On the surface, this new Associated Press report looks like an encouraging news item about a breakthrough announcement for the U.S. military.
President Joe Biden has chosen Adm. Lisa Franchetti to lead the Navy, a senior administration official said Friday. ,B.If confirmed, she would be the first woman to be a U.S. military service chief. … Franchetti, the current vice chief of operations for the Navy, would become the first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Unfortunately, the two words that stood out for me in the report were “if confirmed.”
The problem is not that senators are likely to have a problem with the admiral’s record or qualifications. On the contrary, as the AP’s report noted Franchetti years of experience, “including a number of high-level policy and administrative jobs” that the Biden administration believes provide her with “deep knowledge in budgeting and running the department.”
Instead, the problem is that Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s anti-abortion tantrum is still ongoing, and until the Alabama Republican relents, Franchetti’s nomination will join hundreds of other military promotions that remain stuck thanks to the far-right senator’s procedural hold.
Indeed, as recently as Wednesday night, Senate Democrats tried again to advance these uncontroversial nominees. Once again, Tuberville refused to do the right thing.
The Alabaman is not without offramps. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this week raised the specter of a floor vote on Tuberville’s preferred policy, which would mean ending travel reimbursements for troops who need to travel for reproductive care. As the New York Democrat saw it, this would give the Republican a chance to make the case for his approach and then allow his colleagues to vote on whether to approve it.
Tuberville said that wouldn’t be good enough, adding that the only solution is for the Pentagon to give him what he wants. Given the painfully obvious fact that the coach-turned-politician isn’t the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, the Department of Defense doesn’t seem to like his preferred resolution.
Soon after, Tuberville suggested that the Pentagon should simply scrap the benefits for the troops, as he demands, at which point the Senate could vote on whether to revive the policy. That’s a non-starter, too: Such a measure obviously couldn’t get 60 votes.
He then appeared on a conservative media outlet and said the administration needs to “find a way” to make him happy — or apparently he’ll continue to undermine the interests of his own country’s military.
Or put another way, months into this blockade, Tuberville’s arguments aren’t exactly getting smarter.
In the meantime, GOP divisions over Tuberville’s radical tactics are becoming more obvious. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, not surprisingly, endorsed the Alabaman’s blockade this week, but The Washington Post’s Hugh Hewitt, a prominent conservative pundit, has seen enough.
Hewitt slammed Tuberville’s “inexcusable” decision “to imperil the men and women of the U.S. military,” adding, that the Republican must “stop playing with the lives of U.S. military personnel.”
FRFF in Hucksterby country.
I haven’t seen this yet, but I will watch it and it can’t hurt:
This week on FFRF’s “Ask an Atheist,” FFRF Legal Director Rebecca Markert and FFRF Attorney Sam Grover talk about why thou shalt not place Ten Commandments monuments on government property. Tune in (https://youtu.be/NzlDv5KyNpw) to hear more about Sam Grover’s recent trip to Arkansas to argue FFRF’s latest case in front of a federal judge.
As we wait for Special Counsel Jack Smith to drop a second Trump indictment in DC, there’s a bunch of crazy shit going down in the Fulton County District Attorney’s case. DA Fani Willis has signaled that she plans to indict in the next three weeks, so let’s check in on what will likely be the fourth indictment of presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Last Friday, Trump’s Georgia lawyers Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg, and Jennifer Little filed almost identical “Petitions for Writs of Mandamus and Prohibition” in the Supreme Court of Georgia and the Superior Court of Fulton County demanding that someone — anyone! — save their client’s saggy, orange ass. Specifically, they want to magically disappear the special purpose grand jury report on 2020 election interference issued in January and remove DA Willis from any future 2020 election cases.
They urged the court to toss out Georgia’s entire special purpose grand jury scheme for being unconstitutional, or, barring that, to toss the report because DA Willis is biased against Trump.
[…] Without getting too deeply into the weeds (I’ve written a more nuanced post on that here), the standard for mandamus is abuse of discretion — i.e. NOT if you don’t give me what I want, they’ll indict me, and I really don’t want that to happen. The Georgia Supreme Court took one business day to dropkick this stupid motion, noting that it requires exceptional circumstances to invoke the high court’s original jurisdiction, and this ain’t it. They also observed that Trump made a similar motion before Judge Robert McBurney in March, and the fact that the trial judge hasn’t ruled yet is not a redressable injury.
This morning, Chief Judge Ural Glanville of the Fulton County Superior Court responded in a brief order recusing the judges under his purview from adjudicating this petition. Since Trump claims that Judge McBurney behaved improperly, Judge Glanville is transferring the petition so that it won’t be heard by one of McBurney’s immediate colleagues. Although in a footnote Judge Glanville suggests that this petition might not be long for this world, wherever it lands.
The undersigned notes that, although the Petition is styled as a Petition for Writs of Mandamus and Prohibition, the nature of the relief requested is that this Court (1) quash a special purpose grand jury report, (2) bar the District Attorney from using evidence obtained via the special purpose grand jury investigation, and (3) disqualify the District Attorney for conflict of interest; none of which actually appears to sound in mandamus.
[LOL, that was eloquent.]
Meanwhile, last week DA Willis sent target letters to multiple participants in the fake electors scheme, including Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, state Sen. Brandon Beach, and David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia GOP. Judge McBurney already forced Shafer to get separate counsel, finding him to be differently situated from the other electors. Which is … the kind of special you really don’t want to be.
Shafer responded this week in a letter in which his lawyers demanded that DA Willis call off her prosecution, insisting that his actions assembling a fake slate of electors are protected by the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
[U]nder the Constitution and the ECA, the December 14, 2020 meeting and execution of contingent electoral ballots was also a “petition” to the government, specifically Congress, which is the only governmental authority empowered to adjudicate and count electoral ballots from any State. Any attempt to punish our client for engaging in these protected activities would violate the United States and Georgia Constitutions, as well as unambiguous federal and state law.
Let’s take a wildass guess that this will not deter Willis for one single second. Particularly in light of a story from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell this morning confirming prior reporting that the prosecutor “has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.”
Georgia’s robust racketeering statute requires two predicate crimes to demonstrate the existence of an “enterprise.” Here, they will reportedly be witness intimidation during the call where Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and threatened him with criminal prosecution if he didn’t do it, and the breach of Dominion voting machines in Coffee County by Trump’s Kraken allies.
OMG, can it really be … RICO???? Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.
[…] The plan, which clearly lacks a second district that would allow Black voters to have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice, plainly violates the district court’s 2022 order stating that “any remedial plan will need to include two districts in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.” The passage of this plan comes after Republicans advanced two other plans that similarly lacked a second majority-Black district and voted against alternatives that would have ensured two majority-Black districts.
According to reporting, the sponsor of the Livingston Plan, Steve Livingston (R-Scottsboro), stated that he spoke with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and McCarthy said “I’m interested in keeping my majority.”
[…] Alabama Republicans refusal to pass a map with two majority Black districts comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a district court decision that struck down the state’s original congressional map for likely violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Despite the district court ordering Alabama to pass a map with two majority-Black districts, Republican legislators passed a map that only contains one. […]
Russia on Thursday imposed Soviet-style restrictions on British diplomats, requiring them to give at least five working days’ notice of any plans to travel beyond a 120-km (75-mile) radius, due to what it described as London’s “hostile actions”…
Famed forensic scientist Henry Lee was found liable for fabricating evidence in a murder case that sent two Connecticut men to prison for decades for a crime they did not commit, a federal judge ruled Friday.
Ralph “Ricky” Birch and Shawn Henning were convicted in the Dec. 1, 1985, slaying of Everett Carr, based in part on testimony about what Lee said were bloodstains on a towel found in the 65-year-old’s home in New Milford, 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) southwest of Hartford.
A judge vacated the felony murder convictions in 2020, and the men filed a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit naming Lee, eight police investigators and the town of New Milford.
The ruling Friday sends the case against the police and the town to trial. In granting a motion for summary judgement against Lee, the only outstanding issue for a jury in his case will be the amount of damages.
Lee, the former head of the state’s forensic laboratory and now a professor emeritus at the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment…
Lawyers for suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton are pushing to disqualify three Democratic state senators as jurors in his upcoming impeachment trial.
Paxton’s lawyers filed a motion Friday that asks Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to disqualify Sens. Nathan Johnson of Dallas, Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio and José Menéndez of San Antonio, arguing they have a proven bias against Paxton…
wzrd1says
@495, the right to life governor has kept that razor wire up, despite a 19 year old migrant woman being hung up in the wire in the middle of the river, while suffering a miscarriage.
I’ll not go into children entangled in that wire or the family that drowned getting around the wire, two children still missing in the river.
Now that he’s ordered and DOJ is filing with the courts, I imagine the governor will next mine the border and emplace machine guns, like Stalin did.
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #12…
My guess is that that suit won’t go anywhere. But if it succeeds, someone should sue to disqualify all of the Republican state Senators on the grounds that they are all biased in Paxton’s favor.
wzrd1says
They’re failing on the grounds that impeachment isn’t a civil or criminal trial, but per the SCOTUS, a political process.
So, if one disqualifies a legislator because of a political bias, one would have precisely zero votes once all disqualifications are done.
birgerjohanssonsays
Did Africa have the first Iron Age?
https:youtu.be/touQNmkC5o
As best that I’ve been able to find, it’s arguable that either India or Africa had discovered iron working first, spreading along the trade routes that were already present. Finding an answer is problematic, due to colonialism and the destruction it brought to Africa. That said, I tend to lean toward India as the origin, spreading to Persia and China and Africa, lastly to Europe. Distance making trade and travel of iron more problematic to make it to Europe, due to multiple deserts in the way, even if the Sahara was much smaller back then.
Regardless, all evidence I’ve saw suggests Europe learned how to work iron quite some time after India and China.
Especially, given Europe was recovering from volcanic eruptions in the Med shortly before Iron was first worked, all the safe money’s against Europeans learning how to work iron first.
birgerjohanssonsays
Ha! Tuck Buckford… I mean Alex Jones – is in even more legal trouble, as he has royally pissed off the judge.
(Schadenfreude 😊😊😊)
Retired Russian colonel Konstantin Sivkov, who serves as the deputy president of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, has put forth the idea of detonating nuclear weapons at the North Pole “if necessary” as a way to convey a message to the West, in a statement on Russian state-run TV…
Russian shelling killed four people and wounded a further three in the village of New York in Donetsk Oblast in the evening of July 21, the Prosecutor General’s Office reported on Facebook…
Bulgaria has agreed to provide the Ukrainian army with some 100 armored personnel carriers, marking a turnaround in the NATO member’s policy on sending military equipment to Kyiv following the appointment of a new, pro-Western government.
Direct arms supplies were rejected by previous interim governments, appointed by President Rumen Radev. He is sympathetic to Russia and recently said that Ukraine was to be blamed for the war and that supplying arms to Ukraine only prolongs the conflict.
The parliament in Sofia late Friday approved by 148 votes to 52 the government’s proposal to make the first shipment of heavy military equipment to Ukraine since the beginning of the war…
A conservative group headed by a 2020 presidential election denier will get access to an unredacted list of Illinois voters and their personal information, such as mail and email addresses and telephone numbers, under a federal court settlement with the State Board of Elections.
The settlement includes a confidentiality order aimed at preventing dissemination of voters’ personal information beyond the Illinois Conservative Union. The settlement, filed Tuesday, dismisses a case brought on behalf of the Conservative Union by the right-wing group Judicial Watch.
The Conservative Union and its founder, Carol Davis, a former tea party activist from Carol Stream, had filed a federal challenge to the state election board’s limitations that provided complete voter data only to political committees and governmental entities. Under a previous judicial ruling, individual voter data that greatly redacted personal information had been available to the public.
Now, after paying an existing fee that had been charged to political and governmental entities, the Conservative Union can acquire a complete list of the state’s 8.1 million registered voters along with age, address, phone number and county and state voter ID number, except for individuals covered by special federal or state confidentiality laws…
Reginald Selkirk @ 21, yep! Discovered by the French from a mine in Gabon for uranium, they discovered that the U-235 content was 0.6% U-235, rather than the normal natural ratio of 0.72%, but the normal trace of U-234 was still at normal trace quantities. Natural uranium at the time that the natural reactor “operated” had a content of 3.1% U-235, allowing just regular water to moderate the reaction. The current percentage of 0.72% now needing a graphite or heavy water moderator. A couple of hundred million years later, Eukaryotic cells were invented. ;)
The uranium wouldn’t have been able to concentrate naturally like it did, save for the presence of oxygen, which allowed uranium to form a water soluble oxide, which then concentrated into the uranium deposits found in Gabon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine
birgerjohansson @ 20, Alex Jones pissed off a judge, a violation of the first rule of the courtroom and today is a day that ends in ‘y’ in English. Should I ask what’s new?
A 16 year old was killed in a work related accident at a chicken processing plant in Mississippi, so more states roll back child labor laws.
’cause we’re exceptionalists.
OK, proponents say it’s due to a pandemic related labor shortage. You know, the pandemic that’s now long over and is killing more people now than before. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-states-looking-to-rollback-child-labor-protections-for-alcohol-service-age/
Or maybe it’s to get those babies that are forced births to pull their own weight earlier, ignore the much higher infant and maternal mortality in Texas that’s thanks to the slave birth laws there.
Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday.
Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God, while 69 percent said they believe in angels and 67 percent said they believe in heaven, the poll found. Slightly smaller shares — 59 percent and 58 percent — said they believe in hell and the devil.
Belief in all five spiritual entities has fallen between 3-5 points since 2016, the last time that Gallup polled Americans on the topic…
Malaysia’s government Saturday cut short a music festival after the lead singer of British band The 1975 slammed the country’s anti-gay laws and kissed a male bandmate during their performance.
Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil slammed Matty Healy’s conduct late Friday at the start of the Good Vibes Festival as “very rude.”
Healey used profanity in his speech criticizing the government’s stance against homosexuality, before kissing bass player Ross MacDonald. Footage of the fiasco was posted on social media and sparked a backlash in the predominantly Muslim nation…
North Korea fired cruise missiles in the direction of its western sea on Saturday, according to South Korea’s military, according to the Associated Press.
This is the country’s second event this week, after North Korea launched two short-range missiles on Wednesday to its eastern sea — just one day after the U.S. docked a nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea. North Korea on Thursday threatened possible retaliation over the docking of the USS Kentucky.
“The military security situation in the area of the Korean peninsula, which has undergone a fundamental change due to the reckless military moves of the U.S. and its followers, more clearly indicates what mission the nuclear weapons of the [North Korea] should carry out,” North Korean defense minister Kang Sun Nam said in a statement.
Saturday morning’s launch also comes as the country remains silent on the perceived detention of a U.S. soldier who “willfully” crossed into the country earlier this week. Travis King, a Private 2nd Class in the Army — believed to be in North Korean custody — reportedly sprinted from a tour on the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone.
His current status and whereabouts are unknown, according to officials.
[…] “We’re still doing everything we can to try to find out his whereabouts, his well-being and condition and making it clear that we want to see him safely and quickly returned to the United States,” Kirby added.
The mother of a 24-year-old worker who died from heatstroke while working for a construction firm in San Antonio, Texas, has filed a lawsuit against his employer.
Gabriel Infante was working for B Comm Constructors in San Antonio, Texas, on June 23 2022, digging in the hot summer sun to move internet fiber optic cable, a job he had recently started with a childhood best friend while they were finishing college.
The lawsuit comes after Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, signed a controversial bill into law on June 14 that prohibits local municipalities from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers. The bill nullifies ordinances previously passed in Austin and Dallas that mandated 10-minute breaks for workers every four hours. A similar ordinance was being considered in San Antonio before the state bill was passed.
According to the lawsuit, Infante began exhibiting heatstroke symptoms, including confusion, altered mental state, dizziness and loss of consciousness. His friend and co-worker Joshua Espinoza began pouring cold water over him, trying to cool him down. A foreman insisted Espinoza call the police, claiming Infante’s bizarre behavior was due to drugs, and the foreman pushed for a drug test when emergency medical services arrived.
On the day of the incident, temperatures in San Antonio reached in excess of 100F, with humidity levels reaching as high as 75 percent, noted the lawsuit.
Infante later died in a hospital from severe heatstroke and had a recorded internal temperature of 109.8 F. The Centers for Disease Control states that a body temperature of 103 F or higher is a main symptom of heatstroke.
“Nobody called me. It was Joshua’s mom who called me to tell me I needed to get a hold of Joshua because Gabriel had an accident,” said Velma Infante, Gabriel’s mother. “To this day, I have never, ever gotten a phone call from the owner of the company to offer his condolences for my son’s death. Or, an ‘I’m sorry,’ or nothing like that. I mean, of course it doesn’t make a difference. But I mean, it’s the gesture. To this day no ‘I’m sorry Mrs Infante for your loss,’ Nothing.”
[…] He didn’t even get to see his first paycheck,” Joshua Espinoza, Infante’s co-worker and best friend since childhood, told the San Antonio Express. “My friend Gabe is the epitome of why this bill is ridiculous,” he added of Abbott’s bill. “It’s important for us not to go backward, to learn from our mistakes…It’s blatant process over people. Greg Abbott doesn’t care about workers at all.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed a fine of $13,052 against the construction firm for failing to protect workers from heat hazards on the job, which the company is contesting.
Infante’s mother is seeking $1 million in damages for her son’s death in the lawsuit, noting there were no safeguards or protections in place by the employer to protect workers from extreme heat, nor were there any training or heat-related illness prevention programs or policies in place by the employer at the time.
It’s funny how OSHA and politicians find setting heat injury protection protocols so complex, as to be insoluble problems, yet the DoD has been protecting their service members for generations.
Perhaps, we should incorporate the military as some part of the government, within its own department, so that they could share this mysterious information.
Oh wait, that might be effective in mitigation and soon, the populace might demand our misleadership cease and desist trying to turn earth into venus 2.0.
…and one of the most interesting zones is around Odessa, in the current war zone.
Which confirms that where trade and cultures meet is also a pretty dangerous place to live. There are not many Kurgan builders around today.
birgerjohanssonsays
“Scientists name top five foods rich in prebiotics”
Missing the boat again. FAA investigating aircraft left on the ramp in 115 F heat with passengers aboard, resulting in hospitalizations.
A better question is, why was the aircraft left with passengers aboard in the heat without either the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) or ground cart to supply power and air conditioning to what essentially became an oven in the sun? The aircraft should be able to run the APU for at least 2 hours on the ground. It’ll supply power, bleed air and hydraulics to the aircraft while the engines aren’t running, the batteries will only supply light and APU start power.
We had passengers diverted and no room at the gates for them, we had them parked on the ramp with the APU running once we ran out of ground power units to power them. The airline’s only excuse is that passenger lives were cheaper to them than the cost of jet fuel to run that dinky little turbine engine. They only buy it in quantities of a couple of hundred thousand pounds at a shot and run their diesel ground equipment off of it, as it’s basically really pure kerosene.
Wzrd1 @ 43
Could this be an example of “jobsworth”* aka the people who notice are not authorised to make the necessary decisions, and their bosses in the hierarchy don’t care, or have turned off their cellphones?
A Brit term meaning “if I do anything about it, I could lose my job for by-passing my boss”.
wzrd1says
birgerjohansson, so garlic, onion, greens. Hell, the only thing I don’t shoehorn those into is cookies and cakes and I’ve been tempted.
I have baked the lot of them into bread before.
Still, it’s nice to see research confirmed. Far too little gets replicated.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, who was a top lobbyist for failed crypto exchange FTX, considered purchasing the island nation of Nauru in the Pacific to create a fortified apocalypse bunker state, a lawsuit filed in Delaware bankruptcy court shows.
Gabe Bankman-Fried was looking at buying Nauru in the “event where 50%-99.99% of people die” to protect his philanthropic allies and create a genetically enhanced human species, according to the suit filed Thursday by attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, which is seeking to recover billions of dollars following the collapse of FTX…
When the American Hotel converted into a tourist hotel, its long-term residents lost not just their affordable housing but the creative community that long thrived in the iconic building.
Jaime Colindres’ third-floor room at the American Hotel in Los Angeles was tiny, but in it he painted expansive scenes of the American West on salvaged pieces of wood. Guitar sounds filled the halls, and neighbors kept their doors open. Some residents landed there when the city’s ruthless rental market slammed its doors on them, but they quickly soaked up the creative soul that creaked and hummed, rattled and swelled through the battered hotel.
That was 10 years ago.
The American is now a boutique tourist hotel in L.A.’s downtown Arts District. Nearly all of its longtime residents have been replaced. But the culprit is not gentrification. It’s the city’s failure to enforce its own laws to preserve affordable housing.
A 2008 city ordinance sought to protect residential hotels like the American. Residential hotels often offer single-room dwellings and are sometimes the only housing that elderly, disabled and low-income people can afford. […]
The city recently announced it would investigate all 21 hotels for violations of the law and review the resources needed to improve enforcement. “We are asking for a report on how this happened and recommendations for ensuring this does not happen again,” said Zach Seidl, a spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass.
But the city’s action comes too late for some. The American’s unhindered conversion into guest rooms and suites upended the lives of many tenants who called it home. Their stories illustrate the impact that L.A.’s failure to preserve affordable housing has had on the city’s low-income residents.
[…] The 118-year-old hotel was a hotbed of creativity in part because its low rents gave artists the freedom to focus on their craft. For about $500 a month, most tenants got rooms that were barely big enough to fit their beds, with bathrooms at the end of the hall. The hotel was a place where people turned when they had nowhere to go. Once there, however, they joined a community that many embraced. […]
The State Department has signed off on the sale of air-to-air missiles to Germany, in a deal worth an estimated $2.9 billion.
Berlin would receive 969 AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) and related equipment, according to a Wednesday statement from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the Pentagon arm that handles foreign military sales and transfers…
Russian sabotage units tried unsuccessfully to cross the Ukrainian border into Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts, Lieutenant General Serhii Naiev said on July 21.
“The Russian Federation does not cease trying to find weak points in our defense in the Chernihiv and Sumy directions,” the general wrote on Telegram.
“A penetration of sabotage groups at the border was recorded, but all attempts were unsuccessful.” …
The Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts lie at Ukraine’s northern border with Russia. Both of them were invaded and partially occupied during Russia’s initial onslaught in February 2022, but the invading forces withdrew in April after the Kremlin’s failure to take Kyiv…
A federal judge has ruled that an Arizona law limiting how close people can get to recording law enforcement is unconstitutional, citing infringement against a clearly established right to film police doing their jobs.
The ruling Friday from U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi permanently blocks enforcement of the law that he suspended last year.
The Republican-backed law was signed by former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in July 2022 but enthusiasm for the restrictions faded and legislators refused an opportunity to defend the law during an initial court suspension. Republican state Sen. John Kavanagh, who sponsored the measure, has said he was unable to find an outside group to defend the legislation…
Square Roots, an indoor “smart farm” co-owned by Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal, has closed down four of its five locations and laid off most of its employees on Tuesday. The farming startup opened in 2016, producing herbs, greens, and salad mixes using artificial light in an indoor environment before distributing the produce to local and regional grocery stores.
A former employee at the Grands Rapids location told Business Insider that the staff was notified mid-shift on Tuesday to drop what they were doing and tune in for a Zoom meeting where they were informed production would halt immediately. They were informed there would be layoffs and those affected would receive an email shortly…
[…] ’ve discussed the reasons Ukraine has failed to deliver a quick death blow to Russian forces in its current counteroffensive. That doesn’t mean Ukraine has failed. It just means that it has had to shift tactics, and it is slower going. But they are still putting severe pressure on the Russian lines, slowly pushing forward.
In short, Ukraine hoped that a show of force would quickly collapse Russian lines and break their fighting spirit. That never happened. The same weapons that have bedeviled Russian offensive actions—mines, drones, artillery, and anti-tank guided missiles—did a number on Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine has also been hampered by insufficient combined arms training, so much so that they ignored the greatest advantage of their new Western gear—night vision capabilities—and attacked during daylight, in full sight of the enemy. And even so, they still couldn’t pull it off. Combined arms is tough, and it was unrealistic to think they could learn it over a few months.
Yet there is a big difference between the Russian and Ukrainian failures. Russia, to this day, continues to suffer major losses as it is slow to learn from its battlefield disasters. Ukraine has had one big loss (early on, on the road to Robotyne), and a smaller one a week or so ago, and that’s it. Rather than follow up failure with more failure, Ukraine is quickly evolving and adapting.
For one, that means no more massed armor. It’s just too difficult to get through that network of mines, drones, missiles, and artillery. Instead, Ukraine is relying more heavily on nimble infantry, hand-clearing minefields, clearing Russian trenches and fortified tree lines, and using artillery and tank fire to support those efforts. It’s not maneuver warfare, but it seems to be getting the job done. We’re not seeing an endless parade of videos of destroyed Ukrainian gear nor massive Ukrainian casualties. Every time Russian propagandists recycle images and video of one of the two battlefield losses, it means Ukraine is doing something right.
As of now, there are three active zones, broadly speaking. In the southeast, Ukraine is pushing in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk oblasts in three separate directions: [map at the link]
The left arrow aims toward Melitopol, which is the most strategic city in the entire map, and Russia knows it. Look at all those layers upon layers upon layers of defenses on the way to Melitopol […] And as of yet, Ukraine doesn’t seem to have reached any of those yellow lines anywhere.
Ukraine advanced a handful of settlements in this direction […] Though if Russian Telegram is to be believed (I wouldn’t put too much stock in it), Ukraine made some incremental gains along this advance overnight.
The middle arrow is in the direction of Robotyne, where Ukraine’s two big losses were recorded. Yet Ukraine persists, and Russian Telegram was replete with reports of a major Ukrainian attack in this direction—heroically repelled, of course. This is the second most strategic direction, as it’s on the way to Tokmak, circled in yellow in the map above. Russia has literally surrounded it with defenses given its importance.
Why is Tokmak important? Most of Russia’s logistics in this entire front run through Tokmak. RO37 did one of his explainers about Tokmak. Go check it out.
Ukraine doesn’t have to reach Tokmak to seriously threaten Russian logistics, however. Measuring from the northern edge of Robotyne to the southern corner of Tokmak, the distance is 27 kilometers. Tokmak is already within GMLRS rocket artillery range, but those rockets are scarce and expensive at over $100,000 each. But tube artillery firing M795 rounds have a range of … drum roll please … 30 kilometers! Well not regular cheap rounds, but extended range 155mm shells, reportedly costing around $8,000 each, are still a fraction of the cost of a GMLRS rocket. Much of Tokmak’s utility as a logistics hub could be significantly degraded by Ukrainian tube artillery sitting a couple of kilometers behind a Ukrainian-held Robotyne.
The third, most eastern approach on the map above, is toward the port city of Mariupol. This is also Ukraine’s most promising effort. Not only have Ukrainian forces made some respectable headway, but as you can see from the map, this direction features only a single major defensive line.
Further north from this map, Ukraine is making headway both north and south of Bakhmut, and has occupied the commanding heights around the western part of the city.
Just like I never understood why Russia expended so much effort in capturing the town, I don’t get why Ukraine is expending effort in retaking it. It’s strategically unimportant. My guess is that Ukraine is advancing around here simply because they can. Russia has heavily defended the southeast, so by threatening Russia’s beloved Bakhmut, taken at a frightful cost, perhaps Ukraine hopes to pull in Russian reservers.
Moving up even further to the north, Russia has been going on the offensive around Kreminna and toward Kupiansk (remember that town?). The effort has been serious enough that it has likely required Ukraine to commit forces it would rather use in the counteroffensive. War can often be a game of chess.
New York Times: “Zelensky Pushes for Way to Ship Grain Through Black Sea”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was pushing forward with diplomatic efforts on Saturday to reopen the Black Sea to Ukraine’s grain shipments, strategizing with NATO’s chief a day after discussing with the Turkish president the collapse of a deal that allowed ships to bypass Russia’s blockade.
Moscow pulled out of the yearlong agreement, a rare accord between Russia and Ukraine brokered by Turkey and the United Nations. Efforts to revive it have been plunged into doubt, as Russia has pummeled Ukrainian ports, striking grain stores and other infrastructure, and has vowed it will treat commercial ships in the Black Sea as potentially carrying military cargo.
“Due to Russia’s actions, the world is once again on the brink of a food crisis,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on Twitter late Friday. “A total of 400 million people in many countries of Africa and Asia are at risk of starvation. Together, we must avert a global food crisis.”
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been a key mediator between Russia and Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began last February, standing out from his NATO allies by keeping up friendly relations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Erdogan is expected to meet with Mr. Putin next month.
[…] On Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said that he and the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, had discussed “the priority and future steps necessary for unblocking and sustainable operation of the Black Sea grain corridor.”
Russia has said that it would renew the deal, but only if other nations lift sanctions that they imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine, a move that is unlikely. Moscow says that the deal has not been fair to Russia and that its producers have been forced to sell grain and other agricultural products at below-market prices.
On Friday, Mr. Erdogan told reporters that Russia wanted the grain corridor to remain, “but has some expectations from Western countries, and they need to take action.” He said he would discuss the issue with Mr. Putin on the phone and when they meet next month.
[…] Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Friday, accused Russia of “weaponizing food supplies” and said it would be “very, very difficult” for Ukraine to resume shipments of grain and other food products.
Tensions are also heightened in the region after an attack on Monday on the Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, killed two civilians. Crimea was a key staging ground when Mr. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and remains a key logistics hub for its war. Kyiv has made increasingly bold strikes on the peninsula, though it has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the bridge attack.
On Saturday, a drone attack on an ammunition depot on the peninsula prompted the authorities to evacuate a three-mile radius and briefly suspend some transportation, the Moscow-installed regional governor said Saturday. […] Ukraine’s military confirmed a strike, saying it had destroyed an oil depot and warehouses.
In a video address to the Aspen Security Forum, an annual national security conference, Mr. Zelensky said on Friday that the Kerch Strait Bridge was a legitimate target for Ukraine and that it should be destroyed.
“The goal is to return the entire Crimea, because this is our sovereign territory,” he said. “The Kerch bridge is not some small logistical road. It is used to deliver ammunition and militarize the Crimean Peninsula.”
[…] A cameraman from a German news outlet, Deutsche Welle, was hit and injured after Russia fired cluster munitions at a training camp near Druzhkivka in the Donbas region, according to a Deutsche Welle news release. One Ukrainian soldier died in the attack, and others were seriously injured. The cameraman, Ievgen Shylko, was in stable condition after being treated at a Ukrainian hospital.
Russian propagandists aren’t subtle, are they? Here’s the head of RT Margarita Simonyan: [video at the link: "All our hope is in a famine." "the famine will start now, and they will lift the sanctions, and be friends with us, because they will realize it is necessary."]
Note, this “famine” isn’t in Europe. Ukrainian grain destined to European markets get there via rail. This famine is in Africa.
Russia wants Africans to starve, because then, maybe, the West will cave to Russian cruelty.
The problem for Russia is that the West doesn’t actually care about Africa. [??] That’s been the problem all along.
Russia certainly never learned the adage that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Their propaganda isn’t about working together with allies for the common betterment of all. For Russia, that’s weakness. They’re all about threats and nuclear weapons blah blah blah. For example, one of them got the brilliant idea that the West would get the message that Russia isn’t a joke of a nation if it—get this—blows up the North Pole.
[Video of Russian military expert proposing to blow up the North Pole.] The exchange is actually quite hilarious:
First guy: We could demonstrate [nuclear weapons] at the North Pole.
Second guy: In order to win this war, you are proposing that we blow up the North Pole?
First guy: Why are you twisting my words?
And that wasn’t all. Here’s another hilarious exchange:
First guy: We should move on to non-traditional ways of using nuclear weapons, including heavy duty nuclear warheads.
Second guy: Using them? Using nuclear weapons?
First guy: I dd not say using them.
Second guy: You said “using them”
First guy: You obviously misread it. I was not talking about using them.
Of course he said “using them”! These jokers have nothing.
But maybe they should be careful. A report by a member of the State Duma (Russia’s puppet legislature) calls for authorities to “take repressive measures against those who are insane and with whom it is impossible to negotiate.” It warns of “a militia of people who know how to hold a gun is being formed around Girkin-Strelkov.”
The report was written before the Wagner mutiny, but that was all the excuse necessary to spring the plan into action, which led to Igor Girkin’s arrest this week. But here’s the thing, the report doesn’t stop there, but urges action against propagandists who are “whipping up critical hysteria.” Among those? Simonyan, the head of RT who was cheering mass famine up above. Also mentioned is Vladimir Solovyov, who hosts both a daily radio show and evening TV show and is regularly translated for his fascist-eliminationist rhetoric.
These are all figures who have built large followings by promoting and criticizing the war effort from the nationalist right. As the report notes, “Liberals and hipsters are demoralised and have also largely left the territory of the Russian Federation and cannot play a significant role” in undermining Russian society. [LOL] It is the nationalists who are the greatest danger: “For example, in the programme ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ there is every time essentially a gang rape of the authorities. The speakers are constantly kicking the authorities for various shortcomings in their activities.”
Most of Ukraine’s grain is being shipped to China. Russia really starves the PRC at its own peril.
——————–
Hardly starvation of the PRC. China has other options. Just like their opportunism with bargain-priced Russian petroleum exports, China has been taking advantage of fire sale pricing. Africa and the Middle East are much more impacted by interruption of grain sales from Ukraine.
——————-
Just what we need for more amusement, a bunch of Girkin followers doing their own little insurrection bit. Maybe a couple Molotov cocktails tossed at the Kremlin for good measure.
The longer Ukraine grinds it out the more likely the Russians will collapse somewhere. And the more likely unrest in Russia increases to much more critical levels
———————-
My interpretation was that Konstantin Sivkov WAS taking global warming into consideration: he talked about developing and demonstrating “heavy-duty weapons capable of causing serious geophysical repercussions.” That is what he meant by “non-traditional ways of using nuclear weapons”. The “demonstration” would consist of setting off a 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon at the North Pole to say to the world, “If you don’t do what we want, we can do this again and again, and single-handedly raise global temperature by as many degrees as we want. Do you think Putin cares if the average temperature in Moscow, which gets snow for six or seven months a year, goes up by 3°C?” Sivkov was suggesting that Russia should hold the whole planet to ransom.
And Sivkov is not just some random crackpot. His views are representative of the thinking of the Russian military-scientific community, and of Putin.
John Moralessays
Those read much more like opinion pieces than like updates about the war.
birgerjohanssonsays
An idea to ridicule Paludan and the other koran-burners in Scandinavia without compromising about freedom of expression:
On April 1st, burn a world atlas outside the embassy of Burkina Faso to protest “the difficulty of saying ‘Ouagadougou’ rapidly”. Also, burn ‘Ulysses’ outside the Irish embassy because “it is impossible to figure out who the murderer is, and the detective never turns up”.
birgerjohanssonsays
(If it is not obvious I have not slept for two nights)
Re @ 65 – burn a copy of a H C Andersen book because ‘Danes burn books for bloody silly reasons”.
And burn ‘Finnegans Wake’ because “stream of consciousness’ is how Boris and Trump arrived to their political agendas… like ‘do something about COVID I want a sandwich oops Teletubbies are on the TV”.
birgerjohanssonsays
Goddammit.
Phoenix is so hot people who fall down on the pavement and are too frail to get up immediately get third-degree burns.
Concrete and asphalt get really, really hot.
.
30,000 people are being evacuated as wildfires ravage Rhodes.
wzrd1says
So, lemme get the last part of @ 63 right. Global warming is because of the 3993 warheads detonated, at a total yield of 635 megatons. Talk about massive lag!
Oddly, the largest bomb, Tsar Bomba didn’t warm the planet worth spit, but somehow 100 megaton devices will magically warm up the world if detonated at the north pole. Sounds a lot like a rather shitty science fiction novel I read, where the nukes were to completely fracture the entire northern icecap, because of magical resonance and hand waving.
Just more nuclear saber rattling, trying to get cowards to fear the almighty nuke that can blow up the entire planet into an asteroid belt. Which is well, impossible. All of the reachable fissile material on the planet couldn’t even manage to noticeably strip the atmosphere, let alone have a global physical impact. For large yield weapons, fallout becomes a factor, but nowhere as insane as the media makes them out to be, as you don’t get more mass out of a warhead, you get less and most of that mass won’t be exceptionally hot due to a low neutron cross section. Salted weapons being a lot different, such as cobalt-60 devices, but if that arrives into a NATO nation, it’s an act of war and it doesn’t take all that much to machine a tamper to reply in kind.
Just more of the cowardly bully threatening to hit the victim, who is expected to always cower. Entertaining, given how badly Russian equipment has been underperforming against Western equipment, despite troops using it who are inexperienced in using it to its fullest potential.
Guess we have to surrender, as people fear fiction and threats. So, if I threaten to detonate a large explosive over Yellowstone caldera, will the United States surrender to me and make me emperor?
whheydtsays
Re: wzrd1 @ #68…
I think the idea is to use a nuke over the high arctic to melt the ice, which will decrease the local albedo and heat the arctic ocean faster. Mind you, I may be reading too much logic into the actual plans.
Ukraine has developed and is now testing its own medium-range air defense systems, Verkhovna Rada official Yehor Cherniev said during a televised broadcast on July 22.
“We have the latest air defense systems. They are now of medium range,” Cherniev said. He added that testing of the anti-aircraft systems is underway and “quite successful.” …
Cherniev declined to give a name to the Ukrainian weapons, citing ongoing testing, but said the missiles are “ready.”
Cherniev also said that Ukraine is developing the production of its own mines and shells, which will be “three times cheaper” than those purchased from other nations…
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb announced that he and his team discovered fragments of material at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that may potentially be linked to aliens.
The fragments “could be a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological gadget,” Loeb told CBS News.
But experts who have been searching for alien life for many years told Insider they aren’t sold on the idea that Loeb’s findings represent evidence of alien intelligence…
“I like wild and crazy ideas — they make us all think — occasionally one of them might be right. But I’m extremely skeptical about this one,” said Dan Werthimer, chief technologist of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley…
Loeb’s team found 50 sub-millimeter-sized “spherules” that he said he thinks came from an interstellar meteoroid, which he named IM1, that crashed into waters near Papua New Guinea in 2014.
Both the speed of the meteor and the composition of the spherules is why Loeb thinks they may be of possible alien origin. But experts aren’t convinced.
Loeb went fishing the seabed with a magnet.
First, he would have to establish that the spherules are extraterrestrial, or even extra-solar. This might be possible by examining the elemental and isotopic composition, but he hasn’t done it yet.
Supposing he succeeded at that, the next step would be trying to establish that the spherules are “technology” and not a random meteorite. Good luck with that one.
“As I look at the data, there are just a lot of unknowns,” said Douglas Vakoch, president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), an organization that searches for signs of extraterrestrial life by transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars…
I have never heard of this organization and don’t how seriously to take it.
Some experts are still skeptical. Monica Grady, professor of planetary and space sciences at The Open University, wrote in The Conversation that spherules from space have been found at the bottom of the ocean as far back as 1872 by the HMS Challenger.
Nowadays, it can be difficult to tell the difference between spherules and products of industrial pollution…
An Iowa man who did jail time for taking part in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol will be incarcerated again after pleading guilty to secretly recording women in a tanning salon he operated.
Daryl Johnson, 52, of St. Ansgar was charged along with his son Daniel for taking part in the Capitol riot after officials said they entered the building and helped break through a police line keeping another door closed to more intruders. Johnson eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced in June 2022 to 30 days of incarceration…
Johnson’s arrest in January was on state charges alleging that, while running the iSun Tan 24/7 in Clear Lake, he secretly filmed women who were changing clothes or using the tanning beds.
Johnson ultimately was charged with offenses related to multiple women, and pleaded guilty to four charges of invasion of privacy, an aggravated misdemeanor. On Tuesday, he was sentenced in Cerro Gordo County to consecutive terms of 45 days in jail on each charge, for a total of six months. He also must pay nearly $4,000 in fines and sexual abuse surcharges, and must register as a sex offender, according to court filings…
wzrd1says
whheydt @ 69, well that sounds fine to me, Russia would expend most of its arsenal before it made even one hole. We’re talking average thickness of 3 – 4 meters of ice, with 20 meter thick ridges. All well below freezing to nearly CO2 condensation temperatures. Meanwhile, everyone would see Russian bomber aircraft or missiles heading into the arctic, which puts the US DEFCON to 1. A detonation could be interpreted as a defective weapon that was part of an attack.
The Russians aren’t idiots, only those speakers are.
Reginald Selkirk @ 71, not particularly worried about a planarian worm that’s a predator of earthworms. I’m not likely to eat the invasive worm and it certainly couldn’t mistake me as an earthworm.
Still, since it’s invasive, if I see any, I’ll happily capture and kill them.
@ 72, the iron spherules could be residue from meteorites, but one can quite literally wash the same off of one’s roof with a hose and collect them with a magnet. Doesn’t indicate the source and especially, doesn’t indicate a specific meteorite or even just falling dust from space. A chemical and isotopic analysis is needed before one can consider crediting the claim.
METI was founded in 2015 and for reasons unknowable, has indeed sent signals to several red dwarf stars and to one G-type 94 ly away. They also do optical SETI. Color me dubious… But, thus far, they’ve found a bucket full of nothing and haven’t made any bizarre claims. Their response is heartening, but sending signals to stars whose habitable zone is a veritable radiation bath undermines any trust in judgement.
John Moralessays
Not the best channel, but it does have some good stuff.
Russian tennis player Vera Zvonareva has been banned from entering Poland, the country’s Ministry of the Interior says. She was to participate in a WTA 250 tournament in Warsaw.
A communique on the ministry website says the Border Guard on Friday prevented entry by the former world No.2, who flew in from Belgrade on a French visa. She remained in the transit zone of the Warsaw airport and on Saturday flew to Podgorica, Montenegro.
Zvonareva, currently ranked 60th, was to take part in the PNB Paribas Warsaw Open tournament that begins Monday.
The 38-year-old player was still on the event’s participants’ list on Sunday. The WTA said in a statement it was evaluating the situation.
Poland, which supports Ukraine in its war against Russia’s aggression, said that Zvonareva was on a banned list and has not been allowed into the country for reasons of state and public security…
Elon Musk said on Sunday he was looking to change Twitter’s logo, tweeting: “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds”.
In a post on the site at 12:06 a.m. ET (0406 GMT), the social media platform’s billionaire owner added: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow.” …
Under Musk’s tumultuous tenure since he bought Twitter in October, the company has changed its business name to X Corp, reflecting the billionaire’s vision to create a “super app” like China’s WeChat…
Fascinating story with some very disturbing impications here via Aussie ABC news :
Now a chance rediscovery from that operation (Project IceWorm -ed.) could rewrite the history of the north-west Greenland ice sheet, and our understanding of its stability. Published in Science today, the findings indicate a region of north-west Greenland was completely ice free 400,000 years ago when temperatures in the region were similar to global average temperatures today. That has huge implications for our understanding of how the Greenland ice sheet will respond to climate change, said study co-author Paul Bierman, a geologist from the University of Vermont. … (snip) .. In 1959 the US Army began building a network of tunnels under the ice in Greenland’s remote north-west.The tunnels were to house a military base, and form an under-ice labyrinth connected by railway tracks. … (snip).. The US Army plan, known as Project Iceworm, was to stash nuclear weapons in the ice tunnels, which were within striking distance of the Soviet Union.
In the event of nuclear war with the Soviets, the weapons could be moved undetected under the ice via the railway, popping up to launch in a kind of nuclear Whac-A-Mole.
The staging post was Camp Century, an under-ice base powered by a portable nuclear reactor, that the US claimed was purely an Arctic research station. In the end, around 3 kilometres of tunnels were built — falling far short of the ambitious hundreds to thousands of kilometres slated in the plan. There was a kitchen, dormitories, cafeteria, theatre, chapel, and library, as well as the power station. The nuclear weapons never made it, nor was permission sought from the Danish government to go ahead with the nuclear plan, declassified documents show. But some good science did actually get done.
StevoR @ 81
I do not recall his much the oceans would rise from a Greenland Ica collapse but at the very least Florida, much of the US easy coast, major chunk of the Netherlands, Bangladesh, much of coastal China and India will get submerged .
Because a few congressmen are easy to bribe.
birgerjohanssonsays
Re @ 82.
If you have read the Harry Dresden books, they had a position called “Darkstaff” authorised to remove threats with extreme prejudice.
I like the idea of removing corrupt politicians and officials in as messy a way as Harry Dresden did to his enemies…
wzrd1says
@ 81, Iceworm left behind one hell of a mess. The nuclear reactor was decommissioned early, it having multiple leaks, radioactive waste initially left behind. We eventually had to clean up the mess, once the Danish government found out and well, they weren’t happy.
Discovered: Glacial ice flows, at times quite rapidly, as the tunnels suddenly wouldn’t line up and quickly would be cut off by part of the ice moving more quickly, resulting in tunnels becoming dead ends.
The plan was shelved after finally realizing how unworkable the entire thing was, with some planning for a lunar missile base conducted and as rapidly shelved as even more unworkable. Apparently, not only were their no ice maids in Greenland, there were no moon maids on the moon. Or something.
The Cold War breathed life into all manner of hare brained schemes. Thankfully, none of the more ambitious survived even the briefest suggestion of an introduction to reality intact. Remember Ronnie Raygun’s Rods from God, where all they had to do is just drop tungsten telephone poles and hand wave them from orbit precisely onto a target?
Orbiting x-ray lasers that never worked and could never be aimed even if they could get the damned things to work?
Particle beam weapons? Where’s my ray gun, dammit?! Oh, there it is, at the particle accelerator, where it belongs.
What seems to be incessantly overlooked, but finally drawing attention is that everything isn’t linear or even on a simple curve. There are multiple interacting systems, which if disrupted, disrupt other systems and nature loathes disrupted equilibrium and tends to have out of scale reactions attempting to balance unimaginable amounts of energy over quite broad areas.
Oh well, soon we’ll get shallower sections of oceans becoming exceptionally fizzy. I’m sure some asshole will try to sell that fizzy and flammable ocean water as a drink.
An alien spaceship crash landing cannot be ruled out as the cause of the strange pointy protrusions found on Mars, scientists have said.
In April, Nasa’s Curiosity Rover photographed what appear to be rows of spikes, plates and wedges protruding from rocks on the floor of the 96-mile (154 km) Gale Crater…
“Can’t be ruled out” – maybe we should raise our standard of evidence jsut a bit.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts.
Contrary to claims, Pfizer plant damaged by tornado didn’t hold COVID vaccines
CLAIM: A Pfizer warehouse in North Carolina damaged by a tornado was stocked with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine.
THE FACTS: Pfizer does not manufacture or store its COVID-19 vaccine or treatment for the disease at the facility, a company representative told the AP. The tornado on Wednesday ripped the roof of the drugmaker’s factory near Rocky Mount, North Carolina — potentially disrupting drug supplies at U.S. hospitals. But the news quickly gave rise to false claims online that the twister had struck a site specifically storing doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine — which has been the center of persistent misinformation since its release in December 2020. “BREAKING: A Pfizer Warehouse that was stocked with COVID-19 vaccines was just destroyed by a tornado in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina,” reads one popular tweet. The plant in question is not used to manufacture or store any doses of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, said Pfizer spokesperson Pam Eisele. Nor is the site used to make or store Paxlovid, the company’s pill used to treat those who get sick with the disease. Instead, the plant produces injectables like drugs used in IV infusions or that are delivered under the skin or into patient muscles. Some examples include anesthesia drugs and anti-infectives, typically used to treat things such as fungal infections. Pfizer has said all employees were safely evacuated and accounted for, and that it is still assessing damage.
— Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in New Jersey contributed this report.
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Deadly mosquitoes did not swarm Baltimore music festival
CLAIM: Video shows deadly mosquitoes released at a Baltimore music festival.
THE FACTS: While concertgoers were swarmed by flying insects at one point during an African American music festival last month, concert goers said they were not bitten by mosquitoes but gnats. Experts said swarming mosquitoes would behave differently than the bugs in the video. The Baltimore Health Department also said no insect-borne illnesses were reported following the event. Social media users are nevertheless sharing a video clip they claim shows hordes of killer skeeters dumped on unwitting concertgoers in Maryland’s largest city. The clip pans across a crowd of revelers at a park, many of whom are vigorously waving hats, blankets and other personal items to try and shoo away the teeny pests. “Helicopter released deadly mosquitoes in Baltimore, MD AFRAM 2023,” the text on the video reads. The idea could have been pulled straight from the history books: a Cold War-era military program called Operation Big Buzz involved dropping thousands of mosquitoes across George and Florida in order to see whether the insects could be used in disease warfare. But the airborne invasion at the Baltimore concert wasn’t a swarm of mosquitoes, some of which are known to transmit diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue and Zika, which can be fatal if left untreated. Concert attendees described the bugs as gnats, which are small flying insects that tend to travel en masse. “Y’all can deal with the gnats. Y’all dealt with the cicadas, you can handle the gnats,” Mayor Brandon Scott implored attendees from the stage at one point. “Calm down. Calm down.” Beige Ojai, a Maryland resident who shared a video of the swarm on TikTok, told the AP that the gnats filled her hair and covered her arms but didn’t leave any bites. “They were stuck onto our skin, flying down people’s shirts, flying into people’s hair,” Ojai recounted in an email Tuesday. “They were completely stuck onto my sisters’ eyelashes— her eyelashes were filled with gnats! ” The city health department also hasn’t received any reports of bug-borne illness following the June 17 event, according to Arinze Ifekauche, an agency spokesperson. “I’m assuming they were the normal bugs you’d encounter in a City Park,” he wrote in an email. “We do know definitively that they were not killer bugs dropped from a helicopter— as evidenced by the lack of deaths from said suspected bugs.” What’s more, insect experts say the swarms captured on video aren’t indicative of mosquitoes. Michael Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland, suggested they could be “eye gnats,” which are attracted to the face and eyes. Those gnats breed in lawns like the grassy field at Druid Hill Park where the Juneteenth celebration took place.
— Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.
——————–
The DOJ did not announce that international child sex trafficking is no longer a concern
CLAIM: The U.S. Department of Justice said international child sex trafficking is not an area of concern.
THE FACTS: The Justice Department has made no such declaration. The agency acknowledged that it recently updated language on its website, including removing a lengthy passage about international child sex trafficking from one page. But the DOJ says the issue is more thoroughly covered elsewhere on the site, namely as part of its recently released national strategy on preventing child exploitation. The agency also cited several recent cases it prosecuted that dealt with international sex trafficking. Social media users, however, are claiming the nation’s primary law enforcement agency is de-emphasizing efforts to combat international child sex trafficking because it removed a subsection in its website titled “ International Sex Trafficking of Minors.” […] “Wow!!! And did you know that Joe’s DOJ just said that ‘International Sex Trafficking of Minors’ was not an area of concern and removed it from their list of offenses that deserve a high degree of attention?,” wrote one Instagram user in a post. But there’s nothing to suggest the agency has removed international sex trafficking from any list of high priority offenses or pulled back on its efforts to crackdown on the scourge. “Child sex trafficking” remains one of the “subject areas” highlighted on the webpage for the Child Exploitation and Obscenity unit, but it no longer distinguishes between “international” and “domestic” offenses. The website update also comes as the DOJ has released a new strategy to address child sex trafficking, as well as other forms of child exploitation. In an emailed statement, the DOJ said it continues to place a “very high priority on and devote substantial resources” to fighting child exploitation and sex trafficking abroad and at home. The agency cited several recent prosecutions involving international child sex trafficking found in press releases for the Child Exploitation and Obscenity unit. Submitted to Congress last month, the DOJ’s “ National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction ” is meant to lay out long-range goals for reducing child exploitation, including budget and funding priorities, a review of past and ongoing investigations and prosecutions, grant programs, policy, research and other related efforts. A series of detailed reports focused on specific areas of child exploitation was also released with the new national strategy, the DOJ noted. The agency said the documents, when taken together, represent the “most up to date information” about the complex, ever-evolving challenges around child exploitation. Alicia Peters, an anthropology professor at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, who focuses on human trafficking, […] noted that people are trafficked not just for sex but also to work in industries ranging from domestic work to agriculture and manufacturing.
— Philip Marcelo
———————
Florida isn’t going to be hit by a massive sandstorm seen in footage from the Suez Canal
CLAIM: A video of ships being engulfed by an enormous sandstorm shows weather that is heading toward U.S. states including Florida and New York.
THE FACTS: The video shows a June sandstorm in Egypt as it blew over the Suez Canal. Although dust from the Sahara Desert has reached Florida multiple times this summer — a common occurrence known as the Saharan Air Layer — the sandstorm in the video has nothing to do with this phenomenon, meteorologists told the AP. The video misrepresented by social media users includes two separate clips. In one, a monolithic plume of sand encroaches on a cargo ship that appears miniscule in comparison. The second shows the sand engulfing the boat from which the video is being filmed, until hardly anything is visible. “Sandstorm about to hit Florida,” reads a TikTok post that shared the footage. It had received approximately 1.1 million views as of Thursday. The video was also shared with the false claim on Facebook and Twitter, where some suggested it would hit New York as well. But the video shows a sandstorm in Egypt early last month as it hit the Suez Canal, and users are falsely conflating it with news about dust from the Sahara Desert that regularly crosses the North Atlantic this time of year. A Facebook user first posted a longer version of the footage on June 1 with the caption, “Sand Storm at Bitter Lake, Suez Egypt,” referring to the saltwater lake that is part of the canal. The user did not return a request for comment, but other social media posts support the accuracy of the caption. The same account shared a photo posted by another Facebook user of a container ship seen in the video. The latter user has shared multiple photos from aboard an oil and chemical tanker named “ Eva Usuki,” whose characteristics match the ship from which the video was filmed. For example, both have a large, central tan crane near a collection of blue barrels. The boat also flies under the flag of the Philippines, and people can be heard speaking in Tagalog in the background of the original footage. The Eva Usuki was in the Suez Canal on June 1, according to ship tracking data. Other news outlets reporting on the sandstorm also posted similarfootage at the time, showing different ships being engulfed by the cloud. Multiple meteorologists told the AP that this sandstorm did not and will not impact the U.S. And it has nothing to do with the Saharan Air Layer, a mass of extremely dry and dusty air that forms over the Sahara Desert and moves across the North Atlantic from late spring to early fall, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The video definitely showed a sandstorm, which definitely has a clear leading edge of dust that is at the ground and extends upward from there,” said Stephen Mullens, an assistant instructional professor of meteorology at the University of Florida. “What is coming across the Atlantic Ocean is still sand and dust, but we’d definitely not call it a sandstorm at all.”
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts.
The “LFG” film documentary highlighted the US Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay. They had tremendous financial odds stacked against them, forcing them to play far better than the men to get on equal footing. The Women’s Team filed a lawsuit, and the US Soccer Federation responded with outdated stereotypes as a defense, saying that men’s “skeletal structure, muscle composition” made them naturally superior players, which justified the high pay differential.
Being twice as good at something to be considered half as good as a man is a burden too often granted to women. Thankfully, at least when it comes to these gifted soccer players, it doesn’t seem to be that hard.
This past April, Florida joined Alabama, Missouri, and Indiana to become one of only four states that do not require a unanimous jury decision in death penalty sentencing. Now, only 8 out of 12 jurors are needed to send a person to Florida’s death row.
Since 1973, Florida has exonerated 30 people—17 Black people, eight white people, and five Latino people—sentenced to death for all charges related to the wrongful convictions that had put them on death row. With Gov. Ron DeSantis using Florida as an incubator for U.S. authoritarianism, the risk of the state executing an innocent person has only increased.
Like many other things in this country, capital punishment is used as a political cudgel. While Americans across the political spectrum increasingly oppose this barbaric practice, […] MAGA Republicans fight their unsubtle culture war battles, efforts to enact jury verdicts that are not unanimous in death penalty cases are re-emerging, threatening to plunge us back into a dark chapter of our history and exacerbating systemic injustices.
[…] the “moderate” right became increasingly intolerant of policing the violent far-right and instead steadily shifted resources into pursuing anti-war protestors or the illusory demons of antifa.
[…] The U.S. Constitution requires trials by jury to protect citizens from wrongful convictions. But juries do not guarantee justice. In Florida, 90% of death row exonerees were convicted by a jury that was not unanimous.
The lack of unanimous juries in a death penalty verdicts resurrect Jim Crow-era governance when such laws were explicitly written to oppress Black Americans systematically. When considered in total, it’s hard to see executions as little more than legalized lynchings. The death penalty is among this nation’s most significant failures. We cannot make it easier to condemn a person to death.
Let’s keep it 100: Sometimes, the accused is guilty. It’s a cruel, stomach-churning reality that people are capable of awful things. The reasons behind the actions don’t excuse the harm. However, retribution should never be mistaken for justice. […]
A new lawsuit filed in Wisconsin by a national law firm seeks to once again allow voters to return absentee ballots in drop boxes, a practice that was barred by the state Supreme Court last year following criticism by former President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit filed Thursday by the Elias Law Group comes less than two weeks before the Wisconsin Supreme Court flips from a conservative to liberal majority. Election law challenges like this one are among many issues the new liberal-controlled court is expected to rule on in the coming months.
The rules for voting in Wisconsin are of heightened interest given its place as one of a handful of battleground presidential states. Four of the past six presidential elections in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a percentage point, including the past two.
The 4-3 conservative majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in July 2022, just months before the midterm election, banned the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, which exploded in popularity in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump, who won Wisconsin in 2016 but lost it in 2020, has falsely alleged that absentee voting in the state is rife with fraud.
His defeat in Wisconsin has withstood two partial recounts, a nonpartisan audit, numerous lawsuits and a review by a conservative group.
The state Supreme Court, in its ruling last year, said that the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees elections in the state, did not have the authority to tell election clerks that drop boxes could be placed throughout their communities. The court limited drop boxes only to election clerks’ offices.
“By restricting Wisconsin voters’ options for returning their absentee ballots and having those ballots properly counted, the Drop Box Prohibition severely burdens the right to vote,” the lawsuit said in arguing that last year’s ruling should be overturned. “Without the opportunity to drop off their absentee ballots at drop boxes, voters must instead rely on the U.S. Postal Service — and its unsecured mailboxes — to deliver their absentee ballot and simply hope that the ballot arrives by election day.”
Supporters of the drop boxes have argued that they are a better option than mailing ballots because they go directly to the clerks and can’t be lost or delayed in transit.
The lawsuit also seeks to undo a requirement that a witness sign absentee ballots and that any problems with absentee ballots be corrected by the voter no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day. It argues that absentee voting is a right and not a privilege and that state law not recognizing that violates the Wisconsin Constitution.
The lawsuit was filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission by two liberal-leaning organizations, Priorities USA and the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, as well as a Dane County resident. It will start in Dane County circuit court, but could make its way to the state Supreme Court which will have a 4-3 liberal majority starting Aug. 1. […]
Speaking at the Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank whose cadre of “experts” includes the former guy’s Christian nationalist Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Paul Marshall, whose 2002 book God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics was described as “an indispensable guide for Christians searching for a way to interject their religious convictions into their political actions,” Lt Gen Richard Moore, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs, had the perfect venue to espouse his Christian nationalist opinion that the U.S. military’s use of AI will be more ethical than that of other nations because:
“Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society and we have a moral compass.”
[splutter, choke, gasp, laugh]
Yes, this fine “Judeo-Christian” (a term used by Christian nationalists so they don’t sound antisemitic) 3-star U.S. military general just exemplified what the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has seen for many years — that Christian nationalism goes all the way up to the highest ranks in our military.
This was Lt Gen Moore’s entire only-Christians-can-be-moral statement:
“What will the adversary do? It depends who plays by the rules of warfare and who doesn’t. There are societies that have a very different foundation than ours. Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does, and there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed, and we’ll have to be ready for that.”
[video at the link]
Imagine if you will (yeah, we’re in Rod Serling territory), an AI model trained on the Bible, a book full of violence and vengeance in which God on several occasions called for genocide, like in Deuteronomy 20:16-17, which says, “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them,” or this gem from the destruction of Jericho in Joshua 6: “Now the city shall be doomed by the Lord to destruction, it and all who are in it.“
Or will the military’s AI be trained with materials like the “Jesus Loves Nukes” presentation that MRFF put a stop to back in 2011, in which the Air Force was training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passage after passage from the New Testament.
Putting aside how, exactly, the military’s AI will be trained to make “Judeo-Christian” decisions, in publicly making his statement that America is a “Judeo-Christian society” and, thus, somehow morally superior, Lt Gen Moore was not only in clear violation of the truth, but of Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.12, which unambiguously states (emphasis added):
“Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for their own free exercise of religion, including individual expressions of religious beliefs, and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion. They must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be officially endorsing or disapproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief.”
Retired Air Force Brig Gen and MRFF Advisory Board member Marty France had a few thoughts on Lt Gen Moore’s outrageous Christian nationalist statement:
“Are our bombs more ethical? Our nukes? The implication here–stated without the slightest disguise, or sense of hubris–is that ‘other’ societies have no moral compass, no values, no restraint at all in how they would use power and weapons. I would guess that many of the victims of America’s Judeo-Christian weapons would disagree. Indigenous Americans? Vietnamese villagers napalmed in their huts? Iraqi and Afghan civilians mistakenly killed in drone attacks? A country invaded on the pretense of having WMDs? Does our Judeo-Christian societal foundation console the dead and their survivors because ‘we’ have values and presume that they did not? Comments by White Christian Nationalists in uniform like Lt Gen Moore undermine our international standing and paint us as colonialist elites that can’t be trusted as allies and are a threat to any nation that doesn’t look and think as he does.
“And, by the way, Putin claimed the same moral high ground of ‘Christian Values’ when he invaded Ukraine with the endorsement of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. How about those “Christian values?” Don’t forget as well that the inscription on the belt buckle of most German Wehrmacht Nazi soldiers was ‘Gott Mit Uns.’”
MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein also had a bit to say about the Christian nationalist Lt Gen:
“The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) is demanding that the Department of Defense (DoD) immediately, publicly and aggressively bring General Court Martial charges against Lt. General Richard Moore for one of the most flagrant and brazen Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) criminal violations of Air Force Instruction 1-1, Section 2.12 that MRFF has ever seen!
“And let me make one thing DAMN clear to everyone right now from MRFF, as specific subject matter experts in this EXACT type of extremist religious warfare in our U.S. military; when wretched fundamentalist Christian bigots, like this hateful, repugnant Lt. General Moore, mention the deceptive term ‘Judeo-Christian’ society those are mere thinly veiled, fundamentalist Christian code words for ONLY “Christian” society!
“Again, ONLY CHRISTIAN SOCIETY!!
“Moore’s undeniably repugnant, fundamentalist Christian nationalist rhetoric MUST be answered swiftly by DoD to stem the tide of Moore’s vomitus spewing which WILL generate rampant destruction of good order, morale, discipline, and unit cohesion within the ranks of our American armed forces.
“DoD Secretary Lloyd Austin made it crystal clear when he assumed his present position of leadership that he wanted to be the lodestar for racial and religious diversity at DoD. So DO SOMETHING now, Mr. Secretary!!
“Lt. General Moore’s filthy statements of fundamentalist Christian supremacy, exceptionalism, domination, and exclusivity are in DIRECT violation inter alia of the No Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, its construing Federal caselaw, a slew of DoD and USAF directives, instructions, and regulations, the UCMJ ,and the Core Values of the United States Air Force. […]
So, in their attempt to defend Florida from the vicious attacks by Vice President Harris, Ron Desantis proclaimed that being an enslaved person “taught skills” which could be used later in life. (Presumably as a free person).
Alex Wagner and Jelani Cobb destroyed this argument. [video at the link]
But wait it gets worse. There’s a statement from the people who wrote these new standards defending their position again claiming that it is “well documented” that people who had been slaves gained skills during their enslavement that they could later use. [statement available at the link]
I love this part.
“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”
They could make that point by talking about the black church which was developed during slavery, and how that crossed over into the creation of negro spirituals, and then gospel, and later jazz, blues, R&B, funk, Rock ‘N Roll and Hip Hop. Or they could talk about black cuisine and soul food, blending African tradition with Southern foods. Or they could talk about black art, or black literature and scholarship. But no, they have to make it about “job skills” because — being conservatives — that’s the only thing they apparently value.
Or then again, did they gain job skills? Join me over the jump for the sad truth.
Here’s what VP Harris had to say in Jacksonville pointing out the Rape, Torture, Human Trafficking and Terrorism that was a part of the Slave trade which of course, is worth tolerating if only you could “gain a skill.” [video at the link]
[Besides the point as pointed out in the comments that most slaves were bought and sold specifically because of the skills they already had, and the fact that blacksmithing already existed in Africa] The simple fact is that many of the names on their list of examples — were not slaves. And that most of those who had been slaves gained their business and personal skills — AFTER that slavery.
For example, there’s Ned Cobb who was born in 1885 — 20 years after Slavery ended. [Tweet and list at the link. Excerpt: “The first name is Ned Cobb, who was listed as a blacksmith. Ned Cobb was a tenant farmer and activist who born in 1885, 20 years after the emancipation of slaves.]
Then there’s Henry Blair. [Tweet and example of patent available at the link. Excerpt: “The second name is Henry Blair, also listed as a blacksmith. There is no evidence Henry Blair was ever enslaved, and the fact he could register patents is evidence he was not in fact ever enslaved.]
