Communick News

We all perceive ourselves as the main character, and that leads some people to think bad accidents won't happen to them

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal health officials intend to award a contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to investigate whether there is a link between vaccinations and autism, according to a government procurement notice.

The Troy, New York, engineering school is getting the no-bid contract because of its “unique ability” to link data on children and mothers, according to the notice posted this week.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to questions about the notice, including how much the contract is for or what exactly the researchers intend to do.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading voice in the antivaccine movement before President Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, announced in April a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism by this month. He has repeatedly tried to link vaccines to the condition.

An RPI biotech engineering professor, Juergen Hahn, has used artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to look for patterns in blood samples of children with autism. Hahn “is renowned for the quality and rigor of his research,” RPI officials said in a statement acknowledging the intended grant.

“If this project is awarded, he intends to publish the results of his work at the conclusion of the project,” the statement added.

The Associated Press left messages seeking comment from Hahn.

The notice raises many questions, said Alycia Halladay, who oversees research activities and grants for the Autism Science Foundation.

RPI is not known in the field as having any special access to data on this kind of question and “wouldn’t be the obvious choice,” Halladay said.

It’s also not clear how the contract fits into other autism research that the government may be planning, she said.

But perhaps the biggest question is why money is being spent on such a study at all, she added.

Moderate, 6.7 Out and Back

2,011 ft elevation gain

Hiked 9/5/25

Flickr album

Located in the Catskill Mountains, this trail starts off in a high gear, with the steepest section in the first third of the hike. Once you get to the Great Ledge, a long cliff wall with various views of the surrounding mountains. One more up and down to get to the flat top of Panther Mountain for more views.

A large rock outcrop that has one side mostly covered by a mat of leafy looking lichen.

One final short steep ascent before it levels off at Panther mountain again.

Looking east from a viewpoint on the Giant Ledge into the Catskills Mountains. The top of a dead tree may be seen rising to almost flush with the ledge.

Vice President JD Vance on Monday jumped onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk’s killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance urged listeners on the slain activist’s podcast Monday. “And hell, call their employer.”

Vance’s call also included a vow to target some of the biggest funders of liberal causes as conservatives stepped up their targeting of private individuals for their comments about the killing. It marked an escalation in a campaign that some warned invoked some of the darkest chapters of American history.

“The government involvement in this does inch this closer to looking like McCarthyism,” said Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, referring to the 1950s campaign to root out communists that led to false allegations and ruined careers. “It was not a shining moment for free expression.”

Doesn't affect usability, but I am curious if other people see the timestamps (i.e. '6 hours ago') next to posts and comments in another language before the page fully loads in.

In my case, the timestamps show up in Chinese (or Japanese Kanji?) and are replaced with English once the page fully loads. Am using Librewolf, have CJK fonts installed, and system is set to English, if that is relevant.

In this case, Natasha and her friends.

Natasha is one of the "owners" of Catherine, who she decides to treat as a "pet" because she reminds her of a cat (hence the name CATherine). Natasha and her friends invite Catherine into the friend group and they all live together, but Catherine is treated badly there and Natasha makes a plan to kill Catherine.

She doesn't see Catherine as a person, but as an actual animal, a tool, and a nuisance, and wants to badly mistreat her which ends up traumatizing her.

It leads to aimless scrolling and sometimes reading if I’m motivated.

!covidconscious@lemmy.world

There are other communities for discussion of COVID-19, but none really on this topic.

As someone who still masks and isolates, I can't imagine I'm the only one, and I'm guessing there are enough people with relevant things to talk about to make an active community.

Not, the House house, but y'know, like the scary story to tell in the dark

Renfield (2023) was a box office corpse—$65M budget, $26M gross—yet it’s a surprisingly fun splatter-comedy that deserved better.

Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield, Dracula’s eternally abused familiar. For centuries, he’s been the one covering up massacres, dragging corpses back to the lair, and nursing his master to health every time a vampire hunter gets lucky. The cycle never ends.

Now, he’s sneaking off to therapy groups, wondering if self-actualization is possible when your boss is the Prince of Darkness. That opening sequence even splices Hoult and Cage into footage from Dracula (1931), erasing Dwight Frye and Bela Lugosi as if Universal’s monsters had been quietly recast all along.

Of course, the main draw is Nicolas Cage. He isn’t just chewing scenery for the meme reels—he literally had his teeth shaved down so he could wear ultra-thin 3D-printed fangs and still enunciate through dialogue. Some prosthetic setups weighed twenty pounds, giving him a hulking, unnatural presence. His performance is theatrical, imperious, magnetic. The tragedy is that we don’t see nearly enough of him.

Hoult, though, is no slouch. His Renfield is a perfect blend of pained and pathetic, especially when he pops bugs for power. Those aren’t CGI snacks either—Hoult actually ate potato bugs, crickets, and caramel cockroaches on set. Director Chris McKay even joined him for solidarity, while Cage—who once swallowed live roaches in Vampire’s Kiss—declined this time. The running gag works because Hoult sells both the disgust and the absurdity.

The side cast adds texture. Shohreh Aghdashloo commands the screen as a crime boss in New Orleans, and Ben Schwartz revels in playing her inept, whiny son. Awkwafina, unfortunately, is stranded in the role of a hard-boiled cop—it’s a part that never quite fits her comic timing or voice.

What really makes the movie tick are the fight scenes. McKay insisted on gallons of practical blood—enough to paint half of Bourbon Street—and it pays off. Limbs fly, torsos burst, and the choreography gleefully turns gore into slapstick weapons. Even behind the camera, chaos spilled into real life: during production, more than twenty crew cars were broken into, a touch of crime mirroring the crime family on screen.

Renfield wasn’t the launchpad Universal wanted for its “Monsterverse.” Opening against Mario, John Wick 4, and The Pope’s Exorcist sealed its fate. But what survives is a film that reframes Dracula as a toxic boss and Renfield as a burnt-out employee desperate for freedom.

For that alone, it’s worth watching. And as long as Nicolas Cage keeps sinking his fangs into projects like this, I’ll keep showing up.

Where to watch:

Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81642086

@movies@piefed.social

Maybe I should've hopped the train way earlier, or maybe I'm just a whiny bitch, but I do NOT want to see pop-up ads on my paid service, especially for an even more expensive plan. Like dude, come on.

Archive article: https://archive.ph/PISvQ

Two psychologists are warning that President Donald Trump’s frequent confusion and mounting physical issues may be pointing to something more troubling than just aging. On their podcast Shrinking Trump, psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal argued that the 79-year-old president is showing both physical and linguistic symptoms of what they call “early dementia.”

The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.

His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

The author of this piece, Chris Hedges, was recently interviewed on Democracy Now!.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35965305

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/33708871

The German government is slashing its electricity demand forecast for 2030 to match a lack of progress in rolling out low-carbon options like heat pumps and electric cars.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/470529