Chuck Schumer Is Pretty Stupid.

Return the control of money to the people.

End the Fed.

Double tap and tag a friend of you are stoked to see @criscyborg make her UFC debut this weekend. 👊🏽👊🏽👊🏽 #UFC198

What happened in Las Vegas nearly a year ago?

Boyz 2 men

Eagles beat the Falcons!

Tag Tales

Could this be the ultimate beachcomber find?

Bob Christian and his wife Jeanne were on their regular morning walk near Pigeon Point when an object in a tide pool caught their attention: a pair of small, weather-beaten cylinders, lashed together with wire.  

And so they wondered: Could someone be missing this? Could it be important? They were right on both counts. As it turns out, they’d found the high-tech version of a message in a bottle.

Only in this case, the bottle was a computerized transmitter, and the message was from a great white shark.

Like Swallowing a Computer Chip. And then Throwing it Up.

Turns out the tag had been missing since 2012, when it was “fed” to a 14-foot great white shark off Tomales Point, in Marin County. “It looked like it had been through a war,” says Sal Jorgensen, research scientist for the Aquarium’s white shark program. Jeanne Christian initially thought “it might be a bomb.”

Normally, such tags are wrapped in something yummy—like  blubber. The shark ingests the whole thing then, well, throws it up. “Sharks are like owls,” says Sal. “They regurgitate bones and other indigestible stuff.”  Once the shark spits out the tag, it sends its location to a satellite.

Once recovered, the tag conveys all sorts of useful information. “We can measure stomach temperature five times per second, which tells us when the shark is eating. And this kind of tag has an accelerometer, like a pedometer, so you see how much energy the shark is expending.”

Unfortunately, this particular weather-beaten tag appears to be “dead” and has yet to convey useful information. But Sal was still glad to get it, and rewarded the couple with a special behind-the-scenes tour for their efforts.

Please Phone Home

When it comes to shark tags, Sal has seen it all. Some tags never phone home. Others end up as “land sharks,” and are found in shopping carts, baby strollers, or exceeding the speed limit on Interstate 5 in the trunk of someone’s car. Sal has even had to knock on doors in landlocked neighborhoods in pursuit of a tag gone rogue. Some tags, applied externally and tracked via satellite, will continue transmitting even if picked up by an unsuspecting ocean enthusiast.

However, most of the tags do exactly what they’re supposed to: provide crucial information about the secret lives of sharks.

What Shark Tags Tell Us

What have Aquarium researchers learned? For one, “white sharks are a lot like snakes,” says Sal. “They don’t eat often. And when they do, it lasts a long time. Seals and sea lions are consumed and become stored energy, in the form of oil in their enlarged livers, and are used to power transoceanic migrations to the mid-ocean “White Shark Café”, and Hawaii.

“We’ve discovered that sharks also cruise at a very relaxed pace—they rarely have bursts of energy. They swim in a climb-and-glide pattern, like a bird. It’s more efficient.”

All these discoveries are helping us learn more about the mysterious lives of sharks—so we can help save them.

And by the way—if you ever notice you’re being pursued by shark scientists after a trip to the beach, you may have inadvertently picked up a shark tag. Don’t worry. Our researchers are friendly.

“Everyone is amenable once we explain things,” says Sal. “Plus, there’s a reward!”

Learn about our white shark research

Learn how we’re using floating robots with our Stanford collaborators to help track sharks

Watch the “Great White Highway” on the Discovery Channel

Beware of rip currents!

Beware that rip

Since it’s still summer where I live and I just got back from a beach where this phenomenon is an ever present danger (depending on Oceanos’s mood of the day) a quick line on rips seemed appropriate. They can sweep you out to sea unawares, and if one panics and tries to swim against it rather than parallel to the beach to get out of it, one could end up in serious, even fatal trouble. These narrow currents flow out from the surf zone of sandy beaches, scouring the sea bed to make deeper calm looking hollows where they occur.

Keep reading

No one wakes up one morning and decides to join a cult. Even if someone did, good luck trying to look up the address for the nearest local cult, for there isn’t a single group that would ever admit to or advertise as being a cult. And why would they? The word ‘cult’ is explosive, loaded with connotations of brainwashing, lunatics, and mass suicide — not exactly an ideal marketing strategy. For the most part, cults are keenly and obsessively aware of their public persona and consciously labor to maintain a positive image.

Scrolling through their websites, their mission statements are warmly fuzzy and vague; they promise redemption, renewal, rejuvenation, and reinvention. They offer answers, solutions, and happiness. It’s all there, yours for the taking. What isn’t included is the reality beneath the surface, the leader’s demands for obedience from its members, the psychological pressure, the ability to subordinate all activities to the leader’s will.

But most people don’t find and join cults through Internet searches. Most people stumble upon them accidentally. A flyer in the laundromat for a free meditation class. A listing in the newspaper for a community service project. A poster at the library for a musical performance. Recruitment is purposefully subtle; the pull is gentle, gradual. Events are welcoming; attention is lavished on the visitor with the intention to create an environment that feels inclusive, nonthreatening, and safe. The visitor is warmly encouraged to return, to step in closer. It is not until later, often much later, that one may look around and, with great surprise, discover the strange terrain upon which one now stands.

Cults, whether they are offshoots of Eastern or Western traditional religions, are surprisingly similar in their methods and means. The tactics and techniques used to recruit, maintain, and disown noncompliant members seem pulled from a universal handbook of do’s and don’ts. With all of their rules and restrictions, laws and codes, ultimately cults are about grasping and preserving absolute and unconditional control.

