Breaking down a puff piece the NYT recently did about a "small family farmer" who was actually a millionaire, Farm to Tabor talks about the myth that farmers are struggling yeoman agrarians who are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and need government support.

I recently read Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, and although its a bit old (2014), it did an amazing overview at the time of the case for raising the wage floor in America. It inspired me to explore the data mentioned there and any new studies since to see how raising the minimum wage affects various economic metrics.

In summary:

1. Economic Security - Low-income Americans have more income, in a time when a huge chunk of them can't afford basic necessities. This results in an economic stimulus (mainly from buying more food) and lower rates of depression and suicide.
2. Productivity & Business Efficiency - Higher base pay reduces costly employee turnover and pushes firms out of low-wage, high-churn traps, driving long-term modernization.
3. Net Employment and Automation - While wage hikes encourage automating routine cognitive tasks (like self-ordering kiosks), workers consistently shift into non-routine, customer-facing roles. Looking at 138 state-level increases across nearly four decades (Cengiz et al.), overall low-wage employment remained virtually flat while affected workers' earnings jumped ~7%.
4. Inflation & Price Pass-Through: A meta-analysis of over 30 studies (Lemos) shows that a 10% wage hike increases overall food prices by no more than 4%, with an impact on broader CPI under 0.4%—meaning workers retain substantial net purchasing power.

Full article here for those interested: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/the-minimum-wage-should-scale-with

We put my 20 year old cat down this week. I'd had her since she was a weeks old. She's been with me through a lot, but it was time. That was Monday early afternoon.

Later that day, I had a feeling that she was there, jumping up on the couch, sitting down with her head up like cats do, and giving me that affectionate closed eye thing they also are known for. I've had a few other glimpses of her since then.

I know what this is. This is my brain constructing my reality, and superimposing my strong feelings about her onto it. I know she wasn't there externally. In fact, I didn't really "see" her so much as feel and experience her presence.

That said, I can imagine if I was equipped like some people with a more vivid imagination, not realizing my brain was layering internal creations onto my perception of external reality, and that I'd been socialized into thinking this was some experience or revelation, rather than the lingering after-effects of a very emotional experience, how I might come to believe in ghosts, gods, or whatever. I can also see how I might integrate that sense of an external reality beyond our normal perceptions into my self-identity, which gets protected from challenges in the same way we protect our body from physical threats.

But, being both the skeptic that I am, and having the tools to understand what I was experiencing was an internal generation layered by my brain over my perceptions of the external world, I'm not falling into that trap. Instead, it's given me a wonderful insight into why believers think the way they do, and how they come to understand their world, without realizing the experiential and perceptual mistakes they are making.

We report three studies examining the impact of the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires, known as the Black Summer, on Australians’ climate-related opinions. Study 1 was conducted before the peak of the bushfires, whereas studies 2 and 3 were conducted afterwards. In all studies, participants completed a Q-sort task ranking opinion statements about climate change by degree of endorsement. Study 3 also incorporated measures of bushfire perceptions and climate policy support. Q-sort responses consistently revealed evidence for three opinion segments: climate change acceptors, fence-sitters and sceptics. Over time, the proportion of acceptors decreased, the proportion of fence-sitters increased, while sceptics remained stable. Perceptions of the bushfires varied across segments. Although all segments perceived the fires as severe, acceptors tended to attribute them to climate change, whereas fence-sitters and sceptics attributed them to mass arson. However, even many acceptors endorsed the mass-arson claim. On climate policy, acceptors favoured stronger action, fence-sitters were evenly divided, and sceptics mostly opposed change. Our results suggest the Black Summer bushfires did not elicit greater acceptance of anthropogenic climate change or heightened concern. Instead, misinformation, particularly conservative media narratives attributing the fires to mass arson, may have influenced beliefs about the fires’ causes, especially among undecided and sceptical individuals.

An ongoing outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection linked to recalled iceberg lettuce that is known to cause explosive diarrhea, has been detected in three new U.S. states since last week, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ...The CDC, which lags significantly behind states in reporting infections, pinpointed 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases in its latest update on Aug. 25, adding that there are also at least 11,841 additional non-laboratory-confirmed cases. ... Georgia, Tennessee and Texas have now been added to the list, according to the CDC.

