Canadian-trained psychologist in the Land of Oz, appointments via the Internet to anywhere in the world from my little office on a sub-tropical island.
@chase_the_high Except some people have decided that their beliefs mean I get fewer rights, my daughter gets fewer rights, and the law doesn’t apply equally to everyone. But we’ve known each other a long time, and those discussions aren’t what we’re about here. Sorry.
"My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere.
I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them.
There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. "Is everything all right?" I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were "Take care."
Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake.
Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it.
So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right. That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human."
- Carl Sagan
@TheRickyDavila WELP! Turns out the judge decided for Chapter 7 liquidation because Phil got caught: He’d deleted incriminating text messages saying Chapter 11 was a "gangster move" which would allow him to avoid paying certain creditors. 💯 https://t.co/TEb4vJmnGC
Steve, analyses of Czech registry data often overlook confounding by indication—higher-risk patients were prioritized for vaccination, inflating event rates in that cohort without fine stratification by frailty or comorbidities. Healthcare-seeking behavior also biases uptake toward healthier individuals initially, but temporal shifts require modeling depletion of susceptibles. Rigorous adjustments via multivariable regression or instrumental variables are essential; unadjusted ecological correlations risk Simpson's paradox, as seen in validated global studies affirming net vaccine benefits.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Except it doesn’t bend on its own—it bends because we pull it in the direction of justice. What keeps me hopeful during times like these is being surrounded by people who are doing just that.
I am now the most banned author in the United States--87 books. May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about? Self-righteous book banners don't always get to have their way. This is still America, dammit.
We have people in power making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproven. The degree to which those comments can undermine public health, do harm to women who are pregnant, create anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic – is violence against the truth.
“The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.”
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos