Esoterica

Robots are pouring drinks in Vegas. As AI grows, the city's workers brace for change

Walk any direction in Las Vegas and it's easy to find machines doing human work.

Check-in kiosks have replaced people at the front desk of hotels. Text-bots now make restaurant recommendations instead of a concierge. Robots can serve food, and behind the bar, machines are pouring out drinks.

Automation and technology replacing jobs has long been a conversation in Nevada's most populated city. Studies show that between 38% to 65% of jobs there could be automated by 2035.

With the use of artificial intelligence on the rise, the economy of this city --which relies on tourism and hospitality — is at an inflection point, as companies look to technology to reduce labor costs.

Esoterica

Lori Vallow: US doomsday cult mum guilty of murdering children, rival

[I]n 2017, family and friends said Vallow's demeanour changed as she began reading the books by Chad Daybell, a religious author whose fictional books focused on the apocalypse were loosely drawn from the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The two eventually met sometime in 2018 and began recording a religious podcast together.

At the time, both were married. But together, Vallow and Mr Daybell's views veered towards the extreme, the prosecutor said.

The two deemed people either "light" or "dark" spirits and called those who had been taken over by evil spirits "zombies".

The only way to free someone's soul from the darkness, the couple said, was to kill them.

Esoterica

‘Headed off the charts’: world’s ocean surface temperature hits record high

The temperature of the world’s ocean surface has hit an all-time high since satellite records began, leading to marine heatwaves around the globe, according to US government data.

Climate scientists said preliminary data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) showed the average temperature at the ocean’s surface has been at 21.1C since the start of April – beating the previous high of 21C set in 2016.

“The current trajectory looks like it’s headed off the charts, smashing previous records,” said Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales.

. . .

Current observations show moderate to strong marine heatwaves in several regions, including the southern Indian Ocean, the south Atlantic, off north-west Africa, around New Zealand, off the north-east of Australia and the west of Central America.

Esoterica

John Paul II Allegedly Knew About Priestly Sexual Abuse While Archbishop In Poland

St. John Paul II knew about sexual abuse of children by priests under his authority and sought to conceal it when he was an archbishop in his native Poland, a television news report has alleged.

In a story that aired late Monday, Polish channel TVN24 named three priests whom the future pope then known as Archbishop Karol Wojtyla had moved among parishes or sent to a cloister during the 1970s, including one who was sent to Austria, after they were accused of abusing minors.

Two of the priests, Eugeniusz Surgent and Jozef Loranc, eventually served short prison terms for the abuse, TVN24 said its 2 and 1/2 year-long investigation found. Wojtyla served as archbishop of Krakow from 1964 to 1978, when he became Pope John Paul II. He died in 2005 and was declared a saint in 2014 following a fast-tracked process.

. . .

The findings will gradually lead to a “deconstruction of the image of John Paul II that we have been using so far,” Dominican friar Paweł Gużyński said Tuesday on TVN24, noting that some people may not be prepared to cope with the new facts.

Esoterica

Octopuses were around before dinosaurs, fossil find suggests

Scientists have found the oldest known ancestor of octopuses – an approximately 330m-year-old fossil unearthed in Montana.

The researchers concluded the ancient creature lived millions of years earlier than previously believed, meaning that octopuses originated before the era of dinosaurs.

The 4.7-inch (12-cm) fossil has 10 limbs – modern octopuses have eight – each with two rows of suckers. It probably lived in a shallow, tropical ocean bay.

“It’s very rare to find soft tissue fossils, except in a few places,” said Mike Vecchione, a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History zoologist who was not involved in the study. “This is a very exciting finding. It pushes back the ancestry much farther than previously known.”

Former Pope Offers Non-Apology in Abuse Scandal

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Pope Benedict XVI, retired, has penned a plea for forgiveness for things he did not do and does not apologize for. (!!!) Ya just can't make this stuff up. Here are some of the headlines for this bizarre news event:

• Retired pope asks pardon for abuse, but admits no wrongdoing

• Pope Benedict concedes failings in new letter, but no apology for German abuse cases

• Pope Benedict asks for forgiveness but denies wrongdoing over child sex abuse cases

• Benedict XVI apologizes for clerical abuse but admits no personal responsibility

• Ex-Pope Benedict acknowledges 'errors' but no blame in abuse handling, seeks forgiveness

The 94 year old retiree was pulled back into the spotlight last month, when a detailed report on clerical abuse from 1945 to 2019, was presented by a German law firm, Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, which was commissioned by the archdiocese. The investigation found that then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was among a number of senior clerics who had seriously mishandled abuse cases. They found that his handling of four cases rose to the level of misconduct.