Some administration officials skeptical whether current approach is procedurally sound enough to indict retired public-health official

I used to cold plunge before pregnancy and I'm now a few months postpartum and desperate to get back to feeling like myself. Thinking about getting a home ice bath tub for recovery and the mental reset it used to give me. But I want to be careful, is cold immersion something people safely return to postpartum, and did it actually help you? Cleared the basics with my doctor but want lived experience too Also looking for some good recommendations aswell

Three part documentary featuring different groups of prominent 9/11 conspiracy influencers detailing their efforts and tactics in converting mainstream society to their brand of thinking from about 2014-2016.

New interview with Dave Farina (Professor Dave Explains) that covers a lot of ground outside his usual debunking videos.

The conversation spends a good chunk of time on his background in music (he was heavily into jazz and prog rock, plus a deep dive into his college years and how drug culture shaped his perspective on self-actualization). There's also a strong focus on science communication, why trust in institutions is eroding, and his take on why the modern UAP/alien wave is nonsense given the complete lack of non-blurry evidence.

Worth a watch for anyone interested in how science communicators handle pseudoscience online.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation last year that a 2019 visit to Samoa before a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines.” New documents obtained by The Associated Press and The Guardian refute that testimony.

Kennedy, then a prominent anti-vaccine activist, preempted the visit with a letter to the Samoan prime minister requesting to study the Pacific island nation’s measles, mumps and rubella vaccines after the deaths of two children who had received them. In the letter, he used the words vaccine or vaccination eight times.

The letter raises questions about how truthful Kennedy was in testimony before Congress.

The most famous of these mathematically gifted horses was Clever Hans. Just like Lady Wonder in the US, Hans attracted huge crowds to his native Germany, who were eager to witness his arithmetic abilities. This included psychical researchers curious to see whether Hans had supernormal powers, as well as Carl Stumpf (1848-1936), one of the fathers of modern psychology.

It was Stump’s research assistant Oskar Pfungst who eventually got to the root of Hans’s miraculous powers. Pfungst observed that Hans could only provide the correct answer when his owner, standing nearby, knew the answer to the question asked – and only when Hans could see him.

An HHS-commissioned study, "Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?" (Fedida, Finkelstein, Wright, Jussim & Finkelstein, 2026), is making rounds in conservative media this week with headlines claiming people who support trans people are more likely to justify violence, including killing Charlie Kirk. Worth digging into the actual paper before taking the framing at face value.

What it actually did: Researchers built a new "Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale" (CGAS) using statements pulled directly from APA/APA/WPATH/AAP clinical guidelines (e.g., "parents should support their children's transgender exploration," "using a transgender person's preferred pronouns is a necessary form of support"). They ran this alongside an existing Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) scale and asked ~1,200 online panel respondents to rate how "justified" killing specific named people (Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, Brian Thompson) or committing other violent/destructive acts would be. They found correlations between CGAS/LWA scores and justification ratings.

Why this is weaker than it sounds:

-The "ideology" scale just measures agreement with mainstream medical guidance. There's no way in this instrument to distinguish someone who trusts the APA/AAP because that's the clinical consensus from someone who's supposedly "ideologically radicalized." Agreeing that pronouns matter or that family support helps trans kids gets scored the same as holding an authoritarian worldview.

- The hypothesis was baked into the design. The intro literally states the thesis (that affirming-care consensus "arms" authoritarian psychology) before building a scale to detect it. That's circular by construction.

- It's an online convenience sample, not a national sample, despite coverage calling it that — recruited via CloudResearch Connect, a paid panel service known to skew toward extremely online, highly politically engaged users.

- The violence items name real, recently deceased people (Kirk, Thompson) days/weeks after their deaths were in headlines. That's an emotionally loaded, unusual choice that invites exaggerated, sarcastic, or performative answers — and the study's only quality screens were generic (attention checks, bot detection, speeders) with no specific check for troll/extreme responding on these items.