Here’s Ron Desantis come back where he says it beneficial to “parlay” being a blacksmith — like Henry Blair — as a benefit “later in life.” Besides the fact that Blair was born a free man when he became a blacksmith, American Chattle Slavery was for life, exactly when was that “later time” supposed to be? In the afterlife? [video at the link]
The fact that DeSantis thinks training a slave to use a hammer and tongs would be considered a good idea simply shows how he fails to understand the “at seige” nature of the slave. trade and the fear of potential uprisings.
And then there’s Lewis Lattimer, also a blacksmith, who’s parents had been enslaved but he was actually born in Massachusetts as a free man. [Tweet at the link]
[…] The first possible former slave listed is John Henry who was forced to work the railroad as a prisoner under the Black Codes following Slavery and also is a folk hero […] Henry was not a blacksmith, he was a railroad worker who famously battled a mechanical device at driving railroad spikes with his hammer until he died. […]
Skipping to the chase James Forten, Paul Chuffe, John Chavis, William Whipper were also all born free men.
The seventh name on the list is extra ridiculous because it’s George Washington’s WHITE sister. [Tweet and images at the link]
How exactly do people who call themselves “educators” put George Washington’s sister on a list of people who “gained skills from slavery” never mind the fact that that didn’t happen and she wasn’t a slave, she’s not African either so it doesn’t even make the point the during slavery many African-Americans became prominent businessmen and women.
Now, of the people who were slaves on the list, most of them didn’t actually gain their business skills from slavery itself. [Tweet at the link] Hammon was born into slavery on Long Island. In most of the South, teaching a slave to read and write was illegal. So he gained a “skill” that wasn’t even offered to most slaves at the time and certainly couldn’t be consider an example “things I learned from slavery.”
[…] Then we get to number 12.
The 12th name is Elizabeth Keckley, listed as a seamstress. Elizabeth was indeed a slave, and learned how to be a seamstress while a slave. But it was her enslaved mother who taught her how to do that, while her slavers raped her.
“But it was her enslaved mother who taught her how to do that.” Gaining the skill of being a seamstress had nothing do to with her enslaved condition, it was passed down from mother to daughter which would have likely occurred if both of them had been free. Technically it was probably common for one slave to teach another slave a particular skill […]
[…] So taking stock of all of the bull shit (“truth”) you helped spread, of the 16 names in that statement:
– 9 were never enslaved
– 9 are listed in the wrong industry
– 13/14 didn’t learn their skills by being slaves
– 1 was the white sister of George Washington
While enslaved Booker was illiterate and then taught himself to read after emancipation. Slavery did not make him a teacher.
16 people were listed and apparently, only 2 of them learned a skill while being a slave, and yet that skill wasn’t taught to them because they were a slave but rather in spite of or incidental to it.
This is fucking ridiculous. It’s dumb. It’s sloppy. It’s not even up to the standards of a half-assed google fact check. […]
More at the link.
Response from the doofuses:
It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first stand-alone strand of African American history standards to a few isolated expressions without context.
Response to the weak-ass response:
[…] they worked on this for months? How in the world does someone who calls themself an “educator” get things this hilariously wrong? How does George Washington’s sister get on a list of people who “learned skills from slavery?” How does Ned Cobb get on the list when he was born 20 years after Slavery ended?
Unless pushing an agenda that diminishes the real impact and damage of slavery is exactly the point.
Ron DeSantis was a history major. He graduated from Yale with a degree in history. Jelani Cobb says that no one at Yale taught Ron DeSantis that some slaves benefitted from slavery.
The U.S. has announced that it will not send ATACMS long-range missiles to Ukraine, dashing the hopes of Ukraine and its advocates that it would have the means to strike Crimean bases used to launch recent punishing strikes against Odesa.
The Washington Post reports on the situation:
But U.S. defense and administration officials familiar with the issue said that despite what one called a growing public perception of “some sort of slow, gravitational pull” toward approval, there has been no change in U.S. policy and no substantive discussion about the issue for months. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to address the sensitive subject.
The Pentagon believes that Kyiv has other, more urgent needs than ATACMS, and worries that sending enough to Ukraine to make a difference on the battlefield would severely undercut U.S. readiness for other possible conflicts.
The reaction on social media has been predictable—claims that the U.S. doesn’t want Ukraine to win, that it’s holding back to slowly bleed Russia dry, that it is callously disregarding the sacrifices of Ukraine forces on the ground.
Currently, Ukraine has little ability to reach deep into Russian lines. Here are the options. An asterix means Ukraine already has it:
* Tube artillery: 20-30 kms, depending on type of shells
* GMLRS: 70-80 kms
GLSDB: 150 km
* Storm Shadow/SCALP: 225 kms
ATAMCS: 300 kms
Ukraine already has GMLRS, launched from HIMARS and M270 rocket artillery launchers. The Brits supplied a reported 50 or so Storm Shadow cruise missiles, and they have been used to devastating effect against Russian targets. France recently committed to delivering another 50 of their version of the missile, called SCALP. [Tweet and video at the link]
GLSDB is a brand new version of HIMARS/M270-launched rocket artillery. It doesn’t quite exist. And while defense industry officials hoped to deliver the new longer-range rocket by spring, production has been delayed into the fall or winter. Manufacture requires repurposing old MLRS rocket tubes—the ones that used to carry cluster bomblets back in my day. Turns out that the booster propulsion part of the rockets had issues and have to be refurbished. No one wants them blowing up on launch, destroying both the launcher and killing its crew. Furthermore, GLSDB gets its added range by adding wings, gliding to its final destination. It is slow, and thus theoretically more vulnerable to air defenses.
As for ATACMS, there just aren’t that many of them. Just 4,000 in total have been built, and many of them were used up during the War on Terror and training, while almost 1,000 of them have been sold to foreign buyers. Only 500 are manufactured per year, most of them contractually committed to foreign buyers. And with China and North Korea both acting belligerently, ATACMS would be important in an American defense of either South Korea or Taiwan. It’s clear the Pentagon is hesitate to dip into what appears to be a limited stash.
All that said, absent completely empty stocks, it does seem ridiculous that the United States wouldn’t have 50 of the rockets to spare. It wouldn’t take much: a few dozen fired into Sevastopol would clear out Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and send them out of range of the port city of Odesa, which they are hammering with sea-skimming anti-ship missiles immune to current Ukrainian air defenses. A dozen more might be able to take out the rail line on the Kerch Bridge. That would leave 1-2 dozen ATACMS for opportunistic targets, and to simply keep Russia fearful and at bay.
GLSDB, when they arrive, aren’t the answer. They have less range than Storm Shadows/SCALPS, which already come up just short in necessary range. [map at the link, showing range circles]
NATO armies don’t have more ordinance in that 300-500 km range because they fully expect air power to deliver ordinance at those distances. Ukraine will never have that ability, even if and when F-16s arrive. So to fill the gap, even one month production of ATACMS (around 42 missiles) seems more than reasonable. President Joe Biden should make it happen.
That said, the idea that the U.S. is slow walking its support to bleed out Russia, callous to Ukraine’s needs for a quick victory, are absolutely ludicrous. If anything, there is urgency to make things happen quicker, lest American domestic politics, the 2024 presidential election, and a growing pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party sabotage future military and financial assistance.
The war is expensive for the United States. It’s not just the cost of the donated military gear (which critics claim is a giveaway to the military industrial complex), but billions of dollars in direct American payments to Ukraine to pay for the basics of running a government. Furthermore, the war is causing global economic disruptions that threaten the American economy and that of our European allies. It is in everyone’s interest to end this as quickly as possible.
There is certainly no slow-rolling American support on ammunition. The U.S. has literally emptied out its supply of 155mm artillery shells, and has had to go searching for supplies in places like Israel and South Korea to feed Ukraine’s hungry guns. That’s what led to the controversial decision to send cluster munitions—an action that has infuriated our European allies, congressional Democrats, and emboldened conservative critics of the war.
People complain that the U.S. could do more to send M1 Abrams main battle tanks, but Ukraine is struggling to use the Western armor it has already received. Ukraine, by all indications, still has hundreds, if not thousands, of tanks, including its existing stash of Soviet-era armor, bolstered by captured Russian equipment. Yet on the front lines, we’re now seeing mostly infantry advances. Tanks are simply too vulnerable, and Ukraine doesn’t have the time and means to learn effective combined arms operations that would increase their survivability.
F-16s, carrying anti-ship missiles, would certainly threaten the Russian Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol, more so than ATACMS, but that was always a long-term solution.
What Ukraine needs now, more than anything, is ammunition. What they can’t manage via close-air support, they can manage with a wall of artillery. If Ukraine has the capacity to stand up new armor brigades, then great, provide those tanks and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. But more than anything—and this is reflected in recent aid packages—Ukraine needs more artillery shells, more anti-tank rockets, more mine-clearing charges and equipment, more air defenses, and more small-arms ammunition. It’s not sexy, it’s not a brand new “game changing” weapons systems, but no such thing exists. Ammunition is most crucual to support those brave Ukrainians at the front.
All the said, goddam it, send 50 ATACMS already.
——————–
[Tweet and video at the link: “Ukraine needs a full-fledged sky shield – this is the only way to defeat russian missile terror. We have already shown that we can shoot down even the russian missiles that the terrorists boasted about. Thanks to the help of our partners and the air defense systems provided to Ukraine, our defenders of the sky have saved thousands of lives. But we need more air defense systems for our entire territory, for all our cities and communities. The world must not get used to russian terror – terror must be defeated. And it is possible!” The video is compilation of the damage already sustained from Russian missiles hitting Ukraine. Some disturbing images of wounded civilians are included.]
With the ending of the grain corridor deal, Russia has launched barrage after barrage against the port city of Odesa, targeting not just its port facilities to render them unusable, but also cultural targets in parts of the city designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Last night, it even hit the city’s main historic church. [Tweet and video at the link]
Tankies like Glenn Greenwald wailed when Ukraine shut down the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, very obviously a front for Russian intelligence, in a church gleefully vested in Russia’s war of conquest. They’ll all be silent about this attack, however. [video of priest from the Russian Orthodox Church consecrating Russian tanks. The priest asked that the tanks be allowed to kill as many Ukrainians as possible.]
• The department listed Henry Blair as a slave who became a blacksmith and an inventor. Biography.com and several other sites state there is no information indicating that Blair was enslaved. He invented a corn planter and a cotton planter, becoming the second Black person to earn a U.S. patent.
• The department referred to Paul Cuffe as a shoemaker and shipowner born into slavery and escaped to freedom in 1781. According to PaulCuffe.org, operated by the Westport Historical Society, Cuffe was born in 1759 to an emancipated slave. Having worked on whaling boats starting at age 14, he established a shipping business in Massachusetts.
• The statement mentioned John Chavis as a fisherman born into slavery, who later was known for his work in teaching. The North Carolina Museum of History states that Chavis was born into a free Black family in North Carolina, fought in the Revolutionary War and became an educator.
So now Ron DeSantis is trying to distance himself from the new slavery curriculum proposed for Florida.
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie on Sunday pushed back against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a fellow 2024 White House hopeful, over DeSantis’s reaction to the new slavery curriculum in Florida, claiming the governor is not displaying leadership.
“’I didn’t do it’ and “I’m not involved in it,’ are not the words of leadership,” Christie said in an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.”
Christe, the former governor of New Jersey, was referring to DeSantis’s response to Vice President Harris, who recently called Florida’s new Black history education standards “propaganda.” The guidelines are based on Florida’s controversial law, which requires race be taught in an “objective” manner that doesn’t seek to “indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.”
The guidelines sparked heavy criticism, specifically over the requirement of teachers to instruct on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“Gov. DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it and from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable,” Christie said on Sunday. […]
OK, wow. I wonder if there’s a special school course in boating this way, perhaps at Whatsamatta U. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/us/lake-ozarks-boat-crash-house/index.html
Eight passengers were ejected, six with serious injuries, two with moderate injuries. The second in command apparently was Harvey Wallbanger.
But have you ever heard the story about how “wokeness,” DEI, Jesus, an actual anti-racist, 2 church choirs & 1 of the greatest dance moves of all time got Tony Bennett into show biz?
a Nazi [sonnenrad] symbol flashes on the screen with a row of marching soldiers on either side of it and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ face fading in. […] the outer part of the circle says “Make America Florida,” […] In 2023, he hired a speechwriter with ties to neo-Nazis.
[…]
the first video of the shirtless men was created by a staffer on the team, not a professional campaign ad company. It’s unclear if this video was similarly crafted in-house.
A high-profile Egyptian activist who was recently released from prison landed Sunday in Italy, where the government championed his case.
Patrick George Zaki was greeted by applause and a throng of video and still cameras as he emerged into the arrivals hall at Milan’s Malpensa Airport after traveling on a commercial flight. He continued to Bologna, where he had been living and studying before being detained in Cairo in 2020…
he imagined a “financial superstore” called X.com
[…]
an internship at Scotiabank […] in the early 1990s. He […] wasn’t happy when his superiors wouldn’t agree to a series of risky trades that would’ve left them even more exposed to bad debt. […] the experience taught him “how lame banks are” […] It didn’t matter that he was nineteen years old; he felt he knew better than everyone
[…]
more interested in getting press than building a product. The concept struggled to go anywhere, and Musk was pushed by investors to merge with […] Confinity’s PayPal product
[…]
[A verified tier of Paypal accounts, sign-up bonuses, directing Paypal users to X.com’s financial poducts, unreasonably limiting usage. Ultimately ousted.] Musk is trying to rerun the playbook for his old finance company by grafting it onto a completely unrelated business. Not to mention that the industry today is very different than in the late 1990s.
* Links within to numerous instances of abused workers at SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
* Commenters have added that Tesla’s models are S 3 X Y as further illustration of stunted adolescent thinking.
wzrd1says
Interesting that Putin is out of town when Moscow gets “attacked” and drones are detected and electronically crashed. Almost as if they had the frequencies and codes for them. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/europe/ukraine-russia-drone-attacks-hit-moscow-intl-hnk/index.html
Also entertaining to characterize an attack on Moscow as a terrorist attack, but it’s perfectly acceptable to attack and shell and missile the hell out of Kyiv.
I’m guessing that if D-day was today, Hitler would call the invasion a terrorist attack too.
wzrd1says
Muskrat to replace the blue Twitter bird with a big, black X. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/business/elon-musk-twitter-revamp-intl-hnk/index.html
Priorities, one must have them and the priority isn’t to stabilize the platform and regain users and investors, but to put X marks the spot on everything.
He’ll get there soon, penny stock that is.
I’d like to recommend the BBC podcast series Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, which I’ve just finished listening to. You need to register with the BBC, but I think that’s possible from outwith the UK. It’s introduced by John Sudworth, who was the BBC’s correspondent in China until official harassment forced him to leave. The series doesn’t come to a final conclusion, but does point out that the Chinese authorities deny both the lab leak and the seafood market hypotheses, still ludicrously suggesting that the virus originated abroad, and came to China on frozen food packaging. IOW, you can’t trust a word they say on this issue (or indeed, on anything else).
KGsays
Some relatively good news from Spain: the snap election has produced a “hung parliament”, rather than the expected conservative (PP) – fascist (Vox) majority. PP are the largest party, but would need to recruit other parties besides Vox, which suffered a significant loss of seats. Weeks of negotiations are likely, possibly ending in another election if neither PP nor the social democratic PSOE can recruit enough allies to form a majority.
Further to #112, looking at the detailed results, there has certainly been a rightward shift overall, but I don’t see how the PP+Vox bloc could possibly recruit allies with the 7 seats they would need for a majority (or 6 for a dead heat). Only the Navarrese Peoples’ Union, with 1 seat, looks like a plausible ally. That doesn’t mean the PSOE+Sumar bloc would be able to govern, as they would need support from Catalan and Basque pro-independence parties, and even if these parties would join, relying on them would have political dangers for the PSOE. My guess is that another election will follow.
wzrd1says
Black man runs for mayor in Alabama town, feudal white town council that was unelected and unelected white mayor refuses to allow him to take office in the election that he won. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/patrick-braxton-black-man-says-he-was-elected-mayor-of-newburn-alabama/
Hadn’t had elections in decades until he actually qualified for the election by filing and paying the filing fee, forcing the issue. Town council was literally appointed by the city-state god-king.
I guess we’ll have to get the Army to encircle the town and build a great big wooden rabbit…
wzrd1says
Maricopa County, Aridzona, third degree burns from falls in the street. Totally normal. Maybe soon, we’ll have people bursting into open flames as a normal… https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/index.html
Pavements close to the boiling point of water, what a strange new world. Maybe we’ll not see sea levels rise, after all, if they boil off, they won’t rise in flooding on the land. Although, we’re not supposed to see that happen until the sun is close to going red giant. Might have to move up my Europan vacation plans.
Australia has taken a step closer to becoming the first country to end HIV transmission after the spread of the disease was “virtually eliminated” in inner Sydney.
Between 2010 and 2022, new infections fell by 88 per cent in inner city neighbourhoods once ravaged by the virus, according to data presented at the International Aids Society’s HIV science conference on Monday.
While thousands of men died in the 1980s and 1990s in inner Sydney, an area home to a large population of gay and bisexual men, just 11 new cases were reported last year.
Researchers said the “extraordinary success” paves the way for the areas to become the first in the world to reach the UN’s target for ending transmission of HIV, and proves that existing strategies to prevent spread work extremely well when correctly implemented…
wzrd1says
New theory on “gravity hole” in the Indian Ocean. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/world/gravity-hole-geoid-low-indian-ocean-scn/index.html
Although, one possible confounder is that it’s also located midway at the border of the southern end of the Indian plate.
The earth’s gravitationally bumpy. So is the moon, as was accidentally discovered in the late Apollo missions, with one low lunar orbit satellite that was expected to orbit for 18 months only lasting 35 days. For the moon, there are only 4 low lunar orbits that are reasonably stable. Mass concentrations, or mascons are invaluable for locating resources. We only got serious in mapping them since around 2000. Now, it’s pretty much any planetary or moon probe sent has gravitational mapping as one task.
What will we be mapping or looking for in another generation? Don’t try to predict it, we always get predictions about the future wrong when it comes to technology.
wzrd1says
Right wing Hindus in India angry over Oppenheimer’s use of phrase from the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.
I conditionally agree, as the phrase gets overused throughout the film. He definitely said it a few times throughout his life, especially after the first bomb was detonated at the Trinity test (odd, that no Christians objected to the name Trinity being used). But, incorporating it into a love scene is a bit… Odd.
Also odd, such complaints from a nuclear armed nation’s nationalist group, especially from the faith that brought us the Kama Sutra. One of the few faiths to give humans an instruction manual on marital relations. Yeah, there’s a lot more than just sex in that Sutra.
But then, right wingers need outrage over something to keep their followers in tow. Otherwise, they’d wander off and rejoin their real lives. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/media/india-oppenheimer-backlash-hindu-right-intl-hnk/index.html
wzrd1says
Reginald Selkirk @ 117, great news! If HIV infection finally is curtailed, that can provide a roadmap for highly effective public health interventions for the world.
@ 116, that’s assuming it’s allowed to make the ballot. The far right is pulling every trick in the books to stop the will of the people from coming to fruition.
wzrd1says
There’s a moral to this story. When in bear country, lock your car doors. Bears can and do learn how to open car doors from the outside, opening them again from the inside is a bit trickier for them. Driver’s door inside panel shredded, other doors left alone, so perhaps that bear did have a clue in opening from the inside, but just couldn’t manage it. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/07/24/bear-destroys-car-lake-tahoe-affil-cprog-ldn-vpx.kovr
Once the car door was opened by deputies (with a rope), all anyone saw of that bear was a bear ass, as it ran off into the woods. Hopefully, to find some nice fruit.
We used to go camping with the kids every year, basic backpacking for a week. Every year, we had a black bear come through camp to investigate. Food was in a bear bag up a tree, hung with parachute cord, so the bear couldn’t get it, nor could raccoons climb down to it. Taught the kids basic navigation and foraging, we all enjoyed it, it got us out of the damned city.
The US Air Force is turning to an unlikely place to beef up its electronic warfare countermeasures: a decade-old aircraft-mounted pod known as the “Angry Kitten.”
While not a new device for the USAF, the latest tests involved the first flight of the Angry Kitten Electronic Warfare Pod on an unmanned craft, in this case a General Atomics MQ-9A Reaper drone.
Angry Kitten, developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), is more aptly described as a full-fledged cat at this point, with work on the pod going way back to 2013. As originally developed, the Angry Kitten is designed to be “fully adaptive and autonomous [with] capabilities that aren’t currently available in [radar] jammers,” GTRI research engineer Stan Sutphin mentioned a decade ago.
That said, GTRI describes the original Angry Kitten as a radio frequency jammer built with a mix of commercial electronics, custom hardware and novel machine learning software that allows it to adapt to advanced electronic warfare. By being trained on a variety of different radio electronic attack and electronic protection methods, Angry Kitten can “independently assess and respond to novel opposing technology,” the institute said…
[…] “For much of July hot dangerous conditions have been the normal in parts of the West, Texas and Florida. These summer conditions will build and expand across the Eastern two-thirds of the country this week, starting in the north-central states and Plains.”
As of Monday, excessive heat warnings and heat advisories were issued for parts of the Great Basin, Southwest, Intermountain West, Great Plains and southern Florida, with more expected across the country later this week.
[…] In Arizona, Phoenix has seen record-breaking heat as the city hit its 24th consecutive day with temperatures above 110 degrees Sunday. The excessive heat has prompted health concerns, especially in Southwest National Parks, where at least four people have died from heat-related causes since the beginning of June.
A United Nations agency warned of an increased risk of heart attacks and deaths as the northern hemisphere reeled from heat waves last week. […]
wzrd1says
Texas governor essentially says that Texas and its state constitution outranks the US Constitution and federal government in row over border razor wire Stalin fence. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/politics/doj-texas-border-water-barriers/index.html
Since he’s using the US Army National Guard, federalize them and send in regular forces to supervise and enforce federal authority over US national borders.
Then, a century of reconstruction.
According to the poll, conducted between July 10 and 16, the share of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who view the former president as “unfavorable” has risen from 24% in 2022 to 32% in 2023. The poll also found that Trump’s “favorable” rating amongst Republican and Republican-leaning independents has decreased over the past year, going from 75% to 66%…
So favorable/unfavorable is 2/1.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@wzrd1 #119:
overused throughout the film. He definitely said it a few times throughout his life, especially after the first bomb was detonated at the Trinity test
He said he thought it, years later. His brother present at the time quoted him saying, “I guess it worked.” (Wikipedia)
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@KG #111:
BBC podcast series Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin […] You need to register with the BBC, but I think that’s possible from outwith the UK.
Unskilled Florida Man Regrets Missing Out on Being Enslaved
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
Florida man said that he deeply regrets having missed out on the opportunity to be a slave.
The man said that his “lack of access to enslavement” had made his acquisition of essential skills “impossible.”
“Every day when I mess something up at work, I wonder to myself, would I be doing a better job if I’d been a slave?” he said. “There’s no question that it would have been a game-changer for me.”
He argued that being barred from forced servitude was a form of “white underprivilege,” and that Caucasians who suffer from a resulting skills deficit deserve reparations.
“Something must be done to compensate people like me who were unfairly denied the chance to be slaves,” he said. “When I think about the personal benefits I was prevented from obtaining, it makes me furious.”
When it comes to governing the climate-doomed state of Florida, Republicans are nothing if not consistent: Do Only Harm. It’s almost uncanny how focused the state party is on finding anything in Florida that works so that they can break it […] Gov. Ron DeSantis’ installation of an anti-vaxx pandemic conspiracy crank in the state’s topmost public health office may be the most prominent example of the fervor Republicans have for their task, but the day-to-day grind of wrecking decent government wherever they find it can’t always be that showy.
One of the latest examples comes from Orange County, which has been battling a housing crisis and responded earlier this year with new ordinances meant to protect renters from abusive gamesmanship by landlords. The county barred landlords from raising rents more than 5% without giving renters 60 days of written notice, and from discriminating against renters who use housing vouchers to help make their payments. That was the plan, anyway—until state Republican lawmakers got wind of it and wrote up a new state law wiping out the new ordinances along with similar locally passed renter protections throughout the state.
Why? The usual reason, of course: Florida Republicans are tight as ticks with real estate developers and with landlords, so all it took was a few whines in Republican ears for state lawmakers to jump in […]
WFTV9 brings us the story, a brief bit that touches on the obvious harm this is going to do. But what’s most striking is the Sheer Gall Of These People: An ordinance saying landlords have to give two months’ notice before raising rent more than 5% is not exactly onerous. It’s a piffling little protection, and Republican legislators responded by setting off a statewide bomb barring communities from passing any restrictions on how much landlords can boost rents.
There once was a time when Republicans claimed to be big proponents of local governance, and the more local, the better. The federal government should be in charge of nothing, they would say, and the state governments in charge of as little as possible. The rest would be worked out “close to the people,” with individual communities and local sheriffs deciding what they wanted to tolerate in terms of “gun rights,” or food safety guidelines, or take your pick.
That libertarian-ish funnel of rights never actually worked out, mind you, because while the idea of putting every bit of regulation in the hands of the lowest and most bribable official possible sounds positively utopian if you have lots of money for bribes, it turns out that big business hates the idea of not knowing what the damn laws are in every individual town they do business in, and pushed in the other direction. Every time local governments gained a bit of control, the Republican Party’s corporate donors would immediately hound lawmakers for the exact opposite, demanding the government take over such regulations at the highest level possible.
[…] What’s wrong with Orange County, Florida, responding to a housing inflation crisis with a fairly trivial new requirement that you at least have to give your renters notice before jacking up rents by 10% or 20% or 50%? Nothing! Not a damn thing! It’s more surprising that it wasn’t already a law!
But when the entire Florida Republican Party is in the pocket of the real estate industry, all it takes is a poke to get the petty protection unraveled again. Repeat over and over, and you’ve got the current state of Florida. It sure would be nice to someday find out that all of this was because of brazen corruption in the statehouse, with suitcases full of money being handed out like candy on Halloween. Because if it’s not that, then Florida Republicans have been sabotaging everything from state colleges to history lessons to major employers to pandemic responses to elections to housing because they’re just that devoted to wrecking things.
It can’t be incompetence; it’s far too consistent. So what the hell is it?
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #116…
I’m really hoping that the Ohio voters will (a) reject the ballot proposition in August (not so much because it raises the threshhold for constitutional amendments but changing the requirements to get a measure on the ballot at all), and then (b) pass the abortion amendment by over 60%, thus showing that the change wouldn’t have worked, anyway.
Readers of the article posted their thoughts about the “So what the hell is it?” question.
Chaos, Randi Rhodes keeps saying, “In chaos, they can steal”. It would seem that might be the objective.
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Greed
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How do these landlords insure their properties?
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They will [insure it] until it gets too expensive, and then they’ll stop. They hold the properties in separate limited liability companies, so if there’s a loss they just walk away, leaving the injured party to fence with an entity that has almost nothing except the property itself.
The trick is to suck enough profit out of the property before there’s a loss. Since landlords in FL apparently can raise rents as high as they want as fast as they want, it should not be hard to recover the initial cost of the property.
Oh, and of course when there’s a loss and the uninsured LLC goes bankrupt, the members will claim the loss against their taxes. Win / win.
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Rents will be 2 to 3 x what the mortgage payments will be. An awful lot of people will be unable to afford home ownership there or renting for that matter
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I think there is a strong appeal for the “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd to live somewhere with no state income tax, kind of the “I got mine so f*ck you” crowd. It’s only a matter of time before you get what you pay for rears its ugly head…
——————-
No state income tax only worked because tourists came to the state and the services they used (hotels, etc.) were taxed heavily enough to make up the difference. I’m not sure how things will end up, but ad valorem taxes (autos, property, etc.) have risen at precipitous rates over the last few years. It may not be the tax haven people have come to expect for long, particularly if the real estate market takes a turn for the humane. […]
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car insurance four times what it is in Massachusetts
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it’s only unlivable for those who aren’t well-off straight white christians
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Of course, the major crisis that Florida faces is the possibility that some transgender person might use the same public bathroom you are using, and math textbooks surreptitiously teaching critical race theory, so the fact that insurance companies won’t insure homes anymore has to take a back seat to these more urgent crises.
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The entire State of Florida is looking more like the Titanic every single day. It’s bearing down at top speed on the climate change iceberg, the crew are coming down with scurvy…
….and Republican legislators and DeSantis are locking everyone in their cabins, cutting the lifeboats adrift, and throwing all the life vests overboard. Because freedom.
The anti-woke right wing thought it would flex some post-Bud Light brouhaha muscles by taking down the “Barbie” movie. This did not come off looking like a show of strength for them, to say the least.
After all the Fox News and Newsmax segments attacking the movie before it hit theaters, after Rep. Matt Gaetz’s wife Ginger complaining of “Disappointingly low T from Ken,” and after the criticism on right-wing movie review sites, the movie is an enormous hit. “Barbie” had the biggest opening of the year at the domestic box office, and the biggest opening weekend ever for a movie directed by a woman.
Ben Shapiro dedicated a 43-minute video to trashing the movie, calling it “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen” and urging his followers to downrate the movie if they were polled by market research firm CinemaScore. “Barbie” has an A rating at CinemaScore. Following widespread mockery of his video, Shapiro returned to claim, “The reaction to me burning a Barbie car with, like, a Barbie and Ken in it is like the reaction of the Islamic world when someone burns a Quran in Sweden.” No, Ben: People were making fun of you. There’s a difference.
It was a full far-right pile-on. Alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called it a “man-hating Woke propaganda fest” and “possibly the most anti-male film ever made.” Far-right social media site owner Elon Musk claimed that if “you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘patriarchy’, you will pass out before the movie ends.” […]
It’s important not to lose sight of what this is about: It’s part of an effort to enforce gender roles according to right-wing preferences, a backlash against the movie’s undermining of the ways Barbie has represented femininity for generations now. Although interestingly, they’re really upset about the representation of Ken, as if Ken had ever been some major figure in American visions of masculinity. But using him to mock exactly the kind of people who think about whether a character based on a doll is “low T”—that spurs the hysteria. There’s also another particularly ugly strain to the right-wing efforts to take down “Barbie”: rage over the casting of trans actress Hari Nef as a doctor Barbie.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called the movie “trans propaganda that is in this hyper-feminine, ultra pink propaganda thing, but it’s really been taken over by the trans mafia.” [Trans people are now a “mafia”?]
“One of the Barbies is a trans Barbie,” Shapiro said. “And this is true! Totally normal, as if this is a female Barbie—with a voice deeper than my own.” […]
The anti-trans sentiment directed against Nef’s casting is important here: One reason for the frenzied rage over the movie’s message about gender as a whole is the sense that masculinity and femininity as universal, unchanging truths are being undermined. The idea that Ryan Gosling as Ken is not a rippling specimen of dominant manhood links to anti-trans bigotry. The anger about both is rooted in the belief that a rigid gender binary is sacred […]
But wherever the rage is coming from, the far right, with its huge media infrastructure and high-profile influencers, tried to take down “Barbie.” And holy crap, did they ever fail. In fact, Twitter user @TechnicallyRon took those right-wing reviews and made them into movie-style posters that made some people want to see the movie even more. [Tweet and posters at the link]
Thanks to the right-wing hissy fit, I’m off to the movies this afternoon. Look for an upcoming review of “Barbie” […]
Donald Trump has already been indicted twice on 71 felony counts ranging from violations of the Espionage Act to obstruction of justice. That’s only 71 more than any other president or former president in the history of the United States. And since Trump loves to brag about being the best at everything, he can now be proud that in this one area he has actually achieved his goal.
However, Trump is not resting on his laurels. There are still several indictments pending that he can add to his record. Under the circumstances, you might think that Trump would want to expedite the trials awaiting him, A defendant who was certain that he wasn’t guilty would want to prove his innocence as quickly as possible, particularly if he’s running for office again.
But, no. Trump is trying desperately to delay his trials. Probably because he’s knows he’s guilty and doesn’t want those verdicts to be in the news during his campaign. He’s also likely hoping to be reelected so that he can order his Justice Department to quash the cases against him or so that he can pardon himself. Ironically, he’s using the abundance of charges against him to justify his requests for delays. Perhaps, in retrospect, he shouldn’t have committed so many crimes that his trials are congesting the courts.
In the meantime, Trump is throwing down temper tantrums on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social. The tenor of his rants was especially harsh this weekend. In fact, Trump’s tirades appear to suggest that he has already been informed of new indictments coming down from special counsel Jack Smith who, in addition to his probes of Trump’s theft and hoarding classified documents, is investigating his role in the January 6th insurrection and efforts to subvert democracy. Note the escalating urgency and fear in his recent posts…
Trump alerts his cult devotees to “remember” that everyone is out to get him if anything new about his trials should come out:
“Every time you see these Radical Lunatics and their partners in the Fake News Media talking about the ‘Trials and Tribulations’ of President Donald J. Trump, please remember that it is all a coordinated HOAX.”
Trump is preparing his flock for the results of a well executed and financed investigation:
“Just think of it! Between Mueller, Deranged Jack Smith, and Congressional Committees, over 100 Million Dollars has been spent investigating me since I came down the escalator in Trump Tower.”
Trump frames any new charges as politically partisan, despite the fact that the investigations have been effectively shielded from politics:
“Merrick Garland, Deranged Jack Smith, and coordinating Democrat ‘Prosecutors’ in New York and Atlanta, have become the Campaign Managers for the most corrupt and incompetent President in United States history.”
Trump is now signaling that more indictments are imminent, while threatening the “MONSTERS” he fears::
“How many times can Crooked Joe Biden’s DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE … INDICT HIS POLITICAL OPPONENT DURING THE COURSE OF THE CAMPAIGN? … WE MUST STOP THESE ‘MONSTERS’ FROM FURTHER DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!”
Trump curiously wonders why he wasn’t brought to justice sooner, and again implies that he’s aware of new charges:
“Why didn’t they bring these ridiculous charges years before?”
Trump begs for help from his sycophants in Congress:
“Why hasn’t Republican ‘leadership’ in the Senate spoken up and rebuked Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats, Fascists, and Marxists?”
He isn’t coming right and saying it, but Trump is openly implying that he has knowledge of new indictments. And it’s notable to recall that he was the one who revealed to the world his previous indictments, before the special counsel publicly announced them. Also notable was his outrage at law enforcement for doing their job and holding him accountable for his crimes. So it’s not irrelevant that he’s revisiting that outrage now.
$250 for trimming trees without a permit. […] “Outdated laws limit penalties the City can issue,” […] first-time offenders $250, with a $1,000 maximum for repeated violations. In this case […] the bureau did not find “signigicant damage” to the trees
[…]
the city does not have a mechanism for stopping unilateral tree trimmings of this nature; had the studio applied for a permit the city would have granted one automatically, without any way for the bureau to determine the validity of the request beforehand. […] underfunded and understaffed
[…]
a citizen forester and advocate […] “You never want to trim trees in the hot summer months. You always want to trim trees when it’s cooler.” The International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) generally recommends that most trees be trimmed during the dormant season. […] The American National Standard Institute’s (ANSI) pruning standards define topping as an “unacceptable pruning practice for trees.” The city formally adopted and enforces ISA and ANSI pruning guidelines and standards
Israeli lawmakers voted Monday to limit the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government actions, delivering a long-sought goal of the country’s ascendant right-wing movement. The measure was pushed through despite months of civil unrest, international condemnations and pleas from business and security leaders to seek consensus in a deeply divided society on the verge of chaos.
[…] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — just hours after leaving the hospital where he had an emergency pacemaker implanted — sat calmly through the voting as shouts of derision rained around him, occasionally leaving for consultations. He took several phone calls, including from Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who was trying to broker a last-minute compromise.
But in a dramatic parliamentary session, with shouts of “Shame!” chanted by demonstrators outside the Knesset and by opposition members inside, the prime minister’s coalition of right-wing, religiously conservative and ultranationalist parties stood steadfast.
Shortly before 4 p.m. local time, after opposition members had left the chamber in protest, government loyalists voted 64-0 in the 120-seat body to change Israel’s Basic Law, stripping the Supreme Court of some of its powers of judicial review. It was a first victory in a more expansive plan to rein in the judiciary, which has long been a thorn in the side of Israel’s right wing.
[…] The effort to weaken the judiciary has split the country since the proposal was launched unexpectedly just days after Netanyahu’s new right-wing government took office in late December. Yariv Levin, the justice minister, introduced a package of Knesset bills that would give the ruling parties more power to override Supreme Court decisions and select judges.
The package included legislation that would stop the Supreme Court from blocking politicians convicted of crimes from serving in top government jobs under the judicial standard of “reasonableness.” That authority was stripped from the court in Monday’s vote.
Without a written constitution, the courts have used the reasonableness doctrine to block certain decisions and appointments. Earlier this year, in a case that infuriated conservatives, the court forced Netanyahu to fire a key political ally — ultra-Orthodox party leader Aryeh Deri — from his twin appointments as health and interior minister. Deri was convicted of tax fraud in 2021.
[…] Bankers said deposits and investments had already begun to flee the country. The shekel and the Tel Aviv stock exchange plummeted.
High-tech leaders warned that Israel’s reputation as an open and innovative start-up incubator was at risk. The Israel Business Forum, a federation of 150 of the country’s largest companies, shuttered malls, law firms and gas stations.
Several advocacy groups said they were preparing to challenge the move in a petition to the Supreme Court, though it was unclear what powers the court now has to review the challenge to its authority. Scholars warned of a protracted legal crisis without precedent in Israeli history.
[…] Police used water cannons and horse patrols to disperse crowds that tried to block roads into the parliament compound throughout the day. They dragged demonstrators out of roadways, including military veterans and reservists who linked arms as they lay on the hot pavement.
[…] For the ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist parties that gave Netanyahu his four-seat majority in the Knesset — bringing him back to power after a year and a half on the sidelines — the courts have been a barrier to their long-standing ambition of centering religious conservatism in public spaces and government policy. […]
Members of Congress have redirected roughly $2.3 billion in federal water funds toward political pet projects over the past two years, cutting at times into the money that could have been made available for poorer, needier communities.
As a result, 38 states and territories have been shortchanged about $660 million in federal water aid, according to data obtained and analyzed by The Washington Post, illustrating how the system often has rewarded politically well-connected lawmakers in some of the wealthiest areas nationwide.
The problem is expected to worsen in the coming fiscal year, as House Republicans eye a $1.7 billion cut to the overall funding that Washington sends states for their water needs. That could complicate a new national push to replace lead pipes, repair wastewater facilities and improve other aging infrastructure — an urgent task at a moment when the United States is grappling with extreme heat and other consequences of a fast-warming planet.
Every year, Congress appropriates money for two key federal water funds that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, which then distributes grants to states. Since 2022, the federal allocation has totaled roughly $5.5 billion, amounting to a literal and figurative drop in the bucket for a nation with an estimated $625 billion backlog in projects just to provide cleaner, reliable drinking water.
Before states receive any money, however, members of Congress can skim off the top of the funds. Using a legislative tool known as earmarks, lawmakers can reserve federal water aid for specific projects in their home communities. Only after that does Washington divvy up and distribute a smaller pool of remaining cash among the states. In some parts of the country, the result of that congressional meddling is a net cut in funding — creating, in effect, a system of water winners and losers.
In Illinois, for example, earmarks last year shortchanged the state $14.7 million in federal aid to improve clean water systems, according to state data and records compiled by the Council of Infrastructure Financing Authorities, known as CIFA, which represents local officials. Illinois has some of the greatest water needs in the country, including the second-most lead pipes in the United States, a recent federal analysis shows.
The flood of congressional requests also siphoned away critical water money from Puerto Rico, even as the U.S. territory continued to rebuild from the devastation of Hurricane Fiona in 2022. Over the past two fiscal years, Puerto Rico received roughly $26.6 million less than it would have without earmarks, according to CIFA data shared with The Post. The territory — whose officials did not respond to a request for comment — does not have voting representation in Congress. […]
Little more than a century ago, British and Indian archaeologists began excavating the remains of what they soon realised was a previously unknown civilisation in the Indus Valley. Straddling parts of Pakistan and India and reaching into Afghanistan, the culture these explorers unearthed had existed at the same time as those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and covered a much larger area. It was also astonishingly advanced: sophisticated and complex, boasting large, carefully laid out cities, a relatively affluent population, writing, plumbing and baths, wide trade connections, and even standardised weights and measures.
What kind of a society was the Indus Valley Civilisation, as it came to be known? Who lived there and how did they organise themselves? Archaeologists and other experts ask these questions to this day, but the first explorers were already noticing some unique features.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, “much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on palaces and tombs of kings,” observed Sir John Marshall, who supervised the excavation of two of the five main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, “but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud.”
In the Indus Valley, “the picture is reversed and the finest structures were those erected for the convenience of the citizens. Temples, palaces, and tombs there may of course have been, but if so, they are either still undiscovered or so like other edifices as not to be readily distinguishable from them.”
In its heyday, from about BC 2600 to BC 1900, the Indus Valley Civilisation created what may have been the world’s most egalitarian early complex society, defying long-held presumptions about the relationship between urbanisation and inequality in the past. Its large cities were expansive, planned, and boasted large-scale architecture, including roomy residential houses, and smaller settlements in the surrounding areas appeared to support a similar culture with a similar standard of living…
It’s been a minute since we last checked in on the tankies—that breed of humans who think imperialism is bad, but only the United States can be imperialist. As a result, everything that is bad in the world is the United States’ fault. No one else has agency or independence.
For example, they claim Russia had no choice but to launch its overtly imperialistic war against Ukraine, because it was simply responding to American efforts to surround Russia with its NATO puppets. They are big supporters of the concept of the “global south,” a supposed coalition of developing nations led by global-north nations Russian and China (despotic regimes—a feature, not a bug) as a counterweight to Western hegemony. This pretty much sums it up: [Tweet at the link]
As such, they are quick to denounce imagined abuses by Ukraine, while ignoring Russian abuses. It’s quite a sight. I’ve written about them before here, here, here, here, here, and here [embedded links available at the main link]. These days, they’re celebrating Ukraine’s slow counteroffensive advances, as they’ve given them the opportunity to detract from Russia’s war failures. Meanwhile, tankie voices have gotten a huge boost in domestic American politics with the promotion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an effort by Steve Bannon and MAGA Republicans to create chaos in the Democratic presidential primary.
Medea Benjamin, founder of the supposedly anti-war Code Pink, has become one of the most reliable Putin apologists, excusing all manner of abuses in the name of “peace.” Yet here she is, extolling Henry Kissinger, someone who has actually performed war crimes, for his shadow diplomacy trip to a repressive, murderous regime. [Tweet and photo at the link]
Of course, it’s not President Joe Biden’s job to negotiate Ukrainian territory away, but that’s the essence of being a tankie: thinking an American president can call up anyone and make a thing happen.
So, no: Biden can’t bring peace to Ukraine. And if tankies and their MAGA allies had their way and Ukraine funding was cut, that still wouldn’t end the war. It would just make it go on, spreading misery and economic uncertainty for far longer. Ukraine has zero interest in ending the war until all its people are safe and the occupiers have been expelled. With sufficient aid, that might happen in the next year or two. Without it, Ukraine will still win, but it might be under the Afghanistan timeline—meaning it could be a decade or two before the foreign powers were expelled.
For someone wanting peace, you’d think the shorter timeline makes more sense, but Benjamin and her ilk don’t want peace. They want Russian and Chinese hegemony, rather than imagined American control over the world. And for all of America’s and the West’s faults, the side that fights for democratic self-determination vs. the one run by despots will almost always be the better choice. [Good points]
That’s why Taiwan now grants same-sex couples the right to adopt children while China has banned it, along with depictions of gayness on television or the movies and gay rights groups fighting for inclusion.
Anyway, take a look at who is besties with Benjamin: [Tweet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the link: Excerpt: “Don’t say we weren’t warned. Numerous foreign policy experts have for years told of dangers of expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and deliberately provoking that nation. […] I also want to thank @CODEPINK for its long-standing commitment to peace, especially at times when war fever gripped the entire country.”]
It’s no surprise that those two are so close, given that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is all-in on the tankie ideology: [Tweet and video at the link: RFK Jr: The Ukraine Conflict Really Started in 2014 — When the U.S. Overthrew the Ukraine Govt
“I would say that the real story starts in 2014 when the U.S. government, and particularly the neocons in the White House and elsewhere, participated in and supported the overthrow, violent overthrow – a coup d’état – against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine and put in a very, very anti-Russian government,” […]
“The government that came into the Ukraine began enacting a series of laws that turn turned the Russian populations of the Donbas region into second-class citizens. They illegalized, essentially, their culture, their language, and they began ultimately killing them. They killed 14,000 of them. And it prompted a civil war in the country.” [JFC. JFK Junior is like an automaton programmed to lie.]]
Literally nothing in that quote is correct. First off, he starts with, “I would say that the real story starts in 2014 when the U.S. government, and particularly the neocons in the White House and elsewhere, participated in and supported the overthrow, violent overthrow – a coup d’état – against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine and put in a very, very anti-Russian government.”
So Kennedy would have you believe that “neocons”—we’re talking the Dick Cheney crew—were in the White House in 2014 during the Obama presidency. And like a good tankie, he doesn’t think Ukrainians themselves had any agency during their Maidan “revolution of dignity.” Yes, this orange revolution ousted a pro-Russian government, but it was because then-President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a law passed 355-0 by the legislature creating closer economic ties with the European Union. Russia had lobbied heavily against it, demanding the country face eastward instead.
For all the talk of American imperialism, it was Russia that couldn’t stand the idea of its old colony moving toward European Union membership, and used its puppet president to stand in the way of that move in defiance of the country’s democratically elected legislature. It was that same legislature that ousted Yanukovych after massive popular protests that killed 80 people, with 328 out of 450 legislators voting to oust. Still, Yanukovych, Russia, and their tankies scream “coup,” justifying Russia’s subsequent invasion of Crimea and the Donbas later that year.
So no, there was no violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government by neocons in the Obama White House. That is literally straight out of the Russian propaganda handbook, which Kennedy is happy to regurgitate, as is the second part of that quote above: “The government that came into the Ukraine began enacting a series of laws that turned the Russian populations of the Donbas region into second-class citizens. They illegalized, essentially, their culture, their language, and they began ultimately killing them. They killed 14,000 of them. And it prompted a civil war in the country.”
First of all, it isn’t “the Ukraine,” which is yet another tankie tell. Russia has promoted the use of the “the” as a way to diminutize the territory as a colony, not a nation. Like “the Donbas.”
Furthermore, there was no “civil war,” but an invasion by Russian forces. The military chief at the time was Igor Girkin, the war criminal we love-hated because of his vicious Telegram criticisms of the 2022 Russian invasion and criticisms of top Russian generals and political officials. That all came to an end last week as Putin finally grew tired of it all and had him arrested. Girkin wasn’t Ukrainian. He was a colonel in the Russian GRU—Russia’s external-facing intelligence organization (akin to our CIA). Kennedy claims the CIA spurred a civil war, when it was literally and openly a Russian GRU intelligence operation.
Meanwhile, one only has to listen to any video of Kyiv or any other Ukrainian-held city in the country to realize that people are free to speak all the Russian they want. [Tweet and video at the link]
And no one killed anyone in Donbas until Russian forces came in and tried to take the territory by force. Then it became a hot war, and yes, people die in wars, even those sparked by hostile Russian intelligence officers. [Tweet at the link]
This has been the tankie line ever since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive and failed to quickly win. It demands that the U.S. and NATO pull its support because only starving Ukraine of resources will bring about “peace.” This line of thinking makes several unfounded assumptions:
– A cease-fire is a good thing. A cease-fire would allow Russia to reset, rearm, and refocus for the next phase of its war. It has been pushing since 2014; what makes anyone think that Russia’s stated war aims—keeping Ukraine within its colonial sphere of influence—would change just because the guns went silent? And what makes anyone think that this is the agreement that Russia would suddenly honor? Its history of broken promises is too long to ever trust the country again.
– If Ukraine keeps fighting, where’s the cease-fire? This whole tweet is inherently contradictory. The idea of any cease-fire is that everyone stops fighting. If Ukraine can keep going at its own discretion, that is not a cease-fire. Of course, a tankie would counter with “well then, we don’t have to support that continued fighting.” And sure, that’s true. But if the goal is to end the war, then this stupid plan does nothing to end it.
– If this agreement does nothing to stop the fighting, how are millions of lives supposedly saved? No lives are saved by leaving Ukraine to fend for itself. It would just mean, at best, low-level conflict (like the one we’ve seen since 2014) continuing to decimate lives at the front. All the while, Russia would keep lobbing rockets and missiles into civilian areas, while economically blockading Odesa and other Ukrainian Black Sea ports. The only way to save lives, long-term, is to defeat Russia. Anything short just prolongs it indefinitely.
On the plus side, not all tankies are hopeless causes. [Tweet and images at the link: “You remember the Slovak in a neoprene suit who wanted to get to Russia with only a love poem to Putin in his pocket? Well.. he was arrested in Russia imprisoned for two months and released back to Slovakia. Did you noticed changes on his more recent profile on the right? [background is the Ukrainian flag instead of the Russian flag.]
It sure would be nice if all of them experienced Russia firsthand. That might shatter a few illusions.
———————————–
A Russian occupier laments the babushka who reported on their movements to Ukrainian intelligence after pretending to feed them. [Tweet and video at the link]
—————————-
#UNESCO strongly condemns Russia’s repeated attacks against the city of Odesa. Director-General Audrey Azoulay said, This outrageous destruction marks an escalation of violence against cultural heritage of #Ukraine. Worth noting Russia’s a member of UNESCO [Tweet at the link]
At the very least, Russia should be booted from UNESCO.
—————————— Russian sources report real advances by Ukrainian forces north and south of Bakhmut. I’ll leave the details for Mark Sumner’s update tomorrow, but the areas around Bakhmut have proven the most fertile for Ukrainian gains. For one, Russian forces haven’t been able to create the multilayered defenses and deep mine fields we’ve seen elsewhere. And secondly, this area just isn’t that important, strategically, so it doesn’t actually matter much if Ukraine eventually liberates the ruins of Bakhmut.
“The AFU has reportedly taken control over a large part of height 197 south of Klishchiivka. The last height and defensive stronghold for the Russians near the settlement. When fully controlled, Klishchiivka is cut off from Andriivka. Andriivka will be untennable getting attacked from both the north and west.” https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1683456300863062021
The Justice Department on Monday sued Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott over a floating barrier that the state placed on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
The lawsuit asks a court to force Texas to remove a roughly 1,000-foot (305-meter) line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys that the Biden administration says raises humanitarian and environmental concerns. The suit also claims that Texas unlawfully installed the barrier along without permission near the border city of Eagle Pass.
[…] In anticipation of the lawsuit, Abbott sent President Joe Biden a letter Monday that defended Texas’ right to install the barrier. [Abbott is wrong.] He accused Biden of putting migrants at risk by not doing more to deter them from making the journey to the U.S.
The Biden administration has said illegal border crossings have declined significantly since new immigration rules took effect in May.
The Justice Department warned Texas in a letter last week that the state had until Monday to commit to removing the barrier or face a lawsuit. The letter said the buoy wall “poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns.”
Mexico says the floating barrier violates treaties and asked the U.S. government in June to remove the buoys and razor wire.
A Sunday newsletter from the office of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Az.) featured a link to an antisemitic website known for promoting conspiracies ranging from QAnon to Holocaust denial, according to a report from the progressive nonprofit Media Matters For America.
The newsletter included a link to USSA News, which boasts the tagline “do not let this happen to our country ☭.” Despite Gosar condemning antisemitism in the bulletin, USSA is rampant with antisemitic language, conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and reposted or re-promoted content from Neo-Nazi blogs.
Rep. Gosar’s office did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
According to MMFA’s review of USSA’s recent articles, posts include the promotion of a “documentary” claiming that the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was not actually an extermination camp. “This Documentary exposes lies. I am up for that. Any Lie must be exposed,” the author (writing under the pseudonym “Constitutional Nobody”) wrote. Another article, published Friday by Constitutional Nobody, advised the reader to “watch out for so-called ‘pro-White’ online activists who are trashing [Adolf] Hitler’s legacy, or just giving Hitler lip service.”
Former President Barack Obama’s personal chef has drowned near the family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard.
Massachusetts State Police confirmed that the paddleboarder whose body was recovered from Edgartown Great Pond on Monday was Tafari Campbell, 45, of Dumfries, Virginia.
Campbell was employed by the Obamas and was visiting Martha’s Vineyard. The Obamas were not present at the home at the time of the accident…
KGsays
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@130,
Thanks, that’s interesting – and rather annoying! Living in the UK and using a TV to receive broadcasts, I pay the BBC licence fee – currently around £150 a year, yet have to go through an additional step to listen to their podcasts!
KGsays
Reginald Selkirk@125,
I wonder if the “Angry Kitten” name was derived, perhaps unconsciously, from Cordwainer Smith’s 1961 storyMother Hitton’s Littul Kittons.
Wow, in Pittsburgh, a “reactor” fire killed power and stunk up the place.
That’s how it was reported, ‘A “catastrophic” reactor fire”.
Then, in the body of the story, it’s a “specialized transformer”, with zero explanation.
It’s called a saturable reactor, the core is kept in magnetic saturation, meaning it can’t make much of a stronger magnetic field in its typical operation and hence, acts as a basic AC voltage regulator.
So, a lot important for the infrastructure, but not worth a headline or scare quotes. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/us/pittsburgh-power-substation-fire-brunot-island/index.html
I miss when journalists actually performed due diligence and actually researched a story enough to properly explain it. Alas, that was a brief period in journalism that’s now extinct. Well, back to yellow journalism…
wzrd1says
Take a drug that you don’t have a true medical need for, side effects will make that additional weight a pleasant memory in the hell that is now life.
People have been taking the antidiabetes drugs Ozempic or Wegovy for weight loss in the latest fad. Now, a small number are suffering from long lasting stomach paralysis. Meanwhile, diabetics that need the drug face shortages.
Stop with the quick fix and work with doctor to lose that additional tonnage, as I’ve done. Hey, for those of you who haven’t had to lose weight, yeah, it feels like tonnage, murder on backs and knees and my family has a genetic predisposition for significant weight gain and insulin resistance. Slow weight loss is superior to rapid weight loss, as one avoids going into the yo-yo bit of losing the weight, then regaining it quickly. Add in, I can’t go with strenuous exercise due to heart valve damage (damned COVID! Thankfully, the vaccine blunted the worst and that’s all I got with the virus) and blow discs, yeah, royal PIA to keep the weight off. So, my exercise is pissing off my knees and walking. A few miles to the store and back, a few times per week, local store for a mile. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/health/weight-loss-diabetes-drugs-gastroparesis/index.html
In medicine, I’ve embraced the minimum intervention for the maximum benefit. Not, let’s go with yet another medication first and see what happens.
LeBron James’ oldest son, freshman USC Trojans point guard Bronny James, suffered cardiac arrest while practicing Monday and collapsed on the court. The positive news is that according to a statement by a James family spokesman, Bronny was evaluated and treated in the ICU and ultimately released. However, the concern for Bronny extends beyond basketball going forward…
Sarina Bolden scored in the 24th minute to lead the Philippines to a 1-0 victory over New Zealand in a Group A clash on Tuesday at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Wellington, New Zealand.
Olivia McDaniel made four saves for the Philippines (1-1-0), which recorded its first goal and first win in Women’s World Cup history…
UPS has reached a contract agreement with its 340,000-person strong union Tuesday, averting a strike that had the potential to disrupt logistics nationwide for businesses and households alike.
The Teamsters called the tentative agreement “historic” and “overwhelmingly lucrative.” It includes, among other benefits, higher wages and air conditioning in delivery trucks…
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic – could collapse by the middle of the century, or potentially any time from 2025 onward, because of human-caused climate change, a study published Tuesday suggests.
Such a collapse could potentially trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. If it were to happen, it could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
It could also lead to drastically reduced amounts of rain and snowfall across the central and western U.S., the study authors say…
Fourteen months after St. Luke’s filed a defamation lawsuit against Ammon Bundy and another far-right activist — neither of whom ever came to court — the case has reached a conclusion.
The 12 jurors deciding damages in the civil action filed back into the courtroom early Monday evening to announce what Bundy, close associate Diego Rodriguez and their various entities would be ordered to pay the health system and other plaintiffs.
The verdict: a total of $26.5 million in compensatory damages and $26 million in punitive damages.
The $500,000 extra in the compensatory category came as a result of the jury’s finding that violations of the Idaho Charitable Solicitation Act by Rodriguez and his Freedom Man Press business had harmed the plaintiffs…
Elon Musk has always had a thing about the letter X. It goes back at least as far as 1999, when he reportedly paid $1 million for the x.com domain and invested another $12 million into making x.com into an online banking site. Then while Musk was out of town, the board replaced him with a different CEO and renamed the whole thing PayPal.
[…] As it turns out, Mark Zuckerberg also has a piece of the X-pie. As Reuters reports, Meta, in addition to owning Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, also owns a federal copyright to use X for “software and social media.” Considering that Meta is just about synonymous with social media at this point, they may have a copyright for every letter in the alphabet and a good assortment of cuneiform impressions. Anyway, they’re unlikely to give up their X without protest.
Microsoft, as part of developing its XBox video game platform, also has some easily understandable investment in X, owning copyrights related to using X in communications between players that might easily be seen as extending into the kind of messages sent using X-Twitter. Microsoft is also unlikely to give up a core piece of its own branding without being handed a check with many zeros.
Oh, and about that other problem: Here’s a brief summary using what Musk insists on calling a “xeet” from his platform. [Tweet showing search on Google that brings up porn websites]
That seems like it might be concerning, but then, maybe this has been the plan all along. Maybe Musk’s target for X-Twitter is not Instagram plus PayPal so much as the all new PornHub. That certainly seems possible. Because, getting back to the biggest issue, why would Musk buy Twitter just to wad it up and throw away everything of value? [snipped many details]
Those are just two companies on a very extensive list. In selecting a name this short and this not at all unique, Musk opens X-Twitter to endless lawsuits and litigation. For a guy who frequently comments about the need to bring costs down on his media platform, selecting a new name that is going to mean millions spent in litigation and millions more spent buying out necessary rights seems like a sub-genius-level move.So Musk has thrown away the users, advertisers, technology, and branding of Twitter in exchange for a name that he’ll have to defend in court for years and a vision that can’t be accomplished. Sure, owning the most successful microblogging platform means that Musk can get his latest fart joke in front of millions, and he has managed to slip a single paycheck to some of his favorite Nazis. But is that it? Really? For $44 billion?
Ukraine will receive a batch of tiny Black Hornet nano-drones used for reconnaissance in a new aid package worth about US$400 million.
Source: AP with reference to unnamed US officials, as reported by European Pravda
Details: AP noted that Black Hornets are tiny nano-drones used primarily for intelligence gathering. Ukraine has received them from other Western allies.
In addition, the package will also include various types of ammunition, including missiles for HIMARS and NASAMS air defence systems, as well as artillery ammunition.
The US will also send Javelin anti-tank missile systems and Stinger MANPADS.
The package will also include 32 Stryker armoured combat vehicles, mine clearance equipment, Hydra-70 missiles, mortars and millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition…
I’ve been following news on this clown since he desecrated the Malheur Sanctuary and got away with it (likely with help of untruthful jurors)… now he’s got a LOT of fundraising to do!
‘Threats and intimidation’: Ammon Bundy slammed with over $52 million in damages in hospital lawsuit
In 2022, far-right militia supporter Ammon Bundy and his ally Diego Rodriguez turned their wrath on St. Luke’s Medical Center, accusing the Boise, Idaho hospital of wrongdoing in a child welfare case. St. Luke’s responded with a civil lawsuit, and on Monday, July 24, a jury awarded St. Luke’s more than $52 million in damages — including $26.5 million in compensatory damages and $26 million in punitive damages.
Threats and intimidation is all this bully knows, and I’m so glad an IDAHO (not the most liberal state) jury were fed up!
Mitch McConnel’s role in dark money plot to capture the supreme court
(As my cellphone cannot distinguish between upper-case I and lower-case l i have to write permutations with four links to get the one working link.)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign reboot has started with a bang.
Team DeSantis plans to “let Ron be Ron,” so they can “expose” voters to more DeSantis (their wording, not mine).
Great. Let the exposing begin—this time with double the fascism! First, The New York Times revealed Sunday that the weirdly homoerotic anti-LGBTQ+ video tweeted out earlier this month by the DeSantis campaign was actually made in-house by a DeSantis aide. The campaign then enlisted an outside supporter (who later deleted the original tweet) to send it out on Twitter.
Also Sunday, a DeSantis staffer retweeted an anti-Trump, pro-DeSantis video that literally morphed the Florida State flag into a Nazi emblem with DeSantis’ head superimposed on it. [Tweet and image at the link. The part of the video that depicts Ron’s head in the middle of a Nazi emblem, with marching soldiers … that’s startlingly fascistic. Sheesh.]
The new Nazi video is strangely reminiscent of the now infamous anti-LGBTQ+ ad.
Thematically, the video similarly features Trump’s political failures on the right—even using some of the same images of Trump holding up a Pride flag. In terms of pacing, the video also utilizes quick cuts, interspersing images of DeSantis into a series of bizarre sequences, just like the anti-LGBTQ+ video did. Yet in the final eight seconds, the ad nearly grinds to a halt as the center circle of Florida’s state flag transforms into a “sunwheel”—an ancient European symbol appropriated by the Nazis and now embraced by white supremacists—while troops march toward the Nazi symbol centered on the screen. DeSantis appears on the wheel for several seconds before fading away.
Drink that in for a second: Troops marching toward the sun, depicted as Nazi memorabilia with DeSantis’ mug in the middle of it all. It’s a lot to consider.
The final similarity is the video has now been pulled down from the original account after it was retweeted by a member of Team DeSantis.
[snipped many details about DeSantis’s failed campaign]
The DeSantis campaign was correct in its assertion that without a shakeup, it was headed for disaster. But instead of recalibrating to address donor fears that DeSantis had tacked so far right he wouldn’t be competitive in a general election, they doubled down and went full fascist. […]
Only a campaign demonstrating that type of aptitude could devise a shakeup that landed on, “Ya know what the voters really need? More Ron.”
The Chinese government has removed Qin Gang from the post of foreign minister and replaced him with his predecessor, Wang Yi, according to state media.
“China’s top legislature voted to appoint Wang Yi as foreign minister … as it convened a session on Tuesday,” the Xinhua news agency reported. “Qin Gang was removed from the post of foreign minister.”
The announcement came a month after Qin’s last public appearance…
On Monday, a buoy near Manatee Bay recorded an astounding 101.1 degree water temperature, a temperature common for hot tubs.
[…] This was on the heels of the same buoy in Manatee Bay registering 100.2 degrees on Sunday. For perspective, the average hot tub temperature ranges between 100-102 degrees.
While the readings would’ve been considered a possible outlier or sensor error, surrounding buoys recorded similarly high temperatures, with 99.3F at Murray Key and 98.4F at Johnson Key.
[…] According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), ocean warming since 1991 doubles the size of the marine heat wave forecasted for September 2023.
According to the experimental forecast issued in June, 50 percent of the global oceans could experience heat wave conditions by September 2023.
For context: The plan Ohio Republicans concocted to stop voters from enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution is to up the threshold for such amendments to pass from a simple majority (50 percent plus one) to a floor of 60 percent. But they need voters’ approval to do that—so they’re spending $20 million to hold a special election on August 8, and if the changes pass, it could kneecap the November effort to protect abortion. (The pro-choice position on Issue 1 is voting “no.”) Every living ex-Ohio governor opposes the August special election, including the stridently anti-abortion John Kasich (R).
But new polling shows the brazen scheme is on its way to failure, according to a Washington Post analysis. Not only do Ohioans overwhelmingly oppose the effort to change the amendment process (57 percent to 26 percent), they also support the abortion amendment itself (58 percent to 32 percent)…
That is encouraging, but I hope all those people get out to vote on August 8.
wzrd1says
Just pulls the brake on Biden’s asylum police “that has little daylight between Trump’s illegal asylum policy”.
Biden’s problem is the same as Trump’s problem. Ratified treaties are the law of the land, per some silly little law called the Constitution of the United States of America. The US signed and ratified the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which guarantees asylum and the process was codified into law shortly after. Trying to neutralize that is simply lawlessness on the part of the Chief Executive.
If we’re not going to have laws, I’ll be Emperor. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/politics/biden-asylum-court-ruling/index.html
For fuck’s sake, Joe, you’re a lawyer and should know better!
wzrd1says
@ 163, my money’s on sooner for Gulf Stream shutdown, rather than later. Synergistic effects on multiple systems are still being underestimated. The net effect is loss of cooling in tropical seas and loss of heat from the Gulf Stream for the US and Canadian east coast, as well as loss of warming from the Gulf Stream for Europe. Think fucked up winters with tons of weird storms, polar vortex dips and more.
@ 164, good news, Bundy needed an attitude adjustment from day one when he and his sons, with their buddies drew firearms in effective treason against the US government. When he refuses to pay and we know that he will, send in an army of federal agents to seize everything that he owns and sell it off for cheap to pay the fines.
wzrd1says
Bronny James, the son of NBA star LeBron James, suffered a cardiac arrest during basketball practice at USC. He’s recovering, discharged from the ICU and is currently stable.
