I Shouldn't Have to Tell You Not to Get Your News From Political Influencers

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

I have avoided watching the White House daily briefing ever since Karoline Leavitt assumed the podium. This is partly because I have resolutely resisted watching any extraneous political coverage on the electric teevee machine. This is also because, under Leavitt, the daily White House gaggle has traded institutions like the Associated Press for what appears to be the Sunday night lineup from the Gaia channel.

For example, there is one Kambree Nelson, who represents the America First Policy Institute, a wingnut welfare outfit that serves as the current side hustle for hires like Larry Kudlow, Lou Holtz, and Bobby Jindal. Kambree is an "influencer," one of those modern new media words that have taken the job of reporting and writing stories and turned it into producing content across many platforms. Except that Influencers are as devoted to facts as vampires are to the crucified Christ. And Kambree is an Influencer's Influencer. A Texas yahoo, she runs her own video channel which occasionally runs some fascinating exposes. Robyn Pennacchia of Wonkette reminds us that Kambree was all over the story when the moon disappeared.

A community note attached to her query explained, “[t]he Moon can be difficult to observe in the days around a New Moon because only a small portion of the sunlit side faces Earth and because the Moon is above the horizon mostly during the daytime in this phase. A new moon happens every 29.5 days, most recently on Oct 2.” A follower agreed with her, saying, “I have not seen it at all. It’s like it disappeared,” and Nelson responded, “It has. Why is everyone silent about this? They are quiet about the white sun, too.”

In case you were until now blissfully unaware, there’s a conspiracy that the sun used to be yellow or orange and has since turned white. It’s not clear what they think caused it, or why anyone would turn the sun white, but they definitely remember it being yellow or orange when they were kids. My guess is that it would have something to do with the flat earth belief that the US is covered by a giant glass firmament, kind of like a snow globe, but I see no mention of the two conspiracies together. Notably, whenever anyone said they had seen the moon, Nelson more or less called them liars.

On Monday, Kambree was invited to attend the briefing and, as all good reporters do, asked Leavitt what questions she would like Kambree to ask.

“I’m kind of the nerd when it comes to reporting,” Nelson said. “I’m not the headline news girl. I’m the nuts-and-bolts, I’m the policy-type nerd; so what direction do you advise me to go into? Like the White House files that y’all send out every single day? Because that’s what people are used to. When they wanna ask me questions, they wanna know the nuts and bolts of everything.” “I wish there were people in the legacy media that were like you,” Leavitt responded.

One question. When does "nuts and bolts" Kambree get to the "bolts" part?

Nature brings us a dark prediction of the lasting corruption of the National Science Foundation's grant process.

Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees. The policy has not been made public but was described in documents seen by Nature. An NSF staff member says that although good science can still be funded, the policy has the potential to be “Orwellian overreach”. Another staff member says, “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades”. One program officer says they are resigning because of the policy. Nature spoke with five NSF staffers for this story, all on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

"Alignment with agency priorities" probably doesn't mean what it used to mean. Maybe they're going to give a grant to Kambree to study the disappearance of the moon.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click:"A Kiss To Build A Dream On" (Coolbone Brass Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1924, Black Gold wins the 50th Kentucky Derby, paying $6.50 to win. Rosa Hoots—great name, by the way—became the first woman to both own and bred a Derby winner. Rosa was of the Osage people and Black Gold became known as "the Indian horse." Black Gold is buried in the infield of the Fairgrounds in New Orleans. According to a story by Winston Groom in Garden & Gun, the saga of Black Gold and Rosa Hoots are bound up in the Osage oil bonanza that is described in the book and film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Rosa's husband, Al, had latched onto a fine racing mare named Useeit, whom he guarded jealously, including at gunpoint on one occasion. On his deathbed, Al made Rosa promise to breed Useeit to a famous Kentucky stud horse named Black Toney. Two years later, an oil gusher exploded on land that the Hoots had leased. In 1921, Useeit and Black Toney produced Black Gold. In 1924, Rosa brought Black Gold to Churchill Downs. From Groom's story:

When the starting pistol was fired, Black Gold stumbled at the rail and it got worse from there. Hemmed in but still tracking the leaders, he was bumped, fouled, and thrown off, but recovered to shoulder free on the outside and gain on Chilhowee, who seemed to have the race neatly bagged along the rail. In the stretch it was Black Gold and Chilhowee neck and neck, but Black Gold was not to be denied. Jaydee Mooney asked for more and Black Gold gave it all, bursting across the finish wire a half length ahead at 2:05:20. It wasn’t a pretty race, and a lesser horse might have faltered, but as the esteemed racing chronicler John Hervey wrote, Black Gold “won it in race-horse style after a rough race, displaying rare determination.”

Alas, Black Gold's story did not end well. He broke down with foot trouble and when they tried to put him out to stud, he turned out to be sterile. For some reason, Rosa and his trainer put him back into racing as a six-year old despite the fact that he still had the crack in his foot. In 1928, leading in the Salome Stakes at the Fairgrounds, Black Gold broke a leg. He finished the race on three legs and was put down on the track and buried in the infield, where he has now rested through fires and hurricanes. History is so cool.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From EuroNews:

Thought to be approximately 500-years-old, the boat's remains were unearthed during the excavation of a former fish market—found more than five meters below sea level. Made up of 30 curved wooden ribs and seven hull planks, it measures 10 meters long and three meters wide. Its skeletal construction of wood and iron nails is traditional of mid-15th-century medieval boats once found in the Mediterranean and across Europe.

“We’d thought some archaeological boat remains might turn up on this site, which is near the port and the artificial stone quay that protected the port, and which was a working zone in the 15th and 16th centuries. Two years later, we’ve been lucky enough to find a boat,” Palacios told The Guardian. Other notable finds from the site include an air raid shelter built in 1938, along with structures associated with the 18th-century Bourbon Citadel and 19th-century Old Fish Market.

It's a four-car history pileup! Somebody spent too much time in the Bourbon Citadel, I'm thinking.

Hey, SciNews. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

“The specimen consists of numerous bones and bone fragments that appear to be associated and lying on a single bedding plane within an area of approximately 60 cm by 40 cm,” the paleontologists said. The skeleton was found in exposures of the Kilmaluag Formation north of the village of Elgol on the Isle of Skye. It comprises the most complete fossil of its kind in Scotland, and its original discovery pre-dates the first reported dinosaur fossils from Skye. “The Middle Jurassic of Scotland is increasingly well represented by the fossil discoveries from the Kilmaluag Formation, making it of global importance in our knowledge of this time period in tetrapod evolution,” the researchers said. “It is also the most complete definite dinosaur known from Scotland, despite being broken into fragments, with a partial ilium, neural arch and portions of ribs and other pieces of larger elements.”

Mmmmm, portions of ribs. That makes me happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska. And the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. (Hang in there, Pedro.) And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.