Episode 231 – The One Where We Tear Down This Pay-Wall!

In This Week’s Show, episode 231, we reshow the show that didn’t show.

Episode 231 – The One Where We Tear Down This Pay-Wall!
Episode 231 – The One Where We Tear Down This Pay-Wall!

In This Week’s Show, episode 231, we reshow the show that didn’t show.

Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Linus (the Greek personification of dirges and lamentations) hasn’t struck us down yet, we are trying his patience!

Shea’s Life Lesson

This week I learned that if you were paid a nickel every time a blue whale is born, in one year’s time you would realize you have a very poor paying job in a career that makes no sense.

Jenn’s Actual Lesson

Did you know that Passover (which is occurring the weekend of this show’s release) is the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday?

But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

This Week’s Beer

From 230

Goliath Imperial Stout – White Elm Brewing Company Lincoln, NE

Donated By: Brendon

BA Link: http://bit.ly/2uiZFOF

BA Rating: 4.13

Style: Imperial Stout

ABV: 12%

  • Aaron: 5
  • Jenn: 5
  • Shea: 1
  • Steve: 3

Round Two

  • Aaron: 3
  • Jenn: 4
  • Shea: 1
  • Steve: 3

Oakspire Bourbon Barrel Ale – New Belgium Ft. Collins, CO

Donated By: Steve J

BA Link: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/192/355616/

BA Rating: 3.81

Style: American Strong Ale

ABV: 9%

  • Aaron: 6
  • Jenn: The Beast is Worse
  • Shea: 2
  • Steve: 6

This Week’s Show

Round Table Discussion

We’ve got Patrons!

  • Colin
  • Samantha

High on my must-listen list

by wubwub on
RATING: ★★★★★

Love the guys and gal and their irreverent take on headlines. Wish I had friends as good as these.

We got prezzies!

And we’ve got updates!
‘Smallville’ Actress Allison Mack Pleads Guilty in Sex Cult Case – Variety

https://apple.news/A6rRpVdVVR1qVpt8ilOndsw

Everyone’s Agnostic!

Not only is Jenn back on our show this week she’s also the guest of the week on the episode of Everyone’s Agnostic airing Sunday. So head over to http://www.everyonesagnostic.com

Headlines

HL1 – All Natural…ish.

Story: http://bit.ly/2TJfVTm

FDA: http://bit.ly/2TLYn8T

This story comes to us care of Alex at the American Council on Science and Health’s news page.

Apparently, you can make Leopard Honey.

Because “nature” means safe and “untested by the FDA” means the man and Big … Food safety… aren’t going to be up in your dick.

According to Leopard Honey, a packet of their “Miracle Honey” – coming in 12 packs, each about an ounce – will:

  • Eliminates impotence and infertility

  • Enhances nutrient absorption and metabolism

  • It’s rich in proteins, amino acids … so … proteins, vitamins, digestive and metabolic enzymes

  • Supports the immune system *

  • It’sanislant energy sourc* (direct copy and paste)

  • Intensifies the body’s muscular increase

That’s a fucking lot of stuff for some honey packets to do! Especially when each one is barely enough to sweeten my tea.

I like honey. Fucking hate bees though.

So what’s in Miracle Honey?

1st, of course, you’re going to need Pure Flower honey. The kind from bees. Bees who are, in fact, terrible hate drones.

You’ll need a dash of Tongkat Ali root. Tongkat is a tree native to Southeast Asia and contains quassinoids and alkaloids, and therefore is magic and cures erectile dysfunction and according to a website called “verywellfit.com” it will make you strong and virile, reduce your stress, and alleviate the symptoms of Hypogonadism (when your bits don’t produce hormones).

You’ll need Ginseng because it cures fucking everything ever.

Finally, you’ll want Carob and Cinnamon, a delicious alternative to coffee or hot cocoa… because… yummy… I guess.

And there you go. You’ve now got Miracle Honey that will cure basically everything.

Best of all, this has been clinically proven to help with erectile dysfunction! No, no, it’s true. There have been numerous studies conducted on the effects of Sildenafil…

Which is why the FDA announced that they Leopard Honey are doing a voluntary recall of all their honey, because “somehow” it got “tainted” with Viagra.

Don’t. Buy. Supplements.

HL2 – Big Illuminati’s Public Safety Push

https://wapo.st/2YCUnv4

http://bit.ly/2TKFrHU

Last month, in the quiet Phoenix suburb of Chandler, police officers – guns drawn, clad in tactical gear – raided the home of Brooks Bryce. They didn’t find any drugs, weapons, or illegals… nor were they looking for them.

