics, typically in medically supervised settings.

Ohio is not among those states yet, but Ohio State University (OSU) is now launching its Psychedelic Emergency, Acute, and Continuing Care Education (PEACE) initiative, with nearly half a million dollars of funding from the state Department of Behavioral Health’s (DBH) SOAR Innovation grant program.

“People have started to learn about the benefits of psychedelics while, at the same time, the federal government categorizes these as controlled substances,” Stacey Armstrong, associate director of the OSU’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), said in a press release last week.

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Washington’s Deadly Lack of Foreign Policy Empathy Toward Russia

It is hard to believe that U.S. and other Western officials actually are surprised at the consequences of their habitually tone-deaf policies toward Russia.  Are they truly shocked that a major power, already humiliated by its defeat in the Cold War, resented having the most powerful military alliance in history steadily expand toward its borders?  One need only look at a current map and compare it to a map of Eastern Europe in 1990 at the time of Germany’s reunification to see the geographic extent of NATO’s expanded military power.  The encroachment on Russia’s core security zone is blatant.  Yet, U.S. leaders in five administrations ignored repeated, escalating admonitions and warnings from Moscow as those provocations took place.

The culmination – so far – of such policy arrogance and ineptitude is a dangerous proxy war between NATO and Russia, with NATO using Ukraine as its principal weapon.  Most worrisome of all, the proxy war is a conflict that could, given the slightest miscalculation by either side, escalate to the nuclear level.

Members of America’s foreign policy elite fail to exhibit even a modicum of strategic empathy, and that deficiency urgently needs to be corrected.  The principal global nightmare in the coming decades is likely to be a possible military collision between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  If the new generation of U.S. policymakers cannot do a far better job than the current crop has done with respect to policy toward Russia, a catastrophe becomes much more likely.

Aspiring and current U.S. policymakers should be compelled to conduct mental exercises in which they genuinely attempt to view a geostrategic issue from the perspective of an opponent or competitor of the United States.  As an important corollary, there needs to be a more serious effort to comprehend how the other party seems to view specific U.S. actions and initiatives.  Such an approach requires sincere, in-depth intellectual role reversals.

An attempt to achieve something at least resembling strategic empathy would, for example, try to determine how a defeated and humiliated United States would react to a victorious Russia expanding a powerful military alliance it controls ever closer to the American homeland.  Let’s say that the encroaching Russian great power started by adding small nations in the Caribbean and Central America as new alliance members and then moved on to admit larger countries possessing more significant military assets, such as Colombia and Venezuela.  Not content with implementing those provocations, Moscow then seeks to make Canada or Mexico a front line alliance member against the United States.

Substitute the Baltic republics for the small Caribbean or Central American countries, and substitute Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania for Colombia and Venezuela, and one has the mirror image of what the U.S. and NATO did in Eastern Europe between 1998 and 2004 with the initial stages of NATO’s expansion.  Throughout that period, Washington and other leading NATO powers kept insisting that the moves were not hostile measures directed against Russia – an assertion that had little credibility even during the early phases of expansion and ultimately had no credibility with Russian leaders.  When Anti-Russia hawks began to do their utmost to admit Ukraine to NATO during George W. Bush’s administration, the provocations reached an intolerable level.

Adding Ukraine as a NATO military asset, whether or not Kiev was granted formal membership, was the functional strategic equivalent of a victorious Russia trying to add Mexico or Canada to the looming military power already arrayed against Washington.  In this alternate universe, would anyone be surprised if the increasingly beleaguered United States took decisive steps to prevent Mexico or Canada from becoming a crucial Russian geostrategic asset?  Would we be surprised if U.S. leaders and the American people concluded that they faced an existential security threat and decided that decisive action to neutralize that threat must be taken, whatever the risk?  It is nearly certain that both the public and the government would reach such a conclusion.

Why, then, do U.S. leaders and their NATO allies profess to be surprised and outraged that Russian officials and the Russian people seem to view matters in a similar fashion about the threat their country faces?  The total lack of strategic empathy on the part of Western – especially U.S. – policymakers has produced a predictable, disastrous outcome.

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Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.

They were the sort of disturbing discoveries that anyone taking generic medication would want to know.

At one Indian factory manufacturing drugs for the United States, pigeons infested a storage room and defecated on boxes of sterilized equipment. At another, pathogens contaminated purified water used to produce drugs. At a third, stagnant urine pooled on a bathroom floor not far from where injectable medication was made.

But when the Food and Drug Administration released the grim inspection reports and hundreds of others like them, the agency made a decision that undermined its mission to protect Americans from dangerous drugs.

Instead of sharing the names of the medications coming from the errant foreign factories, the FDA routinely blacked them out, keeping the information secret from the public. That decision prevented doctors, pharmacists and patients from knowing whether the drugs they counted on were tainted by manufacturing failures — and potentially ineffective or unsafe.

“Is there some quality issue? Is there a greater difference in potency than expected? Is there a contaminant? I don’t know,” said Dr. Donna Kirchoff, a pediatrician in Oregon who has spent hours trying to find out where certain drugs were made for patients reporting unexplained reactions.

There’s no specific requirement that the FDA block out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities. Still, the agency preemptively kept that information hidden, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets.

It’s part of a decades-long pattern of discounting the interests of consumers who want to make informed choices about the drugs they take — even as 9 out of 10 prescriptions in the United States are filled with generics, many from India and China.

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Newsom Signs Bill Pointing Kids Toward LGBT Site with Possible Predators

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed new legislation pointing children in government schools toward an LGBT online forum that some in the state believe is likely a hotbed for predators.