Esoterica

Do not condemn your children for their sexual orientation, Pope Francis tells parents

Parents of gay children should not condemn them but offer them support, Pope Francis said.

He spoke in unscripted comments at his weekly audience in reference to difficulties that parents could face in raising offspring.

Those issues included "parents who see different sexual orientations in their children and how to handle this, how to accompany their children, and not hide behind an attitude of condemnation", Francis said on Wednesday.

He has previously said LGBTIQ+ people have a right to be accepted by their families as children and siblings.

He has also said that while the church could not accept same-sex marriage, it can support civil union laws aimed at giving partners joint rights in areas of pensions, health care and inheritance issues.

Esoterica

Study finds California condors can have "virgin births"

Endangered California condors can have “'virgin births," according to a study released Thursday.

Researchers with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance said genetic testing confirmed that two male chicks hatched in 2001 and 2009 from unfertilized eggs were related to their mothers. Neither was related to a male.

The study was published Thursday in the the Journal of Heredity. It's the first report of asexual reproduction in California condors, although parthenogenesis can occur in other species ranging from sharks to honey bees to Komodo dragons.

But in birds, it usually only occurs when females don’t have access to males. In this case, each mother condor had previously bred with males, producing 34 chicks, and each was housed with a fertile male at the time they produced the eggs through parthenogenesis.

Esoterica

In tree rings and radioactive carbon, signs of the Vikings in North America

Vikings from Greenland — the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas — lived in a village in Canada’s Newfoundland exactly 1,000 years ago, according to research published Wednesday.

Scientists have known for many years that Vikings — a name given to the Norse by the English they raided — built a village at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around the turn of the millennium. But a study published in Nature is the first to pinpoint the date of the Norse occupation.

The explorers — up to 100 people, both women and men — felled trees to build the village and to repair their ships, and the new study fixes a date they were there by showing they cut down at least three trees in the year 1021 — at least 470 years before Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in 1492.

“This is the first time the date has been scientifically established,” said archaeologist Margot Kuitems, a researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the study’s lead author.

Esoterica

Empire State Building company now powered entirely by wind

The iconic Empire State Building that has crowned Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s is now a game changer in American architecture in a different way: by becoming completely powered with renewable energy.

Announced on Wednesday, Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) confirmed that it struck a three-year contract with Green Mountain Energy to power its entire commercial real estate portfolio with renewable wind electricity. This reportedly makes ESRT the largest user of green power in U.S. real estate.

. . .

ESRT controls more than 10.1 million square feet of real estate, all of which will be powered by renewable energy for the next three years. This switch will spare about 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere.

This is roughly the equivalent of every New York State household turning off all of their lights for an entire month.

Esoterica

Will a Church Get Away With Making a Teen Listen to Recording of Her Rape?

The victim was 15 years old when she says church elders called her into a room with her mother and stepfather, sat her down, and made her listen to a recording of her own rape. A lifelong Jehovah’s Witness, the girl—who we’ll call Anna—says she was sexually assaulted by an older church member on multiple occasions. But when the church learned of it, they decided to investigate not her assailant, but her—for the crime of having sex outside of marriage. And now it’s down to the Utah Supreme Court to decide if they should get away with it.

The court cases rests on the question of eccleiastical abstention, or whether the court can intervene in matters of religion. The Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses of Roy, Utah, claims it was engaging in regular religious practice when it forced the teenager to relive to her own rape. And so far, the courts have agreed. But lawyers for the woman, now in her late 20s, argue that their conduct is so “utterly intolerable” that it transcends this rule.

. . .

In court filings, the church disputes Anna’s factual allegations and denies mistreating her “in any manner,” while at the same time describing her interrogation as a “common and accepted religious practice.” Anna, it claims, “voluntarily associated with the religious organization and chose to participate in the judicial tribunal with her parents”—something that, they argue, “would not ordinarily cause severe unmanageable mental distress.” At a hearing last week, a Supreme Court justice described the practice as akin to “emotional waterboarding.” A lawyer for the church said she would draw the line at anything physical.

Esoterica

There’s too much gold in the universe. No one knows where it came from.

Something is raining gold across the universe. But no one knows what it is.

Here's the problem: Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries. To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus. That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction. But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either. So where's the gold coming from? There are some other possibilities, including supernovas so intense they turn a star inside out. Unfortunately, even such strange phenomena can't explain how blinged out the local universe is, the new study finds.