They were looking for a 2-year-old. The child has been distressingly ill, because he was unvaccinated. Despite running a life-threatening, 100+ degree fever, the boy’s mother, Sarah Beck, ignored “doctors’” orders and refused to take him to the ER because she was afraid she would get in trouble for not vaccinating him.

Those “doctors” being the folks at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe.
Obviously worried, whoever they had confided in called a welfare check with DCS. The boy’s father, Brooks, refused to let them in. Fearing for the boy’s life, local officials took matters into their own hands and ordered the raid. “They treated us like criminals, busting in our door,” Brooks Bryce, the toddler’s father, told KPNX last month. “I mean, I don’t know what kind of trauma that did to my kids.” Other kids… who he gets to worry about because they’re still alive because society as a whole is better suited to keep them that way than he is.

Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, who wrote the legislation requiring warrants for DCS to remove children in non-emergency circumstances said: “what has our country become that we can tear down the doorway of a family who has a child with a high fever that disagrees with their doctor?”
A place where people grow up I guess…

Kelly continued “what about parents’ rights to decide what’s best for their child?” Townsend said. “Parents felt the child was fine. Next thing we know, the Gestapo is at their door.” The Gestapo, as you might recall, was famously pro-forced-healthcare.

Critics have said that the parents were well within their rights to avoid the “costly hospital trip” – which seems to be the central theme of most of the comments. While people who are fucking ridiculous went back and picked up those other kids Brooks mentioned and put them into foster care where they might just might, live to see adulthood.

This Week’s Stories

Patron Sniffer

Dog sniffs out prehistoric 250,000-year-old wooly rhino bone
http://video.foxnews.com/v/6022952528001

Dinosaurs have gone to the dogs!

Or another pithy intro about dogs and bones and such. I dunno. Enjoy this beagle.

Apparently woolly rhinos are a thing… or were, about 250,000 years ago.

Our story follows four-year-old Crystal, a beagle who has been trained to sniff out fossils and the remains of prehistoric creatures by her paleontologist owner Jamie Jordan.

“Beagles are well known for their sense of smell, and if they can be trained to sniff out drugs, weapons, and bombs. why not try fossils?” he said.

Jordan, who runs a museum and educational center Fossils Galore and totally isn’t trying to fund his research sniffing out the aforementioned drugs and bombs and shit. He’s having the pooch sniff out bones from the Ice Age, which apparently, “have a very organic, very pungent and clay-like smell” which is not what I’d expect from a quarter-million-year-old rhino with wet fur.

Crystal’s biggest find came in 2016 when she sniffed out the wooly rhino leg bone, which was not connected to a wooly rhino shin bone. The rhino has been dubbed “Stompy” because everyone in this story has a cute name.

The dog gets a treat whenever she makes a discovery. Sadly, it’s not the bone she found, which feels a bit shitty, but until bone sniffing dogs unionize what are ya gonna do?

“If they’re on the surface she’ll sniff it out and howl to alert us, but if the bone is underground Crystal will just dig down,” Jordan told SWNS, inadvertently admitting to forcing his four-legged companion to do the manual labor too – and she has to use the wee-tiny brushes. Those are hard for dogs to hold.

Jordan was inspired by the pioneering Victorian paleontologist Mary Anning, who hunted for fossils with her dog Tray on a stretch of the U.K.’s southern coastline dubbed the “Jurassic Coast” – which was a lot more fun until the wooly Britains got out of their cages and gave everyone spotted dick.

Anning’s remarkable life is depicted in the upcoming movie “Ammonite” which stars Kate Winslet as the fossil hunter fated to seek revenge on the fossils who killed her parents… I think.

Woolly rhinos first appeared about 350,000 years ago and existed until about 10,000 years ago when they just gave up and quit, according to the International Rhino Foundation. “Their fossils are fairly common and have been discovered throughout Europe and Asia,” it explains, on its website. “Well-preserved remains have been discovered frozen in ice and buried in oil-saturated soils.”

But how do dogs sniff out fossils?

Well, according to the Institute for Creation Research they can’t. See, you can’t smell something that’s been decomposing over millions of years because it would just smell like more rock. They invite you to test this by smelling rocks and, as you’ll surely notice, rocks smell the same. So there ya go. But what about the wooly rhino? Well, you can smell something that’s died within the last say… 6000 or so years – or the age we all know the Earth actually is. Therefore, dogs prove creationism, no questions please, end sentence.

