Yevgeny Moiseyev, the mayor of the Russian city of Kislovodsk, announced Sunday that a quote from ballet dancer and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov will be removed from a local choreography school because he spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine.
Photos published by the mayor show the following quote from Baryshnikov on one of the school’s walls: “I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
“I’m currently working to figure out who approved the idea to feature a quote from a person who, while he may be a genius, abandoned his native country and doesn’t support it, our heroic boys, or our president in the fight that we all, as a country, and as the entire city of Kislovodsk, are waging for our future, the future of our children, and the entire country,” wrote Moiseyev.
He said he’s ordered for Baryshnikov’s quote to be replaced with “the words of one of our geniuses, a true patriot of their native land.”
Mikhail Baryshnikov was born in Soviet Latvia. In the 1970s, he emigrated to the U.S. [no, he defected to Canada], where he joined the American Ballet Theatre and began performing in films and on Broadway. He now leads the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Baryshnikov began raising money for Ukrainian refugees along with writer Boris Akunin and economist Sergei Guriev as part of the True Russia project. The Russian authorities have banned the initiative as an “undesirable” organization.
birgerjohanssonsays
S C (Salty Current) @ 497 picked the same The Guardian articles that I found most interesting 😊
Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva has been given a four-year ban for doping after initially being cleared.
A Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) investigation found the teenager bore “no fault or negligence” for a failed test before the 2022 Winter Olympics, where she won team gold aged 15.
But the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) has upheld an appeal by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada).
“The doping of children is unforgivable,” Wada said in response.
News of Valieva’s failed test only emerged after she had helped Russia to team gold in Beijing.
The ban has been backdated to 25 December 2021 – the date Valieva took the failed test – and the Cas panel has also ordered “the disqualification all competitive results achieved” from that date.
However, it said the power to strip Russia of the gold medal was “not within the scope of this arbitration procedure and will have to be examined by the sports organisations concerned”.
Governing body the International Skating Union welcomed the Cas decision and said it will publish a full statement with regards to the implications on Tuesday.
…
The Kremlin has criticised the Cas ruling as a “politicised” decision, while the Russian Olympic Committee said: “In effect war has been declared on Russian sport.”
…
Russia won gold in the team figure skating event on 7 February 2022, but it was announced four days later that Valieva had failed a drugs test before the Games.
…
The ISU also called on Cas to determine the final results of the team gold event in Beijing. Though Cas says that duty will now fall elsewhere, the United States, who finished in the silver medal position, are set to be awarded gold, with Japan elevated to silver and Canada receiving bronze following their fourth-place finish two years ago.
“Today is a day we have been eagerly awaiting for two years, as it is a significant win not only for Team USA athletes but also for athletes worldwide who practise fair play and advocate for clean sport,” said Sarah Hirshland, chief executive officer of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
“We now anticipate the day when we can wholeheartedly celebrate these athletes, along with their peers from around the world.”
The ISU subsequently raised the minimum age for competitors in senior events from 15 to 17 to protect skaters’ “physical and mental health, and emotional well-being”.
Wada said it welcomed the decision, saying it had appealed against the earlier decision “in the interests of fairness for athletes and clean sport – and we believe that has been delivered through this decision”.
…
Russian athletes were only allowed to compete at the Beijing Games under the neutral name of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC).
That was after Wada banned Russia from all international sport for four years from 2019 following a doping scandal.
Cas later reduced the ban and ruled that Russian athletes could compete at the Olympics and other international events but the team could not use the Russian name, flag, or anthem.
A Wada investigation in 2016 found Russia operated a state-sponsored doping programme for four years across the “vast majority” of summer and winter Olympic sports.
Last month the International Olympic Committee announced it would allow Russian athletes to compete as neutrals at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris – though that followed a ban on Russian competitors following the invasion of Ukraine.
Travis Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), told BBC Sport: “It’s been a long time coming and justice delayed and certainly justice denied. There are athletes out there who will never get their moment on the podium in front of the world during the Games.
“Of course, our hearts also go out to Valieva. How does a young girl at that age get a hold of this controlled drug? You have to look at the Russia system. And here we go again, unfortunately, with them trying to hijack the Games and at the expense of a young woman.”
Tygart was also critical of Wada and looking ahead to this summer’s Olympics, added: “I’m afraid we’re at the last thread of confidence. And here we go again, into Paris with Russia potentially tainting those Games by sending athletes who haven’t been properly tested.”
Wada director general Olivier Niggli said: “We are very concerned and remain very vigilant about what’s going on in Russia.
“What’s more of a concern, actually, to me, is the fact that the first decision rendered by a panel in Russia was so wrong. And that’s what Cas has proven today. And that, you know, doesn’t give a good message in terms of how serious they are treating the problem.”
Reginald Selkirksays
@ prev487
This was reported in the previous incarnation, but not the link to Ramaswamy. For someone who wants to be taken seriously, he sure has some really stupid ideas.
Vivek Ramaswamy suggested on Monday that the Super Bowl could be rigged to boost the profile of music sensation Taylor Swift ahead of what he claimed was her plans to endorse President Biden in the fall presidential election.
The former Republican presidential candidate floated the bizarro conspiracy that some unseen hand want the Kansas City Chiefs to win the big game because the pop superstar is dating Pro Bowl tight end Travis Kelce.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Ramaswamy mused on Twitter. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
Even Ramaswamy, who says climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a peaceful protest, admitted he might be going out on a limb this time…
Japan is an innovative country that leads the way on many technological fronts. But the wheels of bureaucracy often turn incredibly slowly there. So much so, that the government still requires businesses to provide information on floppy disks and CD-ROMs when they submit certain official documents.
That’s starting to change. Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to stop requiring businesses to submit information on outdated forms of physical media. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. “Under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods,” METI said last week, according to The Register.
After this calendar year, METI will no longer require businesses to submit data on floppy disks under 34 ordinances. The same goes for CD-ROMs when it comes to an unspecified number of procedures. There’s still quite some way to go before businesses can stop using either format entirely, however…
…The average new car today sells for nearly $49,000, and the average used car lists at more than $26,000 – representing a 31% increase for new cars and nearly 40% increase for used cars since 2020, according to data from the industry group Cox Automotive.
These increases have brought the total cost of car ownership to all-time highs in a country where cars aren’t really optional. And that’s despite the easing of inflation and the supply chain issues that snarled the auto industry during the pandemic. So why are consumers still getting squeezed?
Here’s a hint: the automakers are doing great. By essentially coordinating an industry-wide production cut, the pandemic gave manufacturers power to demand mind-boggling prices for fewer cars, leading to record profits. As consumers adjusted their expectations, executives saw an opportunity to establish a lucrative new normal….
Brian Moody, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, a car industry publication, says automakers used the pandemic to shift product lines toward higher-margin products. Instead of small cars and base models, they pivoted to luxury cars and SUVs with fully loaded trims, which turn far greater profits per sale. That means “the less expensive the car, the fewer choices you have”, says Moody. Some commentators have called the trend “trimflation”. A 2023 Cox Automotive report declared that “the US new vehicle market is becoming a luxury market”, a “seismic shift” that, for many buyers, is “about as enjoyable as a sharp stick in the eye”.
But the hurt isn’t limited to car buyers; it’s spread to car owners as well. …maintenance costs, which have ballooned…
The cost of insurance has brought even more pain. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average cost of car insurance rose more than 14% between the end of 2021 and 2022, before soaring another 20% by the end of 2023, the largest one-year increase since the 1970s.
Divya Sangameshwar, an insurance expert at Value Penguin, says those rapid increases have several causes. One is that the rising cost of vehicles and maintenance means insurers have to pay out more when things go wrong. Another is that more vehicles are getting ravaged by the climate crisis. The vehicle data company Carfax estimates that Hurricane Ian destroyed as many as 358,000 cars as the storm tore through Florida and the Carolinas in 2022. [!] The climate crisis, in turn, is only being exacerbated by the trend toward massive vehicles. Unless action is taken to reverse climate change, Sangameshwar says, “it is undeniable that it will continue to have an impact on auto insurance premiums for the next 100 years”.
Until 2022, state governments, which approve rate increases, had been keeping insurance premiums relatively flat for years, leading to “pent-up pressure” among some insurance companies, which “were threatening to walk out of markets where they weren’t profitable any more”, Sangameshwar says. But now that states have relented, insurers are doing splendidly. Companies like Progressive and Travelers reported record-breaking profits this year thanks to the big rate increases, and they say more rate increases are on the way.
Over the last two decades, American jobs have become increasingly dispersed throughout the suburbs, says David King, an associate professor of urban planning at the Arizona State University. Research shows that car-owning Americans have access to far more job options, and “having a reliable car means that you’re more likely to be able to keep that job”, King says.
The preferred solution of many planners – replace car trips with transit – faces difficult odds in this country. Across the United States, transit riderships remain much lower than pre-pandemic numbers, and with Covid-era federal grants due to expire this year, many transit authorities are planning service cuts, sparking fears of a “death spiral”….
Boris Nadezhdin’s surname has its root in the Russian word for “hope,” and he’s inspired just that in tens of thousands of voters as the politician with an antiwar message who’s come the furthest in the country’s byzantine bureaucracy for presidential candidacy. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it’s collected roughly 200,000 signatures, which is twice what it technically needs for the Central Election Commission to add his name to the ballot in March. While the commission’s approval remains unlikely, the Nadezhdin campaign has been a major news event for antiwar Russians, especially in the ever-growing diaspora, where thousands of people have lined up in cities across Europe and the Caucasus to offer their signatures.
Nadezhdhin’s allies have no illusions about his prospects, but showing their support for an antiwar challenger to Vladimir Putin has quickly become the opposition’s first visible civic movement in some time. To understand how this happened, who Nadezhdin is as a politician, and how opposition politics has worked throughout Russia’s Putin era, The Naked Pravda welcomes back Dr. Маrgarita Zavadskaya, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.
TWiV reveals how viruses participate in the organomineralization of travertines, and how neutralizing antibodies evolve to exploit vulnerable sites in the hepatitis C virus envelope glycoprotein E2 and mediate clearance of infection.
This is from two weeks ago but I couldn’t resist the title, and it didn’t disappoint. The whole episode is really interesting, but this section is especially so. (There’s a link to the show notes there and the show notes have a link to the 2023 Scientific Reports paper.)
[Video of Bill Maher]: [Brazilians] lived under a real dictatorship less than 40 years ago. They have an immunity that we do not.
There’s no need to amplify a germ–theory–denying antivax queerphobe. Even if something agreeable comes out of his mouth, there will always be better options.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
^ Maher’s next line in the video was: “It would be nice if we could get that immunity without having to get the disease.”
The Pentagon released the names of the three soldiers who were killed in Jordan yesterday after a drone struck a base near the border with Syria. The service members were identified as Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46, of Carrollton, Georgia; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, of Waycross, Georgia; and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Georgia.
Politico:
South Korea’s military said Sunday that North Korea fired several cruise missiles that flew over waters near a major military shipyard on the country’s eastern coast, extending a streak in weapons tests that are worsening tensions with the United States, South Korea and Japan
The former Internal Revenue Service contractor [Charles Littlejohn] who leaked the tax records of former President Donald Trump to The New York Times as well as the tax records of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to ProPublica was sentenced Monday to five years in prison.
Nearly 30,000 firearms have been stolen from motor vehicles in Tennessee in the decade since Republican lawmakers voted to allow gun owners to keep their weapons in their cars and trucks without any penalty for those who leave them unsecured, a NewsChannel 5 analysis has discovered.
In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings. The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation. CNN pieced together who was involved in the email exchanges by examining court records from three separate cases stemming from the 2020 election.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “national divorce” between red and blue states amid the escalating standoff over migration at the Texas border. The Georgia congressman responded to a post on X listing Democratic-leaning states that have sided with the federal government in the dispute with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.
Commentary:
[…] let’s not lose sight of the larger context: GOP leaders have rewarded Greene with, among other things, a slot on the House Homeland Security Committee. Are Republicans prepared to defend a member of the House Homeland Security Committee openly endorsing the dissolution of the United States?
[…] Her extremism is routine to the point that’s become background noise. Basic American patriotism generally prevents elected officials from endorsing the dissolution of the United States, but we’ve reached the point in our collective history at which members of Congress can publish such messages — which would’ve sparked a genuine scandal up until fairly recently — and much of the political world shrugs, seeing it as somehow routine.
[…] Greene’s extremism has become predictable, but their responses to her radical vision are still relevant. How comfortable are GOP leaders with one of their prominent members calling for the breaking up of our country? What are they prepared to do about it?
Can Americans feel confident in the work of the House Homeland Security Committee knowing that Greene is on it — and she no longer wants to live in the same country as millions of Americans?
OK, this would require the US congress to make an effort, so no.
birgerjohanssonsays
Compylsory accoynt7746 Sky Captain @ 14
He is an antivaxxer? Then I am fortunate he is at the Pacific while I am weĺl into the Eurasian landmass. I suppose ten billion vaccine doses will not convince his ilk.
birgerjohanssonsays
My fat fingers keep pressing the wrong keys, my apologies for misspelling your name.
birgerjohanssonsays
The total value of the Norwegian oil fund that is saving money for when the oil runs out is 1516 billion US $ = 1.516 million million $ The wossname return/dividend for 2023 was 213.65 billion $. It is good to be a Norwegian.
(Kuweit also set up such a fund)
🍾🎆🍻🎉
Now ask me how much Brits or Americans have saved in national funds for when the oil runs out.
Trick question! They never set up such national funds, because they know that taking money from the oil industry is communism or something. ☹
birgerjohanssonsays
“New AI model designs proteins to deliver gene therapy”
Neural networks making gene therapy feasible!
Tories in the House of Lords that were appointed prior to the era of Boris Johnson are unimpressed by the tory government and its suggested legislation.
“Tory peer rips apart government’s Rwanda bill in House of Lords”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XMD8ulY6bWU
StevoRsays
Aussie TV channel ..
Nine apologises for using digitally altered image of Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell
.. (Snip).. The Animal Justice Party MP tweeted an image shown on Nine which showed her wearing a midriff-baring top as part of the network’s coverage of Victoria’s duck hunting issue. Ms Purcell also posted the original image, which was published in the Bendigo Advertiser, which does not show her midriff. “Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing,” she tweeted. “What gives?”
Ms Purcell said she found the altered image concerning. “I think male MPs get to endure catastrophic days without having their bodies photoshopped when they’re on the nightly news,” she told ABC Radio Melbourne. “I can’t imagine that happening to a male politician. I wanted to point out the more insidious ways females continue to be treated.”
Nine News apologised to Ms Purcell and said the image was inadvertently altered.
“Our graphics department sourced an online image of Georgie to use in our story on duck hunting,” Nine News director Hugh Nailon said in a statement. “As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original.
As they collect and analyze massive amounts of genetic sequences from plants, animals, and microbes, biologists keep encountering surprises, including some that may challenge the very definition of life. The latest, reported this week in a preprint, is a new kind of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria dwelling in the human mouth and gut. These “obelisks,” as they’re called by the Stanford University team that unearthed them, have genomes seemingly composed of loops of RNA and sequences belonging to them have been found around the world.
Other scientists are delighted by obelisks’ debut. “It’s insane,” says Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”
It’s not yet known whether obelisks affect human health, says Matthew Sullivan, an integrative biologist at Ohio State University, but they could alter the genetic activity of their bacterial hosts, which in turn could affect human genes…
Among the human microbial databases examined, obelisk sequences were found in 7% of human gut bacteria and in half the bacteria in the human mouth. And the obelisks in microbes from different parts of the body have distinctive sequences, Fire and colleagues report in their preprint, which was posted on 21 January on bioRxiv. Because obelisks contain genes that are unlike any discovered so far in other organisms, they “comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes,” the team writes. (Fire and other co-authors on the preprint declined to comment on their work.) …
This is one to be careful with because while this is so basic that it’s likely to be shared, I want to confirm in humans. The innate visual threat (looming) is there.
I just can’t help but notice that innate visual threat shares territory with conditioned auditory threat. And bigots love their disease, crime (“illegals” as a label), vermin, and invasion insults labels. Little short symbols to tie to the feeling of a threat.
The U.S. government in recent months launched an operation to fight a pervasive Chinese hacking operation that successfully compromised thousands of internet-connected devices, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two Western security officials and another person familiar with the matter. From the report:
The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation sought and received legal authorization to remotely disable aspects of the Chinese hacking campaign, the sources told Reuters. The Biden administration has increasingly focused on hacking, not only for fear nation states may try to disrupt the U.S. election in November, but because ransomware wreaked havoc on Corporate America in 2023.
The hacking group at the center of recent activity, Volt Typhoon, has especially alarmed intelligence officials who say it is part of a larger effort to compromise Western critical infrastructure, including naval ports, internet service providers and utilities…
Even by Alaska standards, there’s a lot of snow this winter.
So much snow has fallen — so far, more than 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) — that roofs on commercial buildings are collapsing around Anchorage and officials are urging residents to break out their shovels to avoid a similar fate at home. Over the weekend, there was nearly 16 more inches (41 centimeters) of snowfall, pushing Alaska’s largest city past the 100-inch (254-centimeters) mark earlier than at any other time in its history.
The city is well on track to break its all-time record of 134.5 inches (342 centimeters)…
Just days after three American soldiers were killed by Iranian proxies, Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., nominated former President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, citing his “historic” Abraham Accords treaty.
“Donald Trump was instrumental in facilitating the first new peace agreements in the Middle East in almost 30 years,” Tenney told Fox News Digital in a statement…
And that’s why we have peace in the Middle East today.
India’s naval forces rescued an Iranian-flagged fishing vessel hijacked by Somali pirates and freed its 19-member Pakistani crew off the east coast of Somalia, a navy statement said Tuesday.
The rescue operation was the third this week involving Somali pirates and came a day after India’s forces freed another Iranian fishing vessel named Iman and its 17 crew members from Somali pirates in the same waters. On Saturday, the Seychelles’ defense forces and coast guard rescued six Sri Lankan fishermen whose vessel had been hijacked by Somali pirates.
The Indian navy’s latest operation rescued the Iranian vessel Al Naeemi from the pirates late Monday. The ship intercepted the vessel and forced the pirates to release the crew and boat, which 11 Somali pirates had boarded, the statement said…
wobblysays
A friend of mine just hit me with the whole; “yeah, Netanyahu is bad and what’s happening in Gaza is bad, but the only reason bad people are doing bad things is because the Palestinians left them no choice!”, complete with the bog-standard platitudes about how Israel have “no partners for peace” since the Palestinians are “bad faith negotiators who have turned down every peace offer even when it gives them everything they want.”
The whole perception and narrative about this conflict and its historical roots is fucked in the US.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has requested medical records from a Georgia telehealth clinic that provides gender-affirming care, a newly discovered move that shows the Republican official is looking in multiple states for information about transgender youths.
Paxton requested transgender youths’ medical records from QueerMed — which is based in Decatur, Ga. — late last year, the health provider’s founder Izzy Lowell told The Washington Post on Sunday.
“This request from the Texas Attorney general is a clear attempt to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care and parents and families that seek that care outside of Texas and other states with bans,” Lowell said in a statement.
Lowell, a family physician, said the clinic stopped providing services to minors in Texas after that state banned gender-affirming care for minors in September. Paxton’s Nov. 17 request, however, was for information about patients dating back to Jan. 1, 2022.
[…]
Texas’s law restricting gender-affirming care for youths does not bar families from seeking care elsewhere.
Georgia is at least the second state where Paxton has sought the medical records of Texas youths, showing that his office is ramping up efforts to curb access to gender-affirming care. Seattle Children’s Hospital received a similar letter in November. In response, the hospital requested a Texas judge to nullify, or at least rein in, Paxton’s demands, saying Paxton does not have jurisdiction over the hospital.
In its legal filing, the hospital also argued that the information Paxton requested was for private medical records and health information covered under HIPAA and Washington state privacy laws, and that Paxton’s queries, purported as an investigation by his consumer protection division, were “sham requests.”
Paxton had asked the Seattle hospital to confirm all medications prescribed by the hospital to Texas children, the number of Texas children treated by the hospital for gender dysphoria, the number of “gender reassignment” surgeries performed, diagnoses for every medication provided by the hospital to Texas children, and the names of labs in Texas that performed tests for the hospital before prescribing medications.
Lowell, of QueerMed, said Paxton’s request for her business’s records was similar to the one Paxton made of the Seattle hospital. It was not clear how many clinics across the country Paxton had requested records, though Lowell said she had seen letters sent to colleagues in other states.
[…]
Lowell founded the clinic in 2017 because at the time transgender and nonbinary people in Georgia, didn’t have good access to health care, she said.
Patients were having to travel great distances for care, she said, so most of the clinic’s patients were using its telehealth services.
“I thought naively that I will provide this care for four to five years and then as access to such care will improve, I will move on to something else,” she said. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
E Jean Carroll says the $83.3m awarded to her in her defamation case against Donald Trump shows “we don’t need to be afraid” of the former president.
“It was an astonishing discovery for me – he’s nothing,” Carroll said on Monday night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show. Comparing Trump to “a walrus snorting” and “a rhino flopping his hands” [hey!], the former Elle magazine columnist added: “He can be knocked down.”
…
“Three, four days before trial, I had an actual breakdown,” Carroll told Maddow. “I lost my ability to speak, I lost my words, I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t go on … That’s how frightened I was.”
But Carroll reiterated her imagination was worse than anything she encountered.
“Amazingly, I looked out, and he was nothing,” Carroll said to Maddow. “He was nothing. He was a phantom. It was the people around him who were giving him power. He himself was nothing.”…
…Speaking of questions,…let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda. To give you a sense of just how deep his pockets are, the MP Andrew Bridgen was last year belatedly forced to declare that Hosking had stumped up £4,470,576.42 in interest-free loans to fund a doomed legal action against Bridgen’s brother for control of the family potato farm. Bridgen was relieved of the Tory whip for comparing the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust, then briefly joined Reclaim, but is now back as an independent. Hosking is still donating to his campaign to retain his seat.
Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. Who is this backroom man, lavishly funding one dickhead’s extended breakdown as part of a campaign to buy his way to political and cultural influence, at the same time as bleating publicly about the state of our democracy? Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey.
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10tn (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health and ease the climate crisis, according to the most comprehensive economic study of its type.
It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.
…
Redirecting the food system would be politically challenging but bring huge economic and welfare benefits, said the international team of authors behind the study, which aims to be the food equivalent of the Stern review, the 2006 examination of the costs of climate change.
Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the study’s authors, said: “The global food system holds the future of humanity on Earth in its hand.”…
SC @40, thanks for the link to Cuban photographer Raúl Cañibano’s work. I really enjoyed that.
In other news, here’s Trump being both vindictive and stupid again:
A few days after the United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden for re-election, former President Donald J. Trump raged at the union’s leader, Shawn Fain, on Sunday night.
Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that Mr. Fain “is selling the Automobile Industry right into the big, powerful, hands of China.”
He claimed that Mr. Biden’s support for electric vehicles would destroy the American auto industry and send jobs overseas. “Shawn Fain doesn’t understand this or have a clue,” he wrote. “Get rid of this dope & vote for DJT. I will bring the Automobile Industry back to our Country.”
The provocation for Mr. Trump’s comments appeared to be a CBS News interview on Sunday in which Mr. Fain said that Mr. Biden had “a history of serving others and serving the working class,” while Mr. Trump had “a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class.” […]
SC @43, I was recently told that my job as a writer would soon be obsolete, that I would be replaced by AI.
I mentioned that AI does not mind using sources known for posting misinformation. The person looking forward to replacing me was not bothered in the least by that prospect.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “national divorce” between red and blue states amid the escalating standoff over migration at the Texas border.
Illinois’ election board on Tuesday kept former President Donald Trump on the state’s primary ballot, a week before the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on whether the Republican’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol disqualifies him from the presidency.
The board’s ruling comes after its hearing officer, a retired judge and Republican, found that a “preponderance of the evidence” shows Trump is ineligible to run for president because he violated a constitutional ban on those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. But the hearing officer recommended the board let the courts make the ultimate decision.
That will likely be the case now, with the Supreme Court scheduled next week to hear arguments in Trump’s appeal of a Colorado ruling declaring him ineligible for the presidency in that state.
The nation’s highest court has never ruled on a case involving Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868 to prevent former confederates from returning to office after the Civil War but has rarely been used since then. Some legal scholars say the post-Civil War clause applies to Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraging his backers to storm the U.S. Capitol after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Dozens of cases have been filed around the country seeking to bar Trump from the presidency under Section 3. The Colorado case is the only one that succeeded in court.
Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State also ruled that Trump violated the 14th Amendment and is no longer eligible for the White House, but her ruling is on hold until the Supreme Court issues a decision.
I notice all there dead soldiers were black. I suspect the labor market & economic prospects have something to do with their choice of profession… which reminds me of what MLK said about the Vietnam war.
There was no huge sea change this week. But there’s also no question that those scripts started to flip, in two important ways.
First and most important, Trump is now the one doddering his way toward dementia. He has been for a while, but the Nikki-Nancy moment, and Nikki Haley’s subsequent attack on Trump, finally forced the media to make Trump’s mental state into a running narrative. […]
The second change, even more important albeit less fun to talk about, has to do with the reality—and the perceptions—of the economy. I won’t throw a bunch of numbers at you, but: gas prices down, Dow setting a new record above 38,000, and a great (not good—great) GDP report this week. More important still were those recent numbers showing that consumer confidence is up more over the last two months than during any two-month period since 1991. […]
Think $83.3 million is a lot of money? Well, hold onto your hat, buster, because this week, New York Judge Arthur Engoron is supposed to announce the penalty he’s slapping on Donald J. Trump in the Trump Organization fraud case.
The case, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2022, accuses Trump of lying to bankers and insurers about the value of his properties. Last September, Engoron declared in a summary judgment that the evidence clearly said Trump had done so. He wrote in his ruling: “In defendants’ world: Rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
Last month, Engoron said he was aiming to announce the fine amount by January 31. That’s Wednesday. James is seeking $370 million.
Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza has been transferred to a single cell-type room (EPKT) in prison colony No. 7 in Omsk, Russia, reports Novaya Gazeta. Communicating through his lawyer, Kara-Murza said that he had been sent to the EPKT for four months. An EPKT is a prison within a prison and amounts to the harshest punishment prison officials can give.
Kara-Murza, who was previously in a different prison colony in Omsk, said that on January 26, he was summoned, without any prior notice, to a “commission” because of a “malicious violation.” According to Kara-Murza, the commission accused him of refusing to stand at the command to “rise,” which he says wasn’t even given to him.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is serving a 25-year prison sentence for charges related to his statements opposing the war in Ukraine.
Russian Internet users from across the country have reported disruptions to their mobile service with several different operators, as well as issues with accessing certain services and websites.
…
The Net Freedoms Project said that the Russian authorities have “long warned that they would try to move all users in the country to the national DNS server,” and conclude that this is what’s likely happening right now….
I don’t fully understand what that means, but it sounds bad. They say it’s a “developing story.”
The “God’s Army” trucker convoy that’s headed to the southern borderin a “Take Our Border Back” campaign has been decimated by conspiracy theories that it’s an FBI front, Vice News reported Monday.
The line of trucks that departed Virginia Beach Monday had just a few dozen participants — much less than the 700,000 organizers had promised.
According to Vice’s report, the less-than-stellar turnout was likely due to theories circulating in right-wing circles that the convoy could be a “psyop” or “honeypot” trap laid by the federal government to coax people into committing violence. […]
The Republican senator who led efforts to negotiate with the Biden administrationon a border deal was condemned and censured by his own state’s party on Saturday for the simple act of speaking with Democrats—despite the fact that the chamber has not yet voted on the measure.
Just one day later, a defiant Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) appeared on Fox News to defend his work in Congress—which many of his colleagues supported until […]Trump came out against the measure last week. […]
“It is interesting: Republicans, four months ago, would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel, and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy. So we actually locked arms together and said, ‘We’re not going to give money for this. We want a change in law,’” Lankford said.
“A few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Oh, just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because of presidential election year.’”
[…] While there is a lot happening now, the most important news of recent days has been the ongoing torrent of encouraging economic news. Let’s recap what we know about the US economy right now:
Best job market since the 1960s, stock market setting records (401Ks are happy), best recovery in the G7, GDP growth 3.3% last quarter, consumer sentiment rising
The inflation fueled by COVID/supply chain disruptions, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and OPEC price hikes has ended, and we are now in a place much closer to historic norms. Prices for many items are falling including groceries, rents and mortgage rates
Historically elevated wage growth, new business formation and prime-age worker participation rates. In the last few months we’ve seen some of the most robust real wage growth we’ve seen in decades, and Americans at all income levels have seen sizeable increases in their overall net worth
Lowest uninsured rate in history, record ACA signups this year
[…] The annual deficit is trillions less than when Biden came to office
For young people the job market is the best since the 1960s; more young people have health insurance today than ever before; the President has forgiven more than $130b in student debt; by some measure home ownership rates are higher for Gen Z than Gen X and Millennials at this point in their lives; and rising minimum wages in states and cities across the US have created higher floors for new and entry-level workers than in many years
Crime and murder rates plummeted across the US in 2023, and remain a fraction of what they were 30 years ago.
The lead attorney for writer E. Jean Carroll, Roberta Kaplan, has threatened to pursue sanctions against Trump lawyer Alina Habba over claims she pushed alleging the federal judge overseeing their clients’ defamation trial failed to disclose a conflict of interest.
In a Monday letter challenging the $83.3 million verdict in the case, Habba referenced a Saturday New York Post article that quoted an anonymous former partner at Paul Weiss, the law firm Kaplan and U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan both previously worked for, claiming that the judge was Roberta Kaplan’s “mentor.”
“As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are utterly baseless,” Roberta Kaplan fired back in a three-page letter Tuesday.
Her time working for the firm briefly intersected with U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s tenure at the company for under two years in the early 1990s, according to The Messenger, and she and the judge are not related.
The Carroll lawyer further questioned the origin of the Post’s claim…
Vladimir Putin has reportedly built a sprawling estate complete with bidets costing £8,000 each, a “stolen” waterfall and the framework for an air-defence system less than 20 miles from Russia’s border with Finland.
The secretive complex is nestled deep in the forests of the northern region of Karelia, according to the Dossier Centre, a Russian investigative organisation which tracks various people associated with the Kremlin.
Leaked details and aerial footage of the estate, on the shores of Lake Ladoga’s Majalahti Bay, revealed it was protected by round-the-clock security, barbed-wire fences, intelligence officers and drone jammers…
The drone flew inside the bathroom to peek at the fixtures?
Ukrainian forces struck a Russian radar station used in coordination with air defense systems near the village of Rozdolne in northwestern Crimea early on Jan. 30, the Ukrainian military reported…
The Ukrainian military didn’t specify which weapons were used to hit the radar system on Jan. 30…
Ukrainian air defenses reportedly shot down a Russian Su-34 jet over Luhansk Oblast on Jan. 29, said Andrii Kovalev, a spokesperson for the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, on national television on Jan. 30.
The downing of the jet brings the total of Russian military aircraft lost since the beginning of the full-scale invasion to an estimated total of 332 as of Jan. 30…
The Justice Department is investigating Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri for misuse of funds, a senior congressional source with knowledge and a source familiar with the probe told CNN, after the DOJ subpoenaed the House Sergeant at Arms Monday for documents related to the matter.
Separately, two law enforcement sources told CNN the investigation is targeting Bush, who is the subject of a corruption probe.
According to the source familiar with the probe, the subpoena involves the misuse of funds surrounding security.
Bush confirmed in a statement that the Justice Department is reviewing her campaign’s spending on security services and says she is fully cooperating with the investigation…
Russia is facing a widespread internet outage that’s affected users across the country, with access to websites on the local .ru domain down. From a report:…
The Republican National Committee is poised to hold its winter meeting in Las Vegas, and at first blush, one might think party leaders and activists have reason to feel cautious optimism as the election year gets underway in earnest.
But as Politico reported, it’s not quite working out that way.
Days before the Republican National Committee was set to convene here, hundreds of Republican officials gathered in a casino ballroom Monday to vent their grievances about the party — and warn that it is ill prepared for the 2024 election. “We are at war,” one man shouted from a microphone at the event, hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action, lifting his arm in the air. “Where are the tools? Where are all the little things that the left is doing but we don’t?”
The report added that some Republicans in and surrounding the RNC are feeling deep frustrations “about its finances, about its struggles to match Democrats’ organizing efforts, [and] about its four-term leader.” Politico went on to note that “many grassroots activists say McDaniel has lost their trust, perhaps permanently.”
So, perhaps things aren’t going especially well for Republicans at the national level. Perhaps the party can take solace at progress at the state level?
Perhaps not.
On Jan. 7, the Republican Party of Michigan removed Kristina Karamo as state party chair after months of infighting and weak fundraising. Karamo claimed the voted didn’t count, as things stand, no one seems to have any idea who the current chair is.
On Jan. 8, the Republican Party of Florida removed Christian Ziegler as state party chair after he faced allegations of rape and video voyeurism. Prosecutors later said he would not be prosecuted for rape, though they’re proceeding with allegations of video voyeurism, accusing Ziegler of allegedly video recording a sexual encounter without consent.
On Jan. 24, Republican Party of Arizona Chair Jeff DeWit resigned following the release of a dubious audio recording of a conversation he apparently had with failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
In other words, over the course of just 17 days, the state Republican chairs in Arizona, Florida, and Michigan — by most measures, three key battleground states — either quit or were kicked out.
In case that weren’t quite enough, in Oklahoma, the state Republican Party generated national headlines over the weekend when it appeared to censure Republican Sen. James Lankford for negotiating a possible bipartisan agreement on border policy. In an odd twist, however, the chair of the Oklahoma GOP issued a statement claiming that the meeting at which Lankford was censured was “illegitimate“ — though the vice chair of the state party apparently disagrees.
All of which is to say, things could be better in Republican Party politics.
Nice to see the Republicans squabbling among themselves and rapidly firing their leaders. Schadenfreude moment.
On Saturday, the Oklahoma Republican Party passed a resolution to “condemn” and censure Sen. James Lankford for his efforts to protect the southern border. On Sunday, the Oklahoma Republican Party issued a statement calling the Saturday resolution illegitimate. But that hasn’t slowed the attacks on the state’s senior senator.
Lankford is, by any measure of policy, ridiculously extreme. He called climate change a “myth,” said that same-sex marriage violates his religious freedom, and disparaged the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. He was one of a handful of senators who announced his intention to object to counting swing state votes following the 2020 election. When the counting process was suspended due to the violence of Jan. 6, Lankford was actually at the podium, objecting to accepting Arizona’s electoral votes. While he reversed course on those objections when the process resumed, he topped off those events by voting against a nonpartisan Jan. 6 commission.
Lankford is as hard right as they come, but now he’s being condemned as a “RINO” and has become the focus of attacks for trying to do something Republicans have claimed they wanted to do for decades. Because this fight isn’t about policy, it’s about whether Donald Trump, even out of office, can control every single action by every single Republican.
But as of Tuesday, it’s not clear that either of the statements from the Oklahoma Republican Party actually came from the Oklahoma Republican Party, because it’s not clear such a thing as a coherent, recognizable Republican Party even exists in Oklahoma.
As the Oklahoma Voice reports, the Saturday meeting at which Lankford was condemned was organized by Republican Party Vice Chairman Wayne Hill. The Sunday statement calling that meeting illegitimate was sent out by Republican Party Chairman Nathan Dahm speaking for the party’s state committee. But Hill claims he had the support of the majority of state committee members at the Saturday meeting.
Since then, Hill has sent out a series of messages justifying the Saturday meeting and elaborating on why Lankford is “an insult to the conservative values of Oklahoma Republicans.” What is purported to be an “official statement” from Hill is circulating, though it’s unclear if it actually came from Hill. Hill’s hate for Lankford seems to go back at least two years: He was the chair of a Republican county organization that voted to condemn Lankford after he reversed course on opposing the count of 2020 votes.
[…] Lankford is supporting the bipartisan border security bill which, by most accounts, gives Republicans almost everything they ever wanted. Sen. Lindsey Graham has said that Republicans won’t get a better deal if Trump is elected. Senate Minority Whip John Thune agreed. […]
Under any other circumstances, Republicans would be scrambling to pass this bill, talking it up across the media, and preparing to celebrate their victory. Except they’re not. Because Donald Trump told them not to pass it so that he could continue to have the border issue to talk about for the upcoming election. […]
Meanwhile, Lankford maintains that Trump is opposing the bill because of misinformation. “They’re all functioning off of internet rumors of what’s in the bill, and many of them are false,” Lankford said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
But that assumes Trump cares about what’s in the bill. Trump is claiming that he completely closed down the border, and “I did it without a bill,” Trump told supporters in Nevada. Except he didn’t.
Johnson is echoing that claim and saying that the Senate bill is “dead on arrival” in the House no matter what it contains.
From the sidelines, it’s certainly entertaining to watch the Republican Party rip itself wide open to put Trump ahead of what they have long claimed to be the most important issue facing the nation—even if it’s not exactly healthy.
Texas made it clear on Monday that it intended to continue adding razor wire along the southern border, despite the tragic drownings of children and a Supreme Court ruling that allowed federal agents to cut or remove these barriers.
That Supreme Court ruling overturned a decision by the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which blocked Border Patrol agents from removing the razor wire. However, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is now arguing that because the Supreme Court ruling only sent the decision back to the 5th Circuit and didn’t explicitly state rules for what happens next, “There was no opinion about anything–about razor wire, what Texas is doing or anything like that.”
MAGA Republicans are celebrating Abbott’s standoff with the federal government and calling on Texas to “Hold the line,” which is bringing on concerns about a constitutional crisis. The most extreme are calling for Texas to secede and initial a second Civil War.
And somehow, the national media doesn’t feel like this is a story.
To resolve the crisis, President Joe Biden could federalize Texas National Guard forces and place them under direct control. Abbott has warned that this would be “the biggest political blunder” Biden could make.
Emboldened Texas nationalists are using this occasion to call on Abbott to expand and “fully militarize” the Texas State Guard, which is not part of the National Guard and can’t be federalized in an emergency. The Texas State Guard is primarily composed of 1,900 volunteers used in situations such as hurricane relief. They don’t have either the training or equipment of Texas’ 23,000 National Guard members.
Last week, Abbott issued a statement in which he said he was invoking Texas’ “right of self-defense.” The language of Abbott’s statement deliberately borrows from the declaration of secession issued by South Carolina when it was the first state to illegally leave the Union in 1860. That mimicry has thrilled Texas nationalists and helped spur calls for civil war throughout the right.
Following Abbott’s statement, 25 other Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Texas’ right to self-defense. […]
Donald Trump has praised Abbott and called on other states to help him. In response, other Republican-controlled states, including Oklahoma and Arkansas, are sending National Guard units to Texas to bolster Abbott’s position.
The standoff has also generated excitement in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s chief deputy has been calling on Texas to get that civil war going.