Cults are fueled by and thrive on control. The willingness to surrender control comes from excessive devotion to the leader and the leader’s vision. The leader’s personal agenda is presented as a universal elixir, one that will eradicate both personal and global moral, ethical, and spiritual maladies. The follower’s faith becomes both the provider and the enabler.

Faith in the mission, faith in the leader is an agent used to unify a disparate collection of strong individuals from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The loss of the individual is the gain of the group. Individual achievements are discouraged, downplayed and finally eradicated while the group’s achievements are encouraged, celebrated and memorialized.

To maintain the unity and cohesion of the cult, there is a clear separation between those ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Members are holy, special, chosen; outsiders are unholy, ignorant, toxic. Contact with the outside world — often including family — is discouraged, and family is redefined as the group itself. In this new family, subjugation and subservience is expected and obedience and control is demanded. From one’s sexuality to one’s personal hygiene, the leader possesses unquestioned, absolute authority over its members’ lives. For a cult leader, it is imperative to seem infallible, to possess the answers, the solutions, the only route to salvation. The leader is fierce in singular righteousness, in the design to hail oneself absolute. A narcissist with insatiable needs for power, control, and, very often fame, the leader seeks affirmation of supreme authority through alignment with public figures and celebrities, achieving large numbers of recruits, and amassing private fiefdoms.

Through the need to please the leader, to ascend the ranks, to work to fulfill the leader’s vision, cults dictate followers’ actions and thoughts. Obedient members receive exalted status and conformity is enforced through notions of guilt, shame, and failure by both the leader and other members. A system of reporting on members for transgressions creates both an internal police force and opportunities for promotion and rewards for turning in brother and sister members. Those who violate the rules are punished and eventually, to maintain the coherent group unity, expelled. After time, the group assumes all roles — family, friends, church, home, work, community, and departing, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, after years or even decades, without having a concrete safety net is challenging, and sometimes utterly impossible. The world on the other side appears frightening and overwhelming.

Just who is so easily swept up in the group-think and loss of individuality that are hallmarks of cults? A misconception is that there is a certain ‘type’ — usually imbalanced, weak — that not only finds themselves caught inside a cult but that isn’t able to extract themselves from it. The truth is, there isn’t one typical profile, ‘type.’ People with advanced degrees and people without any formal education are both equally likely to find themselves swaddled in orange robes or holed up in a compound. The urge to be a part of something is elemental, raw, and natural. To have a defined goal, a purpose, offers meaning. Most people strive for acceptance within social groups and long for affirmation from others. Be it in an office or country club, adjustments are made to conform, to gain approval and to advance.

In cults, extremism is the norm. When hyper devotion is expected behavior, for acceptance new recruits tend to rapidly thrust themselves into the prescribed lifestyle much to the chagrin of their family and friends on the ‘outside.’ There is no blame, no fault for having the audacity to plunge into belief, into faith so deeply, so forcefully that critical and analytical red flags, even if they once appeared, are snapped off. Belief and faith are such intoxicants that logical reason and facts become blurry and nonsensical.

While the boundary between cults and religion often feels confusing — the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions differ only slightly with cults being “small” in size and possessing “beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.” Deciding what is strange or sinister certainly depends on the beholder. When accusations of being in a cult appear, members quickly and vehemently deny they are in a cult — they are part of a ‘spiritual path,’ a ‘special church,’ a ‘progressive movement’ — other groups are cults, but not theirs. No way.

Perhaps it is more useful to discern what a religious movement is or what a cult is by comparing its impact upon members’ lives: does it compliment or control? At their best, healthy religions and organizations compliment rich, full lives by offering balance, community, comfort. At their worst, they lapse into vehicles demanding control. Cults limit lives into narrow, claustrophobic existences whose singular purpose is the cult itself.

Cult leaders, experts in psychological manipulation, prey on both the follower’s ability to believe and need to belong. But this type of behavior is hardly limited to cults. After all, the aptitude and capacity to exploit human beings is universal, and, with the right ambitious and charismatic leader, any group easily could morph into a cult. What prevents that from occurring is that most established religions and groups have accountability mechanisms that restrain that from happening; cults, however, are purposefully designed so that the only restraints are the ones placed upon the people who, without even realizing it, have just done what they never thought they would do — join a cult.

Is it a Cult? The Top Ten Signs the ‘Group’ You’ve Joined is Not what It Seems

The leader and group are always correct and anything the leader does can be justified.

Questions, suggestions, or critical inquiry are forbidden.

Members incessantly scramble with cramped schedules and activities full of largely meaningless work based on the leader’s agenda

Followers are meant to believe that they are never good enough.

Required dependency upon the leader and group for even the most basic problem-solving.

Reporting on members for disobedient actions or thoughts is mandated and rewarded.

Monetary, sexual, or servile labor is expected to gain promotion.

The ‘outside’ world — often including family and friends — is presented as rife with impending catastrophe, evil, and temptations.

Recruitment of new members is designed to be purposefully upbeat and vague about the actual operations of the leader and group.

Former members are shunned and perceived as hostile.

What is her end game? Is this to shape her legacy? Is this to affect public opinion to not land in prison somehow? Why is she so incapable of trying to hog the spotlight?

If you are currently being exposed for how thoroughly corrupt and deceitful your buddies and you were for decades, why wouldn’t you gather up as much money as you could and apply for political asylum in as many other countries as possible?

Is she demented? Is she this arrogant? Is she really this stupid?

It’s hard to pin it on just one motivating factor. But, everyone is waking up to what a complete fraud Hillary Clinton really was.

This latest tweet is her 2018 equivalent of “hot sauce pandering.”

What’s remarkable is just how far America has fallen that substantial chunks of the population saw this… beast as a viable alternative to a successful businessman who didn’t have a robotic laugh and a phony, focus-group-tested sense of humor.