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Sturgeon's House

I Learned Something Today


LostCosmonaut

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Lincoln Detox treated half the patients it was supposed to, but cost four times more per patient than comparable New York City clinics.[1] Black nationalists were employed at the clinic as security guards. In 1976, NYC's Health and Hospitals Corporation discovered one million dollars in unsubstantiated payroll.[1] An auditor's visit found that only 50% of staff on duty were actually present and a doctor overdosed and died at the clinic.[1] Much of the clinic's funding was embezzled and spent on cocaine.[1]

 

 

That sounds like it's entirely within the spirit of communism, actually.

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Today I learned about the invasion of Lae.

 

Have you gotten to the parts in General Kenney's reports where they make special teams to load and unload cargo aircraft at a very high speed so they can get more sorties in, and where they cut trucks into air freight able chunks and fly them to remote places and put them back together?

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TIL. In 1904, Annie Oakley was libeled by the Hearst newspaper chain, which claimed that she was arrested for stealing a man's pants in order to pay for her cocaine habit.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-annie-oakley-princess-of-the-west-preserved-her-ladylike-reputation-55701906/

She sued 55 different newspapers over the next six years and won or settled 54 of the cases which apparently was the largest libel suit of its kind up to that date. Rather than admit fault, William Randolph Hearst hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Oakley in order to smear her reputation in court.

https://books.google.com/books?id=KLTOlPFj2VAC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=annie+oakley+cocaine+hearst&source=bl&ots=3ZRuV7HBxM&sig=BnpGAvEAtuzJJ43WBpsC65GvfyE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN3sXUoY_SAhUL7WMKHQ_UBrI4ChDoAQgZMAA#v=onepage&q=annie oakley cocaine hearst&f=false

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A distressing number of artificial sweeteners were discovered by accident.

Saccharin was discovered by a chemist who had spilled some on his hands, and then noticed that a bread roll he was eating later tasted very sweet.  He then proceeded to taste-test every compound he'd worked with that day to figure out which one had been the sweet one.  Much safety, very wow.

Aspartame was also discovered in this manner; a chemist licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper after working with some of the compound, and then noticed that his finger tasted very sweet.  At least in this case the chemists involved looked back at what compounds they had been experimenting with, reasoned that they were probably safe and then proceeded.

Sucralose was also discovered by accident.  A foreign exchange student was asked to "test these compounds," but apparently he misheard it as "taste these compounds."  Grad students have a high attrition rate because they are simply too trusting.  They're like flightless birds that evolved on isolated islands.  Fortunately they were working with harmless halogenated sugars instead of ebola or something.

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During the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian pilots were distrusted by the theocrats in Tehran as most of them were holdovers from the Shah's reign and Iranian fighter aces were never recognized during the war and many were jailed after the war for various reasons. Often Tomcat and Phantom kills were credited towards IRGC anti-air units which the regime wanted to promote. 

Iraq had no aces in its air force(it had a couple of 4-kill pilots), but Iraqi pilots were like most pilots/tankers/snipers/etc and greatly exaggerated their exploits for propaganda purposes towards the Iraqi populace and towards the international community to show Iraq doesn't suck as much as it actually did. 

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8 hours ago, Xlucine said:

There's an arcane protection racket in papua new guinea. They have snazzy costumes, and threaten violence/murder unless you give them money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duk-Duk

Secret societies crop up all over. My completely clueless guess is that they combine some of the functions of a company (shared resources and joint ownership) with things like member secrecy and role subsumation (members acting in public often wear masks and costumes) as a sort of subversive counterpoint to very heirarchical sociopolitical structures with single foci of power. Where power is more diffuse, they don't seem to form in the same way.

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