“Establishing a People’s Republic of Texas is getting more and more real,” tweeted Dmitry Medvedev. Russia is reportedly using its propaganda machine to push hard on this issue, seizing on a dispute between the federal government and Texas as a means of distracting the U.S. from the war in Ukraine.
Despite all this, the story has generated exactly zero articles in The New York Times and scant attention anywhere else in the national media.
The national press is allowing Republicans to stoke their fabricated border crisis—right down to threats of civil war—even while those same Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine a solution to issues at the border. […]
Citibank is being accused of illegally refusing to reimburse scam victims who lost money due in part to Citibank’s poor online security practices by New York Attorney General Letitia James in a lawsuit filed today in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“The lawsuit alleges that Citi does not implement strong online protections to stop unauthorized account takeovers, misleads account holders about their rights after their accounts are hacked and funds are stolen, and illegally denies reimbursement to victims of fraud,” James’ office said in a press release.
The AG’s office alleged that Citi customers “have lost their life savings, their children’s college funds, or even money needed to support their day-to-day lives as a result of Citi’s illegal and deceptive acts and practices.” …
Fifteen Houstonians called for jury duty filed into a courtroom Thursday afternoon. They were there for an unusually high-profile case for municipal courts, known for hearing traffic violations and facilitating weddings.
Three of the 15 would be selected to decide the outcome of a case alleging that a woman had violated Houston law by feeding the homeless without the city’s permission.
Roughly an hour later, the jury pool filed back out — all 15 of them. The lawyers had been unable to fill an unbiased jury.
Too many of the potential jurors said that even if the defendant, Elisa Meadows, were guilty, they were unwilling to issue the $500 fine a city attorney was seeking, said Ren Rideauxx, Meadows’ attorney. A few jurors were also struck because they could not stay late that afternoon to serve on a jury…
A Delaware judge on Tuesday voided the $56 billion pay package of Tesla
CEO Elon Musk, ruling that the company’s board of directors failed to prove “that the compensation plan was fair.”
Tesla’s share price slid about 3% in after-hours trading Tuesday following news of the decision in the Delaware Chancery Court lawsuit filed by Richard Tornetta, a shareholder in the electric automaker…
00:00 Why we need to talk about our diets
03:40 We’re part of an experiment we didn’t sign up for
10:05 What is ultra processed food?
12:50 What Donald Trump got right about UPF
14:20 What Diet Coke does to your health
17:53 How ultra processed food is made
23:55 Why does ultra processed food cause obesity?
29:05 Doesn’t exercise burn calories?
35:37 What about willpower and diet?
38:18 What role do stress and genes play?
39:45 How does ultra processed food harm us?
47:33 How UPF affects the planet
50:41 Ultra processed food is addictive
52:25 The food system is financialised
54:28 What are the solutions?
This lecture was filmed at the Ri [The Royal Institution] on 19 September 2023 through the generous support of Digital Science.
The industrialisation and commercialisation of food have transformed our diets, whereby most of our calories now come from an entirely novel set of substances. Ultra Processed Food (UPF) now makes up 60% of the average diet in the UK and USA. It is highly processed, highly addictive, and largely unhealthy.
Join award-winning broadcaster, practising NHS doctor and leading academic Chris van Tulleken as he explores the invention of UPF and its impact on our health and weight – from altering metabolism and appetite to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and tooth decay.
Chris uncovers the limitations of relying solely on exercise and willpower to combat the health risks of high UPF diets. Drawing on his own experiment of eating an 80% UPF diet for one month he provides solutions for both individuals and policymakers to challenge this unregulated industry.
Chris van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor at UCLH and one of the UK’s leading science broadcasters. He has won two BAFTAs for his long-running CBBC series Operation Ouch, co-presented with his twin brother Xand, and hosted numerous programmes across the BBC. Following his BBC One documentary ‘What Are We Feeding Our Kids?’ and the chart-topping podcast ‘A Thorough Examination – Addicted to Food’, Chris has become the UK’s go-to expert on ultra-processed food.
Chris trained at Oxford and has a PhD in molecular virology from University College London, where he is now an Associate Professor. His research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of nutrition.
—
whheydt, I too fuck up now and then when just posting naked links — this platform does that.
And not everyone knows how to wrap an anchor tag around videos.
(birgerjohansson, I know I seem nitpicky, but (again) thanks for trying hard, as you clearly do. Kudos)
Donald J. Trump piled up legal expenses in 2023 as he was indicted four times, spending approximately $50 million in donor money on legal bills and investigation-related expenses last year, according to two people briefed on the figure.
It is a staggering sum. His lone remaining rival in the 2024 Republican primary, Nikki Haley, raised roughly the same amount of money across all her committees in the last year as Mr. Trump’s political accounts spent paying the bills stemming from his various legal defenses, including lawyers for witnesses.
The exact figure spent on legal bills will be reported on Wednesday in new filings to the Federal Election Commission. But even those totals can be imprecise depending on how certain expense items are categorized by those doing the paperwork.
The broader picture expected to be outlined in the documents is one of a former president heading toward the Republican nomination while facing enormous financial strain. […]
A member of the pro-Nazi group White Lives Matter was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for firebombing an Ohio church that had been planning to host two drag events. Aimeen Penny, a 20-year-old far-right extremist from Ohio, was arrested last year after he made Molotov cocktails and threw them at the Community Church of Chesterland in Chersterland, Ohio, on March 25, 2023.
Instead of immigrants, the group of extremists mostly battled each other, paranoia, and their GPS systems.
On Monday morning, the organizers of the Take Our Border Back convoy kicked off their road trip to the Texas–Mexico border in Virginia Beach. Though they claimed that up to 40,000 trucks would be joining, only 20 vehicles made up the convoy as it rolled into Jacksonville, Florida, 14 hours later. The promised support had not materialized—not a single truck showed up, tires were reportedly slashed, participants got lost, and paranoia struck the group. In short, the convoy was a complete mess.
The convoy was organized last week as a show of support for Texas governor Greg Abbott and his decision to defy the federal government and President Joe Biden about the installation of razor wire along the Texas–Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas. While at least one organizer initially said they planned to hunt down migrants along the border in collaboration with sympathetic members of law enforcement, the group appeared to walk back that assertion on Monday, issuing a statement that the convoy would not be heading to the border at all but instead going to Quemado, a tiny town in Catron County, Texas. The group’s website, however, still lists the route of the convoy as “Virginia Beach, VA, to Eagle Pass,” and members of the planning group on Telegram still say they are going to the Texas border.
The organizers also repeatedly stated that the event was peaceful, though online chats in a related Telegram group show members discussing “exterminating” migrants. A known white nationalist who was kicked out of the People’s Convoy in 2022, Ryan Sanchez, is among those most active in the group. Sanchez was previously a Marine Corp reservist who says he was kicked out after he was reported to have been demonstrating alongside the Rise Above Movement, an alt-right street-fighting group that took part in the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, which led to the death of one counterprotester.
[…] When the convoy did finally come together in a hotel parking lot in Norfolk, Virginia, there were a few dozen people and around 20 vehicles, based on video footage reviewed by WIRED and comments made by the livestreamers responding to questions from supporters.
[…] Finally, after a prayer from a pastor linked to the Church Militant, a far-right religious website, the convoy rolled out an hour later than scheduled and headed down I-95. It was spearheaded by a bus covered in MAGA slogans.
Almost immediately, one of the vehicles in the convoy got lost, according to messages posted in the Zello walkie-talkie app that the group is using to communicate while on the road. Later, when the convoy linked up to discuss evening plans, the meeting quickly descended into an argument about where they were going to be staying. Even trying to meet up at a gas station was difficult: Due to the size of a Buc-ee’s in South Carolina, convoy members couldn’t locate each other.
A few hours into the trip, the lead bus pulled over onto the highway shoulder and kicked out one of the people onboard, who had traveled on his own from Washington, DC. It was unclear exactly why he was ejected, but the man, who is part of a group that protests daily in support of people jailed for rioting at the Capitol on January 6, was left stranded in Florence, South Carolina, without his wallet, according to details discussed on a livestream of someone in contact with the man.
[…] As the convoy has gained some media attention, the Telegram channels have been scrubbed of a lot of the more virulent, racist, and violent language used by members. However, leaks of the Telegram chat detail clearly how members spoke openly about “exterminating” migrants.
Since Abbott issued his letter in defiance of the Biden administration, he has seen support flow in from dozens of GOP governors and former president Donald Trump, who has urged other states to send troops to Texas. The convoy has been portrayed in right-wing media in recent days as part of a wider right-wing effort to support Abbott and resist Biden’s immigration policies, and as a result, its organizers have been able to raise over $140,000 on a Christian-focused crowdfunding website.
On Tuesday morning, the convoy departed Jacksonville for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with a few more vehicles joining the group—but still no trucks.
StevoRsays
Intresting argments and no certainties here about the possible exomoons around Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708 b but fascinating and intriguing stuff :
Not that there was much doubt already how much Australia’s LNP was anti-environment and anti-Climate science and Cliamte action and well and truly had the big Mining Coroporations pulling their strings but :
The Coalition will strip funding from the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) if it wins the next federal election, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised. The EDO is an environmental legal centre that runs litigation and offers legal support in climate change and environment cases.
Federal funding to the non-government organisation was cut by former prime minister Tony Abbott in 2013 but reinstated by the Albanese government when it came into power. The government committed to providing $8.2 million to the EDO over four years, with the rest of its revenue received from state and territory governments or philanthropy.
“For historians, contemporary evidence from the decision-makers who sponsored, backed, and voted for the 14th Amendment is most probative,” the brief states. “Analysis of this evidence demonstrates that decision-makers crafted Section 3 to cover the President and to create an enduring check on insurrection, requiring no additional action from Congress.”
It’s a lot of convincing evidence! Just one small bit from the brief:
Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis recognized, for example, that Section 3 had automatically disqualified him from holding public office on the day the states ratified the 14th Amendment. Davis argued that he should be immune from prosecution for treason because of the penalty already imposed by this disqualification. Section 3, said Davis’ lawyer, “executes itself, acting proprio vigore. It needs no legislation on the part of Congress to give it effect.” Thus, the disqualification “punishment of Mr. Davis commenced upon the date of the adoption of the fourteenth article, and he therefore could not now be punished in any other way.”
(One of the references in this section is to “Trial of Jeff Davis,” New York Times, 4 December 1868,
p. 1. I’m trying to imagine the bothsidesism in that piece…)
Aso, who is rumoured to be a billionaire, is known for his fashion sense and ill-informed views on entire groups of people. In May 2018, as finance minister, he said there was “no such thing as the crime of sexual harassment” after a senior ministry official was accused of sexually harassing a female TV reporter. Aso also speculated that the official had been “set up” by his victim.
He has insulted elderly people, blue-eyed diplomats, Alzheimer’s patients and women who choose not to have children, and has expressed admiration for the Nazis, describing Adolf Hitler as “having the right motives”.
During the second world war, Aso’s family’s coal mining business used Allied PoW as slave labourers. Aso was president of the firm’s successor, Aso Cement, for most of the 1970s but has refused to apologise for its past use of forced labour.
According to Business Insider, small startups are cashing in on the untapped potential of the e-waste industry, making as much as $85,000 per day recycling old electronic circuit boards…
I wish they were a little more clear whether “making” means revenue or profit.
Until recently, few in the West had ever heard the name Boris Nadezhdin. But over the last two weeks, this plain-spoken political veteran has done the near-impossible: he’s introduced some suspense into Russia’s presidential race. While virtually nobody believes he’ll be Russia’s next leader, the widespread support Russians have shown for his anti-war message means the Kremlin now has to decide between either barring him from the race and further delegitimizing the election in the eyes of the public, or kicking the can down the road by letting him register his candidacy — and allowing his popularity to grow. We’ll likely know their choice on January 31, when Nadezhdin plans to submit his campaign application to Russia’s Central Election Commission. At the request of the independent journalists’ collective Bereg, Meduza correspondents Margarita Lyutova and Andrey Pertsev spoke to Boris Nadezhdin about his political platform, his contingency plans, and what he would do if the impossible happened and he became Russia’s president. Meduza in English is sharing an abridged translation of the interview….
ReligionClause:
Florida Official Rules That Changing Gender Marker On Driver’s License Constitutes Fraud
January 30, 2024
In a January 26 Memorandum (full text), the Executive Director of the Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles Department has rescinded the rule allowing transgender individuals to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses. He ruled that gender reflected on one’s driver’s license must reflect one’s sex as “determined by innate and immutable biological and genetic characteristics.” The Memorandum went on to say:
[M]isrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud … and subjects the offender to criminal and civil penalties, including cancellation, suspension, or revocation of his or her driver license….
Here’s a little challenge for readers: I’ll give you a quote, and you guess who said it.
“A mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be president,” this person said. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”
If you’re thinking the quote came from President Joe Biden or a congressional Democrat, that would certainly make sense. In fact, leading Democratic officials have certainly made plenty of assessments like these about Donald Trump of late.
But the quote actually came from John Bolton — who served as Trump’s White House national security advisor for a year and a half. The paperback version of the notorious foreign policy hawk’s book is out this week, and as Axios noted, it includes fresh criticisms of Bolton’s former boss.
John Bolton — Donald Trump’s former national security adviser — is laying out his nightmare scenarios for a second Trump term in a foreword to the paperback edition of his memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” out Tuesday. … Bolton writes that “a mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be President.”
In the new foreword to his book, Bolton reportedly warns that Trump would likely abandon the NATO alliance, use the levers of power to retaliate against his perceived political foes, and trigger a constitutional crisis. [correct, and, well, duh yeah]
Bolton also sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and said Trump’s candidacy is welcomed by Russia, China, and North Korea, whose leaders see Trump as a “fool” and an “easy mark.” [also correct]
“They’re fully prepared to take advantage of him,” he added. “Trump’s self-absorption makes it impossible for him to understand that.” [yep]
Bolton’s comments come just three weeks after former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who also worked for the former president for a year and a half, told a national television audience that Trump is “a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us.”
[…] If Bolton and Esper were alone, this might be easier to dismiss, but as regular readers know, the likely GOP nominee has faced condemnations from an amazing number of officials from his own team. The list includes several former members of the White House Cabinet — former White House chief of staff John Kelly can barely contain his visceral contempt for the former president — and it grows much longer if we include other officials who worked with Trump just below the Cabinet level.
History offers plenty of examples of presidents who’ve clashed with one aide or another, but we’ve never seen anything like this.
Indeed, one of the things that make the 2024 race unique is an unprecedented dynamic: The Republican candidate’s opponents and many of the Republican candidate’s former aides are saying the exact same things.
David Axe writes in Forbes that according to Greek media, Dark Brandon has finalized a deal with Greece to send military surplus to Greece who will send its old stuff to Ukraine. Greece has Tor and S300 systems and ammunition for example.
Biden plans to use the authority of Excess Defense Articles (EDA) to declare items military surplus, assign them a value, and send them off to allies. This authority is capped at $500 million however there is discretion in the value he assigns to the gear. […]
This isn’t a cure all but it is definitely something.
Posted by readers of the article:
The stakes are very high, and the republican elected officials, in their total submission to Trump, have completely abandoned any sense of responsibility towards international stability. President Biden doesn’t have any choice but to bypass Congress.
——————————
Creative accounting would show the savings from not having to dismantle and dispose of out dated equipment, adding to the amount that can be given to Ukraine.
—————————–
Good to see, now if we can ramp it up. Firmly believe the value on the stuff we are not using anymore, phasing out, sitting around waiting to be able to afford to dispose of it properly has been WAY over inflated in value. Some of that is ammunition at or beyond expiration / recommended shelf life. New ammo / munitions should be about the only thing anywhere near full value (which is often over inflated itself). GIVE UKR bradleys from storage (costing us to keep there) as a COST SAVINGS.
Pierce R. Butlersays
Lynna… @ # 78, quoting Wired: … the convoy was a complete mess.
Wow, it didn’t take long at all for DeSantis’s campaign crew to find a new gig.
There’s good news for steroid fans: juicers will finally get their day on the field. A who’s who of extremely online investors pitched in to fund a series of events called the Enhanced Games, which describes itself as “the 21st Century Olympics without drug testing.” The list includes Christian Angermayer, venture capitalist, Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase CTO, and Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and frenemy of Elon Musk.
“Unlike the Olympic Games, Enhanced believes that excellence deserves to be rewarded,” said Aron D’Souza, President of the Enhanced Games, in a press release. “Support from the world’s leading venture capitalists enables us to create the structures that pay athletes fairly.” (D’Souza previously led Thiel’s litigation against Gawker, Gizmodo’s former parent company.) …
A California man who tried to blame his twin brother for the rapes of a 9-year-old girl and a jogger was sentenced to 140 years to life this week in attacks that happened decades ago, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said.
Genealogy technology led investigators to Kevin Konther, the man who was convicted and sentenced, and his twin brother in 2019 in connection with the sexual assaults in 1995 and 1998, the district attorney’s office said in a statement.
“Identical twins share the same DNA, but conversations covertly recorded between the two brothers following their arrests revealed multiple incriminating statements made by Kevin Konther, including admissions that he carried out the crimes,” the office said in February when he was convicted.
The twin brother has not been charged. The district attorney’s office said that in the recorded conversations, he expressed shock at the allegations against his brother…
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday vetoed a set of new legislative maps passed by Republicans last week amid an order by the liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court to redraw the state’s electoral boundaries.
The legislative action and subsequent veto comes days before two consultants are set to submit a report analyzing several map proposals submitted as part of the redistricting case before the state Supreme Court, which declared the current legislative maps unconstitutional. The court said it is prepared to draw maps if Evers and the Republican-led Legislature cannot reach an agreement…
A group of North Carolina voters sued the state and top Republican leaders on Wednesday over new electoral maps which they argue violate voters’ constitutional right to fair elections.
Unlike other recent challenges to Republican redistricting plans, which were filed in federal courts, this lawsuit hinges on a provision of the state Constitution that guarantees “frequent” and “free” elections.
The plaintiffs, who are represented by former state Supreme Court Justice Robert Orr, argue that this provision should be interpreted to mean that elections must be “fair” as well.
“It all comes down to this question: do North Carolina voters have a right to fair elections under our state constitution?“ Orr said in a press release on Wednesday. “If the answer to that question is ‘yes,’ then any time politicians of either party apportion voters to predetermine winners and losers, it’s a clear violation of North Carolinians’ state constitutional rights,” he said in a press release on Wednesday…
A Mississippi man accused of destroying a statue of a pagan idol at Iowa’s state Capitol is now being charged with a hate crime.
The statue was brought to the Capitol by the Satanic Temple of Iowa under state rules allowing religious displays in the building during the holidays. The move drew strong criticism from state and national leaders, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Florida Gov. and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, both Republicans. On Dec. 14, the figure depicting the horned deity Baphomet was “destroyed beyond repair,” according to the group.
Michael Cassidy, a former congressional and legislative candidate from Mississippi, was charged the next day with fourth-degree criminal mischief, a misdemeanor. He told the conservative website The Sentinel that “my conscience is held captive to the word of God, not to bureaucratic decree. And so I acted.”
Now, Polk County prosecutors have charged Cassidy with a more serious offense, the Des Moines Register reported. A document made public Tuesday charged him with felony third-degree criminal mischief. It alleges the act was committed “in violation of individual rights” under Iowa’s hate crime statute.
“Evidence shows the defendant made statements to law enforcement and the public indicating he destroyed the property because of the victim’s religion,” Lynn Hicks, a spokesman for the Polk County Attorney’s Office, said in a statement…
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #91…
One is reminded of the incident that occurred as part of the Tour de France many years ago. The practice used to be that, if a competitor was discovered to be using drugs, he would be listed as Mr. X in the race standings. One such collapsed during one stage of the race. The crowd put him back on his bike, he rode about another 100 feet, and fell over…dead.
One could speculate about how many “enhanced” athletes in Thiel’s games are going to die from the performance enhancing drugs.
birgerjohanssonsays
“Musician’s Worst Nightmare Has Become Our New Reality”
Frank Zappa saw it coming 37 years ago.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=bjkp48XohbE
.
Brexiteer Doesn’t Understand Border Controls #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/oPIfO-Jl558
Another example of how the architects of Brexit did not bother to learn the nuts and bolts of how trade with EU works…
Now ordinary people suffer either trade delays or the risk of substandard food.
[…] The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, described the total as “a staggering sum,” which was more than fair. If the figures are accurate, we’re talking about a presidential candidate who spent nearly $1 million per week, every week for a year, on his legal expenses.
Ordinarily, when campaign contributors make donations, they assume that their money will go toward advertising, campaign staff, campaign offices, etc. When Trump’s followers send him money, however, a dramatic amount of donors’ money is redirected to the former president’s defense counsel.
The details of his political operation’s finances will come into focus in the latest Federal Election Commission filings — the deadline is roughly 11 hours away — but as the Times’ report explained, the emerging picture will only tell part of a larger story.
After Trump’s defeat in 2020, his followers sent millions to his Save America political action committee, hoping the money would go toward overturning the election results, as the Republican bombarded his base with brazen lies. (It didn’t.)
When the former president’s legal fees took a severe toll on Save America’s finances, the PAC did something weird: It asked an allied super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., to give $60 million back, in order to ease the once-flush Save America operation’s financial strains. (The money was supposed to go toward primary-season advertising. Much of the money went to Trump’s lawyers instead.)
[…] It’s worth noting for context that during Trump’s White House tenure, as the then-president faced growing legal bills, the Republican National Committee agreed to help pay his legal bills. After Trump left office, the RNC continued to help pay Trump’s legal bills.
But because the RNC tried, at least initially, to be neutral in the party’s presidential nominating contest, Trump was forced to find someone else to pay his legal bills — so he appears to have put the onus on his donors.
Of course, the likely Republican nominee could pay his own legal bills — he claims to be an exceedingly wealthy man — but as the Times’ article added, Trump “has long been loath to pay lawyers himself and has a history of stiffing those who represent him.”
In theory, these revelations might discourage contributors from opening their wallets to the former president, though (a) they’re unlikely to hear about any of this; and (b) given the fealty Trump enjoys from his core followers, it might not sway them even if they did know the truth.
Most Americans want to see immigration legislation completed now, not later:
[…] a majority of Americans (58%) believe there need to be more restrictions on immigration. That’s to be expected, given the level of attention this issue has received and the constant drumbeat of stories including the word “crisis” or even “invasion.”
However, a very similar majority (57%) made it clear that the solution to this issue is for Democrats and Republicans to compromise on legislation now, rather than waiting until after the election. And a detailed look at this question shows that even Trump voters aren’t completely sold on waiting for Trump.
As you may know, President Biden and Senate Republicans have been negotiating over a bipartisan immigration deal to address border security. Would you prefer that Democrats and Republicans:
– Compromise on an immigration deal now 57%
– Not make a deal now, and wait until after the 2024 elections 15%
– Neither 18%
– Unsure 11%
With just 15% of participants answering that lawmakers should wait until after the election, the desire to quickly reach an agreement on this issue and move on to implementing changes at the border seems clear.
Even among Trump voters, equal numbers answered that legislators should compromise now (28%) when compared to waiting until after the election (28%). A further 30% of Trump voters answered “neither.” It’s unclear if these voters don’t want the issue addressed because they would miss the stories about rainbow fentanyl and razor wire, or if they expect Trump to be able to enact whatever he wants without compromise should he resume power. But the even split on now versus after the election shows that even Trump voters aren’t ready to pump the brakes on dealing with an issue they’ve been repeatedly told is an emergency.
Those being polled were also asked whether border states or the federal government should have the “ultimate authority” to enforce U.S. border security, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may or may not be pleased with the results, depending on how you group the answers.
Who do you think should have the ultimate authority to enforce U.S. border security?
– The federal government 42%
– States along the border 25%
– Both equally 30%
– Unsure 3%
Only a quarter of Americans believe states should be the sole arbiters of immigration policy, but 55% believe that states should have some role—even if that’s not what the Constitution states. On the other hand, a clear plurality believes that this should be purely a federal issue.
Like every question on this topic, this one also sees a strong divide between the parties with 73% of Biden voters saying that the federal government should have complete authority and only 10% of Trump voters agreeing. Somehow, it seems very likely that both of these numbers would shift if Trump were in the White House, but right now exactly 50% of Trump voters believe border security should be entirely controlled by border states. Just 3% of Biden voters agree.
Civiqs also prepared crosstables of results reflecting respondents’ viewing habits and, as might be expected, frequent viewers of Fox News have results that closely mirror those of voters who say they intend to vote for Trump. A huge majority (91%) of frequent Fox viewers want more restrictions, which seems like a logical response to Fox’s 24/7 drumbeat of border scare stories. […]
A recent YouGov survey showed that Republicans actively distrust most media outlets and that Fox is the only major broadcaster they believe. So it’s not surprising that crosstabs of frequent Fox viewers, Republicans, and Trump voters all end up giving nearly the same results.
When results on these questions are split along racial lines, calls for more restrictions on immigration are greatest among white voters (66%) and lowest among Black voters (31%). Hispanic voters fall right in the center, with 45% feeling that immigration needs to be tighter and 32% saying there need to be fewer restrictions. Large majorities of both Black voters (79%) and Hispanic voters (69%) feel that now is the right time to strike an agreement on border issues.
But the most interesting results may come from two questions much less commonly asked of voters, but which look to define a core American belief: Is immigration a good thing?
– Immigration is good for the economy 44%
– Immigration is bad for the economy 41%
– Immigration does not affect the economy 4%
– Unsure 11%
Thinking about the impact of immigration on U.S. culture, which comes closest to your view:
-Immigration is good for U.S. culture 46%
– Immigration is bad for U.S. culture 35%
– Immigration does not affect U.S. culture 7%
– Unsure 11%
A small plurality of Americans believe that immigration is good for the economy. A slightly bigger plurality believes that immigration is good for the nation’s culture. This raises the question of why so many Americans think that something good for the country needs to happen less. As might be expected, these numbers perform worse with white voters, with only 44% believing that immigration makes American culture better, compared with Black voters (64%) and Hispanic voters (65%).
But maybe the best news is that barely a third of Americans believe that immigration actually harms America’s culture. That third is overwhelmingly Trump voters, where 70% say immigration is a bad thing. This is only another signal of just how important it is to beat Trump and his supporters.
Altogether, it seems like Americans want more control of the border, and want it taken care of now, but they also want to preserve the benefits that immigration brings. Maybe that’s a compromise we can all live with—even if Fox keeps screaming.
Following a contentious 15-hour debate, the House Homeland Security Committee voted in the wee hours of Wednesday morning to approve the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The vote was strictly on party lines, 18-15, and Democrats used amendments and procedural motions to score plenty of hits against congressional Republicans for being the tools of Donald Trump. […]
“It’s pretty rich hearing the gentlewoman from Georgia express her concern about terrorism when she literally was selling ‘defund the FBI’ T-shirts and hats on her website for $30 apiece,” Magaziner said. “The leading law enforcement agency tasked with combating terrorism in this country and keeping people safe, and she wants to defund it,” he continued. “I’m not going to take any lectures from her on securing this homeland from terror.”
Democrats also pointed out Republican actions to stymie Mayorkas, including lawsuits that hamper him from enforcing the law. “When the secretary and the administration has tried to use their limited authority to change policy to limit the number of people coming to the border, to streamline the process, to make it go through ports of entry, Republicans filed lawsuits to stop the administration from doing it,” Rep. Dan Goldman of New York correctly pointed out.
[…] The impeachment resolution is likely to come to the House floor next week, where its passage isn’t assured. There are still at least a few Republicans who have not committed to impeaching a cabinet official over a policy disagreement, and the Republican majority is so tiny that leadership can’t afford much defection. The Democratic conference is as united against the resolution as the committee Democrats are, and the impeachment won’t go anywhere in the Senate.
This isn’t about immigration policy, of course. This is about fighting President Joe Biden on immigration, which is just about the only issue Republicans have working in their favor in this election. Republican lawmakers themselves admit that.
Christian Bale had his 50th birthday this week.
Here is a very young Christian Bale, actor in Mio In The Land Of Faraway (1987), a film based on a story by Astrid Lindgren. Very different from his role in American Psycho…
[…] Let us join hands in merriment at this delightful decision from the Delaware Court of Chancery tossing out Musk’s $55 billion compensation package.
What’s that? You don’t feel like reading a 200-page legal opinion on your lunch break? Not to fear, we got you.
Begin by casting your mind back to the halcyon shellshocked days of 2017. Sure, we were all in a rage stupor because of Trump. But the tech billionaire we loved to loathe back then was Mark Zuckerberg, whose attention-exploitation machine likely cost us the election en route to launching a dangerous conspiracy cult. At the time, Musk still seemed like a genius, thanks to Tesla’s remarkable rise. How could a man who championed electric cars be not only bad, but also a goddamn bloody idiot?
Spoiler Alert: HE COULD.
But back in 2017, Tesla was renegotiating Musk’s compensation package — or, ummm, “negotiating.” According to a shareholder lawsuit filed the following year, the compensation committee was functionally controlled by Musk, stacked with people who were financially dependent on him and with whom he had long personal relationships. The documents were even drafted by his former divorce attorney Todd Maron, now general counsel at Tesla. And so it is perhaps unsurprising that the committee approved a pay deal which wound up being worth $55 billion over 10 years on the theory that Musk was the indispensable genius, solely responsible for all of Tesla’s growth.
That’s a whole lotta zeroes, as Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Chancery Court wrote last night:
With a $55.8 billion maximum value and $2.6 billion grant date fair value, the plan is the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude—250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan and over 33 times larger than the plan’s closest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation plan.
In 2018, shareholders sued to have the package rescinded on the theory that stockholders only approved the plan because they were told that the compensation committee was independent and had negotiated in the best interests of the company, not its CEO. And yesterday, the judge agreed, tossing out Musk’s “unfathomable” compensation package as a violation of Delaware’s law of “fairness.”
“[T]he defendants were unable to prove that the stockholder vote was fully informed because the proxy statement inaccurately described key directors as independent and misleadingly omitted details about the process,” she wrote, noting that the committee members’ own testimony described the negotiations as “cooperative.”
“We were not on different sides of things,” admitted committee leader Ira Ehrenpreis, a venture capitalist who built his career on his relationship with Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal. (Kimbal was also on the committee, but appears to have recused himself from the vote.)
The theory was that Tesla had to give Musk anything he wanted, up to and including close to 30 percent of the stock, because otherwise he’d take his bigly brain genius somewhere else and then Tesla wouldn’t be able to build the truck of the future, as long as that future means no snow, ditches, or bugs.
The problem with this theory was that Musk already owned a fifth of the company when the deal was approved; he’d crafted it in his image, crowning himself Tesla’s “Technoking”; he routinely assigned its employees to projects at his other companies without seeking board approval; and he had publicly stated that he intended to be involved in the company for the rest of his life.
At a high level, the “6% for $600 billion” argument has a lot of appeal. But that appeal quickly fades when one remembers that Musk owned 21.9% of Tesla when the board approved his compensation plan. This ownership stake gave him every incentive to push Tesla to levels of transformative growth—Musk stood to gain over $10 billion for every $50 billion in market capitalization increase. Musk had no intention of leaving Tesla, and he made that clear at the outset of the process and throughout this litigation. Moreover, the compensation plan was not conditioned on Musk devoting any set amount of time to Tesla because the board never proposed such a term. Swept up by the rhetoric of “all upside,” or perhaps starry eyed by Musk’s superstar appeal, the board never asked the $55.8 billion question: Was the plan even necessary for Tesla to retain Musk and achieve its goals?
TL, DR? Tesla didn’t need to give Musk another 8 percent of the company in the biggest CEO compensation package in history. The guy wasn’t going to take his talents elsewhere.
Or, to be more accurate, he was going to go elsewhere. He was going to buy Twitter and submerge his brain in the vat of rightwing battery acid until he emerged as a racist caricature, an immigrant who hates immigrants. [Offensive Musk posts on Xwitter are available at the link.]
[Musk’s posts included text dissing the state of Delaware.] Yes, Delaware, a state that is home to more corporations than human beings, is going to empty out because a lunatic social media junkie can’t get tens of billions of dollars a year to feed his addiction. You betcha.
Tesla stock is up this morning on news of the order, recovering some of the ground it lost last week after a shitshow earnings call where Musk and his minions failed to allay investors’ worries. And at about $191, it’s far off the $293 it reached in August of 2023. Maybe Musk isn’t quite the genius he used to be.
“In the final analysis, Musk launched a self-driving process, recalibrating the speed and direction along the way as he saw fit. The process arrived at an unfair price,” Chancellor McCormick wrote. “In these circumstances, the preferred remedy is the best one. The plaintiff is entitled to rescission.”
I forgot some of you don’t speak lawyer: She means cancel it all, do not pass go.
Cargo bikes started as something you’d see in images from Europe—bakfiets loaded up with groceries or sometimes kids. Now they’re getting more popular, and seemingly for good reason. A new study out of Germany suggests that once you let people try them, they tend to have a real impact on car use, and even car ownership.
The study, from Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, surveyed people using a cargo bike share (CBS) system from 58 different programs and initiatives in Germany, controlling a collective 751 cargo bikes. Out of the 2,386 active CBS users surveyed, 45.8 percent had one car in their home, and 54.2 percent lived without a car. As you might notice, this mix of cargo bike shares and car ownership is not representative of the US, but using a cargo bike, even one they didn’t technically own, still impacted ownership decisions in even one-car households…
That’s where former federal judge Barbara Jones, the court-appointed special monitor in Donald Trump’s New York business fraud case, just planted a financial bombshell that legal experts say suggests Trump lied knowingly and repeatedly on his federal financial disclosures about a major loan that never existed—and may have evaded taxes on $48 million in income.
The detail came in a letter Jones filed on Friday to update New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron, first reported by The Messenger, on her efforts to get a full and clear accounting of the Trump Organization’s assets. The letter claims, yet again, that Trump and his company have filed statements containing inconsistencies and errors, but have been “cooperative” in the review process.
But Jones tucked a major revelation into footnote 6, writing that a massive chunk of debt Trump has claimed to owe one of his own companies for years apparently does not exist, and never did.
“When I inquired about this loan, I was informed that there are no loan agreements that memorialize the loan, but that it was a loan that was believed to be between Donald J. Trump, individually, and Chicago Unit Acquisition for $48 million,” Jones wrote, referencing the name of Trump’s LLC that held his debt…
A new study on public attitudes toward abortion laws finds that the more people know about pregnancy, the more likely they are to oppose legislation that limits women’s access to abortions – regardless of political ideology. The study also found that laws that limit access to abortion after 12 weeks did not have greater support than laws that limit access to abortion after six weeks.
“There is a tremendous amount of research on public attitudes toward abortion in the United States, but very little of that work has been done since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade,” says Steven Greene, co-author of the study and a professor of political science at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to ask questions that directly address the policy issues raised in state legislatures in the wake of Dobbs…
The author digs deep into the statistics to show that by almost any metric—growth, investment, spending, employment—the Democratic president has much more to show and, yes, this includes inflation…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign took in more from donors who gave in the past to former President Donald Trump than President Joe Biden even after he left the Democratic primary to run as an independent.
All told, Kennedy, who announced his independent run in early October, brought in more than $7 million from October through December.
Of that total, $5 million came from itemized donations greater than $200. Roughly $224,000 of those itemized donations were from donors who had given to Trump’s 2020 campaign, according to a POLITICO analysis of the filing submitted to the Federal Election Commission late Tuesday. By contrast, just $105,000 came from donors to Biden’s last campaign.
Those figures continue a trend that was apparent when Kennedy was running in the Democratic primary, further suggesting that he might garnish more interest from Trump supporters if the two of them and Biden face off in the general election…
The Delaware Chancery Court ruled on Tuesday that a nearly $56 billion compensation package awarded to Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2018 was invalid. The decision was made by Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the same judge who forced Musk to go through with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022 after he tried to back out.
That’s an even $100 billion that Musk has lost to the rulings of this single judge. Combined, this would be the single greatest loss of personal wealth in human history, except that someone topped it in 2023. And that someone … was also Elon Musk.
The decision voiding his 2018 pay package comes just two weeks after Musk tried to extort another $80 billion from Tesla’s board while threatening to do his geniusing elsewhere. It seems like a pretty safe bet that’s not going to happen.
[…] while Musk topped Investopedia’s list of the wealthiest people in the world until this week, he may be heading several rungs down the ladder.
The losses in 2023 took Musk’s wealth down from multiples of his nearest rival to the point where he had already moved into second place on the Forbes Magazine list. Subtracting the pay package voided on Tuesday would likely drop Musk to around the 10th position. […]
Following Tuesday’s ruling, Musk tweeted, “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware.” But the truth is that Delaware’s rules are notoriously corporation-friendly, giving companies enormous tax breaks and a great deal of both privacy and flexibility. That’s why over 60% of Fortune 500 companies, no matter where their physical headquarters are located, are incorporated in Delaware.
In short, getting smacked down by the state’s Chancery Court for an internal business dealing means you really screwed up.
[…] Chancellor McCormick has written her ruling more like a work of literature than what you might expect in most courtrooms. It even has a grand opening:
Was the richest person in the world overpaid? The stockholder plaintiff in this derivative lawsuit says so. […]
[…] What executive couldn’t be super wealthy if they supersized their compensation package times 250? And Musk was already the holder of the biggest compensation package on record.
[…] CNBC has pulled out some of the most amusing highlights. For example:
– In response to testimony from Musk’s brother that “Tesla created Elon Musk’s persona and Elon Musk’s persona is attached to Tesla,” McCormick dropped a “Frankenstein” reference. “Tesla and Musk are intertwined, almost in a Mary Shelley (‘You are my creator . . .’) sort of way,” wrote McCormick.
– A lengthy section is devoted to explaining why Musk’s belief that he has “a moral obligation” to colonize Mars is not a factor in determining fair compensation from a car company. [LOL]
– Having already launched into outer space, McCormick followed up with a nod to “Star Trek,” writing that “This decision dares to ‘boldly go where no man has gone before,’ or at least where no Delaware court has tread.”
There’s also a Shakespeare quote in there, along with some uncomplimentary mentions of Musk’s obsession with self-driving cars. But the most important part of the ruling is McCormick’s determination that the Tesla board, which awarded the massive compensation package to Musk, was nothing more than a proxy.
“In addition to his 21.9% equity stake, Musk was the paradigmatic ‘Superstar CEO,’ who held some of the most influential corporate positions (CEO, Chair, and founder), enjoyed thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan. At least as to this transaction, Musk controlled Tesla.
Musk defined all the goals he had to meet to receive bonuses, he set the timing, and he dictated the terms. In other words, when it came to determining his paycheck, Musk was running Tesla, not the board—and certainly not the shareholders. He gave the money to himself.
That’s why he now has to give it back.
No one should cry for Musk. He still has more wealth than any human being should ever hold.
Reginald Selkirk @ #104, I was laughing at the graph in that article and about to post about it when I wondered if anyone else noticed. From the first comment I read:
Wow, that is an impressively unhelpfully presented graph.
I haven’t read it yet but the title looked interesting.
“Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33621637/
In response to testimony from Musk’s brother that “Tesla created Elon Musk’s persona and Elon Musk’s persona is attached to Tesla,” McCormick dropped a “Frankenstein” reference. “Tesla and Musk are intertwined, almost in a Mary Shelley (‘You are my creator . . .’) sort of way,” wrote McCormick.
She knows what’s up. People at Tesla should pay close attention.
…Musk was the paradigmatic ‘Superstar CEO,’ who held some of the most influential corporate positions (CEO, Chair, and founder),…
Despite the fact that he wasn’t the founder.
A lengthy section is devoted to explaining why Musk’s belief that he has “a moral obligation” to colonize Mars is not a factor in determining fair compensation from a car company. [LOL]
Hahaha.
Maybe Musk isn’t quite the genius he used to be.
The other day I listened to the latest episode of the podcast Surfing the Discourse, which is about Musk. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but among the topics he’s recently claimed to have expertise in: the history of battles (not specific to any war, country, or time period – all battles), manufacturing (about which he knows “more…than anyone currently alive on earth”), the video game Quake (I believe) (at which he was once “one of the best…players in the world), N95 masks, ventilators, life support systems on spaceships, consciousness, politics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the psychological effects of social media. He’s a dangerous narcissistic fool.
The US Justice Department said Wednesday that the FBI surreptitiously sent commands to hundreds of infected small office and home office routers to remove malware China state-sponsored hackers were using to wage attacks on critical infrastructure.
The routers—mainly Cisco and Netgear devices that had reached their end of life—were infected with what’s known as KV Botnet malware, Justice Department officials said. Chinese hackers from a group tracked as Volt Typhoon used the malware to wrangle the routers into a network they could control. Traffic passing between the hackers and the compromised devices was encrypted using a VPN module KV Botnet installed. From there, the campaign operators connected to the networks of US critical infrastructure organizations to establish posts that could be used in future cyberattacks. The arrangement caused traffic to appear as originating from US IP addresses with trustworthy reputations rather than suspicious regions in China…
“To effect these seizures, the FBI will issue a command to each Target Device to stop it from running the KV Botnet VPN process,” an agency special agent wrote in an affidavit dated January 9. “This command will also stop the Target Device from operating as a VPN node, thereby preventing the hackers from further accessing Target Devices through any established VPN tunnel. This command will not affect the Target Device if the VPN process is not running, and will not otherwise affect the Target Device, including any legitimate VPN process installed by the owner of the Target Device.”
Wednesday’s Justice Department statement said authorities had followed through on the takedown, which disinfected “hundreds” of infected routers and removed them from the botnet. To prevent the devices from being reinfected, the takedown operators issued additional commands that the affidavit said would “interfere with the hackers’ control over the instrumentalities of their crimes (the Target Devices), including by preventing the hackers from easily re-infecting the Target Devices.” …
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@Reginald Selkirk #111:
The study was interesting. Then the reporter added this.
[ArsTechnica]: Pardon us while we scrub our toilet bowls with Lysol and stock up on toilet tank disinfectant dispensers.
We don’t recommend using tank additives, those tablets or discs […] seem like an easy and maintenance-free option, as they’re designed to be dropped into the tank, where they dissolve over time, spreading disinfectant […] But according to [a] toilet manufacturer […] such tablets turn all the standing water in the tank into a caustic liquid, which can warp the rubber components […] this can lead to leaks [and voids the warranty]
An example of the Dune pop culture craze. The film really made an impression.
“Take a first look at how to build your base in Arrakis! #dune #duneawakening
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7rnoY3Uyno8
Wednesday’s hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee got a little spicy as senators took turns bashing the CEOs of the biggest social media platforms. While well-deserved for the most part, it was Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, who decided to go down a weird path with TikTok CEO Shou Chew.
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party,” Sen. Cotton asked Chew after taking a dramatic pause from asking the CEO multiple questions about what country he was a citizen of.
“Senator, I’m Singaporean. No,” Chew replied with a smirk as if maybe this was a joke told by the gentlemen from Arkansas.
“Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party,” Cotton asked seriously, clearly showing he was not joking.
“No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean,” Chew answered giving a quick glance forward as if to say, “Oh, he was serious about this.” …
birgerjohanssonsays
“Massive Strike on Crimea Airfield Catches Russia Unprepared!”
The clustering of aircraft on the satellite image certainly implies they did not expect to get hit.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=nqzg4oEs9e4
Robert tells Ify about the time tech weirdo’s recreated Hell using AI and Robert pisses off a VP at Google. Plus: More cult shit!…
At the end he mentions Nightshade, which is a fascinating development. He earlier mentions similarities with evolutionary competition, and this seems like a prime example.
Intentionally poisoning someone else is never morally right. But if someone in the office keeps swiping your lunch, wouldn’t you resort to petty vengeance?
For artists, protecting work from being used to train AI models without consent is an uphill battle. Opt-out requests and do-not-scrape codes rely on AI companies to engage in good faith, but those motivated by profit over privacy can easily disregard such measures. Sequestering themselves offline isn’t an option for most artists, who rely on social media exposure for commissions and other work opportunities.
Nightshade, a project from the University of Chicago, gives artists some recourse by “poisoning” image data, rendering it useless or disruptive to AI model training. Ben Zhao, a computer science professor who led the project, compared Nightshade to “putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn’t get stolen from the workplace fridge.”
“We’re showing the fact that generative models in general, no pun intended, are just models. Nightshade itself is not meant as an end-all, extremely powerful weapon to kill these companies,” Zhao said. “Nightshade shows that these models are vulnerable and there are ways to attack. What it means is that there are ways for content owners to provide harder returns than writing Congress or complaining via email or social media.”
Zhao and his team aren’t trying to take down Big AI — they’re just trying to force tech giants to pay for licensed work, instead of training AI models on scraped images.
“There is a right way of doing this,” he continued. “The real issue here is about consent, is about compensation. We are just giving content creators a way to push back against unauthorized training.”…
Much more at the link. The Mona Lisa transformation is outstanding.
students who were on a visit […] to voice their concerns about guns and school shootings
[…]
Last May, [Rep. Jim Lucas] was caught driving under the influence when he struck a guardrail and drove against traffic […] pleaded guilty last week to two misdemeanors—operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident.
drove on three flat tires for more than 2 miles after […] crash caused an estimated $25,000 to $50,000 in damages, with two guardrails struck […] Police Department found Lucas walking […] a firearm located in his pickup
SC @129, the TechCrunch coverage of “Nightshade” was interesting. Artists do need to put a certain amount of work online where it is susceptible to being scraped by AI. It’s good that some people are developing protective software.
Reginald @122, that is such good news.
SC @114, thanks for that list of subjects for which Elon Musk claimed expertise. That shows, more clearly, than any other summary I’ve seen, what a trumpian, narcissistic dunderhead Musk is. Yes, Musk is dangerous. And he seems to be getting worse over time.
[…] As NBC News reported, Disney’s lawsuit against his administration has been thrown out by a federal judge, who ruled that the corporate giant lacked standing.
U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor said Disney’s claims of injury resulting from the appointment of board members to a new district created by Florida lawmakers was “in the past.” Disney also failed to show damages from specific actions the new board has taken or will take because of the governor’s alleged control of it, Winsor wrote.
Before we get to the flawed outcome, let’s quickly review how we arrived at this point.
In 2022, the Florida Republican signed a proposal that critics labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” policy, and Disney, a powerhouse in the Sunshine State, eventually criticized the anti-LGBTQ+ measure in an inconsequential press statement.
In a normal political environment, the governor might’ve defended his position and expressed his disagreement with the company, at which point the relevant players would’ve moved on. But in DeSantis Land, there’s nothing especially normal about politics: The far-right governor responded to the modest and inconsequential criticism by picking an ugly and prolonged fight with Disney — which included real consequences in terms of local governance — in part to punish the corporate giant for daring to disagree with him in public, and in part to send a signal to others that he’d retaliate against anyone who challenges his positions.
Disney filed a lawsuit challenging DeSantis’ willingness to use state government as a tool of political retaliation, and there was reason to believe the litigation had merit and was likely to succeed.
Judge Allen Winsor, however, came to the opposite conclusion, relying on dubious reasoning.
It’s at this point that some readers might be wondering which president chose Winsor for the federal bench. The answer, of course, is Donald Trump.
During Winsor’s confirmation process, senators learned that the Floridian, who served as then-Gov. Rick Scott’s solicitor general, was a longtime member of the Federalist Society. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights described Winsor as “a young, conservative ideologue who has attempted to restrict voting rights, LGBT equality, reproductive freedom, environmental protection, criminal defendants’ rights, and gun safety. He does not possess the neutrality and fair-mindedness necessary to serve in a lifetime position as a federal judge.”
He was narrowly confirmed in 2019, over the objections of every Democratic senator except Joe Manchin.
Five years later, the conservative jurist is doing exactly what the political world expected him to do.
As for the future of the litigation, a Disney spokesperson told CNN, “This is an important case with serious implications for the rule of law, and it will not end here. If left unchallenged, this would set a dangerous precedent and give license to states to weaponize their official powers to punish the expression of political viewpoints they disagree with. We are determined to press forward with our case.”
[…] Never an intelligent man, Trump has forgotten who he is running against and misidentifies the current President. He confuses Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. We all make mistakes […] but at some point, his mental decline can no longer be dismissed as ‘no biggie.’
Today, a subdued Trump faced questions from a reporter asking how he planned to pay for the penalties already on the books — and the big one about to be announced by Judge Engoron. Trump had no clue what she was talking about as he peered myopically at the source of the inquiry.
Reporter: “Do you plan to use campaign funds or some of the PAC monies to pay penalties in the New York fraud and defamation cases?”
Trump: “I don’t understand, what?”
Reporter: “Are you thinking of potentially using campaign money to pay the penalties that you [indecipherable].”
Trump: “What penalties?”
Reporter: “The New York fraud case, the defamation case.”
At this point, it seemed to finally dawn on the sad old man what the reporter was asking. However, Trump dodged her questions and turned to his reflexive position, “I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning.” Although, in comparison, he makes King Lear look like the voice of reason and a man of even temper.
Trump then explained that in his opinion — the only opinion he listens to — it had been proven he was a good boy. Further, higher legal authorities had determined he was “largely” guilt-free. And where they had not, the charges against him were without merit.
Trump: “I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean that’s been proven, as far as I’m concerned. And actually we won in the Court of Appeals. You probably saw that. That case has been largely won in the court of appeals. That was a political case, coordinated with the White House by the attorney general, I assume is what you’re talking about. And we won that case, largely in the Court of Appeals.”
Reporter: “Carroll .. the defamation case.”
Trump: “That’s a ridiculous case.”
I try to stay au courant with Trump’s legal odyssey, but I do not know what he means when he refers to his victory in the Court of Appeals. And that is where it gets scary. Once, I would have attributed his fantasies to an amoral disdain for the truth. Now, I think he truly believes his own bullshit.
In his inner dialogue, he has convinced himself that the “Court of Appeals” has absolved him of his sins — which he did not commit in the first place. It jibes with his behavior during his trials. When he denies knowing E. Jean Carroll, he may be telling the ‘truth’ as he experiences it. When he says that Mar a Lago is worth $1.8 billion — he does not think he is lying. When he looks in the mirror, he sees a 215-pound man.
He has added insanity to immorality — which is frightening. And millions of Americans will still vote for him — which is terrifying. [Tweet and video at the link]
His reference to his “winning in the Court of Appeals” relates to an early ruling by a New York state court of appeals related to the NY Attorney General Tish James civil fraud case.
Trump is correct that many months ago a NY state court of appeals reduced the scope of the case James was trying to make.
The difference is that AG James and Judge Engoron interpreted the court of appeals’ ruling as a narrow and limited one that left most of the AG’s complaints against Trump intact. Trump and his attorneys have consistently maintained that Judge Engoron is misinterpreting the ruling of the court of appeals and that most (or all) of the AG’s case was thrown out by the court of appeals. Trump’s attorneys made a motion to dismiss based on the court of appeals decision, and Judge Engoron denied the motion — and proceeded with the current trial.
That fundamental disagreement about the scope of the court of appeals decision will likely be Trump’s primary argument in his appeal of the decision we all anxiously await from Judge Engoron any day now.
—————————–
I wonder if he will be sufficiently lucid to make it all the way to November. The slips and slurs and confusion of names and faces is already well established, and seems to be getting worse by the week (day?). Nevertheless, we need to work our butts off to put his Repugnant Party in the minority!!
——————————-
I think it’s a mixture. He really couldn’t process the question. And then he either just made something up or, in his delusional mind believes that he defeated Biden in the Appeals Court.
———————————
He who dies with the most cases stalled in the appeals process wins. 🍔🍟🥤☠️
——————————–
I just feel as though someone should mention, particularly in regards to the above clip, that it’s possible he’s having hearing problems. That doesn’t explain things like the Nancy / Nickii mix up, but he’s certainly of an age for it — and it can lead to cognitive issues. Lots of people are in denial about hearing loss, and I can well imagine him being one of them.
———————————
If Biden couldn’t hear, he’d wear the damn hearing aid. You know, he’d deal with reality.
———————————-
He has no intention of paying these penalties, so he’s decided to pretend they don’t exist.
————————————
TFG is a proven liar—and is losing control of whatever mental acuity was there in the first place!
Donald Trump’s attempt to bring a case in the UK against a former MI6 officer who compiled a salacious dossier linking him to Russia has failed.
The former president had been seeking to use data protection laws to sue the company run by Christopher Steele but the High Court has thrown out the case.
Mr Steele compiled the dossier which contained unproven allegations about bribing officials and sex parties.
It was leaked to the media just before Mr Trump was sworn in as president.
In bringing the lawsuit against Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, he said the dossier contained allegations that were inaccurate and breached his data protection rights.
In Thursday’s ruling in London, Mrs Justice Steyn DBE said she did not make any judgement on the allegations themselves but found Mr Trump’s claim had not been brought within the six-year limitation period…
Caitlin Clark is on pace to break the NCAA Division I women’s scoring record in February with a career-high scoring clip.
The 6-foot Iowa point guard is now second on the all-time list with 3,424 points. Kelsey Plum, who has two WNBA championships with the Las Vegas Aces, set the mark with 3,527 points at Washington from 2013-17…
LSU legend Pete Maravich holds the men’s mark with 3,667 points, which Clark is also within striking distance of this year…
Residents of the eastern Spanish region of Catalonia will be banned from washing their cars and filling up empty swimming pools under measures announced on Thursday to alleviate the region’s worst drought on record.
The measures, which will come into force on Friday, will affect around six million people in 200 villages, towns and cities, including Spain’s second largest city Barcelona. They were adopted after reservoirs fell close to 16% of their capacity.
The Iberian peninsula is its driest in 1,200 years, a 2022 study showed, forcing officials to consider bringing in water by ship to Barcelona, a measure adopted in 2008 when reservoir levels were close to 20% and fewer desalination plants were operating…
Indian police cleared a suspected Chinese spy pigeon after eight months’ detention and released it into the wild Tuesday, news agency Press Trust of India reported.
The pigeon’s ordeal began in May when it was captured near a port in Mumbai with two rings tied to its legs, carrying words that looked like Chinese. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in, later sending it to Mumbai’s Bai Sakarbai Dinshaw Petit Hospital for Animals.
Eventually, it turned out the pigeon was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to India. With police permission, the bird was transferred to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose doctors set it free on Tuesday…
A plan to restore one of the Giza pyramids is being slammed by archaeologists, who have compared it to “straightening the Tower of Pisa.”
The project—which is already in motion—aims to reconstruct the outer casing of granite on the Pyramid of Menkaure’s four sides, and is a partnership between the Egyptian government and Japanese archaeologists. The facade is being constructed with the original blocks scattered around the pyramid’s base. According to the project team, the blocks were dislodged during an earthquake within the last thousand years…
birgerjohanssonsays
I found an annoying anachronism in Anne Rice’s ‘Queen of the Damned’. In what appear to be the predynastic time of Egypt, Jericho did indeed exist, but as a local polity, hardly a kingdom extendibg to mt. Carmel. And I am positive Niniveh did not exist; that area of mesopotamia would become known as Akkad before it became it became known as Assyria.
birgerjohanssonsays
Most prisoners never receive visitors, and this may put them at a higher risk of re-offending
.https://phys.org/news/2024-02-prisoners-visitors-higher.html
Very poor information about the rules for visits make visits traumatic and deter family from making repeat visits.
Women are far more likely than men to get autoimmune diseases, when an out-of-whack immune system attacks their own bodies — and new research may finally explain why.
It’s all about how the body handles females’ extra X chromosome, Stanford University researchers reported Thursday — a finding that could lead to better ways to detect a long list of diseases that are hard to diagnose and treat…
The new research, published in the journal Cell, shows that extra X is involved — but in an unexpected way.
Our DNA is carried inside each cell in 23 pairs of chromosomes, including that final pair that determines biological sex. The X chromosome is packed with hundreds of genes, far more than males’ much smaller Y chromosome. Every female cell must switch off one of its X chromosome copies, to avoid getting a toxic double dose of all those genes.
Performing that so-called X-chromosome inactivation is a special type of RNA called Xist, pronounced like “exist.” This long stretch of RNA parks itself in spots along a cell’s extra X chromosome, attracts proteins that bind to it in weird clumps, and silences the chromosome.
Stanford dermatologist Dr. Howard Chang was exploring how Xist does its job when his lab identified nearly 100 of those stuck-on proteins. Chang recognized many as related to skin-related autoimmune disorders — patients can have “autoantibodies” that mistakenly attack those normal proteins.
“That got us thinking: These are the known ones. What about the other proteins in Xist?” Chang said. Maybe this molecule, found only in women, “could somehow organize proteins in such a way as to activate the immune system.” …
Stout, the current mayor of Grand Junction, says her decision was a direct response to Boebert’s switch from Colorado’s 3rd to 4th Congressional District. Adam Frisch is now unopposed in the Democratic primary in the district.
On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing on child safety in social media. Executives from Meta, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Discord, and other sites took questions from senators about what their sites were doing to protect children from scams, predators, and exposure to material intended for adults. Also, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recited a cringeworthy apology on demand from Sen. Josh Hawley.
But when Republican Sen. Tom Cotton got his opportunity to ask questions, he blew past the part of the program where this hearing was supposed to be concerned with children. Instead, he went straight after TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew with a series of odd questions about Chew’s personal connections to “the Chinese Communist Party.”
When Chew tried repeatedly to make it clear that he was not from China, but Singapore, a small nation off the coast of Malaysia, some 1,200 miles from the nearest point in China, Cotton was not having it. Or, at least, not allowing Chew not being Chinese to keep him from asking questions that assumed Chew was Chinese.
Cotton didn’t quite get to All Asians Look Like Commies To Me. But he came close. [Tweet and video at the link]
Cotton: You said today, as you often say, that you live in Singapore. Of what nation are you a citizen?
Chew: Singapore.
Cotton: Are you a citizen of any other nation?
Chew: No, senator.
Cotton: Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?
Chew: Senator, I served my nation of Singapore. No. I did not.
Cotton: Do you have a Singaporean passport?
Chew: Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years.
Cotton: Do you have any other passports?
Chew: No, senator.
[…]
Cotton: Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?
Chew: Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.
Cotton: Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?
Chew: No, senator. Again, I’m Singaporean.
Undaunted by Chew’s responses, Cotton later went on Fox News to claim that “Singapore, unfortunately, is one of the places in the world that has the highest degree of infiltration and influence by the Chinese Communist Party. So, Mr. Chew has a lot to answer for, for what his app is doing in America and why it’s doing it.”
Apparently, what Chew has to answer for is that he’s from Singapore. Unfortunately, Tom Cotton is from America.
A former Atlantic City councilman who went to prison for bribery and a sex blackmail case is facing charges again.
Craig Callaway, 64, is a sought-after political organizer and operative in and around Atlantic City, known for his ability to deliver large blocks of absentee ballots to election officials that often sway the outcome of elections. But he was arrested Thursday and charged with election fraud involving the misuse of absentee ballots — something of which his political foes had long accused him…
Prosecutors said Callaway and others working at his direction paid people $30 to $50 to apply to be messengers for voters purportedly wishing to vote by mail.
They went to the county clerk’s office, signed the messenger portion of the ballot applications and received ballots to be given to the voters listed on the applications.
However, after receiving mail-in ballots, these purported messengers left the county clerk’s office and instead handed the ballots to Callaway or his subordinates, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Many of the mail-in ballots collected by Callaway or his subordinates were ultimately cast in the names of people who have confirmed that they did not vote in the 2022 general election – either in person or by mail, the office said. These voters also said they did not authorize Callaway, his subordinates, or anyone else, to cast ballots for them. Many of these mail-in ballots were counted in the election…
The Oregon Supreme Court said Thursday that 10 Republican state senators who staged a record-long walkout last year to stall bills on abortion, transgender health care and gun rights cannot run for reelection.
The decision upholds the secretary of state’s decision to disqualify the senators from the ballot under a voter-approved measure aimed at stopping such boycotts. Measure 113, passed by voters in 2022, amended the state constitution to bar lawmakers from reelection if they have more than 10 unexcused absences…
An ethics watchdog group has released a damning report that sheds light on the swampy relationship between Donald Trump and the GOP. Specifically, the report focuses on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which Trump sold in May 2022 for a reported $375 million and has since been rebranded as a Waldorf Astoria.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, found that during Trump’s presidency, the D.C. hotel brought in more than $3 million from “Republican political organizations,” more than any other Trump property during that time period. During a 17-month period after Trump sold the property, from June 2022 until the end of November 2023, the Waldorf Astoria pulled in $37,878 from those same folks.
For comparison, GOP groups spent $1,570,239, or 40 times that, in the interval between June 2018 and November 2019—the last comparable period when the building was still under Trump ownership. In fact, the amount spent since it opened is just a quarter of the $154,500 that then-Speaker Paul Ryan’s joint fundraising committee spent there in a single day in 2018, and a fraction of the $435,034 that Republican groups have spent at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence, since the Waldorf Astoria opened.
Remember how in 2019, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told the press that Trump hotels were “just like any other hotel”? It’s a mere coincidence that, according to Forbes, McCarthy spent a whopping $740 at Trump businesses in the 10 years prior to his presidency. McCarthy, who ascended to the position of speaker in no small part due to his ability to fundraise big donor dollars, isn’t known for his frugal spending of PAC money.
McCarthy’s excuses ring about as true as Jan. 6 mob target and former Vice President Mike Pence’s. Back in 2019, he defended his decision to stay at Trump’s golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, as “logical.” The logic of the hotel being situated 140 miles away from any of his scheduled engagements, making it necessary for Pence to fly to his meetings in Dublin, remains an enigma.
Ever since Trump seized control of the Republican Party, he always seems to benefit from campaign money—his own as well as others. GOP candidates spent a reported $4.2 million at Trump-owned properties in the run-up to the 2018 elections. The location near Capitol Hill that Republican customers cited as convenient seems not to have mattered much at all since Trump’s physical proximity to it disappeared. According to CREW, during the Trump administration:
141 individual Members of Congress have visited Trump properties 344 times. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham tops this list with 27 visits, followed by Sen. Rand Paul, and Reps. Matt Gaetz, JJim Jordan, and Kevin McCarthy. The majority of these visits (284) have been to the Trump Hotel in D.C. […]
Conveniently located just blocks away from the White House, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. is the most popular property for federal, state, and foreign government officials to visit. Public officials have visited the property 973 times. Mar-a-Lago is next with 385 visits, followed by Trump National Bedminster with 181 visits, Trump National Golf Club in Virginia with 138, and Trump National Golf Club West Palm Beach with 110 visits from public officials.
Everybody remembers how RICO-indicted Trump vowed he was going to “drain the swamp” when he got to Washington. Not surprisingly, Trump instead dragged more swamp creatures into positions of power. Even less surprising is the fact that Trump’s D.C. hotel, with all of the pay-to-play money coming into it, was reportedly a losing deal—like most of Trump’s business endeavors.
Police suspect that a 17-year-old from California, Alan Filion, may be responsible for “hundreds of swatting incidents and bomb threats” targeting the Pentagon, schools, mosques, FBI offices, and military bases nationwide, CNN reported…
Recently extradited to Florida, Filion was charged with multiple felonies after the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) traced a call where Filion allegedly claimed to be a mass shooter entering the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford, Florida. The caller played “audio of gunfire in the background,” SCSO said, while referencing Satanism and claiming he had a handgun and explosive devices…
Seminole County authorities coordinated with the FBI and Department of Justice to track the alleged “serial swatter” down, ultimately arresting Filion on January 18. According to SCSO, police were able to track down Filion after he allegedly “created several accounts on websites offering swatting services” that were linked to various IP addresses connected to his home address. The FBI then served a search warrant on the residence and found “incriminating evidence.” …
Also, the National Prayer Breakfast was this morning.
The National Prayer Breakfast was this morning, and President Joe Biden spoke at it. We don’t have much to say about that, except that we think the Breakfast is a creepy Christo-fascist ritual started by creepy Christo-fascists, and we wish Democrats, including Biden, didn’t feel obligated to go pay respects to Right-Wing Jesus Inc. once a year like this.
The Breakfast is no longer run by “The Family,” the secretive uber-weirdo right-wing cult that started it. They split last year, and now it’s run by the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, which is run by members of Congress themselves. (Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan has questions about how real the alleged schism is.) But sorry, it’s still creepy in a nation that isn’t and never was supposed to be a Christian theocracy.
Last year, the Breakfast was held in the Capitol Visitors Center. This year it’s in Statuary Hall, near the Rotunda, at the very heart of the Capitol. Journalist Jonathan Larsen explains that this would have to have been approved by extremist Christian insurrectionist Speaker Mike Johnson. That does sound like him. Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman told Larsen that’s a “very disturbing venue,” as Statuary Hall is “the heart of our Capitol, the heart of our democracy.”
But with Mike Johnson in there, the “Handmaid’s Tale” insurgents are holding the gavel. So of course the fascist Jesus breakfast is inside. […]
Speaking of Mike Johnson, it’s been confirmed that the vile Christian extremist televangelist Jack Hibbs was invited personally by Johnson to deliver the opening prayer for the House the other day. In fact, Hibbs confirmed it himself, with his wordhole. JoeMyGod, Right Wing Watch and Media Matters have a bunch of receipts on the dude Johnson saw fit to invite into the People’s House:
– Jack Hibbs recently preached that the only way for Jews to survive the war with Hamas is to stop being Jews and accept Jesus.
– Hibbs asked in a sermon in 2022, “What does a nation look like when it starts to receive the judgment or the cursings of Almighty God?” Well, what happens is that there are suddenly all these trans homo gay characters on “Blue’s Clues,” that’s what.
– He says that “The Democrat Party [sic] is a death cult.”
– He believes COVID-19 was Chinese bio-warfare, and once said that if Donald Trump hadn’t been elected, “you and I would be speaking Chinese now.”
– He said the January 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol for Dear Leader Donald Trump was “what you get when you eject God from the courts and from the schools.”
– Surprise, he’s an anti-gay bigot.
– And an anti-trans bigot.
– And an anti-Muslim bigot.
– And an anti-Semitic bigot. (“True Jews,” he once said, are people who follow Jesus and don’t “get bogged down in Judaism.”)
– And so much more!
So that’s the guy Mike Johnson recently thought it would be cool to have come to the House of Representatives and belt out one of his stupid prayers.
This guy is a Christian extremist, an unhinged loser and a serious fucking lunatic, just like Mike Johnson.
Wonder if he also has Covenant Eyes on his computer to stop him from incessantly masturbating. […,]
The move marks Biden’s first significant act against Israelis since the Hamas attacks and Israel’s military campaign.
President Biden signed an executive order Thursday that imposes sanctions on four West Bank settlers who the administration says have committed violence against Palestinians, marking the most significant action he has taken against Israelis since their country launched a war in Gaza.
[…] It will block the settlers from accessing any property or assets held in the United States and prevent them from receiving any funds, goods or services that pass through the American financial system.
The settlers also will not be allowed to send money to the United States or have anyone act on their behalf, the officials said.
The State Department said each of the individuals sanctioned is responsible for unacceptable acts of violence in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory that, unlike Gaza, is home to numerous controversial — and in many cases illegal — Israeli settlements.
[…] Jewish settlers have attacked and killed Palestinians in hopes of driving them out of their communities, activists and experts say, using such tactics as burning property, tearing up land and destroying olive trees, which are a primary source of income for many Palestinians.
U.S. officials believe that two right-wing members of Israel’s cabinet who come from the settler movement — Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — are particular obstacles to curtailing the violence.
Still, one of the administration officials said the United States is not considering sanctions against Smotrich or Ben-Gvir themselves. […]
A GOP pollster attempted to make a legitimate point about what the Republicans need to ensure a successful 2024 campaign, but his logic was thwarted by artificial intelligence.
Patrick Ruffini posted Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter) to point out that Republicans need to appeal to Black men if they want to win the White House.
However, his post included two photos of a Black man canvassing another Black man that seemed to have been created by AI.
What was the tell? Well, the two men are wearing shirts with incomprehensible logos, but, more important, one of the photos shows the voter has three hands, a demographic that would be considered statistically insignificant in political polls…
“Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training.
[…]
In an effort to address this power asymmetry, we have designed and implemented Nightshade, a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.
[…]
Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.”
Righto. It’s an effort to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, so people will pay for it.
Won’t work on humans, of course — they can look at any image they can look at and then be inspired by it, but AIs don’t get that ordinary benefit, apparently. For some reason.
While human eyes see a shaded image that is largely unchanged from the original, the AI model sees a dramatically different composition in the image.
I can instantly think of a way to bypass this, by merely generating a virtual image based on the image data and then incorporating the generated image data, instead of the unprocessed source data.
The mona lisa example in the original citation shows how, actually.
Obs, if I can do it, I’m pretty sure others can, too.
The Russian guided-missile corvette “Ivanovets” sank on Wednesday evening following a nighttime attack by Ukrainian aquatic drones. The 56-meter-long ship was one of three Project 1241.1 “Trantul”-class corvettes in service in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and though its standard armament includes anti-ship missiles, that didn’t prevent the drones from reaching the ship,
The Ivanovets sank rapidly after tilting to an almost vertical position, generating comments comparing the ship to the Titanic. There is no word on the ship’s 40-man crew, though search-and-rescue operations were reportedly underway. Video from the attack appears to show the involvement of multiple drones.
With this sinking, Russia has now lost 20% of its Black Sea Fleet. That includes the sinking of the flagship “Moskva” and the Kilo-class submarine “Rostov-on-Don.” Ukraine’s use of aquatic drones, aerial drones, and anti-ship missiles has reportedly pinned down Russia’s fleet and allowed Ukraine to maintain shipping of grain and other goods despite the collapse of the official grain deal.
Just as aerial drones have reshaped every aspect of the battlefield on land, making it almost impossible for armored vehicles to be deployed in the way they have for decades, aquatic drones are shaking up ideas of naval power. [Tweet and video at the link]
Like other features of Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s illegal invasion, expect widespread use of aquatic drones to shake up strategies around the world.
Open-source intelligence analyst Andrew Perpetua has another long list of losses recorded in the last day. [List at the link]
These losses show Russia is still giving up jaw-dropping amounts of armor in failed assaults. They continue to show how important both FPV drones and bombs dropped by rotary-wing drones are in turning Russian tanks and APCs into junk.
One big (figuratively and literally) feature of this list that’s new over the past few weeks is Ukraine’s Baba Yaga “mothership” drone. Named for a wicked witch character in Slavic folk tales, the drone is a giant six-rotor hexacopter that is designed to emerge at night, when most FPV drones are grounded, and deliver bombs as large as 15 kilograms to Russian targets. [video at the link]
But, as usual, Perpetua’s list is far from all good news. Particularly concerning is the number of boats that Ukraine has lost, which appears to be related to attempts to hold the bridgehead on the east side of the Dnipro River at Krynky.
These boats, which are forced to land at very few locations to support the relatively small Ukrainian force, have been increasingly vulnerable to Russian attacks. There was some hope that the boats might fare better after Ukraine took out a notorious Russian ace FPV pilot. But based on this latest report, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The big Russian losses on Perpetua’s list are likely connected to a Russian attack that was repulsed on Wednesday near the town of Novomykhailivka, on the eastern front, southwest of Donetsk. [video at the link]
Once again, it was primarily FPV drones that plowed through targets in this failed assault. The tally of tanks and other vehicles lost is simply incredible. But Russia seems willing to take such losses over and over again.
After days of infighting and reports of standoffs with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, it appears that Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny may finally be on his way out. According to CNN, Zaluzhny was informed on Monday that he was fired, and a presidential decree is expected by the end of the week.
Zelenskyy reportedly holds Zaluzhny largely responsible for the planning and execution of the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive last year. Ukraine’s inability to gain more than a few small areas in moving against heavily defended Russian positions has led to months of near-stalemate, and to increasing difficulties for Ukraine when it comes to securing adequate levels of ammunition and equipment.
Zaluzhny, has been commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces since 2021. Zelenskyy reportedly offered to appoint Zaluzhny to a different position, but the general declined.
Replacements for Zaluzhny reportedly include the head of the Defense Intelligence Directorate, Kyrylo Budanov, and Commander of Ukrainian Land Forces Oleksandr Syrskyi. Syrski is considered the “brain” behind Ukraine’s wildly successful counterattacks in Kharkiv and Kherson.
The European Union has overcome opposition by Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán to finalize a $54 billion financial assistance package for Ukraine. This represents a win for both the E.U. and Ukraine, and could signal that Orbán is vulnerable on other issues where he has continued to protect Russia and Vladimir Putin.
[Memorial for a medical professional: photo at the link]
Not ready to say goodbye to my sweet, soft-spoken, and fierce friend Snake. She was the first medical professional in Ukraine that helped me see hope in patching together the best possible care for every single Defender, no matter what. Between us and our dear friend Roman, it was possible. She has always reliably come back to check in and leave me these wonderfully long-winded messages that I don’t think I have ever gotten to tell her exactly what she sparked. Her MO was to be quiet, efficient, safe, fast, and never at any point leave her team without someone that cared about them for a single moment. She wanted things done correctly the first time so that she could give more time to the next guy that needed it. This was her vision for Ukraine to win. Gotchu sis.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing five cities — Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin and Denton — to block their ordinances decriminalizing low-level marijuana possession.
In 2022, voters in the five cities approved policies that would end arrests and citations for possession of less than four ounces of marijuana. An initiative spearheaded by Ground Game Texas — the progressive group that first launched the proposition in Austin — worked with local organizations in the other four cities and succeeded in pushing for similar policies to appear on the ballots.
Paxton said in a Wednesday press release that the cities violated state laws and the Texas constitution concerning marijuana possession and distribution, claiming it to be unlawful for municipalities to adopt ordinances inconsistent with laws enacted by the Texas Legislature.
The ordinances had high levels of support. Austin received an overwhelming 85% of votes in support. In San Marcos, about 82% of votes were in favor. Elgin followed with almost 75% of votes in support. Denton, home to two universities, had about 71% votes in favor. Killeen had close to 70% in support.
The five cities are home-rule cities — jurisdictions that under the Texas constitution are allowed to establish any law or ordinance unless it’s expressly forbidden by state or federal law. However, Paxton argues the Texas Local Government Code forbids them from adopting policies that would result in not fully enforcing drug-related laws. Paxton is seeking to repeal the city’s ordinances and make them enforce state law.
“I will not stand idly by as cities run by pro-crime extremists deliberately violate Texas law and promote the use of illicit drugs that harm our communities,” Paxton said.
A spokesperson for the city of Austin said it will issue a comment Thursday. Officials for the other four cities couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday evening. […]
The article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.
John Moralessays
birgerjohansson, quite old news, if it’s this story, which it almost certainly is.
https://futurism.com/chernobyl-frogs-evolution
Something Cool Is Happening to the Frogs at Chernobyl
These little guys are as cute as they are fascinating.
Updated 10. 3. 22 by Noor Al-Sibai
Chernobyl is best known as the site of the worst nuclear reactor meltdown in history. But since the residents left after the 1986 catastrophe, it’s also become one of the biggest nature reserves in Europe — and within the confines of its Exclusion Zone, frogs are now showing just how unique the area is.
A group of Spanish zoological researchers wrote in The Conversation how they became intrigued by strange, black-tinted Eastern tree frogs found near and around the Exclusion Zone, since the critters are usually a snazzy lime green.
(Because I utterly loathe and detest YouBute (heh) “shorts”, where they enforce aspect ratio, disable controls, limit content, and try to cash in on another platform’s schtick.
John Moralessays
Obs, given current circumstances, I doubt there are many scientific teams out and about in that area.
(There are other stories, though, going back years and years about plants and animals and the ecosystem there after the departure of the population of people)
@156 Have you checked out their FAQ? They address most if not all of the “obvious” ways of defeating the tool (and why they don’t actually work).
This isn’t some random group of unknown nobodies popping out of nowhere with a wild, unsubstantiated claim; the people behind Nightshade have an established track record. Nightshade is a refinement/variation of a similar tool they released last year called Glaze, which got a lot of press and which many people tried to find a way to counter… without success. I honestly don’t understand what you mean by “generating a virtual image based on the image data” (huh?), but I am inclined to doubt there is really a simple, obvious way of bypassing these tools, just because if there were, someone else would have done it by now. The fact that after having been out for almost a year Glaze remains unbroken seems to indicate their methods aren’t nearly as fragile as you’re assuming they are.
John Moralessays
JSNuttall:
@156 Have you checked out their FAQ? They address most if not all of the “obvious” ways of defeating the tool (and why they don’t actually work).
JSNuttall, nope. I do appreciate your referral to the site, but that they have a FAQ does not dispute what I wrote.
Specifically, did they address what I wrote? You know, display the image in a virtual display in whatever encoding is not the encoding of the source image, then generate an image from the displayed image rather than from the source data for the displayed image. I ask because I suspect that, did you know they had so done, you would have mentioned it specifically.
This isn’t some random group of unknown nobodies popping out of nowhere with a wild, unsubstantiated claim; the people behind Nightshade have an established track record.
Yes, I know. I went to the site, remember?
Nightshade is a refinement/variation of a similar tool they released last year called Glaze, which got a lot of press and which many people tried to find a way to counter… without success.
Well then, why refine/vary it since it’s such a robust thing that has never been countered? :)
(Hype is hype)
I honestly don’t understand what you mean by “generating a virtual image based on the image data” (huh?), but I am inclined to doubt there is really a simple, obvious way of bypassing these tools, just because if there were, someone else would have done it by now.
Mmmhmm. See if I can give an example of the type of thing to which I refer.
Say, take the source image and display it on a screen.
Then with a good camera take a photograph of the screen.
Generate image data from the camera capture of the displayed image.
Again: question is, does this technopoison seep through that sort of process?
The fact that after having been out for almost a year Glaze remains unbroken seems to indicate their methods aren’t nearly as fragile as you’re assuming they are.
Yes, I do get your objection. Glaze is already unbreakable, and therefore there’s a new and improved version out which is even more unbreakable. Utterly poisonous to AI data harvesters.
No worries, then. Problem is already solved.
They will release it for free for every one and no image data will ever again be harvested.
Hasn’t been harvested for almost a year, according to you, from participating parties.
(It will be for free, right? ;)
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@John Morales #164:
an example of the type of thing to which I refer.
Say, take the source image and display it on a screen.
Then with a good camera take a photograph of the screen.
Generate image data from the camera capture of the displayed image.
Again: question is, does this technopoison seep through that sort of process?
that they have a FAQ does not dispute what I wrote.
The fact that they have a FAQ does not dispute what you wrote. The content of the FAQ does.
Specifically, did they address what I wrote? … I ask because I suspect that, did you know they had so done, you would have mentioned it specifically.
I didn’t specifically mention their having addressed what you wrote because I didn’t understand what you wrote. I couldn’t figure out what you meant by “generating a virtual image based on the image data”. Now that you’ve expressed it more clearly with an example… yes, that is something they explicitly address. It is in fact the very first item addressed on the Glaze page.
Why can’t someone just get rid of Glaze’s effects by 1) taking a screenshot/photo of the art, 2) cropping the art, 3) filtering for noise/artifacts, 4) reformat/resize/resample the image, 5) compress, 6) smooth out the pixels, 7) add noise to break the pattern? None of those things break Glaze, because it is not a watermark or hidden message (steganography), and it is not brittle. Instead, think of Glaze like a new dimension of the art, one that AI models see but humans do not (like UV light or ultrasonic frequencies), except the dimension itself is hard to locate/compute/reverse engineer. Unless an attack knows exactly the dimension Glaze operates on (it changes and is different on each art piece), it will find it difficult to disrupt Glaze’s effects.
Well then, why refine/vary it since it’s such a robust thing that has never been countered?
Because Glaze and Nightshade serve different and complementary purposes.
A common question is, what is the difference between Nightshade and Glaze. The answer is that Glaze is a defensive tool that individual artists can use to protect themselves against style mimicry attacks, while Nightshade is an offensive tool that artists can use as a group to disrupt models that scrape their images without consent (thus protecting all artists against these models). Glaze should be used on every piece of artwork artists post online to protect themselves, while Nightshade is an entirely optional feature that can be used to deter unscrupulous model trainers. Artists who post their own art online should ideally have both Glaze AND Nightshade applied to their artwork. We are working on an integrated release of these tools.
Neither I nor the Glaze/Nightshade team made any claims about Nightshade being “even more unbreakable”.
(It will be for free, right? ;)
You are asking a lot of questions that are answered in the FAQ, which I gather you still haven’t read.
It is important to us that we not only continue to provide Glaze to visual creators for free, but also extend its protective capabilities.
I’m not particularly interested in arguing further about this; I have no connection to the Glaze/Nightshade team and no vested interest in defending them. I only responded to your previous post because I wanted to point out where there was some further information that might clear up what seemed to me to be a possible misapprehension. I do on the whole have a positive impression of Glaze and Nightshade and tend to think they’re probably a good thing, but then I think in general I’m much less cynical than you are, and perhaps less so than I should be. But if you do want to discuss this further for some reason, I would ask that you at least take the time to read the FAQ first, so you’re not just asking questions that are already addressed there. If after reading their FAQ you still think the Glaze/Nightshade team are a bunch of frauds and/or incompetents and that it’s all just a bunch of vapid hype… so be it. You may even be right. (I don’t think so, but perhaps I’m more of an optimist.) But at least it may offer answers to some of your questions.
John Moralessays
CA7746, mmm. I was addressing JSNuttall, who offered the FAQ, not the link I cited.
That’s a variation of what the FAQ called pixel smoothing.
Which seems odd to me given the prefatory remark to the quotation (my emphasis):
As with Glaze, Nightshade effects are robust to normal changes one might apply to an image. You can crop it, resample it, compress it, smooth out pixels, or add noise, and the effects of the poison will remain. You can take screenshots, or even photos of an image displayed on a monitor, and the shade effects remain. Again, this is because it is not a watermark or hidden message (steganography), and it is not brittle.
Apparently, taking a photo of a displayed image and resampling it is a normal change.
Anyway, fair enough. That’s definitely the claim at hand.
—
JSNuttall,
I would ask that you at least take the time to read the FAQ first
I actually looked at the paper itself, too; too much work to nut it out, what with its talk of curated datasets of text/image pairs to which the poison applies and how it’s designed to fool the current image scrapers in operation.
… you still think the Glaze/Nightshade team are a bunch of frauds and/or incompetents and that it’s all just a bunch of vapid hype …
Be aware you are the one who introduced the terms “frauds and/or incompetents” and “vapid”; I wrote that I don’t believe it’s a general thing (it’s specifically addressed at the current harvesting software) and that it’s hype — that is, it makes grand promises for the future.
But at least it may offer answers to some of your questions.
Not really. I know the claim, but an image is just an image, at the end of the day, and without metadata I can’t see how an image that looks like one thing to a person will look like something else to a scraper without metadata about it.
John Moralessays
PS:
(It will be for free, right? ;)
You are asking a lot of questions that are answered in the FAQ, which I gather you still haven’t read.
Be aware you are the one who introduced the terms “frauds and/or incompetents” and “vapid”;
Why would I not be aware of that? Of course you didn’t use those exact words, but they were a (perhaps mistaken) inference of your opinion based on what you wrote, larded of course with a pinch of rhetorical exaggeration.
I wrote that I don’t believe it’s a general thing (it’s specifically addressed at the current harvesting software) and that it’s hype — that is, it makes grand promises for the future.
Rereading your posts, I don’t actually see where you wrote anything about its being specifically addressed at the current harvesting software, but perhaps I missed it. In any case, I think the team is reasonably up front and realistic about the limitations of their work:
Like Glaze, Nightshade operates with open source AI models as a guide in its computation. That means it is most effective on Stable Diffusion models. Transferability generally means there will be fairly strong effects on other diffusion models, but the precise target might not look the same, and the strength per image might be weakened (i.e. it might require more shaded images to have the same net effect.
As with any security attack or defense, Nightshade is unlikely to stay future proof over long periods of time. But as an attack, Nightshade can easily evolve to continue to keep pace with any potential countermeasures/defenses.
I don’t think they’re making any particularly grandiose claims? (Okay, that “easily” in the last sentence might be pushing it a bit.) But then I suppose that’s a subjective matter. I don’t fully understand the details myself of how the tools work (I am by no means a computer expert), but I don’t see it as inconceivable that the different way a generative AI system “perceives” and analyzes an image relative to a human could mean that it could be thrown off by details that a human wouldn’t notice, without any metadata needed.
In any case, though, I think most of the substantive matters have been cleared up now, and our remaining differences come down mostly to opinion and expectation, which there’s little point in debating. Again, I’m considerably more optimistic and less cynical than you are about these tools (and, well, probably in general, really), but of course I don’t know for sure they’re not just hype, and I suppose time will tell.
So, will it be for free, or will it not?
You are so very coy!
You’ve replied, but you have not answered.
Huh? The answer was in the very next sentence in my post, after the one you just quoted. Here it is again, with emphasis added:
It is important to us that we not only continue to provide Glaze to visual creators for free, but also extend its protective capabilities.
(It is also, again, in the FAQ, which is where this sentence comes from.)
John Moralessays
JSNuttall:
Why would I not be aware of that? Of course you didn’t use those exact words, but they were a (perhaps mistaken) inference of your opinion based on what you wrote, larded of course with a pinch of rhetorical exaggeration.
Yeah, well, perhaps there was a touch of asperity about my comment.
There’s exaggeration, and then there’s ascribing claims to me that I never made.
Rereading your posts, I don’t actually see where you wrote anything about its being specifically addressed at the current harvesting software, but perhaps I missed it.
Not written by me, I mentioned that I’d looked at the paper itself.
In the abstract (my emphasis): “Finally, we propose the use of Nightshade` and similar tools as a last defense for content creators against web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives, and discuss possible implications for model trainers and content creators. ”
I don’t think they’re making any particularly grandiose claims?
Their claims are fine; the hype is in the articles and the reaction to them.
In any case, though, I think most of the substantive matters have been cleared up now, and our remaining differences come down mostly to opinion and expectation, which there’s little point in debating. Again, I’m considerably more optimistic and less cynical than you are about these tools (and, well, probably in general, really), but of course I don’t know for sure they’re not just hype, and I suppose time will tell.
At the lab, where Wendell and Angela scan the victim’s skeleton and run it through a program that suggests causes of death. But before the program can show them anything, the screen glitches, flashes and the computer catches on fire. Malware caused her computers’ fans to fail and catch fire. The virus originated in Angela’s computer and had to come from something she uploaded. The only thing she’d uploaded, however, were the bone scans. Upon examination of the bones, Angela and Bones find fractal patterns on the bones, the malware was written into the bone.
(Image files are magical and execute code!)
John Moralessays
JSNuttall, good grief! I can read, you know.
Huh? The answer was in the very next sentence in my post, after the one you just quoted. Here it is again, with emphasis added:
It is important to us that we not only continue to provide Glaze to visual creators for free, but also extend its protective capabilities.
Sure, the Nightshade FAQ says Glaze is free, but does not say whether Nightshade (the actual thing it’s supposed to be addressing) is or will be free.
That sentence is copied verbatim from the Glaze FAQ, and I presumed (and still do presume) that it is meant to apply to Nightshade as well, but they just neglected to modify the sentence accordingly. You’re technically right, though, that they don’t explicitly say that Nightshade is also meant to be free. I feel it’s fairly clear from the full context and from statements elsewhere on the page that they do intend for both Glaze and Nightshade to be free and it’s just a matter of slightly careless wording, but of course I can’t prove that.
Good grief, John. That was like Argument-from-ignorance-palooza. Thank you, JSNuttall.
Well then, why refine/vary it since it’s such a robust thing that has never been countered? :)
(Hype is hype)
Yes, I do get your objection. Glaze is already unbreakable, and therefore there’s a new and improved version out which is even more unbreakable. Utterly poisonous to AI data harvesters.
No worries, then. Problem is already solved.
They will release it for free for every one and no image data will ever again be harvested.
Hasn’t been harvested for almost a year, according to you, from participating parties.
(It will be for free, right? ;)
I wrote that I don’t believe it’s a general thing (it’s specifically addressed at the current harvesting software) and that it’s hype — that is, it makes grand promises for the future.
So, will it be for free, or will it not?
You are so very coy!
You’ve replied, but you have not answered.
I’m predicting: no.
In the abstract (my emphasis): “Finally, we propose the use of Nightshade` and similar tools as a last defense for content creators against web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives, and discuss possible implications for model trainers and content creators. ”
Their claims are fine; the hype is in the articles and the reaction to them.
You appear to have appreciated (@ #167) that your One Simple Trick to foil the tool wouldn’t work, although…
Not really. I know the claim, but an image is just an image, at the end of the day, and without metadata I can’t see how an image that looks like one thing to a person will look like something else to a scraper without metadata about it.
This is a textbook argument from ignorance. That’s really all there is to say about it.
With regard to whether or not it’s free, I won’t aim your cheeky “Let me Google that for you…” back at you, but yes, a few seconds of googling (or a closer reading of the article I had linked to) would have provided the answer.
A new, free tool designed by researchers at the University of Chicago to help artists “poison” artificial intelligence models trained on their images without their consent has proved immensely popular. Less than a week after it went live, the software was downloaded more than 250,000 times.
Released January 18, Nightshade is currently available for download on Windows and Apple computers from the University of Chicago website. Project leader Ben Zhao, in remarks to VentureBeat, said that the milestone number of downloads was reached in just five days—a surprising outcome though the team expected high enthusiasm. The team did not geolocate downloads, but responses on social media indicate it has been downloaded worldwide.
From the TechCrunch piece:
“Artists, myself included, are feeling just exploited at every turn,” McKernan said. “So when something is given to us freely as a resource, I know we’re appreciative.’
The team behind Nightshade, which consists of Zhao, PhD student Shawn Shan, and several grad students, has been funded by the university, traditional foundations and government grants. But to sustain research, Zhao acknowledged that the team will likely have to figure out a “nonprofit structure” and work with arts foundations. He added that the team still has a “few more tricks” up their sleeves.
“For a long time research was done for the sake of research, expanding human knowledge. But I think something like this, there is an ethical line,” Zhao said. “The research for this matters . . . those who are most vulnerable to this, they tend to be the most creative, and they tend to have the least support in terms of resources. It’s not a fair fight. That’s why we’re doing what we can to help balance the battlefield.”
Your implication has plainly been to insinuate that the creators have been hyping the tool to sell it, but in fact they’ve been remarkably circumspect and forthright in their communications about it. Nor, despite the fact that you later appeared to back off the developers and shift your insinuations to the article-writers and readers, have you provided any evidence of this alleged hype or these grandiose claims. The only grandiose claims made about it have been by you, ventriloquizing.
Indeed, I noted in my comment that it’s comparable to an evolutionary arms race, which is the opposite of suggesting the tools are “unbreakable,” that they’ve “never been countered,” or that “no image data will ever again be harvested.” Of course, as everyone recognizes, the larger ecological context is the legal/regulatory environment; as long as that fails to provide artists with adequate protection, this is one tool that can help them defend themselves.
I’m confused about your confusion regarding how these tools work. As I understand it, Glaze is a defensive tool – interfering with AI scraping of that particular work – and Nightshade is more offensive – corrupting the AI scraping process going forward. They complement one another, as JSNuttall explained. The developers are working on a combined tool they expect to release this year, which will also presumably be free. Of course they work against current harvesting software – what else would they work against? And I don’t see what you’re trying to suggest by highlighting that they defend against “web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives.” Artists don’t need a defense against the ones that don’t ignore those directives! It’s like reading an article about Ukraine developing drones to defend against the attack by Russia and saying well, they’re only designed to work against Russia or in this war, when of course Russia’s the only country attacking them. They don’t need drones against Sweden.
From the TechCrunch article – just before what I quoted @ #177 (my emphasis):
The major players in tech, whose funding and resources dwarf those of academia,…have no incentive to fund projects that are disruptive and yield no financial gain. Zhao is staunchly opposed to monetizing Glaze and Nightshade, or ever selling the projects’ IP to a startup or corporation. Artists like McKernan are grateful to have a reprieve from subscription fees, which are nearly ubiquitous across software used in creative industries.
Donald Trump has made his myriad legal woes a major focus of his presidential campaign, but after raking in millions around his first court appearances last year he has seen a sharp dropoff in fundraising off his sometimes combative clashes with judges…
KGsays
President Biden signed an executive order Thursday that imposes sanctions on four West Bank settlers who the administration says have committed violence against Palestinians, marking the most significant action he has taken against Israelis since their country launched a war in Gaza. – Lynna, OM@153 quoting the Washington Post
I’d say this just points up Biden’s hypocrisy: violent as these four may be, they are unlikely to have slaughtered 10,000+ children.
A controversy has ensued in Spain and on social media over a poster of Jesus created to promote Easter week festivities in the city of Seville — drawing mixed reactions from Spanish conservatives deeming the image an “aberration” and a “sexualized and effeminate” Jesus as well as from social media users who either defended the painter’s artistic vision or created memes poking fun at the image.
The Council of Brotherhoods, which organizes the main Easter week events in Seville, commissioned renowned artist Salustiano García months ago to create a painting promoting the celebration…
Consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to examine maps redrawing state legislative districts said Thursday that plans submitted by the Republican Legislature and a conservative law firm are partisan gerrymanders, but they stopped short of declaring the other four maps constitutional.
Only the court can make the determination of whether any of those four plans from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Democratic lawmakers and others are constitutional, wrote Jonathan Cervas, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Bernard Grofman, of the University of California, Irvine.
Any of those maps could be improved based on criteria the court identified as being important, including political neutrality, compactness, contiguity and preserving communities of interest, the consultants wrote…
Allen Weisselberg, the former longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, is negotiating a deal with Manhattan prosecutors to plead guilty to perjury, according to The New York Times.
The deal would require Weisselberg to admit that he lied while testifying at Trump’s recent civil fraud trial and in an earlier interview with the New York attorney general’s office, sources told the outlet.
The reported deal comes after a long pressure campaign by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose team sought Weisselberg’s cooperation in several investigations into Trump’s business and alleged election crimes. Trump is scheduled for trial in Manhattan in March in the 2016 hush-money case.
The deal likely would not require Weisselberg to “turn on his former boss,” according to the report. Prosecutors are not expected to call him as a witness in the hush-money case and the investigation into Trump’s finances “may no longer be a priority for prosecutors,” the Times reported…
A campaign to overturn Missouri’s near-total abortion ban says it’s raised more than $3 million since launching the effort last month as it gathers signatures to force a statewide vote.
The coalition of abortion rights groups, called Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, is backing a measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution but also give lawmakers leeway to regulate the procedure after fetal viability. It announced Friday that it has received some 2,200 individual contributions…
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis have traded pointed correspondence for months, which didn’t appear to be especially productive. The Ohio Republican kept making dubious requests for information, and the Georgia prosecutor kept telling him to pound sand.
So, the right-wing congressman has apparently decided to take matters to the next level. NBC News reported:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has subpoenaed District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County, Georgia, demanding documents from her office following allegations that Willis fired a whistleblower who tried to stop a top campaign aide from misusing federal funds. … In a letter Friday, Jordan says Willis has failed to comply with two earlier requests for documents related to her office’s use of federal grant money.
At face value, that’s true. Willis really has failed to comply with his earlier requests. The problem, however, is that his earlier requests largely deserved to be ignored.
For those just joining us, let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
After Willis indicted Donald Trump and a number of his associates in August, Jordan did what he always does: The far-right Ohioan launched an investigation into the investigation.
In fact, the GOP congressman didn’t just express dubious concerns to Willis, he also directed the local prosecutor to hand over a series of documents and related information.
It seemed quite possible that the Georgia district attorney might simply shrug her shoulders and put Jordan’s letter in the circular file, but Willis instead acknowledged the chairman’s initial deadline with a letter of her own, telling Jordan that his correspondence included “inaccurate information and misleading statements,” as part of an effort the district attorney characterized as improper interference in an ongoing criminal case.
Willis went on to tell the Judiciary Committee chairman, “Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.”
Her pushback had the benefit of being true, but that didn’t stop him from sending another letter in late September, complaining about Willis’ “hostile response,” and demanding that she provide him with alleged documents that he thinks might exist.
So, the Fulton County district attorney’s tried again to set the record straight. “We have already written a letter — which I have attached again for your reference — explaining why the legal positions you advance are meritless,” she explained. “Nothing you’ve said in your latest letter changes that fact.”
It’s against this backdrop that Jordan responded to Willis’ latest letter with a subpoena.
Initially, Jordan seemed to be working under the assumption that there was some kind of conspiracy in which powerful law enforcement officials at the federal level were secretly pulling the strings, helping orchestrate anti-Trump prosecutions across multiple jurisdictions.
More recently, however, the committee chair has come to believe Willis might’ve misused federal funds and fired a whistleblower.
What will happen now? The House Judiciary Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction to insert itself into criminal prosecutions at the state and local level, a point the Fulton County prosecutor will no doubt emphasize if/when she takes Jordan’s subpoena to court.
That said, if the congressman can make a credible case that his panel is investigating possible misuse of federal resources, the matter might very well proceed. Watch this space.
[…] Republicans are targeting Omar [Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar] over comments she apparently didn’t make.
As my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem explained, “The right-wing reactions stem from a video of Omar’s speech that went viral on [social media] and features captions translating her remarks. But the source of that translation is unclear, and the language appears to be either poorly translated or deliberately mistranslated, according to multiple fact-checkers.”
It would be problematic enough if Republicans criticized a congresswoman for comments that were misattributed to her, but many in the GOP aren’t just denouncing Omar. For example, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer — a member of the leadership who’s really supposed to know better — called for an ethics investigation into his fellow Minnesotan and encouraged Omar to “resign in disgrace.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene not only introduced a censure resolution targeting Omar over a mistranslated speech, the right-wing Georgian said the Democrat’s misattributed remarks were “literally treason” and grounds for Omar to be “deported.” Republican Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made similar calls.
We’ve apparently reached the point in American politics at which Republicans are so anti-immigrant, some in the party are willing to endorse the deportation of Americans because of social media content that GOP officials didn’t understand.
Asked for comment, Omar said, in reference to Greene, “I hope she finds peace in her mind and heart. That’s insane. Truly insane.”
It’s not yet clear whether the House Republican majority will proceed with a vote on a censure resolution, despite what we now know about the video that misquoted Omar and stripped her words of context.
By every metric, the latest jobs report points to an incredibly strong U.S. job market. The political implications have the potential to be dramatic.
Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 185,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in January. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job market managed to do much better than that. CNBC reported:
Job growth posted a surprise increase in January, demonstrating again that the U.S. labor market is solid and poised to support broader economic growth. Nonfarm payrolls expanded by 353,000 for the month, much better than the Dow Jones estimate for 185,000, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The unemployment rate held at 3.7%, against the estimate for 3.8%.
What’s more, while January’s jobs report showed employers adding 353,000 positions last month, we also learned that wage growth continued to outpace inflation, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7%. In fact, the jobless rate has been below 4% for 24 consecutive months — a streak unseen in the United States since the 1960s.
Also note, the jobs report that comes every year in early February is especially notable because it includes revisions for all of the previous year. With this in mind, we now know that 3.05 million jobs were created in 2023 — well above the previous 2.7 million estimate.
As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.
According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created roughly 15.1 million jobs since January 2021 — more than double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.
In recent months, Republicans have responded to developments like these by pretending not to notice them. No one should be surprised if GOP officials keep the trend going today. […]
In August 2022, FBI officials executed a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. The results were devastating: The evidence suggested that Donald Trump not only took classified materials that didn’t belong to him, and not only defied a subpoena, he also stored highly sensitive national security documents carelessly around his glorified country club.
The photographs of materials stacked on a ballroom stage, spilled on the floor of a storage room, and placed in a bathroom are tough to forget.
Of course, that’s what the FBI found when it went room to room. But what if there were other rooms the bureau didn’t check? ABC News reported that special counsel Jack Smith’s team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called “hidden room” at Mar-a-Lago.
As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump’s indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that — long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Smith’s team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there.
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, some of the investigators involved in the case later came to believe there was a locked closet that “should have been opened and checked.”
ABC News added that investigators also came to believe that the former president “allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents.”
As for the prospect of a “hidden room,” ABC’s sources said there was a room connected to the Republican’s bedroom that also went unsearched.
[…] Why did the FBI leave these spaces unchecked? […]
it’s also worth considering how, exactly, investigators came to learn about the possibility of an unsearched “hidden” room. Wouldn’t this suggest there’s someone close to Trump who has spilled the beans?
Russian Central Election Commission deputy chair Nikolai Bulaev said Friday that the commission has found “surprising errors” in signatures submitted by anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin in his candidacy application.
“We’re seeing dozens — plural — of signatures from people who have passed away, which raises questions about the ethical norms followed by the signature collectors, among other people,” Russian state media quoted Bulaev as saying. “To some extent, the candidate is directly involved in this.”
At the same time, a Central Election Commission representative said that the agency is not yet finished verifying the signatures in support of Nadezhdin’s candidacy.
Bulaev proposed inviting Nadezhdin to a commission meeting on February 5 to show him the “results of the verification procedures.”
Under Russian law, Nadezhdin needs 100,000 verified signatures to officially join the presidential race. On January 31, he submitted 105,000 signatures to the Central Election Commission. His campaign says it gathered more than 200,000 from supporters in total.
Weisselberg Poised To Plead Guilty To Perjury In NY Civil Fraud Case
Longtime Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg is in talks with the Manhattan DA’s office to plead guilty to committing perjury during his testimony in the civil fraud trial brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, the NYT is reporting. I should emphasize that the plea deal isn’t final yet, and the NYT report is based on unnamed sources.
According to the report, Weisselberg would admit to lying on the stand and to lying under oath in an interview with James’ office.
[…] this new report suggests even a perjury conviction isn’t going to be enough to flip Weisselberg, who already spent time in jail for his conviction on engaging in fraudulent business practices while at the Trump Org: “The deal being negotiated would most likely not require Mr. Weisselberg, 76, to turn on his former boss.”
Still, Weisselberg was at the center of the Stormy Daniels’ hush money scheme, for which Trump is set to go to trial in coming weeks, in what will now likely be his first criminal trial, and a guilty plea here could bolster Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case while undermining Trump’s defense.
Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for the verdict on damages and penalties in the underlying civil fraud case. The judge had set a self-imposed deadline for himself to rule of Jan. 31, but the court confirmed yesterday that the ruling won’t come until early to mid-February. Not clear if the delay is in any way related to separate Weisselberg prosecution.
Yup, Trump DC Trial Ain’t Happening In March
What’s been obvious for weeks – that the DC trial of Donald Trump for election subversion won’t be happening in March – was further confirmed yesterday when the trial date was removed from the court calendar and reports emerged that the trial judge has acknowledged in open court that her March calendar is now open for other matters.
[…] Didn’t See This Coming
Walt Nauta, Trump’s valet and co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago case, was accused by three female service members of a years-long pattern of sexual misconduct that included his time with Trump in the White House, the Daily Beast reports:
Navy officials had escorted him off White House grounds, reassigned him to a new post, and docked his White House security clearance in response to accusations of fraternization, adultery, harassment, and other inappropriate sexual conduct, including “revenge porn,” […]
Despite the allegations, Trump brought Nauta down to Palm Beach later that same year to work for him there.
Georgia RICO Update
Today is the deadline for Atlanta DA Fani Willis to respond formally via court filing to the allegation that she engaged in a romantic relationship with one of the prosecutors she hired to lead the RICO prosecution of Trump and multiple co-defendants.
Willis has no plans to recuse herself from the case. […]
[…] One of these rooms is reportedly a closet. Missing a closet in a 126-room, 62,500-square-foot mansion located on 17 acres of land, with numerous outbuildings, seems understandable, even for a well-organized search. But there’s more to this than just an overlooked closet. According to ABC’s sources, that closet wasn’t just locked on the day the FBI came to call; two months before the FBI’s search, Trump had the locks changed on the closet and personally took the key to the new lock.
The second room overlooked by the FBI could be even more intriguing. It’s reportedly a “hidden room” accessible through Trump’s bedroom. Considering that the indictment against him in this case states that classified documents were found in “his bedroom,” it certainly seems that FBI agents may have wanted to search this location.
What was in the two missed rooms? The short answer is: We don’t know. But Jack Smith seems to be highly interested.
Reportedly, FBI agents conducting the search noticed the locked closet but couldn’t find the key, were told the door “went nowhere,” in ABC’s words, and decided not to break into it.
But at some point during his investigation, Smith learned that Trump had the lock on the closet changed while one of his attorneys was searching a storage room for classified documents in response to a federal subpoena. Trump reportedly took the key to the new lock. It’s also worth noting that, until then, the Secret Service had managed the closet’s lock, according to ABC’s sources.
The timing is certainly suspicious, and a maintenance worker reportedly called Trump’s request to change the lock and give him the key “unusual.”
The FBI search team was unaware of the hidden room attached to the bedroom, which was accessible through a small door that was reportedly behind a dresser and a TV. While it’s tempting to think that this might be some kind of panic room, ABC’s sources indicate that “maintenance workers sporadically entered [the room] to access cables.” This, in addition to the positioning of the dresser and TV, suggests that this was more of a “wiring closet” than a safe space. Still, it’s unclear how large this area may be or what it may have held other than cables.
[…] There does not seem to have been any subsequent search targeting these locations. Even if a search were conducted at a later date, there would have been ample opportunity to move documents from these two rooms into other locations at Mar-a-Lago or to other sites.
According to ABC, it’s unclear if Trump’s attorneys knew about these locations when they assured the government that there were no more documents.
Renzo Bergamini, the mayor of Gualtieri, was on his way to buy the newspapers on Tuesday morning when he noticed something was amiss with one of the two speed humps positioned on the town’s ring road.
“I saw that the sections of the hump were slightly misaligned,” he said. “The bolts had been unscrewed.”
The Emilia-Romagna town had been struck overnight by Dossoman, one of several speed hump saboteurs who sprung up this week in the wake of the rapidly spreading Fleximan phenomenon, involving enigmatic figures who have been tearing down speed cameras across the country.
Dosso is the Italian word for speed hump, while Fleximan derives from the Italian world for angle grinder, flessibile, the weapon of choice for the destruction of speed cameras due to its capacity for ripping through in seconds the metal poles on which they are perched.
…
The avengers have struck a nerve in a country where people are renowned for driving fast, but which also has the highest number of speed cameras in Europe.
The original Fleximan began waging his campaign last year, destroying at least 15 speed cameras across the Veneto region within eight months. The as-yet unidentified person became a hero to some on social media, where he was lauded as a modern-day Robin Hood among drivers who consider the cameras to be money-making rackets for local authorities. A street mural appeared in Padua, Veneto, depicting the vigilante as the yellow-tracksuit clad assassin played by Uma Thurman in the film Kill Bill holding a sword in one hand and a speed camera in the other.
…
They may be heroes to some, but the saboteurs’ critics [LOL] point to Italy’s high number of road deaths: 3,159 people were killed on the roads in 2022, almost double the number in Spain and the UK.
“Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor; Fleximan steals lives,” Luca Valdiserri, a journalist with Corriere della Sera, wrote in an editorial. “There is nothing heroic in what the new symbol of selfishness is doing in a society which, step by step, is losing empathy and respect for the lives of others.”
New focus groups of potential swing voters conducted in three critical battleground states—Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada—demonstrate the extent to which many voters still haven’t grasped Donald Trump’s sweeping legal liabilities or his belief he’s immune from prosecution.
The groups, conducted by GBAO for Navigator Research, consisted of soft partisans and independents who don’t necessarily prioritize democracy as a top issue but are concerned the country could experience another event like the violent Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. In other words, these voters seem generally grounded in reality, and most take the Jan. 6 insurrection seriously, but they don’t lie awake at night fretting over democracy’s demise.
The most illuminating aspect of the focus groups was how little voters with this profile know about Trump’s legal entanglements and, particularly, his authoritarian push for absolute immunity. In fact, these voters seem aghast as they discover in real time that Trump thinks presidents should be immune from prosecution for actions done while in office.
The moderator informs them of Trump’s argument that every president should have immunity for “everything they do as president,” unless they are impeached and convicted by Congress. “What do you think of that?” asked the moderator.
“It’s ridiculous,” responded an independent Wisconsin woman who leans Republican. “So he’s saying if he killed somebody, he’d be immune.”
“Yeah, I think that’s crazy too. That’s too much power,” said a male Georgia independent who leans Republican.
A Nevada woman, identified as a weak Democrat, grew incredulous at Trump’s assertion. “No matter what? So a president could kill somebody, and they should have immunity?” she said. “That’s crazy.”
[snipped repetition of Trump’s all-caps claims of “full immunity.”]
If the voters in the focus groups were surprised by Trump’s argument, imagine if they learned he pushes out an all-caps tweet on the matter at least once a week.
Some participants were similarly thrown by the extent of Trump’s legal trouble when they learned he is “facing 91 felony indictments.”
“Jesus Christ,” responded a Nevada woman who’s a weak Democrat.
“It certainly is shocking to think that,” replied a male Wisconsin independent who leans Republican. “[T]his is crazy.”
[…] none of the participants quoted in Navigator’s report mentioned Trump being indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election—arguably his most egregious violation as president.
The takeaway from these focus groups is that Democrats shouldn’t take for granted even basic knowledge about Trump’s legal challenges and his autocratic impulses. Many voters still don’t know the severity of Trump’s wide-ranging criminal indictments, and they have no idea the vigor with which he is claiming to be above the law.
[…] The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has said that starting next week, it will “survey identified commercial cryptocurrency miners, which are required to respond with details related to their energy use.”
“We will specifically focus on how the energy demand for cryptocurrency mining is evolving, identify geographic areas of high growth, and quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand,” EIA Administrator Joe DeCarolis said in a written statement this week.
The survey was authorized by the White House Office of Management and Budget as an “emergency collection of data request.”
In order to introduce new cryptocurrency into circulation, “mines” use energy-consuming computers. These computers generate solutions to puzzles that unlock new cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency mining in the U.S. has grown significantly over the past few years, especially after a 2021 crackdown in the activity in China.
A preliminary estimate from the EIA said that under the low-end of its estimate, cryptocurrency mining represents electricity usage equal to entire states like Utah and West Virginia. […]
The increased electricity demand due to cryptocurrency mining has, in some places, enabled idled fossil fuel power plants to come back online. […]
Why are peaceful protesters treated like terrorists, while actual terrorists (especially on the far right, and especially in the US) often remain unmolested by the law? Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Why are ordinary criminals being released early to make space in overcrowded prisons, only for the space to be refilled with political prisoners: people trying peacefully to defend the habitable planet?
There’s a simple explanation. It was clearly expressed by a former analyst at the US Department of Homeland Security. “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying: ‘I wish you’d do something about these rightwing extremists.’” The disproportionate policing of environmental protest, the new offences and extreme sentences, the campaigns of extrajudicial persecution by governments around the world are not, as politicians constantly assure us, designed to protect society. They’re a response to corporate lobbying.
Last week the UN’s special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, issued the kind of bulletin you might expect to see written about the Sisi regime in Egypt or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But it concerned the UK. It noted that draconian anti-protest laws, massive sentences and court rulings forbidding protesters from explaining their motives to juries are crushing “fundamental freedoms” here. He pointed out that until recently it was very rare “for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK”. Now you can get six months merely for marching.
He also highlighted the outrageous treatment of people convicted of no crime. Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to two years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews, and deprived of their social lives and political rights. This is one of many examples of process as punishment. Even before you have been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.
This bombshell report was ignored by almost all the media. You shouldn’t be surprised. With a few exceptions, the media belongs to the corporate-political complex that demanded these laws. All over the world, the billionaire press has been demonising peaceful campaigners and lobbying for ever more oppressive measures against those who challenge destructive industries.
However absurd the media’s hyperbole, governments rush to meet its demands. In Germany, the authorities launched an organised crime investigation into the environmental protest movement Letzte Generation. Italy is using anti-mafia laws against an allied group of environmental defenders, Ultima Generazione. In France and the US, peaceful green protesters are labelled and treated as terrorists. These governments must know they aren’t dealing with organised crime, the mafia or terrorists. But by using these labels they hope to isolate and ostracise peaceful protesters while justifying a madly disproportionate legal response.
In many cases, laws are proposed or drafted by corporate-funded lobby groups masquerading as thinktanks, such as Policy Exchange in the UK and the American Legislative Exchange Council in the US. Such groups create legal templates for crushing protest movements, then press for their adoption all over the world. This tactic has been chillingly effective….
This woman should be somewhere she can’t hurt herself or others.
What is […] Laura Loomer up to these days? Using race science to “prove” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is an idiot? Sure, why not, we haven’t thrown up all our internal organs yet today.
Loomer bravely dared to expound on this controversial subject in the lion’s den that is her podcast on Rumble, the video platform for heterodox thinkers whose collective intellectual energy couldn’t power a Pocket Rocket. Though perhaps we shouldn’t discount the bravery it takes to make galactically bigoted statements in a room by yourself, the sort of statements that once upon a time we couldn’t find so easily because there was no Internet and so they mostly circulated on worn-out audio cassettes at klavern barbecues.
Trigger warning for SOME SERIOUS RACIST BULLSHIT, INCOMING.
“I really do believe in IQ science. I do believe that, you know, there’s a lot to be said about people of different backgrounds with higher and lower IQs. […] And, some of the people that have the lowest IQs are Somalis, okay? And it’s because there’s a problem with inbreeding in Somalia. And the average IQ in Somalia, if you look it up, is actually 70.”
Of course Loomer contradicted herself a couple of minutes later by claiming Somalia’s average IQ is 68, but 70 is the IQ level at which “you’re actually considered to be eligible for a diagnosis of mental retardation by US health care standards.” We’re sure her audience of imbecilic racists and Donald Trump fans (but we repeat ourselves) appreciates her clearing that up.
Omar had apparently gotten on Loomer’s loony radar […] this week because she gave a speech in Somali to some of her constituents in Minneapolis last weekend. Afterwards, a poor English translation of the speech gave the wingnutterati the incorrect impression that Omar had admitted to being some sort of Somali fifth columnist with the power to order the US government to do whatever she wants it to do.
Who knows what horrors might await us if a liberal congresswoman could control the US government like a common George Soros. Universal health care? Aggressive action against the climate change crisis? Free abortions being offered as part of Capitol tours? The mind reels.
[…] Loomer also called for Omar to be booted from Congress and deported […] And we should do it before Omar and her Somali brethren breed all the white people out of existence:
“They call Minneapolis Somalia or Little Somalia because when you go, you go down the street and all you see are people from Somalia with 10 kids. Right? Because these people are breeding like rabbits. I guess they’ve never heard of something called birth control. […] Unfortunate for every single person who doesn’t subscribe to the Islamist ideology because these people are having 10, 15 children a pop, and they’re teaching their kids to hate Christians.”
It should be noted that Donald Trump Jr. recently floated this woman’s name for press secretary if his father, God help us all, gets elected in November. […]
Also too:
“Why do we wanna have our country do the bidding of Al-Shabaab? Like, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna take orders from all these, from all these people that sleep in caves and have sex with goats in Al-Shabaab? I mean, honestly, is this is this what we’re gonna do?”
In many cases, laws are proposed or drafted by corporate-funded lobby groups masquerading as thinktanks, such as Policy Exchange in the UK and the American Legislative Exchange Council in the US. Such groups create legal templates for crushing protest movements, then press for their adoption all over the world. This tactic has been chillingly effective….
How much of a losing streak is gigantic loser Donald Trump on in his continuing legal fights? He’s now losing cases in other countries, meaning his losing streak can be said to have gone global. Loser.
This week the United Kingdom High Court, which is sort of like America’s Supreme Court without the blatant partisanship, the off-the-charts corruption, […] threw out a lawsuit Trump filed last year against the author of the infamous Steele Dossier, that salacious collection of raw intelligence put together by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele that gave us such Trump-era nuggets as “Donald Trump paid Russian hookers for golden showers in a Moscow hotel room once used by Barack Obama.”
[…] Trump had sued Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, saying that its compilation of all that sexxxy bullshit into a handy, easy-to-download-and-leisurely-read-while-chortling .pdf file, violated Britain’s data protection laws. The Court threw the case out on the grounds that a) the dossier came to light when Buzzfeed published it in early 2017 so Trump missed the six-year statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit, […]
From the Washington Post:
She added that Orbis’s possession of copies of the dossier could not “sensibly” have caused Trump distress, not least because copies of it were floating around online.
“Mere storage of the Memoranda by the Defendant cannot sensibly be said to have had any impact on the Claimant — if he was even aware of it — not least in circumstances where the Memoranda are on the internet,” she wrote.
[…] Orbis Business Intelligence pronounced itself “delighted” with the High Court’s decision, adding that US courts are always accusing Trump of pursuing “vexatious litigation.” Which is true.
[…] So add this to the pile of recent Trump losses […]
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) admitted she had a personal relationship with an outside prosecutor she appointed to manage the election interference case against former president Donald Trump and his allies but denied claims that the relationship had tainted the proceedings.
In a 176-page court filing on Friday, Willis called the claims against her “meritless” and “salacious.” She asked a judge to reject motions from Trump and other co-defendants that seek to disqualify her and her office from the case and to do so without a hearing. Willis denied claims of misconduct and said there was no evidence that the relationship between her and special prosecutor Nathan Wade had prejudiced the case.
[…] Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, has scheduled a Feb. 15 evidentiary hearing on the allegations.
[…] Until now, neither Willis nor Wade had directly addressed or denied the allegations. Bank records made public as part of Wade’s divorce proceedings showed Wade purchased plane tickets for himself and Willis on two occasions — a trip to Aruba purchased in October 2022 on American Airlines, and a second trip purchased in April 2023 to San Francisco on Delta Air Lines. It is unclear if Willis reimbursed Wade for the tickets or went on the trips. A spokesman for Willis has declined to comment. Wade has not responded to requests for comment, and his divorce attorney has declined to comment.
[…] On Tuesday, Wade reached a temporary settlement in his divorce case […]
Trump repeatedly referring to Willis and Wade as “lovebirds” and claiming “that case is totally compromised.”
[…] Willis’s formal legal response is unlikely to end the scrutiny of the alleged actions by the two prosecutors — including by her political critics, who have seized on the scandal as an opening to attack her and the Trump case. […]
I think it is likely that Willis will be found to have not done anything illegal, but the “appearance of impropriety” charge will be pushed by Republicans to disqualify her.
A few campaign tidbits, as summarized by Steve Benen:
South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary is still a few weeks away, but the state’s Democratic presidential primary is tomorrow. President Joe Biden is expected to win by a wide margin.
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Kristina Karamo and Pete Hoekstra both claim to be the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, and both attended the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting this week — though neither one was invited, and neither received official recognition. [LOL]
——————————-
Republican voters in Nevada hoping to participate in a presidential nominating contest will discover there’s a GOP primary and caucus. The result is predictable: widespread confusion.
The Nevada Republican presidential primary has long been fraught with conflict over the prospect of holding two contests in one week, two days apart, with different outcomes.
Now, many voters are signaling that they’re confused — and angry.
Driving the bulk of the confusion is the absence of former President Donald Trump’s name on the state primary ballot.
Nevada elections and party officials have, over the last several weeks, fielded thousands of calls from voters who have received ballots in the mail for the Feb. 6 state primary, not realizing Trump is competing only in a Republican caucus two days later […]
Posts have been populating on social media with voters asking why Trump’s name was missing from their ballots. Many floated false conspiracy theories.
Trump is not on the ballot because he did not file for the state election. He is expected to easily win the caucuses and claim all of Nevada’s 26 delegates.
This is the first time Nevada is experiencing the dual contests. The shift happened after a Democratic-led state Legislature changed the law, eliminating state-run caucuses after the 2020 election. The state Republican Party nevertheless decided to hold a caucus. It has decried the state-run primary, saying that it is a waste of taxpayer money and that it is suspicious of the possibility of voter fraud.
Amid the flood of calls, some GOP leaders say they’re telling voters to cast a ballot, but instead of picking Nikki Haley — the only major candidate listed — they’re telling them to select the “none of these candidates” option. They’re then encouraging them to caucus for Trump.
[…] “We tell them there’s three things you can do with your ballot: Write ‘none of these candidates,’ or you can put it in the shredder, or you can blow your nose with it,” Bruce Parks, chair of the Washoe County Republican Party, said of the mail-in ballots of the state-run contest. Washoe is the second-most populous county in Nevada, and Parks said he’s fielded some 1,000 phone calls in the last week from Republicans distressed over their ballots.
Conventional wisdom is that Haley will easily win the state-run primary, because she is the marquee candidate on the ballot. […]
But in Nevada, there’s also an option to vote “none of these candidates.” If that were to somehow log more votes than Haley — a phenomenon that’s happened in the past in Nevada — the former South Carolina governor would still be deemed the winner, but the public vote totals could be embarrassing.
[…] In the less populous Nye County, the Republican chair said he personally fielded about 500 phone calls since mail-in ballots started hitting homes the first week of January. He said he told those who wanted to vote for Trump they could select “none of these candidates” on their ballots and then caucus.
“This has just been creating a tremendous amount of calamity,” Nye County GOP Chair Leo Blundo said. But, he added, he also sees an opportunity.
“This has been a monumental tool to get engagement into the party apparatus, get Republicans activated, engaged and involved in the party, which is what’s critical,” he said.
Many Republicans have been critical of the state for moving to a primary election.
[…] The party hierarchy traveled to Mar-a-Lago last year, and six GOP leaders were recently indicted on charges related to serving as so-called false Trump electors in the 2020 campaign. Several 2024 candidates, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Haley, opted to appear on the primary ballot. Scott and Pence have since dropped out.
Competing in the caucus came with a $55,000 price tag. And the Nevada GOP dictated that candidates could only choose one contest in which to compete. (Voters, however, are free to participate in both the primary and the caucus if they want.)
“I talk to the people in Nevada, they will tell you the caucuses have been sealed up, bought and paid for for a long time. So that’s why we got into the primary,” Haley said at a Jan. 21 stop in New Hampshire. “The caucus is what it is. And these are people who are involved in it that are trying to stop it. But that’s the Trump train rolling through that. But we’re going to focus on the states that are fair.” […]
For months, congressional Republicans have insisted that they won’t allow aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to pass unless they also get big concessions on immigration. That was a purely political demand, egged on by Donald Trump, allowing them to change the subject to the border. Now that that demand is close to being met with a bipartisan deal in the Senate, Republicans have changed their tune, blatantly trying to keep this election-year issue alive. That’s made them look bad and left the critical aid package stranded, and now Republican leadership is reversing course and talking about splitting the two issues apart.
“It’s time for us to move something, hopefully including the border agreement,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “but we need to get help to Israel and Ukraine quickly.”
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a close ally of McConnell, agreed. “It would be nice to change the status quo on the border, but if there is not the political support to do that, then I think we should proceed with the rest of the supplemental,” he said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to agree as well. He’s been in close contact with Trump on the issue and is adamantly opposed to bringing the Senate’s border bill to the floor, if the Senate passes it. But in a meeting with Baltic leaders this week, he signaled that he’s open to the separate Ukraine aid bill.
[Separating out the Ukraine aid bill sounds like a bait-and-switch to me. Republicans will promise to address the issue and then they will fail to do so.]
Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Lauri Hussar, the speaker of Estonia’s parliament, said Johnson expressed “his readiness” to deliver Ukraine aid, with Johnson saying there “should be a way to find a solution to the problems” and “domestic issues” in the way.
“Yesterday we had the opportunity to meet with various congressman, with committee leaders, and of course opinions are different, we heard different views, but overall we are pleased to say there’s broad support for Ukraine,” Daiga Mieriņa, the speaker of Latvia’s parliament, added. “Speaker Johnson also affirmed this close partnership [with the Baltics] and that this close partnership would continue going forward.”
Johnson does, however, face a political problem—namely, MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to try to oust him over Ukraine aid. “I just told him [Johnson] it’s an absolute no-go,” Greene said. “If he funds $60 billion to fund a war in Ukraine to continue killing a whole generation of Ukrainian men—to continue a war that is a losing war, that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s ready for peace talks—yeah, I would introduce the motion to vacate myself.”
Johnson brushed off the threat, saying he was “not worried” about being ousted, but the Freedom Caucus is restless and enraged at Johnson over the fact that he keeps working with the Senate and White House to keep the government functioning.
There’s a way around that opposition, if Johnson is willing to let his GOP colleagues take it. House Democrats have a discharge petition that’s left over from last spring’s debt ceiling fight. Basically, it’s a shell bill into which text can be inserted, and it has priority consideration on the House floor if it gets enough signatures to pass. Democrats have that legislative text ready to go. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, has already filed that supplemental aid bill, and it would take only a handful of Republicans signing on for the bill to be forced to the floor.
wzrd1says
Tesla had a new recall today that has me worried.
The recall, due to too small a font used in a display of a warning.
Why the qualms?
Recalls were originally due to major issues involving safety, like oh, your car bursting into flames while you’re peacefully driving it.
Now, cars bursting into open, involving flames and dim illuminators or (OK, I complain incessantly about tiny text in my elderhood) small fonts are equal in public alarm views. The flame thing not being able to usually be addressed by a fucking software update.
Profanity driven by being an IT type…
Perhaps, re-terming it to “software recall”?
There is a wee difference between “your car will randomly burst into open flames with you and your extended family inside” and “your brakes are about to fail, so safely coast as best you can to the curb”.
Never had a car burst into flames, I have had a few cars whose brakes quit on me, hugely annoying, amazed at my low underwear replacement bill, coasted to a stop or pumped the living shit out of what remained to stop. Got a running a stop sign ticket once after one pumping like it was a brand new influencer event thing.
That cop, later arrested for conspiring with a biker gang, drugs and official misconduct of a similar vein.
I was eating dinner with a judge at the time.*
*I was. Literally. And yes, there was some personal involvement there, as the statute of limitations is long expired.
Having no siblings, I’ve retained an extensive network, “Christianity derived” of friends and contacts, my wife also enjoyed that environment and well, we even adopted entire families to shelter under our wings of advice. I also kept contact with some, rather unreasonable people, hoping to guide them to more fortunate pathways.
Really long story short, “hearts and minds” works, it just takes a while. Quick fix idiocy loses in any long term environment. Always.
You won’t be-leaf the shape of this ancient tree. A team of researchers found a 350-million-year-old fossilized tree species that looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.
The fossils are some of the oldest-known trees and were discovered in what was once an ancient lake in northeastern Canada. The species is called Sanfordiacaulis densifolia and would have taken up residence under the taller members of the forest canopy. The earliest fossil trees date back to the late Devonian Period, and these—from the early Carboniferous—are just a few million years younger. It’s not clear what Sanfordiacaulis’ closest relations are on the tree of life (no pun intended), which means it’s incertae sedis—an enigmatic taxa…
In 2022, US Americans spent an average of $13,493 a year per person on health care. That is more than any other country in the world, and it’s even more bananas when you consider the fact that 40 percent of adults under the age of 55 haven’t even seen a doctor in five years.
A big reason why people avoid going to the doctor, other than the fact that it can be very expensive, is that they already have medical debt and don’t want more — so they will wait and wait to seek medical care until things get really bad, in which case they will be a lot more expensive.
But here’s some good news about that! Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont announced today that his state is set to become the first state to actually cancel medical debt for eligible residents.
The state is partnering with a nonprofit organization that buys debt at the same discount price at which debt collectors buy it, and will be leveraging $6.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to get rid of $1 billion in medical debt.
“This is not something they did because they were spending too much money, this is something because they got hit with a medical emergency,” Lamont said on Good Morning America on Friday. “They should not have to suffer twice — first with the illness, then with the debt.”
Well that does make a certain kind of sense, at least to those of us who are not monsters.
Who is eligible? Residents whose income is less than 400% of the federal poverty line (so $58,320 for individuals, $124,800 for a family of four, etc.) and anyone whose medical debt is more than 5 percent of their annual income. That’s a lot of people.
The best part is that they won’t have to apply for anything, they won’t have to fill anything out — their medical debt will just go away.
I probably don’t have to get into the kinds of problems that having medical debt can cause — it can affect a person’s credit, their ability to buy a home, etc. etc., which in turn means that other people are going to have a harder time selling things and selling their homes. It’s almost as if everything is interconnected and bad things happening to other people also hurts the rest of us.
About 100 million Americans owe $250 or more in medical debt, and while we don’t have an exact figure on how much we owe in total, one analysis determined that it’s about $195 billion ($88 billion of which is in collections), which you will note is a lot of money. Two-thirds of those who file for bankruptcy do so for reasons related to health care and medical debt.
[…] If this goes over well in Connecticut, it’s definitely the kind of thing that other states might consider, given that it’s literally less expensive than the cost of having people with that much debt. Of course, most of the medical debt in the US is in the South, in states with governors and legislatures far less likely to find this kind of thing appealing.
In the meantime, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is working to make it so medical debt no longer affects one’s credit rating, which would be amazing for all of us.
But good for Connecticut and good for all of the people who are going to be unburdened in this way, I can’t imagine what an absolute relief it must be for them to not have that hanging over their heads anymore.
On January 31, Fox News host and serial climate denier Jesse Watters pushed debunked misinformation to argue that climate scientists are “cooking the books.”
In an effort to disprove that 2023 was the hottest year on record, Watters repeated a bogus claim that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s placement of thermometers on urban concrete skewed temperature data.
“Concrete and asphalt attract heat and retain heat a lot more than the countryside,” Watters said. “No wonder we think the earth’s warming. We’re literally cooking the books.” [video at the link]
Watters then cited a post from X user @_ClimateCraze claiming that “improperly located” thermometers “produce unrealistic warming through the Urban Heat Island effect.” Conveniently, Fox News cropped out a portion of the post — a link to a debunked “study” from junk science blogger and climate denier Anthony Watts. The 2022 report, produced by fossil fuel-funded think tank the Heartland Institute, falsely claims that 96% of U.S. climate data is “corrupted” due to thermometer placement
Multiple news outlets and fact-checkers have disproved the Heartland Institute’s bogus study as it spread across social media, with Agence France-Presse noting that past claims about biased data from urban temperature monitoring sites have been “thoroughly refuted.”
PolitiFact pointed out that Heartland’s false claim that the data is corrupted “ignores key facts” including:
First, climate scientists know that weather station data can be impacted by poor siting, and they adjust data accordingly.
Second, climate change analysis focuses on changes over time.
Further, PolitiFact noted that the scientific community has rejected this claim:
“The correct approach is to write a scientific paper and submit it to a scientific journal,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist currently serving as research lead at Stripe, a San Francisco-based technology company. “In this specific case, the author of the report, Anthony Watts, submitted a paper on the topic around 10 years ago, but was unable to successfully convince other scientists of the validity of his findings and to pass the peer review process.”
Watters’ reliance on climate misinformation is no surprise; Fox News has repeatedly proved itself to be a shameless climate denial machine.
Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles and Long Beach are all locations at risk for record-rainfall and potentially significant and damaging flash flooding Sunday and Monday.
A powerful Pacific storm system is expected to impact southern California beginning Saturday night and lasting through Tuesday morning. While this will be a long-duration rainfall event, the peak rainfall will occur Sunday and Monday.
The storm system will be fueled by an atmospheric river, which will pump moisture into the state of California. The area of heavy rain will be intense at times, and could slow-down or even stall over parts of the state which could lead to the possibility of record-setting rainfall amounts.
While the storm system will impact northern California first (including the Bay Area and Big Sur coast) beginning on Saturday afternoon, the worst of the flooding is expected to be Santa Barbara and southward.
By the time the rainfall completely ends on Tuesday, coastal and valley areas, such as Santa Barbara County, Ventura County and the Los Angeles metro area could pick up a widespread 3 to 6 inches of rain, with locally higher amounts of up to 6 to 10 inches of rain.
The mountainous areas will pick up even more rainfall due to terrain enhancement to the totals. A widespread 6 to 12 inches will be possible in these locales, with locally higher amounts up to 15 inches.
[…] Should the upper limits of the rainfall forecasts be reached, they could break 1-day rainfall records, 2-day rainfall records and potentially monthly rainfall records.
[…] Landslides and debris flows will be possible in the hilly and mountainous areas.
The rainfall amounts will be the main headline with this storm, but the Sierra will see heavy snow as well. Snow levels will be around 7,000 feet and 2 to 4 feet of new snow accumulation is possible through Tuesday.
Strong winds and high surf will also be concerns associated with this storm system.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@wzrd1 #209:
Recalls were originally due to major issues involving safety […] Perhaps, re-terming it to “software recall”? […] There is a wee difference between […] burst into open flames […] and “your brakes are about to fail, so safely coast as best you can to the curb”.
Your implication has plainly been to insinuate that the creators have been hyping the tool to sell it, but in fact they’ve been remarkably circumspect and forthright in their communications about it. Nor, despite the fact that you later appeared to back off the developers and shift your insinuations to the article-writers and readers, have you provided any evidence of this alleged hype or these grandiose claims. The only grandiose claims made about it have been by you, ventriloquizing.
Sorta; my opinion is what it is. I was expressing my opinion. That should have been clear.
This: “Zhao and his team aren’t trying to take down Big AI — they’re just trying to force tech giants to pay for licensed work, instead of training AI models on scraped images.” is fairly grandiose, in my opinion.
I’m confused about your confusion regarding how these tools work. As I understand it, Glaze is a defensive tool – interfering with AI scraping of that particular work – and Nightshade is more offensive – corrupting the AI scraping process going forward. They complement one another, as JSNuttall explained. The developers are working on a combined tool they expect to release this year, which will also presumably be free. Of course they work against current harvesting software – what else would they work against?
The image generative software, as suggested by the paper. Supposedly, the scraped images on which they train look like one thing to people and another to AI systems and so when they are asked to render X they instead render Y. Scrapers are just the collecting tools.
I’m not so much confused as ignorant about the process, and I lack the proper background to get what the paper is saying.
—
@178, I am convinced about their good intentions. Fair enough.
Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin showed up Thursday at a rally in Dripping Springs, Texas, for the “Take Our Border Back” trucker convoy that’s en route to the U.S.-Mexico border, whose participants have dubbed themselves “God’s army.” NBC affiliate KXAN reports there were “mixed messages” among the speakers about the convoy’s goal—and Nugent and Palin didn’t help clear anything up in that department.
Former Alaska Gov. Palin went on a classic Palin run, babbling about “every violation of our charters of liberty that’s going on right now. Article 1, Article 4, different clauses in our charters of liberty.” While there is no way to know exactly what Palin was referring to, it’s important to note that the New York Charter of Liberties, written in 1683, isn’t a part of our Constitution: It’s a predecessor document with some similarities. But wow—does she live in Alaska or 17th-century England?
After describing Nugent as “ridiculously patriotic,” Palin ceded the stage to the racist rocker, who played a loud note on his guitar and then launched into Second Amendment schtick, saying America’s problems can be blamed on “compromise bullshit” and letting “the snakes take over our country.”
He cursed a lot as well, and called President Joe Biden a “devil scum snake.” [Tweet and video at the link]
[snipped Jack Posobiec ranting about how Kid Rock and Ted Nugent are better than Taylor Swift]
[…] Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is threatening a civil war and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling against his overreach at the border, is happy to stoke this manufactured right-wing circus. It beats having to justify adding more razor wire across the Rio Grande after the recent tragic drownings of two migrant children and their mother.
Remember the manufactured “migrant caravan” border crisis in 2018? This new “trucker convoy” is a sort of variation on the theme. Having promised to enlist 700,000 trucks to create a vehicular wall on the border, the hype machine has so far raised around $140,000 and gathered about 50 trucks. That’s 50, as in five-zero.
And that number is unlikely to grow by very much. One participant claims that she quickly became disillusioned by the trucker caravan when she realized that it was made up of mostly “grifting, motherf—ing live-streamers.” […]
The underwhelming trucker convoy plans to head to the border on Feb. 3 to do whatever it is they think they’re doing.
When the “trucker convoy” first started out, it didn’t have any trucks. Zero trucks. Just cars. Now they have 50 trucks and Sarah Palin. They are begging “keyboard warriors” to join the fight.
True to form, the organizers put up banners with mistakes, like “February 3th”.
lumipunasays
Random updates from Finland:
The border against Russia remains closed for the foreseeable future. The closure that began in December expired in mid-January and was renewed without fuss. The next time it will expire is in mid-February just after presidential election. Under the current law, the border can be only closed for “short periods of time” – a string of repeated one-month closures is really stretching the interpretation of the law.
There is no indication that Russia plans to stop exploiting the border and the asylum system for harassment and intimidation purposes. While the border remains closed, and the winter makes walking in the woods very difficult, only a few small groups of asylum seekers have crossed the border in that manner in recent weeks. When the snow melts, approximately in April and early May in southeastern Finland, the situation will escalate.
On the presidential election, I was planning to make the point that was just summed up in this Guardian opinion piece:
During recent trips to Estonia and Finland I was struck by the clarity of the message of Russia as an existential threat.
…
Yet, as Finland, Estonia and other Nordic and Baltic states acknowledge, the election that really matters will not be held in the region, but in the United States. There is barely concealed trepidation about the encouragement that Putin will take if Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Personally, I still don’t feel much sense of a threat from Russia – but then again I generally try to avoid thinking about such unpleasant prospects. I think the stress and anxiety is generally higher in Baltic coutries (and for a good reason) than in Finland or Scandinavia.
Anyway, I concur that the November US election will be more consequential for Finland’s national security than our own (and, for that matter, more consequential than the upcoming Russian election, lol). That’s quite remarkable, considering that the Finnish president, in addition to being a national figurehead, is supposed to participate in national security strategy and advance it via diplomatic activity. As it is, the two remaining candidates in this election have fairly similar experience and values, at least in respects that are relevant for the job. Meanwhile, the future security environment will depend on the decisions of United States and big West European countries.
Whether folly, hubris, or denial, it was always going to end this way.
The carnival of stupidity that is a Donald Trump-led Republican Party remains the most distracting show on earth. Last week, after a jury found Trump guilty of repeatedly defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who has credibly accused the former President of sexual assault, the news was dominated by the eighty-three-million-dollar penalty that Trump will now have to pay because of his big mouth. This week, Trump’s G.O.P. has been hyperventilating over the nation’s most celebrated pop star, Taylor Swift, promoting elaborate conspiracy theories about the liberal-leaning musician and her Super Bowl-bound boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Trump, naturally, relished the fight, reportedly insisting that he is “more popular” and has more committed fans than Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and whose prospective support for Biden again seems to have sent the Trumpier corners of the Internet into a frenzy. Even the Wall Street Journal was appalled […] “paranoia on the right” makes the Republican Party and its kooky demagogue “seem, frankly, weird.”
If only weird were the sum of it. […] Trump has demanded that his party kill a major deal linking funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel with changes in immigration policy designed to stanch the flow of asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border. The deal—still not yet formally unveiled—has been a couple of months in the making. Republicans were the ones who demanded it in the first place.
[…] it never seemed realistic to me that the two parties were going to engage with each other in good faith on immigration—arguably the most toxic subject in American politics in the Trump era—and somehow come up with a deal that would pass in an election year with Trump on the ballot. […] The opportunity to prove his continued dominance over the G.O.P. by tanking any breakthrough was inevitably going to prove irresistible to Trump. He spoke “at length” about it to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Johnson acknowledges, and sure enough Johnson, a nonentity who never would have become Speaker last fall had Trump not approved of him, did what Trump wanted, announcing in unequivocal terms that House Republicans would never go along with the Senate’s bipartisan deal. […]
Tying the fate of Ukraine in its existential fight with Russia to a resolution of the near-irresolvable politics of the American border seems a particularly cruel twist. For Trump, it’s like a gift. Why wouldn’t America’s most noted admirer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, want to undercut Ukraine while, at the same time, sinking a package that might look like a real bipartisan win for Joe Biden? Trump wants an issue to run on, not a solution. […]
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it began air strikes around 4 p.m. ET in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force “and affiliated militia groups.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from the United States,” CENTCOM said in a statement. “The airstrikes employed more than 125 precision munitions.”
CENTCOM said it hit command and control operations, intelligence centers, rockets, missiles, drone storages and unmanned aerial vehicle storages and munition supply chain facilities used by militia groups and the IRGC.
[…] “We will have a multi-tiered response,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a Thursday press briefing, saying the U.S. will respond “a number of times depending on what the situation is.”
[…] Some Republicans called for Biden to strike back inside Iran for the deaths, but any move hitting Iranian soil would likely provoke an all-out war between Washington and Tehran, something the president has repeatedly said he does not want.
But hitting targets linked to the country’s militant wing, the IRGC, which is involved in training, supplying and assisting sponsored groups throughout the Middle East, could alone send a strong message to Tehran.
Iran has vowed to respond decisively to any U.S. military action. But Iran has also grown concerned about a wider war, according to CNN. […]
I assume everyone have learned of the poll that puts Biden at 50% and Trump at 43%? It is the women voters that have turned things around. It is almost as if doing sexual assaults is frowned on
Russell Brand was once considered a “hero of the left,” criticizing Fox News and corporate media for their sensational and fear-driven coverage. Now, he’s gone full conspiracy theorist, buddying up with the same right-wingers he used to criticize. His evolution is a great example of “grift drift” — how so-called “free thinkers” get pulled towards extremism in order to get views and make money.
Amid the escalating border standoff between Texas and the White House over illegal immigration, misinformation has spread in China that the Lone Star state has officially declared war to secede from the US.
Popular Chinese outlets have been suggesting that events in Texas have led to deep divisions in the US widening to a point where unrest has become a stark reality.
[…]
The US Supreme Court ruled last month against Mr Abbott, but the Republican has vowed to add more razor wire to crack down on what he calls an “invasion”.
Trending social media posts in China allege Mr Abbott was preparing to go to war with US federal authorities.
Posts with the hashtag #TexasDeclaresAStateOfWar have been viewed and shared thousands of times on the popular social network Sina Weibo. Some posts have been from a user with millions of followers.
A Voice of America journalist Wenhao, who specialises in Chinese online disinformation, posted on X that the “biggest US related news on China’s internet for the past few days is Texas governor declaring war with the federal government, which did not happen in reality”.
birgerjohanssonsays
Carl Kasarda -who has the InRange podcast- is one of the more responsible members of the gun-owning community. I enjoy his podcasts about gun-related history and his humanitarian values. Here he is reaching out to help a black guy who was subjected to a racist assault. If all gun enthusiasts were like this, USA would be a very different place.
“Devin Jones was attacked at SHOT Show and needs our help.” https://youtube.com/shorts/Is9v1emKNyY
Trump, naturally, relished the fight, reportedly insisting that he is “more popular” and has more committed fans than Swift,…
He is such a Real Housewife.
birgerjohanssonsays
Just throwing this in for fun. Ian McKellen/Gandalf in a Pet Shop Boys video 1988.
Pet Shop Boys – Heart (Official Video) [HD Upgrade]
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=vlIsU7ImU0w
wzrd1says
My pet peeve demands grooming.
Entitlements.
Remember that GOP buggerboo?
Entitlements are under section 8 of the US Constitution, hence inherent rights that are well, senior to the “Bill of Rights”.
Yet, oddly, deemed inferior by the right.
OK, spleen vented. Now, excuse me while I clean both my machine gun, howitzer and T-Rex, who all need a good pressure washer cleaning.
Rex demands it.
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038,[1] Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse[2][3]) is a time computing problem that leaves some computer systems unable to represent times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
The problem exists in systems which measure Unix time – the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970) – and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. The data type is only capable of representing integers between −(231) and 231 − 1, meaning the latest time that can be properly encoded is 231 − 1 seconds after epoch (03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038). Attempting to increment to the following second (03:14:08) will cause the integer to overflow, setting its value to −(231) which systems will interpret as 231 seconds before epoch (20:45:52 UTC on 13 December 1901). The problem is similar in nature to the year 2000 problem. Analogous storage constraints for unsigned 32-bit integers will be reached in 2106.
Computer systems that use time for critical computations may encounter fatal errors if the Y2038 problem is not addressed. Some applications that use future dates have already encountered the bug. The most vulnerable systems are those which are infrequently or never updated, such as legacy and embedded systems. To address the problem, many modern systems have been upgraded to measure Unix time with signed 64-bit integers instead, which will take 292 billion years to overflow—approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe…
A Pakistani court has jailed Imran Khan and his wife for seven years after voiding their marriage, in the latest sentence against the ex-prime minister.
The court ruled that Khan’s 2018 marriage with Bushra Bibi, a faith healer, was un-Islamic and illegal…
The complaint was filed by Bibi’s ex-husband, who said her marriage with Khan had been fraudulent.
Under Muslim family law, women are prohibited from remarrying for a few months after their husband dies or they are divorced. The court found that Bibi had remarried before the completion of the stipulated time following her divorce…
The couple married in 2018, months before Khan was elected prime minister. Bibi, a spiritual healer believed to be in her 40s and always wears a veil in public, is Khan’s third wife…
In sequence, his previous two marriages ended.
birgerjohanssonsays
The punk icon Wayne Kramer has died. His band infuenced many others, like The Clash.
In this exclusive interview, attorney Roberta Kaplan discusses her recent victory in a defamation case against former President Donald Trump, where a verdict of $83 million was awarded to her client, E. Jean Carroll. Join George Conway, Sarah Longwell, Roberta Kaplan and Matthew Craig!
This New York love story begins with a criminal act of sabotage.
Under cover of darkness a year ago Friday, someone breached a waist-high fence and slipped into the Central Park Zoo. Once inside, they cut a hole through a steel mesh cage, freeing a majestic Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco who had arrived at the zoo as a fledgling 13 years earlier.
Immediately, Flaco fled the park, blinking his big orange eyes at pedestrians and police on Fifth Avenue before flying off into the night.
In the year since his dramatic escape, Flaco has become one of the city’s most beloved characters. By day he lounges in Manhattan’s courtyards and parks or perches on fire escapes. He spends his nights hooting atop water towers and preying on the city’s abundant rats.
To the surprise of many experts, Flaco is thriving in the urban wilds. An apex predator with a nearly 6-foot (2-meter) wingspan, he has called on abilities some feared he hadn’t developed during a lifetime in captivity, gamely exploring new neighborhoods and turning up unexpectedly at the windows of New Yorkers.
“He was the underdog from the start. People did not expect him to survive,” said Jacqueline Emery, one of several birders who document the owl’s daily movements and share them online with his legions of admirers. “New Yorkers especially connect to him because of his resilience.”
But as Flaco enters his second year in the spotlight, it can be easy to forget that his freedom is the result of a crime, one that has improbably remained unsolved.
…
Privately, the zoo has sought to soften descriptions of Flaco’s former living conditions, in a minivan-sized structure decorated with a painted mountain vista, barely twice the width of Flaco’s extended wings.
In internal emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request, zoo officials urged the Parks Department not to publicly describe Flaco as “raised in captivity.” Likewise, the term “escape” should be avoided.
“That puts the blame [LOL] on the animal rather than the perpetrator,” the zoo’s then-communications director, Max Pulsinelli, wrote in one email. “This was a crime.”
In the absence of official information, theories of the crime abound – a youthful prank, perhaps, or an attempted owl heist gone awry? For many invested in Flaco’s fate, the most plausible explanation is that he was freed for ideological reasons.
Proponents of the animal liberation theory point to the seemingly targeted nature of the crime, as well as the limitations of the owl’s modest enclosure.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone who loved Flaco and wanted him free,” said Nicole Barrantes, a wildlife campaign manager with World Animal Protection, who started a petition against Flaco being returned to the zoo. “His habitat was ridiculous. It was the saddest thing ever.”
…
Even with his proficient hunting skills, Flaco faces many threats in the city, including a grave risk of consuming rodenticide through a poisoned rat….
…
Flaco spent his initial months of freedom mostly in Central Park, which is loaded with wildlife, but has lately preferred more urban sections of Manhattan. There has been some speculation that he has been looking for a mate, though he most certainly won’t find one. Eurasian eagle owls aren’t native to North America.
…
On a recent night on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of the Flaco’s most dedicated observers, David Barrett, struck an ambivalent tone when asked how New Yorkers should think about the crime that made him an avian celebrity.
“To me, the folk hero is Flaco,” said Barrett, who runs the X account Manhattan Bird Alert, documenting the bird’s whereabouts in real time. “It’s an amazing thing: He lives his whole life in captivity and in a matter of days he taught himself to fly and to hunt rats.”
Tuning his ears skyward, Barrett listened for the signature hoot that had echoed across Broadway on so many recent nights.
“It’s not our business to try to solve crimes,” he added. “We’re just glad he’s here.”
Facing a cash crunch and harsh criticism from a faction of far-right conservatives, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday called for the party to unite behind the goal of defeating President Joe Biden…
It is sad that they say this out loud and it is no longer even considered controversial. They don’t want to provide governance, or to pursue certain policies; their only goal is to put themselves in positions of power.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who led a campaign criticizing Harvard University as it has been rocked by turmoil over practices related to antisemitism, plagiarism and financial management, on Friday failed in a bid to get four candidates on the ballot for a governing board of the Ivy League school.
One other candidate backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also failed to win a place on the ballot for Harvard’s board of overseers…
Apparently screwing up universities is the latest hobby of the ultra-rich.
Northern Ireland’s devolved government has reconvened and appointed Michelle O’Neill as first minister in a historic moment for Sinn Féin and Irish nationalism.
The Stormont assembly nominated the County Tyrone republican as the region’s first nationalist first minister.
O’Neill avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of Irish unity in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues.
“Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together,” she said. “We must make power sharing work because collectively, we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”
The appointment of a republican first minister represented “a new dawn” unimaginable to previous generations that grew up with discrimination against Catholics, said O’Neill. “That state is now gone.”
O’Neill will jointly lead the executive with Emma Little-Pengelly, a Democratic Unionist who was nominated deputy first minister, a post with equal power but less prestige.
The devolved government reconvened after the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) walked out of Stormont on 3 February 2022 in protest against post-Brexit trading arrangements that it said undermined the region’s place in the UK. The party agreed to end the boycott this week after its leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, wrung concessions from the UK government that smoothed the so-called Irish Sea border.
O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s deputy leader, became first minister in accordance with a May 2022 assembly election in which the republican party overtook the DUP as the biggest party, a seismic symbolic and psychological shift.
…
O’Neill had played down constitutional issues in the run-up to the sitting but earlier this week Sinn Féin’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said Irish unity was now within “touching distance”.
Sinn Féin, the DUP, the Alliance and the Ulster Unionist party will share ministerial positions using the D’Hondt mechanism based on party strengths, with the exception of the justice ministry, which is decided using a cross-community vote. The Social Democratic and Labour party will form the executive’s opposition.
The executive faces a daunting list of problems including a fiscal crisis, crumbling public services and eroded faith in democracy.
Stormont’s restoration will release a £3.3bn package – including pay rises for public sector workers who have staged multiple strikes – that the UK government had made available, conditional on the revival of institutions set up under the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Donaldson said the parties would seek additional funding from the Treasury. “The finance piece is unfinished business which we intend to finish.”
Business leaders and the Irish government have welcomed the return of power sharing, saying it should provide stability after years of Brexit-related convulsions.
The new rules to smooth trade across the Irish Sea were unveiled by the government on Wednesday. The measures remove routine checks on goods from Great Britain that are destined to remain in Northern Ireland and replace them with a “UK internal market system” for goods that remain within the UK.
The House of Commons approved the changes on Thursday without a formal vote, despite Brexiters’ concerns about the region remaining under EU law.
Ackman supported a group of four candidates called Renew Harvard, which called for upholding free speech, protecting students from bullying and harassment, and addressing financial mismanagement at the university.
A 3-month-old French bulldog named Tyson seems to have pulled off the miraculous. In a recent case report, Cornell University veterinarians describe how the pup spontaneously regrew most of his lower left jaw after it had to be removed to treat his cancer—the first time something like this has ever been documented in canines. Even better, Tyson remains cancer-free to this day…
A U.S. appeals court has blocked Florida from enforcing a ban on Chinese citizens owning homes or land in the state against two Chinese nationals who were in the process of buying property when the law was adopted.
[…] Nikki Haley—who, to be fair, is awful, but as far as we know hasn’t confused Trump with Tip O’Neill or sexually assaulted anyone—is actually going on the attack against Trump […] On Thursday, Haley said Trump’s profligate legal spending is an outrageous waste of donor funds, and suggested his ongoing cash crunch makes him a much weaker candidate going forward.
“It is unconscionable to me that a candidate would spend $50 million in legal fees,” Haley said on CNN’s “The Lead.” “It explains why he’s not doing many rallies. He doesn’t have the money to do it. It explains why he doesn’t want to get on a debate stage, because he doesn’t want to talk about why he’s doing it.”
Trump’s rallies have definitely dwindled. As the Associated Press reported in September:
Instead of the large-scale rallies that dominated his past runs, he is this time relying on state party events that offer large, friendly audiences at no cost to his political organization, which is facing millions of dollars in legal expenses. Friday’s event looked like a typical Trump rally, but was paid for by the state Republican Party. Those in the audience purchased tickets and paid to attend.
In the interview, Haley also implied that Trump’s financial situation was behind his harsh criticism of her in the wake of the New Hampshire primary. Trump, she speculates, is frustrated that she’s staying in the race because he wants all the donor money “going to him [so] he doesn’t have to spend anymore.”
[…] maybe instead of hectoring Haley about continuing her campaign, Trump could just commit more crimes to boost his take. After all, it’s worked like a charm in the past. And with his faithful goofball brigade ready and willing to make it rain, why wouldn’t it work again?
The right wing’s obsession with attacking mega pop star Taylor Swift has prompted the Department of Defense to make an official statement refuting one of the more egregious pieces of misinformation being spread: that Swift is a part of a “deep state” government conspiracy to swing the 2024 election to President Joe Biden.
Department spokesperson Sabrina Singh told Politico, “We know all too well the dangers of conspiracy theories, so to set the record straight—Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.”
Singh’s newest statement follows weeks of right-wingers across the country catching the vapors over Swift successfully encouraging her fanbase to register to vote. Conservative terror around Swift has reached such intense levels that pundits have begun pushing the preposterous theory that Swift was groomed by our secret intelligence agencies and then somehow turned into the most successful musical act in the world, just in time to stop Donald Trump from becoming president again. (And she will supposedly do this while also rigging the Super Bowl so her boyfriend’s team will win!)
While the general psyop theory has been around for some time, the increased media din around it can be traced directly back to Fox News bottom feeder Jesse Watters, who boosted the inane “theory” during a January segment on Swift.
“It’s real. The Pentagon psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online,” Watters said.
An anonymous Biden administration official told Politico that this theory’s spread among the MAGA faithful is bizarre enough in its own right.
“The absurdity of it all boggles the mind,” the official said, then joked, “Is this Team Trump’s new Comet Ping-Pong pizzagate?” Another official reportedly laughed throughout his conversation with the reporter, saying, “I really can’t believe this is a thing.”
DoD officials have fielded so many questions about this harebrained theory that they’ve been forced to make multiple statements, even though they have serious jobs dealing with serious things. […]
Hey there, everybody. I know it’s been a bit of a week, and there’s a lot to get through, so if anyone needs to step outside to hate Taylor Swift for five minutes, I totally understand. Go for it.
Don’tcha just HATE TAYLOR SWIFT? So much? Aren’t you literally overwhelmed by the urge to fill the internet with your intricate calculations connecting her to your George R.R. Martin-esque conspiracy theory about the globalist cabal that feminizes men to keep ‘em docile?
No?
Huh. I’m starting to think maybe you never really wanted to make America great again at all.
Because in MAGA culture, all the good little girls and boys dutifully hate Taylor Swift, like it says in the Bible.