On the other hand, if we talk to people who have read more than one book…

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/12/121210-archaeology-dogs-australia-conservation-canines/

Australian dog trainer Gary Jackson of Multinational K9 has trained a black lab mix named Migaloo as the world’s first “archaeology dog,” able to locate bones that are hundreds of years old. See, they got permission from the Aboriginal tribal elders to use some ancestral bones from the South Australian Museum’s collection. What they saw was that the dog was able to find a buried bone from about ten feet (three meters) away, even if it’s as small as a fingernail. As a test, Migaloo was invited to search an ancient Aboriginal burial ground in South Australia. She immediately turned up a 600-year-old grave. It should be noted that they knew more or less where it was, but the dog and owner didn’t, hence the “test.”

To the concerns about the dog digging up the bones, handler Jackson says “No, Migaloo only digs if I don’t reward her right away. And she has no interest in the bones other than finding them. She just wants the ball!”

Jenn’s Second Half

International Diplomacy and Goodwill: the little girl edition

  • http://www.samanthasmith.info/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith
  • https://www.avclub.com/in-1982-a-10-year-old-american-wrote-to-the-head-of-th-1830869949

I’m dipping my toes back into tales from history this week. Not a ‘weird history’ one, sad to say, but one that I’ve always liked and not everyone may be familiar with. Today I’m going to be discussing the story of Samantha Smith, often referred to as ‘America’s Youngest Ambassador’. I picked this story to share today because international tensions are again on the rise, with diplomacy) at least on the American end, is currently at a depressingly loooow point. This is a reminder that small things and normal people can sometimes make great things happen. (Unless Trump is re-elected and then we’re all doomed.)

The setting of the story is the tense later-Cold War days of the early 80s. Samantha herself was born June 29th, 1972, in Maine, and was a general contemporary of Steve. Being a school child during this time of heightened nuclear war fears, obviously, she was curious about why there were talks of war and made-for-TV movies about society’s annihilation (seriously, Amazon Prime carries ‘Testament’ and I’m really glad I didn’t see that as a kid). From her own words:

“Actually, the whole thing started when I asked my mother if there was going to be a war. There was always something on television about missiles and nuclear bombs. Once I watched a science show on public television and the scientists said that a nuclear war would wreck the Earth and destroy the atmosphere. Nobody would win a nuclear war. I remembered that I woke up one morning and wondered if this was going to be the last day of the Earth.

I asked my mother who would start a war and why. She showed me a news magazine with a story about America and Russia, one that had a picture of the new Russian leader, Yuri Andropov, on the cover. We read it together. It seemed that the people in both Russia and America were worried that the other country would start a nuclear war. It all seemed so dumb to me. I had learned about the awful things that had happened during World War II, so I thought that nobody would ever want to have another war. I told Mom that she should write to Mr. Andropov to find out who was causing all the trouble. She said, “Why don’t you write to him?” So I did.”

And yes she did. In 1982 at the age of 10 she wrote a letter to the newly elected, heavily titled General Secretary of the Central Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov. Now, Samantha was nothing if not precocious. She had previously written a letter to Queen Elizabeth at the age of 5 to tell her how much she admired her (and probably to get tips on how to become a future world leader, as the kid had moxy), so her next focus turned, of course, to the Iron Curtain.

The refreshingly direct letter:

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren’t please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to share and take care of. Not to fight over or have one group of people own it all. Please let’s do what he wanted and have everybody be happy too.

Samantha Smith

Surprisingly (or not, since I’m telling a story about it), the letter drew the attention of Russian officials and, once it was published in the Russian newspaper Pravda, everyday citizens. Samantha was pleased it was published but was not about to let Andropov off the hook and penned another letter to the Soviet Union’s Ambassador to the United States demanding to know if he planned to answer her directly. Called out by a pre-teen girl, Yuri sent back a lengthy and charming letter in April of 1983. Some excerpts:

Dear Samantha,

I received your letter, which is like many others that have reached me recently from your country and from other countries around the world.

It seems to me—I can tell by your letter—that you are a courageous and honest girl, resembling Becky, the friend of Tom Sawyer in the famous book of your compatriot Mark Twain. This book is well known and loved in our country by all boys and girls.

You write that you are anxious about whether there will be a nuclear war between our two countries. And you ask are we doing anything so that war will not break out.

Your question is the most important of those that every thinking man can pose. I will reply to you seriously and honestly.

Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. This is what the great founder of our state, Vladimir Lenin, taught us.

Soviet people well know what a terrible thing war is. Forty-two years ago, Nazi Germany which strove for supremacy over the whole world, attacked our country, burned and destroyed many thousands of our towns and villages, killed millions of Soviet men, women and children.

In that war, which ended with our victory, we were in alliance with the United States: together we fought for the liberation of many people from the Nazi invaders. I hope that you know about this from your history lessons in school. And today we want very much to live in peace, to trade and cooperate with all our neighbors on this earth—with those far away and those nearby. And certainly with such a great country as the United States of America.