Great job, USC! Having people trained in CPR with the availability of an AED can and does save lives. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/sport/bronny-james-cardiac-arrest/index.html
Great job in responding to an emergency!
wzrd1says
Hey, the bullshit film, “Sound of Freedom” is in theaters and is sold out in many locations.
The seats are empty, but mystery buyers buy the tickets so that strangers can see the lies for free. Alas, people are enjoying the heatwave more, so aren’t taking the free seats. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/sound-of-freedom-box-office-pay-it-forward/index.html
Most scams are designed to make money, this one, to look like they’re making money while losing money. I think that was Business 101 at Trump U.
Former “assistant to the president” Peter Navarro apparently sees the writing on the wall—and he doesn’t like it. In a new video, the man who worked feverishly to help Donald Trump overthrow the United States government on Jan. 6, 2021, slaps a picture of the Declaration of Independence behind himself, wires himself up with a microphone that makes it abundantly clear the patriotic background is meant to hide that he’s taping this in his own basement or somebody else’s, and warns that a second Civil War is nearly upon us. [video at the link: “[…] Republicans take back Trump’s America from your cold, woke hands.”]
Well, that was two minutes of absolute batshit gibberish, Peter. Thank you for sharing that.
What the specific f–k Navarro is going on about is unclear, and the frequent edits in the brief clip suggest that he went off the rails numerous times before patching together the half-presentable version of his claims, but the spirit of the thing is clear. Trump has been indicted twice now, and it’s looking more and more likely that he will be indicted for the biggest crime of all: the attempted overthrow of the United States government, which Navarro personally participated in and has been trying to help Trump skate from ever since.
Hold Trump and Navarro responsible for an attempt to erase the results of a United States election, hints the basement-dwelling fascist, and you can expect Republicans to start murdering people. That’s what a civil war is: organized murder. Navarro can play cute with his “cold, woke hands” references and the vagueness of “come back to haunt you,” but “second Civil War” means shooting people, and that’s what Navarro is evidently hoping for if it means getting himself, a far-right seditionist hack who has already been indicted twice and is likely to be indicted again, off the hook.
Yup. That’s where all this is coming from: a violent case of self-interest.
Navarro has been indicted on charges of contempt of Congress and will go on trial in September. Last March he was ordered to turn over more than 200 emails from his White House days to the National Archives after the Department of Justice filed suit to compel him. Navarro had refused because he said the emails might be incriminating, and that the Justice Department was using the Presidential Records Act to get around his Fifth Amendment rights.
Navarro’s current troubles stem from his actions as a traitorous, seditionist crook. He was a major cog in the White House plan to erase Donald Trump’s election loss (aka the crafting of an attempted Republican-backed coup). He allegedly worked with Steve Bannon to implement the John Eastman-advocated plan to have Congress throw out the electoral results in multiple Joe Biden-won states so Republican legislatures in those states could then replace them with Trump-allied electors. That’s why the House committee investigating the coup insisted on talking to him and why Navarro flat-out refused, risking jail time rather than agreeing to provide documents or testimony. It’s also why Navarro was subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating the coup over a year ago.
So yeah, it turns out that this Bannon-allied Trump lackey has a whole lot of reasons to hope Trump supporters go nuts and start murdering Democrats in a new “civil war” rather than abide Trump being held accountable for the attempted coup that Navarro was himself an eager accessory to. Nothing shapes the fascist mind like the possibility of prison time, and if the Department of Justice does muster the courage to indict Trump over the Jan. 6 coup attempt, there’s very little chance they wouldn’t go after Navarro as co-conspirator.
This isn’t new for Navarro, by the way. He dons his black T-shirt to spew these weirdly fascist, possibly cocaine-fueled rants on a regular basis. One of his more memorable attempts was in an appearance with Bannon in which Navarro explained that Trump had stolen the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago so that he could publicly expose them and thwart the next major war or … something? [video at the link]
This guy taught actual college economics classes once upon a time. As a supposed economist. Can you imagine what those effing lectures must have been like?
Here’s what we know about the much-discussed swing voter: They decide elections. They broke for Donald Trump in 2016. They helped install faux-moderate Republican Glen Youngkin as governor in Virginia. They backed Joe Biden in 2020.
Swing voters believe cops should exist and that parents should have some say in what their kids are taught in school. Republicans leveraged to their advantage “defund the police” and “critical race theory,” but now they’re the ones alienating swing voters with extreme positions. Look at Florida, where Republicans went from supposedly fighting mandatory gay-making classes in public schools to declaring that slavery had its upsides.
Democrats at least had the sense of mind to admit it was a bad move when Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said — in public — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Republicans have senselessly defended Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s repulsive remarks about Black people “benefitting” from their enslavement.
National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke railed against Vice President Kamala Harris who denounced Florida’s slavery curriculum. “This is a brazen lie,” Cooke said. “It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie. It is so untrue — so deliberately and cynically misleading — that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology.”
Yes, the Black lady should apologize here. Cooke, who’s white, was born in England, and apparently thinks he knows more about US slavery than Harris. No, I’m not surprised. [video at the link]
Fox News devoted most of Monday to Cooke’s screed, and Jesse Watters — the network’s economy brand Tucker Carlson — declared, “This is historical fact, that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved and then used those skills as blacksmiths, in agriculture, tailoring, in the shipping business, to benefit themselves and their families.”
Enslaved people weren’t able to “benefit themselves and their families” on account of slavery. Watters is also promoting the pernicious myth that Africans arrived in America as blank slates, like a computer with zero software installed. We weren’t just mindless brutes that enlightened white people “trained” in useful skills.
The historical reality, as the Washington Post’s Gillian Brockell states, is that “Africans already were skilled before they were enslaved.”
And, in many cases, enslavers sought and purchased people coming from specific African societies based on skills common in those societies. Decades of research — slave ship manifests, plantation ledgers, newspaper articles, letters, journals and archaeological digs — by dozens of scholars supports this, much of it compiled in the 2022 book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer.
Watters claimed that Harris doesn’t want “African Americans and white Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved,” which isn’t what she said, but this is Fox News, so of course he’s lying.
Co-host Jessica Tarlov dared suggest that she was “fundamentally uncomfortable with this sentence that Blacks benefited at all from [slavery.]”
“And, you know, it made me think of, as someone, obviously, I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish,” she said. “Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? While they were hanging out in concentration camps. You wanted a strong work ethic. Right. Maybe you learned a new skill.”
That’s when wannabe insult comic Greg Gutfeld offered his opinion. He’s neither Black, Jewish, nor — based on his remarks — functionally human.
“Did you ever read Man’s Search for Meaning?” he asked, doing his best Tom Buchanan. “Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
No, it didn’t.
Millions died at concentration camps as soon as they arrived. Yes, the young and strong were exploited, but they eventually succumbed to starvation and disease. Responding to Gutfeld’s malicious ignorance, if not his implicit claim to be on a nickname basis with Mr. Frankl, the Auschwitz Memorial responded:
Viktor Frankl’s observation about the specific situation in Auschwitz, which at some point became a camp that connected the functions of a concentration camp and extermination center and where deported Jews went through the selection process, highlights how some Jews became registered prisoners and might have used their skills to gain favor or prolong their lives in that particular setting.
Yet, it never gave them complete protection. However, we must not overlook the larger picture of the Holocaust. Nazi Germany’s ultimate goal was to exterminate all the people it considered Jews (Nazis created their racial definition of a Jewish person). Millions of Jews were brutally murdered in execution sites, mainly across the east of occupied Europe, with entire communities wiped out regardless of their usefulness or contributions to society. While some of the ghettos seemed to have the goal of being productive and Jews were used as slave labor there, being “useful” did not guarantee safety, as the Nazis eventually decided to liquidate them, leading to the murder of those considered valuable as well.
There is a sign above the gate at the main entrance to Auschwitz. It reads, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes one free). That was a perverse lie, just like Fox News programming.
Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott’s stewardship, is hardly a bastion of human rights. When the state isn’t torturing immigrants, it’s also slow-roasting inmates in prisons that lack air conditioning. […]
According to a July 2022 Texas A&M University report, Texas prisons often reach 110 degrees. Some prison cells have even hit 149 degrees. The Texas A&M report reveals that just 30 percent of Texas prison living areas have air conditioning, compared to the more than 98 percent of Texas homes that have AC. This isn’t a luxury that inmates are denied but a basic standard of living in a state that is only getting hotter.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice operates about 100 prisons, and just 31 are fully air conditioned while 55 have AC in “limited areas.” According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 271 deaths between 2001 and 2019 have been linked to extreme heat days.
Texas is not so broke-ass that it can only afford to cool prisons with a few rickety fans and a prayer. In fact, the state has spent more money fighting efforts in court to install air conditioning than it would have cost to put in AC in the first place.
Despite a $32.7 billion budget surplus, state legislators this year once again refused to devote a red hot nickel toward cooling their state’s dangerously hot prisons. Even if they don’t care about the inmates, the extreme heat also makes it hard to retain prison staff.
This is barbaric, but it’s apparently good for business. Texas Public Radio reports that the price of bottled water increased by 50 percent in prison commissaries across Texas last month. When the free market meets a desperate, captive consumer base, the winners are usually predatory ghouls.
[…] Prison guards do pass out glasses of cold water each day, but a single glass is bullshit during an ongoing heatwave. The TDCJ insists that prisoners have access to tap water, but the Republican-run state predictably has some of the worst tap water in the US. You can thank the corporate polluters that have a welcome home in Texas.
A depressing but not shocking data point is that Texans who live in low-income communities, especially Black and Hispanic people, flat-out don’t believe the drinking water is safe, and they don’t live in prisons that are more than 50 years old.
“I would never drink the water at the tap,” said Don Aldaco, a recently paroled man who spent 24 years in various TDCJ facilities. “I would always get a piece of a sheet and I would tie it on the actual spigot, like a filter. I would have to change it like every other day because of all the rust and all the crud coming out.”
Current inmates have claimed that the tap water in some prison facilities smell like sewage.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality.
“Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, ‘you kind of just smell it all. It’s just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.’”
A TDCJ spokeswoman dismissed the claim, and really, who are you going to believe — the nice prison official or known felons who drink shit water?
Commissary vendor Royal Pacific Tea Company requested to raise the prices in March, before its contract was even complete, and according to released emails, this occurred in concert with the state prison system.
We assume the people involved will nonetheless sleep well in their air-conditioned bedrooms.
my cellphone cannot distinguish between upper-case I and lower-case l i have to write permutations with four links to get the one working link.
I’ve wondered for a while. Why is [long-press the text field, copy/paste] not an option?
Not obvious sometimes. In NewPipe, an ad-less YouTube client, for example. Expand the vid title, revealing extra buttons including “share”. Tapping that offers “copy url”.
In your case, the url is somehow visible yet not selectable? And even so, you can’t test permutations in browser tabs before posting? Strange.
The court filing claims that the Federalist Society leader, a champion of free speech, urged police to violate the First Amendment rights of a demonstrator near his Maine home.
Before she drove off, however, Durand-McDonnell, who was in the passenger seat, chimed in. “You’re a fucking fascist,” he recalled shouting at Leo. Hours later, Durand-McDonnell was at the protest, standing with a dozen or so demonstrators on the shoulder of a public roadway in front of Leo’s property, when police arrived to arrest him. “I asked, ‘What for?’ ” Durand-McDonnell told me. “Honestly, I was so surprised. It was more that than rage or fear. I couldn’t imagine I’d done anything to get arrested.” …
(Ottawa, Canada)
U of O software engineering student’s maps illustrate routes to help avoid crowded R1 replacement buses
Ella Primeau, a self-proclaimed “transit obsessed trans girl,” has been coming up with alternate routes to the replacement buses since an LRT shutdown a year ago.
“It’s funny, I make maps mostly just because it’s something I like doing … I ride the buses quite a bit. And so I’ve accumulated quite a bit of knowledge of this system and this is something I started doing many months ago,” she told host Giacomo Panico on Ottawa Morning…
Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert, was in a panic.
The Texas A&M University professor had just returned home from giving a routine lecture on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch when she learned a student had accused her of disparaging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the talk.
In the few hours it took to drive from Galveston, the complaint had made its way to her supervisors, and Alonzo’s job was suddenly at risk.
…
The email also included a “formal censure” of Alonzo, although it did not specify what she said that was offensive.
Neither UTMB nor Texas A&M would confirm what Alonzo said that prompted such a reaction, and UTMB students interviewed by the Tribune recalled a vague reference to Patrick’s office but nothing specific.
UTMB declined to comment for this story, and Alonzo declined to be interviewed.
Ultimately Texas A&M allowed Alonzo to keep her job after an internal investigation could not confirm any wrongdoing…
Marine veteran Trevor Reed, who was wrongfully detained in Russia for three years before being released as part of a prisoner exchange last year, has been injured while fighting in Ukraine, the State Department confirmed Tuesday.
“We are aware that Trevor Reed was injured while participating in fighting in Ukraine,” deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said at a news conference. “Mr. Reed has been transported to Germany, and he is receiving medical care.”…
But Patel stressed that while in Ukraine, Reed “was not engaged in any activities on behalf of the U.S. government.” …
Re: Reginald Selkirk 187
“No one is more identified with the Court’s conservative turn than Leo, and arguably no issue has been more ardently championed by the Federalist Society than the right to free expression enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Supreme Court Justices who are associated with the Federalist Society, and whose appointments Leo had promoted, have ruled in favor of the First Amendment right of religious opponents of same-sex marriage to deny some business services to couples of whom they disapprove, and of the right of rich political donors to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns as a form of speech. “I think the left misunderstands what we define as rights in our country sometimes, because frankly, those are defined by the Bill of Rights,” Leo said, in an interview this week with the conservative news site Maine Wire. “Most of these rights that we’re talking about in the Bill of Rights are freedom from government oppression, freedom from government interference, they are political and civil rights.””
And that’s why we have the 9th amendment. Presents offensive gesture most useful with Leonard Leo to Leonard Leo
178
Gabe Barnard
Tue, July 25, 2023 at 7:01 PM EDT
A Nampa man who shot the driver of another vehicle during a road rage incident, and was then shot by a police officer in a traffic stop, could serve as many as 20 years in prison.
Third District Judge Randall Grove sentenced Roland Castillo, 42, to five years fixed and 10 years indeterminate for aggravated battery, plus five years fixed for unlawful possession of a firearm as a convicted felon, according to a Tuesday news release from the Canyon County prosecutor. In total, Castillo will serve the first 10 years of his sentence in prison and could serve the remaining 10 in prison or on parole.
On July 13, 2022, Castillo ran a stop sign and was flipped off by another driver in Nampa, according to the news release. Prosecutors said Castillo followed and shot the man using a stolen gun, hitting him in the shoulder and hand. The man called 911 and provided a description of the vehicle and the direction it was headed, according to previous Idaho Statesman reporting.
A Canyon County deputy found Castillo’s vehicle an hour later, initiating a traffic stop. The deputy shot Castillo during the encounter, and he was treated and released from a local hospital…
A coalition of Texas bookstores and national bookseller associations filed suit on Tuesday over House Bill 900, which aims to ban sexually explicit material from school libraries.
HB 900 passed in the Legislature and was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this year. It is set to go into effect on Sept. 1 and requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based on the presence of depictions or references to sex. In school libraries, books with a “sexually explicit” rating will be removed from bookshelves. And students who want to check out school library books deemed “sexually relevant” would have to get parental permission first…
[…] losing slowly rather than rapidly is what passes for success in Russia these days.
[…] the Wall Street Journal does seem to be making a couple of judgements about the situation that are decidedly … odd.
First, The Wall Street Journal writers describe the counteroffensive as “stalled.” But there’s a big difference between stalled and slow, one that can be seen in announcements later in this article. Yes, everyone wished that Ukraine would have smashing victories of the sort it realized when advancing through Kharkiv oblast last year, but Markos has written many times about why no one should have expected those kind of results.
Also, the initial issues with the counteroffensive mean that Ukraine took some of its plans back to the drawing board over the past two weeks, which resulted in making a slow process even slower for a while. But this hopefully will have the ultimate result of speeding up the process.
Ukraine is attacking a large force in prepared defensive positions. As Markos has noted, that’s an extreme challenge even for the best-trained Western armies. Ukraine, for all its grit and determination, is not one of those armies. Not only have they only had a few months to get used to the Western weapons that have been settled on them, they’re dealing with an army that is now about one-half Soviet-era gear, one-quarter homegrown advances, and one-quarter NATO hardware. That NATO hardware also varies from some of the best military equipment in the world to “say, didn’t we have a lot of those gizmos parked out in the south forty?” The logistical problems of supply and repair are beyond daunting, even before a fight begins.
The Ukrainian army is also dealing with something no one in NATO has seen before: a battlefield overrun with all types of drones. Surveillance drones. Quadcopters dropping grenades. FPV drones diving right into the open hatches of vehicles. This is a new kind of war, and Ukraine is in the discovery process about how best to integrate it with both tactics and strategy.
All that contributes to the biggest issue facing Ukraine’s counteroffensive: scale. So far, what we’ve seen since Ukraine took the offensive at the beginning of June is mostly squad-level tactics. A small number of guys; a handful of vehicles; movements that appear to be tentative or designed to extend no farther than the next treeline or set of trenches. There has been none of the kind of large engagement in which dozens of tanks, hundreds of other vehicles, and thousands of men hurl themselves against, and through, objectives that are kilometers away.
In recent days there have been fear-laden reports from Russian sources such as Rybar which suggest that those big Ukranian assaults are coming. In message after message, Russian military bloggers are reporting that Ukraine has just been playing them, drawing Russian forces into the open, carrying out a gradual attrition, and collecting information on both positions and tactics before launching a bigger attack.
These Russian bloggers seem convinced that an overwhelming Ukrainian punch is right around the corner, and they don’t seem to feel Russia is prepared. Let’s hope they are right on both counts, but at this stage, such an attack seems unlikely.
The other odd aspect of The Wall Street Journal article is the supposed goal.
The slow pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian invaders is dimming hopes that negotiations for an end to the fighting could come this year and raising the specter of an open-ended conflict, according to Western officials.
Was anyone seriously thinking that Ukraine and Russia were going to sit down for peace talks and hammer this thing out? Ukrainian forces have made it abundantly clear that they regard any halt in action while Russian forces are still on their territory as an invitation for Russia to regroup and resupply. Dictator Vladimir Putin might consider a chat that involved Ukraine’s surrender, but seems unwilling to engage on any other terms. So what kind of negotiations was anyone expecting? [Unrealistic expectations are not based on the facts as they exist on the ground.]
Frankly, it would not be surprising to see this war end with no kind of peace agreement at all. Ukraine forces Russia to withdraw its forces, the two sides glower at each other across the line, and then … nothing. That possibility seems even more likely considering that Russia failing to sign on any kind of dotted line might make it more difficult for Ukraine to complete its entry into NATO. Putin has to know that signing on to an agreement, even one that seems somewhat favorable, is likely to land him exactly where he has loudly claimed he didn’t want to be. Sitting back in an uneasy situation where either side lobs a missile across the border now and then might be Putin’s best outcome.
One sure thing is that even if the counteroffensive continues at the current pace, the U.S. will continue to provide support—or at least it will so long as Biden is in the White House. In ordinary times, even a Republican candidate who campaigned against supporting Ukraine prior to the election might have a difficult time pulling resources away if they actually took office. But then, these aren’t ordinary times. The possibility of a Republican victory not just cutting off American support but generating schisms within NATO is probably why Zelenskyy is still pushing the idea that Ukraine can win this thing within the next year. And that’s good, so long as he doesn’t feel pressured into taking a gamble Ukraine is unprepared to make.
——————————-
Note: I’m away from my regular desktop today, so I don’t have access to the existing project maps. Still, these images should give some indication of what’s going on.
ADRIIVKA [image at the link] The biggest news of the past 24 hours is that Ukraine turned its forces southeast from Klishchiivka and liberated the town of Adriivka after making a significant advance. Ukraine also seems to have secured the southern end of Klishchiivka (geolocated images show Ukrainian forces there over 12 hours ago) with Russian forces potentially hanging on at the northeast edge of the town.
Expectations are that Klishchiivka will also be liberated soon, opening a path for Ukrainian forces to either move east or divert north toward Bakhmut. Ukraine isn’t particularly eager to get into a street-by-street conflict among the rubble piles of the former city, especially since Russia apparently has VDV forces on hand in an effort to protect their one propaganda victory of the past year. So Ukraine may move in the direction of Opytne before turning to the north.
Ukraine also seems to have picked up a small amount of ground northwest of Bakhmut near Yahidne, but there hasn’t yet been a breakthrough in this area.
A series of videos released by Russia supposedly showed them still positioned in Klishchiivka with no Ukrainian forces in sight, but these videos have now been geolocated as being several kilometers to the east.
ROBOTYNE [image at the link]
This area has been one of the most difficult points for Ukraine to assault since the counteroffensive began. This is the area where both Bradley fighting vehicles and Leopard tanks have been lost as Ukrainian troops are forced to pick their way through an extensive minefield while Russian artillery bombards their positions with artillery from well behind the lines.
Still, Ukraine has made progress here. Three days ago, Ukrainian forces reportedly pushed to the edge of Robotyne village. Since then, they’ve taken territory to the east of the village, flanking the forward Russian positions. Unlike positions to the east in the area south of Velyka Novosilka, Russia is fighting close to the prepared defensive line at Robotyne. [Tweet and video at the link]
That area to the east of the village is not fully under Ukrainian control, but Ukraine seems to be cleaning up the last small groups of Russian soldiers in this zone. That represents a 1.7-kilometer advance over the past couple of days. There are some reports that Russia is falling back from Robotyne to defensive positions just to the south, but this has not been confirmed. Even so, Ukraine’s ability to finally make a significant advance in this area is a good sign and there are hopes that Robotyne will soon be liberated.
SOUTH UKRAINE FRONT AND RUSSIAN ADVANCE
In addition to Robotyne, there are some intense conflicts going on at several locations, as well as some new locations where Ukraine has reportedly moved into position to press Russian forces. One of those new spots is directly south of Hulyaipole, where Ukrainian forces have reportedly begun a movement down the highway leading to Polohy. There is also reportedly fighting near both Pryyutne and around Staromayorske. Ukraine actually took about a quarter of Staromayorske at the beginning of the week, but was reportedly forced to move back due to heavy artillery fire. [Tweet and video at the link]
Meanwhile, Russia seems to have extended its area of control in the north. However, Russian claims about taking three villages really mean just a handful of houses, as the largest of these villages had a pre-war population of 36. It’s not clear that Ukraine had any forces positioned to hold these locations. Look for more details on what’s happening in the largely ignored north in the next update.
—————————-
This video, which shows the whole context around a Ukrainian unit taking out Russians attempting to hold a defensive position, deserves a content warning for … everything. And still, what it shows is so insightful in presenting the conditions on the ground, the way that command and control is able to oversee the battlefield through surveillance drones, and the astonishing level of communication between forces on both sides, that it deserves to be watched. Honestly, this is a short glimpse into warfare that looks so unlike what we usually see that it’s shocking. [Tweet and video at the link. Captions have been added to the video.]
Prosecutors argued that seven additional warrants should be kept secret.
Eight search warrants and affidavits were filed in connection with the federal case involving former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, which resulted in a slew of criminal charges against him, according to recently unsealed court motions.
The motions were filed in connection with the ongoing efforts by media organizations, including NBC News, to obtain access to much of the information in the search warrant served at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last year.
Prosecutors filed a motion last month with the federal court overseeing the case, requesting permission to disclose the warrants and accompanying documents to the legal teams representing Trump and his aide Walt Nauta as part of disclosure requirements now that both men have been charged.
In the motion, which was unsealed Tuesday, prosecutors said they have not publicly disclosed the contents, locations or devices sought by the search warrants, and they asked the court to keep the details under wraps.
The existence of one of the warrants was already known, because it was executed on Trump’s estate last year, and he announced it on his social media website. The indictment also made it clear that prosecutors had obtained other information — including photos and messages from cellphones — but the prosecution did not indicate whom it had obtained the information from, whether voluntarily or through warrants.
The seven other search warrants do not necessarily mean the FBI agents and the Justice Department officials searched seven other physical locations.
The additional search warrants could have been for storage facilities, other parts of the Mar-a-Lago property, phones, tablets, computers, databases or digital accounts.
Federal prosecutors argued in the motion that those warrants should remain secret to prevent sensitive information from becoming public.
“The government, accordingly, has never publicly revealed the existence of any of its search warrant applications, or even the number of warrants at issue; it sought a limited unsealing of the instant search warrant application only after the former President publicly revealed its existence,” they said.
The judge overseeing the case ruled last week that the criminal trial will begin May 20 in Fort Pierce, Florida. […]
UPS and the Teamsters union reached a tentative agreement for a new five-year contract covering 340,000 workers at the nation’s largest package carrier, six days before a threatened strike that risked snarling deliveries across the country.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday honored Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument spanning two states and a call for Americans to learn the country’s full history.
U.S. consumer confidence shot to the highest level in two years this month as inflationary pressures eased and the American economy continued to show resilience in the face of dramatically higher interest rates.
The Biden administration proposed new regulations Tuesday to make state and local government websites and apps for services like libraries, parking, transit and court records more accessible for people with disabilities.
The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s preferences for the relatives of alumni and donors when making admissions decisions, according to lawyers for several groups that claim the practices are discriminatory.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced that his administration is moving forward with new rules meant to push insurance companies to increase their coverage of mental health treatments.
Shuwanza Goff, a longtime congressional aide with strong relationships on both sides of the aisle, will become the next legislative affairs director at the White House and the first African American woman to serve in the role, President Joe Biden announced Monday.
“There are many groups under attack right now, but all of them are facing the same threat, and it is a very real threat. Fascists are actively coming for trans people and asylum seekers, just as the Nazis did in the early days. Defending those groups should be enough motivation for any decent person, but even if it’s not, they never stop there, because they always need people to blame and punish for their society’s problems.” – Abe Drayton
Signal boost for this excellent post on Oceanoxia here :
On Wednesday (July 26), the United States House of Representatives will hear testimony from three witnesses regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, a new term that encompasses not just unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the air, but also any craft or phenomena that are seen in space or underwater that can’t be identified.
The hearing will be held by the House’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs and will include testimony from former U.S. military and intelligence community personnel who claim to have come in contact with craft that defy physics and known flight capabilities or have even seen evidence of “non-human intelligence.” The hearing will be livestreamed on YouTube by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee starting at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Wednesday (July 26). Watch it live here courtesy of the committee.
Rudy Giuliani concedes he made defamatory statements about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in an effort to resolve their lawsuit against him and to satisfy a judge who has considered sanctioning him.
The late-night Tuesday filing from Giuliani says he doesn’t contest Moss and Freeman’s accusations that he smeared them after the 2020 election. Yet the filing says he still wants to be able to argue that his statements about voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election were protected speech. Notably, he also refuses to concede that his statements caused damages to Moss or Freeman…
StevoRsays
Also via space dot com; A new twist in how our nearby and otherwise similar planetary neighbour became the staggeringly hostile hellscape we know today :
Those (Cytherean – ed) impacts generated lots of heat, which the planet has held onto for billions of years. Venus’ youthful appearance could be the result of a ferocious bombardment by asteroids and comets, whose high-energy impacts superheated the planet’s interior, a new study reports.
Scientists may have just cracked the sun’s greatest mystery
By Tereza Pultarova published about 4 hours ago
Newly discovered fast magnetic waves might explain why the sun’s corona is so hot.Scientists may have just found what makes the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, so inexplicably hot.
For decades, scientists have been struggling to explain why temperatures in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, reach mind-boggling temperatures of over 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (one million degrees Celsius). The sun’s surface has only about 10,000 degrees F (6,000 degrees C), and with the corona farther away from the source of the heat inside the star, the outer atmosphere should, in fact, be cooler.
New observations made by the Europe-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft have now provided hints to what might be behind this mysterious heating. Using images taken by the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), a camera that detects the high-energy extreme ultraviolet light emitted by the sun, scientists have discovered small-scale fast-moving magnetic waves that whirl on the sun’s surface. These fast-oscillating waves produce so much energy, according to latest calculations, that they could explain the coronal heating.
Arizona’s saguaro cacti, a symbol of the U.S. West, are leaning, losing arms and in some cases falling over during the state’s record streak of extreme heat, a scientist said on Tuesday.
Summer monsoon rains the cacti rely on have failed to arrive, testing the desert giants’ ability to survive in the wild as well as in cities after temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) for 25 days in Phoenix, said Tania Hernandez…
Oggie: Mathomsays
Reginald Selkirk @ 152
Former President Barack Obama’s personal chef has drowned near the family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard.
So any one want to take bets how soon this becomes a right wing conspiracy fiction? How soon does Fox News start linking this to the “Clinton Mafia”? How soon does the GOP House of Representatives start hearings linking the “Biden Crime Family” to the chef’s death? How long will it take before “Chappaquiddick” and the Kennedy family comparisons are made?
Then again, maybe the right wing fascist media and politicians will treat this as an unfortunate tragedy that, although it has personal implications for the Obama family and the chef’s family, it is a daily occurrence during the summer in the US and has no political implications.
And then, right after that, giant winged porkypines will fly out of my arse. Backwards.
The new honorees represent a variety of women, from different states and different backgrounds, time periods, and fields. The 2024 quarters will feature Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Patsy Takemoto Mink, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, Celia Cruz and Zitkala-Ša…
The majority of African nations’ leaders have chosen not to attend the upcoming Russia-Africa summit, with 38 out of 55 countries opting not to send their heads of state, The Moscow Times reported on July 25.
The summit, intended to showcase Russia’s diplomatic push to increase influence on the continent, is taking place amidst a significant boycott: only 17 out of 55 African countries will be represented by their leaders at the event scheduled for July 27-28…
During the 2023 Goldschmidt Conference on geochemistry, held from July 9 to 14 in Lyon, France, a team of international researchers presented data to suggest that “Northwest Africa 13188″ is a meteorite from Earth. The researchers have not yet published their work in a study.
The meteorite, referred to as NWA 13188 for short, shares the same chemical composition as volcanic rock on Earth, according to the researchers. Some of its elements (or isotopes), however, suggest that it was exposed to cosmic rays in space for a relatively short period of around 10,000 years.
Based on its unique composition, the researchers suggest that NWA 13188 is a meteorite that launched from Earth and later fell back to its surface after spending some time traveling through space. It may have been initially ejected from Earth after an asteroid crashed onto our planet thousands of years ago or through a volcanic eruption, after which the piece of Earth rock traveled in an orbit around the Sun before falling back onto the surface of our planet…
wzrd1says
Ouch! 6 injured, 4 civilians, 2 firefighters when a construction crane on top of a building caught fire and collapsed to the street below. It was lifting 16 tons of concrete when the fire broke out. The operator attempted to extinguish the fire and was forced to evacuate the crane as the fire went out of control.
A building across the street from the construction was damaged in the collapse, with its own debris raining down upon the street. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/us/nyc-crane-collapse/index.html
Unbelievably fortunate that nobody was killed! 16 tons of load, plus the end of the boom, plus chunks of the building damaged is a significant mechanism of injury!
wzrd1says
NASA lost communications and telemetry with the ISS for 90 minutes due to a “power reconfiguration” during electrical work on the Mission Control building. Emergency communications were engaged via the Russian communication systems around 20 minutes into the outage.
Yeah, been there, done that. Work is going on, the doominclature is wrong about what’s connecting to where, disconnect the lines to be replaced and things get… Interesting.
Annoyingly, around 1/3 of the time, the damned things won’t power back up and everyone is scrambling to fix that branch to get the infernal system working again – properly documented this time.
But then, it’s a fundamental law of nature: “It’s never easy”. Whenever someone says that it’ll be easy, a mushroom cloud is on the horizon.
Broadly speaking, Tuberville has repeatedly characterized his father as someone who lied about his age to join the U.S. Army and then went on to become a tank commander on D-Day, earning an incredible five Bronze Stars throughout the course of his service during the war.
While there’s no question that Tuberville’s father really did take part in combat during the conflict, including at the Battle of the Bulge, some specifics that Tuberville has mentioned about his father are in some cases doubtful and in others outright false, according to the Post…
… and his draft card shows that it was actually submitted on his 18th birthday on July 16, 1943, the Post reports.
The newspaper also deemed Tuberville’s assertion that his father was a “tank commander” “dubious.” Charles Tuberville’s tombstone lists his highest rank as a technician fifth grade or “TEC 5,” an Army rank that signified technical skills but not combat leadership. It could be the case that he may have been given the command of a tank at some point during the war, according to the Post, but it seems unlikely that would have been the case on D-Day, as a Feb. 7, 1945, news report—the year after the landings at Normandy—said he had been promoted to corporal…
That Charles Tuberville was awarded a Purple Heart is also definitely true. The further claim that he was awarded a whopping five Bronze Stars, however, is not…
The paper also found that Sen. Tuberville’s claim that his father “drove a tank through the streets of Paris when the U.S. forces liberated the city” could not have happened, as the 746th Tank Battalion was about 90 miles northeast of Paris on Aug. 29, 1944, when the Army’s 28th Infantry Division marched down the Champs-Elysées…
wzrd1says
Bronze stars no, bronze battle stars, probably. My uncle had the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_star
So, he was in 5 battles or campaigns. Just as my uncle was. My uncle only arriving after D-day, but well in time for every other battle phase in Europe.
As for tank commander, basically, he sat in the top observation hatch of the tank and at the time, designated targets for the gunner, total crew of 5, so within the scope of that rank at the time and even now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank#Crew
I’ll give him an honest mistake for battle star vs bronze star, easy mistake for a civilian to make, as he never served in the military.
The rest, no clue why people want to bullshit about an already memorable and honorable service in a horrific war.
Former parliamentarian Yevgeniy Muraev has been charged by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) with treason, the agency’s press service reported on July 25.
The SBU announced that he has also been charged with violating the equality rights of citizens based on racial, national, regional belonging, religious beliefs, disability or other grounds.
If found guilty of treason, Muraev faces a maximum penalty of 15 years imprisonment and the confiscation of property. The second charge entails a maximum sentence of five years.
According to the SBU, Murayev used the Nash TV channel, which he controlled, to ensure the mass dissemination of Kremlin propaganda to “manipulate the public opinion of Ukrainians in the interests of the Russian Federation.” …
President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s plea deal on two tax charges fell apart on Wednesday after the federal judge hearing his case expressed concern over a related agreement on a more serious gun possession charge.
The outcome leaves open, at least temporarily, the yearslong investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. He had been charged with two misdemeanor tax crimes of failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes from over $1.5 million in income in both 2017 and 2018, and he made an agreement with prosecutors, who were planning to recommend two years of probation. [He paid the taxes and the penalties.]
Last month, Biden was charged with possession of a firearm by a person who is a known drug user, a felony. He had a Colt Cobra .38 Special for 11 days in October 2018. He agreed to enter into a diversion agreement, which means that he would not technically plead guilty to the crime. As long as he adhered to the terms of his agreement, the case would be wiped from his record. If not, the deal would be withdrawn. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, said she was concerned about the language in the diversion agreement and suggested the lawyers get back together and discuss it.
“I think having you guys talk more makes sense,” she said.
Republicans had argued Biden was getting a sweetheart deal.
Sounds like a lot of unnecessary confusion. Also, the end result is that the Hunter Biden circus remains in the news for a longer period of time, fueling Republican conspiracy theories and thirst for vengeance against Joe Biden.
The Moldovan government has announced that the number of accredited diplomats and “technical and administrative” staff working at the Russian Embassy in Chisinau will be reduced from 84 to 25, according to Daniel Vodă, a spokesperson for Moldovan Prime Minister Dorin Recean, Deschide.MD reported on July 26.
“We can announce that the number of diplomatic posts has been reduced to 10 and the number of technical staff to 15,” Vodă said.
“This was a principal decision that the Chisinau authorities conveyed to the representative of the Russian Federation this morning at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Later, the Moldovan Foreign Ministry said that Chisinau’s decision is the result of numerous unfriendly actions against the Republic of Moldova, as well as attempts to destabilize the internal situation in the country…
She [U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika] may be looking out for Hunter. It’s a little odd to plead guilty to a crime when prosecutors state an investigation remains ongoing. It’s the judge’s responsibility to confirm any defendant understands a plea. Hunter needs to know if he could plead guilty and still be charged with related crimes.
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she asked the prosecutor point blank in court is this a blanket immunity or is it an immunity just on these charges and is he under investigation for anything else.
The prosecution said no the investigation is not closed
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you got two sets of lawyers that are making two different claims about how far it’s going to go.
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USA Today: Legal experts USA TODAY interviewed agreed the pretrial diversion program was justified.
While the maximum sentence under the statute is 10 years in prison, prosecutors have wide discretion to defer prosecution or seek diversion programs and often do so in cases like Biden’s where the offender has no criminal record, the charges are minor and the case does not involve aggravating circumstances like use of the firearm in a criminal act, according to Cheryl Bader, a former federal prosecutor who runs the Criminal Defense Clinic at Fordham Law.
“I think the feds would not have been bothered with this kind of case if the subject wasn’t the president’s son,” Bader said. “This is probably a instance where being the president’s son − and having the eyes of the nation watching − precluded Hunter Biden from flying under the radar with a ‘sweetheart deal.'”
Joan Meyer, a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine, agreed, noting that while a charge related to a firearm typically is not the subject for pre-trial diversion, the fact that Biden had no criminal history and wasn’t using, or contemplating using, the gun for violence likely justified the diversion resolution.
“My opinion is that if a prosecutor has already decided a defendant is going to get pretrial diversion on a gun charge, it is probably not worth the time and resources it takes to bring the case,” Meyer said. “It should not have taken five years to come up with that resolution.”
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My understanding is that she was actually protecting Hunter’s interest when she questioned whether the plea deal on the gun charge would allow future charges and the prosecution said Yes. The judge asked if it was Hunter’s understanding that the two cases – the guilty plea and the diversion agreement were linked and he and his attorneys said yes. Asked if he would agree to unlink them and he said no. It was speculated that she didn’t want the prosecution to be able to add further charges on the plea deal which is what they are looking to do with their investigations.
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the holdup is over whether or not Hunter would possibly face additional charges in the future arising from the same facts/occurrences. Seems that, as they say, there was no meeting of the minds between the prosecution and defense on that issue.
That’s an embarrassing amount of confusion on the part of the lawyers involved.
A prominent journal has decided to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors — materials that would not require any cooling to conduct electricity with zero resistance. The forthcoming retraction, of a paper published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) in 20211, is significant because the Nature news team has learnt that it is the result of an investigation that found apparent data fabrication.
PRL’s decision follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias’s papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journals team.)
As part of the investigation, co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a long-time collaborator of Dias, supplied what he claimed was raw data used to create figures in the PRL paper. But all four investigators found that the data Salamat provided did not match the figures in the paper. Two of the referees wrote in their report that, the conclusions of their investigation “paint a very disturbing picture of apparent data fabrication followed by an attempt to hide or coverup [sic] the fact. We urge immediate retraction of the paper”…
Issues with data in the 2021 PRL paper came to light late last year because James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, had noticed that text from his own 2007 PhD thesis appeared in Dias’s 2013 thesis. This prompted Hamlin to closely examine Dias’s work.
Scrolling through figures from Dias’s thesis, and comparing them with figures in recent papers by Dias, Hamlin noticed that a plot of the electrical resistance for the material germanium tetraselenide (GeSe4), discussed in Dias’s thesis, closely matched a plot of the resistance for MnS2, presented in the PRL paper. Both plots had an extremely similar curve, especially at low temperatures, he says (see ‘Odd similarity’). “It just seemed very hard to imagine that this could all be a coincidence.” …
Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained how stupidity enables tyranny:
In the 1930s, as many Germans were swept into an antisemitic fervor by the Nazis, while others stood by and did nothing, the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer actively resisted Hitler’s genocide. In April 1943, the Gestapo arrested him. The authorities accused him of being a part of the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler. In April 1945, he was hanged by the Nazis, two weeks before WWII ended.
Few people have had a better view and a deeper understanding of the forces that caused so many unexceptional citizens to become cogs in the Nazi’s death machine. At the end of 1942, Bonhoeffer dissected the causes of the Nazi rise to power in his essay “After Ten Years.” In the piece, he reflected on the role of stupidity in enabling tyranny. […]
Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Anyone who has tried reason on a MAGA knows they reject facts and embrace comforting conspiracy theories. Some MAGAs — especially friends and family — may appear superficially accepting of a sensible argument. But as soon as they return to the internet, they are again down the Q rabbit hole. […]
The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.
[…] the stupid actively seek affirmation for their beliefs by hanging out with other stupid people.
Bonhoeffer goes on to describe the stupid person.
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.
One characteristic of MAGAs on social media is that they never express an original thought. Every argument they advance is someone else’s. And almost invariably, they express themselves in memes. They also love chain emails disseminating complete bullshit — the more lurid, the better.
Left to their own devices, these stupid people would be irritating. But seduced by a charismatic leader, they coalesce into a destabilizing force eager to promote the cult. And avid to be tools of the autocrat. […]
[…] at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.
In Germany’s case the “act of liberation” was the country’s destruction as it lost WWII. Who knows what will cause the MAGAs to come to their senses? With luck, an energized Gen Z will push an aging reactionary mob to the sidelines. With no luck, it will be the civil war Trump and his dead-enders are fomenting.
Or the end could be decades away as the Republicans at the state and federal levels shred democratic norms like ballot access, streamlined registration, early and mail-in voting, ballot measures, and representative districts while armed Brown Shirts patrol polling stations — reducing America to a Soviet-style shithole.
On the last, although I like to be right, I would prefer circumstances to prove me guilty of hyperbole and just plain wrong. Fingers crossed.
I am reminded of the growing number of pundits who say that Trump has to be defeated by voters multiple times before the MAGA cult begins to get a clue.
Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) in an op-ed published Tuesday called on President Biden to “order the immediate removal” of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) razor wire and buoy obstructions in the Rio Grande.
“It’s time for President Biden to step up,” […]
In his New York Times opinion piece, the former lamwaker sharply rebuked Abbott for what he called his “political stunts” and for Operation Lone Star, which O’Rourke described as Abbott’s “dangerous, illegal and ineffective border mission.”
Abbott launched the program in 2021, in an effort to take control of part of the southern border, which by law, is under the authority of the federal government. Texas has spent billions of dollars on the operation, elements of which have been found to violate federal law.
The border security program has come under increased scrutiny for reports of inhumane treatment of migrants, yet still, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “There’s no indication it has worked.”
O’Rourke, however, also took aim at Biden’s new immigration policies, specifically saying the strategy of “prevention through deterrence” behind the administration’s updated asylum restrictions only “risks worsening the humanitarian crisis at the border.” […]
“I know that President Biden is a good man who has the ability to tackle conflict head-on by leading with moral clarity … And to his credit, the president has taken steps to undo some of the most harmful elements of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies,” O’Rourke wrote.
“But he has also imposed new asylum restrictions that cut off access to protection for far too many, while leaving thousands more to wait for weeks or months in squalid tent camps in Mexican border towns, where they suffer alarming rates of kidnapping, sexual assault or worse,” he added.
[…] O’Rourke praised the Justice Department’s lawsuit filed Monday calling on Abbott to remove the “dangerous” barriers in the Rio Grande, but noted the governor has made clear he would not comply.
While O’Rourke acknowledged that it was a “good first step,” he said it was “far from sufficient” to tackle the issue.
“Mr. Biden must change course, and that begins by stopping Mr. Abbott,” he continued. “The president should order the immediate removal of the lethal razor wire and obstructions in the Rio Grande and ensure that Border Patrol are unimpeded by Texas Department of Public Safety officers— today.”
“Every day that Mr. Biden fails to stop Mr. Abbott leads to unnecessary, preventable suffering,” O’Rourke added.
Nate Hochman, a speechwriter on the DeSantis campaign and a former writer for National Review, created the video on his own and shared it through a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, according to a person familiar
[…]
[Tweet]: You know it’s over when DeSantis starts firing the Nazis on his campaign.
Turns out it was the same speechwriter mentioned in passing at #104.
Legitimate Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was feeling like ending the polarization, so last night he visited Sean Hannity, where the polarization ends, for an exclusive town hall. [Heh. Nice bit of sarcasm there.]
That’s what he literally said at the end of the interview when Hannity asked him why he was running for president. He said he would end the polarization by telling the truth. SPOILER: When somebody asks you why you’re running for president, and the beginning of your answer is “I mean …” and then a long pause, you’re definitely about to tell the truth. [video at the link]
[…] The meat of the interview didn’t do much to end the polarization or spread the truth, unless you’re one of the fluffers in King Putin’s court, in which case the message was exactly what you instructed your propagandists to disseminate to the useful idiots.
This next clip is just astounding for the amount of Kremlin-infused bullshit it contains, and the anti-American lies. We don’t know if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been literally turned or compromised by Russia, or if his brain is just so unvaccinated against obvious Russian propaganda that he’s always ready and eager to regurgitate it on command. […]
Hannity couldn’t even put up with it, not that he did an actual good job of pushing back like a real journalist or anything. [video at the link]
It started when Kennedy began babbling that we (America) had “pushed” Ukraine into war with Russia. He has said hallucinatory DSM-V freakshow shit like this before.
“Because of our pushing the Ukraine into the war—” [Kennedy said], before Hannity sought clarification.
“We pushed them into it or did Putin invade?” the Fox host asked.
“Well, let me answer your question,” replied Kennedy Jr., who then accused the U.S. of sabotaging the Minsk agreements in 2014 and 2015, which aimed to end the Donbas war yet largely failed to stop the fighting between Russian separatists and Ukraine’s armed forces.
“Putin, in good faith, began withdrawing troops from the Ukraine. What happened? We sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it because we don’t want peace. We want the war with Russia,” he argued, drawing applause from the audience.
“Drawing applause from the audience.” That’s the kind of anti-American fools a typical Fox News audience is full of now. Tucker’s shadow looms large.
Kennedy just babbled out conspiracy theories somebody has syringed into his brain, for instance claiming State Department official Victoria Nuland ordered Zelenskyy not to make peace with Russia. (She was a private citizen at the time Kennedy cited.) Nuland factors into a lot of pro-Russia conspiracy theories, and plays a starring role in the one about secret Ukraine/US biolabs. Guess which other dumb shit believes in that one.
Kennedy has said he loves Tucker Carlson’s favorite Russian propaganda dispenser Douglas MacGregor. Maybe that’s the turncoat he’s getting some of this shit from.
Wonkette has explained why Kennedy’s understanding of the very recent history he tried to explain in the town hall doesn’t speak well to the overall health of his brain.
So did Alexander Vindman, after the town hall aired last night.
“Absolutely nothing this clown said is remotely correct,” he tweeted. “The dates, names, places, context, everything was wrong. To anyone who understands this topic he sounds like a complete ignoramus.”
[…] In this video, Bobby’s just cheering for the home team. You know, if the home team is Russia. He’s furious at even the suggestion that Russia won’t win its genocidal child-raping war against Ukraine, saying it would be like America losing a war to Mexico. [video at the link]
Of course one way to make sure Ukraine does win the war is for the entire western world to rally behind Ukraine and make sure it has every dollar and weapon it needs to kick Russia out, and beat it back all the way to Ukraine’s 1991 borders. And then once the last Russian soldier leaves the country, grant Ukraine full NATO membership to make sure this never happens again.
But something tells us the shame of the Kennedy family wouldn’t like that outcome. Too much winning on the good guys’ side.
Rudy Giuliani has admitted to making false and defamatory statements about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The pair are suing him for defamation after Giuliani went on television to repeat false and debunked claims that they had produced “suitcases” of ballots for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
In a nolo contendre filing made on Tuesday evening, attorneys working for Giuliani write that he “does not contest” that he made the defamatory statements. He also admits that he spread and amplified these defamatory statements. However, the attorneys claim that Giuliani is making this admission only to move things along to the next phase of the trial, where he can once again move to dismiss the case on grounds that his false, defamatory statements are still “constitutionally protected.”
But the real reason Giuliani appears to be confessing is that the motion seeks to end any search for documents or statements, by making “further discovery unnecessary.” [Text of stipulation available at the link]
Speaking to USA Today, a spokesman for Giuliani insisted that “Giuliani did not acknowledge that the statements were false,” but just wanted to hurry on to the point where he can file another motion to dismiss. However, that statement is completely at odds with the contents of the filing. [Text at the link]
What Giuliani is attempting to do here is to not only confess to lying and defamation, but to place a restriction that says this confession to lying and defamation can’t be used in any other litigation. It’s not at all clear this will work.
But the biggest part of the plan is Giuliani is ceding “any pertinent facts for which discovery from him should be needed,” meaning that Judge Beryl Howell should now stop the search for documents, emails, text messages, and other communications between Giuliani and others involved in the scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
It’s highly unlikely that Howell will dismiss the case over Giuliani’s claims that he was just exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Defamatory statements are just that: defamatory. Neither Freeman nor Moss were public figures, and as ordinary citizens the law affords them the highest protection against statements exactly like those made by Giuliani. He is also claiming that the two women can’t be sure his statements did them any substantial harm. This is also clearly false as following Giuliani’s appearance on One America Network, the election workers were hit with “an immediate onslaught of violent and racist threats and harassment” and are now unable “to live normal lives.”
The effort to cut off discovery in this case could directly impact the special counsel investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 election, as information turned over in the Freeman and Moss lawsuit is being made available to the special counsel’s office through a lawsuit filed by former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
Marcy Wheeler has an extensive look into how the claims made in Giuliani’s attempts to block discovery in this case tie into other cases in which he has been involved, including everything that springs from his false claims about the actions of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. These are the same well-debunked claims Republicans are now pretending to investigate in a series of House hearings that are really nothing more than an opportunity for them to repeat known lies, and for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to show nude pictures of the president’s son.
We don’t know yet whether Giuliani’s attempt to halt discovery will work, or whether his attempt to limit his admissions to this case are secure. We do know that no matter what his spokesman says, he’s admitting that the claims he made about election fraud in Georgia were a lie.
the company did offer […] “Some merch and to meet with management if I like,” […] unclear if the swag would be Twitter or X related.
* They oh so generously renamed his account to @x12345678998765 instead of deleting it entirely. Any user can rename their account on their own, so Twitter’s ‘offer’ to let him pick a new name was literally nothing.
His knowledge and motivation are still relevant for determining punitive damages. Duh. So discovery can still be done. Sounds like he’s hired lawyers from Trump University School of Law.
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Why would false and defamatory statements be constitutionally protected? I’m no lawyer but that sounds like horse shit to me
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[They are not protected] as long as one can prove the statements were known by the speaker to be false and inflammatory, were not an opinion on the issue, and were actual malice.
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It doesn’t sound like he had any evidence for his claim. “These election workers were changing votes” sounds like an actionable assertion- he’s alleging they committed a crime.
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Looks like this was a Hail Mary attempt by the defense counsel to try to shield Giuliani from further discovery without fully thinking through the actual consequences later on down the road. Hope the attorneys have an iron clad letter to their client regarding all consequences which could arise from this admission.
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Coming up next: Rudy files for bankruptcy to avoid paying the multimillion dollar damages award that’s sure to follow.
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Oh please Rudy. He still fails to grasp or accept responsibility that he was more than willing to get innocent people murdered, MURDERED, because of his lies.
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OK so it’s legal now for a famous person to make knowingly false, defamatory statements about private citizens and ruin their lives? We’ll see how that goes.
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I am not persuaded that “I did it just to hurry that one lawsuit along, so I wasn’t really admitting to being a bald-faced liar” is going to be persuasive in future lawsuits. The answer to that is, you did it to avoid discovery, which means you had even bigger skeletons and crimes in that closet.
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Yes, and it seems to me this just put up a neon sign saying, “there’s something I really don’t want Jack Smith to see, and this civil trial was getting uncomfortably close to it.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suddenly stopped speaking during a weekly Republican leadership news conference Wednesday afternoon, appearing to freeze, and then went silent and was walked away.
McConnell, R-Ky., had been making his opening remarks about an annual defense policy bill when he stopped talking. His Republican colleagues asked if he was OK, and Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a top McConnell deputy who previously worked as a physician before serving in Congress, escorted McConnell away from the cameras and reporters.
Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa made a sign of the cross as if she was praying for McConnell.
A few minutes later, McConnell walked back to the news conference by himself. When asked about his health, he said he was fine. Asked whether he is fully able to do his job, McConnell said, “Yeah.” …
Next year, Americans will be required to obtain travel authorization to enter 30 countries, ending visa-free travel in Europe for U.S. citizens.
The European Union announced this week a new security program that would mandate U.S. passport holders to obtain visas before traveling to any of the visa-required countries, including Spain, France and Greece…
Before you secure your flights to your European destination, visit the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS). The earlier you apply and are approved for the visa, the sooner it will arrive, providing peace of mind. Keep in mind that the new rules will be enforced starting in January 2024…
The visa, which will cost about $8…
Most applicants will receive approval in “minutes,” according to the EU. However, some applications may take up to four days. You will be notified of the status by ETIAS. If more documentation is required or you’re called in for an interview, some applications may take 14 days or 30 days. If you are refused an ETIAS visa, you will be able to appeal the decision.
Once approved, your visa will be valid for three years and you can spend up to 90 days in that country…
A former Pentagon intelligence official testified Wednesday that he was “absolutely” certain the government had possession of nonhuman craft.
David Grusch, a former Air Force officer, said during a House Oversight Committee hearing that his information was based on interviews with 40 witnesses and that he knew where the material was being held. Grusch added that nonhuman “biologics” were recovered along with the craft…
The former intelligence officer said he had not seen any nonhuman bodies personally and responded to many questions by stating that he could not discuss details in an open forum but could brief legislators in private…
The Miss Italy pageant has announced that it will not allow trans women to enter, and in response, over 100 trans men from the country have entered the pageant in protest…
An ad launched by Progress Action Fund launched, showing an elderly Republican congressman interrupting a couple in the bedroom, has now been banned on X, formerly known as Twitter.
According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform “has censored” its account as well as the ad, called “Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘Search Ban’ and a ‘Search Suggestion Ban’ on the account.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the account did not show up on the social media platform, yet the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.
The Progress Action Fund said it contacted the platform’s legal department and “appealed the decision, which was denied.”
Joe Jacobson, Founder and Executive Director of Progress Action Fund, took a stab at X’s owner: “Elon Musk loves free speech, but only when it’s convenient for him and his far-right political agenda.” …
birgerjohanssonsays
The podcast has some info about a filter to help SETI (yes, I know, Sabine Hossenfelder dropped the ball on the issue of trans people coming out, but on “nuts and bolts” science she has a good record). It starts ca. 14 minutes in. https://youtu.be/MMzrCkvQe4
or possibly https://youtu.be/-MMzrCkvQe4
Spain coach Jorge Vilda warned there is more to come from his side after they thrashed Zambia to progress to the last 16 of the Fifa Women’s World Cup with a game to spare…
Reginald Selkirksays
@247
On a positive note, Ireland scored twice in their 2-1 loss.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Jul 26, 2023 · 3:25:24 PM MDT · kos
Pentagon now saying this is, indeed, the big show.
Ukrainian officials have told U.S. officials that the enlarged Ukrainian force would try to advance south through Russia’s minefields and other fortifications toward the city of Tokmak, and, if successful, on to Melitopol, near the coast.
That is indeed the most heavily fortified part of Russia’s defenses, because everyone knows it’s the most strategically important. This part is way optimistic:
The new operation, if successful, could take one to three weeks, Ukrainian officials have told officials in Washington.
If Ukrainian forces are in Tokmak in three weeks, it’s a much different war.
Wouldn’t it be funny if just days after The Wall Street Journal declared Ukraine’s counteroffensive “stalled,” it would start making serious progress against those entrenched Russian defenses? [See comment 199]
If Russian Telegram sources are to be believed, that’s exactly what is finally happening.
Russian Telegram sources such as Rybar have been screaming about imminent Ukrainian advances for several weeks now, with little battlefield progress to justify the hysteria. It’s often advantageous for Russian sources to claim Ukrainian advances, as they can then spin yarns about heroic Russian defenders holding the line and victoriously counterattacking to retake lost positions.
Yet this may be one of those “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” situations, as we are finally seeing evidence of such gains. Now to be clear, as I write this, the evidence is circumstantial. Nothing is confirmed until we have video of Ukrainian troops waving their blue and yellow flag in formerly occupied territory, with the front line so distant that no gunfire or artillery can be heard in the background. None of that has happened. But … something is definitely underway.
Consider everything you read below in the context of this very short, very simple statement released by Ukraine’s General Staff: “Ukrainian Defence forces have success at Staromayorske and north-east Robotyne, advancing north and south to Bakhmut.”
Russian sources seem to confirm that assessment. Let’s start with Rybar, the top Russian war blogger. Rybar claims that Ukraine launched major assaults toward both Robotyne and Lobkove, the center and left arrows in the map below, respectively. The yellow lines are Russia’s main defensive lines. [map at the link]
Rybar claimed Ukraine launched an attack with 80 armored vehicles, 20 of which were destroyed. But of course, we have no video of this supposed massive advance. And the destroyed vehicles? We saw a handful of them, but don’t be surprised to learn that most of those were the same old ones they keep recycling. There were a handful of new ones, to be sure.
And those new ones? They suggest that Ukraine hasn’t just penetrated deeper into Russian lines around Robotyne, but the lack of on-the-ground pictures or images (which Russians love to publish) means that they have been pushed out of this location. I’d wager Ukraine has moved beyond this location. [Tweets and images at the link]
Ukraine now appears to have a solid presence on three sides of Robotyne. The Russian position appears to be untenable. As I mentioned a few days ago, Robotyne matters because it puts Tokmak—a key Russian logistics node—in range of tube artillery. While it is already in range of GMLRS rocket artillery, those munitions are limited and expensive. It’s the difference between being able to hit Russian supplies with $100K+ GMLRS rockets and $8,000 extended-range artillery shells.
In the direction of that third arrow all the way to the right, toward Staromlynivka, Ukraine has entered the northern part of Staromayorske. Remember, Ukraine’s general staff claimed, “Ukrainian Defence forces have success at Staromayorske,” and there is evidence of the truth of that matter. Ukrainian sources released drone video of Russians fleeing that town: [videos at the link]
One Russian war blogger on Telegram writes, “As we have previously reported, the enemy is determined to capture Staromaiorske at any cost and create conditions for surrounding Urozhainoye. Communication is being jammed along the entire sector, and some positions have been unresponsive for over an hour, making it quite challenging to understand the situation. For now, the enemy manages to pose difficulties for us, though not without significant losses on their part.” Funny how no one can communicate with Russian defenders on that line, yet somehow they know that Ukraine has suffered “significant losses.”
What’s more, satellite imagery shows heavy Russian shelling west of the settlement, which indicates the presence of Ukrainian troops, as Russia doesn’t typically waste scarce artillery shells on empty ground. [Tweets, video and maps at the link]
This location puts Ukrainian forces about 8 kilometers from Russia’s one and only major defensive line, hugging the southern border of Staromlynivka. [map at the link]
This approach is particularly interesting given the lack of a backup defensive line. If Ukraine breaches the lines south of Staromlynivka, it’s a clear 120 kilometers all the way down to Mariupol. Ukraine could push south and split the Russian front in two, or sweep westward and work to envelop Russian defenses to the west, blocking the approach to the strategic crown jewel of Ukraine: Russian-occupied Melitopol. [map at the link]
Look at this map again, it’s an empty backfield once you get past that single defensive line at the Staromlynivka approach: [map at the link]
What’s more, Russia can’t flood reserves to shore up the defense around Staromlynivka, lest it thin out defenses under pressure around Robotyne and Lobkove.
There’s one more important piece of anecdotal evidence that something big is happening. Rybar’s reporting claims that Ukraine is rotating its advancing units. As war analyst Rob Lee notes, “It is possible Ukraine’s reserve 10th Corps is starting to take over (or commit more of its forces) for 9th Corps, which was responsible for the beginning of the counteroffensive in Orikhiv.”
Each corps is around five brigades, which would mean Ukraine appears to be committing the second half (or so) of its newly formed storm brigades. This isn’t a “reserve” force, but a second echelon. The first was tasked with clearing a path to the main defensive lines, and the second echelon is now able to move up through cleared minefields and forward defenses to take on the main line. That would allow 9th Corps to rotate back, rest, rearm, reconstitute, and prepare for any breaches 10th Corps might punch through.
Political divisions over vaccines may have caused ‘thousands’ of unnecessary deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a new study, which found that registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida had a significantly higher excess death rate than Democrats — after vaccines became widely available.
Thin-skinned hater of science and logic Robert Kennedy Jr. was hosted on Fox News Tuesday night as part of the right’s ongoing scheme to turn this dingus into a spoiler in the 2020 election. In between spewing his numerous indefensible, fact-averse positions, Kennedy took time out to give his insight on the illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
As might be expected, every single word of it is wrong.
He’s not right about what happened. He’s not right about why it happened. He’s not right about when it happened. And he’s definitely not right on what happens next. But there is one thing he gets absolutely right: When it comes to repeating Russian propaganda, RFK Jr. really nails every talking point.
This clip is less than two minutes long. Even so, it manages to squeeze in so much disinformation that it’s in danger of collapsing into an anti-fact black hole. [video at the link]
According to Kennedy, the United States “pushed Ukraine into the war.” That would be the war that began when Russian dictator Vladimir Putin sent thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of troops across the Ukrainian border to destroy cities, flatten towns, and murder children in their homes.
Then Kennedy goes on to say that the Minsk accords were agreed to “in 2019,” and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ran on one issue: “signing the Minsk accords.” Only after the election, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland—a frequent subject of hate on Russian television because of her vocal support for the Maidan protests in Ukraine—told Zelenskyy “he couldn’t do it.”
The problem with this is … everything. The Minsk II agreement was written and signed in 2015. Russia immediately violated that agreement, which called for constitutional reform and to “start a dialogue on interim self-government for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in accordance with Ukrainian law”) by occupying those areas, providing weapons to anti-Ukraine rebels, and setting up pro-Russian separatist governments.
Zelenskyy didn’t run on support for the Minsk agreement. In fact, he more than once called implementation of the agreements impossible as long as Russia was occupying parts of Ukraine.
In fact, the Servant of the People party platform from 2019 is still available. It contains a 16-point plan, none of which involves implementing the Minsk agreement. Zelenskyy ran primarily on eliminating corruption in the government, including in the military. The only statement in his platform that comes close to dealing with Russia is a promise to greatly increase defense spending and institute more training for the military.
This is what Zelenskyy’s platform called for when it came to Ukraine’s dealings with the rest of the world:
Adopt the legislation needed to implement the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and expand cooperation with the EU and NATO
Neither Russia nor the Minsk agreements appear in the platform. Kennedy isn’t just wrong: He’s so wrong that, as with everything else in his statement, it’s clear that he’s being deliberately deceitful. These are not mistakes. He’s using his time on Fox News to hammer pro-Russian propaganda that is intended to make the United States the villain in a story where Putin has initiated torture, mass murder, wholesale destruction, displacement, and kidnapping of children on an industrial scale.
Kennedy then says that Putin sent “40,000 troops in.” This is a fraction of the force actually sent into Ukraine. The estimated number of Russian forces on the border with Ukraine right before the invasion was between 160,000 and 190,000. Additional Russian forces pushed into Ukraine soon after. The number of Russian troops easily exceeded 200,000 on its way to 300,000 following the mobilization of additional forces.
Kennedy then says that what Putin wanted was for “somebody to come to the negotiating table” and that “Zelenskyy came to the table in 2022 and signed a new agreement, that was the Minsk accords II.” Again, the Minsk accords were signed in 2015, not 2022. This is a completely fictional account of events with not even a passing relationship to reality. [The level of ignorance plus deception is fucking astounding.]
Kennedy, continuing this completely fictional account, says, “Putin signed it, Zelenskyy initialed it, and then Putin in good faith began withdrawing troops from the Ukraine.” This never happened. None of this happened. Presumably Kennedy is creating some kind of alternative universe explanation for why Russian forces lost the battle of Kyiv, or possibly why they were pushed back in the Kharkiv offensive. It’s hard to tell because all of this is so divorced from events on our Earth that it’s hard to make any connection. Also, note that Kennedy always says “the Ukraine,” a construction favored by Russia which is meant to make it seem like Ukraine is a breakaway region rather than an independent nation.
And then he claims that “we sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it.” Which … Who knows? Kennedy apparently thinks that former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson works for Joe Biden. “Because we don’t want peace,” says Kennedy. “We want war with Russia.”
All of this is said within one minute and 30 seconds. None of it gets any pushback from Fox News. In fact, when Kennedy sits back from delivering this Russia promo piece, the audience behind him breaks into hoots and applause. [head/desk]
It’s nonsense. But it’s not just nonsense.
It’s a parade of lies intended to erode America’s standing, to demean Ukraine’s role as an independent nation, and to promote Russia’s cause in a war where the country is actively, purposely attacking civilian targets on a daily basis in an effort to maximize human misery. Russia is blocking grain that’s needed to feed the world, bombing grain-loading facilities, and attacking neutral ships in port. Russian forces are leveling villages, towns, and cities in a military strategy that is built around causing the greatest harm.