And every now and then, one of them snaps and decapitates their father. Just like in that Bible story, where that one apostle, recognizing his dad as an agent of th’Deep State, murders him, and displays his severed head on the internet, pleasing the Lord.
Yes, it’s a holy culture war they’re a-wagin’, and not at all a fit pitched by aging incels. And in a culture war, who needs pop icons or championship athletes when you’ve got dusty spitebuckets like Ted Nugent and Jon Voight?
Like any out-of-work-actor, Voight seized the tiny spotlight he’d tumbled backwards into to deliver a new audition monologue, about Saint Dotard the Unjustly Maligned, who was “destroyed as Jesus.”
AS JESUS.
[…] What an embarrassing fucking cult. […]
Incidentally, let me congratulate Real America, on that $50 million y’all dropped on that rapist’s legal bills. Seems to me a billionaire rapist could pay his own legal bills, but I know the rube tithe is sacred in your culture. Your super cool culture where everyone gathers on Sunday to yell at the singer and her boyfriend.
Fifty million dollars.
Fifty million dollars to pay Alina Habba to lose 83.3 million more.
How is there no buyer’s remorse? Ever?
[…] Fifty million bucks to pay shameless idiots to stall, while RNC fundraising craters. Perhaps that death cult wasn’t such a clever investment after all.
We’re starting to piece together the falling Turd Reich’s office culture, fueled, apparently, by the candy store Dr. Ronny Jackson ran out of the Lincoln Sitting Room, where even the Diet Coke Steward was rapey. [Reference to Walt Nauta, see comment 195]
[…] Honestly, given the culture of rapist-worship, it’s surprising more of them don’t decapitate their parents.
A rare overseas stop on the Never Ending Donald Trump Legally Faceplants Tour, because I guess he wanted to hear what it sounds like to get laughed out of court with a British accent. [see comments 138 and 204]
Taylor Swift should do a song about the Steele dossier. […]
I suppose we should check in on Congress, aka MyPillow Presents Mike Johnson’s Tales From the Border. They want spikes n’ alligators now, because of course emotionally stunted people propose cartoon solutions.
Especially when the point is not to solve, but rather to highlight, exaggerate, and whenever possible, exacerbate the problem. The Oklahoma GOP censured their own Senator for working to solve the problem. [see comments 52 and 62]
Can’t solve the problem, y’see, because that’d make it harder to reinstall the rapist in the White House. “Why, we couldn’t possibly help our constituents!” sputtered Chuck Grassley, “They might vote for Joe Biden! Instead of the rapist I work for, the one who tried to overturn the last presidential election!” Looks like a really rewarding life, Charles. Dignified.
Anyway, yeah, it’s the Impeach Mayorkas Show, which offers the core audience a sufficiently foreign-sounding villain. Consumers with edgier tastes may prefer the Pinochet helicopter fantasies of U.S. Congressman Mike Collins, or the unapologetically hateful ramblings of Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, featuring talking points lifted from the El Paso shooter’s manifesto.
Politico tells us Kevin McCarthy is now devoted, body and soul, to revenging himself upon his enemies within the caucus that brought his political career to such a hilariously just end. As something of a connoisseur of circular firing squads, I’m really looking forward to this one.
Like, we get the end of Nancy Mace’s congressional career, or we get to watch one of ascendant American fascism’s shittiest enablers fade into irrelevance before our eyes. Can I see it both ways before I make up my mind? Is there a version that winds up in herky-jerky, suburban dad fisticuffs on Matt Gaetz’s lawn?
Charlie Kirk is a Central Park Five truther now. Or he was for a minute, until he returned his lawyer’s texts. Either way, he’s certainly committed to TPUSA’s Alt Right rebrand, “now with double the racism!” (Wow, and there was a TON of racism in the old version!)
Seems One America “News” Network may have engaged in illegal activities while spreading that Big Lie that caused all the hullabaloo down at the Capitol. A rare stumble for the notoriously ethical right-wing propaganda industry.
Poor Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t seem to get her censure motions to the floor fast enough to keep ahead of the debunking of the disinformation justifying them […]
Indiana state Representative Jim Lucas flashed a gun at some high school kids during the impromptu debate he lost. So, y’know…the MAGA bench is deep.
Meanwhile, even Larry Kudlow has succumbed to the smooth, sensual rhythms of…Brandonomics. And who can blame him? Team Biden keeps grinding out these even-sexxier-than-expected jobs reports […]
We’re told that behind closed doors, Joe Biden refers to his once and future vanquished foe using appropriately profane language. “Sick fuck,” “fucking asshole,” “turd-gargling taintmaggot,” that sort of thing. Nothing the fact-checkers wouldn’t bless.
[…] You stay safe out there. Don’t decapitate your parents!
French farmers’ unions on Thursday called a halt to protests in which they’ve blocked traffic with their tractors and dumped manure and rotting produce in front of government buildings to make their point. The message: They can no longer earn a living due to cheap imports, a lack of subsidies, and increased production costs.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced a series of concessions, including an agreement not to import agricultural products that use pesticides banned in the EU as well as new financial subsidies and tax breaks. The new policies have — for now — appeased France’s two largest agricultural unions, the Young Farmers and the FNSEA (the French acronym for the National Federation of Farmers’ Unions).
[…] France’s farmers seem to have won a victory, but agriculture workers in Germany, Belgium, and other European countries have taken their frustration to the European Union headquarters in Brussels, where the European Commission held a summit Thursday. […]
French farmers’ concerns are somewhat specific to their own agricultural and political tradition, and they reflect a wide range of interests. Some farmers, like a small, un-unionized group in Toulouse credited with starting the highway blockades, claimed their victory last week when the government announced a slate of reforms, including easing regulations around building water reservoirs, compensating farmers for crops lost due to disease, and backpedaling on a proposed diesel fuel price hike.
But other groups, including the FNSEA, the Young Farmers, and the Confédération Paysanne, a leftist union that represents small and rural farmers, weren’t satisfied and vowed to continue their actions through this week, progressing from areas around the country toward Paris. Meanwhile, Belgian farmers moved on Brussels to express their dissatisfaction with EU policies, including a major trade deal with Mercosur, the Latin American economic bloc, and cheap imports from Ukraine. French farmers have concerns about the deal as well.
[…] they are unlikely to have a major effect on European Parliament elections this summer.
[…] There are two major — and interconnected — overarching concerns in France.
The first is income. French farmers, especially smaller and independent farmers, say they aren’t making enough and that their livelihoods will vanish in the near future. Suicide has plagued the agricultural industry in recent years as the sector has shrunk and farmers find themselves unable to earn a living. But French agriculture — wine and cheese, of course, as well as livestock and produce — is a distinct part of French cultural heritage, and France is the EU’s largest agricultural producer.
During Macron’s tenure, tougher environmental standards both in the EU and in France have required French farmers to invest in new production methods. But because of global inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers are searching for cheaper products. Enter competition from outside the EU, forcing French farmers to sell their products for little profit — or none at all.
Those concerns speak directly to the second problem, which many farmers see as exacerbating the first: competition and free trade agreements.
The EU has a pending trade agreement with Mercosur, the economic bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, that would reduce tariffs on imports from the bloc — especially agricultural products. […]
The farmers argue this trade agreement [with Mercosur] and others the EU has with Chile, New Zealand, Kenya, and Ukraine — nations that don’t have the same strict agricultural production standards as the EU — increase unfair competition due to low prices.
[…] “The FNSEA is the union of the big farmers in France, so they don’t defend the interests of the majority of the medium-scale and small-scale farmers in France,” Morgan Ody, a farmer member of Confédération Paysanne and coordinator for the international farmers’ movement La Via Campesina International, told the BBC’s World Business Report. “They defend the interests of the people who want to export … so they are not asking for fair prices, they are not asking for a redistribution of the payments linked to the [Common Agricultural Policy], they are just defending their interests, which are the interests of very wealthy men.”
France is dealing with a multifaceted dilemma […]
[…] Though farmers make up only around 3 percent of the labor force, January’s protests — and Macron’s responses to the agricultural sector throughout his years in power — indicate the power of France’s agricultural sector […] But it’s not going to be the main driver of change within the European Parliament this summer — that’s going to be immigration policy […]
Still, the French protests, and the similar actions by Belgian and German protesters, have been enough to put agricultural issues on the EU summit’s agenda […]
Hey, all! Have you been reading the New York Times editorial page? Because I got to tell you this latest from Pamela Paul on Friday is LOLOBARF. […]
Now I know you all remember Pamela Paul as the word-wizard who ‘splained to us all that we were using the word “queer” wrong and had to shut our gay and lesbian mouths. She added to that with other delights, like how JK Rowling is the new Salman Rushdie and how a core plank of the Left’s support of trans people is that women don’t count. She is now back with a ZOMG 4,500 word term paper on how trans health care for adolescents is wrong and we have to shut our gender-affirming mouths. Of course me calling somebody overly wordy is like the pot calling the kettle, “Hey, you fucking pot!” But the point isn’t the prolix.
Paul’s is a new and different take about how trans people are mentally ill and don’t know ourselves enough to be trusted with our own health care decisions, and also how doctors want nothing more than to transify the gays and the lesbians and the traumatized, probably for the big SorosBux! Let’s look!
On second thought, it is a very silly piece. Let’s not go there.
Wait, what? You’re expecting more insight than 200 words of, “Well that was laughably wrong and horribly emetic”? FINE. We shall go there.
The first thing to know about this piece is that Julia Serano predicted it last year. When summarizing why our entire public conversation about trans children and health care is devastatingly misguided, she noted that the problem for the “Wait, let’s stop and have a conversation before we do anything serious!” crowd is that all the science is on the side of providing care. So what can you really expect the anti-health care crowd to say? Serano had the answer:
[A]nti-trans activists will say, “But what about ‘shifting sex ratios,’ or ‘ROGD/social contagion,’ or ‘detransition,’ or ’80% desistance,’ or ‘gay conversion/lesbian extinction,’ or ‘autogynephilia,’ or ‘grooming,’ and so on.” Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
And I am here to say that I spent three hours reading this piece and checking its sources and I can tell you, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And ROFL Yupadoodledoo!” I will add that she missed a large helping of “Cancel culture!” with a side order of “Both sides!” but Serano was speaking generally and perhaps that’s a specialty of the New York Times. Also, too, ROGD (“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”) is not a thing, so you will not see it again in this piece. Not even in quotes. I am replacing it with “tCH” or “the Cooties Hypothesis” because, yeah, that’s the intellectual sophistication of this thing. I would replace autogynephilia with the same thing except we are just not going to talk about that one again.
[…] Trust me when I say that Serano’s piece above thoroughly debunked Paul’s piece eight months before it was written. If you need your debunking to follow linear time for some reason, you could also go to secret Wonkette girlcrush Erin Reed of Erin In The Morning who did all the journalisms on Paul, and then proceeded to create a list of five other great sources kicking Paul’s Gish Gallop around the internets. […]
Her first source, used to support [the Cooties Hypothesis] is an article by Lisa Littman that has been retracted.
Retracted? That sounds bad. Is it bad when your science is “retracted”?1
[U]nable to validate the theory, she collaborated with Leor Sapir, who lacks a background in transgender mental health care and works at the anti-trans Manhattan Institute, to broaden the definition of “Rapid” so that even a period of two to four years could be considered rapid.
Okay, but this is some kind of study, presumably peer reviewed. Shouldn’t we trust that?
She then published it in a journal run by Ken Zucker, an anti-trans “expert” whose clinic was closed following accusations of conversion therapy.
Oh, that Canadian guy who accused everyone else of deciding in advance what genders their patients were instead of listening to the actual kids and their problems? That one who was then found to assume that he knew what genders his patients were without listening to the actual kids […] and got shut down for “first, do the thing we know causes harm”? That guy? Well.
There are many more debunks, and honestly fisking this NYT monstrosity might actually be good fun, but I am not a doctor. I am a trans woman who has been out for decades now who has seen all this shit before and so I will give you what you did not know you needed. The Context.
“The hell you say?” you say. “How can there be context to this when trans kids were just invented in 2018 and no one knows what the hell to do with them yet?”
Good question. Paul would be proud of you.
The context is that Paul is the latest in a long, long list of people who ignore that every improvement in trans health care was fought for by trans people ourselves. Every time we rose up and demanded something that made our lives better, there were people telling us to sit down, shut up, and wait on the science. And every time they did the science, it turned out that what trans people were asking for actually benefited trans folks. Paul herself cites plenty of sources that find current care benefits quality of life in many ways. However, she cites these sources only to quote them saying, “But here’s a question we haven’t answered yet.” To her mind, the existence of unanswered questions is a reason to do nothing, or worse, actively talk trans people out of seeking care. This is neither justified, nor wise, nor harmless.
[snipped many examples]
[…] All the bullshit about doctors telling adolescents that they are trans and should transition is entirely the opposite of what gender affirmation care is about.
And guess what? This gender affirmation model that has been shown by the best research to be healthier for trans people than every past strategy that has been tried […]
is she’s being white Elvis taking credit for rock and roll. I mean, sure, it’s insulting to my intelligence to cite the same researcher three times and call that “several” people opposed to the consensus, but the thing that really gets my gender in a blender is having to read 4,500 words of some cis woman wanting credit for heroically defending trans people against the dictatorial treatment approach that trans people resisted, subverted, and fought against for fifty years before thoroughly defeating it over twenty years ago.
Crip Dyke writes Pervert Justice.
1 I regret to inform you that the first piece was actually retracted as Reed claimed, but was written by two other authors, not Littman. Littman has her own problematic publishing history, but she wasn’t responsible for this paper.
The nation’s largest rail operators — including Norfolk Southern, the freight railroad behind the 2023 accident — have sought to weaken proposed regulations that might prevent chemical spills and other incidents
[…] Norfolk Southern […] has joined some of the nation’s leading freight railroads in a bid to weaken newly proposed safety legislation, threatening to leave millions of Americans nationwide at risk of deadly derailments and dangerous chemical spills.
The target of the lobbying is a bipartisan proposal from Ohio’s two senators: Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, a Republican. Unveiled last spring as a direct response to the accident in East Palestine, the Railway Safety Act aims to toughen rail inspections, improve derailment-detection technology and ensure greater safeguards for hazardous materials.
Publicly, Norfolk Southern and its peers have pledged to work with lawmakers on the bill. But the companies have still labored to severely weaken or eliminate some of its core provisions, according to 15 lawmakers, congressional aides, union officials and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
“They will often say the right things, but then through their actions, and especially through their lobbying, move in a different direction,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a recent interview.
Over the past year, the nation’s five largest rail operators together spent roughly $17 million to lobby lawmakers, while donating generously to key members of Congress who oversee transportation issues, according to federal records. Some of the chief beneficiaries of industry cash were Republicans, who initially attacked the Biden administration over its handling of the East Palestine derailment before opposing or slowing down safety legislation.
In doing so, rail industry lobbyists also fought the Biden administration on even the most basic upgrades, from efforts to ensure that engineers have special breathing equipment onboard to new rules that would require miles-long trains to be staffed with more than one person. The staunch opposition has bogged down some federal action while leaving Congress unable to hold a single vote on rail safety legislation in the House or Senate. […]
the rail association pitched Congress on a plan for rail operators to continue regulating themselves. […]
The industry’s efforts to engage Republicans stretch back decades, evident in work by leading rail operators to enlist a network of conservative advocacy groups to advance their views […]
Sheesh. Same old fucking story. Anti-regulation lobbying in order to set themselves up to reap greater profits, all the while endangering the public.
More at the link.
tomhsays
Election Law Blog
Federal District Court Rejects Argument that North Dakota’s Acceptance of Ballots Postmarked by Election Day but Arriving After Election Day Violates Federal Law
Rick Hasen / February 2, 2024, 11:55 am
So surprise on the result. This was decided on standing grounds (full text).
I expect a similar loss for the RNC’s case in Mississippi [AP link]
Sales of Digital World Acquisition stock triggered a widespread federal probe that involved a confidential informant, a secret airport phone scan and an elite anti-money-laundering squad. Three people were indicted, but the investigation continues.
In October 2021, former president Donald Trump announced that his media company, the owner of the platform Truth Social, had sealed an incredible deal: a merger with a “special purpose acquisition company” that would deliver to his firm $300 million toward his promise of giving “a voice to all.”
By then, however, the insider trading by investors in the SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, had already begun, according to documents filed recently in the criminal case against three Digital World investors who’ve been charged with securities fraud in New York federal court.
Digital World’s chief executive, Patrick Orlando, a Miami financier Trump had hosted at his golf clubs, had been telling investors privately for months that he’d been talking with Trump about the deal, the filings assert — a violation of federal securities law, the Securities and Exchange Commission would say later, given his company’s pledge in regulatory filings that its leaders had held no talks with any merger targets.
One investor, the Miami Beach businessman Anton Postolnikov, had amassed a huge stake in Digital World. Postolnikov, who was born in Russia and is the nephew of a longtime Russian government official, sold most of his stake just days after Trump’s announcement sent the stock soaring, according to an FBI agent’s search warrant affidavit. His profit: $22 million.
Another, a Ukraine-born nightclub manager turned private equity investor named Michael Shvartsman, told his business partners and a neighbor about the moneymaking opportunity, according to the affidavit — before securing $18 million in profits for himself.
Those profits caught the attention of federal officials who launched a sprawling investigation into Digital World’s investors […] Trump ended up committed to a business arrangement that federal agents now allege was undermined from its inception by financial fraud.
[…] Trump Media has been blocked from accessing the $300 million it expected to receive through the merger — money that it could use to build out Truth Social, Trump’s main online megaphone, ahead of the November election.
Rejected by banks and lenders over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his long history of bankruptcies and business failures, Trump had approved the merger of his company with a special purpose acquisition company as a way to raise money in the months after he lost the White House. Often called “blank check” firms, SPACs promise access to public stock investors with fewer financial disclosures than a traditional corporate listing requires.
Trump allies have claimed that the SEC’s delay in approving the merger proves he’s being persecuted by the Biden administration. [Of course they are making that claim, but it is not true.] But the cache of investigative documents […] shows the investigation went far beyond the SEC.
The documents detail the involvement of agents and investigators from the FBI, the SEC and Homeland Security Investigations, which is the division of the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to rooting out cross-border criminal activity and which includes one of the government’s most elite anti-money-laundering teams. The documents suggest the investigation is ongoing.
[…] Shvartsman, his brother Gerald, and Bruce Garelick, the investment chief of Shvartsman’s private-equity firm Rocket One Capital, have been charged with conspiracy and securities fraud in the case.
[…] In December 2021, more than $16 million had been moved from a Rocket One brokerage account into two OptimumBank accounts in Shvartsman’s name, the indictment said. From there, the money was shuttled into a “wash account” that Shvartsman’s company Transact First had used to transfer millions of dollars in a single day, an HSI agent said in an affidavit for a bank-account-seizure warrant later signed by a judge.
[…] During one March 2023 meeting inside a Rocket One office north of Miami, Shvartsman signed documents to move his assets into an offshore trust and then warned he would “have to kill” the informant if the man tampered with Shvartsman’s fortune, according to the government’s transcript of the meeting.
When the informant told another man in the room, “That’s the second time he said he’s going to kill me,” Shvartsman responded, “I don’t f— around,” the transcript states.
But the conversations also showed the men getting to know each other. During the March meeting, Shvartsman said the main reason he wanted to move his assets was “the ordeal with ‘Trump’” and his “desire to not have the funds acquired from that investment taken from him […]”
[…] in June 2023, four FBI agents, two HSI agents and officers from the local police showed up at Shvartsman’s home in the Miami suburb of Sunny Isles Beach with a warrant for his arrest. Two other arrest teams nabbed his brother and Garelick at their homes in nearby Aventura and Fort Lauderdale […]
Shvartsman’s talks with the informant didn’t stop. The informant assured him that his assets were in the process of moving from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom and then to Belize, according to the transcript — “the full Singapore with a double dip, as we call it, with having the U.K. thrown in there, just to give it that added cleanliness and polishing off,” he said.
[…] In November, a magistrate judge signed a warrant authorizing the seizure of Shvartsman’s bank account. A federal agent said the account contained roughly $15 million, though bank records cited in the seizure-warrant affidavit said it had reached as high as $44 million the month before.
More at the link.
Sounds like Trump was involved with criminals who were smarter than your average trumpian associate.
A 61-year-old nurse from North Carolina was arrested Thursday in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol after she dropped a key piece of evidence at the scene, an FBI agent said in a criminal complaint.
Authorities linked Sandra Lee Hodges to the insurrection after U.S. Capitol Police found her hotel room key card while cleaning up the Capitol grounds three days after the attack, according to the complaint unsealed Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C…
I have made the decision, after 52 years as a Republican, to disassociate myself with the Republican Party. The Republican Party today is not the party of Lincoln, Reagan or McCain. They do not adhere to the fundamental principles of being a Republican, such as limited government, fiscal responsibility, a strong defense (including border security), and the reduction of excessive regulation. They are now simply followers of a corrupt man who cares only about himself and has no interest in the safety and security of the United States…
Steven C. Agee, Ph.D., is dean emeritus and professor of economics at the Meinders School of Business, Oklahoma City University.
President Joe Biden’s reelection bid won’t be won by million-dollar ad buys or social media sound bites, says U.S. Representative James Clyburn, the man who was key to Biden’s 2020 win.
Republican candidate Donald Trump’s supporters have built a “MAGA wall” online of memes and social media noise that is overwhelming news about Biden’s economic and policy wins, making it impossible to get Democrats’ message across, Clyburn said in a recent interview in his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina…
But the “MAGA wall” reflects all that noise so it only deafens those inside the bubble. Dark Brandon knows how the game works.
A new aid package from Estonia has arrived in Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank systems, machine guns, rounds for small arms, various ground and water vehicles, and diving equipment.
Source: European Pravda, citing the Estonian Defence Ministry on 3 February…
A team of scientists and engineers have landed in Antarctica to test a drone that will help experts forecast the impacts of climate change.
The autonomous plane will map areas of the continent that have been out of bounds to researchers…
During a practice run in strong winds with rain lashing the airfield, engineer Rebecca Toomey explained that the drone can fly to remote areas without concerns for pilots’ safety.
It can carry 100kg of cargo up to 1,000km. Instruments including radar and cameras are loaded in the back of the drone and on its wings. Its route is programmed in and an engineer monitors the flight from a computer…
It also uses much less fuel than traditional planes – 10 barrels compared to 200 on one research flight – reducing the environmental impact of scientific research on the planet…
many concerns about Starlink […] Now there’s a new reason to worry. […] disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere […] will create a massive layer of conducting, electrically charged particles around our planet.
[…]
If you gathered up every charged particle in Earth’s Van Allen Belts, their combined mass would be only 0.00018 kg. Other components of the magnetosphere such as the ring current and plasmasphere are even less massive. […] a single deorbited Starlink satellite is 7 million times more massive than the Van Allen Belts. An entire megaconstellation is billions of times more massive.
[…]
There is already evidence of this process in action.
[…]
“Suppose you put a conductive shell (satellite debris) around a spherical magnet (Earth). Outside the shell, the magnetic field goes to zero due to shielding effects. […] we might actually be doing this to our planet. […] We absolutely […] expect some kind of impact. Multidisciplinary studies of this pollution are urgently needed.”
Meteors are mostly silicates, not metals. Satellites are mostly aluminum. That’s going to do very different things to the atmosphere/magentosphere than natural meteorites.
Carly Sagan (Plasma physicist, Author of research in #261)
We need to think of the magnetosphere as a part of our Earth environment—bc it keeps us alive! […] if the space industry continues as-is, it just might be putting us on track to have to wear spacesuits regularly—on Earth.
[…] there are LOTS of possible huge environmental consequences to the absolutely stupendous quantity of metal we’re now sending into orbit, and *we don’t actually know what the consequences will be*
Really. No one knows. No one is studying this. Satellite companies should be funding study of environmental consequences, but they’re not. […]
Vale Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue. Huge Respect. Rest in Power. :
Australia has lost one of its most celebrated Indigenous leaders, Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG.
The Yankunytjatjara woman and former Australian of the Year who fought endlessly for the rights of her people has died aged 91 surrounded by family.
The ABC has been given permission to name Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue and show her image.
Her family announced her death in a statement, saying she died peacefully on Kaurna Country in Adelaide.
“Our Aunty and Nana was the Matriarch of our family, whom we have loved and looked up to our entire lives,” the statement read.
“We adored and admired her when we were young and have grown up full of never-ending pride as she became one of the most respected and influential Aboriginal leaders this country has ever known.
The family said her legacy would continue through the work of the Lowitja O’Donoghue Foundation, which was established on her 90th birthday.
“Aunty Lowitja dedicated her entire lifetime of work to the rights, health, and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” they said.
“We thank and honour her for all that she has done — for all the pathways she created, for all the doors she opened, for all the issues she tackled head-on, for all the tables she sat at and for all the arguments she fought and won.”
A study published Friday in the journal Science Advances said climate change is increasing the frequency of both hazards, particularly in California. The authors found that the combined harm of extreme heat and inhalation of wildfire smoke increased hospitalizations and disproportionately impacted low-income communities and Latino, Black, Asian and other racially marginalized residents.
Then there”s another reason to tackle light polution and a good conclusion here :
.. centuries of witnessing what happens have produced little certainty about why it happens. How does a simple light change fast, precise navigators into helpless, flittering captives? We are researchers examining flight, vision and evolution, and we have used high-speed tracking techniques in research published in Nature Communications to provide an answer.
Plus inlight of our new understadning of neptiuné real colour we have
This recent paper summarizes observations from that program, incorporating data from additional observations to address why some planets appear cloudy while others are clear. “The goal is to explore the physical explanations behind the distinct appearances of these planets,” Brande said.
As President Joe Biden and that other guy fight for union votes and endorsements in the run-up to the November election—Biden by touting his historically robust labor record and Donald Trump by screaming at the UAW president for not liking him—a particularly telling detail has emerged in the fine print of Trump’s latest FEC filings.
We’ve long known that Trump faked a union rally the day after Biden walked the picket line with striking autoworkers last September. What we didn’t know until now is that Trump spent $20,000 for that fakery […]
As Michigan politics reporter Jonathan Oosting discovered, recent financial disclosures show that the Trump campaign paid Drake Enterprises 20-large for use of its facility last fall […]
As for Trump’s September invite-only “union” “rally” at a nonunion auto parts plant? At the time, Fain dubbed it a “pathetic irony.”
Here’s a reminder of how that event played out, courtesy of The Detroit News:
About 400 to 500 Trump supporters were inside a Drake Enterprises facility for the speech. Drake Enterprises employs about 150 people, and the UAW doesn’t represent its workforce. It wasn’t clear how many auto workers were in the crowd for the speech, which was targeted at them.
One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said “union members for Trump,” acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event. Another person with a sign that read “auto workers for Trump” said he wasn’t an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn’t provide their names.
[…] In the same week that Biden became the first sitting president ever to walk a picket line, Trump was up to his phony face tan in performative piffle.
[…] Chris Silvera, a Teamsters Local 808 leader in New York City, was just as blunt, telling The Washington Post, “There is nothing in Trump’s behavior that has indicated to anyone that he would be supportive of the labor movement. Let me put it this way, it’s as if I would travel to Rome to convince the Pope he should become a Muslim.” […]
Better even than expected: Joe Biden got almost 97% of the votes in the North Carolina Democratic primary.
President Joe Biden won an early, decisive victory in South Carolina’s primary, the first official contest in the Democratic presidential race.
NBC News projects that Biden will also receive all 55 of the state’s delegates. Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, the only other major Democratic presidential candidates, did not get 15% of the vote statewide or in any congressional district. […]
A South Dakota tribe has banned Republican Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also said cartels are infiltrating the state’s reservations.
“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation…
Saturday Night Live instantly started receiving backlash after Nikki Haley made a surprise appearance during the Feb. 3 show.
During a town hall sketch for the cold open, the Republican presidential candidate made a cameo to ask James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump some questions of her own…
To address the problem, many modern systems have been upgraded to measure Unix time with signed 64-bit integers instead, which will take 292 billion years to overflow—approximately 21 times the estimated age of the universe… – Reginald Selkirk@233 quoting wikipedia
New Mexico Democrats who control the Legislature want to make it a crime to pose as a fake presidential elector in one of the few states where Republicans signed certificates in 2020 falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner.
Legislators advanced a bill Friday on a party-line committee vote that would make it a felony starting in the 2024 presidential election to submit a fake elector certificate “knowingly or recklessly.” The Legislature’s Republican minority would need Democratic support to vote down the legislation, which carries criminal penalties like those being considered in a handful of other states…
“knowingly or recklessly” – sounds like it could be a challenge to prove in court.
One of Arizona’s famed fake electors was hoping the Republican Party would bail him out of jail, if it comes to that.
Here was the party’s reply (in my words, not theirs): Pound sand, Tyler.
Turning Point Action’s Tyler Bowyer asked the Republican National Committee to formally acknowledge that the fake elector plan was schemed up by Republican leadership with Donald Trump’s approval, and to “immediately indemnify” all those who participated in what he calls the “contingent elector plan.”
“With all of the problems ahead, we need to send a clear signal that the RNC will defend those who serve as electors against Democrat radicals trying to criminalize civic engagement and process,” Bowyer said, in a social media post.
“Civic engagement?” That’s what we’re calling it now, when people sign legal documents and send them to Congress, avowing that they were “duly elected” to cast Arizona’s electoral votes for the guy who didn’t win?
Instead, the RNC on Friday promised to “vocally” support those who “lawfully” served as Trump electors in states Trump won.
Translation: Not Tyler Bowyer and his fellow 10 electors who participated in a scheme to steal Arizona’s vote…
The United States and the United Kingdom launched airstrikes Saturday targeting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in response to the group’s continued attacks in the Red Sea, the countries confirmed in a joint statement.
The U.S. and U.K. struck 36 Houthi targets in 13 locations in Yemen using missiles launched from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, they said in the statement.
More than two dozen aircraft were also launched from the ship, a U.S. official said, some carrying 2,000-pound bombs, sidewinder air-to-air missiles and other precision-guided missiles.
It is not immediately clear if anyone was killed or wounded in the strikes.
The strikes Saturday “targeted sites associated with the Houthis’ deeply buried weapons storage facilities, missile systems and launchers, air defense systems, and radars,” the joint statement said.
The statement added that the “precision strikes” were meant to “disrupt and degrade the capabilities” the Houthis have used to attack ships in the Red Sea, threatening global trade and innocent sailors operating the ships.
[…] The U.K. Ministry of Defense identified the locations and targets of three strikes in a statement released Saturday.
The first was at As Salif, due west of Sanaa on the Red Sea coast, the ministry said. It targeted a ground control station inside a defensive position that was said to be used to control Houthi drones that are launched further inland and carry out attacks over the sea against international shipping vessels.
Another drone ground control station was the site of the second target at Al Munirah, near the first, according to the ministry.
A “significant number of targets” were also attacked at Bani, the ministry statement said. Buildings at this location had been confirmed as involved in Houthi drone and missile operations. The ministry added that “an initial group of facilities” at this site were struck by the Royal Air Force on Jan. 11.
[…] “We remain committed to protecting freedom of navigation and international commerce and holding the Houthis accountable for their illegal and unjustifiable attacks on commercial shipping and naval vessels,” the statement said. “Our aim remains to de-escalate tensions and restore stability in the Red Sea but let us reiterate our warning to Houthi leadership: we will not hesitate to continue to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most critical waterways in the face of continued threats.”
Reginald @279, one of the problems with Trump’s “it was just a joke” defense is that he repeated the same promise to be a dictator for a day on multiple media outlets … some of them on camera.
In other news, this is a followup to comment 280:
ABOARD THE USS EISENHOWER, the Red Sea — One by one, more than two dozen aircraft—Navy F/A-18 fighter jets, E/A18 Growler radar jammers, E2 Hawkeye reconnaissance planes as well helicopters and tankers—roared off the deck of this aircraft carrier Saturday night to conduct joint U.S.-British attacks on Iranian-backed Houthis.
[…] Houthi militants based in Yemen have attacked roughly 30 cargo ships navigating the Red Sea since Nov. 19. An estimated 12% of global shipping passes through the strategic waterway daily.
[…] Last month, Maersk and other shipping giants announced pauses in their operations in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, moves that added time and money to the delivery of goods by ship. If the Houthi attacks continue, they could fuel consumer price increases in the U.S. as the 2024 election approaches.
Houthi leaders dismissed the U.S. and U.K. strikes on Saturday and vowed to continue their Red Sea attacks until Israel ends its military operations in Gaza.
“Our military operations against the Zionist entity will continue until the aggression against Gaza stops,” Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi political leader, said. “We will meet escalation with escalation, and victory comes only from God.”
[…] U.S. officials said that the strikes in Yemen conducted Saturday were separate from the reprisal airstrikes conducted by U.S. aircraft on Friday in Iraq and Syria after three U.S. troops were killed and dozens were injured on a U.S. outpost in Jordan.
Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh vowed that the U.S. would continue its effort to degrade Houthi forces and safeguard shipping in the Red Sea. “We are going to hold those groups accountable who are attacking our forces,” she said on MSNBC. “And of course, we are going to protect commercial shipping through that Red Sea area as well.”
Experts in the region have warned that it is unlikely American airstrikes will be able to destroy all of the ballistic missiles and drones that Iran has supplied to Houthi forces in Yemen. With multiple locations where arms can be hidden in Yemen, including in deep, underground storage areas, U.S. forces are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Houthis.
[…] the American jets returned safely to the Eisenhower on Saturday […]
[…] A combination of warm air from the Pacific, “strong onshore/upslope flow and cool air can produce thunderstorms and rainfall upwards of 1 inch per hour.
Damaging winds, brief tornadoes and waterspouts are also possible Sunday along coasts and valleys in southwest California, per the National Weather Service in Los Angeles.
Much of the state is expected to receive heavy rainfall, with around 3 to 6 inches possible in coasts and valleys and 6 to 12 inches likely for mountain ranges. […]
Mandatory evacuations were ordered for parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties in response to the weather event. […]
Damaging wind gusts up to 95 mph may also impact Northern and Southern California Sunday through Sunday night, leading to downed trees and power outages, according to the NWS.
[…] In the Bay Area, hurricane force wind gusts are possible.
“The waters from the Big Sur Coast to 60 nautical miles out have been upgraded to Hurricane Force Wind Warnings for winds […]
“Snow totals of several feet are forecast for the Sierra through Tuesday morning,” the NWS said. “Heavy snow rates of 2-3”/hour along with strong winds will lead to whiteout conditions and dangerous, near impossible travel conditions.”
[…] The system is expected to move northward and inland and bring “moderate to heavy snow for the regional mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, and Northern Rockies over the next couple of days,” according to the weather service.
[…] Haley, who appeared in the audience as a “concerned South Carolina voter,” asked a question of James Austin Johnson’s Trump, who was standing on the debate stage.
“My question is, why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?” she said.
Johnson as Trump — who described South Carolina as “one of the top two Carolinas” — acted like he saw a ghost.
“Oh, my God, it’s her,” he said. “It’s her — the woman who was in charge of security on Jan. 6,” Johnson’s Trump said. “It’s Nancy Pelosi.”
He echoed real-life remarks Trump made at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Jan. 19, where Trump appeared to mistake Haley for the Democratic congresswoman from California and former House speaker. […]
“Are you doing OK, Donald?” Haley said during the sketch. “You might need a mental competency test.”
Johnson’s Trump responded: “I did. I took the test. And I aced it, OK? Perfect score. They said I was 100% mental.”
He went on to suggest Haley wouldn’t make for a good president because she’s a woman. “Women are terrible with money,” he said.
“In fact, a woman I know recently asked me for $83.3 million,” he said, referring to last month’s jury decision that he must pay journalist E. Jean Carrol $83.3 million for defaming her.
Haley countered that he may be the one with money problems, given the sizable award. “You need to borrow some money?” she said.
Trump played word games with Haley’s name, then said, “I’m always very nice to you except when I’m implying you weren’t born in this country.”
[…] Haley asked if Trump won his former home state of New York. (He lost). Johnson’s Trump responded: “I won Staten Island and the parts of Long Island where there are fistfights.”
Haley later posted on X about the cameo: “[…] looking forward to the stream of unhinged tweets in the a.m.”
Tara Polansky and her husband were torn about where to enroll their daughter when they moved back to Columbus, Ohio, a year and a half ago. The couple, who work for a nonprofit organization and a foundation, respectively, were concerned about the quality of the city’s public schools and finally decided to send her to Columbus Jewish Day School. It was a long drive out to the suburbs every day, but they admired the school for its liberal-minded outlook.
So Polansky was startled when, in September, the school wrote to families telling them to apply for taxpayer-funded vouchers to cover part of the $18,000 tuition. In June, the Republican-controlled state government had expanded the state’s private-school voucher program to increase the value of the vouchers — to a maximum of $8,407 a year for high school students and $6,165 for those in lower grades — and, crucially, to make them available to all families.
[…] Demand for EdChoice vouchers has nearly doubled this year, at a cost to Ohio taxpayers of several hundred million additional dollars, the final tally of which won’t be known for months.
That surge has been propelled by private school leaders, who have an obvious interest: The more voucher money families receive, the less schools have to offer in financial aid. The voucher revenue also makes it easier to raise tuition.
“The Board has voted to require all families receiving financial assistance … to apply for the EdChoice Program. We also encourage all families paying full tuition to apply for this funding,” […]
Polansky bridled at the direction. She had long subscribed to the main argument against private school vouchers: that they draw resources away from public education. It was one thing for her family to have chosen a private school. But she did not want to be part of an effort that, as she saw it, would decrease funding for schools serving other Columbus children. Together with another parent, she wrote a letter objecting to the demand.
“For this public money to go to kids to get a religious education is incredibly wrong,” she told ProPublica. “I absolutely don’t want to pull money out of an underfunded school district.”
For decades, Republicans have pushed, with mixed success, for school voucher programs in the name of parental choice and encouraging free-market competition among schools. But in just the past couple of years, vouchers have expanded to become available to most or all children in 10 states: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.
The expansion has been spurred by growing Republican dominance in many state capitals, U.S. Supreme Court rulings loosening restrictions on taxpayer funding for religious schools, and parental frustration […] with public school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. […]
But much of the demand for the expanded voucher programs is in fact coming from families, many quite affluent, whose children were already attending private schools. [Welfare for the rich.]
[…]The surge in applications this school year has been so dramatic that it’s nearing the total enrollment for all private schools in the entire state of Ohio.
[…] At Holy Family School near Youngstown, the directive arrived a few days later, on Aug. 3. “As you are aware, ALL students attending Holy Family School will be eligible for the EdChoice Scholarship. We are requesting that all families register their child/ren for this scholarship as soon as possible,” wrote the school’s leadership. And then it added in bold: “It is imperative that you register for EdChoice for each of your students. We are waiting to send invoices until your EdChoice Scholarship has been awarded.”
In an interview at the school, Holy Family principal Laura Parise said the push to apply for EdChoice had succeeded. “One hundred percent of our students are on it,” she said. “We made it that way — we made our families fill out the form, and we’re going from there.”