In America and in our country there are nuclear weapons—terrible weapons that can kill millions of people in an instant. But we do not want them to be ever used. That’s precisely why the Soviet Union solemnly declared throughout the entire world that never—never—will it use nuclear weapons first against any country. In general we propose to discontinue further production of them and to proceed to the abolition of all the stockpiles on earth.

It seems to me that this is a sufficient answer to your second question: “Why do you want to wage war against the whole world or at least the United States?” We want nothing of the kind. No one in our country—neither workers, peasants, writers nor doctors, neither grown-ups nor children, nor members of the government—want either a big or “little” war.

We want peace—there is something that we are occupied with: growing wheat, building and inventing, writing books and flying into space. We want peace for ourselves and for all peoples of the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.

I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer. You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children’s camp—”Artek”—on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples.

Thank you for your letter. I wish you all the best in your young life.

Samantha took him up on his offer and that July she and her parents visited Russia and the Artek camp. From her website:

Smith family’s tour was broadcast on the two available Soviet channels, and the Soviets were glued to the TV screens following the girl’s every move. For many in the Soviet Union Samantha and her family put a human face on the U.S. On the other side of the ocean, Americans got a rare glimpse of the Soviet Union.

The goodwill tour of the USSR helped humanize both sides to the other. It also led to Samantha having multiple media appearance like the Tonight Show, a subsequent goodwill tour of Japan, an autobiographical book Journey to the Soviet Union and, incongruously, a recurring role on Charles in Charge (fuck off, Scott Baio). While in Japan she attended the Children’s International Symposium in Kobe where she suggested to the leaders of the US and Russia they exchange granddaughters for two weeks every year. Her rationale being each “wouldn’t want to send a bomb to a country his granddaughter would be visiting”.

Sadly, Samantha and Yuri Andropov were destined to never meet. At some point during their correspondence, Andropov became gravely ill and recused himself from the public eye. The two did speak on the phone. He died in early 1984 of renal failure after only 15 months in office. The wheels of global change were beginning to turn, however, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, lasted only 13 months, and under his successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, the next casualty would be the Soviet Union itself.

Tragically, despite all early indications, Samantha was not destined to become our supreme leader and usher in an era of world peace. On August 25th, 1985, at the age of 13, Samantha was in a plane crash with her father while returning home to Maine. All 8 occupants aboard were killed. She was eulogized in Moscow, with a personal message of condolence from Gorbachev,

“Everyone in the Soviet Union who has known Samantha Smith will forever remember the image of the American girl who, like millions of Soviet young men and women, dreamt about peace, and about friendship between the peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

President Reagan sent a letter of condolence to her mother:

“Perhaps you can take some measure of comfort in the knowledge that millions of Americans, indeed millions of people, share the burdens of your grief. They also will cherish and remember Samantha, her smile, her idealism and unaffected sweetness of spirit.”

Next Week’s Beer

Festbier – Boulder Beer Co, Boulder, CO

Donated By: RW

  • BA Link: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/130/370849/
  • BA Rating: 3.75
  • Style: German Märzen / Oktoberfest
  • ABV: 5.4%

Faith In Humanity Restored

Lady archeologists finally get the recognition they deserve… only about 150 years late.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/internet-sleuths-help-uncover-names-female-archaeologists-20th-century-photographs-180971828/

Online sleuths put their thinking caps on and tentatively identified four female archaeologists who helped excavate Skara Brae and were simply dismissed as visitors or tourists.

Handwriting on the back of this 1929 photograph identifies archaeologist V. Gordon Childe and

Back in 1850, a huge storm devastated Scotland. On the positive side, it also unearthed Skara Brae, a Neolithic village that goes back over 5,000 years. However, it wasn’t until the 1920s that the site was thoroughly investigated by a team under the leadership of Professor V. Gordon Childe from the University of Edinburgh.

Some photographs from that time recently made their way online courtesy of the Orkney Library and Archive. Four women who appear in the images have been categorized as “visitors” in a book about the dig. However, closer inspection of the photos suggests that they were more than that. The women have muddy shoes, and one of them can be seen holding a trowel. The back of one of the original photographs identifies Professor Childe and “4 of his lady students.”

Unfortunately, women in science having their contributions minimized, even ignored, has been a common problem throughout history. On this occasion, though, armchair detectives got to work to identify four archaeologists who helped excavate the most complete Neolithic village in Europe. Although this isn’t definitive, they have been recognized as Margaret Simpson, Margaret Mitchell, Mary Kennedy, and Margaret Cole.

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