Newsom signed Assembly Bill 727 on Oct. 10, which was World Mental Health Day, mandating that school IDs for public middle schools, high schools, and colleges have contact information for The Trevor Project on the back.

The group purports to prevent suicide for self-proclaimed homosexual and transgender young people, but their online forum, TrevorSpace, lacks age verification and moderation standards, according to The Christian Post.

Brenda Lebsack, a Santa Ana Unified School District trustee, said that The Trevor Project allows for easy predation on children.

“I saw with my own eyes that Trevor Project is putting kids in harm’s way through TrevorSpace by connecting minors with unfettered random adults on an international virtual platform to explore their genders and sexualities, and this is dangerous for our most vulnerable kids who identify as LGBTQ,” Lebsack wrote in a recent article, according to a release from the California Family Council.

TrevorSpace is advertised as a “welcoming online social community for LGBTQ+ young people between the ages of 13-24 years old.”

There are over 400,000 members on the forum, where young people can “find support groups and make friends.”

The California Family Council wrote that “multiple investigations, including those cited by law enforcement and school officials, reveal that anyone can create an account, set their age, and directly message minors.”

“There is no reliable age verification, and moderation is limited,” the organization said.

Kevin Brown, a retired police officer who launched the anti-trafficking entity Lives Worth Saving, said that his experience in law enforcement led him to believe that TrevorSpace could be easily compromised.

“I understand the strategies used by child predators and traffickers to lure their victims,” Brown said in written testimony against Assembly Bill 727.

“Because TrevorSpace readily admits it does not constantly monitor the site, and there are people of all ages online, the opportunity for a child to be manipulated by a predator is an exponential threat.”

Brown testified that he had even tested the site himself, creating a fake account designed to resemble a 15-year-old boy.

“Within minutes, I was able to connect with several others via a ‘club’ that is actually a chat room,” he continued.

“One person was of particular interest, as he wanted to take our chat from TrevorSpace and move it to Discord, another social media site I’m familiar with. In an undercover capacity, I have made contact with people on Discord who sell and distribute Child Sexual Abuse Materials.”

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The Charlie Kirk Hysteria Is a Blueprint for Future Political Chaos

Despite their stark differences, both partisan reactions stemmed from deeply held beliefs expressed with intense emotion. Many of these beliefs concerned the biggest threats facing the United States. The mainstream right-wing reaction generally reflected a narrative familiar to their worldview: the evil left killed Charlie Kirk. Meanwhile, left-wing indifference and celebration reflected their worldview: that Charlie Kirk was a Nazi, and MAGA is largely a collection of evil fascists.

The reactions to the assassination have settled down—for now. But the collective reactivity it triggered is cause for both concern and curiosity and applies to far more than his murder. Such volatile emotions and behavior will undoubtedly flare up again as current events grow increasingly inflammatory and polarized. Because this dynamic will inevitably play out again, it is vital to understand what made it so explosive.

One way to understand the collective chaos in response to Kirk’s death and many other dramatic events comes from a book that inspired one of America’s top propagandists, Edward Bernays. Bernays helped engineer public support for World War I, lent his talents to promoting and sanitizing a CIA-backed coup while working for the United Fruit Company, and wrote openly about the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses.”

“The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion”

The Crowd by Gustav Le Bon, written in 1895, explores crowd psychology, analyzing the hivemind and herd-like behavior of collective groups. In a chapter called “The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion,” Le Bon discussed how “leaders” can program beliefs, sentiments, and behaviors into collective groups. He explained how leaders can “stir up a crowd for a short space of time, to induce it to commit an act of any nature,” cautioning that “the crowd must be acted upon by rapid suggestion.” While rapid suggestion is key, Le Bon stressed that “it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared” to react in the way the leaders desire.

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Delusional Chuck Schumer Implies the Trump Administration is Being ‘Shielded’ by the Press

How out of touch with reality is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer? So out of touch that he recently suggested that the Trump administration is being shielded by the press.

Schumer was talking about the fact that some media companies are being acquired by conservatives who might be more positive in their coverage of Trump and the administration. You know, the way that 99 percent of the media has treated Democrats for decades now.

In the course of his remarks, he used this to say that we aren’t going to have a free press anymore. Naturally, he tried to tie in the whole stupid ‘No Kings’ thing as well.

Transcript via Schumer’s Senate Page:

Schumer: I had a few questions this morning of my great colleague — and once again, his strength, his indomitability, and his caring about this democracy, which we all know is at risk, is just amazing and so my question relates to something he touched on before, in his discussions with our great senator from New Hampshire. There are so many ways this administration is trying to rip apart democracy and one of them, you mentioned a minute ago, is the threatening of media to just do what Trump wants and the man who’s head of the FCC seems to be an instrumentality of that.

Trump has said, things they say I don’t like should not be put on the air, and they’ve held over the heads the broadcast licenses of some of our great media companies. In other ways, they’re getting some of their friends to take over some of our media companies. And isn’t one of the greatest blows to democracy — I would ask my colleague — one of the greatest blows to democracy when we don’t have a fully free press?

And has it been a hallmark of so many of the countries that he has mentioned that are autocracies or absolute dictatorships to have no free press, so no information can come out? And doesn’t that dramatically hurt the American people, when government is shielded and can do whatever it wants — and hurt as many people as it wants — because you don’t have a free press? Shouldn’t it really frighten every American that this is a large step on the road away from democracy towards tyranny and towards authoritarian government?

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