MEdia Dragon 🐉 remembers well 1981 when Festival of Light won Upper House seat: Fred Nile to retire from parliament to make way for his wife
FASTER, PLEASE: Experimental antibiotic torpedoes the protective slime that makes resistant bacteria tougher to fight.
As it happened: China’s 20th Communist Party national congress opens in Beijing South China Morning Post
New York Times Op-Ed: Why the Music of Rich Mullins Endures, 25 Years After His Death, by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):
Few outside the world of evangelicalism and contemporary Christian music have heard of Rich Mullins. But inside that world, he’s a legend — a singer-songwriter, poet, prophet and teacher whose legacy endures 25 years after his death in a car crash at age 41. Amy Grant described him as “the uneasy conscience of Christian music.”
Mullins’s life and art defy the dichotomies and assumptions that many of us bring to faith. In the conservative, buttoned up evangelical culture of the 1980s and ’90s, he was unflinchingly honest about struggles with temptation, loneliness, and discouragement. Yet these struggles did not lead him to abandon his faith. If anything, they seemed to make Jesus grow more luminous to him. Amid growing wealth and fame, he took up voluntary poverty and eschewed celebrity because of his convictions about the call of scripture. In front of white, conservative crowds, he sang songs about injustices done to Native Americans and criticized the materialism and insularity of evangelical leaders of his time.
The New York Times: “In Seoul, garbage cans automatically weigh how much food gets tossed in the trash. In London, grocers have stopped putting date labels on fruits and vegetables to reduce confusion about what is still edible
Jim Treacher asks: Why Would You Take Your Kid to a Drag Show? “If a guy wants to put on women’s clothes and dance around, and if a bunch of fat housewives think it’s hilarious to throw money at him, that’s their business. But when you start bringing kids into this nonsense, it makes me want to vomit. What the hell is wrong with everybody? It’s okay to admit this stuff is bad, libs. Your visceral disgust at a man in a dress exposing himself in front of children, while lip-syncing about the vagina he’ll never have, doesn’t make you a bigot. It makes you a human being with a conscience.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists discover possible target for treating and preventing osteoarthritis.
Wired Review: HaikuboxWired – “This AI-enabled device can identify the species around your home by their songs and alert you when new ones arrive. For bird watchers, being able to identify birds by their song is the holy grail. Some people seem to be naturals, hearing a song once and remembering it forever. If you’re like me—not one of those people—you’ve probably had the thought, “Why isn’t there a Shazamfor birds?” Surely if Shazam can identify a song with a few seconds of bad audio playing over some blown-out speakers, someone can figure out how to do the same for a bird singing clearly in a nearby tree. That, in a nutshell, is what the creators of the Haikubox have done—created the Shazam of birdsong. That in itself is welcome and remarkable, but the Haikubox turns out to be much more than that. It’s one of the rare pieces of technology that actually increases your connection to the world around you, rather than cutting you off…
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Can You Swim Faster Than a Police Helicopter Can Fly?
New Insights into how Serotonin Regulates Behavior. “Rates of anxiety and depression have been increasing around the world for decades, a trend that has been sharply exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. New research led by the Boyce Thompson Institute’s Frank Schroeder could ultimately lead to new therapeutics to help relieve this global mental health burden.”
The pandemic didn’t exacerbate that, the government and media response to the pandemic exacerbated that.