Neutron star collisions build gold by briefly smashing protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei, then spewing those newly-bound heavy nuclei across space. Regular supernovas can't explain the universe's gold because stars massive enough to fuse gold before they die -- which are rare -- become black holes when they explode, said Chiaki Kobayashi, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom and lead author of the new study. And, in a regular supernova, that gold gets sucked into the black hole.

So what about those odder, star-flipping supernovas? This type of star explosion, a so-called magneto-rotational supernova, is "a very rare supernova, spinning very fast," Kobayashi told Live Science.

Esoterica

Jeffrey Epstein’s Harvard Connections Show How Money Can Distort Research

This past May, Harvard University (where I teach) issued a report on its relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was an admirably forthright mea culpa highlighting three areas of concern. The first was the contradiction of addressing sexual assault and harassment on campus while accepting money from a man who had promoted sexual abuse of minors. The second was the mockery made of academic standards when, after donating $200,000 to the psychology department, Epstein was appointed as a visiting fellow there despite a complete lack of appropriate academic qualifications. The third was his close connection to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED). Even after his release from prison, Epstein continued to be a frequent visitor: between 2010 and 2018 Epstein (at that point a registered sex offender) went to the PED offices more than 40 times. During that period he had an on-campus office and a key card and pass code with which he could enter buildings during off-hours.

It is not just that an awful person was able to buy a halo of respectability. The Epstein affair brings to light a much larger problem: it undermines the integrity of the research enterprise when individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry that appeal to them simply because they can pay for them.

. . .

What made it even worse was that Epstein was a latter-day eugenicist whose interests were tied to a delusional notion of seeding the human race with his own DNA. Given this stance, it is particularly disturbing that he focused his largesse on research on the genetic basis of human behavior. Human genetics is an ethically sensitive and intellectually contested domain where it behooves us to ensure that the highest standards of scientific rigor are in place and that nongenetic explanations for behavior are given a fair chance to compete.

Esoterica

Vatican publishes manual on dealing with sex abuse claims

The Vatican has released guidelines for bishops and other senior church officials on how to deal with clerical child sex abuse claims after Pope Francis called for the procedures to be laid out step-by-step.

. . .

It contains some of the clearest language on reporting sexual abuse ever in a Vatican document.

Previous Vatican documents required clerics to report any cases of abuse to church superiors but said they should follow local law on whether they are obliged to report alleged sexual abuse to civil authorities.

"Even in cases where there is no explicit legal obligation to do so, the ecclesiastical authorities should make a report to the competent civil authorities if this is considered necessary to protect the person involved or other minors from the danger of further criminal acts," the handbook says.

Esoterica

Pentagon officially releases videos of 'unidentified' flying objects

The Pentagon on Monday officially released three videos of “unidentified” flying objects that have been previously leaked to the public.

. . .

The Navy acknowledged last September that the videos released by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge's UFO research organization and published in The New York Times showed unidentified flying objects.

. . .

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) praised Monday's release of the videos, but said more action is needed.

“I’m glad the Pentagon is finally releasing this footage, but it only scratches the surface of research and materials available,” he tweeted. “The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications. The American people deserve to be informed.”

Esoterica

Pennsylvania Catholic diocese files for bankruptcy amid sexual abuse lawsuits

A Pennsylvania Catholic diocese on Wednesday filed for bankruptcy in the midst of facing several sexual abuse lawsuits against priests.

The Diocese of Harrisburg is the first Catholic diocese in the state to seek bankruptcy protection after a 2018 investigation revealed more than 300 priests had allegedly sexually abused more than 1,000 children in Pennsylvania.

. . .

The statute of limitations in Pennsylvania forbids almost all of the victims named in the 2018 report from suing alleged abusers, The Washington Post reported. But the state Superior Court recently ruled that some victims can sue dioceses, even if the statute prevents them from suing the alleged abusive priests.

This decision sparked several new lawsuits to be filed against the Harrisburg Diocese, which Haverstick told the Post was “something that we considered” when deciding to file for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy would freeze all lawsuits, and any compensation for the victims would become a part of those proceedings.

Esoterica

Bikram yoga founder Bikram Choudhury trapped in Mexico after passport seized; fleet of CA cars to be auctioned

Once at the top of an international yoga empire, Bikram Choudhury is now on the run from creditors, hiding from an arrest warrant and trapped in Mexico where his bills are only growing.

Eyewitness News learned that the founder of the hot yoga brand, whose international Bikram Yoga empire is headquartered in West Los Angeles, had his passport seized in Mexico, where he failed to pay a $180,000 bill at the Princess Mundo Imperial Hotel.

