If the shooter was black they would have sent the SWAT team within an hour. I can’t believe the chief was saying this shit out loud. “We knocked on the door, he didn’t answer, there was nothing we could do.”

This story is bananas. After Moturi was shot, it wasn’t until he went to the press that the police made an effort to arrest the shooter. Here’s MPD chief’s unhinged response to the criticism.

https://youtu.be/A0TCnMHHhwY

As a young photographer, he was a hometown hero for me. Rest in peace.

Either he’s never heard of John Chau or he’s trying to become the next John Chau.

I’m a white American.

Most friendly: Portugal. They seem to be a happy bunch in general, and they all seemed excited to have visitors. Lisbon, Cascais, Lagos, and all the little towns in between.

Least friendly: Iceland. They could just be less open and emotionally expressive with strangers, but unless it was a business transaction I was frequently ignored when I said hello and people seemed uninterested in having a conversation.

I frequently hear this stereotype from people who haven’t been to France. I specifically hear that the French are rude to anyone who doesn’t speak French. My experience was that they can be rude to Americans who assume everyone will speak English. I would do my best to have a conversation in French, and the locals would usually take pity on me and switch to English.

I’m not denying there are unfriendly French people, but I would expect anyone to get tired of tourists who don’t make any effort to speak the local language.

Is that how you think this works? Nobody gets to choose where they’re born, and people tend to stay close to their families or other support systems, and their jobs. They might have partners or kids who are similarly invested in the area. Not so easy.

My oldest sister got [what she believes to be] COVID in Feb 2020. She’s been on disability since then, and while she’s not cognitively impaired, she can’t walk around for more than 60 seconds before having to lay down again.

I’m naive. What’s the motive for an attack like this?

This one really hurts to think about. What an evil act. She deserves to be alive, the officer(s?) deserve to be in prison forever, and whatever payout the family receives should come from the department’s pension fund.

What’s insane? That she was wrongfully convicted, or that anyone is questioning her guilt? If the latter, we should never stop scrutinizing the government when they’re able to lock people up for life. To be clear, I’m not making a judgment about Letby.

I think about this one a lot. IIRC the gist was “Don’t tell anyone. Get a lawyer. Don’t tell anyone. Get rid of most of it.”

I hope you wrote this light-heartedly, because it made me laugh and helps me understand autism a little better.

At the very least they should lose every penny they have, and every penny they earn henceforth should go directly to the fund. Or am I just describing incarceration?

This case sounds eerily similar to the case of Curtis Flowers, who spent 20+ years on death row for a quadruple-homicide in Mississippi. The DA and investigators just didn’t want to do their jobs, so they pinned it on someone who they didn’t expect to fight back, and they tried and convicted him 6 times instead of looking for the real culprit. In the Dark is an incredible podcast about it.

The state isn’t just stealing the years these guys were locked up. They’re stealing the years afterwards too. In Ziegler’s case, he’s never used a cell phone, never used the internet. There’s no amount of money that would compensate for what they did to him.

This is great. Some people think the goal of meditation is to maintain focus on one thing without getting distracted. It’s common, then, for a meditation practice to feel frustrating and discouraging; yet another activity for them to fail because they can’t stay focused. It might help to think of meditation as “practice of returning.” Through this lens we assume that we WILL get distracted, and once we notice we’ve gotten distracted, we practice returning to our breath/blank space, etc.

Thanks for writing this. I had zero idea what EVs mean for a mechanic.

I’m a licensed mental health professional but I don’t specialize in ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and take stimulants every day.

ADHD is mostly genetic, but IMO the increase in diagnoses is partly due to the information overload from the digital age we’re living in. There are simply more things distracting us, more cognitive demands, such that even “normal” brains will struggle to keep up.

I want to point out, too, that the DSM has serious issues with validity and reliability. Some of the criteria are so subjective as to be useless, and two providers diagnosing the same person can arrive at very different disorders. Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV (we’re on DSM-5 now) wrote a book called Saving Normal where he criticizes the APA’s trend of pathologizing basic human experiences. With each DSM edition the diagnostic criteria get more broad, to the point that I can argue that any given person meets criteria for SOME disorder. If everyone is disordered, then what’s normal anymore? How is that helpful?

Most of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD describe someone who isn’t a “good student” or a “good employee.” It doesn’t consider context. If someone fucking hates their job, I’m not surprised they struggle to complete tasks that require sustained mental effort. Kids are reminded every day that the world is burning, so of course they’re distracted from their math homework. I’m not saying people aren’t suffering from what we call ADHD, I’m saying that it’s a normal human response to the state of the world right now, so why are we calling it a disorder?

Edit: a word

Frozen grapes. Once they’ve been out of the freezer for a couple minutes, they thaw into little slushie bubbles.

On Alone: Australia, one of the contestants was a biologist. She refused to eat any animal that “cares for its young.” I had never thought about differentiating that way.