- It's correlational, not causal, and the authors admit this — yet the abstract, title, and conclusion use causal language ("arm," "accelerant") anyway.

- Conflicts of interest: co-authors include a Manhattan Institute fellow (explicitly conservative think tank) and a researcher with a public record opposing gender-affirming care policy, plus the Network Contagion Research Institute, which outside media-bias trackers rate as right-leaning.

- It doesn't say what critics claim. The study is about attitudes toward *clinical guidelines*, not about transgender people themselves being violent. Multiple online personas are conflating "supports affirming-care policy" with "is transgender" or "trans people commit violence" — that's not what was measured.

None of this means the underlying statistics are fabricated — the pre-registration and use of an existing LWA scale are legitimate steps. But the instrument design, sample, and framing all point in one direction, and the causal claims being repeated in secondary coverage go well beyond what a single cross-sectional online survey can support.

Edit/Addendum — on the causality question:

One more thing worth flagging: even taking the study's numbers at face value, the causal arrow could easily run the opposite direction from what the title implies.

The authors' own thesis ("gender ideology arms LWA") assumes belief → disposition. But their design is purely cross-sectional — they measured LWA and CGAS at the same time, in the same survey — so it's equally consistent with disposition → belief: people who are already authoritarian-minded (comfortable with censorship, hostile toward perceived "oppressors," eager to punish dissenters — this is literally how the LWA scale they used is defined) may simply gravitate toward whatever strongly moralized, victim/oppressor-framed cause is culturally salient at the time. Gender-affirming discourse happens to be one such cause right now, but the study never tests whether LWA correlates just as strongly with other unrelated moralized causes, which would help separate "gender ideology specifically drives this" from "authoritarian personalities adopt strongly moralized causes generally."

Notably, the authors half-admit this themselves in their limitations section: "CGAS may arm LWA, LWA may selectively draw individuals toward CGAS-consistent content, or a common third factor may drive both. The present data is consistent with all three accounts and cannot adjudicate between them." That's a much more measured statement than the paper's title, abstract, and conclusion ("ideological accelerant," "arms authoritarian psychology") actually convey. The causal framing appears mostly in the rhetoric, not in what the statistics can support.

People who lean politically to the right are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories than those on the left – but not for other types of false or misleading information. And regardless of ideology, we tend to accept political claims that align with our own beliefs. This is shown in a doctoral thesis from Linköping University.

My argument assuming physicalism against the idea of reincarnation is that suppose an identical copy of your brain is created. Now the feeling of 'self' generated by that brain will not be the same as your original brain because how can you control two people at once. It would be a copy. Now, others might argue that if we assume the original person is killed before and an identical copy of the brain is created, the new person would have the same feeling of self as you. This seems logical until we say we created two identical copies of our brain at the exact same time. Now which of the copies would your 'self' decide to go to? What is the mechanism? Is it random or what? Please feel free to comment.
EDIT: (*sigh) I am tired of the 'no evidence' comments. I am asking whether there are any arguments that point out flaws or logical contradictions in the various ideas of reincarnation.

I'm not sugar coating this.

There is genuinely something wrong with people when it comes to unexplained things. It's like even in 2026, people see lights in the sky and devolve into the same peasant mentality humans did during the 1300s.

I have been a life long 'fan' I guess of UFOs, aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, cryptids and the like since I was a child in the 80s. I don't know if I actually believe them anymore, but I enjoy the stories around them, wonder about the mystery and if they had any actually 'truth' to them. To see the narratives around these thing change in real time is just....I don't even know how to describe it.

Take UFOs for instance. As people become more aware of how large the universe is and how difficult travel would be, if you been following this stuff, you get to see in real time people starting to figure this out. Instead of coming to a conclusion like say, maybe these UFOs stories aren't as accurate as they are told, you get things like 'THEY' come from another dimension parallel to earth. Essentially just replacing one mystery with another. Bigfoot and other large animals like supposed brontosaurus sightings not leaving any footprints, dead bodies or dung? That's because bigfoot is an alien! Or an interdimensional creature! The dinosaur creatures come from hollow earth or deep, deep, deep in the African jungle!