Russia is taking stolen children and parading them on Russian television as trophies—and all these folks who are supposedly concerned about some kind of international child trafficking just don’t care.
What Kennedy is, first and foremost, is a tankie. That’s a peculiar form of Russia supporter who claims to be against imperialism, but believes only the United States can be guilty of imperialism. Tankies are so determined that Russia is always right and the United States is always wrong that they will go to any lengths to prove it.
Lying isn’t a problem for a tankie. Lying is just a start.
In his disgusting fantasies, Kennedy shows that while he will never be president of the United States, he can lay legitimate claim to the title of King Tankie. Nothing he says about Ukraine or America is true. He knows that. So does Fox News. But then, this is who watches Fox News: [video at the link]
After the thunderous applause over his anti-American fairytale dies down, Kennedy reassures the audience that Russia can’t possibly lose.
Thank God he’s also wrong about that. [Image of Ukrainians mourning near the mass grave in Bucha, Ukraine.]
Ukraine continues to advance both north and south of Bakhmut, liberating the town of Andriivka, and entering Klishiivka just to its north. [map at the link]
Those newly recaptured positions north and south of Bakhmut are on high ground, providing fire coverage of any Russian forces hapless enough to be stuck in that rubble. Ukraine doesn’t seem to have much committed here—the Azov guys mostly—and they’re advancing via small-unit tactics, tree line to tree line.
Everything I ever wrote about Bakhmut’s strategic irrelevancy still applies here. So why is Ukraine expending precious resources trying to recapture the ruins of Bakhmut? Part of it is Russia’s lack of a serious defensive network. It allows a single Ukrainian brigade to steadily chip away at those Russian gains without expending too much energy or resources. But again, why? Who cares if Russia sits in that rubble, if Ukraine managed to punch through those southern lines and made a run toward Mariupol or Melitopol?
My brother has a decent theory. Let’s zoom out on the map: [map at the link]
Purple is pre-February 2022 Russian-occupied territory. Red is what Russia still occupies.
North of that purple, that is mostly empty agricultural steppe; think of the Dakotas. Russia has a single defensive line and if Ukraine wanted to, it could punch through to Starobilsk and that entire swath of red is liberated. It was Ukraine’s lowest-risk, lowest-reward counteroffensive option, and it clearly decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Regardless, Russia holds it tentatively.
Southwest of that purple territory: That’s the direction of Ukraine’s main advance, pushing toward Mariupol and Melitopol.
The slice of red I circled above? That’s the Bakhmut-Popasna chunk that Russia spent a year and a half capturing. The towns are 30 kilometers apart, around 20 miles. For all its mightiest efforts, Russia has struggled to breach Ukrainian defenses west of its pre-2022 positions.
So here’s my brother’s theory: There is a potential scenario in which both Russia and Ukraine are spent, and negotiations indeed happen. In that scenario, the most likely outcome in any frozen conflict is that Russia keeps its eastern Ukraine holdings, and either cedes the rest of its newly captured territory or it is wrestled away militarily by Ukraine.
If that were to happen, it is drastically unlikely that Russia surrenders any of the territory buffering its original holdings, which would include that Bakhmut-Popasna chunk of land. Therefore, while Ukraine’s main effort is directed at Russia’s land bridge between the Russian mainland and Crimea, that Mariupol-Melitopol, it behooves Ukraine to recapture anything in the east that is within easy reach, just in case they have to cede any of that territory in future negotiations.
Is that the reason why? Or is Ukraine merely giving Russia a big fuck you, threatening its only propaganda victory of the past year? Beats me, but either theory makes political sense, even if militarily it does not.
Finally, Russia is pushing hard up north. [Tweet and map at the link: “Ukraine’s situation north of Kreminna has deteriorated, this is due to a troop rotation that left inexperienced brigades in charge of a long stretch of front line, where Russia immediately capitalized.”]
Russia caught Ukraine sleeping and has pushed around 5 kilometers on a front around 9 kilometers wide. Ukraine is reportedly moving reserves in to halt the advance.
[…] Officer Ryan Speakman was fired from the Circleville Police Department “effective immediately,” after a review of the early July incident found he “did not meet the standards and expectations we hold for our police officers,” the department said in a statement reported by CNN.
Speakman released a police dog on Jaddarius Rose, a 23-year-old truck driver, while he was kneeling with his hands up following a car chase with police on July 4.
Police say Rose had failed to stop for an inspection on state highway 35 in Ohio, resulting in the chase involving Circleville police officers and state troopers. While he initially refused to get out of the truck and get on the ground, he later got on his knees and raised in hands in the air.
In body camera footage of the incident, a state trooper can be heard repeatedly yelling at Speakman, “Do not release the dog with his hands up!”
However, Speakman let the dog loose, and the canine attacked Rose and dragged him to the ground. He was later treated at a hospital for dog bites. […]
wzrd1says
@ 236, RFK Jr has advanced from ignoramus to imbecile and now is regressing farther than any human in recorded history. But, he’s gotten the Russian trick, perfected by the god-Emperor Trump totally right.
Time doesn’t matter, actually seeing and hearing something doesn’t matter, video doesn’t matter, what matters is what these drones that follow such mindless automatons say, not what actually happened.
Well, it’s either that or someone’s using a time machine a fucking hell of a lot. Kind of hard to tell which is true, since some Doctor borrowed my time machine.
@ 237, the theory that Rudy can avoid discovery and well, anything he says will be used against him is decidedly odd, as statements to reporters are not statements given to the court under oath. Hence, well more than one public figure actually mentioned that in court and what was said wasn’t going to be used as sworn testimony because of that defect. Only statements admitting, which the figure then simply claimed to be a lie to a reporter.
Which, unlike perjury, is legal.
Given those facts, well, I think that Rudy’s been changing gears without using the clutch for a bit too long and he’s utterly stripped all of the gears in his tiny noggin.
@ 241, could be a TIA, dementia or simply having a senior moment. Get them myself. A less ageist version being, “losing one’s train of thought”. Hate to defend the monster, but I was raised to respect and support the truth.
@ 243, I find it decidedly odd that anyone who can travel around the galaxy and actually make it to a planet inside of a star system is so phenomenally competent to do so, yet so utterly inept as to then slam into a planet that suddenly swerves into their path and stops. Which, of course, planets entirely refrain from doing.
More likely, the idiot kept asking stupid and leading questions in the office and being tired of it all, fed him a lot of bullshit, which he took for fact.
Also odd, asking to speak in private, as anyone with a clearance would not say “in private”, but require a SCIF to discuss things classified. That whole hot mess has pegged my bullshitometer, bent the needle and now I need to install a new one. Given it’s an election year, I’ll probably special order the overload resistant model I have been using for my sarcasometer, as before I ordered that reinforced model, I went through an entire pallet of meters.
Although, had he claimed to have observed non-human bodies, I’d have asked when he was peeping at me at the clothing optional beach.
Now, excuse me, Mork needs help corralling ALF before the cat gets eaten.
A few minutes later, McConnell walked back to the news conference by himself. When asked about his health, he said he was fine. Asked whether he is fully able to do his job, McConnell said, “Yeah.”
This is shocking. I saw the video. Maybe not a stroke, but something happened. He should have been taken to the hospital and evaluated immediately.
wzrd1says
Oh, RIP Sinéad. Didn’t care much for the music, but I did like the style and messages.
I’ll just say that I have a suspicion, given the timing since her son’s death. I understand, don’t agree, but I’m not the designated approving authority for people’s decisions. And I’ve considered that pathway on the anniversary of my wife’s death and for some time after. Recognizing the symptoms, I managed to take corrective action before making such a deficient decision.
wzrd1says
SC @ 256, I agree entirely. Could just be a derailed train of thought, could be something significant, such as a TIA.
Better safe than sorry.
Especially were it to happen to me, don’t have many brain cells left to spare!
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@birgerjohansson:
Could you elaborate on your link difficulties?
(visible url yet seemingly unable to copy/paste or test in-browser)
I’d asked in #186, which got swamped in all the news.
whheydtsays
Re: wzrd1 @ #257…
I promised my late wife that I’d do my best to hang around until all the grandchildren are grown. I take that to be when the youngest makes it to 21. Said youngest is now 2. So while I miss my wife, I want to carry out my promise to her, so I need to survive another 19 years….all of which will be spent in mourning.
McConnell, 81, was out of the Senate for almost six weeks earlier this year after falling and hitting his head. His office later said he suffered a concussion and fractured a rib. His speech has recently sounded more halting, prompting questions among some of his colleagues about his health.
After the press conference, [Republican Senator and former orthopedic surgeon John] Barrasso told reporters that he “wanted to make sure everything was fine” and walked McConnell down the hall.
Barrasso said he has been concerned since McConnell was injured earlier this year, “and I continue to be concerned”.
But when asked about his particular concerns, Barrasso said: “I said I was concerned when he fell and hit his head a number of months ago and was hospitalized. And I think he’s made a remarkable recovery, he’s doing a great job leading our conference and was able to answer every question the press asked him today.”
JFC.
Jazzletsays
wzrd1
It’s hard when your mind gets that way, but glad you were able to tae corrective action, your comments oten make me smile, and I value that.
whheydt
I am glad you made that promise. I have promised not to commit suicide until Mr J agrees, and he has promised that if my chronic pain becomes uncontrolled he will help. It isn’t alwaays easy, but on balance I do like being alive most of the time. I can’t imagine being in your position, and I respect your strength in honouring your promise.
Oggie: Mathomsays
Totaolly off topic:
Stwerarts Key lime Soda, some mint from the back yard, and some Presidente White rum (olts of rum) makes a really apssapble mohjito.
Re: Jazzlet @ #262…
She had her issues. Chronic fatigue syndrome, occasional bouts of COPD, and–in the end–ALS. We were married for 51 years. So, yes…it’s hard. I also promised to take care of the cats for the rest of their natural lives. They’re 3, so the grandkids getting to be adults is the longer commitment. When people wish me a good day, I sometimes just note that I don’t get good days…just bad days and worse days.
So far as I know, chronic pain is something that the medical field is working on, so you can hope for relief there.
Re; Oggie: Mathom @ #263…
Vanilla ice cream and ginger beer to make a float. I don’t drink (can’t stand the taste of alcohol and would probably be a REALLY morose drunk at this point), so that aspect has no appeal to me.
wzrd1says
Oggie: Mathom @ 263, now you’ve got to make one for everyone and attach it in your comment. ;)
A new Russian drone could hibernate for long periods before assaulting targets.
The Joker FPV loitering munitions sleeps to hide from electronic countermeasures, according to a Google translation of a report by the government-affiliated TASS news agency. The drone is being produced to aid in the war against Ukraine, which is increasingly seeing the use of uncrewed aircraft.
“A tool for hibernating FPV drones of the Joker line and its top model, Ultimatum, was developed and implemented at the Central Design Bureau,” Dmitry Kuzyakin, the director general of Russia’s Center for Integrated Unmanned Solutions, told TASS. “A drone with a hibernator can take up a position for an attack and literally go into hibernation for several weeks. On the air, a sleeping drone does not manifest itself and attack.”
The Joker was designed to be placed on tall structures such as building rooftops to wait for the right moment to attack, Kuzyakin said. As the drone is pre-positioned close to the battlefield, the time it takes to hit its target is reduced to just a few seconds. The drone is also less affected by various countermeasures…
Sounds odd. Considering how Russia is losing ground, the sleeping drones might be captured before they could be activated.
The 75th anniversary of racial desegregation of the US Armed Forces is on Wednesday, July 26.
A press release from Lubbock NAACP stated the Executive Order 9981 signed by President Harry S. Truman on July 26, 1948 marked a significant step towards racial segregation and discrimination in the United States Armed Forces…
wzrd1says
Reginald Selkirk @ 267, if on the air, it’s “listening”, which means oscillators are running, which means some vulnerabilities inherent to radios present themselves.
So, it’d not take much to analyze a few and equip a drone to fly about locating Russian sleeping drones and give them an explosively rude awakening on the cheap.
@ 269, I’d not be surprised to see a concerted attempt to roll back desegregation. They’re trying to roll everything else back.
“one of the biggest conspiracy accounts on Twitter,”
[…]
Musk included a link to a CNN article about Peter Scully, a man who was sentenced last year to 129 years in prison
[…]
Most social media platforms have a zero tolerance policy […] In fact, X itself does too […] The influencer’s posts appear to be part of a thread discussing Scully and his crimes. However, regardless of intent, it is against X’s stated policies, and illegal under federal law in the U.S.
SC @256, I saw that moment, or moments, as the man went into still mode. I agree with you. No matter what, McConnell should have been taken to the hospital immediately for tests. The fact that he did not go and get checked out makes me wonder if he actually knows already what is wrong with him.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #272…
If I’m reading the data correctly, he was last elected in 2020, so his term runs to 2026. Probably what needs to be seen is if either he doesn’t run again in ’26 (when he’ll be 85), or if he retires before then. (Or, of course, he dies in office.)
Oggie: Mathomsays
SC @264:
that sounds delicious.
It was delicious.
whheydt @265:
Vanilla ice cream and ginger beer to make a float. I don’t drink (can’t stand the taste of alcohol and would probably be a REALLY morose drunk at this point), so that aspect has no appeal to me.
Wife loves their root beer, with a dollop of vanilla extract and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
And I sympathize with the pain. I am there, not constant, but between my broken back and the neck surgery, I end up with nerve pain in strange places.
wzrd1 @266:
now you’ve got to make one for everyone and attach it in your comment. ;)
Only have the one bottle of soda. Had the one bottle. Only a half bottle of that particular rum. And alcohol does not travel well through the internet tubes. It dissolves the cheez whiz.
StevoRsays
In the new book “American Whitelash,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery examines the pattern of racist violence that follows racial progress in our country, including the recent white supremacist violence that surged following Barack Obama’s presidency. Wesley sat down with Geoff Bennett to discuss his findings.
Thought this was a pretty interesting interview here from PBS Newshour.
wzrd1says
Oggie: Mathom @ 274,
It dissolves the cheez whiz.
True, but it’s a worthy sacrifice.
StevoRsays
@217. Reginald Selkirk : As well as the saguro cacti there’s an isue with Palm trees “melting” and breaking and dying in Spain – & probly elsewhere in the worst heatwave areas too.
An urgent rescue operation is underway […] reefs around the Florida Keys are now completely bleached or dead in a grim escalation that took place in as little as two weeks […] “This is akin to all of the trees in the rainforest dying,”
[…]
experts are now plucking genetically important species from their nurseries—where they plant and cultivate coral bred to be more resilient—and taking them to land where they will wait out the extreme heat.
[…]
“[…] at this point the best solution we have is to take as much coral out of the ocean as we can […] It’s shocking when you think about that.”
Three scientists in South Korea claim they’ve crafted a superconductor that works at both room temperature and ambient pressure – a revolutionary breakthrough if confirmed.
Superconductors – which are able to conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, and therefore have almost zero energy loss – typically require intense cold and pressure to function. In a pre-print paper, the scientific trio state they were able to produce a modified form of lead-apatite dubbed LK-99 that is superconductive at any temperature below 127°C (261°F) without the need for pressure chambers…
Activating traditional superconductors requires intense physical conditions, which limits the scope of their use to large or bulky installations, experimental systems, and the like. The three boffins – Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of the Quantum Energy Research Centre in South Korea, and Young-Wan Kwon of the KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology at Korea University – suggest those days could be over.
“All evidence and explanation lead that LK-99 is the first room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor,” the trio claimed in their paper…
Anyone interested in the high temperature superconductor field will be wary, given the retractions of Ranga Dias (@232)
The rarest crocodile species in the world, the critically endangered Philippines crocodile (Crocodylus mindorensis) also known as the Mindoro crocodile, Bukarot and Buwaya is this week’s Endangered Species of the Week. The alternative Mindoro crocodile name is actually somewhat misleading since as well as Mindoro this sepcie sis also found on the Filipino islands of Luzon, Samar, Jolo, Mindanao and others and probably lived throughout the archipelago on all larger islands before human impacts including hunting and habitat loss reduced it to scattered populutions in its present range. Endemic to thae eponymous nation, this species was only recognised as a separate one from its close relative the New Guinea Crocodile in 1989.
Despite these generally fearsome and bad reputation of crocodilians; this relatively small species is shy, hiding in ponds, marshes and watercourses feeding on fsih , small vertebrates and poses no threat to humans. Sadly, as usual, humans are a huge threat to it. These reptiles have been devasted by hunting, habitat loss, dyanmite fishing, drowning as bycatch in fishing nets and more. In fact, so many of these amazing reptiles had been lost that in 2001 there were just a dozen individuals left in the wild.
Remarkably, the story of the Philippine Crocodile shows that humanity can be good too in that the subsequent work of numerous environmentalists from, of course, locally in the Phillipinnes with the Mabuwaya Foundation to as far away as zoos in Britain and Victoria in Oz have helped to improve their situation working to educate and conserve the Buwaya and increasing its population to around 250 in the wild. However, this remains in a very parlous plight and we can only hope that continued efforts do manage to save this harmless and rather surprisingly cute critter.
@StevoR #277:
Weird clip. Images from unrelated recent stories. Text-to-speech palm tree story came from the Mirror tabloid. Only other place saying that is Daily Express.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Ukraine cannot protect all of its main cities from Russian missile threats without a significant increase in the provision of air defence systems, according to a key adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Mykhailo Podolyak said the strikes on Odesa over the past week had shown clearly that the Russian strategy was to bombard Ukrainian cities, with the aim of overwhelming air defence systems.
“Russia’s tactics are clear: they use massive drone attacks to overload our anti-aircraft systems and then in parallel they have a window of opportunity to use ballistic missiles to target infrastructure,” he told the Guardian, in an interview at the presidential administration in Kyiv.
That strategy no longer works in Kyiv, where Ukraine has built a sophisticated multilayered air defence system using a range of equipment provided by western allies. However, in Odesa and other parts of the Ukrainian south, Russian missiles have caused chaos in the past week. There have been numerous hits on grain export infrastructure as well as multiple strikes that hit residential areas and even a cathedral.
Podolyak said: “We don’t have enough modern anti-aircraft systems like Patriot, that are able to hit the latest generation Russian missiles like Oniks and Kinzhal – the deficit of these systems means we can’t cover all the parts of the country.”
Ukraine has two Patriot systems, one provided by the US and another from Germany. Podolyak said Ukraine needed 10 to 12 Patriot or similar systems to be able to cover the whole country. He added that the recent strikes on Odesa showed that providing more air defence systems was the right thing to do economically as well as morally.
The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world’s hottest month on record.
“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning,” Guterres said. “It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”
Guterres’s comments came after scientists confirmed on Thursday that the past three weeks have been the hottest since records began and July is on track to be the hottest month ever recorded.
Global temperatures this month have shattered records, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels and spurring violent weather.
The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse.
The WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas, said: “The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is more urgent than ever before. Climate action is not a luxury but a must.”
Other climate scientists confirmed the findings….
More at the link.
KGsays
Activating traditional superconductors requires intense physical conditions, which limits the scope of their use to large or bulky installations, experimental systems, and the like. The three boffins – Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim of the Quantum Energy Research Centre in South Korea, and Young-Wan Kwon of the KU-KIST Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology at Korea University – suggest those days could be over. – The Register, quoted by Reginal Selkirk@280
Well, if three fully certified boffins are saying it, that’s good enough for me!
KGsays
Florida ocean temps surge to 100 degrees – CNN quoted by CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @277
What??!!?! These so-called climate scientists have been giving everyone false reassurance, claiming global warming couldn’t possibly cause the oceans to boil away like on Venus!!!
KGsays
SC@256,
McConnell’s symptoms sound exactly like a TIA. My guess is that he will take medical advice, but wanted to show he’s OK (which, clearly, he’s not, and should have gone straight for examination).
MSNBC is reporting that two of Trump’s lawyers are meeting with special counsel Jack Smith’s team and have been told to expect an indictment, possibly as soon as today.
KGsays
Reginald Selkirk@244,
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the comments are stuffed with transphobic hate.
An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.
Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.
Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.
The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government – including environmental policy.
…
Meanwhile, House GOP members are also continuing to attack federal climate funding in their spending bill proposals, putting governmental functions at risk….
The article notes:
The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.
September 25, 2020: A federal district court in Montana set aside two Resource Management Plans that had been finalized under the authority of William Perry Pendley —the Lewistown plan and the Missoula plan—which, if implemented, would have reduced protections for fish and wildlife habitat, cultural resources, and recreational uses on federal lands in Montana. The court held that Pendl[e]y—who had been appointed by the Secretary of the Interior as Acting Director of the Bureau of Land Management, but had not been confirmed by the Senate—was unlawfully serving in that role, in violation of the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, and the Administrative Procedure Act, and that any decisions issued by Pendley were arbitrary and capricious.
As reporters confront sophisticated tactics aimed at obscuring the reality of climate change, knowledge is their ultimate weapon against deception, say media experts, who exposed the greenwashing influence of PR teams and emphasized the benefits of local reporting at a recent online briefing about fighting disinformation.
…
Complicating the commonly-held assumption that climate disinformation is “always ideological, that people are spreading falsehoods in order to push a political agenda or enact a worldview,” King said a great deal of climate disinformation is beholden to only one principle: the maintenance of a profitable status quo….
…Each minute the fossil fuel industry exists, each drilling permit, airplane flight, gallon of gas, fossil fuel ad, lobbyist’s email, takes us further into irreversible heat catastrophe, socially and physically. These floods and fires and heat waves and crop failures will keep pushing harder against the systems of our society – insurance, real estate, infrastructure, food, water, energy, geopolitics, everything – until at some point, inevitably, the systems will break. Nowhere is safe….
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US liveblog. From there:
The Guardian’s Michael Sainato is out with a look at how many Americans will be dealing with high, and often extremely high, temperatures today, and the numbers are staggering:
Over 170 million Americans are under heat alerts this week, according to the National Weather Service, as a heat wave that has affected the southern US for weeks has expanded into parts of the Great Plains, midwest and north-east US.
Between 250 and 275 million people in the US will face heat indexes of at least 90F (32C), as the US braces for the hottest weather of the summer averaged across the country.
The largest electric grid operator in the US, PJM Connection, which oversees electric power supply of 13 states and Washington DC, covering 65 million Americans, issued a level one emergency alert for Thursday in anticipation of increases in demands for electricity during the most recent heatwave.
The supreme court has just allowed construction to resume on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial project transporting natural gas through West Virginia and Virginia, Bloomberg Law reports:…
Long championed by West Virginia’s lawmakers, including their Democratic senator Joe Manchin, despite local opposition, Congress had included language fast-tracking its construction in a deal reached last month to raise America’s debt ceiling and ward off a default.
Joe Biden will soon speak on his administration’s efforts to protect workers from extreme heat, including by asking the labor department to issue a “Hazard Alert” as swaths of the US struggle with scorching temperatures.
“The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law. As part of the alert, the Department of Labor will provide information on what employers can and should be doing now to protect their workers, help ensure employees are aware of their rights, including protections against retaliation, and highlight the steps the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is currently taking to protect workers,” the White House announced. “Additionally, the Department of Labor will ramp up enforcement of heat-safety violations, increasing inspections in high-risk industries like construction and agriculture, while OSHA continues to develop a national standard for workplace heat-safety rules.”
Earlier this week, 112 Democratic lawmakers asked Biden to direct OSHA to issue standards for protecting workers from extreme heat, in reaction to Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott’s signature of legislation stopping local ordinances that mandated water breaks for construction workers.
In his address from the White House, Biden will also announce at $7m infusion of funds to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration so it can improve weather forecasting, including of heatwaves, as well as $152m allocation for California, Washington and Colorado to pay for new water infrastructure.
UPDATE: Thursday, Jul 27, 2023 · 9:32:07 AM MDT · Mark Sumner
NBC reports that Trump’s attorneys have completed their meeting and were told to expect an indictment. No other details so far.
Considering that it has already come not once, but twice in the last few months, it might seem that the excitement of indictment day would be wearing off. But as attorneys gather around the Elijah Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., there is definitely a rise in expectations.
The grand jury convened by special counsel Jack Smith has been looking at all aspects of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and enshrine himself as an unelected dictator. Trump repeatedly lied about claims of election fraud. He made phone calls to governors, state officials, and even members of local election boards in an effort to pressure them into falsifying the results of the election. He worked with his staff and Republican leaders around the country to create slates of false electors with the intention of derailing the final count. And he leaned on Mike Pence to prevent the lawful completion of the election process.
There’s no doubt that Trump committed crimes in his efforts to reverse the 2020 election. The only question is what charges, and how many counts of these charges, Trump will face when the grand jury issues its findings. And it’s starting to look as if today might be that day.
[…] Other than the target letter and the general high level of activity around the courthouse in the last week, there is another reason to believe that Smith might act today or tomorrow to get these indictments completed. That’s because Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis has already signaled that an indictment of Trump and others in connection to election interference could come as soon as next week. Smith might move now just to stay out of Willis’ way.
[…] there are reasons to believe that indictments could come today. And reasons to believe that they might not come for several days. Or even weeks.
However, it’s almost certain that following the meeting between his attorneys and attorneys from the special counsel’s office, Trump will know what indictments are headed his way. So expect the charges to be in a fundraising letter by the end of the day.
[…] The fruit and vegetable benefit that House Republicans want to cut was added with the recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. It “increased to $24 per month for children, $43 per month for pregnant and postpartum individuals, and $47 per month for fully and partially breastfeeding individuals. This more than doubles the usual benefit of $9 for fruits and vegetables per month for children and more than triples the usual $11 per month for pregnant and postpartum individuals,” the Food Research & Action Center reported. A 2022 report from the National WIC Association and the Nutrition Policy Institute found that the increase worked, raising fruit and vegetable consumption among WIC families.[the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC]
This is a program for some of the most physically vulnerable people in the country—babies, toddlers, pregnant and postpartum women—and it has long-term benefits for the families that get it. Those benefits start at birth, with babies born to WIC participants healthier and more likely to survive infancy than babies born to otherwise similar mothers who didn’t get WIC, according to a CBPP review of the research. Children on WIC are more likely to be immunized and to receive preventive medical care than other low-income kids. And get this: “Children whose mothers participated in WIC while pregnant scored higher on assessments of mental development at age 2 than similar children whose mothers did not participate, and they later performed better on reading assessments while in school.”
So here’s a program that literally saves babies’ lives and improves reading assessments—and House Republicans want to cut it. It gets better: These proposed cuts are happening directly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Republican-controlled states rushed to ban abortion, a policy that directly increases the number of babies born to parents who are struggling and don’t feel able to support another child. […]
Reginald Selkirk @ 280, totally a real thing. Of course, the room conditions was that of the solar corona and the low end temperature was freezing – well, the freezing point of iron.
I’ve been taking such claims with a wee grain of salt – the size of Gibraltar, as every damned one fell through.
The heat is harmless, BTW, not a single thing on Venus has died from the heat. Indeed, everything under those conditions is immortal, as nothing has yet been detected to be rotting.
Trust me, it doesn’t need to make sense for the MAGA crowd. Maybe it’s their masters simply preparing them for hell…
Lynna, OM @ 296, well, didn’t Jesus tell his disciples to make the children suffer?
Ow! It’s a wet trout, not a frozen one!
Shit, that just reminded me, I forgot to defrost the fish for tonight’s dinner…
whheydtsays
Re: KG @ #288….
I haven’t read the article yet, but there is a headline on the BBC that McConnell has had several falls “recently”. The only thing that comes to my mind is that that is what happened with my wife before she was diagnosed with ALS.
In the lead-up to Sunday’s election in Spain, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, delivered a buoyant video message to supporters of the radical right Vox party. “The hour of the patriots has arrived,” said Ms Meloni, ahead of a poll expected to deliver more evidence that authoritarian, xenophobic nationalism was becoming normalised in Europe’s politics.
It didn’t happen. Instead, after a high turnout in searing summer heat, Vox lost 19 seats, as its share of the vote fell compared with its breakthrough election in 2019. The conservative People’s party (PP), led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, won the most seats but failed to come close to winning a majority. The consequent parliamentary arithmetic means that a role for Vox as junior coalition partner, in an administration led by the PP, is a non-starter. The prospect of a radical right presence in national government, for the first time since the return of democracy to Spain in 1975, has thus receded….
I believe Meloni is in the US meeting with Biden today.
About 10 months ago, a smiling Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, proudly described the northern region of Castilla y León as a model of what lay ahead for the party.
The sparsely populated region, where the far right had made its first foray into a Spanish regional government since the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, was a “showroom” for the party’s promises to do away with Spanish laws on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality and violence against women.
Castilla y León, Abascal added in the interview with Spanish radio, was “an example of the alternative Spain needs”.
His words may have proved prescient, but not in the way he intended [LOL]: Sunday’s snap general election saw Vox lose five of the six seats it won in Castilla y León in the 2019 vote.
This downward trend played out across Spain, as Vox saw its vote count drop from the 15% it received in 2019 to 12%. The loss – amounting to about 623,000 votes – sent the party’s representation in the country’s parliament plummeting from 52 to 33 seats….
Vox ha perdido fuelle en las elecciones generales del 23 de julio, pero hay millones de personas que le han dado su confianza a un partido que es la tercera fuerza política en España, con más de tres millones de votantes y un sinnúmero de simpatizantes. Para entender cómo ha calado su estrategia analizamos qué mueve a esas personas que se sienten representadas por Vox y hasta dónde ha calado el discurso del miedo, al que el partido de Santiago Abascal lleva apelando ya 10 años, y que ha convencido en otros países europeos: la ultraderecha gobierna en Italia, en Hungría, en Polonia, en Suecia y es la segunda fuerza en Francia y Alemania.
[…] Political Wire summarized the former president’s latest video on the subject.
Donald Trump released a video pleading with Congress to save him from the multiple legal battles he’s currently facing. Said Trump: “Congress, if you will, please investigate the political witch hunts against me currently being brought by the corrupt DOJ and FBI, who are totally out of control.”
The video concluded, in an apparent appeal to lawmakers, “Stop them now. Save our country.”
Obviously, the substance of Trump’s recorded message is a mess. The investigations aren’t “witch hunts”; there’s no evidence of corruption in federal law enforcement; and while the United States faces challenges, derailing the cases involving the former president would not actually “save our country.”
But Trump’s dishonesty is hardly worth mentioning. What’s more interesting is his increasingly frequent begging, which makes far less sense than he seems to realize.
[…] the push began in earnest in late April, when the former president’s lawyers sent a strange, 10-page letter to the House Intelligence Committee, insisting that the panel approve a “legislative solution” to prevent federal prosecutors from pursuing the case further.
The letter proposed that the Justice Department “should be ordered to stand down” — as if members of the legislative branch have the authority to direct federal prosecutors to drop a case. (They have no such authority.)
In May, Trump reiterated the point, publishing an online tantrum in which he argued that Congress should “demand” that federal prosecutors “stop the Witch Hunt against ‘TRUMP.’” (I still don’t know why he referred to himself in third person and put his name in quotes.)
In June, as his first federal criminal indictment neared, he again looked to Capitol Hill for some kind of rescue. “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS MUST MAKE THIS THEIR # 1 ISSUE!!!” Trump wrote.
Now it’s July, and he’s still at it.
Let’s briefly review a handful of basic details that Trump might not fully appreciate. The first is that Congress has no control over who is or isn’t indicted, and lawmakers can’t simply choose to insert themselves into active criminal investigations, at least not in a legally consequential way.
The second is that lawmakers might care, but short of defunding prosecutors — a step Trump apparently supports — it wouldn’t make much of a practical difference whether GOP lawmakers made the former president’s legal troubles “their #1 issue” or not.
The third, with Trump’s latest appeal in mind, congressional Republicans could launch more “investigations” into the ongoing investigations, but there’s no reason to think they’d uncover any wrongdoing, and possible hearings wouldn’t make the indictments disappear. […]
Trump does not know how the federal government works. He is incapable of learning, and he thinks he can bully his way to the outcome he desires.
Oh dear, this is not good, but the “moment of confusion” might be overly hyped:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) had what appeared to be a moment of confusion Thursday as she began delivering a speech instead of voting during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
During a roll call vote on the defense appropriations bill Thursday morning, Feinstein started to give a speech in support of the measure. Shortly after, a staffer and committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) cut her off, asking her to simply “say aye.”
“I would like to support a yes vote on this, it provides $823 billion. That’s an increase of $26 billion for the Department of Defense and it funds priorities submitted…” Feinstein said as a staffer cut her off and told her, “Just vote ‘Aye.’”
“Just say ‘Aye,’” Murray added.
“Aye,” Feinstein said eventually.
A Feinstein spokesperson attributed the moment to a markup that was “a little chaotic.”
“Trying to complete all of the appropriations bills before recess, the committee markup this morning was a little chaotic, constantly switching back and forth between statements, votes, and debate and the order of bills. The senator was preoccupied, didn’t realize debate had just ended and a vote was called. She started to give a statement, was informed it was a vote and then cast her vote,” the spokesperson said. [Yeah, I can see how that could be a reasonable explanation.]
Feinstein, 90, announced earlier this year that she will not run for another term in office and subsequently missed more than two months of work as she recovered from a serious case of shingles. […]
I am not a lawyer and I knew, back in the 1990s, that Trump was a really difficult client for lawyers. When the shit started to go down during his administration (which is to say, about a month in (and calling it an administration is stretching the definition of administration to new heights)), and he kept telling everyone which laws and rules and regulations he was violating, again and again and again, it became obvious to me — again, a non-lawyer — that when — not if, but when — the shit he was pulling would lead to legal troubles, and then, after he lost (did he get tired of winning?) the election, even I could see the obvious legal implications (even before the whole Presidential Records Act and Espionage Act fiascos) and the exposure for indictment. How in the name of the seven levels of purple pluperfect hell could there still be lawyers out there who think any of these cases can be won or think that Trump will actually listen to his law team?
(sorry about that second sentence but it is difficult to write anything about Trumps moral/ethical/legal imbroglios without going into run-on mode)
Former President Donald Trump is struggling to find enough lawyers to defend him in a mounting number of legal cases, according to Rolling Stone.
Trump, who has been indicted in connection to the 2016 campaign hush-money payments in Manhattan and the Mar-a-Lago documents case, faces potential indictments for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in D.C. and Georgia. But Trump’s effort to recruit new lawyers to defend him has been “fraught,” in part because Trump is an “infamously difficult client,” sources told the outlet.
One attorney who turned down Trump told Rolling Stone they were dissuaded by the long track record of Trump’s lawyers finding themselves in their own legal jeopardy. Other attorneys who have discussed the case with Trump believe the Jan. 6 “case is a certain loser for the defense,” according to the report. Given that the trial would be held in deep-blue D.C., even some of Trump’s top legal and political advisers have privately called the job of defending Trump a “suicide mission,” the report added.
Other lawyers have approached the Trump team themselves and were “initially receptive” before “pulling out because of concerns from their peers,” according to the report, which added that partners at some firms objected to taking on the former president as a client because it could cost them other clients.
As expected, the Justice Department has followed through on its letter last week telling Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to either remove a 1000-foot border barrier made of floating orange buoys from the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, lest the government sue Texas to make him do it. The government’s suit came at light speed after a Texas EMT’s report that the state was literally ordering troopers to push small children back into the river, as well as that a pregnant woman had miscarried when caught in barbed wire along the shoreline.
On Monday, the DOJ filed suit in federal court in Austin, saying that Abbott had violated “sections 12 and 17 of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899,” which forbids obstructing the “navigable waters of the United States” without the federal government’s authorization […]
It should be a pretty open and shut case, really. The Rio Grande is a navigable water of the US, the barrier obstructs it, and Abbott never bothered requesting permission from the relevant authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, so get that sucker out of there. But in a twist to the story we hadn’t been aware of previously, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern points out that the DOJ lawsuit should neatly demolish not only those nasty buoys (oh you nasty buoys!), but also a devious little scheme to subvert the Constitution that Abbott hoped to pursue all the way to the Supreme Court.
You see, Greg Abbott, like lots of Republican governors, really can’t stand that the executive branch has control over immigration policy and border security, a principle that the Supreme Court just bloody upheld in June. So to get around that, Abbott, apparently with the advice of actual lawyers who should know better, decided to pursue an even more cockamamie legal theory: Since undocumented immigration is an “invasion” of border states, and thereby an act of war, maybe the US Constitution gives the states the power to take immigration enforcement into their own hands if the president, as Commander in Chief, doesn’t stop the “invaders.”
Yeah, this is the kind of legal thinking you get from people who think the Second Amendment enshrines the right to shoot leaders you think are tyrants, that state legislatures’ election rules aren’t subject to judicial review, or that the vice president of the USA has the power to throw out election results. It’s twaddle, flummery, and poppycock, is what it is.
Stern explains the bizarre theory, which Abbott invoked in a letter he sent to President Biden last November:
First, he asserted that Biden had failed to “honor” the so-called invasion clause, which says that the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.” Second, he wrote that he would invoke his power under Article 1, Section 10, which says, “No State shall, without the consent of Congress, … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” Biden’s purported refusal to enforce immigration law, he reasoned, had placed Texas in “imminent danger,” giving the governor power to “engage in war.” (A war against Mexico? Cartels? Migrants themselves? Abbott did not clarify.)
This is pure hooey. No matter how many times people say it on Fox News, undocumented immigrants, even in large numbers, are not an invading military force. Sincere belief in a metaphor doesn’t change that. And for all Abbott’s invocation of his alleged war powers if the government fails to stop the “invasion,” all the actions he demanded Biden take to “defend” Texas were distinctly civilian, like imprisoning or deporting everyone, ending the right to asylum, and building WALL. He didn’t even ask for a single strafing run by an A-10, although we suspect the idea occurred to him.
In any case, no, the president is in charge of the armed forces and even the Trump Court has been quite clear on this. Trivia fans may appreciate that Abbott’s specious constitutional claims originated with a 2012 dissent by Antonin Scalia, which wasn’t joined by any other justices, in which the Great Originalist decided that sure, states can use force to “protect their territory,” […]
Abbott apparently thought this was such a brilliant argument that he was looking forward to taking it “all the way to the United States Supreme Court,” as he said on Fox News, adding, “Texas is defending its sovereignty and its constitutional right to secure the border, our state and our country.” Which in this case he has not got.
In any case, the DOJ lawsuit filed Monday doesn’t include any of that grand constitutional twaddle, sticking instead to the facts, ma’am: Texas is in violation of the 1899 law and didn’t bother asking the proper agency for permission, now take your buoys and go. As Stern notes, the DOJ has asked that the case be
heard by the same judge who has already been assigned to separate litigation against the barrier brought by a canoe rental company. That judge is Robert Pitman, a Barack Obama appointee, who is likelier than most Texas judges to apply the actual law.
If Abbott loses, he would appeal to the loonies at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose Bizarroland judges may give his buoys some breathing room, but Stern is as optimistic as anyone can be when considering what might happen in the Supreme Court Wood Chipper, noting that John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh have
consistently supported federal supremacy over national defense while looking skeptically at red states’ efforts to seize control over border policy. They need not even invoke any lofty principles to reach the right result: The Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act does all the work—with a crucial assist from Abbott’s awful lawyering.
That makes all kinds of sense to us, although we should add that it doesn’t account for the possibility that if it gets to the Supremes, the suit might be heard on Opposites Day.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin told African leaders at the Africa-Russia Summit on July 27 that Russia is ready to offer their countries grain supplies to replace Ukrainian grain exports that are now virtually blocked after Russia pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative earlier this month.
Putin promised to replace Ukrainian products both through tens of thousands of metric tons of free supplies and on a commercial basis, Reuters reports.
Russia is expecting a record grain harvest and “will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Eritrea with 25-50,000 (metric tons) of free grain each in the next three to four months,” Putin told the summit.
The Kremlin leader also promised free delivery to consumers and stressed that in 2022, Russia exported 60 million metric tons of grain, including 48 million metric tons of wheat.
Reacting to Putin’s proposal, Zimbwabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa said that he is grateful for the offer but his country is “not in any grain deficit at all,” Sky News reported.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres commented that a “handful of donations to some countries” will not mitigate the fallout of the grain deal’s collapse.
Other leaders were more receptive to Putin’s offer….
…
Russia withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative on July 17, effectively terminating the deal. The agreement, brokered in July 2022 by Turkey and the U.N., allowed Ukraine to export its agricultural products through its Black Sea ports.
The move sparked fears of food insecurity worldwide as prices of grain products began to rise following the deal’s collapse.
According to Deputy Chairman of Ukraine’s National Bank Serhii Nikolaichuk, the country expects to lose $2 billion in profits from grain exports this year unless the grain deal is revived.
Nikolaichuk also said that it is unlikely that the initiative will be restarted before the war ends, Sky News reported. He stressed that alternative export corridors, such as the EU’s solidarity lanes, are now vital for Ukraine.
…
Ukraine’s grain exports are vital to the world’s food supply. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine was the fifth-largest wheat exporter globally. The grain deal had allowed for nearly 33 million metric tons of food to be exported through Ukrainian ports while it was in force, according to the U.N.
…
The two-day Africa-Russia summit started in St. Petersburg on July 27. The Kremlin is looking to tighten economic cooperation with African countries amid deepening isolation from the West.
According to Russian officials, 49 out of 54 invited countries have confirmed participation. Only 17 of them will be represented by their heads of state, however. This is significantly less than during the inaugural Sochi summit in 2019, where 43 heads of state took part in the event.
Oggie @303, and that’s all in addition to the fact that Trump has a history of not paying his lawyers. Although, he may be doing a bit better in that department because he is constantly fundraising based on the indictments. That gives him money sucked from his gullible cult followers. He uses that to pay his legal bills.
One would think that Trump would get a clue when everyone is refusing to work with him.
…
While there are several ways to effectively kill a hammerhead worm, the Georgia Department of Agriculture does not recommend to “chop up their bodies.”
Hammerhead worms are hermaphroditic, meaning they carry both male and female reproductive organs, and it is thought that their primary means of reproduction comes when the worm splits itself into smaller pieces and a new head forms.
Instead, you can put a hammerhead in soapy water, crush them, or apply salt, vinegar or citrus oil to the worm as an effective means to kill them.
Wonkette: Biden Will Help The Hague Hold Russia Accountable For Vile War Crimes In Ukraine
There are these odd quirks of US foreign policy. Like for instance […] the second there’s any kind of treaty about international law or the International Criminal Court (ICC), we clam up like NOPE! And when you look to see who else refuses to sign the thing, it’s like us and Sudan and some group of warlords who didn’t even know they were invited to sign the birthday card.
The stated reasons have always been that we’re worried the ICC or some other governing body could be used to prosecute US troops for war crimes. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the essence.
But oh hey, there might be a teeny change on that! (Joe Biden with his teeny changes, like actually ending the war in Afghanistan.)
Biden has ordered the US to start sharing evidence on Russian war crimes in Ukraine to the ICC. This is actually a huge fuckin’ deal, and not a teeny shift.
President Biden has quietly ordered the U.S. government to begin sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, according to officials familiar with the matter, signaling a major shift in American policy.
The decision, made by Mr. Biden in recent days, overrides months of resistance by the Pentagon, which had argued that it could pave the way for the court to prosecute American troops, according to the officials.
[…] The Times reports that “Last week, for example, a Senate committee approved a government funding bill that had a provision stating that the president ‘shall provide information’ to the court to assist with its investigations into war crimes in Ukraine.”
Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, are bipartisanly on board, and they emphasize that they’ve been pushing Biden on this for months. This is their statement:
“Ensuring that the United States is doing all that it can to hold the perpetrators of atrocities in Ukraine accountable is essential to help our Ukrainian friends and to send a clear message to Putin: The United States will not tolerate these horrific crimes,” they said. “After pressing the administration for months, we are pleased that the administration is finally supporting the I.C.C.’s investigation.”
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, is on board. The Times notes that he specifically has been encouraging the administration to work with the ICC on holding Russia accountable, specifically on the issue of the thousands upon thousands of children Russian has stolen from Ukraine and deported to Russia. […]
But aside from that, Russia has committed so many more atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine. A United Nations panel found last year that Russia had raped and tortured children and executed untold numbers. There are reports of Russia deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure, and so much more.
Truly you have to be a monster to even think about defending Russia in this war. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., how’s your sick conscience?) It’s beyond overdue that US foreign policy is changing to seek true accountability for Russians who commit these kinds of atrocities.
The Times says it’s specifically been this war that’s fixed American politicians’ wagons when it comes to the ICC:
After the war began, American officials applauded the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, for his investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine. In December, Congress eased restrictions that barred it from providing aid to the court for its investigation into Russian atrocities. And the Biden administration expressed support for the court when it issued arrest warrants in March for top Russian officials, like President Vladimir V. Putin, accusing them of orchestrating the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.
[…] there haven’t been any big announcements on this. […] But clearly the White House is moving forward on this.
[…] Like we said, Joe Biden with his teeny tiny changes and course corrections and doing the right thing sometimes just because it’s the right thing to do.
Putin promised to replace Ukrainian products both through tens of thousands of metric tons of free supplies [to African countries] and on a commercial basis […]
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sharply rebuked a suggestion from Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) that President Biden’s national drug control strategy is flawed because it does not mention God or faith, calling that idea “preposterous” in a hearing Thursday.
In a hearing examining the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s efforts to combat the overdose crisis, Raskin argued that mentioning God or faith would violate the U.S. Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from making laws respecting an establishment of religion…
n a truly on-the-nose representation of what Republicanism wants America to become, libraries in at least 28 Houston public schools are being repurposed into “disciplinary centers.”
No, that’s not satire. ABC13 has a story on the reform ordered by the brand-new, state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, and it consists of eliminating librarian and media specialist positions at the schools and turning the libraries into detention rooms. […]
Former library spaces at some schools will be converted into rooms where students who misbehave will be relocated to watch lessons virtually, work alone, or in groups with differentiated lessons. Books will remain on shelves and students will still be able to borrow books on a honor code system.
“Libraries will be available to students who are dropped off at school before classes begin, or after school before they go home,” according to HISD’s statement. “Depending on each campus’ needs, some library spaces may be repurposed into team centers, which are designed for students to continue working, individually or in teams, throughout the school day.”
It’s quite the concession for the new state-appointed superintendent to leave the books on the shelves. But all of this appears to be a cost-cutting move because God knows the state isn’t going to put money into schools for anything except maybe more bullet-resistant doors out front. That means the books are almost certainly staying solely because Houston ISD doesn’t want to pay anybody to pack them up. But there won’t be a librarian there to keep track of the books, much less re-shelve them, and if students want to read one they’re going to have to do it outside of school hours.
And if students aren’t able to make it to the library outside of school hours because that’s not how school bus programs work, they’re out of luck. No reading for you, kid.
We’re in the middle of a nationwide book-banning spree that has conservatives throwing fits about the audacity of school librarians stocking anything but Bill Bennett and David Barton fanfiction. This ongoing spree has seen Republican lawmakers vote to shutter public libraries rather than abide books they don’t like on the shelves, but Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles might be the first to actually pull the trigger on firing the librarians and repurposing the rooms as child detention centers.
This is what a failed state looks like: lots of guns, lots of focus on discipline, and lots of contempt for anybody who looks like they might grow up to be a book-learner.
The more typical budget fights in American schools usually pit school football teams against Advanced Placement programs, with both competing for money and the sports teams winning out almost every time because parents aren’t allowed to get drunk and heckle AP classrooms like they can on Friday game nights. Stripping educational funding so that you can better isolate the kids who need discipline is a hell of a lot less common. In an America currently playing footsie with each of the major tenets of fascism, though, it was only a matter of time.
As for who Miles is and how Houston got to this point? That’s been a story all on its own. The Texas Education Agency pushed Miles into the role in June as part of its takeover of Houston schools, a dubiously premised exercise of state power and an especially curious move given that Miles’ brief time in a similar role in Dallas led to a string of scandals before he left after the district refused to boost his pay.
There’s a lot of bluster going on about how the repurposing of school libraries into disciplinary centers is part of Miles’ larger plan to do in Houston what he did in Dallas: boosting teacher pay but tying it to their students’ standardized test scores and similar changes. These moves “failed to show any significant gains under Miles’ tenure” in Dallas.
But “most” of the 28 schools that will have their librarians relocated to other campuses “are located in low-income communities of color,” notes Houston Public Media, and again: You can’t get a more on-the-nose example of how Republican-led states are trying to reshape our schools than removing school librarians in communities of color so that they can repurpose the rooms into disciplinary centers.
Are we supposed to pretend this is anything but what it looks like? Because it looks like writing off whole schools full of kids as needing detention rather than education.
I’m amazed that I seem to be more concerned about Mitch McConnell’s health than his colleagues are and I genuinely hate him.
Oggie: Mathomsays
So someone in Florida decided that a reference to “spin-the-bottle”, in an Arthur book (Arthur’s Birthday) is going to damage children’s souls (no, seriously, under the section of the form “What do you believe might be the result of a student using this material”, Bruce Friedman, the idiot making the complaint, wrote, “DAMAGED SOULS”) and must therefore be removed from the library.
On his form, Friedman wrote, “PROTECT CHILDREN!! IT IS NOT APPROPRIATE TO DISCUSS ‘SPIN THE BOTTLE’ WITH ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN. THIS BOOK IS FOUND IN ALL/ALMOST ALL [DISTRICT SCHOOLS]!”
So if they are too young to get the reference, no harm done. If they are old enough to get the reference, the ‘harm’ is already done.
On the bright side, the portion of the form that asks if the material violates the anti-obscenity law, Freidman checked ‘no.’ I guess that shows at least one brain cell was fired.
A third defendant has been charged alongside Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case in Florida, according to court documents in Florida.
Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Carlos De Oliveira, a maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents around Mar-a-Lago after investigators first subpoenaed Trump for classified documents last May.
Special counsel Jack Smith has brought additional charges against Donald Trump in the case surrounding his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House, according to court documents.
The additional allegations of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information were added to the indictment by a team of prosecutors led by Smith. A new defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, was also added to the case.
After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit…
This is criminal.
wzrd1says
@ 311, you missed a few critical facets of the attack on the libraries.
First, no borrowing after school, as that would be interfering with the detentions. Second, borrowing is on the honor system, so the books will go by rapid attrition and we can guarantee that missing books shan’t be replaced.
What they need is a few barrels of pine tar and a truckload of feathers for the new superintendent, to be generously applied by the local parents.
I wonder if his strategy is to accumulate so many charges and cases to deplete the availability of any attorney willing to represent him, then plead that he has no counsel and hope that the case simply goes away?
tomhsays
NYT
Re: #315
The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment (full text) that named the maintenance worker, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case.
The revised indictment also added three serious charges against Mr. Trump — attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count, the 32nd, under the Espionage Act stemming from a classified national security document he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
Brad is scheduled to speak on August 26th at an interfaith event held by the Metropolex Atheists. However, the city of Fort Worth refuses to allow the group to advertise. Brad speaks with Nick Fish, president of the American Atheists, on how the City is creating a false pretext to prevent a group of non-religious Americans from advertising their event in public.
“Since at least 1998, Fort Worth has permitted nonprofit organizations to rent out space on downtown lamp posts to advertise events. These nonprofits include Kenneth Copeland Ministries and Texas Christian University. By its policy, the City has created a limited public forum under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and may not discriminate based on viewpoint, which includes atheism. The Supreme Court recently confirmed these protections in its 2022 decision Shurtleff v. Boston.
Nonetheless, the City of Fort Worth has denied Metroplex Atheists the right to advertise an event on combating Christian nationalism and protecting secular public schools, planned for August 26 at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens. Assistant City Manager William Johnson, who denied the banner display, claimed that the education event was not of “sufficient magnitude.” Yet nowhere does the City’s Banner Display Policy mention such a requirement.”
Reports of God’s death remain greatly exaggerated in GOD’S NOT DEAD 2 , in which Evangelical Christianity is put literally on trial. We welcome back Alex Shephard (staff writer for The New Republic and expert in the blockbuster Christian film franchise), and discuss how this instalment’s relentless focus on Facts and Logic situates it in a recent but very different era of the culture war. PLUS: Ron DeSantis continues to have no juice….
That’s right like moths to the flame, or aliens to a Unified Geometric Field drive, we are back in Weinstein world.
This time we are looking at a conversation between the irrepressible (ex?) podcaster & mathematician, Eric Weinstein, and skeptical investigator, author, and recent guest on the show, Mick West.
The conversation here concerns the evidence for UAP/UFOs and the reaction of skeptics and advocates. It had the potential to be something forensic and transcendent but sadly it gets mired in the messy ‘interpersonal drama’ that Eric just hates so much and tries to avoid at all costs.
Nonetheless, there is much that can be learnt here, including: the linguistic complexities of the word ‘flex’, the precise levels of passive aggressiveness that a human mind can tolerate, if there is already secret anti-gravity tech, and whether our obsession with Einsteinian physics is what is stopping us from really understanding what is going on with UAPs.
We don’t have answers. We are just asking questions… honest!
Also featured: a recent kerfuffle in the online psychology world over DEI statements, the numerology spectrum, the potential harms of green drinks, and much much more!
So join us, won’t you, as we boldly venture through the outermost reaches of the gurusphere.
The casual listener, who might possibly not be a loyal Patreon subscriber, or might hypothetically not listen devotedly to every Gurometer scoring episode, could conceivably be a little vague about what we mean by a secular guru(!). And therefore might be tempted to make an ill-considered and poorly-informed comment on Twitter or Reddit, thus exposing them to the devastating yet apropos riposte of a “You know nothing, Jon Snow” meme in reply.
Don’t let it be you!
Here is a tutorial, a short illustrated primer if you will, on the Science and the Art of ‘Gurometry’. No more will you have to live with the shame of not knowing how many syllables there are in anti-establishmentarianism. Never again will you be liable to fall prey to the siren song of pseudo-profound bullshit or fall foul of conspiracy mongers.
Listen to it. Study it. Meditate on it.
In no time at all you’ll be spotting gurus in the wild, categorising, and classifying them at will. You’ll feel like an ornithologist who’s just been given a great big pair of binoculars, a spotter’s guidebook, and a free afternoon to wander about a National park. Impress your friends, family, and potential sexual partners with your intimate and subtle understanding of What It Means to Be a Guru.
You’re welcome.
Oggie: Mathomsays
wzrd1 @318:
I wonder if his strategy is to accumulate so many charges and cases to deplete the availability of any attorney willing to represent him, then plead that he has no counsel and hope that the case simply goes away?
Are public defenders available for Federal Court cases?
wzrd1says
Bollocks!
Just got a notification from my credit union of a data security breach. Fortunately nothing important was compromised, just my name, DOB, social security number and possibly my member number. So, my hat size remains secure information.
This, from a data transfer software package that CISA informed them was compromised. Apparently, data at rest and in transit need not be encrypted…
I’ve taken the additional effort to filter the stream of profanity out of this posting.
wzrd1says
OK, quick check, CL0P, linked to FIN11, linked to Russian residence crime group. Financial crimes is their specialty.
Color me annoyed.
But, if I need backups of all of my information, at least I know that I can ask either Russia or China for a copy of my private information.
Hell, might even get a security clearance from both nations as well.*
*The OPM investigator during my last background check’s Q&A really hated that joke. Comforting to know that some things aren’t subject to change, such as investigators having entirely no sense of humor.
wzrd1says
Oggie: Mathom @ 321, yes, they are. They have to be, as it’s a criminal case.
Although, given that being an attorney for Trump is effectively career suicide, I can see a PD trying to beg off being assigned.
. . . Comforting to know that some things aren’t subject to change, such as investigators having entirely no sense of humor.
I had one investigator who was, along with me, very amused that the biggest flag on my questionnaire was that neither of the colleges I attended existed. And neither had gone out of business. But the simple explanation that Hagerstown Junior College was now Hagerstown Community College, and that Franklin Pierce College was now Franklin Pierce University. We both had a good laugh at that.
The Republican-controlled House voted late Wednesday to block the Department of Veterans Affairs from updating its motto to include female veterans.
The VA would not be able to “modify or remove any display” of the mission statement it adopted 64 years ago under an amendment passed as part of an annual VA spending bill. The motto refers only to male veterans and was based on a line in President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.”
The new motto chosen by the VA hews closely to the original but acknowledges women who have served the country, as well as other surviving spouses and family members: “To fulfill President Lincoln’s promise to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers and survivors.” …
Reginald Selkirk @ 327, I honestly think that the GOP is doing its utmost to sabotage our Armed Forces, to at a minimum, deplete the ranks of female service members and all minorities. That’d make the military utterly non-mission capable.
Maybe they’ll do us the honor of being in our new Surrender Brigade.
Yesterday’s update examined what seemed to be the beginning of Ukraine’s main counteroffensive thrust. Pentagon officials certainly claim that it is. “Ukrainian officials have told U.S. officials that the enlarged Ukrainian force would try to advance south through Russia’s minefields and other fortifications toward the city of Tokmak, and, if successful, on to Melitopol, near the coast,” reported the New York Times. (Someone tell the Times that Melitopol is 50 kilometers from the nearest coast …)
The fog of war remains thick, with little information coming from the Ukrainian side. But Russian war bloggers are certainly in all-out panic mode as Ukraine appears to be notching significant gains.
Here is the map of the southern Zaporizhzhia front, with Ukraine’s main thrusts and main Russian defensive lines in yellow. [map at the link]
Russian sources claim a serious Ukrainian push on all three of those approaches, as Ukraine aims to sever the “land bridge” though southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts that connect mainland Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula. In particular, liberating Melitopol would crumble Russian defenses in this entire slice of territory. Furthermore, with Crimea’s water supply cut off and the Kerch Bridge in closer range of Ukrainian missile attacks, Russia’s hold on Crimea would be tenuous at best.
The latest updates from the front:
In the direction of Robotyne/Tokmak, Ukraine reportedly advanced 5 kilometers east of Robotyne and 2 kilometers west of the settlement. With continued pressure from the north, the town is now under threat from three sides. In fact, we now have video of Ukraine reaching Russia’s first line with the “Toblerone” concrete fortifications. It’s only a matter of time before Russia is forced to retreat from Robotyne, before their garrison there gets cut off. [Tweet and images at the link]
We know Ukraine is there because of this video of them sending an unmanned vehicle to test the approach to that tank ditch. [video at the link] The keen-eyed among you might notice two major things here: Nothing was fired at that vehicle as it approached the ditch, and it hit no mines. Is anyone manning this line? […]
To advance, Ukraine must bridge the tank ditch, get through the inevitable minefield between it and those white concrete pyramid barriers, and then hit the entrenched infantry presumably hidden in that tree line. Still weird that no anti-tank missiles were fired from that tree line. Either way, these are legit advances.
Still, this is the most heavily defended part of the front. Look at this hornet’s nest Ukraine must navigate to get to Tokmak. [map at the link] Tokmak, again, is a key logistics hub for Russia. They know it, literally ringing it with defenses. Liberating Robotyne alone will put huge pressure on Russian supply lines in the town, as it will be in range of Ukrainian tube artillery. GMLRS rocket artillery can already hit it (and did so today), but those rounds are scarce and expensive. Extended-range shells cost around $8,000 and are far more plentiful compared to $100,000+ for GMLRS. Ukraine will be able to turn up the heat exponentially. […]
Toward Staromlynivka/Mariupol, Ukrainian forces are now in Staromaiorske, and Russian sources claim Ukraine has moved past the town. [video at the link: "Staromaiors'ke is liberated."] That means the towns of Zavitne Bazhannya, Urozhaine, and Staromlynivka are next. Ukraine is still around 8 kilometers from the first—and only—defensive line in this approach.
If they punch through here, Ukraine can either drive down toward Melitopol, fully severing the land bridge, or they can loop west and cut off Russian defenses from the rear. To be sure, that’s easier said than done, mostly because of the logistics of supporting such an operation. But it sure would be sweet. [map at the link]
Around Bakhmut, Ukraine continues to consolidate positions both north and south of the city. On its southern flank, Andriivka is likely liberated, while Ukraine holds the heights west of Klishchiivka and is pushing into the town.
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Those Russian battlefield propagandists seem to be dropping like flies. [Tweet with English translation: “9 days ago Russian milblogger Daniil from Karlssonnews issued a warning to Ukrainins in Klishchiivka. Today he is confirmed to have died there.” […]]
——————–
Wow, this is amazing: [Tweet and image at the link: “It’s extraordinary to see how clearly defined the frontline now is in Ukraine, even when viewed from space at a macro scale. The grey of the dried up Kakhovka Reservoir followed by a green scar of un-harvested fields where it is too dangerous for agriculture.”]
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Remember Seymour Hersh, last seen spewing fiction about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline? He’s got quite the doozy today, complaining about the latest attack on the Kerch Bridge. [Tweet and image at the link: “He also now claims that his intelligence sources have told him that the initial attack on the Kerch Bridge in October was done using US technology and submersible drones. Something that, like all Hersh’s statements is categorically false. [What the hell happened to Hersh? He used to be a good journalist.] “Yes Hersh, this is definitely something a U.S. official told you and not just one of your many fever dreams or your Russian handler.” [Hersh’s fever dream text is available at the link.]]
Eagle-eyed observers zeroed in on this quote, supposedly from an “American official”:
At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan, a poor waif in his underwear and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking.
The thing is, no one who speaks English has ever said “he’s a poor waif in his underwear.” The only references to “waif” in the past hundred years referred to emaciated supermodels in the ‘90s.
But it just so happens that the phrase “poor waif in his underwear” is a direct translation to a common Russian saying. Hersh either got played by Russian intelligence or is willingly in cahoots with them.
Who wants to bet that another quote attributed to that official is also a direct translation of a common Russian saying? “… the official also downplayed US strategic gains as ‘neither strong like bull, nor smart like tractor.’” [sheesh]
wzrd1says
Webb telescope finds water far closer to young star than anticipated, suggesting the possibility of planets with water being able to form in the habitable zone of the star.
PDS 70 is 370 light years away, the star being around 5.4 million years old, its mass being 0.76 solar masses. It currently has two planets confirmed, both super Jupiters estimated at 7 and 3 jovian masses, respectively. The largest having a 120 year orbit.
Small dust grains have been detected, which is protecting the water from being chemically dismantled by the radiation of the T Tauri star.
Young stars emit far less than more mature stars, as an example, our own sun increases output at approximately 10% per billion years. So, there is a real chance for astronomers to observe the formation of rocky earth type planets. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/world/webb-telescope-water-planetary-system-scn/index.html
Not bad for a bunch of waifs in their underwear.
—————-
Well-trained and determined waifs in seriously badass underwear!
——————
A story yesterday in Ukrainian media, seemingly abandoned trenches have been mined and are remotely triggered when UKR soldiers do recon work.
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Seymour Hersh and RFK, Jr…mid-life crisis? Overwhelming desire for relevancy? Something in the water? FSB stooges?
————————-
I doubt it’s a mid-life crisis, since RFK Jr is nearly 70 and Hersh is 86.
I would guess it’s FSB stooges (and possibly a toxic dose of locoweed).
———————
My own tractor quote. “Putin taking over Ukraine is like a Python swallowing a Tractor”
———————–
With the engine running
——————-
No, no, no — you have to leave out the indefinite articles: “Putin taking over Ukraine is like Python swallowing Tractor”
————————-
I’m sure “waif” surfaces frequently in discussion of 19th century literature.
Which means that Hersh will have a Dickens of a time in justifying its appearance.
————————
“Potemkin Trenches” needs to enter the lexicon.
———————–
A Russian officer posted something on Telegram (quoted at @wartranslated I think) complaining about (among other things) how Russian troops were being sent en masse to some trenches, so they were way “overmanned.” The result was that everyone got in each other’s way, plus a lot of the newer troops essentially did nothing, some would not even dig in. It’s quite possible that there are way too many in some places, and very few (or none) in others. [Yeah, that sounds like a typical Russian snafu.]
———————-
So how will the Ukrainian military unit who earns the right to call themselves “the Waif’s Underwear” be selected?
——————-
‼️This is what the aerial alarm looks like in a camp for RuZZian prisoners of war during a missile attack on 🇺🇦#Ukraine.
All occupants, including the non-walking wounded who are in sanchasts, are hidden in cover to avoid being hit by a Russian missile. In other words, #Ukrainians save RuZZians from Russians.
———————-
I find it interesting that the Russian propagandists are using Hunter Biden just like Republicans do. It’s NOT a coincidence. Republicans are evidently still working with Russia.
———————–
Kinda sad, really. Seymour Hersch did some solid work back in the Vietnam era. But it’s been all downhill since, especially beginning with his absurd stuff on the Iraq war. Now it’s straight Tankie/Russian propaganda
——————-
Great analysis as (as always). Small error, however. When discussing a possible breakthrough at Staromlynivka, I believe you meant that UA could either swing west or continue southeast toward Mariupol rather than Melitipol (both in the text and on the map).
The U.S. economy showed few signs of recession in the second quarter, as gross domestic product grew at a faster-than-expected pace during the period, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide ‘rosy’ projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments. […]
Seven major automakers announced a plan on Wednesday to nearly double the number of fast chargers in the United States in an effort to address one of the main reasons that people hesitate to buy electric cars.
Donald Trump asked a staffer to delete camera footage at his Florida estate in an effort to obstruct the federal investigation into his possession of classified documents, according to an updated indictment unsealed Thursday that adds new charges against the former president and names an additional defendant.
