All posts tagged: hijacks

The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th

The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th

Published by Sam Flores

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why. Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson. The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But …

When Your Phone Pings, It Hijacks Your Brain for 7 Seconds, Study Finds

When Your Phone Pings, It Hijacks Your Brain for 7 Seconds, Study Finds

Published by skeptic

The ping or buzz of your phone that lets you know a new message has arrived is hard to ignore. But it can mean trouble when you’re trying to concentrate on a task, according to a new study that will be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior.  The study found that whenever we receive a message notification, it interrupts our concentration for 7 seconds. It turns out that the type of information that we see in the notification also matters. The more personally relevant the notification, the larger the distraction. “This interruption likely arises from several mechanisms, such as [a notification’s] perceptual prominence, the conditioning acquired through repeated exposure, and the possible social significance,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s first author, told CNET. While 7 seconds may not seem like much, we get a lot of notifications throughout the day, and those seconds can add up.  “We observed that both the volume of notifications and how often individuals check …

Kash Patel hijacks Team USA’s Olympic hockey win

Kash Patel hijacks Team USA’s Olympic hockey win

Published by Sam Flores

Leave it to Donald Trump and his administration to ruin something joyful like Team USA’s men’s hockey Olympic win and turn it into a tawdry, self-serving spectacle. What started as a unifying, goosebumps-inducing sports moment quickly became a case study in how the Trump administration degrades every institution it touches — from the White House to the FBI to the Winter Olympics. There is a particular kind of hypocrisy so brazen, so cartoonishly on-the-nose, that it almost defies satire. FBI Director Kash Patel, who spent years burning with righteous fury over the perceived corruption of the bureau’s leadership class — who took to his podcast to demand that former director Christopher Wray’s government-funded G5 be grounded, who testified before Congress in barely contained outrage over FBI directors using taxpayer planes for personal travel — has now been caught doing precisely that and more, and worse. And he did it with a beer in his hand and a gold medal around his neck that he did nothing to earn. Patel flew on a government jet to …