[…] Since private-school vouchers launched in Ohio nearly three decades ago, there has been a debate over who their true beneficiaries are. Then-Gov. George Voinovich, a Republican who had been mayor of Cleveland, pushed for the creation of a voucher program in that city in 1995, selling it as an outlet for disadvantaged families seeking an alternative to the city’s troubled schools.
[…] By 2001, the share of Black students among voucher recipients in Cleveland was 53%, below the 71% ratio of Black students in public school.
The program was the first in the nation to provide public money for tuition at religious schools, and by 2000, virtually all Cleveland voucher recipients were using them at a religious private school (mostly Catholic) rather than secular ones. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected a challenge to the Cleveland vouchers; the court ruled that because the vouchers could be used for religious or nonreligious schools, they did not violate the constitutional prohibition against a state favoring religion. […]
[…] The EdChoice line item is folded within the state’s overall budget for K-12 education, which is roughly $13 billion, and the EdChoice line item is not capped […]
The program’s expansion in recent years has prompted another lawsuit, filed in 2022, this one from a coalition of 250 school districts. The suit argues that the vouchers worsen segregation, since private schools can choose their students (an analysis found that as of November, 90% of the new voucher recipients were white, far above the statewide share of white students, which is about two-thirds); that they violate the state Constitution’s bars against religious control of public school funds (the vast majority of EdChoice funds go to Christian schools); and that the vouchers undermine the Ohio Constitution’s promise of an adequate education for all by leaching money from public schools. […]
Aaron Churchill, the research director at the Ohio branch of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education-reform think tank, said that even if more vouchers are going to families already enrolled in private school, those vouchers are still supporting school choice. […]
Polansky, the Columbus Jewish Day School mother, found an ally in Micah Berman, a fellow parent of a third grader. “One of the reasons we went to this school is because it does have a strong emphasis on teaching students about caring for the broader community and in particular caring for those that have more needs,” he said. “And the idea that you would be putting some pressure on families to accept these vouchers that in effect take money out of school districts that need it strikes me as problematic and in conflict with that.”
[…] Soon after they sent the letter, school leaders lifted the requirement that families on financial aid apply for the vouchers. But Polansky worried that the order had already had its desired effect in spurring applications. “Even though it was rescinded, my sense is that a lot of the damage was already done,” she said.
[…] Visits to both CJDS and St. Brendan to ask other parents what they made of the voucher debate, in the parking lot during school drop-off and pickup, were unsuccessful: At both schools, administrators (and a heavily armed guard at CJDS) came outside to tell this reporter to vacate the premises. Regardless of how much public funding the schools receive, they are, after all, private.
More than a year after the Florida Supreme Court granted Gov. Ron DeSantis’ request to empanel a statewide grand jury to investigate “criminal or wrongful activity” related to COVID-19 vaccines, the body released its first report and said its probe is “nowhere near complete.”
Their 33-page report released late Friday said “lockdowns were not a good trade” and that “we have never had sound evidence of (masks’) effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” among other conclusions.
“In a way, this Grand Jury has allowed us to do something that most Americans simply do not have the time, access, or wherewithal to do: Follow the science,” the report said.
Conclusions in the report on masks contradict recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….
The report discussed whether lockdowns, mask mandates and social-distancing guidelines “had a significant impact on the overall risk” of COVID-19.
Among the body’s conclusions:… [bunch of nonsense and falsehoods]
…
Kenneth Goodman, founder and director of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, said the report raises questions about which professionals the grand jury spoke with and how those professionals were vetted.
“Using the language of science to promote mysticism is particularly egregious,” Goodman said.
In an update on the CDC’s website on Thursday, the agency said their new data shows updated COVID-19 vaccines were effective and advises that everyone ages 6 months and older should get the updated 2023–24 COVID-19 vaccines.
Since Jan. 1, 2020, more than 82,000 Floridians have died from COVID-19, according to the most current CDC data. Just under 900 people have died from the virus in the past three months.
There are 17.8 million people in Florida who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, CDC data shows, about 83% of the state’s population. About 70% completed the first series of vaccines. Only about 12% of the state’s population has received an updated booster dose.
DeSantis and State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo routinely have voiced skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines. Ladapo in September advised people under the age of 65 against getting the new booster when it was approved.
Last month, Ladapo called for a halt in using the vaccines, discussing in a statement a refuted theory that they may be “delivering contaminant DNA into human cells.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in a letter to Ladapo last December refuted his concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
“The challenge we continue to face is the ongoing proliferation of misinformation and disinformation about these vaccines which results in vaccine hesitancy that lowers vaccine uptake,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research for the FDA, wrote to Ladapo. “Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19.”
A University of South Florida/Florida Atlantic University public survey last August showed that notable numbers of Floridians incorrectly believe that vaccines can cause DNA alterations or believe a conspiracy theory that they contain microchips. Republicans were more likely than Democrats and independents to believe vaccine misinformation, the survey found.
DeSantis has time and again fought against the federal mandates that he and his voter-base viewed as governmental overreach while portraying Florida’s policies as “pro-freedom.”
…
The Supreme Court’s order stated the grand jury can investigate “pharmaceutical manufacturers (and their executive officers) and other medical associations or organizations” involved in almost any way with the use of “vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.”
The order also said the grand jury could also look into “other criminal activity or wrongdoing that the statewide grand jury uncovers during the course of the investigation” or anything that’s part of an “organized criminal conspiracy.”
The report did not include any recommendations, but the grand jury could make some in future reports.
“The Statewide Grand Jury only has the power to recommend solutions; we cannot enact them. It will be up to state legislators, federal lawmakers or even the people themselves to ensure that our efforts are not wasted,” the report said. “Moreover, we concur that if violations of Florida criminal law occurred with respect to COVID-19 vaccines, they must be addressed by the appropriate authorities.”
The grand jury remains in session and Cox is scheduling future witnesses to appear, the report said. It was signed by Christopher C. Sabella, chief judge for the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit.
A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.
Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.
Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.
They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.
The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned – except as punishment for a crime.
That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.
[…] Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
[…] While most critics don’t believe all jobs should be eliminated, they say incarcerated people should be paid fairly, treated humanely and that all work should be voluntary. Some note that even when people get specialized training, like firefighting, their criminal records can make it almost impossible to get hired on the outside.
“They are largely uncompensated, they are being forced to work, and it’s unsafe. They also aren’t learning skills that will help them when they are released,” said law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert on prison labor at Loyola University New Orleans. “It raises the question of why we are still forcing people to work in the fields.”
[…] Angola is imposing in its sheer scale. The so-called “Alcatraz of the South” is tucked far away, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps in a bend of the Mississippi River. It spans 18,000 acres – an area bigger than the island of Manhattan – and has its own ZIP code.
The former 19th-century antebellum plantation once was owned by one of the largest slave traders in the U.S. Today, it houses some 3,800 men behind its razor-wire walls, about 65 percent of them Black. Within days of arrival, they typically head to the fields, sometimes using hoes and shovels or picking crops by hand. They initially work for free, but then can earn between 2 cents and 40 cents an hour.
Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at Angola, said anyone who refused to work, didn’t produce enough or just stepped outside the long straight rows knew there would be consequences.
“If he shoots the gun in the air because you done passed that line, that means you’re going to get locked up and you’re going to have to pay for that bullet that he shot,” said Thomas, adding that some days were so blistering hot the guards’ horses would collapse.
“You can’t call it anything else,” he said. “It’s just slavery.”
[…] In Alabama, where prisoners are leased out by companies, AP reporters followed inmate transport vans to poultry plants run by Tyson Foods […]
for many states, it’s the work-release programs that have become the biggest cash generators, largely because of the low overhead. In Alabama, for instance, the state brought in more than $32 million in the past five fiscal years after garnishing 40 percent of prisoners’ wages. […]
Alas, this article is much too optimistic. A far more realistic option is a space tether. A refer you to the Internet if you want to explore the ‘space tether’ concept.
Most of you will have read about how Asshole 45 disrespected the lawyer of the rape victin with the anagram “See you next Thursday”*
However, the Brit version of the word is unisex, and sometimes it can be very, very apt. Here is a song that is even more apt today, considering the tens of thousands of extra COVID deaths.
Sen. J.D. Vance’s interview on ABC’s “This Week” gets cut short after he made a comment implying he believes Trump can defy the Supreme Court…
Stephanopoulos then asked Vance if it was OK for the president to defy the Supreme Court, to which Vance responded that if the Supreme Court said the president couldn’t fire a general, then it would be an “illegitimate ruling.”
After Vance was finished with his answer, Stephanopoulos said, “You’ve made it very clear: You believe the president can defy the Supreme Court.”
Stephanopoulos thanked Vance for his time, while Vance could be heard saying, “No, no, George.” Stephanopoulos then cut to another segment and Vance’s audio went mute…
Visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t something on too many people’s bucket list. While the many UNESCO world heritage sites, alcohol-free dining options, and segregated beaches may have their appeal, intentionally traveling to a country where so-called morality police murder women for letting a stray strand of hair or two escape from their headscarves is a bridge too far for most.
Not content with brutally oppressing its citizens at home, the Iranian government also enjoys killing citizens living abroad, and last week the Department of Justice announced they’d prevented an assassination scheme involving two Hells Angels from Canada, who are both currently in jail on unrelated charges. No doubt this will give Tucker Carlson and his ilk another reason to insist Prime Minster Justin Trudeau has lost control and the country needs to be forcefully liberated.
A Bond villain named Naji Sharifi Zindashti, operating with the alleged go-ahead of government officials, offered the bikers, Damion Ryan and Adam Pearson, $350,000 to assemble a crew to whack an unnamed Iranian dissident and his female companion living in Maryland. Plus an extra $25,000 for travel expenses, which was thoughtful of him. [Photo of bikers at the link]
[…] The goons cooked up the plan via the encrypted chat app SkyECC, which has been linked to a number of organized crime cases, and the company’s records were seized by law enforcement in 2021. It’s pretty gruesome reading, with Ryan promising the hitmen would deliver multiple headshots to “erase his head from his torso” to properly send a message. Zindashti is also suspected of being behind the kidnapping of Habib Chaab, a Swedish-Iranian activist who disappeared during a visit to Turkey and was hanged last May for being “corrupt on earth,” a capital offense under Iran’s take on Islamic law.
[…] Progressive Persians with the means have been fleeing the country ever since the angry beardy dudes overthrew the Shah and went medieval on everyone’s asses back in 1979. While America is known colloquially as “the Great Satan” in Iran, it is nonetheless home to the world’s largest Iranian diaspora, with roughly 1.5 million people […], followed by Canada, the Great Satan’s Mini-Me, with around 400,000.
Clearly these guys — and they’re all guys obv — want to make “Death to America!” great again. The axis of evil OG also seems to have learned a thing or two from the disastrous murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, where the Saudis ultimately had to execute some of their own men following show trials to help pretend Jared Kushner’s good friend and benefactor Prince Bonesaw didn’t personally greenlight the whole ugly mess.
[…] Muslim fundamentalists bankrolling infidels in an organization with a blasphemous name like Hells Angels seems an unlikely development but we do now live in the weirdest timeline imaginable. Maybe other motorcycle gangs like the Bandidos or Mongols weren’t available. Or perhaps they’re just, you know, fucking hypocrites.
While it’s obviously a good thing nobody got their heads obliterated with bullets, the timing of the indictments couldn’t be worse given an Iran-backed militia was behind a recent drone attack on an American military base in Jordan near the border with Syria and Iraq that killed three people — the first US combat deaths since the Israel-Hamas war began Oct. 7 — and injured dozens more.
Iran, on behalf of their Russian real dad, is plainly trying to drag the Biden administration deeper into the increasingly sprawling battlefield, and it seems to be working. On Friday, the US bombed seven different targets in Syria and Iraq in the latest escalation of W̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ W̶a̶r̶ I̶I̶I̶ tensions, with a chance of more air strikes expected in the forecast.
The fact Iran feels perfectly content to try to murder people on American soil isn’t exactly going to help lower the temperature in the Situation Room.
However, the Brit version of the word is unisex, and sometimes it can be very, very apt.
Nope. Knock it off, please.
birgerjohanssonsays
SC @ 298
OK. Help me out here. What should I call BoJo and his band of merry sociopaths? “Fascist” is not apt. Some of them do not give a damn about ideology.
My list of invectives somehow falls short of describing monsters who sent old people from hospitals to elder care facilities without testing them for Covid (thus ensuring the epidemic spread like wildfire) …all because they might lose prestige by admitting the hospitals had a shortage of beds after their budget cuts.
I know “the triviality of evil ” fits the situation but it is way too anemic. Rolls-royce driving murderers?
birgerjohanssonsays
“Understanding music-performance anxiety in children”
Goddammit. If you push kids, they will hate the activity the rest of their lives. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-music-anxiety-children.html
Hey! Teachers! Leave the kids alone! (guitar riff)
John Moralessays
birger, SC is telling you that word still has power regardless of its usage elsewhere.
No more and no less.
(Takes me back to 2006 or so, where she was one of the people who shaped this blog’s tone)
—
As for suggestions, what about the classics, such as ‘a shit’?
SC @ 303 -if Hossenfelder is right about AI fooling scientific journals in the future, we are all screwed over.
I can imagine bad-faith actors tailoring AI articles to deliberately drive wedges between researchers, instead of ‘merely’ publishing fake data.
Reginald Selkirk @ 306
We are living in a Philip K. Dick world…enabled by stupidity instead of high tech.
.
Every school kid should have to watch this Youtube short :
“I’m a biological male… born looking female? #intersexawareness #intersexawarenessday”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/A68-MCGq0EU
Thank you, John Morales @ #301. birgerjohansson, apologies if I sounded snippy. As John alluded to, this was debated (to use the term generously) ad nauseam here a while back, which was exhausting and depressing and involved much toxic entitled petulance. Thank you for not digging in.
birgerjohanssonsays
OK not going there again.
.
POV: Moving Someone’s Wheel Chair #disability #wheelchair #skit
.https://youtube.com/shorts/wvhqtLF2RQI
(Jeez, even I know better. Which is a pretty low bar)
Senators on Sunday released the details of a $118.2 billion bipartisan aid proposal for Ukraine, Israel and the southern U.S. border, after months of painstaking, closed-door negotiations.
The long-awaited bill requests $60.1 billion for Ukraine aid, $14.1 billion for Israel and $20.2 billion to improve security at the U.S. border. It also includes smaller pockets of funding for humanitarian assistance in war-torn regions, and defense operations in the Red Sea and Taiwan…
You know how this works. Now they have to try to convince the House to pass it.
Google […] confirmed the feature removal […] For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.
[…]
Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google’s page. As the Google web crawler scoured […] it would also save a copy […] a backup of basically the entire Internet […] an uncountable number of petabytes of data.
[…]
The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden
On Wednesday, online news site The Messenger shut down abruptly. The site, which expired after less than a year of operation, represents one of the biggest failures in online journalism after launching with over $50 million in funding.
Messenger staff members were reportedly given no warning and only learned about the closing from reading the news at other sites. Staff were unable to retrieve personal items from offices and could no longer log into their company accounts. They were reportedly given no severance pay, and their health insurance was cut off immediately.
Worst of all, The Messenger owners deleted the site’s content. For the writers and staff of the news site, that means all their work from the past year was turned to digital dust in an instant. The Messenger’s former staff is left unable to retrieve the stories that could be vital to finding their next job. Sites that referenced The Messenger are now left with links that go nowhere. The information contained in all the site’s articles, op-eds, and photographs is now simply gone. [Tweet at the link]
The Messenger launched as a general news outlet, covering everything from politics to sports. Funding was largely based on ad sales, and in a market where everyone is seeing massive declines in ad revenue and journalism jobs are evaporating at an increasing pace, proclamations that the site would generate $100 million in revenue during 2024 never made much sense. Even so, founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein was reportedly close to securing additional funding before the deal fell through and the site was abruptly closed.
[…] Finkelstein pocketed $130 million from the 2021 sale of The Hill, which was founded by his father in 1994. Apparently, none of that money could be spared to give his former employees a few weeks of health insurance or anything to cushion this blow.
As The Messenger was disappearing, the staff of the Chicago Tribune went out on strike Thursday for the first time in the paper’s 177-year history. Editors joined reporters and photographers on the picket line as they marched against the paper’s owners, Alden Global Capital, which has been described as a “hedge fund vampire” by Vanity Fair, and as “a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country” by The Atlantic.
Alden Global Capital purchased the Chicago Tribune in 2021, and what’s happened to the paper since then goes beyond the general decline other local papers have been facing. […] They just immediately moved to gutting the place.
Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone. […]
But even as the Chicago Tribune is being decimated, the owners are dealing with the workers, and those workers can strike to bring attention to their cause. Those who have left have been recipients of a buyout.
That’s a big step up from finding the office door closed in your face and all your work deleted.
This is a good illustration of why workers at The Texas Tribune are moving to unionize. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit organization and an award-winning newsroom. How it is structured and its ability to sustain itself in the increasingly grim market for news has been of great interest to other sites looking for alternatives.
[…] The Texas Tribune’s management has been supportive of the union effort. “Our response is simple,” wrote CEO Sonal Shah. “If Tribune employees want to be represented by a union, we will respect their right to representation.”
In this environment, with major media outlets seemingly failing by the day, even workers at publications as consistently excellent as The Texas Tribune can’t take their status for granted.
Meanwhile, New York Magazine has a view on the final days of The Messenger from a writer who rode the wreck down.
When I tell you I was the film critic and a senior entertainment writer for The Messenger, you’ll have to take me at my word. The website is a blank white page now — the most terrifying image for any writer — with just the company’s name and an email address. I doubt any correspondence sent there will be returned.
(Warning: False social media accounts have materialized pretending to be some of The Messenger’s better-known writers, likely to deceptively tap into Venmo, GoFundMe, BuyMeACoffee, and other demonstrations of goodwill aimed at the displaced workers, so take care.)
birgerjohanssonsays
“Shocking! Content creator starts working in mines after being told get a real job” https://youtube.com/shorts/ac1G0ykrWCs
Goddammit, I want that fake job.
I guess Vladimir Putin has ended the work from home policy for Tucker Carlson.
The Telegraph, Politico, and other media outlets are reporting that Carlson is in Moscow. He was spotted at the airport and watching a performance of “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Apparently Carlson flew to Moscow via Istanbul three days ago. […]
Carlson has defended Putin and his war on Ukraine. Carlson opposes American support for Ukraine and blames the West for provoking Russia. Russian media and Putin apologists speculate Carlson will be granted an interview by Putin because the former Fox News Host is “sympathetic” to Russia.
Vladimir Solovyov, an anchor on a Russian state-controlled channel encouraged Carlson to “come join us” after he and Fox News severed ties. Mother Jones reported in 2022 on a leaked Kremlin memo that it was essential to feature more Carlson segments in Russian programming.
“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.”
No wonder he’s popular in Moscow. Carlson repeats Russian propaganda directly to his American viewers and espouses a very Pro-Kremlin mindset. In an interview with a rightwing Swiss magazine, Die Weltwoche, last September, Carlson whined that he “tried to interview Vladimir Putin, but the U.S. government stopped me… You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice, ‘coz why?”
Vanity Fair notes that Carlson has kept “close ties” to other Russian sympathizers, including Donald Trump, and “has been rumored as a possible VP pick”.
With “Midnights,” Swift became the first person to win album of the year four times.
Taylor Swift set a record for album of the year wins Sunday with “Midnights.” She’s the first singer to win that category four times.
Swift had been the first and only female solo artist to win the award three times, tying her with Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder.
The other artists in the category: Jon Batiste, boygenius, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Janelle Monáe, Olivia Rodrigo and SZA.
“I would love to tell you that this is the best moment in my life,” she said while accepting the win. “But I feel this happy when I finished a song or when I cracked the code to a bridge that I love or when I’m shortlisting a music video or when I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or getting ready to go to Tokyo to play a show. For me, the award is the work.”
Swift was nominated in five other categories this year. She won Sunday for best pop vocal album for “Midnights,” and in her acceptance speech, she surprised fans in announcing her brand-new album, “Tortured Poets Department.”
The historic win comes after a year when Swift dominated headlines.
Her record-breaking Eras Tour was credited with helping revitalize local business and tourism after the economic and social devastation wrought by the pandemic. The “Eras Tour” concert film also became the highest-grossing concert film of all time in the U.S. and Canada within days of its premiere in theaters.
Swift’s re-release of “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” and “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” brought forth 11 new vault tracks, or previously unreleased songs from the original albums, many of which went on to inspire viral trends online.
Her songwriting prowess and business acumen have even spawned the launch of college courses about her, including at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University.
“This conversation is weird. It’s normal to see John Morales choosing not to understand something in a pedantic way, but not so much Silentbob or flex.
Those of you who are smugly stroking your philosophy beards and saying “It is stupid to judge someone solely on wealth” are… not understanding the argument at all, acting like wealth is a totally arbitrary number that just beams out of nowhere like cosmic rays. It’s not. In order for monstrous ‘billionaire’ style wealth to have accumulated in a single place, a great deal of something immoral had to happen: massive worker exploitation, massive hoarding of life necessities (eg. real estate), massive middleman skimming, or some other form of massive rent seeking. This is the thing that Lotharloo et al are getting at; it is not merely an argument that it is immoral to sit on a dragon hoard of wealth while others suffer because their needs are not being met (though that’s an argument that can be made), rather it’s the argument that in order for that hoard to exist harm had to have been done, usually to thousands or millions of people.”
“Musician
$1.1B Real Time Net Worth as of 2/3/24
#2315 in the world today”
John Moralessays
[oops, I forgot the emphasis. Feel free to guess what it may have been.
Instead, an addendum, from the same comment]
“All of which is to say: Nobody is judging anyone on a meaningless number, you abnormally dense wankers! The wealth is not the crime, it’s a powerful near-certain indicator of the presence of many completed and ongoing immoral acts!”
degrowth originated in France in 2002 to address the current “limitless growth” economic model
[…]
Timothée Parrique, an economist […] argues […] wealthy, industrialized nations could significantly scale back production and consumption […] allowing low- and middle-income nations the latitude they need to raise their standards of living.
Excerpts from the overlong episode.
(13:02, Host): Growth is not giving what it is purported to give. […] small minorities skimming off the profits and hoarding these resources
(15:13, Guest): we’re stuck on the wrong indicator […] GDP (blind monetary agitation) […] that has lost all correlation with what should be considered true development […] longer, healthier lives, convivial lifestyles, healthy diet, lack of poverty, relative equality, dynamic democracy, free time
(19:00): 27 countries outperform the US, in terms of education and health, with a lower GDP. […] If the US was as efficient as Slovenia or Cyprus […] that would reduce 5% of global emissions.
(23:30): If you decompose 100 euros of [French] economic growth […] 35 euros, of that extra 100, goes in the pocket of the top 1% […] that are most distant from potential poverty. Then you get 32 euros that go to the next 9%. […] that’s the logic of capitalism: we reward people that were already rich […] which is counterproductive […] if […] the economy is about need satisfaction. […] the poorest half of the French population […] only pocket 8 euros. [What are the rich going to do with their growth?] They’re gonna just invest it: [buy property, rent it out, add wealth still faster and reinvest, worsening inequality].
(1:01:31, Host): [Economist Blair Fix] said after Hurricane Katrina, a huge amount of money was spent rebuilding [so] regional GDP went up. It was a more successful year than the year before.
I was like, “That’s crazy. That’s madness.” A community has just [lost lives, properties, memories, been displaced, and the rebuild itself was a disaster.] But none of that was taken into consideration. Just the fact that money was spent […] how on Earth can you tell whether anything is in fact positive or negative? It revealed the fallacy that a dollar spent is the same everywhere
if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’. That adds up to $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. […] that adds nothing, in and of itself, to the fundamentals of human welfare.
[…]
This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% […] while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.
This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65%
Um. USA is much, much, much bigger. Its geography is entirely different. Its location is diffferent.
Its trade patterns are different. Its climatic range is much different. Its culture is different. Its trading partners are different. Lots of differences, actually.
But somehow, all these things can be ignored and that simplistic comparison can be essayed.
if Portugal has higher levels of human welfare than the United States with $38,000 less GDP per capita, then we can conclude that $38,000 of America’s per capita income is effectively ‘wasted’
Um, GDP per capita is not anything like income per capita, because income is not GDP.
Entirely different metrics, so this summary is automatically suspect.
(Surely the relevant metric is welfare per capita, no? ;)
Yeah, I know… I need to look at the original context, it’s all done by experts, blah blah blah.
I am a fool for imagining that intimates that GDP (per capita) equates to income (per capita) — presumably, from that snippet, average income/GDP rather than the median. That sort of thing.
(But hey, hyperbole, right? Works for you!)
birgerjohanssonsays
“The impudent red guest of the panther Luna (Eng sub)”
Black leopard and rottweiler alarmed by fox incursion 😊
But hey, CA7746, I did check out the site. FWTW.
In case I seem a bit cynical or negative, I’ll share my cursory check results, but not too shabby, is what I think.
Since I was curious, I did check further:
“Rhett A. Butler founded Mongabay.com in 1999 out of his passion for tropical forests. He called the site Mongabay after an island in Madagascar.”
Righto.
“The founder of the website explains that “mongabay” originated from an anglicized spelling and pronunciation of Nosy Mangabe, an island off the coast of Madagascar. He goes on to note that it is best known as “a preserve for the aye-aye, a rare and unusual lemur famous for its bizarre appearance”. ”
Again, admirable, and it explains why Googling the actual name only yields that site. Good.
“As of April 29, 2021, Mongabay.org had a 100/100 score on Charity Navigator’s Encompass Rating System, which evaluates a nonprofit organization’s financial health including measures of stability, efficiency and sustainability as well as its accountability and transparency policies. Mongabay.org had a Guidestar Platinum Transparency rating, which according to the Guidestar “[demonstrates] its commitment to transparency.”
Excellent moral credentials, there.
Of course, none of that vitiates the comparison for GDP/Welfare ratio they essayed between two entirely different countries. I reckon a comparison with Vatican City would be even more impressive… probably not too many people sleeping rough, there :)
Malcolm Turnbull describes his infamous call with Donald Trump over Australia’s refugee swap deal as ‘tough’.
lumipunasays
Re 262: On the effect metal space debris on Earth’s magnetic field. Specifically the part “nobody knows what adverse effects this might have”.
It’s been just over one page (500 comments) since I asked something about orbital physics, for fiction writing purposes. Now I’m still studying Wikipedia for the same story, on various space-related topics. The whole project is horribly out of proportion, but I’m learning a lot of amazing things.
Like Juggalos, I’m struggling with trying to understand magnets in general, and Earth’s magnetic field in particular. My story needs humans colonizing the inner Van Allen Belt, which is notorious for accumulating captured protons that bounce around in that area, resulting in dangerously high levels of proton radiation. It supposedly causes trouble even for electronics, limiting satellite activity.
Now, Wikipedia notes that some futuristic methods have been proposed for “draining” the Van Allen Belt of charged particles, which would greatly benefit humans using the near-Earth space. There’s only a brief note about possible unknowable unintended consequences. I’d rather not write that.
I’m trying to figure out potential other solutions. Like, could you install an orbital space station or space colony with its own magnetic field (well within Earth’s magnetic field) to deflect protons? What would it require, or look like in practice? Why isn’t this a thing already for satellites? There must be some catch.
Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue shared this report from WION: :
The Hong Kong branch of a multinational company has lost $25.6 million after a scammer used deepfake technology to pose as the firm’s chief financial officer (CFO) in a video conference call and ordered money transfers, according to the police, in what is being highlighted as first of its kind cases in the city.
The transaction was ordered during a meeting where it was found that everyone present on the video call except the victim were deepfakes of real people, said the Hong Kong police, on Friday (Feb 2)…
Scammers in this case used deepfake technology to turn publicly available video and other footage of staff members into convincing meeting participants.
A drone attack on a base housing U.S. troops in eastern Syria killed six allied Kurdish fighters late Sunday, in the first significant attack in Syria or Iraq since the U.S. launched retaliatory strikes over the weekend against Iran-backed militias that have been targeting its forces in the region.
The U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Monday the attack hit a training ground at al-Omar base in Syria’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour, where the forces’ commando units are trained. No casualties were reported among U.S. troops…
Excavation has been completed for the gigantic particle detector that will serve the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which is located at a facility hosted in the former Homestake mine in South Dakota, the biggest and deepest gold mine in North America until its closure in 2002.
Engineering, construction and excavation teams have been working 4,850 feet below the surface since 2021 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Construction crews dismantled heavy mining equipment and, piece by piece, transported it underground using an existing shaft.
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Once below the surface, workers reassembled the equipment and spent almost two years blasting and removing rock. Close to 800,000 tons of rock were excavated and transported from underground into an expansive former mining area above ground.
Now, the three colossal caverns that are at the core of the new research facility span an underground area about the size of eight soccer fields…
In an historic unanimous decision, the Nevada Supreme Court has ruled that the state may restrict new groundwater pumping if it will impact other users and wildlife. The decision puts a big crimp in the plans of a developer to construct a new community for 250,000 people in the Mojave Desert. It will also change how the state manages its groundwater…
A clutch of tiny black eggs, discovered by a remotely operated vehicle in the abyss of the Pacific Ocean, is the first concrete evidence that deep-sea flatworms exist more than 6,000 meters (3.7 miles) deep.
At first, when the undersea vehicle shone its light on the mysterious black spheres, researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan didn’t even know what they were looking at.
Marine researcher Yasunori Kano, who was operating the ROV that day, was intrigued, and he decided to retrieve the capsules from their resting place around 6,200 meters (20,341 feet or 3.85 miles) deep in a trench of the northwest Pacific.
Once out of the water, Kano noticed that most of the black spheres were attached to rock, and were torn and empty. He sent four intact ones to Hokkaido University invertebrate biologists, Keiichi Kakui and Aoi Tsuyuki.
Upon examination, the duo found each leathery casing, or ‘cocoon’, was roughly 3 millimeters wide and contained three to seven developing flatworms…
Scientists have successfully converted transparent glass into a photovoltaic surface using a laser similar to that used in eye surgeries.
The revolutionary discovery was made by physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in collaboration with scientists from Tokyo Tech.
Led by Gözden Torun at the Galatea Lab, the researchers were intrigued to see how tellurite glass would react when exposed to femtosecond laser light. This curiosity led to the unexpected discovery of nanoscale tellurium and tellurium oxide crystals, both semiconducting materials, forming where the glass was exposed to the laser. The presence of semiconducting materials on a surface exposed to daylight could potentially generate electricity…
Rob Grigjanissays
lumipuna @329:
Like, could you install an orbital space station or space colony with its own magnetic field (well within Earth’s magnetic field) to deflect protons? What would it require, or look like in practice? Why isn’t this a thing already for satellites? There must be some catch.
The catch is that, the smaller the object you want to protect, the stronger the required magnetic field*. The stronger the field, the more mass you need to create and sustain the field, and also protect the rest of the ship/station from that field. I’m guessing that research into that is ongoing.
*A quick and dirty calculation says you’d need a field of about 1T at the surface of the ship/station, if the size of the thing is on the order of 100m.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is forced to educate U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon at length on why Trump’s counter-narrative in the Mar-a-Lago case is bogus, evidence-free, and self-serving. It’s quite a read.
[…] The motion should be denied as legally and factually flawed. Discovery requests must be based on specific demands, tied to the case, for items material to preparing the defense. Instead of meeting those standards, the defendants’ motion seeks non-discoverable materials based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.
Many of the requests are so generalized that it is difficult to decipher what they seek. Others reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution. For still others, the Government has already furnished the defendants with what they seek to the extent that the law requires.
The Government will explain below why the defendants’ showings fall short of applicable legal requirements. But before turning to those arguments, it is necessary to set the record straight on the underlying facts that led to this prosecution, because the defendants’ motion paints an inaccurate and distorted picture of events.
The Government will clear the air on those issues not because the Court needs to resolve factual disputes before denying the motion (it need not resolve the facts), but because the defendants’ misstatements, if unanswered, leave a highly misleading impression on a number of matters.
After that discussion, the Government will turn to the underlying legal principles and their application to defendants’ requests, all of which should be denied. A word at the outset about those requests: the defendants have scattered their requests throughout the motion. For the Court’s convenience, the Government includes as an appendix to this response a chart enumerating what the defendants appear to seek.
[…] The defendants’ attempt to equate the standard practice of compressing files with deliberately altering those files to render them “unviewable” is misleading and baseless. Second, the Government’s history of prompt responsiveness in helping counsel navigate any technical problems, including making FBI technical support available and providing laptops to counsel, belies the defendants’ characterization of the Government as delaying or impeding counsel’s ability to view the footage.
The Government has produced the CCTV footage in an accessible format and has also taken several additional steps to facilitate ease of review for defense counsel, all of whom are able to access and view the footage. Accordingly, the Court should deny as moot the defendants’ unsupported request for an order compelling production of the CCTV footage in an accessible format. […]
Yep. It is an educational document that demonstrates patience and attention to detail. The whole thing also comes off like a long sigh accompanying an unspoken “Do we really have to do this?”
[…] The Chilean wildfires are still burning after 112 people were killed ( and counting), with hundreds if not thousands missing and the deaths of countless wildlife and our fur babies. The damage is in the country’s central region, which heats and dries up during El Nino. Climate change amplifies the disaster worse. Global heating is a threat multiplier when conditions are ripe. The world’s climate system is breaking down, and we witness it in such events.
The fires in Chile have surpassed the deaths and devastation of the Lahaina wildfire. They are now the deadliest in South American history.
The videos below are nothing but remarkable. [videos at the link]
An underground website called OnlyFake is claiming to use “neural networks” to generate realistic looking photos of fake IDs for just $15, radically disrupting the marketplace for fake identities and cybersecurity more generally. This technology, which 404 Media has verified produces fake IDs nearly instantly, could streamline everything from bank fraud to laundering stolen funds. In our own tests, OnlyFake created a highly convincing California driver’s license, complete with whatever arbitrary name, biographical information, address, expiration date, and signature we wanted…
The sandwich originated from University of Akron philosophy professor Chris Buford, who shared his creation — a sandwich with bacon, lettuce, mayo and pepperoncini — on the Akron subreddit after realizing the acronym for the ingredients spelled BLMP.
Eric Brewer, a sandwich maker at Diamond Deli, saw Buford’s post and tried his hand at making it at the shop with the addition of Italian dressing to complete its BLIMP status. It was soon added to the deli’s menu as a special…
Genetic mutations are essential for innovation and evolution, yet too many—or the wrong ones—can be fatal. So researchers at Cambridge established a synthetic “orthogonal” DNA replication system in E. coli that they can use as a risk-free way to generate and study such mutations. It is orthogonal because it is completely separate from the system that E. coli uses to copy its actual genome, which contains the genes E. coli needs to survive.
The genes in the orthogonal system are copied with an extraordinarily error-prone DNA replication enzyme, which spurs rapid evolution by generating many random mutations. This goes on while E. coli’s genes are replicated by its normal high-fidelity DNA copying enzyme. The two enzymes work alongside each other, each doing their own thing but not interfering with the other’s genes…
The sudden appearance of bright red squirrels in one New York town led investigators to discover they were being intentionally painted and released into the wild, according to investigators.
One man was responsible and he was “caught red handed” after a very unusual surveillance operation in the town of Patterson, 75 miles north of the city of New York, investigators said…
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
John Morales #321:
“[…] It’s normal to see John Morales choosing not to understand something in a pedantic way […]”
#325:
Yeah, I know… I need to look at the original context, it’s all done by experts, blah blah blah. I am a fool
[…]
hyperbole, right?
Close. Macroeconomic theory.
#327:
not too shabby […] Admirable goals. […] Again, admirable […] Good. […] Excellent moral credentials […] Gotta admire that
SC @347, overkill for sure. I just stopped watching the news.
Reginald @349, as I expected. Still disappointing, still bad news. Sheesh. Followup:
[…] McConnell’s initial goal, according to Senate GOP colleagues, was to get a border security deal that would have the support of at least half of his conference, which numbers 49 members.
It now appears the defense supplemental spending bill, which includes the border security provisions as well as funding for Ukraine, Israel and Indo-Pacific security, will get less Republican support than that.
Aides are predicting between 12 and 20 Senate GOP votes for the bill, and that the vote total will shift as lawmakers digest the text of the legislation, which was finally made public Sunday evening.
The stakes are high for the 81-year-old Senate Republican leader, as he will come under significant pressure from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other conservative critics to abandon the bill if it doesn’t look like it will get much more than 10 GOP votes.
But if the legislation gets between 18 and 25 Senate Republican votes, that will then put heavy pressure on Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to take the bill up in the House, despite his earlier declaration it would likely be “dead on arrival” in the lower chamber.
McConnell declined to say last week whether he would favor moving ahead with a bill that had support from only a minority of his conference, and acknowledged he doesn’t know exactly how the debate will play out.
“It’s certainly been a challenge,” he admitted when asked if it was a mistake to link Ukraine aid to border security reform. “But it’s time for us to move something, hopefully including a border agreement. But we need to get help to Israel and to Ukraine quickly.” […]
Too many dunderheaded Republicans spending all their time looking for ways to make the bill fail … or if not complete failure, at least the failure to send aid to Ukraine. It is mindbogglingly stupid and counterproductive.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah seems to be ginning up a division among Republicans in the Senate after a group of senators released a bipartisan deal on the border and Ukraine on Sunday. The $118 billion package, which includes wartime aid to Ukraine, Israel, and other allies, was tied to negotiated border security measures.
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson very quickly called the bill “even worse than we expected,” saying the bill would be “dead on arrival” in the House. Majority Leader Steve Scalise promised the bill would not even receive a vote in the House.
Lee, who expressed skepticism of the bill long before it was unveiled, quickly went to X (formerly Twitter) to write, “Senate GOP leadership screwed this up—and screwed us.” Saying that any support for the bill would be “unpatriotic,” Lee ended his attack on GOP leadership by proclaiming, “This is a disqualifying betrayal.”
[“unpatriotic,” OMFG. They damned the bill before they had even read all of it.]
According to Punchbowl News’ Andrew Desiderio, the fireworks aren’t just happening in the public sphere. Lee’s staff was reportedly “yelling” at Republican Sen. James Lankford’s team after their presentation of the bill.
Lee has proceeded to repost other Senate Republicans’ denouncements of the bill, including Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Steve Daines of Montana.
Republican leadership has denied it is taking its marching orders directly from Donald Trump, who has very publicly attacked the concept of a border deal. But their preemptive attacks on any immigration legislation, and the fact that the Senate’s bipartisan bill could be considered a huge policy victory for conservatives, show how beholden they are to Trump.
For his part, Trump has been spending his time on failed social media platform Truth Social posting […] “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was optimistic the bipartisan bill will still pass through the Senate—even with the “right-wing Trump part of the party” continuing to gum up the works. “Will the senators drown out the political noise from Trump and his minions and do the right thing for America? It’s a crucial question. History will is looking down on every one of us right now.”