The indictment includes new counts of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information, compounding Trump’s legal jeopardy even as he braces for a possible additional indictment in Washington over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The additional counts underscore the extent of the yearlong investigation into Trump that first produced charges last month in the form of a 38-count indictment against Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta.
[…] The superseding indictment charges Trump with an additional count of willfully retaining national defense information relating to the former president discussing U.S. military plans to attack another country during an interview in July 2021 at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. The interview was for a memoir being written by his onetime chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who in his subsequent book named the country as Iran.
According to the indictment, Trump returned that document, which was marked as top secret and not approved to show to foreign nationals, to the federal government on Jan. 17. 2022.
It marks a notable shift in the prosecution’s approach to Trump’s case, charging him for retaining a document it alleges the former president knew was highly sensitive after he left office — and not just for failing to return it to the government when asked. […]
Carlos D’Oliviera. Basically the property manager […] The guy who claimed he drained the pool and flooded the server room. Or lied about that
———————
Name one innocent person ever that ordered for video proof of their innocence to be deleted.
———————-
A more modern version of the Nixsonian disappearing act.
———————-
So, in terms counts vs Trump:
1) 34 counts in NY (Bragg)
2) 37 counts in MaL/FL (Smith)
3) + 3 in superseding MaL (Smith)
So, up to 74 now?
———————-
There are conversations shown in the new indictment questioning and confirming his [Carlos D’Oliviera’s] ‘loyalty’. Once that is confirmed through several people, TFG agrees to pay his lawyer fees, meaning that it’s TFG’s lawyer who will coach him to ‘not recall’.
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The indictment lists 10 new counts in addition to the original 32. Trump is charged with 8 new counts, if I read it correctly.
Trump’s lawyers are complaining that discussing classified information at a SCIF with Trump is inconvenient and want to discuss it with Trump at his various homes.
You know, basically repeat the offenses that have landed in him court.
Having to use a SCIF is inconvenient to commanders and political leaders, but they use a SCIF anyway because it’s the law and the practice protects classified information. Apparently, the god-Emperor is far beyond such silly mortal things like laws. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/politics/classified-information-special-counsel-trump-team/index.html
That said, the POTUS has a portable SCIF wherever he goes. The location checked in advance and cleared, the equipment brought in to secure the site and shield it. If Trump wants to spend that kind of money, the judge may allow that. The locations would then be prohibited guests for the duration of said SCIF usage, have a guard with a full machine gun and an intrusion prevention device set from hell to ensure nobody wanders near. Plus additional fencing.
Figure around $10 million per location he wants to use, plus security. All, at the court’s expense. A serious budget buster for the judicial branch!
birgerjohanssonsays
There is a claim made by a Korean team that they have created a sample of a material that displays supercpnductivity in ambient temperatures.
I will wait for the experiment to be replicated before I start celebrating.
birgerjohanssonsays
Randy Meissner, founding member of the Eagles dies of COPD. He was 77.
birgerjohanssonsays
…also, thank you, tobacco industry for destroying the lungs of millions of people. Meissner is just one of them.
birgerjohanssonsays
The tory client media will probably not bring up the threat of Gulf Stream collapse, not with idiot PM Rishi Sunak using the cost of changing energy systems as an argument to scare voters away from the opposition.
I do not know about the media in USA. Theoretically the oligarchs do not want the economy to collapse along with everything else but the US conservative media has achieved “epistemic closure” – unwanted information will just not be made available.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, urged Russia on Friday to revive the Black Sea grain deal, under which it had allowed Ukraine to export grain from its seaports despite the war. Sisi told the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg that it was “essential to reach agreement” on reviving the deal, which Russia withdrew from last week.
…
Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, said that despite a relatively quiet night, residents should stay vigilant as there was still “a high probability of missile attacks”. He said: “The night was quiet. There was little activity of enemy aircraft. There are not many nights like this. Many Ukrainians had the opportunity to sleep at least. We hope this day will be calm.”
…
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, who also serves as foreign minister, is on a visit to Ukraine. He will meet Ukraine’s prime minister and foreign minister.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been taking part in a ceremony in Kyiv this morning to mark Ukraine’s Statehood Day, giving out passports to people eligible to hold them for the first time.
Lynna @ #330, the quote from Hersh’s “source” is truly funny.
Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria…
A US official gratuitously snipes at an African country while Putin meets with African leaders? How coincidental.
The public still thinks we use the Richter scale, in part because we don’t do a great job communicating about these things. But the scales we use are all adjusted to look just like the Richter scale.
You’ll notice that CNN caled it a “2.3 magnitude earthquake” full stop.
Sky News (relayed by MSN) initially said Richter (in Google’s cache), then fixed it.
Kenya’s first atheist group is battling to keep legal recognition in a case filed by a Christian bishop seeking to suspend its registration.
The Atheists in Kenya Society (AKS) said basic civil liberties hung in the balance as it prepares to file a submission on Monday in response to a petition presented against the group and the Kenyan registrar of societies by Stephen Ndichu.
Ndichu claims the group’s activities violate the constitution, which “acknowledges the existence of God”. He argues that the AKS has “through public statements and via its social media platforms … expressed its distaste against religion … creating ‘cynical effects’ within the larger society”, and “undermined people’s beliefs in religions”.
“In Kenya, you cannot divorce government and religion,” Ndichu told the Guardian. “You find that people in the government are also part of the church, and people in the church are also part of the government … so there’s no boundary.”
Kenya is a secular state where roughly 85% of people describe themselves as Christian. An estimated 755,000 out of Kenya’s population of about 55 million say they are atheists, according to the last census in 2019.
AKS leaders say their unofficial polling indicates that the figure is at least double that. . The society faces strong opposition in its efforts to promote secular beliefs.
“Our country has, historically, been very religiously inclined, and that impacts how the government views atheism,” said Harrison Mumia, AKS president. “[Atheism] is not palatable within the government because religious groups are powerful in Kenya. The current administration is ultra-religious and is running on that strength, so we may see secularism diminishing, and religion playing a bigger role in public life.”
Kenya elected its first openly evangelical president, William Ruto, last year. Before the election, he signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) “to protect the church”, which included government funding for pastors, building grants, the appointment of clergy to government roles, and the lifting of a moratorium on the registration of new churches. This moratorium had been imposed by a former attorney general to curb growing radicalisation and commercialisation.
The president and first lady, Rachel Ruto, have a chapel in one of their suburban homes.
Rachel Ruto publicly championed “faith diplomacy” as a tool for social and economic change during a summit for African first ladies earlier this year. She has said she would work with religious organisations to spread a culture of prayer and to protect family values amid perceived threats from calls for LGBTQ+ rights, which have been strongly opposed by religious groups and Kenya’s political class.
Over the past year, the AKS has been increasingly vocal on what it says is a disproportionate inclusion of religious activity within government. It protested against the chief justice’s participation in the annual national prayer breakfast last year, and criticised the hosting of religious leaders in State House after Ruto was elected. The society called it a “flagrant abuse”, a misuse of the residence as a “religious playfield”, and a disregard for religious diversity.
“It’s problematic because Kenya is a secular democracy, and these actions can be seen as government promotion of one or two religions,” said Morris Wanjohi, a researcher and AKS member, who says it has become “a nightmare” to push for ideas such as separation of church and state, or sex education.
“The biggest danger we have is government accountability. There is an unholy alliance between the church and the political class. Churches provide politicians with a ready platform. When the church supports a politician, they are halfway there. They have become interdependent, so the church gets away with a lot and can whip up the political class on policy issues like LGBTQ+ rights,” he said.
…
The AKS is growing its public profile through philanthropic work, such as supporting needy schoolchildren, to reshape public perceptions that atheists lack compassion, but its reach is limited.
This is not the first time the AKS has faced legal challenges. In 2016, the society’s hard-won registration certificate was revoked after religious groups claimed it threatened public order. The move was overruled in 2018 by the high court, which upheld the group’s right to association.
Wanjohi is confident that this ruling will also go in the AKS’s favour. “There’s a court precedent, which says that the freedom of worship includes the right not to worship,” he said.
The ruling may have implications for Wanjohi’s attempts to register his own sceptics and atheists association. Nearly a year since he filed for registration, which usually takes a maximum of four months, he is still waiting for a decision.
…
AKS’s lawyer Richard Ngari categorises the group as a “marginalised class”, and said the action taken against them was an attempt to “bypass” laws.
“Secular societies are easy targets in a religious society. We are low-hanging fruit,” said Wanjohi. “Our biggest challenge is simply to exist, so it’s very important for the courts to affirm that.”
wzrd1says
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 346, when the report uses Richter scale, do we refer to it instead by a different unit? Do I report King’s speed because miles per hour isn’t SI units? Many here even relay mph, with SI conversion.
Guess it’s wrong, I’ll report all miles per hour as King’s Speed units.
Or simply not bother relaying. So, stay with flying saucers are real, because someone might criticize reporting that which was reported about actual information and just stick with the myth.
The earth can’t shake, because units are misreported and disputed, so regardless, it’s nothing.
And the Seine will remain forever toxic, because someone might criticize a unit, reality be damned.
And we wonder why Trump is doing so we, despite new charges that are of course, disputed and shouldn’t be reported due to disputes, all hail the god-Emperor! Long may he wane!
OK, if CNN reports something in units called mugwumps, I’ll still report the units as mugwumps and maybe, if I really feel up to the gymnastics of converting odd units of measure to SI, I will. On bad dyslexia days, I’ll refrain from doing so, as my results are equally as likely to become as fictitious as flying saucer reports that have space aliens aboard. Because, planets swerve into their path and stop, those lousy driving planets. :P:p:P:p
Now, off to wrangle something annoying – my bank. Experian can’t identify me with the information that the credit union provided to them, so the identity protection plan that the credit union purchased for me due to their breach isn’t available to me.
Should be right up there in fun with dealing with the IRS and having a root canal.
Qatar will provide Ukraine with $100 million in humanitarian aid to support health, education and demining, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Friday after talks with the Gulf state’s prime minister.
Qatar had earlier on Friday announced that Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, who also serves as foreign minister, was visiting Ukraine.
The head of Ukraine’s ground forces has said that Russian forces are constantly attacking in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions in Donetsk, but that Ukraine’s defence line is holding firm.
He added that the main task for Ukrainian troops at the moment was to knock out enemy artillery where possible, and claimed small advances in the Bakhmut direction.
Ukrinform quotes Oleksandr Syrskyi saying:
The enemy is constantly attacking in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions using its most professional units. Every day we repel numerous attacks in these areas. None of our positions have been lost.
The situation in the Bakhmut direction is very tense, but we are gradually advancing and liberating our lands. The enemy is clinging to every inch, conducting intense artillery and mortar attacks.
In these conditions, it is very important to make timely management decisions based on the current situation and take measures to manoeuvre forces and resources, redeploy units and subdivisions to areas where success has been achieved or withdraw them from enemy fire.
Counter-battery combat is now at the forefront of our actions.
Reliable information from the frontline of the battlefield has been difficult to obtain, with both Ukraine and Russian authorities making constant claim and counter-claim about advances.
Statehood day is being celebrated in Ukraine because it is considered the anniversary of the baptism of Kyiv, as Christianity began to be adopted in the region.
A ceremony has been taking place in the capital to commemorate this pivotal moment in the history of the Kyivan Rus’.
Next year Statehood day is due to fall on 15 July rather than 28 July, as the church in Ukraine is adopting the revised Julian calendar, in a further breach between the Ukrainian and Russian churches.
Reginald Selkirksays
<a href=”https://news.yahoo.com/leprosy-cases-central-florida-account-125918765.html:>Leprosy cases in central Florida account for nearly 20% of national cases
Rising evidence is pointing to the possibility that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern U.S. with Florida being named among the top reported states.
In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state.
Leprosy, which is scientifically known as Hansen’s disease, is a chronic infectious disease that primarily affects the skin and peripheral nervous system…
Ukraine has moved its official Christmas holiday to 25 December in a break with the Russian Orthodox church, which celebrates it on 7 January.
The bill signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday highlights the deepening rift between churches in Kyiv and Moscow since Russia’s invasion of its pro-western neighbour.
“The relentless and successful struggle for their identity contributes to … the desire of every Ukrainian to live their own life with their own traditions and holidays,” reads an explanatory note to the bill on the parliament’s website.
The church has traditionally observed Christmas on 7 January, at the same time as the Moscow patriarchy, which has given its blessing to Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, is a prominent Putin supporter and has said Russian soldiers who are killed will be cleansed of all their sins. Last year the Orthodox church of Ukraine allowed worshippers to celebrate Christmas on 25 December.
A kremlin propagandist Sladkov arrived to the temporarily occupied Berdyansk and suddenly found that locals are not keen to replace Ukrainian number plates on vehicles with Russian ones. “We’re replacing their tarmac, but they’re not keen to replace their plates”, he says.
Video at the link.
“A Ukrainian plate. A Ukrainian plate. A Ukrainian plate.” That’s right, you thug. They know what country they’re in, and are waiting you out.
wzrd1says
“We’re replacing their tarmac…”
Fair’s fair, given Russians tore up that tarmac. And everything else that defines a civilized society along the way.
President Joe Biden doing his job:
– took new steps to protect renters and boost housing supply
– announced new efforts to address methane pollution
– unveiled new measures designed to increase coverage of mental health care
– established a new national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley
– announced new steps to improve access to online services for Americans with disabilities
– provided student debt relief to thousands of students who’d been ripped off.
– took steps to begin sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court in The Hague
– signed an executive order that shifted decisions on “the prosecution of serious military crimes, including sexual assault, to independent military attorneys, taking that power away from victims’ commanders”
– announced new plans to protect workers and communities from extreme heat, and also issued “a hazard alert to tell employers what they should do to protect workers; help ensure employees are aware of their rights, such as protections against retaliation; and highlight steps the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has to try to ensure worker safety.”
Recent strikes targeting the southern Ukrainian city, including its orthodox cathedral, have left residents questioning its historical links to Russia…
On Thursday evening, a new federal indictment against Donald Trump finally arrived—but it was not the indictment anyone had been expecting. Rather than charges related to the election case being heard in Washington, D.C., this was a new superseding indictment from the grand jury in West Palm Beach that had previously issued 38 felony indictments related to illegal retention of classified documents.
The new indictment adds both new charges and a new defendant to the case. It also increases the number of charges directly against Trump to an even 40. But the most important feature of this superseding indictment is that it details efforts in which Trump conspired to cover his tracks by ordering his staff to delete security camera footage of the area where classified documents had been stored.
It doesn’t only show that Trump destroyed evidence. It shows that he was engaged in wrongdoing, and he knew it.
The new defendant in the case is Carlos De Oliveira, who is listed as a “property manager” at Mar-a-Lago. That name may seem unfamiliar, but De Oliveira was a central player in one very interesting story over the last few months.
This CNN story from June covers the “accidental” destruction of security recordings at Mar-a-Lago when an employee “drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept.” That action was reportedly considered suspect at the time it was reported. Apparently, everyone was right to be suspicious.
The indictment records a series of actions taken by De Oliveira after speaking with both Trump and Walt Nauta. De Oliveira then drags another unnamed Trump employee into a closet so he can discuss the situation.
De Oliveira took Trump Employee 4 to a small room known as an “audio closet” near the White and Gold Ballroom. Once inside the audio closet, De Oliveira and Trump Employee 4 had the following exchange:
a. De Oliveira told Trump Employee 4 that their conversation should remain between the two of them.
b. De Oliveira asked Trump Employee 4 how many days the server retained footage. Trump Employee 4 responded that he believed it was approximately 45 days.
c. De Oliveira told Trump Employee 4 that “the boss” wanted the server deleted. Trump Employee 4 responded that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe he would have the rights to do that. Trump Employee 4 told De Oliveira that De Oliveira would have to reach out to another employee who was a supervisor of security for Trump’s business organization. De Oliveira then insisted to Trump Employee 4 that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and asked “what are we going to do?”
The answer to “what are we going to do?” seems ultimately to have been to claim that there was an accident while draining the pool.
It seems safe to say that considering De Olivieira took Trump Employee 4 into a soundproof closet to hold this discussion, Trump Employee 4 is cooperating with the special counsel’s office in their investigation.
Both Nauta and Trump frequently talked with De Oliveira, and this part of the indictment ends with Trump promising to get De Oliveira an attorney to secure his loyalty.
As with so many other parts of this case, there seems to be nothing more that prosecutors might want. Everything is here from motive to means, including a lengthy collection of text messages between De Oliveira and Nauta, as well as multiple meetings with Trump.
All of this earns De Oliveira charges of:
– Conspiracy to obstruct justice.
– Altering, mutilating, destroying, or concealing an object.
– Altering, mutilating, destroying, or concealing a document, record, or other object.
– False statements or representations.
That’s a potential 65 years’ worth of charges for his role in covering up Trump’s crimes. These charges also get added to Nauta’s list, along with a “scheme to conceal” that could be good for another five years. In all, Nauta now faces eight charges with a potential 130 years of penalties.
Trump also picks up “altering, mutilating, destroying, or concealing an object” along with ”corruptly altering, mutilating, destroying, or concealing an object,” for an additional 40 years.
But that’s not the end of Trump’s additional charges. That’s because the document that was detailed in the previous indictment—the classified document concerning Iran that Trump held up and bragged about while speaking with a writer at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club—is now added to the list of national documents for which Trump faces a charge of willful retention of national defense information.
This is the same document that Trump has tried to claim was simply “a bunch of paper” and “not a real document.” But the recorded conversation had always made it clear that this document was very real, and highly classified. It’s now been added as charge number 32 under the Espionage Act in Trump’s overall 40-count list.
Again and again, so much of the indictment seems to come back to a conversation between Trump and one of his attorneys in which Trump keeps pushing everyone to cover up what he has done.
a. I don’t want anybody looking. I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes.
b. Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?
c. Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?
Trump also whines at his attorneys about how someone else took the blame for erasing Hillary Clinton’s emails as he can’t seem to understand why they won’t take the fall for him. He seems offended that attorneys won’t put their careers, and their freedom, directly on the line to lie for him. After all, it seems that Nauta and De Oliveira were willing to take Trump’s orders, even when they knew doing what Trump wanted put them in danger.
Just as the recorded conversation at Bedminster has Trump spelling out that he has classified documents, knows he has classified documents, knows he’s not supposed to have them, and knows he can’t declassify them, the evidence in the new indictment shows Nauta and De Oliveira ticking every box on the “yep, we’re scheming to destroy evidence” checklist. It would be hard to find a better example of criminals anywhere admitting that they committed the crimes, conspired to cover up the crimes, and lied about all of it. […]
That’s a potential 450 years’ worth of charges on the classified documents case alone. It’s safe to say that the list of charges against Trump is going to grow again. Soon.
Overall, the new indictment shows a much larger effort by Trump and his employees to cover up his actions and in particular to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.” However, this isn’t one of those cases where the cover-up was worse than the crime. It’s more a case where the crime was extreme and the cover-up was simply incompetent at every level.
The Justice Department has recommended to Judge Aileen Cannon that this new indictment not affect her recently announced schedule that would have the trial begin in May 2024. That seems like an ambitious request, and Trump’s legal team will certainly seek additional time.
But at least now De Oliveira will get to use that lawyer Trump obtained for him. Though, of course, Trump never made it clear he would pay for that attorney.
By now you’ve heard that the white supremacist trope that slavery had personal benefits for Black Americans is being taught to Florida’s school children. It stems from the lie from the Southern politicians and preachers of the antebellum era who declared that the “white man civilized the Black man and gave him skills.” Now it’s curricula. Of course, this is happening in DeSantis’ Florida, the same man who rejected having an AP course on African American studies because it “significantly lacks educational value.”
Yet there is another “benchmark clarification” for teachers that hasn’t gotten as much notice but is just as deplorable. It turns out that Black Americans must share the blame for their own massacres:
“Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C., Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” (emphasis added).
And by?
In each of those massacres, Blacks were never the perpetrators.
In the early 1920s, the town of Rosewood, Florida was a small but self-sufficient, thriving Black community. As is the case in Tulsa and elsewhere in the US, this led to resentment from white supremacists in the nearby white towns. Just like in Tulsa, there was an accusation that a Black man assaulted a white woman, and a racist mob was formed.
The entire town of Rosewood, Florida burned for days. The buildings and homes were destroyed. Women were gang-raped, and as many as 150 people were killed. The survivors fled and never returned.
To be perfectly clear, some white people in the mob did die, but only because some of Rosewood’s residents took up arms to defend their homes and their families from being murdered and raped. Yet self-defense by Blacks is being called violence now here in Florida.
[…] People didn’t enroll to learn a skill for a business opportunity or personal growth. It was about raw survival in a hellish condition. Period. From 1619 — 1865, anytime someone enslaved learned anything it was for the sole purpose for the labor to be exploited by the one who enslaved him.
In most cases, the enslaved didn’t learn “new skills.” They were already farmers and craftsmen in Africa and the Carribean. In fact, it was often the other way around. […] the enslaved man who taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey […] Carribean distillers were highly sought after for their skills.
[…] people are allowed to defend their homes from violence without being called the perpetrators of said violence. This holds true even if you happen to have dark skin.
Leaving Florida, or refusing to visit Florida … it’s become a thing (except perhaps for mosquitoes and leprosy):
Florida has lost another major convention thanks to the ongoing racist actions and policies of Ron DeSantis and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, the oldest intercollegiate Black fraternity in the country, announced that it was relocating its 99th General Convention and 119th Anniversary Convention from Orlando “due to Governor Ron DeSantis’ harmful, racist, and insensitive policies against the Black community,” according to a press release. The event generates $4.6 million economic impact.
The fraternity did not mince words in stating its reasons for pulling its convention from Florida:
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. has an unmatched legacy of social justice, advocacy, and leadership for the Black community,” said General President Dr. Willis L. Lonzer, III. “In this environment of manufactured division and attacks on the Black community, Alpha Phi Alpha refuses to direct a projected $4.6 million convention economic impact to a place hostile to the communities we serve. Although we are moving our convention from Florida, Alpha Phi Alpha will continue to support the strong advocacy of Alpha Brothers and other advocates fighting against the continued assault on our communities in Florida by Governor Ron DeSantis.
In announcing its convention move, Alpha Phi Alpha cited Florida’s horrendous new K-12 curriculum for African American history, which, as the fraternity rightly notes, “erases Florida’s role in slavery and oppression, blames the victims, and declares that African Americans who endured slavery benefitted from the horrific and torturous institution.”
Florida’s loss of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity’s convention comes on the heels of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) announcing earlier this month that it was pulling its 2024 convention out of Florida and relocating the event to Atlanta (you’re welcome, Georgia). The convention has a $1.2 million economic impact.
[…] At least a dozen conventions have pulled out of Florida recently due to its hostile political environment and racist and homophobic actions and policies. This includes a loss of at least five conventions in Orlando and six conventions in Broward County/Fort Lauderdale. Visit Lauderdale estimated that those six events represent a lost of $9 million in revenue for the region. One group that pulled out of Fort Lauderdale “selected Atlanta due to current Florida’s political climate” (you’re welcome again, Georgia) while another group, from Mississippi, cited its reason for pulling out of Florida as “Governor DeSantis.”
Other examples:
– Game of Thrones convention Con of Thrones canceled its event in Orlando due to “the increasingly anti-humanitarian legislation and atmosphere in Florida.”
– The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning moved its conference from Miami to Chicago, saying it would pay a “steep penalty” for moving the event but members had expressed “significant concerns” about holding the event in Florida, particularly in light of the state’s controversial educational policies targeting diversity initiatives. […]
Parts of Arizona have been so hot in recent weeks that people are arriving in emergency rooms with serious burns just from having fallen on the sidewalk. This comes in a month that has broken records—multiple times—for the hottest day ever measured on Earth.
President Joe Biden responded to this ongoing disaster on Thursday, announcing that the Department of Labor will issue the first ever hazard alert for heat. “Even those places that are used to extreme heat have never seen as hot as it is now for as long as it’s been,” he said. “Even those who deny that we’re in the midst of a climate crisis can’t deny the impact of extreme heat is having on Americans.”
People affected by the extreme heat include “the farm workers, who have to harvest crop in the dead of night to avoid the high temperatures, or farmers who risk losing everything they planted for the year, or the construction workers, who literally risk their lives working all day in blazing heat, and in some places don’t even have the right to take a water break,” Biden said, taking a swipe at Texas, where state lawmakers recently passed a law overriding local ordinances giving construction workers mandatory water breaks. “That’s outrageous.”
The heat hazard alert, Biden said, “clarifies that workers have federal heat-related protections. We should be protecting workers from hazardous conditions, and we will. And those states where they do not, I’m going to be calling them out, where they refuse to protect these workers in this awful heat.”
Additionally, Biden highlighted a series of programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that will help mitigate the effects of such heat. That includes expanding water storage capacity in California, Colorado, and Washington; grants to plant trees in cities and towns, reducing heat islands; money to make buildings more energy efficient and heat resistant; and money to open cooling centers. […]
Wonkette: “What Does Fox News Have To Say About Trump Trying To Destroy Evidence?”
The new superseding indictment Special Counsel Jack Smith filed against Donald Trump on Thursday night over his efforts to hide classified documents in that cut-rate San Simeon he calls home in Florida is bad. We know it’s bad. You know it’s bad. Lawyers know it’s bad. […]
You know who also knows the indictment is bad? The lunkheads at Fox News know it’s bad. Which is why the primetime lineup mostly ignored what would in just about any other universe be big news. When they weren’t ignoring the charges, they yelled about unequal justice because Hunter Biden got a plea deal (which he now didn’t!) despite being America’s greatest criminal since the Cleveland Torso Killer, or some such.
Greg Gutfeld mostly talked about Thursday’s hearing that someone in Congress for some reason thought was a good idea on whether aliens have been visiting Earth. Hannity spent the first 90 seconds of his show trying to draw an equivalence between the new charges and JOE BIDEN GARAGE CHINATOWN CORVETTE SOMETHING SOMETHING before bringing on Alan Dershowitz to reassure him that Hunter Biden’s plea deal (which now isn’t) was a corrupt sweetheart deal. (We guess the Dersh has given up on ever getting back on the Martha’s Vineyard cocktail party circuit.)
But we would be remiss if we did not at least note that Laura Ingraham invited on Sen. Josh Hawley, the biggest dork to roam Washington DC […], to pretend that despite being a lawyer and a former law professor and a state Attorney General, he’s more confused about the new Trump charges than a Lhasa Apso with a head injury:
INGRAHAM: They just keep piling on Trump from every corner.
Well, he seems to have committed a lot of crimes!
HAWLEY: Now we’re down to charging random people, just throwing those into the indictment.
We assume Hawley is referring to newly indicted Carlos De Oliveira, property manager at Mar-a-Lago who at Trump’s direction — allegedly! — went all Rose Mary Woods on surveillance footage of the closet where his future convicted felon of a boss was illegally keeping classified documents. And then allegedly lied about a whole bunch of stuff to the FBI, such as that he never saw or touched or had anything to do with any boxes that Trump moved to Mar-a-Lago after reality pried him out of the White House.
Then there was some blah blah with Hawley pretending to be outraged that Joe Biden has yet to go on national television and admit to being a huge crook despite all the evidence that he took bribes which makes him the worst criminal president since Bill Clinton lied about getting a hummer from an intern. (No seriously, Hawley complained that the DOJ keeps letting both Hillary and Bill Clinton off the hook.)
The worst sucking up that we could find, however, came from Kari Lake. Facelift Barbie went on Newsmax to tell Eric Bolling that the DOJ is “playing checkers, while President Trump is playing chess at the highest levels.” [Oh Lordy. Lots of LOL]
Meanwhile, even lawyers who once defended Trump from criminal charges will publicly admit that his lifetime of crimes may finally be catching up to the giant orange oaf. The splendidly mustachioed Ty Cobb, whom you may remember from being on Trump’s defense team during the Robert Mueller investigation told the Guardian:
“I think this original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity,” Ty Cobb told CNN. “This is such a tight case, the evidence is so overwhelming.”
Oh God please don’t let this last an antiquity. America has suffered enough.
Reginald Selkirksays
@358: Many Republicans have put themselves in thrall to Trump, and they don’t seem to be learning anything new.
whheydtsays
Re: birgerjohansson @ #340, #341…
It’s possible to develop COPD without ever smoking.
whheydtsays
About the Richter Magnitude scale vs. Moment Magnitude scale. Charles Richter developed his earthquake magnitude scale on a very specific design of seismograph. It was later found to fail to record properly at very high magnitudes (over R8, IIRC) and the Moment Magnitude scale was developed to correct for that deficiency. So for any ‘quake below about M8, Moment magnitude and Richter magnitude will be the same value. Thus for a M2.3, it really doesn’t matter which scale you use. The results will be the same.
whheydtsays
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #351…
To the best of my knowledge, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25. The reason it gets cited as Jan. 7 (and not that long ago was cited as Jan. 6) is that that church is still using the Julian calendar. So the Ukrainian church isn’t “moving” the date of the holiday, rather it is updating its calendar to allow for the correction made creating the Gregorian calendar.
(Side note… George Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1732. So why do we record his birthday as Feb. 22? It’s because the UK and its colonies were still on the Julian calendar when he was born. After the UK and colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar in Sept. 1752, he had his birth date changed to keep his age the same. Hence, Feb. 22.
On any Linux or unix system, run the command “cal 09 1752” to see the changeover.)
birgerjohanssonsays
Whheydt @ 363.
Tragically, that is true. My assumption is based on “what unnwcessary shit is most likely to have killed him?” not an actual scrutiny of his health history.
.
The Scathing Atheist 545
Sound of Barbenheimer
(also, White Power Point) https://youtu.be/tfgPjtaX5Qo
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@wzrd1 #348:
Uh, what? The seismologist herself said it’s a common misconception. I thought that worth amplifying.
when the report uses Richter scale
CNN was correct. Your summary of CNN added the misconception.
I’ll report all miles per hour as King’s Speed units. Or simply not bother relaying. […] because someone might criticize reporting
SkyNews fixed their wording, presumably after someone informed them. They didn’t rant and forgo all seizmic reporting out of spite (sarcastically or otherwise).
do we refer to it instead by a different unit?
Richter’s was the “Local Magnitude Scale”, ML (I can’t do a subscript L). There are a bunch of scales with other subscripts, situationally useful measuring different things.
“Magnitude” suffices. The “Moment Magnitude Scale”, Mw (subscripted) or M. Wikipedia: “the authoritative magnitude scale for ranking earthquakes […] more directly related to the energy of an earthquake than other scales, and does not saturate—that is, it does not underestimate magnitudes as other scales do in certain conditions.”
modern methods for measuring magnitude were designed to be consistent with the Richter scale. […] seismologists often no longer follow Richter’s original methodology. […] It is, therefore, useful to separate the method and the scale in releasing estimates of magnitude to the public. […] Moment magnitude is the preferred magnitude for all earthquakes listed in USGS catalogs. […] The least complicated, and probably most accurate, terminology is to just use the term “magnitude” and to use the symbol M (i.e., a capital M, plain text, without any subscripts or superscripts).
PennState GeoSci – Magnitude and Energy
^ Details Richter’s methodology. Versus modern “seismic moment” (M0 subbed), in unintuitive “newton meters” units for academics. Then converting that to “moment magnitude” (Mw) for general consumption.
OK, if CNN reports something in units called mugwumps, I’ll still report the units as mugwumps
Walking back the myth-affirming, reality-damning, trump-worshipping modest proposal? Okay then. Sorry about your bank.
the 44th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill, when 94 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Puerco River, spanning northwestern New Mexico and northern Arizona […] nuclear hegemony. It’s an accomplishment built on top of the bodies of Navajo […] erased from history.
[…]
From the 1940s to the 1990s, the U.S. used the Navajo Nation to supply them with uranium […] failed to enforce proper safety […] unregulated […] Workers drank the mine’s cool spring water, while their wives washed their yellowed work clothes. Families built homes with local rocks and sediment and let their children play for hours on uranium byproducts […] most Navajos did not know what radiation was—let alone the danger presented by every second of exposure.
[…]
Navajo Code Talkers are esteemed for heroically saving countless lives […] our uranium miners have largely been overlooked. […] compensate all those impacted by the harms of the nuclear age. It is only then that my people can begin to heal
After several days of increased activity on the front lines, there don’t seem to be any new liberations to announce, but Ukraine continues to advance. Ukraine is still fairly tight-lipped about its activities, but Russian war bloggers are in full freak-out mode.
Murz is an officer in the Russian army and a popular Telegram war blogger with over 100,000 followers. Today, he wrote about Russia’s predicament on the front lines. (Post translated by Telegram’s “translate” function, with me cleaning stuff up here and there.)
In the meantime, our amazing propaganda moved from stories about the “Ukrainian counteroffensive being repelled” to stories about “Well, they finally crawled along the forefield to the first line of our defense, and what?”
Let me try again to explain what is happening in human language. It is not so important how deep the enemy has advanced, but how much the balance of forces in the direction has changed during his advance.
Fortifications, no matter how powerful they may be, including minefields, without the necessary filling of fortifications and fire cover for minefields, are of little worth. [A landmine] will not jump out of the ground and run after the “Leopard” shouting “Stop, you nasty [B-word]! I shouldn’t have lain in the mud for half a year!” The enemy piece of iron must itself run into these mines in an attempt to overcome the minefield or bypass it, because … because the minefield has eyes, the eyes have a radio station, and at the other end of the radio channel, for example, is a battery of 152-mm artillery. And clearing a minefield covered by fire, by any means, is a long and dreary task, which will be crowned with significant success only at the moment when the artillery battery with its guns are driven away by immediate counter-battery, so that the mine-clearing vehicle and the platoon of sappers will be able to come up and work without being stuffed with cast iron.
Instead of artillery, there may be mobile “tourists” (anti-tank guided missiles), there may be helicopter pilots, also with ATGMs, both variations and combinations are possible.
So. If you spend all your reserves and resources on the defense of the “foreground”, and do it reasonably, because in the foreground you have places that are convenient to defend, exchanging people and equipment at the most favorable rate, then the enemy’s access to the main line of defense is very very bad. Not because you miscalculated the defense of the forefield, but because the enemy crushes you with numerical and qualitative superiority.
I will pause here to note that I still don’t understand this Russian obsession with defending in front of their defensive lines. Trenches exist precisely because they’re so hard to penetrate. Why would you defend out in the open, in front of those meticulously laid out lines, when your defenders can hunker down, better-defended against incoming fire? That’s why Ukraine has held the lines around Donetsk city since 2014: because their defenders stay in the trenches and make it impossible for Russia to advance.
Yet here is Murz talking about the areas in front of the defensive lines as “places that are convenient to defend.”
This officer’s account makes clear that the notion of defending out in the open is official Russian doctrine, and its officers are convinced of its wisdom. Moving on.
As I have already said, in order to break through our defenses, the enemy is not interested in the depth of his penetration into our defenses in itself, but in changing the balance of forces in the sector. If ours “grind down” faster than the enemy, then instead of an unshakable wall of the “main line of defense”, he may encounter emptiness or almost emptiness.
It is precisely in order to sharply change the balance on that sector of the front where the main prize of the summer campaign that they want lies that the enemy is carrying out attacks in other directions, including, first of all, on the flanks of Artyomovsk [Russia’s name for Bakhmut]. And his numerous “eyes” on our side of the front tell him what and where he is going there, to strengthen these flanks.
This is the argument many (like me) have been making, which really comes down to, “Ukraine is shaping the battlefield.” The failure of Ukraine’s original thrust aside, what happened next must’ve shocked Ukraine’s general staff: Rather than hunker down in their shiny new trenches, Russia sent wave after wave of soldiers to attempt to retake what little ground Ukraine had liberated. So why push forward, against heavily manned defenses, when Ukrainian troops could simply sit back and eliminate those Russian attackers out in the open field?
So as Murz notes, Ukraine became uninterested in mindlessly pushing forward, took advantage of the bizarre Russian tactics, and shifted to a “thin the herd” approach. Why not? Sitting back and killing Russians out in the open worked well. Why get in the way of their enemy’s stupidity? That delay in forward advances inevitably led to cries of, “Oh noes, Ukraine is stalled” and other such nonsense, but in reality it meant that Russia’s ability to man those lines was degraded after each one of those unfathomably stupid counterattacks to regain insignificant slices of territory.
But that wasn’t Russia’s only potential strategic miscalculation. Back to Murz:
It was in order for the enemy to pull his own reinforcements north that an offensive was launched on the northern flank of the LPR. If the enemy forces are underestimated, then this will be a waste of the critically important last-last combat-ready units that could support the flanks of Artyomovsk [Bakhmut].
The answer to the question “How did it happen that the enemy has such a numerical superiority over us, and in some places also a qualitative one?” lies in the winter and spring “meat assaults”, which gobbled up the lion’s share of the people mobilized in the fall. The enemy, constantly combing the rear for men fit for mobilization, is successfully replenished, training some, while others are being caught, and still others are already dying, paving the way for the APU forward
The “northern flank of the LPR” refers to Russia’s offensive toward Kupyansk, near the Luhansk-Kharkiv border in northeastern Ukraine. Reports place up to 100,000 Russian troops in that direction, though I find that wholly implausible. We’re certainly not seeing any assaults in force, and Russian gains have been modest at best—a few kilometers of open ground as Ukrainian troops retreat behind more defensible ground behind a river.
The point of that assault is clearly an attempt to draw Ukraine’s reserves away from Zaporizhzhia down in the south, as the lines up north are almost assuredly held by more poorly trained and equipped Territorial Defense Forces. But as I’ve noted before, just the nature of who controls what territory means it is incredibly difficult for Russia to shift reserves around the front, while it’s dramatically easier for Ukraine to do so. [map at the link: “Ukraine can move easily, internally. Russia always has to travel the long way.”]
But Russia isn’t just diverting reserves to a hopeless advance up north. Murz also notes the horrific loss in personnel during Russia’s campaign to capture Bakhmut. Remember, Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted to over 20,000 dead mercenaries in the city’s assault, and that was back in May. The total Russian loss, including other units involved, plus those removed from the battlefield because of injuries, likely topped 100,000—all for a strategically insignificant two-day propaganda victory.
Russian commanders likely wish they had those troops today for the strategically significant Zaporizhzhia front, protecting Putin’s precious “land bridge” between mainland Russia and the Crimean Peninsula.
The full takeaway from Murz’s rant? Russia isn’t winning the current battles at the front. Ukraine’s territorial gains might be slow, but they are systematically grinding down Russia’s manpower and artillery advantages, and creating a situation where Russia might not have the forces to fully man those defensive lines.
Murz isn’t the only Russian propagandist in a foul mood today. Russian battlefield propagandist War Gonzo noted the Russian difficulties south of Bakhmut, “The darkest news comes from [Andriivka], south of [Klishchiivka]. Fierce battles are also going on for [Andriivka]. But, even when withdrawing from positions, our troops will obviously make attempts to return to them at the first.” Well, obviously they’ll try to recapture any lost terrain. Ukraine is likely hoping they do so! Again, it’s easier to kill Russians charging out in the open than those hunkered down in the next defensive line.
Meanwhile, there is new video of Ukrainian armor advancing on defensive trenches southeast of Robotyne, using smoke as a screen. [video at the link]
Distressingly, as you can see if you watch deep enough into that video, Russia manages to smash much of that column
Sucks to lose that equipment, and crews undoubtedly died, but if you notice in the second video, the infantry had already deployed and occupied positions in that trench line. We can even see some vehicle crews bailing. Equipment can be replaced while infantry cannot, and it appears the U.S. is replacing destroyed vehicles on a 1-to-1 basis (sending around 90 new M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles this past month alone). With another 1,600 M2s in American reserve stocks, Ukraine can afford to lose vehicles as it works to penetrate those lines. The job of those vehicles is to keep the soldiers inside safe.
We don’t know the ultimate outcome of this attack. Did Ukraine actually clear and hold that trench? We see at least two Ukrainian vehicles hit by anti-tank guided missiles. Did Ukraine infantry neutralize that threat, so that follow-up armor can advance? Or did Russia hold them off, requiring another attack to break these Russian defenders?
What it does tell us, however, is that Ukraine continues to penetrate deeper into Russian lines, having gotten through the initial screening lines. This is the location of that defensive line: [map at the link]
Robotyne is now under pressure from three sides. It’s doubtful Russia holds it much longer. As a reminder, Robotyne’s liberation will put strategically vital Tokmak in range of tube artillery. Right now, Ukraine can only hit it with sparse and expensive GMLRS rocket artillery.
Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps pounding trenches concealed in tree line after tree line. [video at the link]
Now let’s see where this attack is going: [map at the link]
Once Ukraine clears this line, there’s one south of Robotyne that should be tough, but easier once the settlement is held. Then it’s pretty clear until they get down to Solodka Balka on the way to Tokmak. Here’s another way to look at the current situation: [Tweets, map and satellite images showing Russian defense lines and which ones have been breached.]
If Ukraine is lucky, Russia will continue its human-wave charges against newly held Ukrainian positions, further thinning the Russian herd out in the open. Sure, it means that further progress might be delayed a week or three, but that would be a delay everyone would be happy to tolerate.
———————
Now it’s Egypt’s turn to make Russia’s Vladimir Putin wait. [video at the link] How humiliating. Putin used to be famous for pulling this power move. [Tweet showing list of how many minutes Putin made other world leaders want in the past.] Egypt now joins the leaders of Turkey (twice), Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and India in humiliating Putin in like fashion.
The Senate has passed a massive annual defense bill that would deliver a 5.2% pay raise for service members and keep the nation’s military operating, avoiding partisan policy battles to move the bill forward with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. Senate passage, 86-11, sets up a clash with the House, which passed its own version of the annual defense bill along party lines after repeated clashes over social issues like abortion access and diversity initiatives.
House Republican leaders on Thursday punted a second government funding bill and dismissed lawmakers for a six-week break from Washington, hamstrung by conservative demands for more spending cuts and internal division over social issues like abortion.
[…] The House’s decision to adjourn for a six-week break amid the GOP stalemate portends a rocky September, when lawmakers will return to the Hill with just three weeks left to stave off a government shutdown.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy ’s leadership team hoped to pass as many of their 12 annual funding bills as possible on the floor this month, aiming for a show of Republican unity that might bolster the House in a coming standoff with the Senate over federal funding. Now House GOP lawmakers are leaving the Capitol on a note of disarray rather than cohesion […]
The Freedom Caucus’ proposals for additional agriculture cuts have particularly infuriated a swath of rank-and-file Republicans, especially those in rural districts who have strong ties to GOP leadership. McCarthy himself represents an agriculture-heavy district in California.
Rep. Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa) said he was “mortified” about some of the cuts to key agriculture programs that Freedom Caucus members were working to secure on Thursday. He added that further cuts to USDA would impact food safety and U.S. agriculture exports that farmers in his state rely on.
[…] Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro of New York also confirmed that his resistance to the agriculture funding bill’s treatment of abortion pill access still isn’t ironed out. Molinaro, a House Agriculture Committee member, reiterated that he would vote against the final bill if it included the GOP-backed ban on mail delivery of abortion pills.
However, far-right members have similarly threatened to vote against the bill if Republican leaders remove the provision. […]
The Diocese of Syracuse, New York, has agreed to a $100 million settlement with parishioners who claimed they were preyed on by priests, the biggest payout by a Roman Catholic diocese in the U.S. since at least 2018.
President Biden requires ‘near certainty’ that U.S. drone strikes outside conventional war zones will not kill or injure noncombatants. He also bans ‘signature strikes,’ which target groups of militants even though the United States might not know every targeted individual’s identity, and he further limits the use of lethal force by drones to situations in which ‘capture is not feasible.’ The president also wants to personally approve drone targets outside areas of active hostilities unless U.S. troops or partner forces are ‘under attack or are threatened with an imminent attack.’
The scientifically discredited practice of so-called conversion therapy, which aims to ‘convert’ LGBTQ people to heterosexuality or traditional gender expectations, is now banned for minors in Michigan under legislation signed Wednesday by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Everyone knows how a “Mission: Impossible” film works. Clever schemes. Razor-sharp timing. The best of the best at riding motorcycles backward while firing guns […] Also, someone takes off some kind of mask and monologues the plot while everyone waits to see if this is the one where Tom Cruise actually dies.
What if there were a thriller with none of that, but one that did contain a secret mission to destroy an extremely important computer server, trying to hide from the FBI by sneaking into the bushes, and at least a dozen uses of the word “bro”? What if it was all part of the astonishing tale of how Donald Trump and his hapless lackeys Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira tried, failed, failed some more, and eventually managed to destroy the security footage at Mar-a-Lago?
Put away “Mission: Impossible” for a moment and cue the “Dragnet” theme, because the story you are about to read is true. Only this time, no names have been changed to protect these criminal muttonheads.
FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2022
An attorney at the Department of Justice sends an email to an attorney for Donald Trump containing a subpoena requiring that they produce all “surveillance records, videos, images, photographs and / or CCTV footage” from locations around Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
1:25 PM – The attorney talks to Trump and informs him of the subpoena.
3:44 PM – Trump summons Nauta to his office.
5:00 PM – Nauta cancels plans to go with Trump to Chicago and arranges to fly back to Mar-a-Lago instead. He gives a different story about why he needs to suddenly return to the place he left less than 24 hours earlier to everyone who asks.
5:04 PM – Nauta texts Trump Employee 4, “Hey bro, you around this weekend?”
5:05 PM – Nauta texts De Oliveira, “Hey brother You working today?”
5:09 PM – Trump Employee 4 texts back that he’s “local” but has family visiting.
5:10 PM – Nauta replies, “Okay cool. No biggies” and closes with an “Enjoy bro!”
6:56 PM – De Oliveira texts Trump Employee 4. “Hey buddy how are you … Walter call me early said it was trying to get in touch with you I guess he’s coming down tomorrow I guess needs you for something.”
6:57 PM – Trump Employee 4 texts De Oliveira saying he has already texted with Nauta and that “he told me no worries.”
6:58 PM – Trump Employee 4 texts Nauta, “Bro, if you need me, I can get away for a few.”
6:59 PM – Nauta responds with a “sounds good.”
7:14 PM – Nauta sends a text to a colleague saying he is going back to Mar-a-Lago because of a “family emergency.” He highlights the nature of this emergency by including “shushing” emojis. 🤫🤫🤫
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2022
Nauta flies back to Mar-a-Lago for his shhh! family emergency. De Oliveira sends Trump Employee 5 to pick him up at the airport. De Oliveira also tells Trump Employee 5 “not to tell anyone that Nauta is coming down because Nauta wanted the trip to remain secret.”
There are at this point at least four Trump employees aware of Nauta’s secret visit; five if you count the recipient of the “shushing” text.
6:46 PM – Trump Employee 5 brings Nauta to Mar-a-Lago and he immediately meets with De Oliveira. The two then go to the security guard booth, where they can see the surveillance video being displayed on monitors. They then go to the tunnel leading to the storage room where the infamous boxes of classified documents were stored. Along the way, Nauta uses a flashlight to point out the location of security cameras and … you just know there is security footage of Nauta using a flashlight to point out the cameras recording security footage.
MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2022
9:48 AM – De Oliveira walks into an IT office where Trump Employee 4 and Trump Employee Not Appearing in This Picture are working. De Oliveira drags Trump Employee 4 out of the office.
9:49 AM – De Oliveira leads Trump Employee 4 through a basement tunnel and takes him into “a small room known as the ‘audio closet,’” because we are heavily into doing super-secret stuff by this point. Once literally in the closet, De Oliveira tells Trump Employee 4 that this is just between the two of them. Once this understanding is exchanged, he asks Trump Employee 4 how long the video is retained on the security camera server. Trump Employee 4 says he thinks it’s about 45 days. De Oliveira then says that “the boss” wants the server deleted. Trump Employee 4 says he doesn’t know how to do that, and even if he did, he doesn’t have the access rights. He tells De Oliveira that he needs to contact another Trump employee who is in charge of security. De Oliveira then tries the well-tested theory of just repeating what didn’t work the last time. He tells Trump Employee 4 that “the boss” wants the server deleted. Then he asks, “What are we going to do about it?”
What De Oliveira eventually did about it is coming up later in this article, but what Trump Employee 4 did is clear enough—because the Department of Justice has a word-for-word transcript of a conversation between two people that was held in a closet.
10:14 AM – De Oliveira texts Nauta, “Hey buddy are you working today?”
10:15 AM – De Oliveira gives up waiting for Nauta to reply and just calls him. This is one of the few conversations that the Department of Justice doesn’t have transcribed, but it lasted about a minute.
1:06 PM – Nauta texts De Oliveira, “On my way to you.”
1:31 PM – De Oliveira walks into the bushes at the northern edge of Mar-a-Lago. Nauta joins him in the bushes. Because when you really, really want to say “secret meeting,” a basement closet just isn’t good enough.
1:50 PM – De Oliveira walks back out of the bushes, goes back to the IT office, then goes back to meet Nauta again. In the bushes.
3:55 PM – Trump calls De Oliveira and speaks to him for about three and a half minutes. If a recording of this doesn’t turn up, I’m going to be disappointed. But whatever was said, the obvious hijinks appear to be over for the moment.
MONDAY, AUG. 8, 2022
The FBI carries out a search at Mar-a-Lago and removes 102 classified documents, 32 of which are now starring in indictments of Donald Trump.
FRIDAY, AUG. 26, 2022
Unknown time – Nauta makes a phone call to Trump Employee 5 and asks him if “Carlos is good.” Trump Employee 5 assures Nauta that De Oliveira “is loyal” and that he would “not do anything to affect his relationship with Trump.” If this conversation did not come with background music from “The Godfather,” someone was really falling down on their job.
Later that same day – Trump Employee 5 starts a group using the Signal phone app for secure communications, and speaks to a representative of Trump’s PAC to assure them that De Oliveira is loyal. Uncovering the identity of this PAC member is way up there on the “Things I Wish I Knew” list.
Still later that day – Trump tells De Oliveira that he will get him an attorney. Donald Trump telling you that he will get you an attorney has to be one of the saddest moments in anyone’s life.
That’s the plot, so far as the indictment is concerned. And it’s a good one. There are conversations in a closet, two trips into the bushes, questions about loyalty, shush emojis, and all the “bro” anyone could want.
However, there is a coda to this story, because in October 2022 someone drained the pool at Mar-a-Lago.
An employee at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
While it’s unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it happened by mistake, the incident occurred amid a series of events that federal prosecutors found suspicious.
Who was that employee? Multiple reports indicate that the employee who pulled the plug on that pool was Carlos De Oliveira. Apparently he never could get Trump Employee 4 to do the job, so he found a way. And yes, that way was a hilarious and over-the-top stunt, but every good action flick needs one of those.
Unfortunately for bro and buddy, based on the detailed time stamps accompanying events on the indictment, it’s clear that Nauta and De Oliveira didn’t manage to erase those videos in time to keep them from being seen directing flashlights at security cameras and sneaking into the bushes. It’s also clear that Trump Employee 4 is currently writing an autobiography for the FBI, with a heavy emphasis on events at Mar-a-Lago.
But you have to wonder: If De Oliveira knew the servers only retained images for 45 days, what was happening in September and October, after the FBI search, that needed to be covered up?
Leaving things at this point may be disappointing, but don’t worry. The next part of this story should be even more exciting.
Yep, this looks like more unethical actions on the part of a Supreme Court Justice:
Justice Samuel Alito gave a softball interview published Friday to two WSJ [Wall Street Journal] writers, including one who is an attorney representing plaintiffs in a key case before the Supreme Court.
Alito spoke with attorney David B. Rivkin Jr., the attorney, and a Wall Street Journal opinion editor for an interview published on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page.
Rivkin regularly writes for the Journal’s opinion section, and is an attorney at law firm Baker Hostetler. It’s there that he has a key item of business before the Court: he’s part of a team representing the plaintiffs in Moore v. U.S., a case which asks the Court to upend the country’s tax system and potentially foreclose a wealth tax of the sort some Democrats have championed in recent years.
Rivkin and his co-author, editorial features editor James Taranto, disclosed in the column that Rivkin had a case before the Court. They wrote that Alito sat with them for more than four hours of interviews across two sessions, with the first taking place in April.
The column itself lavishes more than 2,400 words on Alito, praising him for a “candor that is refreshing and can be startling.” Alito used the interview to assail an effort by Senate Democrats to pass a judicial ethics bill, which would impose a code of conduct on all justices on the Court. [JFC]
“Congress did not create the Supreme Court,” Alito told the interviewers. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he added. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Rivkin has also represented Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who has dedicated his life to the conservative legal movement. Notably, Rivkin authored a letter to two Democratic senators this week on Leo’s behalf, in which Leo refused to comply with a request from the Senate for information about Leo’s relationship with Alito.
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told TPM that she found the column troubling.
“I believe it was imprudent of Alito to interview with a lawyer representing a party with a case pending before the court,” she wrote in an email. “Arguably, Rivkin is giving Alito something of value in these pieces, and Alito may well feel grateful to him, raising the problem of impartiality.” [understatement]
[…] Steven Rosenthal, a tax attorney and expert at Urban-Brookings, has described the Moore case as potentially destructive to the tax code, and expressed shock to TPM in a phone call that Alito did the interview.
“He’s either tone deaf, or simply doesn’t give a damn about ethics and the appearance of conflict,” Rosenthal told TPM.
Rivkin’s involvement in the Moore case goes back to when it was first filed at the District Court level in 2019.
In September 2021, he and another attorney representing the plaintiffs wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal presenting the case as a way for the Supreme Court to head off any potential future wealth tax of the kind that was under consideration by Democratic legislators at the time.
“If [the plaintiffs] prevail,” they wrote, “that would confirm that the Supreme Court’s precedents … remain good law, clearly barring any kind of federal property tax, including a wealth tax — unless Congress apportions it, which there is no obvious way to do.”
The plaintiffs lost at both the district court and appellate levels, and asked the Supreme Court to hear the case in March 2023.
The Rivkin and Taranto article published on Friday said the authors began speaking with Alito in April for a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. At that time, the Supreme Court was still mulling whether to hear the case.
That same month, Alito published a highly unusual prebuttal of a ProPublica piece in the same newspaper opinion section. The ProPublica article reported on a luxury fishing vacation that Alito took with billionaire Paul Singer.
The paper’s editorial board published a call for the Supreme Court to take on the Moore case on June 14, saying it would allow the Supreme Court to “shut the constitutional door” to a wealth tax. The Court agreed to hear the Moore case on June 26.
A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately return TPM’s request for comment.
Rosenthal, the tax expert, told TPM that he regards the Moore case — which the plaintiffs filed over a $14,000 tax debt but which could upend the national tax system — as a “stalking horse to preempt billionaire taxes.” [Yep]
Alito told Rivkin that he holds himself to higher ethical and disclosure standards than are mandated by law.
On whether other justices agree with him that Congress cannot impose an ethical code on the Court, he said, “I don’t know that any of my colleagues have spoken about it publicly, so I don’t think I should say. But I think it is something we have all thought about.”
Local and federal authorities have shut down what seems to be an illegal medical lab hidden in a California warehouse that contained nearly 1,000 laboratory mice, hundreds of unknown chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, vials of biohazardous materials, including blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus.
According to NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno, local authorities were first tipped off to the unlicensed facility when a local code enforcement officer noticed that a garden hose was illegally attached to the back of the building. That led city officials to obtain a search warrant to inspect the warehouse, which was supposed to only be used for storage.
According to court documents obtained by NBC News, city officials inspected the warehouse, located in Reedley, southeast of Fresno, on March 3. County health officials then inspected the facility on March 16. What they found reportedly shocked them…
After the special counsel Jack Smith brought new charges against Donald J. Trump, political experts agreed that the former President is but a few indictments away from clinching the Republican nomination.
With felony counts in the double digits, Trump is well ahead of his closest rival, Ron DeSantis.
Harland Dorrinson, a prominent G.O.P. pollster, said that, “for today’s Republican voter, felony counts confer instant credibility, and, by that measure, no other candidate comes close to Trump.”
He added that the pressure is on DeSantis “to get indicted for something—and fast.”
“There’s a chance that he could be charged with human trafficking for transporting migrants from the Mexican border to Martha’s Vineyard,” Dorrinson said. “But that indictment might be too little, too late.”
The extreme heat experienced by much of the U.S. this summer is continuing to break down our very infrastructure. Two sections of the I-94 freeway buckled in Minnesota this week, where temperatures hit the triple digits this week.
The buckling happened near Moorhead, Minnesota, close to the state’s border with South Dakota. The Minnesota Department of Transportation tweeted images of the two sites on I-94 where the pavement gave way under intense heat and pressure: …
Doing the bare minimum to win seems to be England’s way in this World Cup. The Three Lionesses have a pair of 1-0 wins in the tournament, including the win over Denmark early Friday morning. Already without Leah Williamson, Beth Mead, and Fran Kirby for the global showcase, Keira Walsh was taken off on a stretcher late in the first half, putting the United Kingdom’s finest down four legitimate starters against the rest of the world. That’s not going to be a recipe for success…
The events leading up to the brawl in question apparently took place on June 21, when House Republicans voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over his role in investigating former President Trump. Swalwell stood near McCarthy at the podium as the House Speaker oversaw the vote, and in C-SPAN footage, you can hear Swalwell tell the Speaker, “This is pathetic. You’re weak. You’re a weak man.” One source, an unnamed House Democrat, told the Daily Beast that McCarthy was visibly upset at Swalwell to the point that “he had a vein popping out of his forehead” and stared down the Democrat for 10 whole seconds before walking away.
Things only escalated the following day, June 22, which saw Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi deliver remarks to Congress. As Swalwell emerged from a bathroom, McCarthy confronted him, and the two were allegedly “in each other’s faces,” another House member told the Daily Beast. According to both sources, McCarthy told Swalwell, “If you ever say something like that to me again, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you.” There was some back-and-forth between the two, the witnesses said, leading up to McCarthy telling the Democrat, “Call me a pussy again and I’ll kick your ass.”
To this, Swalwell offered a wonderfully mature response: “You. Are. A. Pussy.” Per the Daily Beast, two different members recounted this stand-off between the two adult men, and both “delivered Swalwell’s response in exactly the same way.”…
Hirsh Singh, an engineer who has unsuccessfully run for multiple offices in New Jersey in recent years, threw his hat into the ring to join the crowded GOP field for president on Thursday…
Vanity project
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #381…
We have had two presidents who were engineers. Sadly, neither did a particularly stellar job of it. Both, however, had really good post-presidential careers doing and supporting public works.
The city of San Francisco has opened a complaint and launched an investigation into a giant “X” sign that was installed Friday on top of the downtown building formerly known as Twitter headquarters as owner Elon Musk continues his rebrand of the social media platform.
City officials say replacing letters or symbols on buildings, or erecting a sign on top of one, requires a permit for design and safety reasons.
The X appeared after San Francisco police stopped workers on Monday from removing the brand’s iconic bird and logo from the side of the building, saying they hadn’t taped off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.
Any replacement letters or symbols would require a permit to ensure “consistency with the historic nature of the building” and to make sure additions are safely attached to the sign, Patrick Hannan, spokesperson for the Department of Building Inspection said earlier this week.
Erecting a sign on top of a building also requires a permit, Hannan said Friday…
To the best of my knowledge, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25. The reason it gets cited as Jan. 7 (and not that long ago was cited as Jan. 6) is that that church is still using the Julian calendar.
I get the point you’re making, but it’s “cited” as January 7 because it is in fact celebrated on January 7. It’s January 7 in Russia, Ukraine, and here. That’s the date it’s celebrated. The countries don’t use the Julian calendar.
So the Ukrainian church isn’t “moving” the date of the holiday, rather it is updating its calendar to allow for the correction made creating the Gregorian calendar.
“Ukraine has moved its official Christmas holiday to 25 December in a break with the Russian Orthodox church, which celebrates it on 7 January” is completely accurate. Zelenskyy signed a bill moving the national observance of the holiday from January 7 to December 25. Those are actual dates. It would have been celebrated officially on January 7, 2024, but now will be celebrated on December 25, 2023.
(Side note… George Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1732. So why do we record his birthday as Feb. 22? It’s because the UK and its colonies were still on the Julian calendar when he was born. After the UK and colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar in Sept. 1752, he had his birth date changed to keep his age the same. Hence, Feb. 22.
On any Linux or unix system, run the command “cal 09 1752” to see the changeover.)
There was a discussion about the calendars and the switch on another thread here not that long ago, which I’m too sleepy to find.
whheydtsays
Re; SC (Salty Current) @ #387…
It appears to be a difference between the civil calendar and the liturgical calendar. My question would be…has the church in Ukraine switched calendars, or simply adjusted its liturgical calendar for the accumulated difference?
whheydt@388, John Morales@389,
Interestingly (well, to me anyway!) the switch is of the liturgical calendar only (Ukraine, like all countries with dominant Eastern Orthodox churches, has switched to the Gregorian calendar as the official state calendar) and is to the “Revised Julian Calendar” (or “New Julian Calendar”), devised by a Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković in 1923. Most Eastern Orthodox churches have made the switch, but the Russian has not. The Revised Julian uses a similar adjustment to the Gregorian, but not the same one (because that was brought in by the Roman Catholic Church, which would never do): in the Gregorian, years ending in “00” are not leap years unless divisible by 400, while in the Revised Julian, they are not leap years unless the remainder when divided by 900 is either 200 or 600. The Revised Julian seems a bit more clunky, but is slightly more accurate (relative to the actual length of the mean solar day and solar year) in the long run, but the first future year on which the two disagree is 2800 CE, which is* a Gregorian but not a Revised Julian leap year. I worked out (can’t find my calculations right now) that if the Gregorian calendar was adjusted so years divisible by 3200 are not leap years, it would be pretty close to as accurate as allowed by the movement of the earth itself (variability in the rotation on its axis varies more than that of its path around the sun – and melting of the icecaps will probably be the largest factor in changing its rotational speed over the next millennium).
*I say “is” rather than “will be” because these rea facts about two abstract systems, which remain true even if neither the human species nor the earth exists at that time.
KGsays
SC@387,
With regard to Washington’s d.o.b., there’s also the complication that from 1155 to 1751, the year began on 25th March in England, Wales, Ireland, and the English/British colonies (Scotland made that switch in 1600). So as a youth, he’d have said he was born on 11th Feb 1731! Whether that change was made retrospective, I don’t know.
Sometimes, it’s better to look at the long game when making decisions and realize that a “yes” now could avoid a lot of trouble in the future.
This definitely applies to the city of Fort Worth when it comes to a new free speech lawsuit logged against them by the Metroplex Atheists. The group filed the complaint July 17, charging that the city violated its speech rights by refusing to let the group hang banner advertisements for an event on keeping religion out of public schools, scheduled for Aug. 26.
Fort Worth allows groups to hang banners with ads for events on light poles in various spots downtown, so long as their applications are approved…
A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, litigation centered on references made by on-air figures to “the Big Lie,” or the former president’s unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Trump had argued in his lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida, that the references to the phrase were defamatory as they created a “false and incendiary association” between him and Adolf Hitler.
U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal wrote that CNN’s references to the term “the Big Lie” were matters of opinion, not fact…
I am not sure that a comparison to Hitler would damage Trump among his followers.
An Illinois billionaire dropped another $4 million into the fight over whether it should be harder to amend Ohio’s Constitution, new campaign filings show.
But the donations from shipping supply magnate Richard Uihlein aren’t the only out-of-state money flowing ahead of the Aug. 8 special election. The campaigns for and against Issue 1 are relying heavily on donors from California to Washington, D.C. as they blast the influence of special interests on Ohio politics.
The issue, if passed, would require 60% of the vote to enact new constitutional amendments and change the signature-gathering process for citizen amendments. Ohio Republicans pushed for the August election to preempt a November ballot question that would enshrine abortion rights in the constitution…
wzrd1says
@ 375, I am very, very confused.
“Alito told Rivkin that he holds himself to higher ethical and disclosure standards than are mandated by law.”
After saying, ‘“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”’
Are laws in the US now flowing from other than Congress, which Alito just denied had the authority to enact legislation regulating the Supreme Court? Do said laws flow naturally out of a Keebler hollow tree?
Or is he just completing his assassination of Themis, forgetting that she also holds a sword?
wzrd1says
whheydt @ 365, thanks for the reminder! I had entirely forgotten to install the cal package.
Package ncal for Debian based systems.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to Twitter Friday to complain that his request for secret service protection has been denied. “Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection,” he tweeted. “But not me.” [Tweet available at the link]
Kennedy wants special treatment and taxpayer-funded security, and he’s shameless enough to invoke his father’s assassination to get it, which just adds to how much of an asshole he is. At any rate, there’s nothing unusual in the denial of his request. In fact, granting it would be a departure from standard practice.
The service is provided to “major presidential and vice presidential candidates” after consideration by the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and an advisory committee that includes congressional leadership of both parties. They consider a number of factors, including polling thresholds and “a specific assessment of threats against that candidate.” Kennedy’s campaign doesn’t cut it when it comes to polling right now. The “67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm” that Kennedy says he provided the committee seems not to have convinced them there was justification.
The Secret Service’s FAQ says they normally provide security for candidates and their spouses “within 120 days of a general presidential election.” In the 2004 election, frontrunner John Kerry didn’t get protection until the primaries had begun in February of that year. The earliest a candidate has received protection was about nine months before the primaries in 2007, when former President Barack Obama’s private campaign security was replaced by the Secret Service in May 2007. As the first prominent Black candidate for president, he needed it for pretty obvious reasons. President Joe Biden didn’t get it until March 2020.