The 76-year-old yogi is also accused of using his trademark name to market his teacher training sessions at the Acapulco resort in violation of court orders.

. . .

On his trail is the woman who brought him down. His former attorney, Micki Jafa-Bodden, won a $6.6 million sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit. Four years after the court judgment, Jafa-Bodden is closing in on Bikram's hidden assets.

Esoterica

How Nicole Kidman Almost Got Tom Cruise to Leave Scientology

[A]fter marrying Cruise, Kidman played the role of the dutiful wife, working her way up the Scientology ladder. In Scientology, once one achieves full control over one's thoughts, thereby reaching the level of “Clear,” they may work their way up “The Bridge to Total Freedom,” or the spiritual ranks of the practice (each level will run you many thousands of dollars). These are called Operating Thetan (OT) levels. OT members are believed to have achieved a state of godliness, able to exercise full control over both their mind and their surrounding environment. Kidman is said to have reached OT II, wherein one’s confronted their past “incarnations” and released the accompanying negative energy.

. . .

But by late 1992, Kidman had become fed up with [David] Miscavige, in particular, and left Scientology. Cruise followed shortly thereafter, and by the time filming began on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut across the pond in November 1996, the two had been separated from the practice for a few years. But Miscavige had his ways of remaining in the picture.

“Miscavige used all of Cruise’s household employees, including his assistant Michael Doven, who spied on him for 10 years on behalf of the Church of Scientology, to give Miscavige daily reports of what Cruise was up to,” says [Tony] Ortega.

“They were all Scientologists,” adds [Mike] Rinder, “so everything that went on in Tom’s life was reported to either Shelly or David Miscavige, and when they went to the U.K. for Eyes Wide Shut, they were sequestered.”

"Vanilla" Rape, Unrepentant Self-Pity, and Toothless Edicts: The Moral Sickness of the Catholic Church

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

***TRIGGER WARNING***

On March 29th, Pope Francis took the unprecedented step of making Vatican City officials and diplomats mandated reporters of sexual abuse. Reminder: It is now the year of our Lord 2019.

The edict, called a Motu Proprio and which goes into effect on June 1, comes after an international summit of church leaders convened at the Vatican in February to address the abuse and protection of minors. It is the first set of concrete protocols established by the Holy See in response to the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church to its core.

But the Church was "rocked to its core" in January of 2002, when the Boston Globe ran a groundbreaking expose in its "Spotlight" section. That was when whispers, rumors, and dark humor became full-blown, public scandal. The Church hierarchy had known about the problem at least as early as 1985 when Father Thomas Doyle tried to sound an alarm at the US conference of bishops. His warning was ignored, as those same bishops continued to quietly move pedophile priests from diocese to diocese. For an organization "rocked to its core," it sure is taking its sweet time in taking any meaningful action. And this edict, appropriate as it may be, is not particularly meaningful. It's mostly symbolic, governing only Vatican personnel, and intended as "a model," not a directive, for the wider Church.

The decree and accompanying guidelines have no legal impact on parishes or congregations in other nations. Archbishop Charles Scicluna said in an interview with Vatican News that the edicts "are not intended to be for the rest of the world, they actually contemplate the concrete situation of Vatican City State; a number of minors, who either live there, work there, or visit ... always within its jurisdiction."

The Vatican's editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, acknowledged "very few children" will ultimately be affected but said that while the edict is limited in scope, the pope wants it to serve as a model for the entire church. The new requirements "contain exemplary indications that take into account the most advanced international parameters."

Esoterica

Rare half-male, half-female cardinal spotted in Pennsylvania

Jeffrey and Shirley Caldwell have been attracting birds for 25 years with carefully tended backyard feeders. But the lifelong Erie, Pennsylvania, residents have never seen a creature so wondrous as the half-vermillion, half-taupe cardinal—its colors split right down the middle—that first showed up a few weeks ago in the dawn redwood tree 10 yards from their home.

. . .

The anomaly is known as a bilateral gynandromorph. In plain language: Half its body is male and the other half is female. “This remarkable bird is a genuine male/female chimera,” says Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in an email.

Gynandromorphs, known as “half-siders” among ornithologists, are uncommon but not unheard of. They likely occur across all species of birds, Hooper says, but we’re only likely to notice them in species where the adult males and females look distinct from each other, a trait known as sexual dimorphism. “Cardinals are one of the most well-known sexually dimorphic birds in North America—their bright red plumage in males is iconic—so people easily notice when they look different,” Hooper says.