The man who co-directed Airplane! spent the 1990s watching his baby son have a hundred seizures a day.
Jim Abrahams gave the world "Surely you can't be serious." Then his eleven-month-old, Charlie, developed an epilepsy so violent the seizures came in the dozens, sometimes a hundred in a single day, while he was already on a fistful of medications.
The specialists were not short of opinions. The family visited the best neurologists in America. The verdict was a life of continued seizures and what one doctor called progressive retardation. Brain surgery was floated. More drugs were floated. A change of diet never came up, because not one of those specialists thought to raise it.
Jim, being a man who had spent his career refusing to take things at face value, went digging through the medical literature himself and found a treatment that had been sitting in the textbooks the whole time. A high-fat, near-zero-carbohydrate diet, used since the 1920s, gathering dust because it could not be bottled and sold.
He took Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the last places in the country still bothering to use it. The seizures stopped within days. Charlie stayed on the diet for five years, went back to eating normally, and never had another seizure in his life. He turned thirty a few years ago. He became a preschool teacher.
Jim was so quietly furious that a cure had been hiding in plain sight that he and his wife Nancy founded the Charlie Foundation, and he made a film about it, First Do No Harm, starring Meryl Streep. His estimate of how long the foundation would need to exist before the obvious caught on was about a year.
That was 1994. The foundation is still going. Funny how slowly the obvious travels when nobody profits from you knowing it.
There is a weedkiller sprayed across the American corn belt that turns male frogs female. Not weakens them. Turns them. Europe banned it twenty years ago. America set a safe limit and poured another glass.
- Atrazine is sprayed on roughly half the US corn crop
- At 0.1 parts per billion, thirty times below the "safe" tap-water limit, male frogs grow eggs. At the doses near real farms, three-quarters are chemically castrated
- Some turn fully female, mate with other males, and lay viable eggs. A full recall on the entire sex
- It is an endocrine disruptor, the polite term for a chemical that reroutes your hormones, and the most common contaminant in American tap water
- Europe saw this in 2004, decided it could never be cleaned up, and stopped
America saw the same data, invented a number it could call safe, and kept spraying. The official line: everything is fine, provided you are not a frog. Yet.
If you've ever found one on your porch in June, wings still, not moving, you were probably looking at an insect in the last week of its life.
The luna moth has no functional mouthparts. It emerges from its cocoon unable to eat, living entirely on fat reserves accumulated during its weeks as a caterpillar. Everything it will ever do as an adult, it does on fuel stored during its larval life.
It doesn't rest much either. It finds a mate, spends up to 24 hours in copula, and the female lays up to 400 eggs on the undersides of leaves, one small cluster at a time. Then it's done, typically becoming a meal for a bird or something else in the food chain.
The caterpillar stage is where the luna actually lives, months of steady eating on sweet gum, walnut, birch, and hickory, building the reserves that will eventually power a week of flight and reproduction.
Here's one more cool thing to know: luna moth tails aren't just decoration. Bats hunt by echolocation, and those long trailing wings spin in flight and scatter the bat's sonar signal, buying the moth a few extra seconds.
An insect with no mouth, not much time, and a week to pull off the whole point of its existence, and it's out there playing tricks on bats.
“We have an 18-year-old boy who came here to celebrate his graduation who is leaving in a coffin. It’s totally unacceptable,” @CMFrankMorano told The Post on Thursday.
“The time for treating these accidents as isolated incidents is over,” he said. “It is an industry that no longer makes sense.”
@NYCMayor has said he supports outlawing carriage rides in Central Park, a pledge he made on the campaign trail.
#RydersLaw
https://t.co/X58OB5y29Y
The meat industry = the fish industry 👺And the other way around ..in fact they canabilize on each other. Also chickens are fed with pork🤢Pigs are fed chicken remains 🤢So chicken is not even ‘halal’ or ‘kosher’ anymore. Better: #GoPlantbased 🌱 #LiveVegan because you care ✌️
WOW. Big news.
The Assembly of Treaty Chiefs just dropped a bomb on Danielle Smith.
Treaty 6, 7 & 8. United. Unanimously calling for an RCMP and Auditor General investigation into whether the Premier and her UCP government committed TREASON under Section 46 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
The Chiefs met on Treaty 7 territory in Calgary on June 16 and voted as one — pushing a separation referendum that puts Canada’s sovereignty at risk, trampling the Treaty relationship, ignoring privacy violations affecting millions, and opening the door to foreign interference. That’s the case they’re laying out.
And they’re going back to the source. When Treaty was signed, the Northwest Mounted Police — now the RCMP — made a promise: protect First Nations, protect these Territories. The Crown guaranteed peace and goodwill in exchange for sharing this land.
The Chiefs are saying: eff around and find out.
#TreatyRights #Treaty6 #Treaty7 #Treaty8 #AlbertaSeparation
We've been informed that the Port Authority of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria took a first step towards closing the application to build the world’s first octopus farm.
We must keep up the pressure until the file is officially closed. Speak out: https://t.co/KrAfWJGpiv
Straight from the 🍊🤮 mouth... quote is a famous piece of personal advice offered by Donald Trump. It originates from a New York Times interview by writer Timothy L. O'Brien, was published on Sunday, September 12, 2005, as part of the promotional circuit for O'Brien's book
@HydroOne this senior recieved a notice that Hydro One intends to shut off the power to my farm. I have never refused to pay. I refuse to pay what they say I owe. I pay a little each month until this mess is sorted out. I have been taking meter readings for almost 4 yrs.
Hydro One said I had to replace the outside service because that would improve the readings, it did not ...then . they would install a new meter. That was 2024...only now has a new meter been installed.
Enclosed is the card of the last electrician (there have been a few...at my expense on the advice of Hydro one) who came here on hydos advice because Hydro said the problem was with the house. The electricians found none.
@HydroOne Also enclosed some of the many meter readings taken over the yrs. Could some one explain to me why August 2024 was so high compared to June 2026 with the new meter.
@HydroOne Hydro One said I had to replace the outside service because that would improve the readings, it did not ...then . they would install a new meter. That was 2024...only now has a new meter been installed.
@HydroOne Enclosed is the card of the last electrician (there have been a few...at my expense on the advice of Hydro one) who came here on hydos advice because Hydro said the problem was with the house. The electricians found none.