Which takes us back to Kennedy and this part of his tweet: “Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request.”
That seems like a contrived effort to include those specific numbers, which carry significance for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League deems them “hate symbols.” The “14-day” bit seems to have been plucked out of thin air—it doesn’t appear anywhere on the Secret Service’s site, and news reports about other candidates’ protection don’t mention it. And Kennedy just happened to get the rejection on the 88th day after he submitted the request? Really?
Given the company he’s been keeping, what this tweet really feels like is another call to his neo-Nazi fan base.
Americans need protection from rfk . If covid comes back they will die in droves thanks to his anti Vax bs. Stats are already showING a 7% increase in Republican deaths in Ohio and Florida post vaccine general availability
—————————–
he can provide his own fucking security for himself. If he would look at the facts of SS protection instead of what he wishes were true — he would see his request is a bunch of fucking bullshit. […] Should Maryanne Williamson ALSO be given SS detail?
———————-
1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the “14 Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The second is 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs.
We are to understand that the 14 day reference, which has no actual antecedent in Secret Service procedures, and the 88 day reference are merely accidental? I’d really like to know when Kennedy’s application was rejected, if only to put the lie to this possibility that goddam Kennedy is actually performing Nazi dog whistles.
————————-
He could well have a closet Nazi type who’s managed to get his confidence enough to have been given control of the social media. This person could also be writing his lines for him. He strikes me as a complete idiot who could easily be a quite useful idiot with the right person pulling his strings.
————————
At this stage of the campaign, candidates hire their own security details if they feel it’s needed. RFK Jr. is running up a tab of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to file nuisance SLAPP lawsuits against Kos and community member NortheastDem in an effort to bully and silence his critics. If he is so concerned about his personal security, he obviously has more than enough money to hire a security detail.
[…] “The 2023 Minnesota legislative session is over. Democrats returned to St. Paul in January with a $17.5 billion surplus and total control of state government, which hinges on a one-seat majority in the Senate (decided by a few hundred votes). One dissenting voice would have been enough to derail their entire agenda. Instead, swing-district senators were reliable green votes on every major piece of legislation.
In just four months, the DFL majority:
– Established a fundamental right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy
– Declared Minnesota a ”refuge” for children seeking sex changes
– Passed the “Take Pride Act”, which will prohibit nonprofits that serve minors from discriminating based on “gender identity” in hiring practices
– Passed protections for women who travel to Minnesota for abortions
– Repealed protections for babies who survive abortions
– Stripped pregnancy resource centers of state funding [Those are not real resource centers, they are fakes set up to pressure women into not getting abortions. Those centers are mostly religion-based propaganda organizations.]
– Gutted reporting requirements for abortion facilities [I think that is more like protecting the privacy of women who seek abortions or other reproductive care.]
– Expanded medical assistance to include abortion
– Repealed an informed consent law for abortion
– Legalized recreational marijuana use
– Raised the gas tax by indexing it to inflation
– Increased sales taxes and fees for vehicle purchases and registration
– Enacted automatic voter registration
– Passed pre-registration for 16- and 17- year olds
– Joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
– Funded a study on ranked-choice voting
– Passed a bill to provide driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants [the bill does not label people as “illegal”]
– Passed a bill to provide health care to illegal immigrants [as above]
– Restored the right to vote to violent felons who are on probation [the bill does not label felons as “violent”]
– Created a commission to design a new state flag
– Replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day
– Declared Juneteenth a state holiday
– Raised the threshold for a political party to attain “major party” status from five percent to eight percent beginning in the 2024 general election
– Passed a bill to require Minnesota’s energy grid to be 100% carbon-free by 2040
– Banned so-called “conversion therapy”
– Passed two gun control laws and universal background checks
– Provided free college at all state institutions for students in families with incomes under $80,000
– Passed a bill to provide free lunch and breakfast to all Minnesota students regardless of family income
– Increased spending on K-12 education BY 10.2%
– Banned native American mascots
– Raised fees for fishing, boating, visiting state parks
– Created a hate speech database
– Banned no-knock warrants
– Created a program that will allow inmates who complete certain programming to serve just half of their prison sentences
– Established a new legal avenue for prosecutors to seek lower sentences.
– Funded an Office of Restorative Practices that will propose alternatives to incarceration for juveniles who commit serious crimes
– Commissioned a study on abolishing cash bail
– Created a new public database that will assign climate scores to large businesses
– Capped rebate checks at $260 per filer, with income limits, and down from the $1,000 initially proposed by Gov. Tim Walz”
[…]
The list was being used at a central Minnesota fair to enrage republican Minnesotans.
lumipunasays
Re 390:
Most Eastern Orthodox churches have made the switch, but the Russian has not. The Revised Julian uses a similar adjustment to the Gregorian, but not the same one (because that was brought in by the Roman Catholic Church, which would never do)
English Wikipedia doesn’t mention any Eastern Orthodox churches using the standard Gregorian calendar. According to Finnish Wikipedia, however, the EO churches of Finland and Estonia adopted Gregorian calendar in the 1920s, under political pressure from the newly independent national governments, apparently just before the Revised Julian calendar was introduced in 1923.
At this time, the national churches in question also separated themselves from the Russian Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Moscow), which was in administrative chaos under early Soviet persecution. However, the tiny EO churches of Finland and Estonia didn’t become fully independent, like the church of Ukraine just recently did, but rather joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople as semi-independent branches. The EO church of Estonia was subsequently annexed by the Russian Orthodox church under Soviet occupation. This annexation was reversed in 1990s, but then the Estonian church then adopted the Revised Julian calendar. Thus, the EO church of Finland seems to be the only one using Gregorian calendar.
(Finland is overwhelmingly a Lutheran country, where only around 2 % of the population were Orthodox in early 20th century. However, during Russian era the Orthodox church had become loosely affiliated with the autonomous Finnish national government, on a roughly equal footing with the Lutheran church, and this situation was preserved during independence.)
Speaking of anti-Catholic sentiment, there was also a Lutheran “improved” version of the Gregorian calendar, developed in Germany in the 17th century, that was adopted in Sweden in 1753 to replace the Julian calendar. This calendar remained in use (for both secular and ecclesiastic purposes) well into 19th century, both in Sweden proper and in Finland, which were separated from each other in 1809. The only practical difference was the date of Easter (lol), which on some years differed from both Julian and standard Gregorian calendar. In 1845, Finland remained awkwardly as the only country in the world celebrating Easter according to this “Improved calendar”.
Reginald Selkirksays
@399: “If covid comes back”
They got that one wrong. Covid is still here. I had it one month ago. A friend of mine is still sick with it. Fortunately we are vaccinated.
A new lawsuit from Republicans asks the Ohio Supreme Court to block the abortion rights amendment from the November ballot.
The legal challenge, filed Friday, argues that abortion rights petitions failed to list the state laws that would be repealed or changed if the constitutional amendment took effect.
According to the lawsuit, those laws include a ban on doctors performing abortions after cardiac activity is detected; a ban on abortions after a fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome; and parental consent for abortions.
Attorney Curt Hartman filed the challenge on behalf of two Republicans: former state Rep. Tom Brinkman from Cincinnati and ex-legislative candidate Jenn Giroux. They asked the Ohio Supreme Court to invalidate the petitions and prohibit the measure from appearing on the Nov. 7 ballot…
whheydtsays
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #394…
One might well wonder who “asked”. St. Javelin, perhaps?
Ukraine has publicly unveiled its new sea drone for the first time as it seeks to limit the Russian fleet’s operations in the Black Sea, CNN reported.
The outlet got an exclusive look at the new naval drone, which is designed to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It packs hundreds of pounds of explosives and can hit targets 500 miles away, per the report.
The Ukrainian-designed and manufactured drone is remotely controlled and can also be used for reconnaissance and surveillance missions, among other things, the report says…
Joe Rogan and a guest on his top-ranked Spotify podcast suggested in a July 2023 episode that US nuclear tests captured on video were faked, arguing that cameras could not sustain the forces that blew up model houses, cars and electrical structures. This is false; the Cold War-era experiments used film setups built to withstand atomic blasts and radiation, experts told AFP.
“Boy, that does look fake,” Rogan said as billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen rolled tape of nuclear test explosions during a July 19, 2023 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which reaches millions of listeners…
A Russian army ammunition depot exploded in the Kozacha Bay in Sevastopol in occupied Crimea at approximately 10.00 p.m. on July 28, Ukrainian military intelligence has said…
My bewilderment at Russian tactics has been a running theme throughout these updates. Despite building an extensive network of seemingly effective fortifications, Russian forces insist in fighting in front of those fortifications, out in the open—where they are easier to kill.
And it’s happening again.
After two months of grinding attritional warfare and battlefield shaping, Ukraine’s counteroffensive has picked up steam in the last week, penetrating deeper into Russian-occupied territory, and even reaching the first major Russian defensive lines.
Among those gains was the village of Staromaiorske, on the Staromlynivka/Mariupol axis. This is a dangerous advance for the Russians, as they have only a single major defensive line. If Ukraine breaches it, there’s lots of potential havoc it can create. [map at the link]
Russia’s best bet is to hole up in those trenches and punish any Ukrainian advance. Indeed, Ukrainian forces are at their most exposed when they have to tread carefully through minefields, bridge anti-tank ditches, cross more minefields, push aside anti-tank barriers, and then occupy trenches full of infantry.
Russia should be well aware of this, given its costly efforts to gain territory against entrenched Ukrainian positions. All Russia has to do now is sit back and let Ukraine crash against its own. It would be a great opportunity for payback.
Here’s what I wrote Friday:
If Ukraine is lucky, Russia will continue its human-wave charges against newly held Ukrainian positions, further thinning the Russian herd out in the open. Sure, it means that further progress might be delayed a week or three, but that would be a delay everyone would be happy to tolerate.
Well, Ukraine got lucky. [Tweet and map at the link]
This is a pro-Russian account, but it has a track record of accuracy. The pro-Putin crowd is happy about this. They think it’s good to rush out in the open to recapture lost territory, when it’s very much in Ukraine’s best interest to retreat, lay down a wall of (cluster) artillery, and further thin the Russian herd before the next advance.
Russia is very wedded to this tactic. In Friday’s Ukraine Update, I featured a Russian officer at the front who explained why Ukraine was winning. His rant was illuminating in various ways, but this part particularly stuck out to me:
So. If you spend all your reserves and resources on the defense of the “foreground”, and do it reasonably, because in the foreground you have places that are convenient to defend, exchanging people and equipment at the most favorable rate, then the enemy’s access to the main line of defense is very very bad.
For some reason, they think reaching the main defensive line is bad, and that defending in the “foreground”—that is, in front of that line—is “convenient.” Please make it make sense! We’re not talking one or two inept Russian commanders giving bad orders (or attacking out of fear of reporting failures back to Putin); no, this is deeply entrenched Russian doctrine.
In the comments to that post, community member Patrick Walsh noted that this is nothing new for the Russians.
It’s largely forgotten now — but the USSR also did that at the Battle of Kursk— they had layers of defenses set up, they were making the Nazis pay dearly for every meter gained… and then halfway through the battle, the Soviets suddenly came charging out of their prepared defenses with hundreds of tanks… and that part of the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank on tank battle in history, was an utter fiasco for the Soviets- they got absolutely mauled- it was a gallant effort at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory- but the Soviets won anyway, because the German offensive was pretty much doomed to run out of steam any way.
The thing is, the way the Soviets and now Russians tell it in their popular history, was that mass charge of T-34s against the German Panzers was the glorious highlight- that is WHEN they turned the tide and won the battle! That myth version of the battle is completely untrue- that ill-conceived charge/counterattack- almost cost them a battle they were already winning.
Anyway, the idea that you don’t stay in your fixed defenses when attacked, you charge out to counterattack immediately- seems to be something that many Russian officers are fixated on.
Community member RO37 added the Russian imperative is to always be on the offensive:
Russian tactics in the Russo-Ukrainian War have consistently held to 100 year old [principles developed by the early Red Army’s greatest theorist and WW1 tactician, Alexei Brusilov]. The near blind adherence for Russian commanders to feel a need to maintain an offensive somewhere somewhat comports with Brusilov’s ideas of the need to dictate tempo and intiative… although i’d argue Brusilov would be aghast at how his ideas of offensive tempo weren’t meant to abandon the idea of the value of defensive actions.
Brusilov emphasized how friendly trench positions can serve to secure rearward security of limited counterattacks to disrupt enemy offensive actions—basically, if a unit charges forth out of a fortified line, they can launch limited attacks without needing to worry about being encircled. And can be deeply disruptive to enemy offensive actions aimed at a fortified line.
I don’t think he meant never fight on a trench, but the idea of aggressive defensive actions aimed at disrupting enemy advances towards a defensive line broadly comports with traditional Soviet doctrine.
RO37 makes a great point—the notion of harassing an approaching enemy is as old as time itself. You want to make life as miserable as possible for any attacking force, and guerrilla-style attacks are part of that, as are larger-scale raids. But those are generally fight-and-run attacks. Inflict damage and boom! You’re gone. Lather, rinse, repeat, sapping the enemy’s supplies, manpower, and morale.
But of course, that’s not what’s happening here. Yes, Russia is trying to disrupt the Ukrainian advance, but it’s trying to do so by holding territory. That’s not disrupting, that’s stopping. And again, it’s much easier to stop an advancing enemy from entrenched positions.
Another line from that Russian officer caught some people’s attention:
The answer to the question “How did it happen that the enemy has such a numerical superiority over us, and in some places also a qualitative one?” lies in the winter and spring “meat assaults”, which gobbled up the lion’s share of the people mobilized in the fall.
Here we see both an admission that Russia threw away its mobilized troops in “meat assaults”—something their propagandists accuse Ukraine of doing, as well as a lack of regret about that loss of life. All those lives were just “gobbled up.” Oh well. That sucks. Too bad they’re not around to throw into new meat assaults in front of these great trenches.
I mean, look at how they treat their own: [Tweet and awful video at the link: “The Commander of the “2nd Battalion” berates ChMobiks for abandoning their positions. I am not sure but this may be a DPR militia unit – the 2nd Special Purpose Battalion “Donbas”. The Izgoys probably left their positions to receive medical care because they are all fucked up from artillery strikes and can’t fight anymore. But who cares when you need meat on the lines…Welcome to the Russian Army.]
For all of Russia’s talk about the “Global South” and the decaying morality of the West, immigrants from those Global South countries aren’t risking their lives to get into Russia (or China, for that matter). They’re trying to get to the West—Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
————————–
Speaking of the Global South, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is hosting leaders of nearly two dozen African nations, trying to expand his country’s influence in that colonialism-scarred continent.
Thing is, he can’t help but lie—about everything. [Tweet and video at the link: “We were asked to withdraw troops from Kyiv in order to create conditions for concluding peace,” Putin lied.]
Russia has all the conditions for peace it needs; Putin can send the order to withdraw all forces from Ukrainian territory anytime he wants.
And though he offered free grain to six friendly African nations (nothing is free), his charm offensive is coming up short, according to Reuters.
African leaders pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday to move ahead with their plan to end the Ukraine conflict and to renew a deal crucial to Africa on the safe wartime export of Ukrainian grain, which Moscow tore up last week.
While not directly critical of Russia, their interventions on the second day of a summit were more concerted and forceful than those that African countries have voiced until now.
They served as reminders of the depth of African concern at the consequences of the war, especially rising food prices.
“This war must end. And it can only end on the basis of justice and reason,” African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat told Putin and African leaders in St Petersburg.
“The disruptions of energy and grain supplies must end immediately. The grain deal must be extended for the benefit of all the peoples of the world, Africans in particular.”
Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi humiliated Putin by showing up late for their meeting. [video at the link]
———————–
This is fun. [Tweet at the link: russian milbloggers are losing it tonight…. “Ukraine of the 21st Century has nothing to do with the Ukrainian SSR, I lost my younger brother in the NVO, on February 24 he came in as a peacekeeper, they shared the last can of stew with their unit, there is no Ukraine there is a Bandera offspring, while our Military-Political Leadership of the Country plays take off in the Soft Strength, our guys are dying every day, and Putin also said he would look for a peaceful solution to Ukraine, and now think about why our NVO has been going on for so long and will go on while Traitors are sitting in the Kremlin.”](NVO refers to “Special Military Operation,” which I guess is still a thing, since Putin won’t call this a war.)
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This Russian literally recorded his own death on his phone: [Tweet and video at the link]
[…] The role of women in emerging civilization needs rethinking, the authors of a new paper say
In the nature journal Scientific Reports, it turns out a chalcolithic-era body dubbed the “Ivory Merchant” and presumed male when found in 2008 in Valencina, Spain, monumentally buried and with uniquely rare and magnificent grave goods a 260 foot distance from a communal grave of the same period, was a woman.
And the denizens of the also luxurious communal grave —one in a garment made of thousands of carved seashell beads— appear to be female as well. Perhaps patriarchy was not the social order there 4,900 to 4,650 years ago.
Valencina was a mega-site of the Copper Age, the biggest-known settlement in the time in that area. It featured monumental construction, communal burials and high-end material culture, the team writes. … in the graves, they found luxuries made of exotic materials such as shiny crystals (which humankind seems to have coveted for over 100,000 years), amber, imported ostrich eggs (also prized in deeper antiquity). And ivory.
The woman … interred alone … was at first thought to be a young man aged 17 to 25, of local origin based on isotope analysis, and unfortunately suffered from high exposure to toxic mercury (… likely exposed to cinnabar, which is mercury ore). Her grave goods included a large pottery plate on which the researchers detected traces of wine and cannabis, a plant indigenous to Eurasia. She had a copper awl, flint tools (which remained in wide use through the Copper Age and subsequent Iron Age) and [remarkable] objects made of precious ivory .. even … a 1.8-kilogram (4-pound) [African] elephant tusk by her head.
The fact that communal burial was the rule —and children of great houses not interred differently from other children— with this isolated monument receiving intense ritual attention across some 200 to 250 years, with over 60 smaller tombs and other deposits at respectful distance around hers, in addition to the unique offerings of in-Iberia-of-that-era unmatched rarity, value, “sophistication, quality, and quantity”, underlines the tremendously prominent social standing of the regal Ivory Lady and suggests that it was a stature earned by personal achievement and merit, not inherited from parents nor acquired through marriage.
By all the evidence, “established interpretations about the political role of women at the onset of social complexity should be revisited,” the authors tell us.
Another example: in 1941, near Birka, Sweden, a burial of splendor —artifacts included armor-piercing arrows, other weaponry, and two horses— which finally in 2016 researchers postulated to be of a female based upon skeletal morphology, was shortly proven by DNA to be precisely that, after 76 years of conventional belief to the masculine contrary.
“Viking scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the agency of women with weapons,” the lady-warrior team wrote.
[…] And in 2019, four Scythian warrior women, comprising three generations from 2,500 years ago were found together in a magnificent barrow among 18 lesser ones by a ten-year study near the western Russian village of Devitsa, the youngest about 12 or 13 years of age, the eldest 45 or 50 —still wearing an engraved gold headdress called a calathos, apparently missed by past grave robbers— and two in their twenties. The grave goods included practical items as well as wealth: dozens of iron arrowheads and knives. Their sex was no great surprise to the well-informed, however: chief excavator Valerii Guliaev stated that “women warriors were the norm, not the exception, in Scythian culture.”
[…] if you are buried with fanfare, sacrificed helpmeets and mainly if your grave bristled with weapons, and if your remains were not sufficiently well preserved to say otherwise – you were a man.
At least until microscience happens to prove otherwise. And if it hasn’t, by default you must be. Until recently, children found interred with weaponry or other masculo-typic objects were routinely considered male when DNA was too deteriorated to help, the skeletal remains at that age being pretty much indistinguishable. But amelogenin to the rescue! The sex of Ivory Person was determined by analysis of this protein, which is involved in tooth enamel and coded on both the X and Y chromosome. yet distinguishably. So, if analysis of a body’s enamel amelogenin finds Y chromosome type, the body is a male, which means it should “[work] for the kiddies of antiquity too.” Whether it “works” in the case of ancient intersex individuals is unclear, perhaps. As may also be the gender with which the individual personally identified in life: you don’t necessarily get to choose what apparel and gear will accompany you into eternity. […]
A small clump of soil from a Massachusetts forest holds giant viruses unlike any previously discovered, according to new research. The find hints that scientists are just scratching the surface of the astounding diversity of these tiny and enigmatic giants that likely lie beneath our feet.
Giant viruses are huge, comparatively speaking. For context, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, measures about 100 nanometers across. Giant viruses can be more than 20 times as large, and often pack genomes that dwarf many complex organisms. All viruses need a host to replicate — including giant ones. These parasites can infect larger single-celled organisms like amoeba or algae.
Most of what scientists know about these viral behemoths comes from laboratory studies of aquatic viruses. But giant virus DNA abounds in soils, too, though scientists didn’t have a clear idea what these giants actually look like.
Now, researchers have some idea: In a paper posted to the preprint server bioRxiv in June, they used electron microscopy to inspect the giant viruses living in a patch of forest outside of Boston. They found endless forms most beautiful, as Charles Darwin might have said…
whheydtsays
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #406…
That’s kind of funny in a way. There is a claim that after the George Pal War of the Worlds came out, the studio was visited by the FBI demanding to know where they’d gotten footage of a nuclear explosion, since all of them were classified. That footage was actually done on a sound stage after getting (unclassified) descriptions of the real thing. The “mushroom cloud’ seen in the movie is about 50 feet tall. So…it was done so realistically that it fooled US intelligence.
When President Joe Biden delivered a speech Thursday at the Truman Civil Rights Symposium, he had a message for the country: Republicans are endangering military readiness.
Biden specifically took issue with Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who since February has single-handedly held up hundreds of promotions of generals and flag officers. Tuberville is protesting the military’s post-Roe v. Wade policy of ensuring service members can access abortion care, regardless of which state they are assigned to.
“Something dangerous is happening,” Biden told the audience. “The Republican Party used to always support the military, but today they’re undermining the military. The senior senator from Alabama, who claims to support our troops, is now blocking more than 300 military operations with his extreme political agenda.”
Caught up in Tuberville’s forced-birther blockade are Biden’s nominees for Joint Chiefs chair, C.Q. Brown, and Chief of Naval Operations, Lisa Franchetti, who just happen to be a person of color and a woman, respectively. The Marine Corps currently lacks a commander. But for Tuberville’s blockade, Brown is poised to be first Black Joint Chiefs chair in three decades after Gen. Colin Powell served in the position during the elder Bush and then Clinton administrations.
“That’s who I’ve nominated,” Biden said of Brown. “He’s waiting.”
Calling Tuberville’s blockade “outrageous,” Biden said “outstanding leaders of all backgrounds” were also on hold.
“We need them,” Biden said. “Right now, tens of thousands of America’s daughters and sons are deployed around the world tonight keeping us safe from immense national security challenges. But the senator from Alabama is not.”
Senate Democrats have been urging Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to broker a solution to the impasse. McConnell’s only response to a signed letter from Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee was a tweet from his press secretary, noting, “Did Democrats forget that they’re in the majority and control the floor?”
But Tuberville isn’t the only congressional Republican threatening national security over anti-abortion zealotry. House Republicans also larded up the annual military budget bill with extremist social policies, including an effort to end the Pentagon’s policies on abortion access and gender-affirming care.
This week, the Senate handily passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) sans toxic social policy on a bipartisan 86-11 vote. But reconciling the bipartisan Senate bill with the extremist House bill is going to be the tricky part, especially with barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the wheel.
Regardless of how these issues get resolved, it’s clear that congressional Republicans regard the U.S. military as just one more hostage they can take on the way to forcing their anti-freedom agenda on the country.
Republicans have always been weird about sex — more specifically, anyone other than heterosexual men having it. And now that the incels and the other internet misogynists have joined forces with the traditional religious misogynists, it’s somehow gotten even worse. It’s just a big ol giant Voltron of fury over the idea of women having sex outside of marriage with men who are not them.
This week, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace gave a deeply awkward speech at Tim Scott’s Prayer Breakfast in which she announced that she turned down morning sex with her fiancé in order to get there on time, because of how very, very jazzed she was to get to Tim Scott’s Prayer Breakfast. Truly, the event of the season.
“I woke up this morning at 7,” she told the audience. “Patrick, my fiancè, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed and I was like, ‘No baby, we don’t got time for that this morning. I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.”
“A little TMI, but he can wait,” she added. “I’ll see him later tonight,”
So yes. Breaking news, 45-year-old twice-married, currently engaged Nancy Mace fucks. Was the confession a little out-of-nowhere? Sure. We can all make jokes about that kind of shit. But the Right, her target audience, completely lost it for a different reason — because she should not have been having premarital sex.
Keep in mind these are the same people who worship Andrew Tate and Donald Trump. The difference here was that Nancy Mace is a woman and, we can assume, only has consensual sex with her fiancé.
Let’s get some quotes, shall we?
“Premarital sex is a sin Nancy Mace. All sinners burn in the lake of fire. Thanks for telling everyone you’re just another fake Christian.” — Twitter Rando
“That’s some hoe talk.” — Lavern Spicer
“She was inches away from taking applications for a threesome. …She was like, ‘Oh, by the way, if you want to join us tonight, 7 PM.’” — Charlie Kirk
“Let me get this straight – Nancy Mace is engaged to someone (so she’s unmarried) & she’s living with the guy (I’m assuming, since she woke up in his bed – I could be wrong) and she said ‘no to sex this morning’ because she had to speak at a prayer breakfast? Mmmmmkay.” — Twitter Rando
“Here’s your daily reminder that Nancy Mace is trash.” — Conservative “comedian” Tim Young (we’ve never heard of him either)
“Nancy Mace is apparently clueless that fornication is a sin. She also has a very foul mouth. The worst part is that she has no sense of shame about these vices, and no class. Not a great reflection on the people, whoever they are, who voted her into office in South Carolina.” — Twitter Rando
Unmarried concubine invited to speak at a prayer breakfast. Now I’ll get bombarded by her white knight defenders telling me I need to remove the log from my eye. — Twitter Rando
“This is the way of an adulterous woman: She eats and wipes her mouth, And says, ‘I have done no wickedness.’” — Twitter Rando
Wait, so now women can’t eat without being adulterous and wicked? Is that a thing? Is she eating people? […]
Quote from StratCom: “The defence forces of Ukraine have successfully launched a strike on the Chonhar Bridge on the morning of 29.07.2023.”
Details: The Crimean Wind Telegram channel reports that information about the damage to the Chonhar Bridge “is confirmed by Russian tourists who went along the land corridor to Crimea for new experience.”
On the published screenshot, users write that the Chonhar bridge is blocked due to damage, and Russian invaders send cars to detour…
Details: USAID will send drones to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. Skydio 2+ are equipped with 4K cameras and will be used for taking photos and videos to document war crimes.
Quote: “These will aid the Office of the Prosecutor General to document the more than 115,000 instances of destroyed civilian infrastructure, and evidence of human rights abuses on frontline communities and liberated territories.” …
The Frisco, Texas, police chief issued an apology on Friday after a family from Little Rock, Arkansas, who were headed to a basketball tournament in Grapevine, was mistakenly pulled over in a “high-risk stop,” after a Frisco officer ran the car’s plates as being from Arizona, instead of Arkansas, leading police to believe it was stolen, according to body camera video and information released by police.
On July 23, a Frisco police officer saw a black Dodge Charger with an out-of-state license plate leave a hotel and ran a check of the vehicle’s license plate. According to a news release from Frisco Police, when entering the information, the officer mistakenly entered the plate as being from Arizona, instead of Arkansas, causing an incorrect registration return and leading the officer to believe that the vehicle was possibly stolen.
The officer then initiated a “high-risk traffic stop” on the Dallas North Tollway and waited for backup officers to arrive, the release said. Police closed the southbound lanes of the tollway and conducted the high-risk stop, which the department said is “standard procedure for stolen vehicles.”
Body camera video from two officers, released by the department on Friday, shows the mother who was driving and her 6th grade son, who was in the back seat, being ordered out of the vehicle…
Former president Donald Trump’s political group spent more than $40 million on legal costs in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump, his advisers and others, according to people familiar with the matter, financing legal work that has drawn scrutiny from prosecutors about potential conflicts of interest between Trump and witnesses.
Save America, the former president’s PAC, is expected to disclose about $40.2 million in legal spending in a filing expected Monday, said the people familiar with the filing, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been made public.
That total is more than any other expense the PAC has incurred during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and, according to federal filings from earlier this month, more than Trump’s campaign raised in the second quarter of 2023. It will bring the PAC’s post-presidential legal spending to about $56 million, as Trump faces a federal indictment in Florida, state charges in New York, and the prospect of additional criminal indictments in Washington and Fulton County, Ga.
[…]
While interviewing potential witnesses associated with Trump, prosecutors have raised pointed questions about who is paying for their lawyers and why, people familiar with the questions said. Trump advisers told The Washington Post that the PAC, which raises most of its money from small-dollar contributions by Trump supporters across the country, is footing the legal bills for almost anyone drawn into the investigations who requests help from the former president and his advisers, the advisers say.
[…]
The PAC’s own fundraising and creation is under investigation, The Post has reported, though the group has not been accused of wrongdoing. Much of the money it is using to pay for legal bills was raised on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
StevoRsays
Seen as meme on facebook today :
“The era of Global Boiling has arrived.” – Antonio Guterres
Exxon did this. Shell did this. Total Energies did this.PetroChina did this. Chevron did this.BP did this.gazprom did this.Coal India did this.Saudi Aramcodid this.Just 100 companies casued 71% of man -made (sic) global warming emissions.”
– Assaad Razzouk @Assaad Razzouk
Author : Saving the Planet without the Bullshit.
Plus an added bit in separate meme :
Sophie Gabrielle ( source & author here -ed)
Can we please add ouir governments over the past decades? Can we?
They knew,
They lied as they pillaged.
And they too stole from Humanity our one safe habitat.
They continue the pillage even in
ClimateBoiling
Climate Breakdown.
2nd Quote also by Armando Sousa here – not sure who said it first.
John Moralessays
StevoR, boiling is 100C.
It’s stupid to call it boiling.
(Also, there’s no pillaging, can’t pillage the environment, it’s all around us)
StevoRsays
^ Huh. Hashtag symbol # not showing up here? Seems not.
For info on the Saving the Planet without the Bullshit book see :
StevoR, it’s the consumers who consume the bulk fossil fuels who did it as much as the purveyors. The industrial revolution. The people who have gas heaters and/or stoves. The people who burn coal to keep warm. The people who drive cars, who go on holidays. Who watch drag racing. Who go on cruises. Etc.
If people didn’t buy it and consume it, $Big Fossil& would not suck it up and sell it.
(Assaad is mistaken)
StevoRsays
@420. John Morales :Metaphors & turns of phrase, how do they work again?
Hint : when Ppeople say “boiling” in terms of say weather & climate, they usually aren’t literally meaning above 100 degrees Celsius.
Also tell that to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who I was quoting.
Sometimes John Morales your ability to miss the point is just staggering.
KGsays
Republicans have always been weird about sex — more specifically, anyone other than heterosexual men having it. – Lynna, OM quoting Wonkette@414
That reads a little oddly – because surely those heterosexual men need partners, who would be, if I’ve got the terminology right – women. But I guess Republicans think of those women as having sex done to them by heterosexual men.
Silentbobsays
@ 420
Juan Ramón this presupposes we are at the end of the era to which Guterres refers.
As usual, you confidently make an error in logic.
(Runaway greenhouse effect is a thing – at least in theory.)
KGsays
Astounding Diversity of Giant Viruses Discovered in Massachusetts Forest – Reginald Selkirk@411
So, at last we have an explanation for all those Bigfoot sightings!
Silentbobsays
@ 422 John Morales
This “argument” is downright idiotic. It’s like saying the people who spend the coin are responsible for the queen’s (king’s) head being on the coin. The masses must trade in the currency provided lest they go to great efforts to live off the grid.
The Pentagon has approved an agreement with SpaceX to purchase Starlink for Ukraine, which the company’s founder, Elon Musk, will not be able to disconnect.
Source: The New York Times citing sources
Details: In June 2023, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin approved a Pentagon deal to buy 400 to 500 new Starlink terminals and services, according to the media outlet.
Two sources familiar with the contract stated that the Pentagon will gain control over the Starlink signal settings on the territory of Ukraine, so that the new devices will be able to implement the objectives.
As noted, this was done in order to provide Ukraine with terminals and services to perform tasks without fear of communication interruption…
StevoRsays
@ 428. John Morales :
@420. John Morales :Metaphors & turns of phrase, how do they work again? – SR
Pretty fucking badly, in this particular case. Enough to call them out. – JM
Except everyone who isn’t deliberately being hyper-pedantic understands them and finds them nicely descriptive and evocative so, I disagree that they work “badly” & reckon they work pretty well.
Hint : when people say “boiling” in terms of, say, weather & climate, they usually aren’t literally meaning above 100 degrees Celsius. – SR
So, according to you, sometimes they literally are meaning above 100 degrees Celsius. Or centigrade, as it’s more usually called. – JM
I thought Celsius was the norm there but whatever. Same diff.
Actually if we want to get really pedantic it isn’t specified as to what substance is boiling and, for example, Gallium boils at 29.7666 °C, (85.5799 °F) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium) so.. yeah, it could literally be boiling temperatures just not usually for H20 – air pressure depending! ;-)
KGsays
Overseas votes have shifted one seat from the PSOE to te PP in Spain’s election. According to the Guardian, this means either party is likely to need the support of at least one Junts (centrist Catalan independence party) vote to form a government, and its leader, Carles Puigdemont, has made clear that he would make demands neither party is likely to concede – so a new election looks most likely.
For two decades, the United States has pursued a far-reaching global agenda to fight HIV and AIDS, an initiative credited with saving more than 25 million lives. But the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, better known as PEPFAR, has been abruptly bogged down in a domestic political fight, with Republicans citing allegations that the program’s funding is being used to indirectly support abortions — claims that health advocates, Democrats and PEPFAR officials say are baseless.
As a result, lawmakers have spent months wrangling over whether Congress will reauthorize the program for five years, for one year or not at all — a decision that experts warn has both practical and symbolic consequences…
Treasured by medical professionals and praised by foreign leaders, PEPFAR is the world’s largest health program devoted to a single disease — a status that officials say achieves the dual goal of strengthening U.S. diplomatic ties and boosting public health. Since the program’s inception in 2003, spearheaded by President George W. Bush, PEPFAR has spent in excess of $100 billion across more than 50 countries; distributed millions of courses of medicine to treat and prevent HIV; collected data that shed new light on the virus’s spread; and forged durable partnerships with local governments and organizations.
Experts have credited PEPFAR for helping stabilize health systems in regions including sub-Saharan Africa, which was devastated by the spread of HIV in the 1990s, and for building global capacity for future crises.
But the program is now dogged by accusations that its funds are helping prop up abortion providers, a charge first publicly leveled in a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation in May and amplified by Rep. Christopher H. Smith (N.J.), an antiabortion Republican who chairs a key House panel.
“It’s just dumbfounding to me that the charge has been taken seriously,” said Shepherd Smith, a co-founder of the Children’s AIDS Fund International who has worked closely with PEPFAR since its start and is among the advocates urging Congress to reauthorize the program before key provisions expire later this year.
The Biden administration had sought a “clean” five-year reauthorization of the HIV program, with no new policy restrictions, allowing Congress to quickly update the existing PEPFAR legislation without opening it back up to a lengthy debate.
Antiabortion advocacy groups insist that is a nonstarter. Heritage, Family Research Council and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have warned lawmakers that if they vote for the Biden-backed bill, they will be docked on the organizations’ scorecards — a key metric that many antiabortion Republicans rely on when campaigning for reelection.
[…]
Biden officials have said the claims about PEPFAR being used to support abortions are baseless, and that forcing annual votes on the program will inevitably create opportunities to weaken it.
[…]
Instead, antiabortion advocates and Republicans have pushed for a one-year reauthorization that adds explicit abortion restrictions to PEPFAR. They also argue that the shorter extension buys time in the event a Republican returns to the White House in 2025, potentially ushering in changes to PEPFAR and the United States’ broader global health strategy.
As a result, negotiations over PEPFAR’s future have stalled on Capitol Hill.
[…]
The logjam over the HIV program has angered Democratic leaders such as Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has been negotiating for months to reauthorize PEPFAR and attempted to include it in the armed services bill that passed the Senate on Thursday. In an interview, Menendez singled out the public health and foreign policy implications of the program, including its geopolitical role at a time when rival nations such as China seek to curry favor with African countries.
PEPFAR “helps us in a continent where China is all over the place,” Menendez said. “The one place they’re not all over the place is on helping to save people’s lives. We are, and we are known for that.”
[…]
[…] Black women earn 64 cents compared with the White man’s dollar. Thursday, which marks Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, recognizes that disparity. The weight of student loans is a key part of why that disparity exists. It could grow even larger in the wake of a pair of Supreme Court decisions reversing affirmative action, ending race-conscious admissions at most colleges and universities, and blocking the Biden administration from canceling student loan debt for 40 million borrowers.
Already, Black women — who pursue education at higher rates than Black men — hold the highest debt of any group: $38,800 on average for an undergraduate degree and $58,252 on average for a graduate degree alone. When they earn at least a bachelor’s degree and enter the labor force, Black women and Latinas’ pay are the lowest among similarly educated people from other racial groups. Black women are also the most likely to have caregiving responsibilities such as being student parents, which makes them more likely to borrow additional money while having to navigate child care costs.
For Black women, “it feels like the dream that’s being deferred constantly,” said Ashley Gray, a higher education consultant. Gray has a bachelor’s degree in African American studies and a master’s and doctoral degree in higher education with an “extremely high amount of debt” as a result.[…]
Advocates fear the recent Supreme Court rulings will, at best, keep the pay gap between Black women and White men stagnant, or at worse, widen disparities by discouraging Black women from pursuing higher education or limiting the college admissions opportunities they do have access to.
[…] “We know how this is going to play out. They’re gonna have debt, that’s gonna take longer to pay off, it lowers their wealth, and it’s really like a circle, right? It just circles back around,” Jones [Janelle Jones, the chief economist at the Service Employees International Union and the former chief economist at the Department of Labor, the first Black woman to hold that pos] said. “We still very much believe in this narrative, this higher ed gospel where we tell people the only way you can get economic stability and security is to go to college, and we see that promise has not paid off for Black folks in this country. Even when it has, we are enshrining ways that will make it much harder or almost impossible for a generation of folks.”
Instead, lower wages are saddling Black women with debt long after degree completion. Even just a year out from graduation, Black women have 36 percent more undergraduate debt and 69 percent more graduate debt than White women, according to an April 2022 study by The Education Trust, an advocacy organization focused on racial justice in higher ed. Eliminating the pay gap could give Black women enough money to pay off the average student loan debt in less than two years, the National Partnership for Women and Families found.
[…] Pipelines to better opportunities with higher pay could be even more difficult to access following the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse a 1978 decision that allowed colleges to factor race into the admission process. Experts believe the decision could gut college diversity, equity and inclusion departments, making it more difficult for women of color to enter elite universities — and, by extension, the jobs that education could afford them.
[…] Some states are already pushing to end DEI initiatives at colleges, initiatives that have been vital in ensuring students of color can attain better employment opportunities. That would come on top of the high rates of employment discrimination Black women are already experiencing — two-thirds report experiencing racial discrimination at work and half report gender discrimination — factors that have exacerbated a pay gap, even for those with a college degree.
[Snipped personal stories]
About 40 percent of Black women in college are also parents, the highest proportion of any group, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. […]
The student loan debt conversation often misses those people who start degrees but can’t complete them, leaving them with the debt but without the degree that could give them some higher wages, however marginal.
The conversation doesn’t just ‘miss’ them, it completely ignores the existence of this devastating and very common outcome. Nobody talks about it- no idea why it is so ignored.
Halfway to a bachelors has precisely zero value, and if this is where things stop, the result is lost time and student debt […]
Colleges and Universities need to take the lead on this, and do much more to ensure their students finish with a degree. They don’t seem to care…
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday sharply criticized Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s assertion this week that Congress does not have authority to regulate the Supreme Court and noted that Alito’s seat on the court exists only because Congress determined the number of justices that sit on the high court.
“First of all, it’s just stunningly wrong. And he should know that more than anyone else because his seat on the Supreme Court exists only because of an act passed by Congress. It is Congress that establishes the number of justices on the Supreme Court. It is Congress that has passed in the past requirements for justices to disclose certain information,” Murphy said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“It is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the Supreme Court. In fact, from the very beginning, Congress has set those rules,” Murphy added.
Murphy’s statement comes after Alito, in a Wall Street Journal interview Friday, pushed back on efforts by Senate Democrats to enact stronger ethics rules on the high court after reporting emerged that conservative justices accepted gifts from GOP donors without disclosing them.
“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito said in the interview. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”
On Sunday, Murphy specifically took issue with the fact that Alito was weighing in on a congressional debate, saying it’s “disturbing that Alito feels the need to insert himself into a congressional debate, and it is just more evidence that these justices on the Supreme Court, these conservative justices, just see themselves as politicians.”
“They just see themselves as a second legislative body that has just as much power and right to impose their political will on the country, as Congress does. They’re going to bend the law in order to impose their right-wing view of how the country should work on the rest of us,” Murphy added. “And it’s why we need to pass this common-sense ethics legislation to at least make sure we know that these guys aren’t having their lifestyles paid for by conservative donors, as we have unfortunately seen in these latest revelations.
Give Alito time, he’ll proclaim from the bench that Congress is now allowed to legislate.
There’s too great of arriving at another deadlocked Supreme Court, perhaps we need a handful of new Justices appointed.
Twitter’s new sign is up. It’s held in place by either sandbags or water bags […] don’t walk under it. Especially on a windy day. […] [Photos]
Misc Replies:
So basically a very big sail vs some sandbags, where the sail has the longer lever. That’s very close to intentionally designing it to fall over.
–
That’s earthquake country…
–
It also strobes bright white at night.
–
Morbidly curious about the electrical wiring, given how much power those signs can draw and what we know about his willingness to hire unlicensed contractors…
–
The symbolism is rife here.
–
These pictures could very well be future deposition exhibits. To show that some things were reasonably foreseeable.
it’s the subject of an investigation by San Francisco for permit violations.
[Video clips of the sign and mockey]
birgerjohanssonsays
John Morales @ 432
They shopped around the film concept forever, no studios wanted to touch it, for some reason 😊
Tomh @ 439
The fuckers are capable of sabotaging absolutely everything.
wzrd1says
@ 444, seeing that sign at night, if that were across from my apartment, I suspect that that building would suffer an odd industrial accident involving 5 gallons of benzene and a gallon of toluene and the power feed to the building.
While, of course, I’m busily filing litigation with the courts for his actions that deny me to ability to enjoy the rights to property that I’m paying for – to wit, the ability to sleep in a bedroom bathed with enough light to land a space shuttle.
Followed by an FAA complaint as to a hazard to aerial navigation by an excessively bright white light directed omnidirectionally.
Tie it up in legal delays, a serious toluene spill right into the natural gas entries to the building.
Yeah, I take losing sleep very, very seriously. I’ve actually had a battalion commander issue a direct order to not only allow me to sleep, but under no circumstances allow anything to wake me up.
Propaganda is appearing in Minecraft and other popular games and discussion groups as the Kremlin tries to win over new audiences.
Russian propaganda is spreading into the world’s video games.
In Minecraft, the immersive game owned by Microsoft, Russian players re-enacted the battle for Soledar, a city in Ukraine that Russian forces captured in January, posting a video of the game on their country’s most popular social media network, VKontakte.
A channel on World of Tanks, a multiplayer warfare game, commemorated the 78th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in May with a recreation of the Soviet Union’s parade of tanks in Moscow in 1945. On Roblox, the popular gaming platform, a user created an array of Interior Ministry forces in June to celebrate the national holiday, Russia Day.
These games and adjacent discussion sites like Discord and Steam are becoming online platforms for Russian agitprop, circulating to new, mostly younger audiences a torrent of propaganda that the Kremlin has used to try to justify the war in Ukraine.
In this virtual world, players have adopted the letter Z, a symbol of the Russian troops who invaded last year; embraced legally specious Russian territorial claims in Crimea and other places; and echoed President Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to denigrate Ukrainians as Nazis and blame the West for the conflict.
“Glory to Russia,” declared a video tutorial on how to construct a flagpole with a Russian flag on Minecraft. It showed a Russian flag over a cityscape labeled Luhansk, one of the Ukrainian provinces that Russia has illegally annexed.
“The gaming world is really a platform that can impact public opinion, to reach an audience, especially young populations,” said Tanya Bekker, a researcher at ActiveFence, a cybersecurity company that identified several examples of Russian propaganda on Minecraft for The New York Times.
Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, disclosed in April that the company’s security teams had identified recent Russian efforts “basically to penetrate some of these gaming communities,” citing examples in Minecraft and in Discord discussion groups. He said Microsoft had advised governments, which he did not name […]
The head of Microsoft’s threat analysis team, Clint Watts, told researchers at New York University’s Stern School of Business that the Russian paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group promoted “malign narratives” on Discord and Steam to support the Kremlin’s views. It may have also sought to encourage enlistments when Russian combat casualties were taking an enormous toll.
“The propaganda mainly seeks to make Wagner and the Russian military look cool and menacing,” Mr. Watts told the researchers, who were examining extremism in video games.
[…] The Kremlin’s reach into video games shows how tenaciously Mr. Putin’s government has sought to bolster its political goals by using Western social media and consumer products despite diplomatic and economic isolation. In June, celebrities, musicians and at least one Russian government official staged a concert on Minecraft celebrating Russia Day. […]
“A game should help a person develop, help him find himself, should help educate a person both within the framework of universal human values and within the framework of patriotism,” Mr. Putin said in remarks in the Kremlin.
[…] “Russian propaganda is trying new things to promote its regime,” said Artem Starosiek, the head of Molfar, a Ukrainian consultancy that analyzes online threats.
[…] Molfar’s researchers identified more than a dozen instances of pro-Kremlin propaganda in Minecraft, Roblox, World of Tanks, World of Warships, Fly Corp, Armored Warfare and War Thunder. Almost all extolled the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, a theme Mr. Putin and his advisers have used to build support for today’s war. Some of it had explicit links to political parties or government agencies.
It is not clear what steps, if any, Microsoft or other companies have taken to block Russian efforts. Wargaming Group, the Cyprus-based creator of World of Tanks and other games, spun off its Russian and Belarusian business last year to Lesta Studio, a subsidiary in St. Petersburg.
[…] “They need to get everybody back on board with the war,” Dr. Brown said. “It’s another piece of this whole puzzle of constant propaganda, all the time. In every single medium they can get to you with, they will get to you.”
wzrd1 @446, I know that you are stating a hypothetical, possibly as hyperbole or as a joke, but it sounds like you are making a threat to physically damage property. Please don’t do that on this thread. Thank you.
No longer a “Special Operation”? Is it now “an armed conflict”?
[Putin said] “We have 2023. And the Russian Federation is in a state of armed conflict with a neighbor. And I think that there should be a certain attitude towards those people who harm us inside the country,”
Here, Putin is using his invasion of Ukraine to justify cracking down on his critics.
And he’s doing something else: he’s calling his invasion an “armed conflict” (“vooruzhennyy konflikt”) instead of the “special military operation” (“spetsial’naya voyennaya operatsiya”) euphemism he has long preferred. Although he’s still not calling his war a “war” (“voyna”), his use of “armed conflict” is a signal that his preferred euphemism isn’t working as well as he’d like.
After a reporter asked about African leaders’ ceasefire proposal, Putin responded:
The Ukrainian army is advancing, they are on the attack, as they say. We cannot cease fire when they attack us.
Here, Putin is saying he won’t negotiate unless the Russians are winning. But he’s also doing something else: he’s publicly admitting that the Russian Army is retreating.
These two phrases may not sound like much […] However, it is a public concession by Putin that his invasion is facing effective opposition.
Putin appears to be trying to prepare Russians for a long and bloody continuation of his war of conquest. What Putin doesn’t know — and nobody knows — is how Russians will respond to his call.
And it’s all thanks to wacky MAGA preacher Sean Feucht!
The number one song on iTunes this week is Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town,” not because it’s a particularly good song (content aside, it’s terrible, and I have no problem admitting when I think terrible people have good voices or wrote a catchy tune) but rather because the Right ran out and bought it in order to “own the libs.” You know, because we’re not so hot for lynching jams.
But two can play at that game!
Last week, the very ridiculous MAGA preacher Sean Feucht, whom you may remember from his COVID lockdown-era shenanigans and the rumors that he was Lauren Boebert’s sidepiece, pitched a fit about Christian musician Derek Webb’s recent musical collaboration with drag queen (and fellow Christian musician) Flamy Grant.
“If you’re wondering the end goal of the deconstruction movement in the church, then look no further than former worship leader @derekwebb’s new collab with a drag queen.” he wrote on Twitter. “These are truly the last days.”
It is very normal to believe in an almighty deity who would look down on Earth and say, “What? Someone is singing songs with a drag queen? Not on my watch! Time to pack it all in — start vacuuming up the righteous so we can explode the entire giant universe I created!”
“End goal? Baby, we’re just getting started,” Grant retorted.
“Well good for us hardly anyone listens or cares what you do,” Feucht tweeted. “Bad for you is that one day you’ll sit before Jesus and give an account for the perversion you tried to force on kids. There’s a verse about a millstone to warn you (Matt 18:6).”
Oh for Feucht’s sake.
Feucht, it turns out, is something of a false prophet — his little spat with Flamy Grant led to a lot of people listening to her and caring what she does, and now her album Bible Belt Baby is number one on the Christian and Gospel charts!
[…] Vivek Ramaswamy is a … guy. Who’s running for president. As a Republican.
[…] Ramaswamy no doubt knows he’s a long-shot candidate, so he’s trying to dominate the “promise to pardon the unrepentant insurrectionist/secret documents thief who’s running against you instead of criticizing him for being a multiply indicted proto-felon” lane in the crowded GOP primary field.
Of course, sucking up to Donald Trump—who, again, is directly competing against all these jabronis—hardly sets Ramaswamy apart from the rest of his primary opponents, so his strategy is to suck up harder and longer and with ever-more alacrity […]
On Sunday, he joined Kasie Hunt on CNN’s “State of the Union” to insist he will be president one day and will totally pardon Trump when that happens. [video at the link]
HUNT: “Let’s move on now to, federal prosecutors added new obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump on Thursday. The superseding indictment says that after Trump learned that the Justice Department wanted to subpoena security footage from Mar-a-Lago, Trump talked with an aide who later told the IT director at Mar-a-Lago that, quote, the boss, end quote, wanted the footage deleted. Now I know you’ve said repeatedly that you would pardon Trump in this documents case, but this is significant new information. So given this new information, would you still pardon him if you were president?”
RAMASWAMY: “The standard I use as our next president is, what moves our country forward? What is the right thing for the United States of America …”
HUNT: “Right, and would having a president like this move it forward?”
RAMASWAMY: “… the right answer is to move on and I would pardon him. I intend to be our next president, and yes I do believe I will move us forward, and yes I think one of the right ways to do that is to pardon the former president of the United States from what is clearly a politicized prosecution. And I’ll share a view with you, Kasie. This is not specific to Trump. This is part of my broader view on justice system in our country. I think that our general norm in our Justice Department is that you should not convict somebody of a process crime when there was no actual underlying crime. I think that’s a major problem …”
HUNT: “So you think destroying evidence is a process crime?”
RAMASWAMY: “I think it is by definition a process crime. Nobody, left, right, … any legal scholar will agree with me on that statement. That is by definition a process crime—a crime that would not have existed but for the existence of an investigation. And if we look ourselves in the mirror over the last several years—even look at the acquittal in the [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer case, the fact that two people were acquitted of entrapment. I think it’s a bad habit that our FBI and DOJ have gotten into—creating crimes that would not have existed but for their actions. And I think as it relates to moving forward as a country, I absolutely think that the right answer for the country is to put the grievances of the past behind us, to pardon President Trump, so we can move forward as one nation rather than marching toward a national divorce.”
Sigh.
So stealing highly sensitive government documents and showing them to the person ghostwriting Mark Meadows’ pop-up book is a “process crime” now?
Republicans! Please! Wean yourself off Trump. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the only GOPster actually running for president right now. Look at what he’s doing. Take notes. […]
Speaking of Christie, more than anyone else these days, he embodies the old adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He may be just as awful as your typical Republican when it comes to policy—and his candidacy may be a bridge too far—but goddamn if he isn’t entertaining these days. As the only GOP candidate truly running against Trump, he’s free to say whatever he wants. And that’s exactly what he’s doing.
He also joined Hunt on “State of the Union” and immediately turned the spotlight on Ramaswamy, et al.’s, craven nonsense. [video at the link]
HUNT: “I’d like to know, when you look at this new evidence, is there a clearcut case of obstruction of justice here?”
CHRISTIE: “It appears that way, Kasie. You look at it, it’s pretty brazen. These guys were acting like the Corleones with no experience. The day after a grand jury subpoena is served, which includes the surveillance tapes, they go down to Mar-a-Lago, and Walt Nauta appears to be the Fredo of this family—they sent him to go down there, and they sent him to go and delete it. This is bad stuff, and you can’t say there was no underlying potential crime here. This was the withholding of confidential, classified information from the government, after 18 months of asking Donald Trump to return it voluntarily. Not only did he not return it, he lied about having it. this is not the kind of thing we can do. I want you to think, Kasie, for a second about the potential effect on our troops and our intelligence officers by having this stuff just laying around and him just willy-nilly showing it to whoever he feels like to be a showoff on the back deck at Mar-a-Lago. This is not what a former president should be doing, and it’s certainly not something that someone who wants to be president should be doing.”
@ 448, I never suggested that I would do such a thing!
Only a suggestion of a coincidence. And yes, a joke.
There are far, far, far better ways to ensure that business came down, all involving regulatory authorities and courts and as final as collapsing a building.
With zero risk to people nearby.
Besides, I’d be more likely to program a small fleet of custom drones with Muskrat’s mug programmed as primary target and even brighter lights flashing at him 24/7.
Given my budget where I’m wondering how to purchase a can of coffee, yeah, that ain’t happening either.
wzrd1says
In new child labor efforts to bring the US below developing nation levels, the US Department of Labor reported major losses in prevention of child labor in the US. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/economy/child-labor-louisiana-texas/index.html
I suggest raising the fines tenfold. Erase the profit and produce a loss for each hiring, the incentive will be erased.
Although, I’m irate enough to also want some vengeance, say, 10000 hours of mother-in-law service for corporate officers wink and nodding the practice along.*
*I do, in person, use mother-in-law jokes a lot. I also qualify them with the truth, I’ve had an non-human life, as I had an exceptionally nice mother-in-law. Lost her to breast cancer, complicated by a lack of self-advocacy causing her to ignore the symptoms “to not bother the doctor” until it was stage 4. She became a life lesson, rather than a treasured friend.
I really do prefer friends. Treasures are transitory, friends are to a fair extent, lasting.
The first time I met my mother-in-law was when my wife and I were dating, of course. Dolly was cooking up some collard greens, which I’ve never had. She was shocked when she served up a sample for this Philly boy and I really needed a second spoon. I do love my green, leafy greens.
I still keep cans of collard, mustard and turnip greens on the shelf, for when I can’t prepare such fresh.
Standard recipe there. Garlic, onion, to taste red pepper, some olive oil. Saute, then add in water and greens, add chicken bouillon or a buttload of chicken stock with fat to neutralize bitter flavors, boil till done, call it a day.
The chemistry and heat do all the serious work.
July has been the hottest month ever recorded—not locally, not regionally, but across the globe. More than one-third of all Americans are currently under some level of heat advisory as multiple heat domes cook the country. Hospitals are currently treating burn patients who were injured because they fell onto sunbaked roads or sidewalks. Ocean temperatures near the Florida Keys have reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing a new massive bleaching and die-off in “one of the Florida Keys’ most resilient reefs.”
And all of that is precursor. Scientists believe key Atlantic Ocean circulation currents may be near the point of collapse, a change that would have broad-reaching consequences for at least half of the world.
Climate change is here, and we’re already taking a pounding from a “new normal” that will continue to get worse for a good long while, even if we shut off every source of carbon emissions mankind produces.
And Republicans? Republicans do not give a flying damn.
This story by Capitol Hill reporter Pablo Manríquez in The New Republic is well worth a read, if only because Manríquez went to the effort to ask a whole basket of House Republicans their thoughts about the heat their own constituents are cooking under—and the mocking contempt for the question positively drips from every mouth. Hang this one up and frame it, because you won’t find a better summation of Republicanism anywhere.
“Only in Washington will they try to find an excuse to take something that’s been going on for hundreds of years … to promote their crazy left agenda,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, bristling at the suggestion that man-made climate change might be behind the heat dome. “Southern Louisiana, it’s always hot,” he said. “Thank God for air conditioning,” laughed Scalise, perhaps unaware that incarcerated juveniles in his state’s Angola Prison are reporting temperatures as high as 132 degrees, according to an emergency filing last Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union
We can all rest assured that Scalise has never given a dime’s worth of thought to Louisiana juveniles sitting in 132-degree prison cells, and he never will. But the broader point is that what is happening now is quite definitely not what has been happening for hundreds of years, which is what “hottest month ever recorded” or “hottest ocean temperature ever recorded” means, if this melonhead spent even two seconds thinking about it.
Does it get hot in Louisiana during summertime? You bet it does. Does it get this hot, in this many places, all at once? No. Not until now, it sure didn’t.
The rest of the Louisiana contingent also could not find a damn to give, although Sen. Bill Cassidy took the opportunity to invoke what the rest of the planet might remember as a scene from “Schindler’s List.”
Bayou State Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who once treated patients in Angola, suggested cooling down the prisoners by “spraying water” from a “garden hose or lawn sprinkler” to lower the temperature. “I got nothing for you on that,” said John Kennedy, the other Louisiana senator, when asked if the state’s prisons should be air conditioned.
Yeah, what if we just sprayed inmates through the bars with a garden hose? That’ll fix it.
Manríquez doesn’t appear to have been able to track down Sen. Ted Cruz, which is astonishing because all you have to do is hold up a microphone or smartphone and Cruz will fight his way through a tour bus’ worth of grandmas to get to you. But he does note a Texas Public Radio report of Cruz swatting away any thought that climate change might have anything to do with, you know, the changing climate. “There are lots of people who have political agendas, and whatever happens with the weather they attribute to climate change. That’s not science, it’s ideology,” Cruz whined.
Again, though: That’s not how this works. Measuring global temperatures and noting that the numbers are higher than the numbers used to be is science. […]
The Republican Party is not, of course, merely committed to mocking climate change even as scientists now tell us we’re stewing in it. The party is committed to making climate change worse, on purpose. It’s part of the same fascist twitch that has the party reflexively opposing anything any non-Republican has to say to them, whether it be pandemic disease specialists, climate researchers, or scientists who warn them not to drink pool cleaner for funsies.
That’s why these same House and Senate Republicans have already drafted plans to reverse every bit of the Biden administration’s energy modernization and resilience programs as soon as the next Republican president takes office. It’s not that they don’t care either way. They want to do actively destructive things because doing destructive things is literally all that Republicanism stands for.
WTF? Did we all travel back in time? Nope. The Washington Post has a report detailing that Trump demanded withholding Ukraine aid unless everyone and their mother proceeds with an investigation into Hunter Biden, (same demand that led to Trump’s first impeachment … but this is Trump spewing the same sludge on July 29, 2023.)
Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden.
“Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
[…] Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa responded Saturday: “Just like when he was impeached, Trump is using aid to Ukraine to play politics, which only serves to benefit one person: Vladimir Putin. MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kevin McCarthy are echoing Trump’s baseless attacks, floating a political impeachment, and wasting taxpayer dollars instead of working with President Biden on actually delivering lower costs, more jobs, and safer communities for the American people.”
In 2019, Trump spoke on the phone with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and responded to his plea for missiles to help the country resist Russia’s invasion by saying, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Trump went on to ask Zelensky to assist in finding Democratic National Committee emails that were, without substantiation, purported to be in Ukraine. He also asked Zelensky to talk to his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr about investigating Hunter Biden.
The phone call led to a whistleblower complaint that prompted an impeachment inquiry. Trump stonewalled the proceedings and was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate acquitted him in February 2020, with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joining the Democrats.
Trump has insisted his phone call with Zelensky was “perfect,” a claim he repeated at Saturday’s rally. […]
It’s tough to be surprised by anything coming from russia, but this is genuinely attention-worthy. I’ve heard about it twice now, from locals, and it’s been confirmed by the General Staff: a construction team brought to Mariupol has been mobilized into the russian army.
And this news is similar:
18-to-19-year old women from Kamchatka who joined the Russian Army as nurses are being made to sign contracts changing their role to that of motorised riflemen, according to a local regional deputy.
Space dot com news item on how nearby exoplanet AU Microscopii b is getting its atmosphere observably blown away by its young, volatile, red dwarf sun’s flares here :
Plus on how, once disturbed, our planet’s Climate – notably the Hadley Cell circulation – will take centuries if not longer to recover even if we can reduce the current CO2 levels dramatically here :
On Monday (July 24), Aeolus performed two engine burns that lasted a total of 37.5 minutes and lowered its altitude by about 19 miles (30 km), to 155 miles (250 km). The campaign picked up again Thursday (July 27), with four planned orbit-lowering maneuvers. One final maneuver occurred Friday, which was expected to set the stage for reentry about five hours later. And that appears to have gone mostly according to plan. …(snip)… Aeolus’ deorbit campaign “paves the way for the safe return of active satellites that were never designed for controlled reentry,” ESA’s Peter Bickerton wrote in a July 19 blog post.
StevoRsays
On the not so good front, the space dot com headline about the eruptive actvity from Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks here :
is sensationalised and misleading in that this comet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12P/Pons%E2%80%93Brooks ) is heading for its perihelion and will NOT approach Earth that closely – in fact being over an Astronomical Unit (SunEarth distance) away and no threat to us at all.
Noty sure about the “volcanic”part here although Iguess the geyser type activity counts -hardly “magna”in the erathly usualsense of the word and as for seeing its “horns” well, it is not visible without optical aid almost certainly still requiring a telescope to observe it at all being around 12th magnitude in brightness. (6th mag being the usual limit of good vision in a dark sky.) Worse for me anyhow, us mob in the Southern Hemisphere will be completely out of luck since Comet Pons-Brooks is currently in the northerrn circumpolar cosntellation of Draco. See a more reasonably headlined and a better article on the outburst of this periodic comet here :
As always, beware misleading media hype and sensationalism. (It’s probly too cloudy out anyhow..)
StevoRsays
^ Typo fix for clarity. Could swear the computer switches letters around on me after I’ve typed them, sigh :
Not sure about the “volcanic”part here although I guess the cometary geyser type activity counts – hardly “magma” in the earthly usual sense of the word and, as for seeing its “horns”, well, Comet 12/P Pons -Brooks is not visible without optical aid..
Would that we’d see more like this. Scientist thanks PubPeer contributor for finding error in a paper released the previous day, promises swift correction. https://pubpeer.com/publications/5E357AE05565E8A0810B88188BD0FD
This is how we can keep having nice things.
As suspected, the canister-like object that washed ashore in Green Head, Western Australia, in mid-July likely belongs to a discarded third stage from an Indian rocket, the Australian Space Agency announced over the weekend.
More specifically, the third stage came from a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), a medium-lift rocket that the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launches on a regular basis. The PSLV third stage is a “solid rocket motor that provides the upper stages high thrust after the atmospheric phase of the launch,” according to ISRO…
larparsays
Reginald Selkirk @461
That’s what they want you to think. : )
(CNN)–Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis reaffirmed in a local news interview that she will announce charging decisions by September 1 in her investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result, while applauding the ramped-up security measures around the local courthouse.
“The work is accomplished,” Willis told CNN affiliate WXIA at a back-to-school event over the weekend. “We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”
Willis has previously signaled in letters to local officials and those providing security that she would make any charging announcements between July 31 and the end of August. She laid out a variety of security provisions her team plans to take beginning Monday.
Willis’ latest commitment to that time frame comes after a judge scheduled an August 10 hearing on the Trump team’s efforts to disqualify Willis, a Democrat, from the case, toss much of the evidence she has collected and remove another judge in Fulton County from presiding over the case.
In the local news interview, Willis also praised the Fulton County sheriff after barricades recently went up around the county courthouse in anticipation of what the sheriff’s office referred to as “high profile legal proceedings.”
“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” Willis said. “I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way.”
Willis said that people may not be happy with her upcoming announcements and “sometimes when people are unhappy, they act in a way that could create harm.”
Trump in full trumpian escalation mode when it comes to Jack Smith:
[…] Last fall, Trump labeled Smith a “fully weaponized monster.” In January, the former president went further, calling Smith a “thug” in a “mental state of derangement” who “may very well turn out to be a criminal.” A month later, he condemned the special counsel as a “mad dog psycho.”
The former president has also accused Smith of overseeing “a Gestapo type operation,” as well as being an “animal” and a “lunatic.” In May, Trump suggested the special counsel’s investigation was “treasonous.”
