BARRETT TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- There's something creepy living in the lake at Skytop Lodge in Monroe County. It's called a jelly brain. The colony of moss animals is harmless, but the gooey blobs caught the attention of guests and naturalists during a weekend tour.
And Democratics, who are converging on the place to acquire new voters.
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The misery of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction hits deep in San Francisco and has turned parts of a beautiful city into a public toilet. Outraged residents Fox News spoke to in late June said they're tired of waiting for their elected officials to come up with a plan and complain no one ever seems to be on the same page.
What's equally frustrating is that the city still manages to blow through hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year to address the crisis and blames everyone but themselves when the homeless count rises.
"The city is running out of strategies," Anna Suarez told Fox. "I'm moving to Austin."
Unsurprisingly, the city "leaders" are scapegoating, blaming the rise in homelessness on big tech companies that have moved to the area, including Twitter, Salesforce, NVIDIA and Eventbrite. They say the businesses have brought high-paying jobs with them, which has caused housing prices to soar and pushed people who can't afford to keep up financially out of the area or onto the streets.
Just wait until they get fed up and leave. As has been noted here before, animals across species share a number of commonalities. Among them: if you feed rats, you get more rats. My view has long been that if you cut "services", you'll cut the problem. That's logic 101, but SF doesn't seem to get that - and they don't understand why productive people are leaving.
But at least there's not a plastic straw in sight on the streets.
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FAIRFIELD — Police arrested six people — including a pair of people in their 80s — last week after getting reports of “lewd and sexual activity” in the Grace Richardson Open Space area at the intersection of Congress Street and Morehouse Highway.
At least town officials got a takeaway from this: they now know where to locate their senior center.
And really, who among us has never had great sex next to a waterfall?
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Seattle company Whooshh has come up with an interesting way to transport fish over dams.
Mike Messina, a Whooshh representative, told me that the technology was originally designed as a way to transport apples from high branches without bruising. While field testing the devices, Messina said, the Whooshh team had “an ‘Aha!’ moment” when they kept seeing helicopters overhead that were moving fish over a nearby dam on the Columbia River—an especially dramatic version of the collect-and-transport strategy.
Whooshh’s machinery moves the fish through a pneumatic tube; the tube is made with a flexible proprietary material and filled with mist, allowing for a “frictionless glide” to ease the fish’s passage.
Transport past the obstacle takes one minute.
The newest models are full of whiz-bang; fish swim in and a computerized system photographs each fish, then directs each one to the appropriately-sized tube. The system even notes whether it's a wild or hatchery fish. It's the first real change in fish transport technology in over half a century - and it really ought to irk the sea lions, too.
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President Trump donated his salary from the second quarter of 2019 to the Surgeon General's office, the White House announced Friday. The Surgeon General's office falls under the Department of Health and Human Services. The White House said the donation will help address the opioid epidemic and the growing use of e-cigarettes by teenagers and children.
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FULLERTON, Calif. - A faculty member was stabbed to death on Cal State University's Fullerton campus Monday prompting a homicide investigation on the first day of fall semester, police said.
And...
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (FOX 11) - Police continue to search for the suspect who gunned down a middle school teacher just blocks away from her house. On Saturday, Nancy Magana was shot and killed while sitting in her truck at Delmann Heights Park in San Bernardino.
Nancy’s five-year-old son and boyfriend were in the vehicle at the time of the shooting. Her sister Maria tells FOX 11 police have no suspects or motive for the senseless attack.
It's beginning to look as though SoCal's somewhat less than conducive to teacher longevity.
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An influential medical journal published a study Monday that links fluoride consumption during pregnancy with lower childhood IQs—a finding that could undermine decades of public-health messaging, fire up conspiracy theorists, and alarm mothers-to-be. The research was expected to be so controversial that JAMA Pediatrics included an editor’s note saying the decision to publish it was not easy and that it was subjected to “additional scrutiny.”
The effects were associated with IQ deficits of 3.7 to 4.5 among both genders, comparable to the effects of lead.
It appears that post-natal exposure to fluoride provides certain benefits; specifically strengthening tooth enamel - but prenatal exposure is problematic:
In an accompanying analysis, Harvard Professor David Bellinger said “high-quality epidemiological studies” are needed, but added: “The hypothesis that fluoride is a neurodevelopmental toxicant must now be given serious consideration.”
As with many things in life, it's bad for you until it becomes good for you.
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Want to know just how badly polluted the air we're breathing is getting? It can be as harmful for your lungs as a pack of cigarettes a day, new research has revealed. The new data might explain why more non-smokers are getting lung problems traditionally associated with smoking.
Researchers found that higher levels of pollutants in city air – ozone in particular – could cause emphysema to progress as quickly as would be expected from smoking an entire pack of cigarettes every day. "Rates of chronic lung disease in this country are going up and increasingly it is recognised that this disease occurs in non-smokers," says physician-epidemiologist Joel Kaufman, from the University of Washington.
Add to that the relatively high rate of smoking seen in many city-dwellers, and they're basically doubling their health risks.
In a ten-year period, just breathing in city air was found to be roughly equivalent to smoking a pack a day for 29 years.
Next thing you know, they'll be prescribing gas-masks for city dwellers, which would really put a crimp in the whole dating scene....
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They say there’s a smartphone app for everything, and doubters should know there are now at least two dealing with excrement on the sidewalks of San Francisco. The city has its official SF311 app, part of its “San Francisco at your Service” program, and last year a private developer introduced Snapcrap, which allows residents to upload a photo of an offending specimen directly to the SF311 website. This alerts the city’s new five-person “poop patrol,” which will follow up, presumably, with a smile.
The website RealtyHop.com dubs San Francisco “the doo-doo capital of the U.S.” They noted that the city’s poop reports almost tripled between 2011 and 2017.
The majority of the nation’s homeless people now live in California.
36,000 of them in L.A. and San Francisco, which makes for a lot of poop on the streets and sidewalks of the two cities.
Well, as some have observed - if you put out food for birds or rats, rodents will appear. The same applies even in California.
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In the days after our chronically sleep-deprived country “springs forward,” costing us an hour of rest, disoriented Americans face a slightly greater risk of heart attack and stroke. There are more car crashes. Workplace accidents increase, too.
As a major proponent observes, even if it doesn't kill you, switching back and forth is annoying.
This is one of those issues that cuts across party lines, so there's actually a chance of passage at the federal level.
Amazingly, Congress might actually accomplish something this session.
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