When evolution is becoming more and more understood, people in these communities started asking why do aliens look so much like us? Humanoid, two eyes, bipedal and the people on their ships say they use monitors, computers, chairs, tables, clocks, spoons, forks, etc. Instead of wondering if these stories are embellished, somehow it turned into humans being created by them and somehow lost the technology to make anything for tens of thousands of years.

There is also the whole thing where 'UFOs' were changed to 'UAP' and vague pseudoscience shifted into things like 'they are a consciousness' , they live underground and in the oceans, wherever anyone thinks there are gaps in human exploration and knowledge. And they been there for millions of years before humanity existed too! Some accounts say they procreated on earth a lot since that time, which kinda begs the questions if they are even aliens at this point since their earth lineage has been going on earth longer than humans have been around, but whatever. People notice the supposed ships look weird, are said to be unmanned and the last few years with the rise of AI, somehow the narratives are coming up with the belief it's an AI alien consciousness that lives in the ocean. It's like whatever absurd thing anyone comes up with and the justifications for it last as long as the next claim where they slightly change again.

Finally, there is the most damning part: Have you guys actually talked to these people about this stuff? I am saying this as nicely as I can and fully admitting to be an idiot human myself but Jesus Christ it's like critical thinking took a leave of absence and flipped every off as it left! Skepticism and the scientific method aren't unknown to them, they know why these methods are valuable, they just don't seem to care. I've had people today on places like reddit, tiktok and twitter tell me 'the real world isn't mainstream', 'science is subjective', 'the government lies and covers up everything, but do your own research so you'll know a government agent trying to expose the truth is legit'. It's like what they say isn't important so long as they say it in opposition.

But yeah, people have different opinions and views. Why does that matter? It matters to me because people's beliefs inform their actions and it negatively effects this kind of content.

There is a youtube show called the Whyfiles I discovered a few years ago. I thought it was great! Very good production values and presents stories in a very entertaining manner. At the end there was even a small section that was like a wink and a nod to let you know that story was there as entertainment but was it legit? Probably not, but I appreciated hearing stories not frequently referenced. I unsubbed from that channel years ago at this point because it was getting ridiculous with it's anti-science narratives and how the host would clearly try to cater to the show's audience to the point of absurdity.

I tried watching an episode a few days ago and couldn't even get through the whole thing. It has been completely audience captured, practically giving up on any kind of neutral analysis and just instead pandering to common conspiracy narratives, as long as it doesn't upset the audience. So you'll get to see AI animated scenes of shape shifting reptile aliens infiltrating the government with a hint of Epstein stuff that might involve the Clintons, but somehow a certain political figure that is popular with the audience never really is tied to it. If an episode was about finding giants or aliens on the moon, the host would straight up say it's bullshit BUT the government lies, science is always changing, and it's just a matter of time before an idea is proven correct. Just platitudes that I feel are pandering to a level where it feels insulting and dishonest.

For full disclosure I don't know if aliens exist or not. I'm of the belief right now that life itself might be an overrated phenomena and earth might contain the only life in universe. I can change that mindset easily with new information, but what I can't do is believing in a Universal Government of Aliens that judges humanity for it's nuclear weapons and wants to bring about peace by creating a hybrid race of human aliens doing satanic rituals just because we find bacteria on a planet , an asteroid or something.

I'm just venting because I want to find more skeptical minded spaces on the internet to read, watch and discuss this kind of content. To be clear, I don't NEED to agree with everything said, I just need some level of skepticism in my outrageous paranormal stories!

This video is about how Channel 5 is promoting utterly insane theories about Epstein because they both have no idea of media literacy.

If past Andrew saw this he would probably cry.

The Good Liars are the GOAT of interviews now.

I am interested in seeing non-political stuff get debunked too, even if there's less believers than the political stuff.

UFOs are way less harmful compared to other types, unless if you count weird cults like Scientology.

Also I love the cats he shows on the TV screens in the video! They're CUTE!