And now the former president has broken new ground once again, telling the public that he also wants to see Smith “in jail” for reasons unknown. […]
You know, you don’t hear much about leprosy these days […] but like so many other unpleasant things that many of us wrongly assumed were relics of a bygone age, leprosy is seemingly making a comeback in the southeastern part of the United States … Florida, in particular.
The Pensacola News-Journal reports that while CDC researchers have witnessed an uptick in what is now more politely referred to as Hansen’s Disease in several states — 159 cases in 2020 alone — 20 percent of those cases came from Central Florida alone and 34 percent of the new patients in that area were likely infected from exposure to other humans in Florida with the condition, rather than through the usual risk factors, such as traveling to areas of the world where it is more common or by palling around with armadillos. (Note to self, however — avoid armadillos)
The CDC report warns that Hansen’s Disease is close to becoming endemic in Florida and recommends that doctors keep it in mind when treating patients who have traveled there, should they show any symptoms.
Luckily, leprosy is not quite as infectious as people once thought it was, and most people are now pretty immune to it. Scientists currently believe that when it is passed from one person to another, it only happens when someone without immunity has prolonged contact with a person who has Hansen’s Disease and that “it may happen when a person with Hansen’s Disease coughs or sneezes, and a healthy person breathes in the droplets containing the bacteria.” It’s also very curable, so long as one takes antibiotics prescribed by a doctor rather than horse Ivermectin, magic bleach or black salve. […]
In other Florida news, the state’s academic brain drain problem is getting increasingly worse. The New College of Florida, the university that DeSantis was so determined to de-woke that he filled its board with culture warriors such as Christopher Rufo, currently has 36 of its 100 teaching positions to fill and pretty much no one interested in taking any of them.
The Guardian reports:
[…] Andrew Gothard, the state-level president of the United Faculty of Florida labor union, predicts a loss of between 20 and 30% of faculty members at some universities during the upcoming academic year in comparison with 2022-23, which would signify a marked increase in annual turnover rates that traditionally have stood at 10% or less.
Now, the fact that leprosy, much like defending the institution of slavery and the desire to pretend that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, has made a comeback in the state probably (definitely) has nothing to do with why college professors are leaving Florida in droves and applications to schools in the state are way down, that is something that is happening as well, and both are things that seem to exemplify a state in decline.
Though, to be fair, “Move here and maybe get leprosy” is probably not a draw.
[…] Donald Trump cannot stop himself from going back to visit the scenes of his crimes and even maybe trying to repeat them if possible.
This time, Donald Trump would like Joe Biden to do him a favor, though, and he’s using Ukraine as the bargaining chip. It’s a bit different from how he did it when he was trying to force Ukraine to help him steal the 2020 election, of course, which led to his first impeachment. He doesn’t have the presidency, and he can’t illegally withhold military aid from Ukraine in exchange for fake announcements from Volodymyr Zelenskyy that they are investigating fake Ukrainian crimes committed by Hunter Biden. (Though you absolutely know he would illegally withhold aid, even as his BFFs in Russia are blowing Ukrainian babies to pieces.)
This time he wants to hurt Ukraine unless Joe Biden does what he wants, which is to, we guess, make up fake evidence against himself and give it to Republicans in Congress.
Trump calls for conditioning Ukraine aid on congressional Biden probes.
That’s the headline.
He’s not president, so he’s just demanding the dumbasses in Congress do his dirty work and refuse military aid to Ukraine — which again, is literally currently the unprovoked victim in a genocidal war being waged by the most worthless nation on the globe AKA the one Trump loves the most — unless Joe Biden hands over the evidence on Joe Biden. (Which is imaginary and exists only in his brain, much like how that moron truly believed/still believes Ukraine has secret DNC servers buried in its backyard.)
He said it at a rally in Pennsylvania:
“Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
And if they don’t have any evidence, make some up!
[…] We say “make some up,” because when Trump was committing the crimes for which he was impeached the first time, it was extremely clear he did not care whether there actually was evidence against Joe Biden or Hunter Biden to be found in Ukraine. The “deliverable” he was incessantly demanding was an announcement during a CNN interview by Zelenskyy that Ukraine was investigating the Bidens. He couldn’t have cared less about the substance. This was about extorting Ukraine into helping him steal the election, in exchange for protection from the virulent rogue nation that had already invaded and was occupying it in part.
Now he wants his Republican anti-American insurgents in Congress to condition aid to Ukraine (while Ukraine is under the bombardment of full-on war) on the Biden administration playing along with all its bizarre investigations into Hunter Biden’s penis.
[…] It’s so fucking tiresome at this point.
WaPo reports that at the same rally, Trump again promised that if he manages to beg/borrow/steal his way into a second term, he will appoint a prosecutor specifically to investigate the Bidens, which is what real weaponization looks like.
The sooner he is locked under a prison, the better.
[…] Donald Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to defend her client in light of the new indictments regarding his alleged attempts to destroy evidence.
When host Shannon Bream asked Habba about the charges, after reading sworn statements from a former Trump employee at Mar-A-Lago, Habba gave what has to be one the worst legal defenses we’ve ever heard.
HABBA: Well, let’s be clear. If there was an attempt by someone who lives in a home, take our President Trump, who owns a company, he owns it. He owns the I.T., he pays for all these employees. IF there was an attempt for him not to turn over documents or he wanted something deleted, do you not think that’s something he couldn’t have gotten done?
So, let’s get this straight: Habba’s defense is that Trump is such a criminal boss that IF he wanted to hide or delete evidence, it would have been?! As in Trump runs such a tight criminal enterprise that he could order obstruction of justice and it would be accomplished successfully??!!
[…] Hell, Trump’s idea of document deletion was reportedly flushing documents down the nearest toilet […]
A Georgia judge on Monday rejected former U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to quash an investigation into whether he illegally interfered with the state’s 2020 election, just days before criminal charges are expected to be filed.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney denied Trump’s request to disqualify the lead prosecutor, block any potential indictments and throw out a special grand jury report that included recommendations on whom to charge…
The saga of North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham (R) is a strange one: She was a vocally pro-choice Democrat who revealed in 2015 that she’d had a medically necessary abortion, then won her old seat in November 2022 only to defect to the Republican party in April and give the GOP a supermajority that they used to pass an abortion ban. Now, new reporting shows that local Republicans urged her to run as a Democrat—fooling voters in her very blue Charlotte-area district into thinking she strongly supported abortion rights—and were planting the seeds for her party switch for months.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that both Republican House Speaker Tim Moore and Republican Majority Leader John Bell encouraged her to run in the Democratic primary in the spring of 2022. The Times described it this way: “Republican leaders cultivated her before she ran and, seeing her growing estrangement [from Democrats], seized a chance to coax her across party lines.”…
Fearing more attacks on the Crimean bridge, the Russian military is deploying floating “anti-sabotage booms” next to the illegal structure, which connects Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea with Russia.
Russian Telegram channel Mash posted a picture apparently showing the assembly of a section of the boom, which resembles ribbed piping. The “pipe” additionally has on top of it a “fence” of vertical metal rods, reinforced with a crosspiece. The barriers are designed to protect against surface and underwater drones, Mash wrote.
“The Crimean bridge was additionally fenced with special anti-sabotage booms – in case of new attempts by Kyiv to commit a terrorist attack. According to our information, in the future, the structures will protect the bridge from attacks throughout its entire length,” Mash wrote in its post…
Nearly every Ukrainian thermal power plant that was damaged by Russian missile attacks last winter has been repaired, Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said in a Facebook post on July 31.
“The focus is on preparing for the heating season,” the minister said…
In a Wall Street Journal interview, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made a startling assertion of constitutional power: “No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.” Alito was responding to legislation the Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved, a bill requiring the court adopt a code of ethics since the justices refuse to do it voluntarily. Democrats, along with constitutional scholars and lawyers, have been quick to set the record straight.
“It is just wrong on the facts to say that Congress doesn’t have anything to do with the rules guiding the Supreme Court,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, from the very beginning, Congress has set those rules,” he added. “No Congressional authority over the Supreme Court—is among the most audacious, absurd, and arrogant of recent Alito misstatements,” tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Judiciary Committee member. “His head-smacking claim is stunning in saying the Court is answerable to no one.”
“Let me get this straight,” tweeted Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat. “Congress has the authority to set the Supreme Court’s budget and to infinitely expand the high court. But, according to Justice Alito, Congress cannot require SCOTUS to have a code of ethics like the rest of the federal government. Does that sound remotely logical?” His colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up Alito’s attitude: “Alito’s next opinion piece in the WSJ is about to be ‘I am a little king, actually. The Constitution doesn’t explicitly say I’m not.’”
That’s pretty much Alito’s claim, and it is exactly wrong. Stunningly wrong for a supposed strict originalist who supposedly adheres to the exact words of the Constitution (and 17th-century English common law) in his judicial reasoning. In fact, here’s the Constitution:
“Article III Section 2 : In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.“
University of Virginia Law Professor Amanda Frost explains it succinctly in her testimony to the Judiciary Committee. [video at the link]
Checks and balances is equally as important [as separation of powers], and the role of the Congress is to establish the Supreme Court. It’s not just permitted, it’s required. The Supreme Court of the United States is constitutionally mandated under Article III, but there is no detail about how it is to operate because that was left to the Congress of the United States under Article 1, Section 8—the necessary and proper clause. And immediately, Congress agreed to do that in the Judiciary Act of 1789…. The Congress sets the size of the Supreme Court; that is not in the hands of Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues. Congress establishes the quorum requirement; that is not in the hands of Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues.
When this Congress passes a law that says that they must recuse themselves, the judges and justices of our federal judiciary, when there are certain conflicts of interest. The justices are not free to say “that law doesn’t apply to me, I’m going to sit on that case anyway.” So what is troubling is there is an implication [by this court] … that it doesn’t think these laws bind it. I find that very confusing in light of the … long history of congressional administration of the courts.
Speaking of recusal, the person interviewing Alito for that Wall Street Journal piece is David B. Rivkin Jr., a Federalist Society regular pundit. Rivkin just happens to be a lead attorney on a major tax case that will be in front of the Supreme Court next term. That warranted a parenthetical disclosure in paragraph 26 of the article.
Rivkin is also acting as Leonard Leo’s representative to Congress. Leo is the billionaire friend and fixer to Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, a dark money operative who brings them together with the billionaires who provide them a jet-setting lifestyle. Leo is the architect of this conservative Supreme Court who is using the vast fortune he’s amassed to undo decades of civil rights and social progress.
The Judiciary Committee had the audacity to write to Leo for information after ProPublica reported on a luxury fishing trip he arranged for Alito in 2008. Alito’s flight, entertainment, fishing, meals, wine, and room were covered by hedge fund manager Paul Singer, with Leo arranging and accompanying them on the trip.
Rivkin took care of Leo’s response to the committee in a scathing letter claiming—you guessed it—the committee has no authority to investigate the court or to request that information, to investigate, or to legislate the justices’ behavior because that would violate the separation of powers principle.
To sum up, the lawyer who will be arguing before Alito to overthrow a century’s worth of precedent and say that Congress does not have the power to levy taxes on very wealthy people is also giving Alito a soft-ball interview in which he says Congress does not have the power to regulate his behavior. Which involves undeclared luxury trips from the very rich people Rivkin says Congress can’t tax.
That sounds like a very big ethical—and constitutional—problem.
A group of parents, clergy and education activists in Oklahoma have filed a lawsuit asking a state court to block the opening of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which could become the nation’s first religious charter school.
The group claims that St. Isidore’s will discriminate if it becomes operational and that it violates the state constitution and state law, which requires that charter schools be “nonsectarian in [their] programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.” The state’s virtual charter board approved the school in June; it is scheduled to open in fall of 2024.
Attorneys from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, Education Law Center and Freedom From Religion Foundation are representing the group. In the lawsuit, they wrote that St. Isidore “will provide a religious education and indoctrinate its students in Catholic religious beliefs.
“Indeed, [St. Isidore’s] application states that the school … ‘participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church,’ ” the attorney wrote.
“When a religious public school is allowed to proceed in one state, it emboldens religious extremists in other states to try the same thing,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
St. Isidore’s backers expected it would invite litigation. They are eager to test the question of whether charter schools are bound by the same rules of public schools — and whether they are truly public schools at all.
“We remain confident that the Oklahoma court will ultimately agree with the US Supreme Court’s opinion in favor of religious liberty,” said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, alluding to several recent cases governing religion in public life.
They are not the only ones advancing the argument that charter schools don’t have to abide by the same rules as public schools. In 2019, a federal court ruled in favor of a trio of female students who sued Charter Day School in North Carolina over its requirement that girls wear skirts “to preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men.” Attorneys for Charter Day School unsuccessfully argued that the school was not bound by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court declined to take the case earlier this year.
Oklahoma’s former attorney general, Republican John M. O’Connor, wrote a legal opinion that called Oklahoma’s charter school law unconstitutional before he left office in January. His successor, Gentner Drummond, also a Republican, withdrew that opinion, saying it “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion.” […]
Religious conservatives have made recent gains in pushing more religion into schools. Several states have expanded voucher programs that give families money to send their children to private schools, including religious schools. Texas this year passed a law allowing chaplains into public schools, including to replace professional counselors.
[…] while it says it is open to families of all faiths or no faith, it described its plan to teach that students who “reject God’s invitation” will “end up in hell.” […]
Over the weekend, Donald Trump resuscitated the same anti-Ukraine crusade and tactic that got him impeached the first time around: holding Ukraine aid hostage unless the Biden family is “investigated.” No one will ever accuse him of learning from his mistakes.
Yet his renewed and vocal ire against Ukraine is having a real effect on the MAGA view of the conflict, according to Civiqs polling.
Civiqs doesn’t publicly track attitudes about the Ukraine war, but it has tracked one relevant question for the past six years: ”Do you see Russia as more of a potential ally, or a foe of America?”
Among the general public, Russia’s ratings are in the gutter—10% consider it an ally, while 76% are correct that it is a foe. It’s not a subjective matter. Russian leadership regularly threatens to launch nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies. It’s hard to “Make America Great” if America (and the rest of the world) is a nuclear wasteland. This shouldn’t be controversial.
Yet that 10% is a very special decile. It represents MAGA country, and they are increasingly warming up to Russia’s fascist dictator Vladimir Putin, as Trump and MAGA leaders like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene lead the charge.
Check out the chart among Republicans: [chart at the link]
What’s initially interesting is that despite Trump’s railing about the “Russian hoax,” Republican attitudes toward Russia worsened throughout Trump’s first impeachment proceedings, the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2020 elections, and ultimately, Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Yet attitudes about Russia among Republicans have improved from their nadir in November 2022, going from 11% ally, 71% foe, to 15-64 today, an 11-point net swing. Russia’s brutality and nuclear rhetoric have only worsened since, so the shift is all from domestic politics.
Indeed, that November 2022 nadir is notable, as that is when Republicans took the House, emboldening Greene to make promises at a Trump rally that, “Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. Our country comes first.”
She and Rep. Matt Gaetz unsuccessfully tried to defund Ukraine aid this past month. Greene’s effort got 89 Republican votes, with 130 opposed. Gaetz’s push got 70 votes, with 149 opposed. It’s not a majority opinion in the Republican Party, but Trump is moving his base’s opinion on the matter.
What’s interesting is which Republicans are changing their minds.
Among Republicans older than 65, the spread is 8% ally, 78% foe. These are old Cold War survivors who lived under the threat of Soviet annihilation. But the younger the Republican, the more likely they support Putin. Among Republicans age 18-34, the spread is 20-52. [chart at the link]
This is the crowd that worships incels like Nick Fuentes, megalomaniacs like pro-Russia Elon Musk, and weirdos like Jackson Hinkle.
If you don’t know who Jackson Hinkle is, this is a taste: [Tweet at the link: Satanic Zelensky has signed a law moving Christmas in Ukraine from January 7 (Orthodox Christmas) to December 25, in his effort to “renounce Russian heritage.”]
Can you think of anything more satanic than celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25? This is a great thread if you want to hate-read more about Hinkle. It includes stories about his pathetic romantic life and his parents smacking him down for his lies.
Those younger conservatives […] are part of a social media algorithmic culture that rewards contrarianism and outrage-harvesting. It really is telling that the geriatric Republican caucus in the Senate has little patience for Russia, while the youngest Republican House members drive divisions in the House.
These numbers among Republicans will likely keep swinging toward Putin as Trump centers much of his campaign on this message. He is under legal assault for breathtaking corruption, he feels an existential need to “both sides” that level of corruption, and he still weirdly thinks that centering Ukraine in that narrative gets him there. And let’s face it, Trump loves Putin. He wants to be Putin. And any enemy of Putin is no friend of Trump.
[…] As of now, the pro-Putin MAGA crowd is far from garnering the necessary support to block Russian aid. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be making this a defining rallying cry for both the Republican primary (former vice president Mike Pence was booed on a campaign stage for defending Ukraine aid), and the 2024 general election.
———————–
I’ve mostly ignored Russia’s big push around Kreminna and Svatove up in northeastern Ukraine, on the Luhansk-Kharkiv border. At one point, Ukraine claimed that 100,000 Russian troops had gathered to try and retake the strategic logistical hub city of Kupyansk, which they lost in last year’s fall counteroffensive.
The whole notion was as stupid as fears that Belarus would invade Ukraine, or that Russia would launch an amphibious assault on the Black Sea port city of Odesa. When something seems implausible, it most likely is. And the idea that Russia would move one-third of its forces to a part of Ukraine with little strategic value when it was failing to advance anywhere else on the map was ridiculous.
But Russia is dumb; we know that. So it made sense to keep an eye on things. In the end, the most that Russia could accomplish was to capture three “towns” with a combined population of around 80 people. If there were 100,000 Russian troops in the area, why were we only seeing a few dozen here or there?
In any case, Ukraine has recaptured at least two of those three “towns,” and maybe even the third. There is violence and death in that section of the front, so I don’t mean to minimize what those troops are experiencing. But in the greater scheme of things, it’s not very relevant at all. There were never 100,000 Russian troops, and Ukraine never worried too much about it.
The real action is happening down south.
——————————
[…] a refocus on shaping the battlefield in southern Ukraine. That meant two things: 1.) degrading Russia’s massive artillery advantage, and 2.) degrading Russia’s logistics. If Russian frontline troops can’t get the supplies they need, and if they can’t put up a wall of artillery in front of a Ukrainian advance, things look a lot different for any Ukrainian advance.
Ukrainian counterbattery fire has done a number on Russian artillery, and General Staff still claims between 20-30 artillery kills every single day.
Russia has long ago adjusted for GMLRS rocket artillery, moving its supply depots and hubs beyond its range. But that changed with the arrival of British Storm Shadow cruise missiles and their French counterpart, SCALP. Suddenly, supply depots, troop concentrations, and command control centers once considered safe by Russia are going “boom” all around Russian-occupied territory. And just as importantly, so are bridges.
In fact, Ukraine just shut down the last remaining rail link connecting Crimea to southern Ukraine. [Tweet and map at the link]
Russia can truck supplies in, but it is infinitely more challenging to do so. Trucks use more fuel, they break down, they get ambushed by partisans, more stuff gets stolen or “diverted,” and you need far more vehicles to transfer the same amount of supplies that a single train can ship.
It’s the same problem with closing the grain shipping corridor. There are other ways for Ukraine to move that grain—like trucks and rail—but those have nowhere near the capacity of a single one of those massive container ships.
Given current satellite photos and a single Russian on-the-ground photo (they’re being better at hiding the evidence this time around), it’s hard to tell just how extensive the damage to the bridge is. Rail lines can be fixed quickly, so it depends on how damaged the bridge’s supports are. But now we know Ukraine can hit it, and can continue to hit it to keep the bridge out of action.
Indeed, we’re starting to see something akin to last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensives, where Ukraine spent the spring and summer shaping the battlefield, targeting Russian logistics, command, and control, then pulled the big trigger in the fall. Let’s hope for equal success!
The giant, glowing “X” sign has been removed from the San Francisco headquarters of the social media company formerly known as Twitter.
Multiple outlets reported Monday that the sign, which was installed last week amid the company’s rebrand, was removed by workers after city residents and officials complained.
More than a dozen complaints were filed to the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection after the sign was put up, including criticisms that the display wasn’t permitted and was a nuisance and that its flashing lights made it hard for residents to sleep, according to CNBC.
Complaints filed last Friday also said the old Twitter sign on the side of the building, which police had stopped workers from dismantling, was in an “unsafe condition” and that a city inspector had visited the headquarters and requested access to the roof where the “X” sign was installed, but had been denied by the company. An X representative reportedly explained to the inspector that the “X” structure was a “temporary lighted sign for an event.”
City officials launched an investigation into the company’s headquarters last week following the installation of the sign.
Department of Building Inspection spokesperson Patrick Hannan told The San Francisco Standard that a “building permit is required to make sure the sign is structurally sound and installed safely.”
“Planning review and approval is also necessary for the installation of this sign,” Hannan said in his statement. “The city is opening a complaint and initiating an investigation.” […]
The European Union has cut off financial support to Niger and the United States has threatened to do the same after military leaders this week announced they had overthrown the democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world, receiving close to $2 billion a year in official development assistance, according to the World Bank.
Also from NBC News:
Thousands of protesters supporting a coup in Niger took to the streets on Sunday and attacked the French embassy as West African governments warned of possible military action to restore democratic rule.
Also from NBC News:
Demonstrators in the capital, Niamey, many waving Russian flags, smashed windows at the French embassy and set a perimeter door on fire but never breached the walls of the embassy compound.
While some states’ “trigger laws” went into effect after the radical right-wing Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, reversing decades of settled reproductive law, conservative-led legislatures like Texas pushed forward on enacting grotesque new abortion bans. The anti-abortion movement championed by so-called Christian conservatives is finally achieving the results everyone said they would achieve: Dead infants and tortured citizens.
CNN recently got their hands on preliminary infant mortality data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. The numbers are staggering. According to the Texas’ DHS, more than 2,200 infants died in the Lone Star state in 2022. This represents an increase of 11.5% from the previous year. The infant deaths due to “severe genetic and birth defects” increased 21.6 percent. Dr. Erika Werner, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center, told the news site: “We all knew the infant mortality rate would go up […]
We don’t know how many of those infant deaths included someone being forced to bring an unviable fetus to term. But we do know that given the rise, there are definitely many Americans who were forced to birth a child with such profound defects that all medical personnel knew the child would not survive, all while the person giving birth was praying for their own survival. People like Amanda Zurawski, who suffered for days and developed sepsis when Texas doctors refused to abort her no longer viable fetus after her water broke at 18 weeks. […]
One week after changing Twitter’s name to X, Elon Musk has changed his own name to WTF.
Explaining the decision to reporters, he said, “Elon Musk is an O.K. name, but WTF fits me better.”
“I know that people everywhere have extremely warm and positive associations with the name Elon Musk,” he added. “But, as we say at SpaceX, sometimes you have to blow things up.”
The tech magnate revealed that his new name had been chosen “in a fun contest” by employees at X headquarters. “People may have been pissed when I wouldn’t let them work from home, but one perk of coming in to the office is you get to do cool stuff like this,” he noted.
He said that the name WTF won the contest after beating back a strong challenge from the employees’ second-favorite name for him, LMFAO.
while it says it is open to families of all faiths or no faith, it described its plan to teach that students who “reject God’s invitation” will “end up in hell.” – Lynna, OM@478, quoting Washington Post
That’s a really tempting invitation, isn’t it? “Please come to my party! If you don’t, I’ll subject you to indescribable agonies forever.”
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
A high-rise Moscow building housing Russian government ministries has been hit by a drone for the second time in three days, the city’s mayor has said, as air defences also shot down “several” drones targeting the capital region.
The Russian defence ministry said two drones were destroyed by air defence systems in the Odintsovo and Naro-Fominsk districts near Moscow, while it claimed a third was jammed and went “out of control” before it crashed in the Moscow City business district, a cluster of glass skyscrapers that was built to show Russia’s growing integration into world financial markets. . The ministry blamed Ukraine for what it called an “attempted terrorist attack”.
Photos and video showed that a drone had ripped off part of the facade of a modern skyscraper, IQ-Quarter, 3.4 miles (5.5km) from the Kremlin, which houses staff from several ministries, including Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media.
Ukrainian political adviser Anton Gerashchenko has said that a second drone strike on the business district of Moscow within days shows that the Kremlin is unable to protect the city’s most privileged residents, and symbolises the failure of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He wrote on social media:
The Moskva-City high-rises were a symbol of Russian economic flourishing and success, as well as Russia’s integration into global economy. After the second drone attack they will symbolise failure of the “special military operation” and lies of the Kremlin regime that promised and keeps promising Moscow residents complete protection.
Those who work in Moskva-City towers are the privileged class of government officials and business people. They saw with their own eyes that Russian authorities are incapable of and cannot protect even their social group. There is no air defence, air raid alerts, bomb shelters for them. Russia is unprotected. Everything that is going on in Russia and Moscow is a clear consequence of the full-scale war that Russia wages.
The Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, has said more attacks on Russian soil are coming as the war moves into the territory.
In a tweet, he said:
Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war, which, in turn, will soon finally move to the territory of the “authors of the war” to collect all their debts …
Everything that will happen in Russia is an objective historical process. More unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts, more war …
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, said early on Tuesday that at least three drones hit populated areas of his city and one drone destroyed two floors of a dormitory. Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram: “A fire broke out and emergency services are attending. Details on casualties are being clarified.”
A doctor was killed and a nurse was wounded in Russian shelling of a hospital in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson on Tuesday, regional officials said.
Usually, Russian milbloggers discuss all attacks, Ukrainian and Russian. But they are staying mum about a recent Ukrainian strike on the Chonhar bridge, a crucial transport hub for the Russian occupation troops….
A cargo ship sailing under the Israeli flag has defied Russia’s supposed blockade of Ukrainian ports, becoming the first ship the enter the Ukrainian branch of the Danube since July 25, Ukrainian news outlet Militarnyi reported on July 31.
Citing transponder data, Militarnyi writes that on the night of July 30, three civilian vessels – Ams1, Sahin 2, and Yilmaz Kaptan (from Israel, Greece, and Turkey/Georgia, respectively) –entered the Black Sea, openly broadcasting Ukraine as their destinations.
On July 31, Ams1 became the first ship to breach the blockade of the Black Sea by after the Russian bombing of the Ukrainian Danube port in Reni on July 25.
“Starting its journey from Ashdod, Israel, it openly advertised its destination as Ukraine and crossed the Black Sea on a direct course,” the report said.
Four more ships are following Ams1 and will anchor in the Danube. According to Militarnyi, their passage is monitored by a U.S. maritime reconnaissance aircraft P8, which is being refueled in flight above Romania.
After exiting the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) on July 17, Russia has said that it will regard any vessels bound for Ukrainian ports as carriers of military cargo, suggesting an attempt to effectively blockade Kyiv from access to maritime trade routes.
In another sign of shifting forces in the social media universe, the UK’s national public service broadcaster, the BBC, is dipping a toe into the fediverse by setting up its own Mastodon instance.
The BBC is labelling its move as an experiment — and, to be clear, it’s not abandoning its presence on more mainstream social networks at this stage (or possibly ever) — with the organization saying it plans to be on Mastodon for six months. After which it says it will take a decision on whether or not to continue, based on evaluating factors such as how much engagement its presence is generating and how much cost is entailed in hosting its own little piece of the fediverse…
birgerjohanssonsays
Satire in fake news- there are joke fake news that people have taken seriously.
There was a guy who claimed the government had killed 12 billion birds and replaced them with drones camouflaged as birds. To his surprise, his joke got lots of followers.
There were also those who claimed the failure of hurricanes hitting Hong Kong was due to a big business there having invented a force field that kept hurricanes away. Also, people ended up believing in the joke.
billionaire Patrick G. Ryan pledged $480 million to the university—provided that a big chunk went toward a new $800-million football stadium.
But the site’s main purpose . . would be a for-profit, open-air outdoor performance venue competing with the Chicago area’s largest. . . The arena would seat 28,500 concertgoers and replace the existing stadium in the midst of (And destroying, my words) a residential community with schools, parks, playgrounds, churches, a fire station, and a hospital with a Level 1 trauma center.
In the early 1970s I saw how USC kicked many families out of their longtime homes to build a huge tennis stadium. Many of those displaced were not wealthy and were relying on an older mortgage at a low interest rate to keep their homes. They wouldn’t be able to afford a new home at current prices and loan rates.
I HATE BULLIES. Especially wealthy ones that think they can buy everything.
birgerjohanssonsays
Emma Thorne digs up some fun stuff in Christian conspiracy theories.
“Everything is demonic / Christian TikTok ” https://youtu.be/5Kvd97bHAaA
Anew report from Rolling Stone claims that Donald Trump’s legal team is planning to blame the former president’s prior lawyers if he gets hit with criminal charges over his effort to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
According to the publication’s sources, Trump’s lawyers are planning to argue that he was misled by attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani about the legal feasibility of having Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally throw out certified election results to declare Trump the winner.
One source told the publication that the strategy of blaming the lawyers he chose to listen to over the objections of his own White House counsel and senior officials of his own Department of Justice is “an argument the [former] president likes, and the team is on board with it.”
The source then added that “John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel… Other people can decide how sound it was.”
READ MORE: ‘Now they are killing the parents’: Mike Lindell makes wild claim about abortion providers
But Steven Groves, a one-time Trump spokesperson, expressed skepticism about such a strategy to Rolling Stone, as he said that Trump would clearly be stretching the limits of an advice-of-counsel defense were he to employ it.
“As a lawyer, I can’t tell my client: Look, there’s this obscure, ancient law that I found that says you can kill your wife,” he said. “If the client goes out and kills his wife, it doesn’t really work if the client turns around and says, ‘Well, wait, my lawyer told me I could do that.'”
Reginald Selkirksays
@494:
The arena would seat 28,500 concertgoers and replace the existing stadium in the midst of (And destroying, my words) a residential community with schools, parks, playgrounds, churches, a fire station, and a hospital with a Level 1 trauma center.
Dyche Stadium, later Ryan Field, has been occupying that site since 1926. It has hosted collegiate athletics events, professional athletic events, Olympic events, etc.
The new Ryan Field will seat 35,000, more than 12,000 less than the current stadium, and will feature a canopy to better focus light and noise toward the field and away from the surrounding neighborhood.
A business trade group representing 10,000 gunmakers, dealers and other firearm firms is emerging as a rising force in the US and starting to eclipse – in some respects – the might of the powerful but scandal-plagued National Rifle Association.
Meet the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s conservative and aggressive lobbying group. Its range of activities is broad but always geared to zealously and single-mindedly preserving and extending the power of the gun industry…
Link
Hello, Readers,
As you can see, The Infinite Thread racked up 500 comments in the previous chapter and has now rolled over to begin anew with comment #1.
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous chapter.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-1/#comment-2188552
Good: Justice Department orders Texas to remove deadly—and illegal—Rio Grande traps
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-1/#comment-2188535
Putin claims that western Poland is gift from Stalin
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-1/#comment-2188553
Ukraine Update
FRFF in Hucksterby country.
I haven’t seen this yet, but I will watch it and it can’t hurt:
This week on FFRF’s “Ask an Atheist,” FFRF Legal Director Rebecca Markert and FFRF Attorney Sam Grover talk about why thou shalt not place Ten Commandments monuments on government property. Tune in (https://youtu.be/NzlDv5KyNpw) to hear more about Sam Grover’s recent trip to Arkansas to argue FFRF’s latest case in front of a federal judge.
to @2 Lynna, OM I just want to say Thanks for your work keeping the Infinite Threads rolling!
Watch Your Back, Jack Smith, DA Fani Willis Is Fixing To Beat You To The Indictment Punch
https://www.wonkette.com/p/watch-your-back-jack-smith-da-fani
shermanj @4, Thank you for that note of appreciation!
Alabama Republicans Send Congressional Map Without Second Majority-Black District to Governor
Russia imposes Soviet-style restrictions on British diplomats in Moscow
@%499:
Nebraska Teen Sentenced to Jail After Abortion Said She Didn’t Want Child With Abusive Partner
Judge finds forensic scientist Henry Lee liable for fabricating evidence in a murder case
Poll: Trump voters say racism against white Americans is a bigger problem than racism against Black Americans
Interpretation of poll: Trump voters are stupid.
Paxton lawyers seek to disqualify 3 Democratic senators as impeachment juror
@495, the right to life governor has kept that razor wire up, despite a 19 year old migrant woman being hung up in the wire in the middle of the river, while suffering a miscarriage.
I’ll not go into children entangled in that wire or the family that drowned getting around the wire, two children still missing in the river.
Now that he’s ordered and DOJ is filing with the courts, I imagine the governor will next mine the border and emplace machine guns, like Stalin did.
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #12…
My guess is that that suit won’t go anywhere. But if it succeeds, someone should sue to disqualify all of the Republican state Senators on the grounds that they are all biased in Paxton’s favor.
They’re failing on the grounds that impeachment isn’t a civil or criminal trial, but per the SCOTUS, a political process.
So, if one disqualifies a legislator because of a political bias, one would have precisely zero votes once all disqualifications are done.
Did Africa have the first Iron Age?
https:youtu.be/touQNmkC5o
Erratum!
https://youtu.be/touQNmkC5o
I am too tired to type properly. My bad.
-Did Africa have the first Iron Age?
https://youtu.be/touQN1mkC5o
As best that I’ve been able to find, it’s arguable that either India or Africa had discovered iron working first, spreading along the trade routes that were already present. Finding an answer is problematic, due to colonialism and the destruction it brought to Africa. That said, I tend to lean toward India as the origin, spreading to Persia and China and Africa, lastly to Europe. Distance making trade and travel of iron more problematic to make it to Europe, due to multiple deserts in the way, even if the Sahara was much smaller back then.
Regardless, all evidence I’ve saw suggests Europe learned how to work iron quite some time after India and China.
Especially, given Europe was recovering from volcanic eruptions in the Med shortly before Iron was first worked, all the safe money’s against Europeans learning how to work iron first.
Ha! Tuck Buckford… I mean Alex Jones – is in even more legal trouble, as he has royally pissed off the judge.
(Schadenfreude 😊😊😊)
@16: Did Africa have the first Atomic Age?
link
Retired Russian colonel proposes blowing up the North Pole to send message to the West
Peruvian court opens door to legally recognize same-sex couples
Russia attacks New York
Spanish general election tipped to put the far right back in office for the first time since Franco
Bulgaria agrees to send heavy military equipment to Ukraine for the first time since the invasion
Conservative group headed by 2020 presidential election denier wins access to Illinois voter data in court settlement
These four articles are on important subjects. I’m putting links to them here in case anyone agrees:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/larry-beinhart/107044/the-supreme-court-is-so-corrupt
https://www.rsn.org/001/joe-biden-has-a-cornel-west-problem.html
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/20/wisconsin_censors_rainbowland_teacher_melissa_tempel
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/healthcare-reform
Reginald Selkirk @ 21, yep! Discovered by the French from a mine in Gabon for uranium, they discovered that the U-235 content was 0.6% U-235, rather than the normal natural ratio of 0.72%, but the normal trace of U-234 was still at normal trace quantities. Natural uranium at the time that the natural reactor “operated” had a content of 3.1% U-235, allowing just regular water to moderate the reaction. The current percentage of 0.72% now needing a graphite or heavy water moderator. A couple of hundred million years later, Eukaryotic cells were invented. ;)
The uranium wouldn’t have been able to concentrate naturally like it did, save for the presence of oxygen, which allowed uranium to form a water soluble oxide, which then concentrated into the uranium deposits found in Gabon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine
birgerjohansson @ 20, Alex Jones pissed off a judge, a violation of the first rule of the courtroom and today is a day that ends in ‘y’ in English. Should I ask what’s new?
Trump issued a very thinly veiled threat in an interview, when he stated “it’d be highly dangerous” if he was convicted and sent to prison.
I say, “OK, solitary confinement it is then!”.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/07/21/trump-jack-smith-dangerous-if-put-in-jail-sot-ebof-vpx.cnn
And deny visitation rights to his golf clubs, as supermax cells don’t have putting greens. Especially for putzes.
Why we no longer build public pools. Hint: Gotta fuck the poors and those with dark skin somehow.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/22/business/public-pools-extreme-heat/index.html
A 16 year old was killed in a work related accident at a chicken processing plant in Mississippi, so more states roll back child labor laws.
’cause we’re exceptionalists.
OK, proponents say it’s due to a pandemic related labor shortage. You know, the pandemic that’s now long over and is killing more people now than before.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-states-looking-to-rollback-child-labor-protections-for-alcohol-service-age/
Or maybe it’s to get those babies that are forced births to pull their own weight earlier, ignore the much higher infant and maternal mortality in Texas that’s thanks to the slave birth laws there.
XKCD
We are fortunate.
https://xkcd.com/2802/
Belief in God, the devil falls to new low: Gallup
Malaysia cuts short music fest after British band slams anti-gay laws, singer kisses male bandmate
Link
Link
It’s funny how OSHA and politicians find setting heat injury protection protocols so complex, as to be insoluble problems, yet the DoD has been protecting their service members for generations.
Perhaps, we should incorporate the military as some part of the government, within its own department, so that they could share this mysterious information.
Oh wait, that might be effective in mitigation and soon, the populace might demand our misleadership cease and desist trying to turn earth into venus 2.0.
NB
The DNA news of early Europeans keep coming in
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-ancient-dna-reveals-earliest-europeans.html
Erratum
https://youtu.be/news/2023-07-ancient-dna-reveals-earliest-evidence.html
Ok. Spell check interfered – it is at phys.org and nothing else.
Here we go- migrations 5000 years ago!
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-ancient-dna-reveals-earliest-evidence.html
…and one of the most interesting zones is around Odessa, in the current war zone.
Which confirms that where trade and cultures meet is also a pretty dangerous place to live. There are not many Kurgan builders around today.
“Scientists name top five foods rich in prebiotics”
Maybe culinary experts reading this will feel inspired? Myself, I am a slave to old habits.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-07-scientists-foods-rich-prebiotics.html
Missing the boat again. FAA investigating aircraft left on the ramp in 115 F heat with passengers aboard, resulting in hospitalizations.
A better question is, why was the aircraft left with passengers aboard in the heat without either the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) or ground cart to supply power and air conditioning to what essentially became an oven in the sun? The aircraft should be able to run the APU for at least 2 hours on the ground. It’ll supply power, bleed air and hydraulics to the aircraft while the engines aren’t running, the batteries will only supply light and APU start power.
We had passengers diverted and no room at the gates for them, we had them parked on the ramp with the APU running once we ran out of ground power units to power them. The airline’s only excuse is that passenger lives were cheaper to them than the cost of jet fuel to run that dinky little turbine engine. They only buy it in quantities of a couple of hundred thousand pounds at a shot and run their diesel ground equipment off of it, as it’s basically really pure kerosene.
Oops, forgot the story link.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/delta-delay-las-vegas-heat/index.html
Lots of new ideas, presenter by ‘the Chieftain’ Nicholas Moran
“Designing the tank of the future”
https://youtu.be/iFs6LG0TEyU
Wzrd1 @ 43
Could this be an example of “jobsworth”* aka the people who notice are not authorised to make the necessary decisions, and their bosses in the hierarchy don’t care, or have turned off their cellphones?
A Brit term meaning “if I do anything about it, I could lose my job for by-passing my boss”.
birgerjohansson, so garlic, onion, greens. Hell, the only thing I don’t shoehorn those into is cookies and cakes and I’ve been tempted.
I have baked the lot of them into bread before.
Still, it’s nice to see research confirmed. Far too little gets replicated.
FTX lobbyist tried to buy Pacific island of Nauru to create a new superspecies, lawsuit says
L.A. promised to preserve low-cost housing. These tenants’ homes were turned into hotel rooms anyway
Link
People were making do with what they had. Now they have not place to go.
Myanmar’s generals unveil giant Buddha statue as they seek to win hearts and minds during civil war
If they want to win hearts and minds, maybe they should stop committing genocide.
US approves possible $2.9 billion missiles sale to Germany
Ukraine war latest: Russia tries to conduct sabotage raids in Sumy, Chernihiv oblasts
Court strikes down limits on filming of police in Arizona
In an Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Two Mycologists Catalogue Hundreds of Fantastical Fungi
(beautiful photos)
Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick has died.
The Supreme Court Has a Clear Intellectual Lightweight
Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh
‘This Is a Really Big Deal’: How College Towns Are Decimating the GOP
Elon Musk’s Brother Shutters Most Locations of Farming Startup
USA 3-0 Vietnam
England 1-0 Haiti
Ukraine Update: Taking a step back to take stock of the current front lines
More Ukraine updates coming soon
New York Times: “Zelensky Pushes for Way to Ship Grain Through Black Sea”
Followup to comment 60.
More Ukraine updates.
Link. Scroll down to view updates.
Followup to comment 62.
Posted by readers of the article:
Those read much more like opinion pieces than like updates about the war.
An idea to ridicule Paludan and the other koran-burners in Scandinavia without compromising about freedom of expression:
On April 1st, burn a world atlas outside the embassy of Burkina Faso to protest “the difficulty of saying ‘Ouagadougou’ rapidly”. Also, burn ‘Ulysses’ outside the Irish embassy because “it is impossible to figure out who the murderer is, and the detective never turns up”.
(If it is not obvious I have not slept for two nights)
Re @ 65 – burn a copy of a H C Andersen book because ‘Danes burn books for bloody silly reasons”.
And burn ‘Finnegans Wake’ because “stream of consciousness’ is how Boris and Trump arrived to their political agendas… like ‘do something about COVID I want a sandwich oops Teletubbies are on the TV”.
Goddammit.
Phoenix is so hot people who fall down on the pavement and are too frail to get up immediately get third-degree burns.
Concrete and asphalt get really, really hot.
.
30,000 people are being evacuated as wildfires ravage Rhodes.
So, lemme get the last part of @ 63 right. Global warming is because of the 3993 warheads detonated, at a total yield of 635 megatons. Talk about massive lag!
Oddly, the largest bomb, Tsar Bomba didn’t warm the planet worth spit, but somehow 100 megaton devices will magically warm up the world if detonated at the north pole. Sounds a lot like a rather shitty science fiction novel I read, where the nukes were to completely fracture the entire northern icecap, because of magical resonance and hand waving.
Just more nuclear saber rattling, trying to get cowards to fear the almighty nuke that can blow up the entire planet into an asteroid belt. Which is well, impossible. All of the reachable fissile material on the planet couldn’t even manage to noticeably strip the atmosphere, let alone have a global physical impact. For large yield weapons, fallout becomes a factor, but nowhere as insane as the media makes them out to be, as you don’t get more mass out of a warhead, you get less and most of that mass won’t be exceptionally hot due to a low neutron cross section. Salted weapons being a lot different, such as cobalt-60 devices, but if that arrives into a NATO nation, it’s an act of war and it doesn’t take all that much to machine a tamper to reply in kind.
Just more of the cowardly bully threatening to hit the victim, who is expected to always cower. Entertaining, given how badly Russian equipment has been underperforming against Western equipment, despite troops using it who are inexperienced in using it to its fullest potential.
Guess we have to surrender, as people fear fiction and threats. So, if I threaten to detonate a large explosive over Yellowstone caldera, will the United States surrender to me and make me emperor?
Re: wzrd1 @ #68…
I think the idea is to use a nuke over the high arctic to melt the ice, which will decrease the local albedo and heat the arctic ocean faster. Mind you, I may be reading too much logic into the actual plans.
Ukraine has developed its own air defense systems, official says
Worms that contain the same lethal neurotoxin as puffer fish are invading the East Coast
The world’s top alien hunters explain why a Harvard physicist’s discovery of ‘alien’ tech is likely a false alarm
Loeb went fishing the seabed with a magnet.
First, he would have to establish that the spherules are extraterrestrial, or even extra-solar. This might be possible by examining the elemental and isotopic composition, but he hasn’t done it yet.
Supposing he succeeded at that, the next step would be trying to establish that the spherules are “technology” and not a random meteorite. Good luck with that one.
I have never heard of this organization and don’t how seriously to take it.
We tested it and Elon Musk is right: Twitter no longer responds to our emails with a poop emoji
Iowan jailed for Capitol riot role gets more jail time for illicit tanning salon videos
whheydt @ 69, well that sounds fine to me, Russia would expend most of its arsenal before it made even one hole. We’re talking average thickness of 3 – 4 meters of ice, with 20 meter thick ridges. All well below freezing to nearly CO2 condensation temperatures. Meanwhile, everyone would see Russian bomber aircraft or missiles heading into the arctic, which puts the US DEFCON to 1. A detonation could be interpreted as a defective weapon that was part of an attack.
The Russians aren’t idiots, only those speakers are.
Reginald Selkirk @ 71, not particularly worried about a planarian worm that’s a predator of earthworms. I’m not likely to eat the invasive worm and it certainly couldn’t mistake me as an earthworm.
Still, since it’s invasive, if I see any, I’ll happily capture and kill them.
@ 72, the iron spherules could be residue from meteorites, but one can quite literally wash the same off of one’s roof with a hose and collect them with a magnet. Doesn’t indicate the source and especially, doesn’t indicate a specific meteorite or even just falling dust from space. A chemical and isotopic analysis is needed before one can consider crediting the claim.
METI was founded in 2015 and for reasons unknowable, has indeed sent signals to several red dwarf stars and to one G-type 94 ly away. They also do optical SETI. Color me dubious… But, thus far, they’ve found a bucket full of nothing and haven’t made any bizarre claims. Their response is heartening, but sending signals to stars whose habitable zone is a veritable radiation bath undermines any trust in judgement.
Not the best channel, but it does have some good stuff.
This about the grain and the Black Sea, from an expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcDqd_eSpvc
(There you go, Lynna — no embedding)
Russia’s Zvonareva banned from entering Poland for WTA 250 tournament
Elon Musk says Twitter to change logo, adieu to ‘all the birds’
Late Sweden winner denies South Africa historic Women’s World Cup draw; Netherlands wins
Saburo Sakai – The good Japanese in WWII.
https://youtu.be/WE3xwbKbddE
Fascinating story with some very disturbing impications here via Aussie ABC news :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-07-21/greenland-ice-core-secret-us-army-base-reveals-dramatic-melting/102609654
StevoR @ 81
I do not recall his much the oceans would rise from a Greenland Ica collapse but at the very least Florida, much of the US easy coast, major chunk of the Netherlands, Bangladesh, much of coastal China and India will get submerged .
Because a few congressmen are easy to bribe.
Re @ 82.
If you have read the Harry Dresden books, they had a position called “Darkstaff” authorised to remove threats with extreme prejudice.
I like the idea of removing corrupt politicians and officials in as messy a way as Harry Dresden did to his enemies…
@ 81, Iceworm left behind one hell of a mess. The nuclear reactor was decommissioned early, it having multiple leaks, radioactive waste initially left behind. We eventually had to clean up the mess, once the Danish government found out and well, they weren’t happy.
Discovered: Glacial ice flows, at times quite rapidly, as the tunnels suddenly wouldn’t line up and quickly would be cut off by part of the ice moving more quickly, resulting in tunnels becoming dead ends.
The plan was shelved after finally realizing how unworkable the entire thing was, with some planning for a lunar missile base conducted and as rapidly shelved as even more unworkable. Apparently, not only were their no ice maids in Greenland, there were no moon maids on the moon. Or something.
The Cold War breathed life into all manner of hare brained schemes. Thankfully, none of the more ambitious survived even the briefest suggestion of an introduction to reality intact. Remember Ronnie Raygun’s Rods from God, where all they had to do is just drop tungsten telephone poles and hand wave them from orbit precisely onto a target?
Orbiting x-ray lasers that never worked and could never be aimed even if they could get the damned things to work?
Particle beam weapons? Where’s my ray gun, dammit?! Oh, there it is, at the particle accelerator, where it belongs.
@ 82, not a lot of rise in ocean levels, around 7 meters maximum from Greenland’s icecap.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2883/study-predicts-more-long-term-sea-level-rise-from-greenland-ice/
Here’s what it’d look like, although the only place that seems to have an impact is the US… Yeah…
https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/0/-8178717.6335976105/4803855.1667315895/5/satellite/none/0.8/2050/interHigh/midAccretion
A defective model for just Greenland, as the Arctic would also have a corresponding melt, raising levels even more as synergistic effects amplify the effects. Then, there’s the effects of halocline current disruption, such as the Gulf Stream being disrupted, causing warming currents to halt to the US east coast, Iceland and Europe, weather would get downright interesting!
What seems to be incessantly overlooked, but finally drawing attention is that everything isn’t linear or even on a simple curve. There are multiple interacting systems, which if disrupted, disrupt other systems and nature loathes disrupted equilibrium and tends to have out of scale reactions attempting to balance unimaginable amounts of energy over quite broad areas.
Oh well, soon we’ll get shallower sections of oceans becoming exceptionally fizzy. I’m sure some asshole will try to sell that fizzy and flammable ocean water as a drink.
Alien spaceship ‘could have crash-landed on Mars’
“Can’t be ruled out” – maybe we should raise our standard of evidence jsut a bit.
“The Heat Will Kill You First”: Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell on Life and Death on a Scorched Planet – 20 mins long youtube interview about a book I haven’t yet read but am keen to do so.
Benefited from slavery? Critics say some of the state’s examples were never even slaves.
NOT REAL NEWS
NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week
Facts and debunking available at the link.
Link
Video is available at the link.
Video also on available on YouTube
Making capital punishment easier: Four states abolish unanimous jury requirement in death sentencing
Link
I feel like the descriptor “liberal” should be replaced with “reasonable” in this case.
What now?
Don’t worry, the U.S. military’s AI will be “Judeo-Christian,” says 3-star Pentagon general
More at the link.
Response from the doofuses:
Response to the weak-ass response:
Followup to comment 93.
I recommend the video in which Alex Wagner and Jelani Cobb destroyed Ron DeSantis’s arguments.
It is also available on YouTube
Followup to comment 93 and 94.
Ron DeSantis was a history major. He graduated from Yale with a degree in history. Jelani Cobb says that no one at Yale taught Ron DeSantis that some slaves benefitted from slavery.
Ukraine Update: No ATAMCS long-range missiles for Ukraine, for now
Followup to comment 93.
Tampa Bay Times:
So now Ron DeSantis is trying to distance himself from the new slavery curriculum proposed for Florida.
Link
JFC, I feel like I’m back in the early 1960’s again.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/us/ohio-black-man-attacked-police-dog/index.html
State police: Surrender or else.
Local police: Surrender and I’ll kill you.
Fortunately, there were too many State Police witnesses for the locals to follow through.
Mike Pence is a deeply religious man and faithfully worships his God-Emperor, Trump.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/07/23/mike-pence-reacts-to-donald-trump-very-dangerous-sot-bash-sotu-vpx.cnn
OK, wow. I wonder if there’s a special school course in boating this way, perhaps at Whatsamatta U.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/us/lake-ozarks-boat-crash-house/index.html
Eight passengers were ejected, six with serious injuries, two with moderate injuries. The second in command apparently was Harvey Wallbanger.
A lot of outlets have been telling the story of Tony Bennett marching with MLK.
But have you ever heard the story about how “wokeness,” DEI, Jesus, an actual anti-racist, 2 church choirs & 1 of the greatest dance moves of all time got Tony Bennett into show biz?
DeSantis campaign deletes video after Nazi images found
DeStupid says that Jan 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was only a protest that turned into a riot.
Because, everyone goes to protests with enough lumber and rope and makes gallows.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/07/23/ron-desantis-january-6-capitol-riot-harry-dunn-acostanr.cnn
Ignore the guilty verdicts for sedition, that’s just heresy against the god-emperor.
Now, for a chuckle.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/entertainment/2023/07/19/horse-goat-farm-tangled-tail-moos-vpx.cnn
Yeah, goats are like that.
Freed Egyptian human rights campaigner arrives in Italy, which championed his case
Elon Musk wants to relive his start-up days. He’s repeating the same mistakes.
* Links within to numerous instances of abused workers at SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter.
* Commenters have added that Tesla’s models are S 3 X Y as further illustration of stunted adolescent thinking.
Interesting that Putin is out of town when Moscow gets “attacked” and drones are detected and electronically crashed. Almost as if they had the frequencies and codes for them.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/europe/ukraine-russia-drone-attacks-hit-moscow-intl-hnk/index.html
Also entertaining to characterize an attack on Moscow as a terrorist attack, but it’s perfectly acceptable to attack and shell and missile the hell out of Kyiv.
I’m guessing that if D-day was today, Hitler would call the invasion a terrorist attack too.
Muskrat to replace the blue Twitter bird with a big, black X.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/23/business/elon-musk-twitter-revamp-intl-hnk/index.html
Priorities, one must have them and the priority isn’t to stabilize the platform and regain users and investors, but to put X marks the spot on everything.
He’ll get there soon, penny stock that is.
Meta releases Llama 2 as “open source”, with licensing terms so encumbered as to look like a rental car agreement on steroids.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/llama_is_not_open_source/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=top-article
To run the top of the line model, you’ll need a GPU like an A100 80 GB card, which runs around $15k.
The starter model will need a GPU with around 8 GB of memory.
I’d like to recommend the BBC podcast series Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, which I’ve just finished listening to. You need to register with the BBC, but I think that’s possible from outwith the UK. It’s introduced by John Sudworth, who was the BBC’s correspondent in China until official harassment forced him to leave. The series doesn’t come to a final conclusion, but does point out that the Chinese authorities deny both the lab leak and the seafood market hypotheses, still ludicrously suggesting that the virus originated abroad, and came to China on frozen food packaging. IOW, you can’t trust a word they say on this issue (or indeed, on anything else).
Some relatively good news from Spain: the snap election has produced a “hung parliament”, rather than the expected conservative (PP) – fascist (Vox) majority. PP are the largest party, but would need to recruit other parties besides Vox, which suffered a significant loss of seats. Weeks of negotiations are likely, possibly ending in another election if neither PP nor the social democratic PSOE can recruit enough allies to form a majority.
Meanwhile the German conservative leader announces he’s willing to work with the fascist AfD at the local level. The German “respectable right” was one of the few holdouts against teaming up with fascists in Europe.
Further to #112, looking at the detailed results, there has certainly been a rightward shift overall, but I don’t see how the PP+Vox bloc could possibly recruit allies with the 7 seats they would need for a majority (or 6 for a dead heat). Only the Navarrese Peoples’ Union, with 1 seat, looks like a plausible ally. That doesn’t mean the PSOE+Sumar bloc would be able to govern, as they would need support from Catalan and Basque pro-independence parties, and even if these parties would join, relying on them would have political dangers for the PSOE. My guess is that another election will follow.
Black man runs for mayor in Alabama town, feudal white town council that was unelected and unelected white mayor refuses to allow him to take office in the election that he won.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/patrick-braxton-black-man-says-he-was-elected-mayor-of-newburn-alabama/
Hadn’t had elections in decades until he actually qualified for the election by filing and paying the filing fee, forcing the issue. Town council was literally appointed by the city-state god-king.
I guess we’ll have to get the Army to encircle the town and build a great big wooden rabbit…
Maricopa County, Aridzona, third degree burns from falls in the street. Totally normal. Maybe soon, we’ll have people bursting into open flames as a normal…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/health/arizona-heat-burns-er/index.html
Pavements close to the boiling point of water, what a strange new world. Maybe we’ll not see sea levels rise, after all, if they boil off, they won’t rise in flooding on the land. Although, we’re not supposed to see that happen until the sun is close to going red giant. Might have to move up my Europan vacation plans.
Poll: 58% of likely Ohio voters back proposal to enshrine abortion access in constitution
Australia has HIV elimination in sight after dramatic fall in Sydney infections
New theory on “gravity hole” in the Indian Ocean.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/world/gravity-hole-geoid-low-indian-ocean-scn/index.html
Although, one possible confounder is that it’s also located midway at the border of the southern end of the Indian plate.
The earth’s gravitationally bumpy. So is the moon, as was accidentally discovered in the late Apollo missions, with one low lunar orbit satellite that was expected to orbit for 18 months only lasting 35 days. For the moon, there are only 4 low lunar orbits that are reasonably stable. Mass concentrations, or mascons are invaluable for locating resources. We only got serious in mapping them since around 2000. Now, it’s pretty much any planetary or moon probe sent has gravitational mapping as one task.
What will we be mapping or looking for in another generation? Don’t try to predict it, we always get predictions about the future wrong when it comes to technology.
Right wing Hindus in India angry over Oppenheimer’s use of phrase from the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.
I conditionally agree, as the phrase gets overused throughout the film. He definitely said it a few times throughout his life, especially after the first bomb was detonated at the Trinity test (odd, that no Christians objected to the name Trinity being used). But, incorporating it into a love scene is a bit… Odd.
Also odd, such complaints from a nuclear armed nation’s nationalist group, especially from the faith that brought us the Kama Sutra. One of the few faiths to give humans an instruction manual on marital relations. Yeah, there’s a lot more than just sex in that Sutra.
But then, right wingers need outrage over something to keep their followers in tow. Otherwise, they’d wander off and rejoin their real lives.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/media/india-oppenheimer-backlash-hindu-right-intl-hnk/index.html
Reginald Selkirk @ 117, great news! If HIV infection finally is curtailed, that can provide a roadmap for highly effective public health interventions for the world.
@ 116, that’s assuming it’s allowed to make the ballot. The far right is pulling every trick in the books to stop the will of the people from coming to fruition.
There’s a moral to this story. When in bear country, lock your car doors. Bears can and do learn how to open car doors from the outside, opening them again from the inside is a bit trickier for them. Driver’s door inside panel shredded, other doors left alone, so perhaps that bear did have a clue in opening from the inside, but just couldn’t manage it.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/07/24/bear-destroys-car-lake-tahoe-affil-cprog-ldn-vpx.kovr
Once the car door was opened by deputies (with a rope), all anyone saw of that bear was a bear ass, as it ran off into the woods. Hopefully, to find some nice fruit.
We used to go camping with the kids every year, basic backpacking for a week. Every year, we had a black bear come through camp to investigate. Food was in a bear bag up a tree, hung with parachute cord, so the bear couldn’t get it, nor could raccoons climb down to it. Taught the kids basic navigation and foraging, we all enjoyed it, it got us out of the damned city.
The other side of the bear coin. Woman killed after brown bear attack.
Even money, the bear was eating or protecting cubs.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/us/montana-bear-encounter-woman-killed/index.html
Situational awareness, folks, after all, when in the woods, you are in the bear’s backyard.
Norway government ministries hit by cyber attack
Cartoon: The real danger
US Air Force’s Angry Kitten turns Reaper drone into fierce feline of electronic warfare
Heatwave expected to expand, cover most of US
Texas governor essentially says that Texas and its state constitution outranks the US Constitution and federal government in row over border razor wire Stalin fence.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/24/politics/doj-texas-border-water-barriers/index.html
Since he’s using the US Army National Guard, federalize them and send in regular forces to supervise and enforce federal authority over US national borders.
Then, a century of reconstruction.
Nearly a third of Republicans now view Trump as ‘unfavorable’: Pew
Former President Donald Trump’s becoming more and more unfavorable amongst Republicans as the 2024 presidential election approaches, according to a recent Pew Research poll.
According to the poll, conducted between July 10 and 16, the share of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who view the former president as “unfavorable” has risen from 24% in 2022 to 32% in 2023. The poll also found that Trump’s “favorable” rating amongst Republican and Republican-leaning independents has decreased over the past year, going from 75% to 66%…
So favorable/unfavorable is 2/1.
@wzrd1 #119:
He said he thought it, years later. His brother present at the time quoted him saying, “I guess it worked.” (Wikipedia)
@KG #111:
Works in the US, no registration needed.
Unskilled Florida Man Regrets Missing Out on Being Enslaved
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
Florida Republicans strip renter protections in latest bid to make state unlivable
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #116…
I’m really hoping that the Ohio voters will (a) reject the ballot proposition in August (not so much because it raises the threshhold for constitutional amendments but changing the requirements to get a measure on the ballot at all), and then (b) pass the abortion amendment by over 60%, thus showing that the change wouldn’t have worked, anyway.
Followup to comment 132.
Readers of the article posted their thoughts about the “So what the hell is it?” question.
Right-wing effort to cancel ‘Barbie’ is an epic fail
Link
TruthOrFiction – NBC Universal’s Anti-Union Tree-Trimming Results in Paltry Fine
Here is something lighter, with Bill Bailey doing standup.
https://youtu.be/eojzHAcpiac
Israeli government votes to limit Supreme Court powers amid mass protests.
Washington Post link.
Washington Post link
Why are archaeologists unable to find evidence of a ruling class of Indus civilization?
Have I got a story for you. It starts with a simple tip that someone has done a FOIA request for all 7 million voter signature cards in Georgia. I was able to get a screenshot of the request. It’s much more insane than I could have possibly thought and people need to know…
Ukraine Update: Tankies claim to want ‘peace’ as they advocate for Putin’s war aims
Yep. They filed that lawsuit.
Link
Trademark application
Filed May 25, 2017
For a letter “X” logo concerning any computer software
Current owner: Meta Corp.
Police crashed Elon Musk’s attempt to take down Twitter’s sign with a crane
Guess who didn’t get a permit for the work?
Police crashed Elon Musk’s attempt to take down Twitter’s sign with a crane
Let’s just say that a smart businessman would have got a permit for something like that.
@147: dammit, wrong thread
Paul Gosar’s Newsletter Features Website That Calls for Readers to ‘Stand up for Hitler’: Report
Man who beat officer with flagpole during Capitol riot is sentenced to over 4 years in prison
Jason Aldean was too busy fretting about flag burning to comment. Also, he has been known to wear a Confederate flag T-shirt on stage.
Obamas’ personal chef drowns near family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@130,
Thanks, that’s interesting – and rather annoying! Living in the UK and using a TV to receive broadcasts, I pay the BBC licence fee – currently around £150 a year, yet have to go through an additional step to listen to their podcasts!
Reginald Selkirk@125,
I wonder if the “Angry Kitten” name was derived, perhaps unconsciously, from Cordwainer Smith’s 1961 storyMother Hitton’s Littul Kittons.
KG, not overtly.
cf. https://ig.space/commslink/overview-of-the-angry-kitten-pod-program
Wow, in Pittsburgh, a “reactor” fire killed power and stunk up the place.
That’s how it was reported, ‘A “catastrophic” reactor fire”.
Then, in the body of the story, it’s a “specialized transformer”, with zero explanation.
It’s called a saturable reactor, the core is kept in magnetic saturation, meaning it can’t make much of a stronger magnetic field in its typical operation and hence, acts as a basic AC voltage regulator.
So, a lot important for the infrastructure, but not worth a headline or scare quotes.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/us/pittsburgh-power-substation-fire-brunot-island/index.html
I miss when journalists actually performed due diligence and actually researched a story enough to properly explain it. Alas, that was a brief period in journalism that’s now extinct. Well, back to yellow journalism…
Take a drug that you don’t have a true medical need for, side effects will make that additional weight a pleasant memory in the hell that is now life.
People have been taking the antidiabetes drugs Ozempic or Wegovy for weight loss in the latest fad. Now, a small number are suffering from long lasting stomach paralysis. Meanwhile, diabetics that need the drug face shortages.
Stop with the quick fix and work with doctor to lose that additional tonnage, as I’ve done. Hey, for those of you who haven’t had to lose weight, yeah, it feels like tonnage, murder on backs and knees and my family has a genetic predisposition for significant weight gain and insulin resistance. Slow weight loss is superior to rapid weight loss, as one avoids going into the yo-yo bit of losing the weight, then regaining it quickly. Add in, I can’t go with strenuous exercise due to heart valve damage (damned COVID! Thankfully, the vaccine blunted the worst and that’s all I got with the virus) and blow discs, yeah, royal PIA to keep the weight off. So, my exercise is pissing off my knees and walking. A few miles to the store and back, a few times per week, local store for a mile.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/health/weight-loss-diabetes-drugs-gastroparesis/index.html
In medicine, I’ve embraced the minimum intervention for the maximum benefit. Not, let’s go with yet another medication first and see what happens.
Dwayne Johnson Donates ‘Seven Figures’ to Support Fellow SAG-AFTRA Members
Bronny James collapses at USC practice
Philippines 1 – 0 New Zealand
Chet Hanks Promotes ‘Sound of Freedom’ Despite QAnon Constantly Calling His Dad a Pedophile
UPS reaches contract with 340,000 unionized workers, averting potentially calamitous strike
Atlantic Ocean current could collapse soon. How you may endure dramatic weather changes.
Idaho jury hits Bundy, defendants with tens of millions in damages in St. Luke’s lawsuit
Followup to Reginald @145.
Link
US to provide tiny Black Hornet nano-drones to Ukraine in new aid package
Followup to Reginald @163.
Done Bundy – $52 Million in Damages!
Jared Kushner’s family members throw maximum donations to Chris Christie campaign
Mitch McConnel’s role in dark money plot to capture the supreme court
(As my cellphone cannot distinguish between upper-case I and lower-case l i have to write permutations with four links to get the one working link.)
https://youtu.be/8mizDWIdkIA
or
https://youtu.be/8mizDWIdklA
The DeSantis ‘reboot’ starts with a fascist bang
China replaces Foreign Minister Qin Gang with Wang Yi
https://youtu.be/8mizDWldkIA
or
https://youtu.be/8mizDWldklA
Here we have a senator exposing the lying corrupt bastard *ssholes.
https://youtu.be/8mizDWldkIA
Cartoon: Quackery quotas
Like a hot tub: Water temperatures off Florida soar over 100 degrees, stunning experts
On Monday, a buoy near Manatee Bay recorded an astounding 101.1 degree water temperature, a temperature common for hot tubs.
