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      A New Place to Learn Civics: The Workplace

      news.movim.eu / TheNewYorkTimes · Sunday, 29 October - 09:00


    Fearing that rising distrust could spell doom for businesses, some companies are offering employees lessons in democracy.
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      A small town became the center of a QAnon storm. Now it’s fighting back

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 13 April, 2023 - 13:51

    distorted image with qanon logo

    Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)

    Bodegraven is the type of well-heeled Dutch town where young moms push their prams past smart restaurants, people say hello to each other as they pass in the street and packs of children roam around by bicycle. In March, the only sign that something strange has happened here is the insistence of the groundsman in the local graveyard that he cannot speak to passing journalists.

    Two years ago, this graveyard was overwhelmed with visitors who turned up from out of town to leave flowers and messages of outrage for children buried here, believing they had died at the hands of a satanic pedophile ring involving the prime minister and a Dutch virologist, the Netherlands’ equivalent of Anthony Fauci.

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      Missouri House advances bill to limit nonexistent vaccine microchips—just in case

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 23 March, 2023 - 19:54 · 1 minute

    A person wearing a tinfoil hat on September 20, 2019.

    Enlarge / A person wearing a tinfoil hat on September 20, 2019. (credit: Getty | Bridget Bennett )

    In the latest efforts by Republican lawmakers to enshrine into law Americans' right to freely spread deadly infectious diseases to each other, the Missouri House this week advanced a bill that would bar governments, schools, and employers from mandating certain vaccines—as well as things like vaccine microchips, which do not exist.

    The bill, HB 700 ( PDF ), was sponsored by Rep. Bill Hardwick, a Republican from Waynesville. Hardwick told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he believed people " lost their minds " during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that legally barring officials and employers from requiring life-saving vaccination, even among health care workers, feels "like it's the right thing to do."

    The bill specifically bars requirements for people to receive COVID-19 vaccines. But it doesn't stop there. It also bars any requirements for people to receive "a dose of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)," thus barring requirements for any future mRNA-based vaccines, should they be needed in upcoming pandemics or outbreaks. It also bars requirements for "any treatment or procedure intended or designed to edit or alter human deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or the human genome," and "any mechanical or electronic device" that would be placed "under the skin."

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      The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 25 February, 2023 - 12:00 · 1 minute

    Image of a flat earth with the Sun in the background.

    Enlarge (credit: Martin Wimmer )

    Off the Edge is not a book about conspiracy theories, exactly. It does get there, but really it is a book about the history of the Flat Earth movement as the sort of original conspiracy theory. It is the second such book, in fact; Christine Garwood wrote Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea in 2007. But it is a whole different world now, conspiracy-theory-wise, so Kelly Weill thought an update was in order.

    Weill covers extremism, disinformation, and the Internet for The Daily Beast , a website whose tagline is “a smart, speedy take on news from around the world.” (A previous editor-in-chief described it as a “high-end tabloid.”) Like the site, the book is well-researched and makes for quick and entertaining, if disturbing, reading.

    The pull of conspiracy

    Weill started Off the Edge when she noticed Flat Earthers repeatedly cropping up in the far and alt-right chat groups and websites she was covering. She said that she initially thought they were a joke because “how could anyone really believe anything so ludicrous?” To find out, she entered their world; the book is in first-person, with Weill frequently recounting her misadventures meeting Flat Earthers and attending their conferences.

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      The Moon landing was faked, and wind farms are bad

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 12 December, 2022 - 18:40

    The Moon landing was faked, and wind farms are bad

    (credit: NSF )

    Germany ranks third in the world for installed wind power capacity. In 2020, almost a quarter of the country’s energy came from wind, and the government has pledged to double that by 2030, designating 2 percent of Germany’s landmass to become wind farms.

    Switching away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources like wind is essential if we want to try to mitigate some of the worst consequences of the climate change we’ve started, but this switch is extraordinarily difficult for many reasons. Watching how this switch plays out in early adopters of wind power like Germany may help inform how the rest of us decarbonize.

    People are generally keen on wind power in the abstract, but a huge NIMBY (not in my backyard) factor comes into play when wind farms have to actually get built in communities. Researchers in Germany wondered what it was, exactly, that made people vote against local wind farms. They found that a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking helped explain a lot of the resistance.

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      Doc who thinks vaccinated people are magnetic is in big trouble with med board

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 28 October, 2022 - 17:09

    Clevland doctor Sherri Tenpenny gives false testimony on June 8, 2021, saying COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people.

    Enlarge / Clevland doctor Sherri Tenpenny gives false testimony on June 8, 2021, saying COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people. (credit: The Ohio Channel )

    The State Medical Board of Ohio is threatening to limit, suspend, or even permanently revoke the medical license of Sherri Tenpenny, the infamous anti-vaccine doctor who made headlines last year for falsely testifying to state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccinations make people magnetic—among espousing other nonsensical anti-vaccine-related conspiracy theories.

    "I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the Internet of people who have had these shots and now they're magnetized," Tenpenny said in her viral testimony. "You can put a key on their forehead—it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that."

    She went on to suggest that there may be an "interface—yet to be defined" between the components of life-saving vaccines and "all of the 5G towers." She added that the connection is "not proven yet" but that "we're trying to figure [it] out."

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      Adafruit’s Cheekmate gets to the bottom (ahem) of chess cheating controversy

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 6 October, 2022 - 17:09 · 1 minute

    The clever folks at Adafruit tested their Cheekmate chess-cheating prototype by embedding it in a slab of pork butt.

    The Internet has been abuzz for weeks about a particularly juicy chess cheating controversy that erupted last month. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost in the third round to a 19-year-old upstart, Hans Niemann, in what was widely considered to be a shocking upset. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament the next day, and his cryptic comments on Twitter fueled rampant speculation that Niemann had cheated. The fact that Niemann admitted to cheating in online chess matches didn't help his case, but he steadfastly insisted he never cheated in over-the-board games.

    The fierce debate eventually produced a bizarre viral conspiracy theory that Niemann had used anal beads to receive coded messages during the match. But would that even be possible? The folks at Adafruit Industries were sufficiently intrigued to put the theory to the test—you know, just to get to the bottom of the matter. The result is a prototype device called Cheekmate —because the Adafruit team rightfully loves their punny innuendoes—complete with a step-by-step guide for those who might want to build their own prototype.

    This device, Adafruit insists, is not for actual cheating: "That would be asinine… in brief, a stain on the sport, but to record for posterior whether this sort of backdoor intrusion is even plausible or just an Internet myth." Lacking any willing human volunteers to test the prototype, they ended up embedding Cheekmate in a big, juicy slab of pork butt.

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