Weird News

Places to avoid being ill and elderly—Ecuador and the state of New York.

Bella Montoya, 76, was first declared dead by a doctor at a hospital in the city of Babahoyo last week.

But when mourners attending her wake heard her knocking on her coffin, she was immediately rushed back to the same hospital for treatment.
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In February, an 82-year-old woman was found to be breathing while lying in a funeral home in New York State. She had been pronounced dead three hours earlier at a nursing home. (source)

I must’ve read a horror story about this sort of thing when I was a kid because this has always been in the top five of my biggest fears. Yes, it’s supremely unlikely that I'll be buried or cremated while alive but, hey, when do fears have to be based in statistically high probability.

In other news, can the drug MDMA (AKA Ecstasy or Molly) cure people of their violent, bigoted, insane bullshit thoughts and behaviors?

According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things. But Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs. (source) 

The answer is—sometimes but don’t bet on it being some magic kumbaya pill. It worked for the white nationalist asshole ‘Brendan’ because he was already primed for change. When his beliefs and actions came to light, his family and friends, outside of his jerkwadian, incel Identity Evropa group, ditched him. His employers, likewise, told him to piss off. The dude’s wealthy so he didn’t need the job for financial survival BUT money can’t buy you love. The boy was lonely and ready for change.

That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures. If MDMA, with proper preparation, can nudge us toward embracing this state of being, then the idea of using the drug as an aid to help make the world a more loving, less hateful place may be more than just a pipe dream. (source)

How abominably pathetic are we humans that we, some of us anyway, need Ecstasy to feel empathy and kindness?

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
~ Jack Kerouac

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Due to age and illness, I am WAY less social than I used to be. I’m not terribly robust anymore so I avoid situations and places where I might run into gun-toting, trash-talking, bigoted rageaholics. Yeah, I don’t get out of Massachusetts much.