EU Passes Law To Blanket Highways With Fast EV Chargers by End of 2025
Ohio Republicans’ Shady Anti-Abortion Ploy Is Not Going Well
That is encouraging, but I hope all those people get out to vote on August 8.
Just pulls the brake on Biden’s asylum police “that has little daylight between Trump’s illegal asylum policy”.
Biden’s problem is the same as Trump’s problem. Ratified treaties are the law of the land, per some silly little law called the Constitution of the United States of America. The US signed and ratified the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which guarantees asylum and the process was codified into law shortly after. Trying to neutralize that is simply lawlessness on the part of the Chief Executive.
If we’re not going to have laws, I’ll be Emperor.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/politics/biden-asylum-court-ruling/index.html
For fuck’s sake, Joe, you’re a lawyer and should know better!
@ 163, my money’s on sooner for Gulf Stream shutdown, rather than later. Synergistic effects on multiple systems are still being underestimated. The net effect is loss of cooling in tropical seas and loss of heat from the Gulf Stream for the US and Canadian east coast, as well as loss of warming from the Gulf Stream for Europe. Think fucked up winters with tons of weird storms, polar vortex dips and more.
@ 164, good news, Bundy needed an attitude adjustment from day one when he and his sons, with their buddies drew firearms in effective treason against the US government. When he refuses to pay and we know that he will, send in an army of federal agents to seize everything that he owns and sell it off for cheap to pay the fines.
Bronny James, the son of NBA star LeBron James, suffered a cardiac arrest during basketball practice at USC. He’s recovering, discharged from the ICU and is currently stable.
Great job, USC! Having people trained in CPR with the availability of an AED can and does save lives.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/sport/bronny-james-cardiac-arrest/index.html
Great job in responding to an emergency!
Hey, the bullshit film, “Sound of Freedom” is in theaters and is sold out in many locations.
The seats are empty, but mystery buyers buy the tickets so that strangers can see the lies for free. Alas, people are enjoying the heatwave more, so aren’t taking the free seats.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/business/sound-of-freedom-box-office-pay-it-forward/index.html
Most scams are designed to make money, this one, to look like they’re making money while losing money. I think that was Business 101 at Trump U.
Some Godwin’s law violations should be capitol offenses – literally.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/media/white-house-fox-news-slavery-holocaust/index.html
I had family members who relieved those camps and have known Holocaust survivors, my blood is beyond the boiling point with that crap the idiot spewed.
Trump ally warns of ‘second Civil War’ if they can’t get away with coup attempt
Followup to wzrd1 @182
Black People ‘Benefited’ From Slavery, ‘Useful’ Jews Survived Holocaust … Just Another Day At Fox News
https://www.wonkette.com/p/black-people-benefited-from-slavery
https://www.wonkette.com/p/texas-prison-luxuries-149-degree
@birgerjohansson #169:
I’ve wondered for a while. Why is [long-press the text field, copy/paste] not an option?
Not obvious sometimes. In NewPipe, an ad-less YouTube client, for example. Expand the vid title, revealing extra buttons including “share”. Tapping that offers “copy url”.
In your case, the url is somehow visible yet not selectable? And even so, you can’t test permutations in browser tabs before posting? Strange.
A New Lawsuit Alleges That Leonard Leo Called for the Arrest of a Pro-Choice Protester
Pandemic deaths in Ohio and Florida show partisan divide after vaccine rollout
Software engineering student saves the day for frustrated LRT riders
Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture
ANF turns to silver flies to help thwart HWA
Trump causes confusion by sharing meme calling Jan 6 a ‘government staged riot’ even though he was in power
Marine veteran Trevor Reed, released by Russia in prisoner swap, hurt while fighting in Ukraine
Re: Reginald Selkirk 187
“No one is more identified with the Court’s conservative turn than Leo, and arguably no issue has been more ardently championed by the Federalist Society than the right to free expression enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Supreme Court Justices who are associated with the Federalist Society, and whose appointments Leo had promoted, have ruled in favor of the First Amendment right of religious opponents of same-sex marriage to deny some business services to couples of whom they disapprove, and of the right of rich political donors to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns as a form of speech. “I think the left misunderstands what we define as rights in our country sometimes, because frankly, those are defined by the Bill of Rights,” Leo said, in an interview this week with the conservative news site Maine Wire. “Most of these rights that we’re talking about in the Bill of Rights are freedom from government oppression, freedom from government interference, they are political and civil rights.””
And that’s why we have the 9th amendment.
Presents offensive gesture most useful with Leonard Leo to Leonard Leo
Nampa man shot driver for giving him the middle finger. What the judge decided
Booksellers sue over Texas law requiring them to rate books for appropriateness
TikTok launches text posts amid Musk’s X rebrand
Cartoon: WWJD?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/25/2183147/-Cartoon-WWJD
Ukraine Update: One town south of Bakhmut is liberated, and another is almost there
Wow. That’s a lot more search warrants than what we knew about previously.
Eight search warrants issued in Trump classified documents case, new filings show
Prosecutors argued that seven additional warrants should be kept secret.
NBC News:
NBC News:
Associated Press:
NBC News:
New York Times:
Associated Press:
RollCall:
Re: Reginald Selkirk 187, me @ 194
Not to mention how quickly a political opinion about fascist behavior became an “insult”. How very fragile.
Indonesia has blocked Twitter’s new doman, x {dot} com.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/26/elon-musks-x-com-blocked-in-indonesia-under-curbs-on-porn
Apparently, they needed to be informed that the change would not include porn and Twitter didn’t respond.
Oh well, good for business, eliminating 278 million potential users.
For the first time in a full century, Parisians will be able and allowed to swim in the Seine river. It’s been closed for swimming due to pollution.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/sport/paris-seine-river-swimming-spt-scli-intl/index.html
Signal boost for this excellent post on Oceanoxia here :
^ https://freethoughtblogs.com/oceanoxia/2023/07/25/a-desert-full-of-bones-razor-wire-asylum-and-fascism/
Dunno if anyone’s interested but :
Source : https://www.space.com/ufos-congress-hearing-livestream-july-2023
No I don’t believ but still it might make for some interesting viewing /hearing.. maybe?
Heads up for the basci skeptics & yeah, I do vaguely recall them doing something else like this not that long ago as well..
Giuliani concedes he made defamatory statements about Georgia election workers
Also via space dot com; A new twist in how our nearby and otherwise similar planetary neighbour became the staggeringly hostile hellscape we know today :
Source : https://www.space.com/venus-volcanoes-violent-asteroid-comet-impacts
Also :
Source : https://www.space.com/solar-orbiter-fast-magnetic-waves-sun-coronal-heating
Whilst even closer to home, China seems tobe getting serious about its lunar plans to puta Taikonaut on the grey regolith by 2030 :
https://www.space.com/china-moon-lander-rover-spacesuit-astronauts
Ohio Secretary of State says contraception would not be banned if amendment threshold raised
Is there any reason we should trust him?
Ah, you see, it’s just a misunderstanding. He is talking about “reasonable” people. We are talking about Republican legislators.
Saguaro cacti collapsing in Arizona extreme heat, scientist says
Reginald Selkirk @ 152
So any one want to take bets how soon this becomes a right wing conspiracy fiction? How soon does Fox News start linking this to the “Clinton Mafia”? How soon does the GOP House of Representatives start hearings linking the “Biden Crime Family” to the chef’s death? How long will it take before “Chappaquiddick” and the Kennedy family comparisons are made?
Then again, maybe the right wing fascist media and politicians will treat this as an unfortunate tragedy that, although it has personal implications for the Obama family and the chef’s family, it is a daily occurrence during the summer in the US and has no political implications.
And then, right after that, giant winged porkypines will fly out of my arse. Backwards.
These five American women will appear on new quarters in 2024
Naked woman gets out of car at major Bay Area bridge, starts firing gun
‘Murica! F— yeah!
Two-thirds of African leaders refuse to attend Putin’s summit
Unprecedented Meteorite Believed to Have Originated From Earth
Ouch! 6 injured, 4 civilians, 2 firefighters when a construction crane on top of a building caught fire and collapsed to the street below. It was lifting 16 tons of concrete when the fire broke out. The operator attempted to extinguish the fire and was forced to evacuate the crane as the fire went out of control.
A building across the street from the construction was damaged in the collapse, with its own debris raining down upon the street.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/us/nyc-crane-collapse/index.html
Unbelievably fortunate that nobody was killed! 16 tons of load, plus the end of the boom, plus chunks of the building damaged is a significant mechanism of injury!
NASA lost communications and telemetry with the ISS for 90 minutes due to a “power reconfiguration” during electrical work on the Mission Control building. Emergency communications were engaged via the Russian communication systems around 20 minutes into the outage.
Yeah, been there, done that. Work is going on, the doominclature is wrong about what’s connecting to where, disconnect the lines to be replaced and things get… Interesting.
Annoyingly, around 1/3 of the time, the damned things won’t power back up and everyone is scrambling to fix that branch to get the infernal system working again – properly documented this time.
But then, it’s a fundamental law of nature: “It’s never easy”. Whenever someone says that it’ll be easy, a mushroom cloud is on the horizon.
Abandoned and forgotten Mayan city found in the Yucatan Peninsula. Abandoned approximately 1000 years ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/americas/laser-mapping-reveals-a-forgotten-maya-city-scn/index.html
Given its remoteness, being forgotten and overgrown by the jungle, hopefully they’ll get some excellent finds and information!
Tommy Tuberville’s Claims About His Dad in World War II Questioned
Bronze stars no, bronze battle stars, probably. My uncle had the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_star
So, he was in 5 battles or campaigns. Just as my uncle was. My uncle only arriving after D-day, but well in time for every other battle phase in Europe.
As for tank commander, basically, he sat in the top observation hatch of the tank and at the time, designated targets for the gunner, total crew of 5, so within the scope of that rank at the time and even now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank#Crew
I’ll give him an honest mistake for battle star vs bronze star, easy mistake for a civilian to make, as he never served in the military.
The rest, no clue why people want to bullshit about an already memorable and honorable service in a horrific war.
SBU charges ex-deputy Yevgeniy Murayev with treason
Hunter Biden plea deal falls apart
Sounds like a lot of unnecessary confusion. Also, the end result is that the Hunter Biden circus remains in the news for a longer period of time, fueling Republican conspiracy theories and thirst for vengeance against Joe Biden.
Moldova orders mass expulsion of nearly 60 Russian diplomats, cites spying concerns
Followup to comment 229.
Posted by readers of the article:
That’s an embarrassing amount of confusion on the part of the lawyers involved.
‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction imminent for controversial physicist
Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained how stupidity enables tyranny:
Link
I am reminded of the growing number of pundits who say that Trump has to be defeated by voters multiple times before the MAGA cult begins to get a clue.
O’Rourke: Biden should order ‘immediate removal’ of Abbott’s razor wire, Rio Grande obstructions
JoeMyGod – DeSantis Fires Aide Who Secretly Made Nazi Video
Turns out it was the same speechwriter mentioned in passing at #104.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Hannity Town Hall Probably Sounded Better In The Original Russian
https://www.wonkette.com/p/robert-f-kennedy-jrs-hannity-town
Followup to Reginald @214.
Link
Elon Musk and company take @x handle from its original user. He got zero dollars for it.
* They oh so generously renamed his account to @x12345678998765 instead of deleting it entirely. Any user can rename their account on their own, so Twitter’s ‘offer’ to let him pick a new name was literally nothing.
Followup to comment 237.
Posted by readers of the article:
NOOOOO!
Sinead O’Connor dead at 56.
Mitch McConnell escorted away from cameras after freezing during a news conference
Americans will need a visa to visit Europe starting in 2024. Here’s what you should know.
UFO hearing: Whistleblower testifies government ‘absolutely’ has possession of ‘nonhuman’ craft
100+ Trans Men Signed Up For Miss Italy Pageant After Trans Woman Ban
Elon Musk’s Twitter bans ad showing Republican interrupting couple in bedroom
The podcast has some info about a filter to help SETI (yes, I know, Sabine Hossenfelder dropped the ball on the issue of trans people coming out, but on “nuts and bolts” science she has a good record). It starts ca. 14 minutes in.
https://youtu.be/MMzrCkvQe4
or possibly
https://youtu.be/-MMzrCkvQe4
Canda 2 – 1 Ireland
Spain 5 – 0 Zambia
@247
On a positive note, Ireland scored twice in their 2-1 loss.
Corrupt tories being corrupt
https://youtu.be/V8ww-5P1_1k
Ukraine Update: Intensity increases along front as Ukraine steps up attacks
More Ukraine updates coming soon.
New Republic:
Followup to comment 236.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is wrong on every single point about Ukraine
Followup to comment 250.
More Ukraine updates:
Ohio officer who released K-9 on unarmed Black man fired
@ 236, RFK Jr has advanced from ignoramus to imbecile and now is regressing farther than any human in recorded history. But, he’s gotten the Russian trick, perfected by the god-Emperor Trump totally right.
Time doesn’t matter, actually seeing and hearing something doesn’t matter, video doesn’t matter, what matters is what these drones that follow such mindless automatons say, not what actually happened.
Well, it’s either that or someone’s using a time machine a fucking hell of a lot. Kind of hard to tell which is true, since some Doctor borrowed my time machine.
@ 237, the theory that Rudy can avoid discovery and well, anything he says will be used against him is decidedly odd, as statements to reporters are not statements given to the court under oath. Hence, well more than one public figure actually mentioned that in court and what was said wasn’t going to be used as sworn testimony because of that defect. Only statements admitting, which the figure then simply claimed to be a lie to a reporter.
Which, unlike perjury, is legal.
Given those facts, well, I think that Rudy’s been changing gears without using the clutch for a bit too long and he’s utterly stripped all of the gears in his tiny noggin.
@ 241, could be a TIA, dementia or simply having a senior moment. Get them myself. A less ageist version being, “losing one’s train of thought”. Hate to defend the monster, but I was raised to respect and support the truth.
@ 243, I find it decidedly odd that anyone who can travel around the galaxy and actually make it to a planet inside of a star system is so phenomenally competent to do so, yet so utterly inept as to then slam into a planet that suddenly swerves into their path and stops. Which, of course, planets entirely refrain from doing.
More likely, the idiot kept asking stupid and leading questions in the office and being tired of it all, fed him a lot of bullshit, which he took for fact.
Also odd, asking to speak in private, as anyone with a clearance would not say “in private”, but require a SCIF to discuss things classified. That whole hot mess has pegged my bullshitometer, bent the needle and now I need to install a new one. Given it’s an election year, I’ll probably special order the overload resistant model I have been using for my sarcasometer, as before I ordered that reinforced model, I went through an entire pallet of meters.
Although, had he claimed to have observed non-human bodies, I’d have asked when he was peeping at me at the clothing optional beach.
Now, excuse me, Mork needs help corralling ALF before the cat gets eaten.
From Reginald Selkirk’s #241:
This is shocking. I saw the video. Maybe not a stroke, but something happened. He should have been taken to the hospital and evaluated immediately.
Oh, RIP Sinéad. Didn’t care much for the music, but I did like the style and messages.
I’ll just say that I have a suspicion, given the timing since her son’s death. I understand, don’t agree, but I’m not the designated approving authority for people’s decisions. And I’ve considered that pathway on the anniversary of my wife’s death and for some time after. Recognizing the symptoms, I managed to take corrective action before making such a deficient decision.
SC @ 256, I agree entirely. Could just be a derailed train of thought, could be something significant, such as a TIA.
Better safe than sorry.
Especially were it to happen to me, don’t have many brain cells left to spare!
@birgerjohansson:
Could you elaborate on your link difficulties?
(visible url yet seemingly unable to copy/paste or test in-browser)
I’d asked in #186, which got swamped in all the news.
Re: wzrd1 @ #257…
I promised my late wife that I’d do my best to hang around until all the grandchildren are grown. I take that to be when the youngest makes it to 21. Said youngest is now 2. So while I miss my wife, I want to carry out my promise to her, so I need to survive another 19 years….all of which will be spent in mourning.
From the Guardian (AP):
JFC.
wzrd1
It’s hard when your mind gets that way, but glad you were able to tae corrective action, your comments oten make me smile, and I value that.
whheydt
I am glad you made that promise. I have promised not to commit suicide until Mr J agrees, and he has promised that if my chronic pain becomes uncontrolled he will help. It isn’t alwaays easy, but on balance I do like being alive most of the time. I can’t imagine being in your position, and I respect your strength in honouring your promise.
Totaolly off topic:
Stwerarts Key lime Soda, some mint from the back yard, and some Presidente White rum (olts of rum) makes a really apssapble mohjito.
Oggie @ #263, that sounds delicious.
Re: Jazzlet @ #262…
She had her issues. Chronic fatigue syndrome, occasional bouts of COPD, and–in the end–ALS. We were married for 51 years. So, yes…it’s hard. I also promised to take care of the cats for the rest of their natural lives. They’re 3, so the grandkids getting to be adults is the longer commitment. When people wish me a good day, I sometimes just note that I don’t get good days…just bad days and worse days.
So far as I know, chronic pain is something that the medical field is working on, so you can hope for relief there.
Re; Oggie: Mathom @ #263…
Vanilla ice cream and ginger beer to make a float. I don’t drink (can’t stand the taste of alcohol and would probably be a REALLY morose drunk at this point), so that aspect has no appeal to me.
Oggie: Mathom @ 263, now you’ve got to make one for everyone and attach it in your comment. ;)
Russia Says It’s Building Hibernating Drones That Can Sleep for Weeks Before Attacking
Sounds odd. Considering how Russia is losing ground, the sleeping drones might be captured before they could be activated.
Blinken says Ukraine has taken back 50% of territory that Russia seized
Lubbock NAACP celebrates 75 years of racial desegregation in the military
Reginald Selkirk @ 267, if on the air, it’s “listening”, which means oscillators are running, which means some vulnerabilities inherent to radios present themselves.
So, it’d not take much to analyze a few and equip a drone to fly about locating Russian sleeping drones and give them an explosively rude awakening on the cheap.
@ 269, I’d not be surprised to see a concerted attempt to roll back desegregation. They’re trying to roll everything else back.
AOL – Musk’s app reinstates user who posted ‘child exploitation photos’
Tweet: Matt Binder
SC @256, I saw that moment, or moments, as the man went into still mode. I agree with you. No matter what, McConnell should have been taken to the hospital immediately for tests. The fact that he did not go and get checked out makes me wonder if he actually knows already what is wrong with him.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #272…
If I’m reading the data correctly, he was last elected in 2020, so his term runs to 2026. Probably what needs to be seen is if either he doesn’t run again in ’26 (when he’ll be 85), or if he retires before then. (Or, of course, he dies in office.)
SC @264:
It was delicious.
whheydt @265:
Wife loves their root beer, with a dollop of vanilla extract and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
And I sympathize with the pain. I am there, not constant, but between my broken back and the neck surgery, I end up with nerve pain in strange places.
wzrd1 @266:
Only have the one bottle of soda. Had the one bottle. Only a half bottle of that particular rum. And alcohol does not travel well through the internet tubes. It dissolves the cheez whiz.
Source : https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pattern-of-racist-violence-following-progress-examined-in-new-book-american-whitelash
Thought this was a pretty interesting interview here from PBS Newshour.
Oggie: Mathom @ 274,
True, but it’s a worthy sacrifice.
@217. Reginald Selkirk : As well as the saguro cacti there’s an isue with Palm trees “melting” and breaking and dying in Spain – & probly elsewhere in the worst heatwave areas too.
Palm trees MELT in Spain amid sweltering heatwave as temperatures hit 45C news clip from youtube here – 2 mins 26 secs long.
When famously heat loving (heat adapted) plants like palms and cacti are in trouble, well, gotta wodner about everything else flora~wise.
CNN – Florida ocean temps surge to 100 degrees as mass coral bleaching event is found in some reefs
@278
Fortunately that’s in Fahrenheit.
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look
Anyone interested in the high temperature superconductor field will be wary, given the retractions of Ranga Dias (@232)
Portugal 2 – 0 Vietnam
Nigeria 3 – 2 Australia
USA 1-1 Netherlands
The rarest crocodile species in the world, the critically endangered Philippines crocodile (Crocodylus mindorensis) also known as the Mindoro crocodile, Bukarot and Buwaya is this week’s Endangered Species of the Week. The alternative Mindoro crocodile name is actually somewhat misleading since as well as Mindoro this sepcie sis also found on the Filipino islands of Luzon, Samar, Jolo, Mindanao and others and probably lived throughout the archipelago on all larger islands before human impacts including hunting and habitat loss reduced it to scattered populutions in its present range. Endemic to thae eponymous nation, this species was only recognised as a separate one from its close relative the New Guinea Crocodile in 1989.
Despite these generally fearsome and bad reputation of crocodilians; this relatively small species is shy, hiding in ponds, marshes and watercourses feeding on fsih , small vertebrates and poses no threat to humans. Sadly, as usual, humans are a huge threat to it. These reptiles have been devasted by hunting, habitat loss, dyanmite fishing, drowning as bycatch in fishing nets and more. In fact, so many of these amazing reptiles had been lost that in 2001 there were just a dozen individuals left in the wild.
Remarkably, the story of the Philippine Crocodile shows that humanity can be good too in that the subsequent work of numerous environmentalists from, of course, locally in the Phillipinnes with the Mabuwaya Foundation to as far away as zoos in Britain and Victoria in Oz have helped to improve their situation working to educate and conserve the Buwaya and increasing its population to around 250 in the wild. However, this remains in a very parlous plight and we can only hope that continued efforts do manage to save this harmless and rather surprisingly cute critter.
See : https://www.synchronicityearth.org/crocodile-success-story/
With video here : of eggs hatching and chirping toeacgh other via Zoos Victoria plus thsi oen of a crocodile havinga brush witha brusgh and loving it!
@StevoR #277:
Weird clip. Images from unrelated recent stories. Text-to-speech palm tree story came from the Mirror tabloid. Only other place saying that is Daily Express.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Guardian – “‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record”:
More at the link.
Well, if three fully certified boffins are saying it, that’s good enough for me!
What??!!?! These so-called climate scientists have been giving everyone false reassurance, claiming global warming couldn’t possibly cause the oceans to boil away like on Venus!!!
SC@256,
McConnell’s symptoms sound exactly like a TIA. My guess is that he will take medical advice, but wanted to show he’s OK (which, clearly, he’s not, and should have gone straight for examination).
MSNBC is reporting that two of Trump’s lawyers are meeting with special counsel Jack Smith’s team and have been told to expect an indictment, possibly as soon as today.
Reginald Selkirk@244,
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the comments are stuffed with transphobic hate.
Some related links:
Guardian – “‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president”:
The article notes:
He didn’t so much lead the department as corruptly and illegally squat there. From the compilation of court decisions about federal agencies’ actions under Trump:
DeSmog – “Expert Panel Warns Journalists of Coordinated Climate Disinformation Campaigns”:
Guardian – “Jetting off to the sun? The adverts are selling you a ticket to climate disaster”:
Peter Kalmus in the Guardian – “Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so now”:
He didn’t so much lead the department
The bureau, I meant.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US liveblog. From there:
Biden is speaking now.
Followup to SC 2289.
We are officially on indictment watch
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on GOP approved Barbies
Republicans are targeting food aid … again.
Link
Reginald Selkirk @ 280, totally a real thing. Of course, the room conditions was that of the solar corona and the low end temperature was freezing – well, the freezing point of iron.
I’ve been taking such claims with a wee grain of salt – the size of Gibraltar, as every damned one fell through.
The heat is harmless, BTW, not a single thing on Venus has died from the heat. Indeed, everything under those conditions is immortal, as nothing has yet been detected to be rotting.
Trust me, it doesn’t need to make sense for the MAGA crowd. Maybe it’s their masters simply preparing them for hell…
Lynna, OM @ 296, well, didn’t Jesus tell his disciples to make the children suffer?
Ow! It’s a wet trout, not a frozen one!
Shit, that just reminded me, I forgot to defrost the fish for tonight’s dinner…
Re: KG @ #288….
I haven’t read the article yet, but there is a headline on the BBC that McConnell has had several falls “recently”. The only thing that comes to my mind is that that is what happened with my wife before she was diagnosed with ALS.
A few links related to KG’s #113:
Guardian editorial – “The Guardian view on the Spanish election: a good day when voters said ‘¡No pasarán!’ to the far right”:
I believe Meloni is in the US meeting with Biden today.
Guardian analysis – “Vox party’s hardline attitudes appear to have turned off Spanish voters”:
Hoy en El País podcast – “¿Se le ha perdido el miedo a Vox?”:
(Patricia Simón’s book Miedo looks interesting.)
Guardian liveblog:
SC @300, that is good news!
In other news: For the fourth time in four months, Donald Trump is begging Congress to rescue him from his legal problems. That won’t, and can’t, happen.
Trump does not know how the federal government works. He is incapable of learning, and he thinks he can bully his way to the outcome he desires.
Oh dear, this is not good, but the “moment of confusion” might be overly hyped:
Link
Suicide Mission.
I am not a lawyer and I knew, back in the 1990s, that Trump was a really difficult client for lawyers. When the shit started to go down during his administration (which is to say, about a month in (and calling it an administration is stretching the definition of administration to new heights)), and he kept telling everyone which laws and rules and regulations he was violating, again and again and again, it became obvious to me — again, a non-lawyer — that when — not if, but when — the shit he was pulling would lead to legal troubles, and then, after he lost (did he get tired of winning?) the election, even I could see the obvious legal implications (even before the whole Presidential Records Act and Espionage Act fiascos) and the exposure for indictment. How in the name of the seven levels of purple pluperfect hell could there still be lawyers out there who think any of these cases can be won or think that Trump will actually listen to his law team?
(sorry about that second sentence but it is difficult to write anything about Trumps moral/ethical/legal imbroglios without going into run-on mode)
https://www.wonkette.com/p/joe-biden-wont-let-texas-gov-greg
Kyiv Independent – “Putin attempts to bribe African leaders with free grain after pulling out of grain deal”:
Oggie @303, and that’s all in addition to the fact that Trump has a history of not paying his lawyers. Although, he may be doing a bit better in that department because he is constantly fundraising based on the indictments. That gives him money sucked from his gullible cult followers. He uses that to pay his legal bills.
One would think that Trump would get a clue when everyone is refusing to work with him.
If you see an invasive hammerhead worm, don’t cut it in half. Here’s how to kill them.
Wonkette: Biden Will Help The Hague Hold Russia Accountable For Vile War Crimes In Ukraine
From text quoted by SC in comment 305:
I would not trust Putin to honor that promise.
Raskin slams ‘preposterous’ idea that Biden drug control strategy should include ‘faith’
Houston school libraries are now being converted to ‘disciplinary centers’
I’m amazed that I seem to be more concerned about Mitch McConnell’s health than his colleagues are and I genuinely hate him.
So someone in Florida decided that a reference to “spin-the-bottle”, in an Arthur book (Arthur’s Birthday) is going to damage children’s souls (no, seriously, under the section of the form “What do you believe might be the result of a student using this material”, Bruce Friedman, the idiot making the complaint, wrote, “DAMAGED SOULS”) and must therefore be removed from the library.
So if they are too young to get the reference, no harm done. If they are old enough to get the reference, the ‘harm’ is already done.
On the bright side, the portion of the form that asks if the material violates the anti-obscenity law, Freidman checked ‘no.’ I guess that shows at least one brain cell was fired.
Guardian liveblog:
Guardian liveblog:
Guardian – “A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district”:
This is criminal.
@ 311, you missed a few critical facets of the attack on the libraries.
First, no borrowing after school, as that would be interfering with the detentions. Second, borrowing is on the honor system, so the books will go by rapid attrition and we can guarantee that missing books shan’t be replaced.
What they need is a few barrels of pine tar and a truckload of feathers for the new superintendent, to be generously applied by the local parents.
More charges for Trump in the classified documents case. Including obstruction. He had demanded a “server be deleted” that had surveillance footage on it and more.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23888938/superseding-indictment-in-classified-documents-case.pdf
I wonder if his strategy is to accumulate so many charges and cases to deplete the availability of any attorney willing to represent him, then plead that he has no counsel and hope that the case simply goes away?
NYT
Re: #315
The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment (full text) that named the maintenance worker, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case.
The revised indictment also added three serious charges against Mr. Trump — attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count, the 32nd, under the Espionage Act stemming from a classified national security document he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
Some podcast episodes:
SWAJ – “We Are in a Lawsuit, in Texas, Over Free Speech!”:
Michael and Us – “#444 – He’s Surely Alive (w/ Alex Shephard)”:
Decoding the Gurus – “Mick West & Eric Weinstein: UFO Tango”:
“The Science and the Art of Gurometry”:
wzrd1 @318:
Are public defenders available for Federal Court cases?
Bollocks!
Just got a notification from my credit union of a data security breach. Fortunately nothing important was compromised, just my name, DOB, social security number and possibly my member number. So, my hat size remains secure information.
This, from a data transfer software package that CISA informed them was compromised. Apparently, data at rest and in transit need not be encrypted…
I’ve taken the additional effort to filter the stream of profanity out of this posting.
OK, quick check, CL0P, linked to FIN11, linked to Russian residence crime group. Financial crimes is their specialty.
Color me annoyed.
But, if I need backups of all of my information, at least I know that I can ask either Russia or China for a copy of my private information.
Hell, might even get a security clearance from both nations as well.*
*The OPM investigator during my last background check’s Q&A really hated that joke. Comforting to know that some things aren’t subject to change, such as investigators having entirely no sense of humor.
Oggie: Mathom @ 321, yes, they are. They have to be, as it’s a criminal case.
Although, given that being an attorney for Trump is effectively career suicide, I can see a PD trying to beg off being assigned.
Glad they were able to put a cap on the damage.
wzrd1 @323
I had one investigator who was, along with me, very amused that the biggest flag on my questionnaire was that neither of the colleges I attended existed. And neither had gone out of business. But the simple explanation that Hagerstown Junior College was now Hagerstown Community College, and that Franklin Pierce College was now Franklin Pierce University. We both had a good laugh at that.
House Republicans Vote to Block VA from Changing Motto to Include Female Veterans
Barriers put up around Georgia courthouse as possible Trump indictments loom
Reginald Selkirk @ 327, I honestly think that the GOP is doing its utmost to sabotage our Armed Forces, to at a minimum, deplete the ranks of female service members and all minorities. That’d make the military utterly non-mission capable.
Maybe they’ll do us the honor of being in our new Surrender Brigade.
Ukraine Update: Ukraine counteroffensive is real and it’s picking up steam
Webb telescope finds water far closer to young star than anticipated, suggesting the possibility of planets with water being able to form in the habitable zone of the star.
PDS 70 is 370 light years away, the star being around 5.4 million years old, its mass being 0.76 solar masses. It currently has two planets confirmed, both super Jupiters estimated at 7 and 3 jovian masses, respectively. The largest having a 120 year orbit.
Small dust grains have been detected, which is protecting the water from being chemically dismantled by the radiation of the T Tauri star.
Young stars emit far less than more mature stars, as an example, our own sun increases output at approximately 10% per billion years. So, there is a real chance for astronomers to observe the formation of rocky earth type planets.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/world/webb-telescope-water-planetary-system-scn/index.html
Followup to comment 330.
Posted by readers of the Ukraine Update:
CNBC:
Reuters:
Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints
New York Times:
Followup to 318 and 319.
Link
Posted by readers of the article:
Taylor Swift concert attendees give significant signature on seismometer. As in 2.3 Richter in time with the music.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/entertainment/taylor-swift-seismic-activity/index.html
I wonder if seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, who reported the findings is going to get a bill for a concert ticket. ;)
Trump’s lawyers are complaining that discussing classified information at a SCIF with Trump is inconvenient and want to discuss it with Trump at his various homes.
You know, basically repeat the offenses that have landed in him court.
Having to use a SCIF is inconvenient to commanders and political leaders, but they use a SCIF anyway because it’s the law and the practice protects classified information. Apparently, the god-Emperor is far beyond such silly mortal things like laws.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/politics/classified-information-special-counsel-trump-team/index.html
That said, the POTUS has a portable SCIF wherever he goes. The location checked in advance and cleared, the equipment brought in to secure the site and shield it. If Trump wants to spend that kind of money, the judge may allow that. The locations would then be prohibited guests for the duration of said SCIF usage, have a guard with a full machine gun and an intrusion prevention device set from hell to ensure nobody wanders near. Plus additional fencing.
Figure around $10 million per location he wants to use, plus security. All, at the court’s expense. A serious budget buster for the judicial branch!
There is a claim made by a Korean team that they have created a sample of a material that displays supercpnductivity in ambient temperatures.
I will wait for the experiment to be replicated before I start celebrating.
Randy Meissner, founding member of the Eagles dies of COPD. He was 77.
…also, thank you, tobacco industry for destroying the lungs of millions of people. Meissner is just one of them.
The tory client media will probably not bring up the threat of Gulf Stream collapse, not with idiot PM Rishi Sunak using the cost of changing energy systems as an argument to scare voters away from the opposition.
I do not know about the media in USA. Theoretically the oligarchs do not want the economy to collapse along with everything else but the US conservative media has achieved “epistemic closure” – unwanted information will just not be made available.
Top ten Middle-Earth misconceptions https://youtu.be/pciR1eEIWoQ
or
https://youtu.be/pciR1eElWoQ
Some good news, at last.
“Terrestrial ecosystems can significantly offset human carbon emissions, finds new analysis ”
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-terrestrial-ecosystems-significantly-offset-human.html
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Lynna @ #330, the quote from Hersh’s “source” is truly funny.
A US official gratuitously snipes at an African country while Putin meets with African leaders? How coincidental.
@wzrd1 #337:
Tweet: Jackie Caplan-Auerbach
You’ll notice that CNN caled it a “2.3 magnitude earthquake” full stop.
Sky News (relayed by MSN) initially said Richter (in Google’s cache), then fixed it.
Guardian – “‘Our biggest challenge is simply to exist’: atheist society fights for legal recognition in God-fearing Kenya”:
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain @ 346, when the report uses Richter scale, do we refer to it instead by a different unit? Do I report King’s speed because miles per hour isn’t SI units? Many here even relay mph, with SI conversion.
Guess it’s wrong, I’ll report all miles per hour as King’s Speed units.
Or simply not bother relaying. So, stay with flying saucers are real, because someone might criticize reporting that which was reported about actual information and just stick with the myth.
The earth can’t shake, because units are misreported and disputed, so regardless, it’s nothing.
And the Seine will remain forever toxic, because someone might criticize a unit, reality be damned.
And we wonder why Trump is doing so we, despite new charges that are of course, disputed and shouldn’t be reported due to disputes, all hail the god-Emperor! Long may he wane!
OK, if CNN reports something in units called mugwumps, I’ll still report the units as mugwumps and maybe, if I really feel up to the gymnastics of converting odd units of measure to SI, I will. On bad dyslexia days, I’ll refrain from doing so, as my results are equally as likely to become as fictitious as flying saucer reports that have space aliens aboard. Because, planets swerve into their path and stop, those lousy driving planets. :P:p:P:p
Now, off to wrangle something annoying – my bank. Experian can’t identify me with the information that the credit union provided to them, so the identity protection plan that the credit union purchased for me due to their breach isn’t available to me.
Should be right up there in fun with dealing with the IRS and having a root canal.
Guardian liveblog:
<a href=”https://news.yahoo.com/leprosy-cases-central-florida-account-125918765.html:>Leprosy cases in central Florida account for nearly 20% of national cases
Guardian liveblog:
Dmitri on Twitter/whatever:
Video at the link.
“A Ukrainian plate. A Ukrainian plate. A Ukrainian plate.” That’s right, you thug. They know what country they’re in, and are waiting you out.
“We’re replacing their tarmac…”
Fair’s fair, given Russians tore up that tarmac. And everything else that defines a civilized society along the way.
President Joe Biden doing his job:
– took new steps to protect renters and boost housing supply
– announced new efforts to address methane pollution
– unveiled new measures designed to increase coverage of mental health care
– established a new national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley
– announced new steps to improve access to online services for Americans with disabilities
– provided student debt relief to thousands of students who’d been ripped off.
– took steps to begin sharing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court in The Hague
– signed an executive order that shifted decisions on “the prosecution of serious military crimes, including sexual assault, to independent military attorneys, taking that power away from victims’ commanders”
– announced new plans to protect workers and communities from extreme heat, and also issued “a hazard alert to tell employers what they should do to protect workers; help ensure employees are aware of their rights, such as protections against retaliation; and highlight steps the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has to try to ensure worker safety.”
Shaun Walker in the Guardian – very interesting – “Removing statues and renaming streets: Odesa cuts out Russia”:
Cartoon: Aliens address Congress!
New indictment in classified documents case adds more nails to Trump’s coffin
Link
Leaving Florida, or refusing to visit Florida … it’s become a thing (except perhaps for mosquitoes and leprosy):
Link
In Florida’s local malaria outbreak, forgotten bite led to surprise hospitalization
Leprosy cases in central Florida account for nearly 20% of national cases. See Reginald’s comment 350.
Followup to comment 354.
As Texas removes worker heat protections, Biden bolsters them
Wonkette: “What Does Fox News Have To Say About Trump Trying To Destroy Evidence?”
@358: Many Republicans have put themselves in thrall to Trump, and they don’t seem to be learning anything new.
Re: birgerjohansson @ #340, #341…
It’s possible to develop COPD without ever smoking.
About the Richter Magnitude scale vs. Moment Magnitude scale. Charles Richter developed his earthquake magnitude scale on a very specific design of seismograph. It was later found to fail to record properly at very high magnitudes (over R8, IIRC) and the Moment Magnitude scale was developed to correct for that deficiency. So for any ‘quake below about M8, Moment magnitude and Richter magnitude will be the same value. Thus for a M2.3, it really doesn’t matter which scale you use. The results will be the same.
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #351…
To the best of my knowledge, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25. The reason it gets cited as Jan. 7 (and not that long ago was cited as Jan. 6) is that that church is still using the Julian calendar. So the Ukrainian church isn’t “moving” the date of the holiday, rather it is updating its calendar to allow for the correction made creating the Gregorian calendar.
(Side note… George Washington was born on Feb. 11, 1732. So why do we record his birthday as Feb. 22? It’s because the UK and its colonies were still on the Julian calendar when he was born. After the UK and colonies switched to the Gregorian calendar in Sept. 1752, he had his birth date changed to keep his age the same. Hence, Feb. 22.
On any Linux or unix system, run the command “cal 09 1752” to see the changeover.)
Whheydt @ 363.
Tragically, that is true. My assumption is based on “what unnwcessary shit is most likely to have killed him?” not an actual scrutiny of his health history.
.
The Scathing Atheist 545
Sound of Barbenheimer
(also, White Power Point)
https://youtu.be/tfgPjtaX5Qo
@wzrd1 #348:
Uh, what? The seismologist herself said it’s a common misconception. I thought that worth amplifying.
CNN was correct. Your summary of CNN added the misconception.
SkyNews fixed their wording, presumably after someone informed them. They didn’t rant and forgo all seizmic reporting out of spite (sarcastically or otherwise).
Richter’s was the “Local Magnitude Scale”, ML (I can’t do a subscript L). There are a bunch of scales with other subscripts, situationally useful measuring different things.
“Magnitude” suffices. The “Moment Magnitude Scale”, Mw (subscripted) or M. Wikipedia: “the authoritative magnitude scale for ranking earthquakes […] more directly related to the energy of an earthquake than other scales, and does not saturate—that is, it does not underestimate magnitudes as other scales do in certain conditions.”
USGS – Earthquake Magnitude Policy
PennState GeoSci – Magnitude and Energy
^ Details Richter’s methodology. Versus modern “seismic moment” (M0 subbed), in unintuitive “newton meters” units for academics. Then converting that to “moment magnitude” (Mw) for general consumption.
Walking back the myth-affirming, reality-damning, trump-worshipping modest proposal? Okay then. Sorry about your bank.
The Navajo Suffered From Nuclear Testing. Oppenheimer Doesn’t Tell Our Story
whheydt @364, thank you for that explanation.
In other news, Ukraine Update: Russian officer at the front explains why Ukraine is winning
NBC News:
The strong bipartisan vote for the legislation in the Senate could give it momentum as the two chambers next look to settle their differences.
Politico:
Republican leaders punted their agriculture and FDA spending bill until September — a setback for their hopes of unity.
So that’s how that’s going.
NBC News:
Washington Post:
NBC News:
Mission Undoable: The plan to erase Trump’s server was better than any Tom Cruise stunt
Yep, this looks like more unethical actions on the part of a Supreme Court Justice:
Link
Illegal lab with infectious diseases and dead mice busted in California
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
Extreme Heat Causes I-94 Freeway To Buckle In Minnesota
World Cup Day 9: England wins and loses at the same time
Eric Swalwell Called Kevin McCarthy a ‘P-ssy’ on the House Floor and a Hilarious Fight Broke Out
Hirsh Singh joins crowded GOP presidential field
Vanity project
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #381…
We have had two presidents who were engineers. Sadly, neither did a particularly stellar job of it. Both, however, had really good post-presidential careers doing and supporting public works.
With “coward” you avoid all that irrational defensive association between vulvas and lack of courage. “Submissive” felt off but I wanted to use it.
‘X’ logo installed atop Twitter building, spurring San Francisco to investigate permit violation
Netball World Cup 2023: England beat Barbados 90-29 in Pool B opener/a>
@371 Typical Catholic church: preying on parishioners rather than praying for them.
whheydt @ #365:
I get the point you’re making, but it’s “cited” as January 7 because it is in fact celebrated on January 7. It’s January 7 in Russia, Ukraine, and here. That’s the date it’s celebrated. The countries don’t use the Julian calendar.
“Ukraine has moved its official Christmas holiday to 25 December in a break with the Russian Orthodox church, which celebrates it on 7 January” is completely accurate. Zelenskyy signed a bill moving the national observance of the holiday from January 7 to December 25. Those are actual dates. It would have been celebrated officially on January 7, 2024, but now will be celebrated on December 25, 2023.
There was a discussion about the calendars and the switch on another thread here not that long ago, which I’m too sleepy to find.
Re; SC (Salty Current) @ #387…
It appears to be a difference between the civil calendar and the liturgical calendar. My question would be…has the church in Ukraine switched calendars, or simply adjusted its liturgical calendar for the accumulated difference?
whheydt, easy enough to look.
https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/away-from-moscow-orthodox-church-of-ukraine-switches-to-new-calendar/
whheydt@388, John Morales@389,
Interestingly (well, to me anyway!) the switch is of the liturgical calendar only (Ukraine, like all countries with dominant Eastern Orthodox churches, has switched to the Gregorian calendar as the official state calendar) and is to the “Revised Julian Calendar” (or “New Julian Calendar”), devised by a Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković in 1923. Most Eastern Orthodox churches have made the switch, but the Russian has not. The Revised Julian uses a similar adjustment to the Gregorian, but not the same one (because that was brought in by the Roman Catholic Church, which would never do): in the Gregorian, years ending in “00” are not leap years unless divisible by 400, while in the Revised Julian, they are not leap years unless the remainder when divided by 900 is either 200 or 600. The Revised Julian seems a bit more clunky, but is slightly more accurate (relative to the actual length of the mean solar day and solar year) in the long run, but the first future year on which the two disagree is 2800 CE, which is* a Gregorian but not a Revised Julian leap year. I worked out (can’t find my calculations right now) that if the Gregorian calendar was adjusted so years divisible by 3200 are not leap years, it would be pretty close to as accurate as allowed by the movement of the earth itself (variability in the rotation on its axis varies more than that of its path around the sun – and melting of the icecaps will probably be the largest factor in changing its rotational speed over the next millennium).
*I say “is” rather than “will be” because these rea facts about two abstract systems, which remain true even if neither the human species nor the earth exists at that time.
SC@387,
With regard to Washington’s d.o.b., there’s also the complication that from 1155 to 1751, the year began on 25th March in England, Wales, Ireland, and the English/British colonies (Scotland made that switch in 1600). So as a youth, he’d have said he was born on 11th Feb 1731! Whether that change was made retrospective, I don’t know.
Fort Worth said no to atheists’ banners. Sorry, their free speech rights count, too
Judge Dismisses Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” Defamation Lawsuit Against CNN
I am not sure that a comparison to Hitler would damage Trump among his followers.
Putin says Russia withdrew army from Kyiv because it was “asked”
Who’s funding the Ohio Issue 1 campaigns? Donors from Illinois, D.C. and California
@ 375, I am very, very confused.
“Alito told Rivkin that he holds himself to higher ethical and disclosure standards than are mandated by law.”
After saying, ‘“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”’
Are laws in the US now flowing from other than Congress, which Alito just denied had the authority to enact legislation regulating the Supreme Court? Do said laws flow naturally out of a Keebler hollow tree?
Or is he just completing his assassination of Themis, forgetting that she also holds a sword?
whheydt @ 365, thanks for the reminder! I had entirely forgotten to install the cal package.
Package ncal for Debian based systems.
RFK Jr.’s latest stunt for attention has a dark undertone
Followup to comment 398.
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
The list was being used at a central Minnesota fair to enrage republican Minnesotans.
Re 390:
English Wikipedia doesn’t mention any Eastern Orthodox churches using the standard Gregorian calendar. According to Finnish Wikipedia, however, the EO churches of Finland and Estonia adopted Gregorian calendar in the 1920s, under political pressure from the newly independent national governments, apparently just before the Revised Julian calendar was introduced in 1923.
At this time, the national churches in question also separated themselves from the Russian Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Moscow), which was in administrative chaos under early Soviet persecution. However, the tiny EO churches of Finland and Estonia didn’t become fully independent, like the church of Ukraine just recently did, but rather joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople as semi-independent branches. The EO church of Estonia was subsequently annexed by the Russian Orthodox church under Soviet occupation. This annexation was reversed in 1990s, but then the Estonian church then adopted the Revised Julian calendar. Thus, the EO church of Finland seems to be the only one using Gregorian calendar.
(Finland is overwhelmingly a Lutheran country, where only around 2 % of the population were Orthodox in early 20th century. However, during Russian era the Orthodox church had become loosely affiliated with the autonomous Finnish national government, on a roughly equal footing with the Lutheran church, and this situation was preserved during independence.)
Speaking of anti-Catholic sentiment, there was also a Lutheran “improved” version of the Gregorian calendar, developed in Germany in the 17th century, that was adopted in Sweden in 1753 to replace the Julian calendar. This calendar remained in use (for both secular and ecclesiastic purposes) well into 19th century, both in Sweden proper and in Finland, which were separated from each other in 1809. The only practical difference was the date of Easter (lol), which on some years differed from both Julian and standard Gregorian calendar. In 1845, Finland remained awkwardly as the only country in the world celebrating Easter according to this “Improved calendar”.
They got that one wrong. Covid is still here. I had it one month ago. A friend of mine is still sick with it. Fortunately we are vaccinated.
Lawsuit asks Ohio Supreme Court to block abortion rights measure from November ballot
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #394…
One might well wonder who “asked”. St. Javelin, perhaps?
Ukraine shows off a sea drone that can wipe out Russian ships and is ‘faster than anything in the Black Sea’
Joe Rogan amplifies conspiracy theory that nuclear tests were faked
Russian ammo depot explodes in occupied Crimea’s Kozacha Bay — HUR
Ukraine Update: Russia doing its ‘counterattack out in the open’ thing all over again
Sweden 5 – 0 Italy
France 2 – 1 Brazil
Jamaica 1 – 0 Panama
Link.
More at the link.
Astounding Diversity of Giant Viruses Discovered in Massachusetts Forest
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #406…
That’s kind of funny in a way. There is a claim that after the George Pal War of the Worlds came out, the studio was visited by the FBI demanding to know where they’d gotten footage of a nuclear explosion, since all of them were classified. That footage was actually done on a sound stage after getting (unclassified) descriptions of the real thing. The “mushroom cloud’ seen in the movie is about 50 feet tall. So…it was done so realistically that it fooled US intelligence.
‘Undermining the military’: Biden takes aim at Republicans’ ongoing national security threat
https://www.wonkette.com/p/right-wing-incels-lose-their-shit
Ukrainian Armed Forces announces successful strike on Chonhar Bridge
US to transfer Skydio autonomous drones to Ukraine
‘We’ve made a mistake’: Frisco police mistakenly pull over family headed to a basketball tournament with guns drawn
WaPo:
Trump PAC has spent more than $40 million on legal costs this year for himself, others
By Josh Dawsey, Devlin Barrett and Spencer S. Hsu / July 29, 2023
Seen as meme on facebook today :
Plus an added bit in separate meme :
2nd Quote also by Armando Sousa here – not sure who said it first.
StevoR, boiling is 100C.
It’s stupid to call it boiling.
(Also, there’s no pillaging, can’t pillage the environment, it’s all around us)
^ Huh. Hashtag symbol # not showing up here? Seems not.
For info on the Saving the Planet without the Bullshit book see :
https://www.amazon.com.au/Saving-Planet-Without-Bullshit-Climate/dp/1838954627
Plus :
https://www.ft.com/content/14882cbd-c355-4298-80eb-4d586bc42a35
With the author’s wikipage here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assaad_W._Razzouk
StevoR, it’s the consumers who consume the bulk fossil fuels who did it as much as the purveyors. The industrial revolution. The people who have gas heaters and/or stoves. The people who burn coal to keep warm. The people who drive cars, who go on holidays. Who watch drag racing. Who go on cruises. Etc.
If people didn’t buy it and consume it, $Big Fossil& would not suck it up and sell it.
(Assaad is mistaken)
@420. John Morales :Metaphors & turns of phrase, how do they work again?
Hint : when Ppeople say “boiling” in terms of say weather & climate, they usually aren’t literally meaning above 100 degrees Celsius.
Also tell that to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who I was quoting.
Sometimes John Morales your ability to miss the point is just staggering.
That reads a little oddly – because surely those heterosexual men need partners, who would be, if I’ve got the terminology right – women. But I guess Republicans think of those women as having sex done to them by heterosexual men.
@ 420
Juan Ramón this presupposes we are at the end of the era to which Guterres refers.
As usual, you confidently make an error in logic.
(Runaway greenhouse effect is a thing – at least in theory.)
So, at last we have an explanation for all those Bigfoot sightings!
@ 422 John Morales
This “argument” is downright idiotic. It’s like saying the people who spend the coin are responsible for the queen’s (king’s) head being on the coin. The masses must trade in the currency provided lest they go to great efforts to live off the grid.
And Mano recently posted about where that can lead:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/07/27/the-need-to-balance-fear-with-hope
You really don’t think at all before posting do you? Just throw some contrarian troll shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Pretty fucking badly, in this particular case. Enough to call them out.
So, according to you, sometimes they literally are meaning above 100 degrees Celsius. Or centigrade, as it’s more usually called.
Feel free to tell him yourself.
And sometimes StevoR your ability to miss the point is entirely predictable.
Nope. That’s a stupid claim.
As usual, you are all bluster and no substance.
Yes, and one inch above the ground is on the way to Mars.
—
That’s a particularly stupid attempted analogy.
And that’s even more stupid.
And that’s even more stupid.
Bah.
KG @ 424
Yup. Objects have no agency.
Live from Detroit- God Awful Movies explores the cinematic droppings of L. Ron Hubbard
“GAM414 Battlefield Earth”
https://youtu.be/7D-OS9zH510
birgerjohansson, the movie was made in 2000, Hubbard died in 1986.
So, no. He made no cinematic droppings of it, it was John Travolta who did.
Pentagon will buy Starlink terminals for Ukraine that Elon Musk won’t be able to disconnect
@ 428. John Morales :
Except everyone who isn’t deliberately being hyper-pedantic understands them and finds them nicely descriptive and evocative so, I disagree that they work “badly” & reckon they work pretty well.
I thought Celsius was the norm there but whatever. Same diff.
Actually if we want to get really pedantic it isn’t specified as to what substance is boiling and, for example, Gallium boils at 29.7666 °C, (85.5799 °F) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium) so.. yeah, it could literally be boiling temperatures just not usually for H20 – air pressure depending! ;-)
Overseas votes have shifted one seat from the PSOE to te PP in Spain’s election. According to the Guardian, this means either party is likely to need the support of at least one Junts (centrist Catalan independence party) vote to form a government, and its leader, Carles Puigdemont, has made clear that he would make demands neither party is likely to concede – so a new election looks most likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Centigrade_vis-%C3%A0-vis_Celsius
Germany 1 – 2 Colombia
South Korea 1 – 0 Morocco
Norway 6 – 0 Philippines
Switzerland 0 – 0 New Zealand
Germany Colombia was a treat. And what a first goal by the 18 years old Colombian talent. It’s was definitely one the best goals in the tournament.
WaPo:
Lifesaving HIV program faces a new threat: U.S. abortion politics
By Dan Diamond / July 29, 2023
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on the hapless Ron DeSantis
Link
Followup to comment 375.
Link
Give Alito time, he’ll proclaim from the bench that Congress is now allowed to legislate.
There’s too great of arriving at another deadlocked Supreme Court, perhaps we need a handful of new Justices appointed.
Apple’s App Store can’t accept the new name for Twitter’s iOS app because of minimum character requirements.
Toot:
Misc Replies:
Elon Musk’s New Flashing X Sign Is Infuriating Neighbors: ‘It’s Hard to Describe How Bright It Is’
John Morales @ 432
They shopped around the film concept forever, no studios wanted to touch it, for some reason 😊
Tomh @ 439
The fuckers are capable of sabotaging absolutely everything.
@ 444, seeing that sign at night, if that were across from my apartment, I suspect that that building would suffer an odd industrial accident involving 5 gallons of benzene and a gallon of toluene and the power feed to the building.
While, of course, I’m busily filing litigation with the courts for his actions that deny me to ability to enjoy the rights to property that I’m paying for – to wit, the ability to sleep in a bedroom bathed with enough light to land a space shuttle.
Followed by an FAA complaint as to a hazard to aerial navigation by an excessively bright white light directed omnidirectionally.
Tie it up in legal delays, a serious toluene spill right into the natural gas entries to the building.
Yeah, I take losing sleep very, very seriously. I’ve actually had a battalion commander issue a direct order to not only allow me to sleep, but under no circumstances allow anything to wake me up.
Russia Takes Its Ukraine Information War Into Video Games
New York Times link.
Propaganda is appearing in Minecraft and other popular games and discussion groups as the Kremlin tries to win over new audiences.
wzrd1 @446, I know that you are stating a hypothetical, possibly as hyperbole or as a joke, but it sounds like you are making a threat to physically damage property. Please don’t do that on this thread. Thank you.
No longer a “Special Operation”? Is it now “an armed conflict”?
Link
A Drag Queen Is Taking Over The Christian And Gospel Charts On ITunes
https://www.wonkette.com/p/flamy-grant-drag-christian-album
And it’s all thanks to wacky MAGA preacher Sean Feucht!
Link
@ 448, I never suggested that I would do such a thing!
Only a suggestion of a coincidence. And yes, a joke.
There are far, far, far better ways to ensure that business came down, all involving regulatory authorities and courts and as final as collapsing a building.
With zero risk to people nearby.
Besides, I’d be more likely to program a small fleet of custom drones with Muskrat’s mug programmed as primary target and even brighter lights flashing at him 24/7.
Given my budget where I’m wondering how to purchase a can of coffee, yeah, that ain’t happening either.
In new child labor efforts to bring the US below developing nation levels, the US Department of Labor reported major losses in prevention of child labor in the US.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/economy/child-labor-louisiana-texas/index.html
I suggest raising the fines tenfold. Erase the profit and produce a loss for each hiring, the incentive will be erased.
Although, I’m irate enough to also want some vengeance, say, 10000 hours of mother-in-law service for corporate officers wink and nodding the practice along.*
*I do, in person, use mother-in-law jokes a lot. I also qualify them with the truth, I’ve had an non-human life, as I had an exceptionally nice mother-in-law. Lost her to breast cancer, complicated by a lack of self-advocacy causing her to ignore the symptoms “to not bother the doctor” until it was stage 4. She became a life lesson, rather than a treasured friend.
I really do prefer friends. Treasures are transitory, friends are to a fair extent, lasting.
The first time I met my mother-in-law was when my wife and I were dating, of course. Dolly was cooking up some collard greens, which I’ve never had. She was shocked when she served up a sample for this Philly boy and I really needed a second spoon. I do love my green, leafy greens.
I still keep cans of collard, mustard and turnip greens on the shelf, for when I can’t prepare such fresh.
Standard recipe there. Garlic, onion, to taste red pepper, some olive oil. Saute, then add in water and greens, add chicken bouillon or a buttload of chicken stock with fat to neutralize bitter flavors, boil till done, call it a day.
The chemistry and heat do all the serious work.
Link
WTF? Did we all travel back in time? Nope. The Washington Post has a report detailing that Trump demanded withholding Ukraine aid unless everyone and their mother proceeds with an investigation into Hunter Biden, (same demand that led to Trump’s first impeachment … but this is Trump spewing the same sludge on July 29, 2023.)
Washington Post link
In other news related to Russia:
And this news is similar:
For fun: a combat kitty video: https://twitter.com/NafoOnline/status/1685406811845754880
Space dot com news item on how nearby exoplanet AU Microscopii b is getting its atmosphere observably blown away by its young, volatile, red dwarf sun’s flares here :
https://www.space.com/hubble-telescope-sees-angry-star-evaporating-planet
Plus on how, once disturbed, our planet’s Climate – notably the Hadley Cell circulation – will take centuries if not longer to recover even if we can reduce the current CO2 levels dramatically here :
https://www.space.com/carbon-removal-does-not-reverse-climate-change-effects
Whilst in better news Aeolus is dead and gone -but went out ina good historic way :
https://www.space.com/europe-aeolus-wind-satellite-reentry
On the not so good front, the space dot com headline about the eruptive actvity from Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks here :
https://www.space.com/comet-grows-horns-volcanic-eruption
City-size comet headed toward Earth ‘grows horns’ after massive volcanic eruption
is sensationalised and misleading in that this comet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12P/Pons%E2%80%93Brooks ) is heading for its perihelion and will NOT approach Earth that closely – in fact being over an Astronomical Unit (SunEarth distance) away and no threat to us at all.
Noty sure about the “volcanic”part here although Iguess the geyser type activity counts -hardly “magna”in the erathly usualsense of the word and as for seeing its “horns” well, it is not visible without optical aid almost certainly still requiring a telescope to observe it at all being around 12th magnitude in brightness. (6th mag being the usual limit of good vision in a dark sky.) Worse for me anyhow, us mob in the Southern Hemisphere will be completely out of luck since Comet Pons-Brooks is currently in the northerrn circumpolar cosntellation of Draco. See a more reasonably headlined and a better article on the outburst of this periodic comet here :
https://www.astronomy.com/observing/comet-pons-brooks-just-had-an-outburst-heres-how-to-find-it/
As always, beware misleading media hype and sensationalism. (It’s probly too cloudy out anyhow..)
^ Typo fix for clarity. Could swear the computer switches letters around on me after I’ve typed them, sigh :
Not sure about the “volcanic”part here although I guess the cometary geyser type activity counts – hardly “magma” in the earthly usual sense of the word and, as for seeing its “horns”, well, Comet 12/P Pons -Brooks is not visible without optical aid..
Canada 0 – 4 Australia
Ireland 0 – 0 Nigeria
Costa Rica 1 – 3 Zambia
Japan 4 – 0 Spain
Would that we’d see more like this. Scientist thanks PubPeer contributor for finding error in a paper released the previous day, promises swift correction.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/5E357AE05565E8A0810B88188BD0FD
This is how we can keep having nice things.
Australian Space Agency Unravels Mystery of Unidentified Seashore Object
Reginald Selkirk @461
That’s what they want you to think. : )
Fulton County DA says work is done in Trump probe and ‘we’re ready to go’
By Sara Murray and Jason Morris, CNN / Mon July 31, 2023
GOP splits further over Tuberville’s military blockade as it stretches through summer
Afghanistan: Taliban burn ‘immoral’ musical instruments
Musk threatens to sue researchers who documented the rise in hateful tweets
Another day, another way in which Mush demonstrates he has no clue what “free speech” even means.
Trump in full trumpian escalation mode when it comes to Jack Smith:
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/florida-plagued-by-leprosy-academic
Followup to comment 455.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/new-generations-same-old-ideas
More sad news: Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman) has died of cancer.
And now for something lighter, if rather stickier….
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/big-rig-crashes-spills-chocolate/3284614/
Trump’s bid to quash Georgia probe rejected by judge as charges loom
Turns Out Rep. Tricia Cotham, North Carolina Abortion Traitor, Was a GOP Plant All Along
Russians surround Crimean bridge with special floating barriers in attempt to ward off more attacks
Ukraine has largely restored all its damaged thermal power plants – minister
Followup to comments 375, 396 and 442
Democrats remind Alito that he’s not a king. Even if he thinks he is
Yep.
A group has sued to stop the Oklahoma City Archdiocese from opening St. Isidore, which it says would violate the separation of church and state.
Washington Post link
Ukraine Update: MAGA support for Russia rising as Trump attacks Ukraine in his campaign
In-N-Out and Other California Workplaces Can’t Prevent Employees From Wearing Masks, Regulators Say
Link
NBC News:
Also from NBC News:
Also from NBC News:
Link
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
That’s a really tempting invitation, isn’t it? “Please come to my party! If you don’t, I’ll subject you to indescribable agonies forever.”
Quoted in Lynna’s #450:
LOL.
Flamy Grant, “What Did You Drag Me Into?”
Flamy Grant, “Good Day (feat. Derek Webb).”
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Euromaidan Press yesterday – “Russia restricts milbloggers from reporting Ukrainian attack on crucial bridge – ISW”:
Israeli cargo vessel breaches Russian blockade in the Black Sea
Also in the Guardian:
“#Barbenheimer backlash: Japan rejects co-marketing of Barbie and Oppenheimer as trivialising nuclear war”: “Warner Bros Japan has publicly criticised their US counterparts over ‘inconsiderate’ reactions to art combining playful Barbie imagery with mushroom clouds…”
“Mexican city of Chihuahua bans misogynist lyrics in live music venues”: “Fines of up to £55,000 could be imposed on musicians who sing songs deemed to promote violence against women…”
“‘Even more insidious than the NRA’: US gun lobby group gains in power”: “The National Shooting Sports Foundation has been aggressively pushing gun manufacturers’ interests, and is starting to eclipse its bigger rival…”
“‘I knew Bill Cosby was going to try to ruin me’: Andrea Constand on her 14-year fight for justice”: “More than 60 women have made allegations against Cosby – but Constand was the woman whose case resulted in criminal charges. She explains her determination to fight for all the survivors…”
“Chinese zoo denies its sun bears are humans dressed in costumes”: “Hangzhou zoo insists animals are real after video of one standing on hind legs triggers online speculation…”
Portugal 0 – 0 USA
Vietnam 0 – 7 Netherlands
China 1 – 6 England
Haiti 0 – 2 Denmark
BBC is testing being on Mastodon, says fediverse better fit for public purposes than Twitter or Threads
Satire in fake news- there are joke fake news that people have taken seriously.
There was a guy who claimed the government had killed 12 billion birds and replaced them with drones camouflaged as birds. To his surprise, his joke got lots of followers.
There were also those who claimed the failure of hurricanes hitting Hong Kong was due to a big business there having invented a force field that kept hurricanes away. Also, people ended up believing in the joke.
PZ and others here will probably find this valuable:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/steven-harper/107153/northwestern-university-s-guide-to-quashing-community-dissent-in-3-acts
billionaire Patrick G. Ryan pledged $480 million to the university—provided that a big chunk went toward a new $800-million football stadium.
But the site’s main purpose . . would be a for-profit, open-air outdoor performance venue competing with the Chicago area’s largest. . . The arena would seat 28,500 concertgoers and replace the existing stadium in the midst of (And destroying, my words) a residential community with schools, parks, playgrounds, churches, a fire station, and a hospital with a Level 1 trauma center.
In the early 1970s I saw how USC kicked many families out of their longtime homes to build a huge tennis stadium. Many of those displaced were not wealthy and were relying on an older mortgage at a low interest rate to keep their homes. They wouldn’t be able to afford a new home at current prices and loan rates.
I HATE BULLIES. Especially wealthy ones that think they can buy everything.
Emma Thorne digs up some fun stuff in Christian conspiracy theories.
“Everything is demonic / Christian TikTok ”
https://youtu.be/5Kvd97bHAaA
Mystery iron age warrior turns out to be female.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-mystery-iron-age-warrior-small.html
Trump plans to toss Eastman and Giuliani under the bus. Now, I know you cannot see me right now, but I am wearing my ‘really, really, really surprised’ face right now. Really, I am. Honest.
@494:
Dyche Stadium, later Ryan Field, has been occupying that site since 1926. It has hosted collegiate athletics events, professional athletic events, Olympic events, etc.
IMHO this is a big nothing-burger.
With Tesla cars, steering is optional entirely.
You get a choice, lose power steering randomly or the entire steering wheel comes off in your hand. Consider it a bonus feature.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/business/tesla-steering-investigation/index.html
I wish I was joking.
‘Even more insidious than the NRA’: US gun lobby group gains in power