The fact that Senate Republicans could be this divided on the border package is extraordinary. This bill, which Democratic critics say could effectively shut down our asylum program for the next year while doing nothing progressive to resolve our immigration processes, is a right-wing xenophobe’s dream when it comes to “compromise.”
The fact that a two-time popular vote loser like Trump can dictate his party’s decision-making, even while facing prosecution for sedition and corruption and racketeering, is a damning indictment of the GOP.
[…] The bill also provides humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people in Gaza […]
Johnson also claimed that House Republicans had been shut out of the negotiations. However, Sen. James Lankford made it clear that Johnson had been invited, but refused to participate. […]
Dismissing a bill that would be the toughest border control in U.S. history as “worse than we expected” and falsely claiming that under the bill, “the border never closes” shows how far Johnson is willing to go to keep this issue in play for Donald Trump. Scalise also claimed the proposed legislation “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day and gives automatic work permits to asylum recipients—a magnet for more illegal immigration.” Which isn’t even close to true.
According to the summary of the legislation, the changes to border security focus primarily on streamlining the process of applying for asylum so that most applicants can be dealt with at the port of entry and those entering the U.S. will see processing times cut from several years to under six months. The bill includes:
– New emergency authority to restrict border crossings if daily encounters with migrants exceed a series of limits.
– A requirement that the government process at least 1,400 asylum applications a day at official ports of entry if emergency authority is triggered.
– Closure of the border for up to 270 days in the first year the legislation is in effect, with the number of days declining to 180 in the third year.
– Tougher standards for passing the initial asylum interview, meaning that more applicants will be turned back immediately.
– A new application process for adults provides an immediate decision without the case ever going to the immigration court system.
– Funding for more immigration judges to increase the capacity of immigration courts.
– Funding to the U.S. Marshall Service to provide housing for those held on charges of human and drug trafficking crimes while awaiting trial.
– Funding to the FBI for searching out potential criminals among those seeking entry, including expanded DNA testing.
The bill also includes $60.06 billion in direct or indirect assistance for Ukraine. That breaks down to $19.85 billion for ammunition, parts, and repairs for U.S. equipment already provided; $13.8 billion for additional U.S. weapons systems; and $14.8 billion for support activities such as training and intelligence sharing. The bill also increases the president’s authority to draw down equipment in existing military stocks.
Another $14.1 billion in assistance is aimed at Israel. […]
The bill also includes $10 billion in humanitarian assistance—food, water, shelter, and emergency services—for the populations of Gaza, Ukraine, and other areas caught up in war.
One section of the bill that’s getting little attention is $4.83 billion for “Countering the Aggression and Malign Influence of the People’s Republic of China.” That includes both military and humanitarian assistance designed to decrease China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
[…] With Trump pressuring Republicans to obstruct any bill so that he can run on the border issue in the fall, Johnson and Scalise may continue to refuse to even bring the bill up for a vote.
Unfortunately, many media outlets will not make it clear to the public that the Republicans are lying.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume Democrats got taken by working with Senate Republicans to put together this bipartisan border deal. There are a number of provisions in this deal which many Democrats won’t like at all just on the merits. That is an important question. But here I’m talking about the politics. It’s House Republicans who are in an awkward position now.
House Republicans are now clearly refusing to support provisions they’ve been demanding for years. Now they claim that they are refusing to support or even allow a vote on the deal because it doesn’t go far enough. But it’s a bit late for that since they were already pretty open about simply refusing to vote for anything until Trump becomes President again.
[…] If they can stick by their effort, they can kill the bill. […]
It puts pressure on Republicans to explain why they refuse to vote for things they’ve been demanding. It makes them look hypocritical and silly.
But can House Republicans actually kill it?
Probably.
But maybe not necessarily?
Over the last 48 hours every House Republican has been putting out statements that the bill is absolutely, positively dead on arrival. DEAD, they tell you! They’re protesting a bit too much. They really, really want this bill to die in the Senate. If it doesn’t get a vote in the Senate, there’s not a lot of pressure. Schedule a vote on what?, they can reasonably ask. It hasn’t even passed the Senate. If and when it does pass the Senate it gets harder to refuse it a vote.
You and I both know that “NO!” is the Republican superpower. You have something so popular, so un-no-able and yet they say “NO!” […] But here the protestations give away the game. Can they prevent it from getting a vote in the House even if it passes the Senate? If I were betting I would say they can and will. But their actions tell us that they know refusing the bill a vote in the House after it’s passed on a bipartisan basis in the Senate will do them a lot of harm on their signature issue during an election year.
Democrats should force them to accept that damage. […] They have to force it. And the key is getting it passed in the Senate.
[…] Last night, gracing the Grammys stage for the first time since she accepted the award for best new artist 35 years ago, Chapman […] looked as unmarked by those decades as her smoky contralto sounded. It was only the glittering silver of dreadlocks that hinted at the passage of time. Her eyes sparkled. The crowd roared.
Watching Combs last night, all but trembling as he harmonized with an artist he clearly idolized, I came to appreciate what he had been up to. With apologies to Bruce Springsteen, there is nothing in the modern American songbook that matches “Fast Car” as a song about working people and the yearning for a life with dignity and freedom. It’s a song about mobility, about longing to make the seemingly impossible journey from “work in a market as a checkout girl” to “finally see what it means to be living.”
[…] There was no mistaking who owned that song on that stage. And so at the end of his performance he genuflected to Chapman, who received a rapturous ovation.
[…] Chapman was a poet of the despair wrought by the cruel economic vision of the Reagan years. What might she have to say about the intervening decades of hurtling down that same track?
But Chapman has chosen a different path, living a private life of her own making. I hope she is happy and fulfilled, and that she is spending her royalty checks on fast cars, or whatever else brings her joy.
Friday is the last day on the job for the town manager of a small New Hampshire community after an LGBTQ art display off the town’s Main Street kicked off a local controversy.
Jim Gleason, 65, officially resigned after three pieces of art, sponsored by the nonprofit LGBTQ group North Country Pride, drew the ire of state Sen. Carrie Gendreau, who is also a member of the town board.
The art, which went up last summer on the side of a Chinese restaurant, featured a subtle rainbow, meant to symbolize inclusivity for the LGBTQ community. But Gendreau wasn’t warming to the new art in her community.
“I don’t want that to be in our town. I don’t want it to be here,” Gendreau said at a town board meeting in August. Gleason reminded her that the town can’t police private property.
“If it’s on private property, I just know we need to make sure that we also weren’t violating freedom of speech and freedom of expression,” Gleason said.
A few weeks later, Gendreau spoke to The Boston Globe. Gendreau, a Christian, told the Globe she was perceiving the artwork from a “biblical perspective.” She also said it had “demonic hidden messages” and called homosexuality an “abomination.” …
Senator Ted Cruz has said he wants airport escorts for lawmakers.
The Texas senator said he is proposing a bill amendment that would offer politicians a dedicated security escort at airports, along with expedited screening outside of public view, Politico reported.
Federal judges and Cabinet members, as well as a limited number of their family and staff, would also be entitled to a security escort and expedited screening, according to the legislation…
Cthulhu forbid he should have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.
… The long shadow cast by Boebert over Western Colorado is beginning to vanish in her backyard. And many within her constituency say that it can’t happen fast enough…
Reginald Selkirksays
@363 ibid
A veritable Boebert 2.0 has popped up to fill that slot, with Jan. 6 attendee Ron Hanks announcing days after the incumbent’s district swap that he would join the race for the GOP nomination.
The Air Force veteran, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2022 with an ad depicting him blowing up a fake voting machine, calls himself a “pro-Trump warrior” and issued a written statement announcing his CD3 candidacy that could have been ripped out of Boebert’s playbook, the rhetoric railing against RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and quips like “the danger is real” and “I cannot stand idly by.”
Hanks shares another new trait with Boebert, however, and it’s one that’s unlikely to help either of them: he came from Fremont County, which is not in CD3, and told Colorado Politics he’s recently started renting a room from the GOP treasurer in Grand Junction. Hanks is carpetbagging in a district that’s turned on its carpetbagging incumbent, an attack point that his fellow GOP candidates will surely zero in on…
lumipunasays
Rob Grigjanis at 342 – Thanks again!
The catch is that, the smaller the object you want to protect, the stronger the required magnetic field*. The stronger the field, the more mass you need to create and sustain the field, and also protect the rest of the ship/station from that field. I’m guessing that research into that is ongoing.
*A quick and dirty calculation says you’d need a field of about 1T at the surface of the ship/station, if the size of the thing is on the order of 100m.
I take it that the 100 m refers to how much mass/shielding would be needed to protect (to some arbitrary level) the inhabitants from the residual protons?
I was actually thinking about building an electromagnet around a potato-shaped orbital asteroid of about 10 km in size. Like, could you just coil a wire a few times around its longest axis and electrify the wire? What kind of power source would it take, and what kind of field (if any) would it generate?
Reginald Selkirksays
@365: It would take more power than you could get from using the potato as a battery.
Over the weekend, images emerged of former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson visiting the Bolshoi Theater and other historic locations as he strolled around Moscow. Speculation is that Carlson is in Russia to interview dictator Vladimir Putin.
After being booted from Fox, Carlson started a program on Elon Musk’s “X” social media platform, where election deniers and friends of dictators are welcome. Whether Putin is actually going to sit down for a chat with Carlson remains unclear, but considering Russia’s use of social media to spread propaganda about their illegal invasion of Ukraine, handing Carlson an exclusive interview seems possible. Especially since Russian state television has promoted Carlson’s show.
[…] It seems extremely unlikely to be a coincidence that Carlson arrived in Moscow just as a bipartisan bill emerged to provide funding to Ukraine.
MAGA Republicans seem ecstatic about the prospect of Carlson interviewing a Russian dictator in the middle of a war against a U.S. ally. [snipped Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments]
Meanwhile, Russian state media is playing supposed man-on-the-street interviews in which Muscovites praise Carlson as a “’courageous journalist.”
[…] Years before Russian tanks rolled across the border in 2022, Carlson declared that he was rooting for Russia in its conflict with Ukraine.
In a conversation with former Hillary Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein, Carlson said, “Why do I care … what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? … And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia, which I am?”
When Goldstein replied that “preserving democracy is important,” Carlson was unphased.
“I don’t care!” Carlson said.
After the unprovoked invasion began, Carlson initially voiced tepid support for Ukraine. Over the following months, he became more and more vocal in his open support for Russia and exerted all the pressure his show could deliver to push Republicans into supporting Putin.
[…] Framing this issue as left versus right rather than democracy versus dictatorship, Carlson sneers at American policy and politicians while praising men who have no greater ambition than to see the United States humiliated. And he makes supporting Putin as much a part of MAGA as supporting Donald Trump. […]
John Moralessays
CA7746:
Close. Macroeconomic theory.
Ah, right. Thus Portugal is comparable to the USA, because of that theory.
After all, an economy is an economy, right?
Let me reiterate the risible conclusion: “This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% […] while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.”
Presumably, distributing “income” (they cite GDP) more fairly and investing in public goods can be achieved without scaling the economy (isn’t that proxied by the GDP?) by a staggering 65%, no?
Reginald, huh. Here’s a pullquote you neglected to add:
The idea has been proposed before. But experts question whether adding another hurricane category would help get across the risks of such storms.
See, there’s a “strongest” category already; adding a new “strongest” category seems rather pointless, since one can only do so much to prepare — knowing human nature, people would then think to the effect that “well, it’s only a 5” since there’s a 6 to be had — that is, what is now the most worrisome category won’t diminish in potency, but will be seen as lesser.
Last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. Tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman has now announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they have awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. Three winning team members are Luke Farritor, Yousef Nader, and Julian Schilliger…
Rob Grigjanissays
lumipuna @365:
I take it that the 100 m refers to how much mass/shielding would be needed to protect (to some arbitrary level) the inhabitants from the residual protons?
No, the 100m refers to the size (radius) of the station/spaceship. I assume a generator at the core of the vessel. The rest of your questions are beyond my competency and interest.
A Toroidal Magnetic Spacecraft Shield
Simon G. Shepherd
Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 03755
John P. G. Shepherd
Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, River Falls, Wisconsin, 54022
As conservatives in Congress have blasted the new bipartisan border agreement for not going far enough, the legislation earned a key endorsement on Monday: the labor union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents.
The National Border Patrol Council — which represents more than 18,000 agents — said the bill would “drop illegal border crossings nationwide and will allow our agents to get back to detecting and apprehending those who want to cross our border illegally and evade apprehension.” …
Giant fossils uncovered in the Sahara Desert reveal new secrets of how whales evolved.
Jazzletsays
Birger you could try Stewart Lee’s version from his Guardian columns which in full is: “Boris P*******y Watermelon Letterbox Cake B*****s Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson”. NB Yes there are offensive words in there all of which Boris himself used while in public, I’ve starred out the worst. Lee started off just using Johnson’s full name – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, then added bits as the oaf said unbelievably rude, condescending, horrendous things. Johnson chose to use just “Boris” as it made him sound more like an ordinary person than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
birgerjohanssonsays
Jazzlet @ 384
You should have some kind of award, but as it would be associated with BoJo it might smell as bad as the orange guy.
birgerjohanssonsays
If there are any Canadians reading this maybe you can update us on the situation in Canada. I am told the party of former PM Harper -aka The Awful Horrible Bastard Party- is catching up with the government in the polls, now that people have had time to forget Harper.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ruled that Donald Trump does not enjoy broad immunity from federal prosecution, a major legal setback for the former president who almost certainly will appeal.
The ruling comes a month after lawyers for Trump argued made sweeping claims that he enjoyed immunity from federal prosecution, claims that lawyers for the special counsel said would “undermine democracy” and give presidents license to commit crimes while in the White House, such as accepting bribes for directing government contracts or selling nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary….
Tuesday’s decision comes at a crucial time for both Trump and the federal case against him. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination and continues to insist — without basis in fact — that he won the 2020 presidential election. He almost certainly will appeal the ruling either to the full D.C. Circuit or to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Molly Elwood is a writer, copywriter, storyteller, and creative strategist. Between creative agencies and in-house creative teams, she has spent more than ten years writing and humanizing for her clients. She is also the creator of Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat, a satirical, comprehensive, and wickedly effective social media phenomenon. What began as a grassroots movement designed to provoke a conversation about how we treat animals is now creating meaningful and tangible social change.
“…but what’s happening lately is that mink on fur farms have been starting to be infected with H5n1 bird flu. So, the World Health Organization is worried that this disease is now changing to better infect mammals. Of course, we are mammals. And of course, if it’s on fur farms, there’s human mammals on the fur farms who can be infected by the bird flu, just the same way that COVID kept pinging back and forth between animals and fur farms and the humans who work there. And so this is a real concern because it’s a 60% mortality rate, I mean, that can wipe out most of humanity.” – Poorva Joshipura
Poorva Joshipura has spent her entire career at PETA. She’s currently PETA’s Senior Vice President of International Affairs.
Poorva’s second book, Survival at Stake, was just released. It’s about how we treat animals and how our current ways of doing things, from factory farming to animal testing to the use of animals in materials and everywhere else we exploit them greatly affects us all.
Our treatment of animals is linked to pandemics, epidemics, antibiotic resistance, climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and many other horrors that humans and the planet are currently facing. It’s all connected and unless we change how we treat animals, and remove them from all of the systems that they’re innocent victims of, things don’t look so good for our survival as a species.
Christine Ball-Blakely of the Animal Legal Defense Fund joins us to discuss the work of a coalition of organizations that has filed petitions for rulemaking regarding the unbelievable subsidization, with your tax money, of “biogas,” aka factory farm gas, which, as far as I am concerned, appears to be an out and out scam to prop up factory farming, hide its worst environmental harms and convince people that it is part of a sustainable future, when it is, in fact, one of the worst causes of climate change. It’s all outrageous but also flying way too far under the radar, as so many stories about the harms of factory farming tend to do, as they are science-y, deliberately hidden away and obfuscated, and, perhaps most important, definitely not what people want to hear. Fortunately, WE want to hear it, and Christine makes it all very comprehensible.
The U.S. government’s definition of what constitutes an “ecoterrorist” has long driven backlash against environmental activists and in recent years that definition has only broadened. Investigative reporter and Drilled senior editor Alleen Brown dug into this recently and found that the Department of Homeland Security had been warning officials in Atlanta about the threat posed by “Defend the Atlanta Forest” for months before police raided the forest, ultimately killing one protestor, and charging dozens more with domestic terrorism and racketeering. It was such an overreaction that even mainstream media covered it.
In their decision, the federal appeals court judges Florence Pan, Karen Henderson and Michelle Childs were sharply critical of Donald Trump’s arguments, saying that he essentially wanted to make presidents immune from accountability:
We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power – the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.
At bottom, former President Trump’s stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the President beyond the reach of all three Branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the President, the Congress could not legislate, the Executive could not prosecute and the Judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.
Childs and Pan were appointed to the bench by Joe Biden. The Republican former president George HW Bush appointed Henderson.
For the first time, NCAA athletes have been allowed to unionize. A National Labor Relations Board regional manager ruled on Monday the Dartmouth men’s basketball team could vote to form a union. It would mark the first time a labor union would consist of NCAA athletes…
Taylor Swift’s lawyers told a college student who tracks celebrity jets online to cut it out or risk facing legal action — something made crystal clear in a letter they fired off to him.
According to WaPo, Jack Sweeney — a University of Central Florida student — received a cease and desist from Taylor’s camp in December of this past year … which told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to stop posting Taylor’s whereabouts on his social pages…
The information Sweeney is posting is perfectly legal. Elon Musk failed to shut it down.
The longest – and slowest – music composition in existence had a big day on Monday – it changed chord for the first time in two years.
Crowds gathered at a church in Germany to witness the rare moment, which is part of an artistic feat by avant-garde composer, John Cage.
The experimental piece, entitled As Slow as Possible, began in 2001.
Being played on a specially-built organ, it is not set to finish playing until the year 2640…
birgerjohanssonsays
“No Evidence that Social Media Affects Mental Health, Zuckerberg Says”
No one wants to be on the same side as Zuckerberg, but in this case he seems to be correct. (My comment: traditionally new media become scapegoats for problems caused by other things, and the statistics are on Zuckerberg’s side). Here is the link to Hossenfelder’s video:
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hlZTv5vGJIo
birgerjohanssonsays
“Leaked: Ukraine Out-Killing Russia 20:1 in Avdiivka!”
(as Russia has mishandled everything from day one, I am prone to believe this)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Oy7atJ-6rlM
The United States’s first major climate legislation dismantled, a crackdown on government scientists, a frenzy of oil and gas drilling, the Paris climate deal not only dead but buried.
A blueprint is emerging for a second Donald Trump term that is even more extreme for the environment than his first, according to interviews with multiple Trump allies and advisers.
In contrast to a sometimes chaotic first White House term, they outlined a far more methodical second presidency: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining mainstream climate scientists and overturning rules that curb planet-heating emissions.
“Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before,” said Myron Ebell, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for Trump’s first term. “He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.”
The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will be the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370bn bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles. Ebell said the legislation, signed by Biden in 2022 with no Republican votes, was “the biggest defeat we’ve suffered”.
Carla Sands, a key environment adviser to the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who has criticized Biden’s “apocalyptic green fantasies”, said: “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.”
…
In recent rallies, Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has called renewable energy “a scam business” and vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. On his first day in office, Trump has said he would repeal “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate” and approve a glut of new gas export terminals currently paused by Biden.
…
“A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, now fellow at the University of New Hampshire.
“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
…
Should Trump manage to repeal the IRA and water down or scrap EPA pollution rules, there would be severe consequences for a world that is struggling to contain an escalating climate crisis, experts say.
The US, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, would still see its emissions drop under Trump due to previous policies and a market-led shift away from coal to gas as an energy source, but at only half the rate of a second Biden term, according to an analysis by Energy Innovation shared with the Guardian.
This would deal a mortal blow to the global effort to restrain dangerous global heating, with scientists warning that the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half this decade, and eliminate them entirely by 2050, to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits and plunge billions of people into worsening heatwaves, floods and droughts.
…
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told E&E News last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”…
tomhsays
More on Trump decision.
The Court’s judgment requires Trump to seek a stay by Monday, Feb 12 from the Supreme Court or the case goes back to trial. Filing an en banc petition with the Appeals Court will not delay things,
Paris has developed a taste for better city living. Its vote to begin pricing sports utility vehicles (SUVs) off its streets by tripling parking charges is part of a diet for reversing autobesity – the trend by car manufacturers towards larger, more dangerous and polluting cars.
It’s not difficult to see what has driven Parisians’ ire: the reasons to dislike SUVs form a tailback so long it’s hard to see the front of the queue.
First, they get in the way. Size is a selling point and in the UK alone, 150,000 cars were sold in 2019 that were too big for a standard parking space. Potential green benefits from better technology have been cancelled out by vehicles getting bigger. Average car width in the EU and UK has been growing by 1cm every two years (if that continues, by the year 2544 the typical car will be as wide as an average UK terraced house). Astonishingly, in the US the average weight of a new car is almost two tonnes.
It takes a lot of materials to build bigger cars and an increasing amount of energy to move them. With bulk comes pollution and waste. In the decade from 2010, the International Energy Agency found that “SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions” after the power sector, but ahead of heavy industry, trucks and aviation. Emissions from the motor sector could have fallen 30% more between 2010 and 2022 if car sizes hadn’t grown.
Then there is the other problem: electric or not, SUVs are killers. People in a light vehicle are three times more likely to get seriously injured when in collision with a much bigger car than one of similar weight; and for pedestrians and cyclists, the risk of death rises 30% if the bonnet of the car that hits them is 10cm higher than average.
For these reasons, Paris’s vote against the SUV is a vote against four-wheeled antisocial behaviour….
But how did we get here and what can be done? SUVs didn’t just swarm on to city streets like a natural phenomenon – even if that’s the impression the adverts like to create. In a very short period of time, consumer behaviour was switched on to the SUV by massive marketing campaigns and new consumer debt models, in the shape of personal contract purchase (PCP) loans.
In 2010, SUVs accounted for just one in 10 new car sales in the EU, but by last year this had climbed to over half. It’s a stunning example of how quickly a heavily polluting sector can change. Unfortunately for human health and the climate, it has been in the wrong direction. Why is not hard to understand. In a saturated car market, manufacturers found they could charge more and make more profit from SUVs….
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ruled that Donald Trump does not enjoy broad immunity from federal prosecution, a major legal setback for the former president who almost certainly will appeal.
I was glad to see that the ruling was unanimous!
“Setback” sounds too temporary. I suppose it is correct in that Trump can appeal, but I certainly wish the idea of Trump enjoying broad immunity could be killed outright.
[…] The long-anticipated decision removes a key obstacle to returning the case to the district court, which has been frozen since Trump launched his appeal claiming that presidential immunity and the failure to convict him at a February 2021 impeachment trial preclude his prosecution.
Despite speculation given the court’s delay in issuing the ruling, all three judges on the D.C. Circuit panel joined the opinion. Some had wondered whether Judge Karen Henderson, the only judge on the panel appointed by a Republican president, was holding up the ruling by writing in dissent.
But the judges issued an opinion that was unanimous in finding that Trump has no special protections due to his status as a former president. [snipped quotes that tomh already presented in comment 390]
The judges infused the ruling with historical data points, perhaps to appeal to the right-wing Supreme Court justices who all but demand that arguments interpret the Constitution through an originalist lens. [Good move. The rightwing judges on the Supreme Court are a significant problem.] The panel quoted the framers, including Alexander Hamilton, underscoring their efforts to differentiate the American presidency from the “sacred and inviolable” British monarchy.
Critically, the panel found that the charges against Trump from the indictment may permissibly be heard in federal court without running afoul of the separation of powers doctrine. Precedential cases, the judges wrote, underscore that “we may review the President’s actions when he is bound by law, including by federal criminal statutes.”
They took up and dismissed the pillars of Trump’s arguments in turn: The “interest in criminal accountability,” they wrote, outweighs concerns about chilling presidential conduct, or threatening him with frivolous litigation. Legislators and judges can be criminally prosecuted for official acts, despite enjoying other protections. Criminal prosecution after impeachment can’t be double jeopardy, they argued, as impeachment’s punishment is political and not criminal in nature. [Correct! Glad they made that clear.]
[…] In a statement, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “President Trump respectfully disagrees with the DC Circuit’s decision and will appeal it in order to safeguard the Presidency and the Constitution.” [bitter laughter at the idea of Trump giving a fuck about safeguarding anything but himself]
A separate judgment issued by the appeals court panel puts Trump on a tight clock. The appeals court will hold onto the case through Feb. 12, giving Trump a chance to appeal to the Supreme Court. The D.C. Circuit structured the stay so it will automatically continue until the Supreme Court rules. If Trump doesn’t act by the end of Feb. 12, the case reverts back to the trial court. Notably, the appeals court did not give Trump a specific allotment of time to ask the full D.C. Circuit for a rehearing. That puts Trump in a box, and could spur him to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, potentially sealing off one avenue of appeal, which could add weeks or months of time. [Smart move.]
[…] The judges were decisive in their unanimity: Trump’s get-out-of-jail-free card, at least for now, won’t work.
“Former President Trump lacked any lawful discretionary authority to defy federal criminal law and he is answerable in court for his conduct,” they wrote.
Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.
I think Sands has it backwards. The IRA attempts to level the playing field for green energy because the oil companies have been given subsidies and favored status for so long that they think fairness is unfair to them.
Senate Republicans, under heavy pressure from […] Trump, will block a procedural motion to begin debate on a bipartisan border security deal this week, leaving funding for the war in Ukraine in limbo for the foreseeable future. [JFC!]
A failure to advance the border security deal this week would signal the legislation is unlikely to pass the Senate without major changes. And any revisions to asylum and border security reforms negotiated with the White House and Senate Democrats could scuttle the whole deal.
Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.), whose staff has briefed Republican senators and their offices on the details of the sweeping border security package, said Tuesday that a motion to end debate on proceeding to the bill won’t get much, if any, Republican support.
Asked Tuesday morning if any Senate Republicans will vote to proceed to the bill, Thune said it’s “unlikely” because members of his conference want more time to study the complicated package.
[That’s a bullshit excuse that apparently all Republicans have agreed to spout.]
[…] He said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) decision to schedule a vote Wednesday to allow the bill to proceed is “rushing it.” [Oh, FFS.]
[…] Even Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the lead Republican negotiator who has worked on the border security package over the past four months, said Monday evening he doesn’t know whether he will vote to proceed to the bill Wednesday. [WTF!?]
Schumer filed a cloture motion Monday setting up a midweek vote on ending dilatory debate on the motion to proceed to the bill.
But the Democratic leader acknowledged Tuesday the bill won’t move forward this week, calling the Senate outlook “gloomy.”
“After months of good faith negotiations, after months of giving Republicans many of the things they asked for, [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell and the Republican conference are ready to kill the national security supplemental package, even with the border provisions they so fervently demanded,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Schumer said he would be willing to delay the first procedural vote on the package until Thursday but expressed doubt that would make any difference in getting enough votes to begin debate and amend it.
“We’ll even offer to delay that vote until some time Thursday to give even more time for senators to make up their minds. But I suspect they won’t accept even that offer because they really don’t want more time. They’re just using it as an excuse,” he said.
[…] Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading Republican voice on immigration and national security issues, said Monday he looked “forward to the amendment process to try to improve the bill.” [Hogwash. Graham is lying.]
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), an important Republican swing vote, has proposed delaying votes on the border security and foreign aid package beyond this week so that senators would have more time to debate and vote on amendments. [More disingenuous delay tactics]
He said he would vote “no” on moving to the bill Wednesday.
[snipped more infuriating excuse-making from Mike Rounds.]
The Senate is scheduled to take a two-week recess beginning on Saturday, which means that if Republicans block the border security and Ukraine funding package this week, they won’t have a chance to return to the bill until the week of Feb. 26.
The IRA attempts to level the playing field for green energy because the oil companies have been given subsidies and favored status for so long that they think fairness is unfair to them.
Republicans in Missouri are looking to pass a bill that would allow naturopaths to be licensed as real “doctors” in the state, even to the point of allowing them to prescribe actual medicine.
An article published Friday in the Missouri Independent tells the deeply sympathetic-sounding story of Emmalyn Pratt, a lady raised in a family of firefighters who went to naturopathy school in hopes of becoming a doctor so that she could heal first responders like those in her family.
That’s part of the reason she decided to study at the Sonoran University of Health Sciences in Arizona to become a naturopathic doctor — or a primary care physician with a focus on holistic care. Pratt’s dream is to open her own practice in her hometown to, in part, help optimize the health of first responders.
But under current state law, Pratt couldn’t establish that practice in Missouri. Unlike Kansas and 22 other states, Missouri does not have licensing or registration laws for naturopathic doctors.
As well they should not.
What is a naturopathic doctor, you ask? Well, first of all it is not a thing. Second of all, it’s a person who prescribes various snake-oil remedies and treatments for fools who think they are being healthy and all-natural.
In states where the practice of naturopathic medicine is regulated, doctors are required to graduate from accredited four-year residential naturopathic medical programs and pass a postdoctoral board examination in order to receive a license or registration.
Technically, that is true. Ish. In reality, while these programs teach some science-based information, the vast majority of their studies are focused on things like acupuncture, homeopathy, cupping, hydrotherapy, vitamin IVs, and other alternative treatments. [All true. And I will add that the naturopathic “schools” are making a lot of money off those gullible students.]
Former naturopath and current naturopath whistleblower Britt Hermes, a graduate of a school in the same network as the one Pratt attended, has written about this “accreditation” before. The fact is, the US Department of Education does not manage accreditation itself, but rather delegates that task to various groups. You know who decides if naturopathy schools are accredited? The Council on Naturopathic Medicine. Very unbiased-sounding organization there!
Because Missouri doesn’t have a licensing program, Pratt could consult with patients, but she couldn’t write prescriptions, order lab tests or many of the other things she’s trained to do.
To be clear, only five of the states that give out licenses to “naturopaths” actually allow them to write prescriptions.
Two Republican lawmakers have proposed legislation to establish that licensing structure in Missouri — state Sen. Nick Schroer of Defiance and Rep. Doug Richey of Excelsior Springs.
Richey said Emmalyn and her father, Kevin Pratt, brought the issue to his attention a couple years ago. He believes the legislation will provide Missourians with more opportunities for quality health care. [More like “more opportunities to be scammed.”]
“As we continue to talk about the need for more access to healthcare in both rural as well as metro contexts, this is an area of medicine that is known to be effective,” [not true] Richey said. “There are other states that have formally recognized it as such.”
In no way is naturopathy “known to be effective” outside of people’s imaginations. [placebo effect perhaps] I will be more than willing to take that back when they do a double-blind test on homeopathic solutions or when someone successfully overdoses on them […]
The article then suggests that licensing naturopaths would help with the physician shortage in the state — which is about as true as saying that someone with a plastic Fisher-Price doctor kit could help with the physician shortage in the state. Although to be fair, your average toddler probably wouldn’t tell someone to put any black salve on a tick bite, recommend a hydrogen peroxide IV treatment, or prescribe anything else that could cause serious harm.
Naturopathic medicine lends to healing, [Dr. Jamila Owens-Todd] said, despite the demographic or socioeconomic boundaries or the severity of the illness.
And it requires extensive training, she said.
Currently, Hudson said there are numerous people using the title “naturopathic doctor” in Missouri who have not gone through the training that would be required under the licensing framework outlined in the bill.
If the bill passes, those who don’t have the required education will no longer be able to use the title.
“That title protection, that’s the utmost importance for the safety of Missouri,” Hudson said, “so that people don’t have to dig or feel confused about what type of practitioner they’re seeing.”
What difference could there possibly be between a doctor prescribing you sugar pills and someone with a four-year degree in sugar pills prescribing you sugar pills? They are all snake-oil salespeople. [Good point!]
The real confusion to be worried about here is people thinking they’re going to see an actual doctor with actual medical training, walking into their office and seeing the ”doctor” bust out the crystals and calipers.
It’s true that we need more doctors, but we need more actual doctors, not quacks. If that’s the case, why not just bring back barber surgeons so that people can get a perm and an appendix removal at the same appointment? Multi-tasking!
The ability to prescribe actual medicine is particularly dangerous. While you may assume that naturopaths shun regular medicine, that’s not always the case — and there is certainly a tendency to abuse IV antibiotics to treat “chronic Lyme disease.” Chronic Lyme disease is distinct from Lyme disease, untreated Lyme disease and post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome in that it is usually self-diagnosed, does not have any specific symptoms and does not require proof of a current or previous Borealis bacteria infection. Overuse of antibiotics can cause someone to build up a tolerance, rendering them ineffective when later needed — so you really don’t want to take a whole bunch in general, but especially not when you don’t have an actual bacterial infection.
Also dangerous? Naturopaths have a strong tendency to oppose vaccines, which is likely why Republicans love them so much all of a sudden.
Part of the problem with bills like this is that each time one of the schools is “accredited” or a state passes a law allowing naturopaths to call themselves doctors or prescribe medicine, it seems increasingly legitimate, despite there being absolutely no evidence, anywhere, that any of it does jack shit.
This isn’t just about letting people believe what they want if it’s not harming anyone. It is one thing for someone who sincerely believes that water has a memory to go and take homeopathic cold pills, it’s another when someone is not well-informed on the subject and thinks they’re getting regular, effective pills from a regular doctor. It would be even worse if the “doctor” prescribing crystals and snake oil and black salve is the only doctor in their area.
Hopefully these bills will fail, but in the meantime we should actually get on repealing these statutes in the states that currently have them.
A lot of potential for harm if state legislators give quacks a license to write prescriptions.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 400–I think it’s about time I came off my break.
“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
Obviously Mr. Rosenberg has very little contact with conservatives our he’d know that their “logic,” such as it is, revolves around freedom and individual liberty. And to these “libertarian’ knuckle-draggers, losing the ability to do whatever they want is far, far worse than any of the environmentalist threats that they think are communist-created hoaxes designed to trick us into submitting to them. Also, as others have pointed out, it’s easy to not give a damn about a world you’ve been convinced that the world is broken and evil, deserves to be destroyed, and that a new, better world awaits everyone who does what the child-molesting grifters wearing a clergy collar and clutching a Bible says.
Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik posted a tweet, boasting, “House Republicans have already passed HR2 — the Secure Our Border Act, which would actually secure the border.”
That’s a bogus argument. The earlier “Secure Our Border Act” was not a serious bill. See the comments below.
The Washington Post:
Efforts to fix immigration, apparently, must run on gasoline. That’s the opinion of House Republicans, anyway, whose attempt at addressing the border crisis … specifies that “no funds are authorized to be appropriated for electric vehicles.” The bill doesn’t, in fact, offer funds for anything that might stop immigration. Instead, it demands that the Department of Homeland Security ensure border agents get adequate religious counseling. While it doesn’t require the Border Patrol to be staffed entirely with anti-vaxxers, it does require DHS to “make every effort to retain Department employees who are not vaccinated against COVID-19.”
Commentary:
[…] The “Secure Our Border Act” was most certainly a messaging bill. It was plainly obvious when it reached the House floor early last year that it was not a serious attempt at federal policymaking; it was a way for the new Republican majority to pound its chest.
For GOP leaders, nearly a year later, to suggest “America’s sovereignty” is dependent on the Senate taking up their unserious proposal is foolish. H.R. 2 was not, is not, a real bill, even if Republicans now prefer to pretend otherwise.
Nikki Haley has applied for Secret Service protection. The Wall Street Journal reported that she made the appeal because she’s facing “increasing threats.” Those threats are coming from MAGA Republicans. While the threats increase, Trump continues to stoke animus against Haley.
The day after the bipartisan compromise on border policy and security aid was unveiled, one Republican after another lined up to announce their opposition. A few hours ago, they were joined by Sen. John Barrasso — the No. 3 Republican in the chamber, and the highest-ranking GOP leader to reject the legislative deal.
“Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis,” the Wyoming senator said in a written statement.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan made a similar comment during an appearance on Fox Business:
Let’s say ‘timeout’ and then let the American people decide how we want to deal with this in November, when we have President Trump … against President Biden. Let the country decide.
In other words, as far as the Ohio Republican is concerned, Congress shouldn’t just reject the bipartisan compromise, Jordan believes lawmakers should take a timeout for the remainder of the legislative session, ceasing all work on matters related to immigration and border policy.
It’s a perspective rooted in the idea that voters will decide the future of the policy. If Americans want the conservative approach embraced by President Joe Biden, they can re-elect him. If the electorate wants an even more far-right policy, people can back the likely GOP nominee.
I imagine some might find this solution reasonable. It is not.
First, even if Americans re-elect the Democratic incumbent, recent history suggests folks like Jordan won’t accept the legitimacy of the outcome. It’s one thing to say, “Let the country decide”; it’s something else to honor the results after the country has already decided.
Second, Republicans really need to make up their minds about the urgency of the matter at hand. They can say conditions at the border are an ongoing crisis in need of immediate attention, or they can say the country can afford to take an 11-month timeout during which time the problem will fester. But to make both assertions simultaneously is ridiculous.
Finally, while “let the American people decide” might have some superficial appeal, let’s not forget the inconvenient fact that that the American people already decided. They elected a president, 100 senators, and 435 representatives. Voters made these choices in free and fair elections, with the expectation that those who govern in their name would actually try to act in the nation’s interests.
No one voted with the assumption that lawmakers would effectively take an election year off.
To hear Jordan tell it, the responsible course of action is for elected lawmakers to simply stop working, roughly halfway through the current Congress, on an issue that he and his party believe is critically important. […]
New Hampshire’s Attorney General on Tuesday named a Texas telecom company as the source of an apparently AI-generated robocall impersonating President Joe Biden that told Democrats not to vote in last month’s presidential primary.
At a news conference in Concord, John Formella, a Republican, said his office has opened a criminal investigation after it worked with the Federal Communications Commission and a private industry group to trace the source of robocalls.
NBC News was the first to report that the calls had been made to voters ahead of the January primary vote.
With artificial intelligence technology becoming more accessible, Formella said he and other law enforcement agencies want to make an example of the case to deter others from trying something similar ahead of the November election.
“We have never seen something so close to an election before and with such a blatant attempt to mislead voters,” Formella said of AI robocalls. “We don’t want this to be the first of many.”
The calls could violate New Hampshire election laws against voter suppression, in addition to federal telecom statutes, he said, adding that law enforcement is actively pursuing both civil and criminal actions against the companies allegedly behind the calls.
[…] The call urged Democrats to “save your vote” until the November general election, giving a false impression that voters could only vote once. […]
Investigators traced the source of the call to Life Corp., a Texas telecom marketing company, Formella said, adding that it appeared to be owned by a man named Walter Monk. […]
Formella’s office sent Life Corp. a cease and desist letter on Tuesday, ordering the company to stop “any further conduct” that could be voter suppression under state law.
Limited information is readily available online about Monk or Life Corp., and the company does not appear to have a website. On LinkedIn, Walter Monk lists himself as a Dallas-based entrepreneur and the owner or chief technology officer of two other communications companies.
[…] In 2003, the FCC issued an official citation to Life Corp. and more than a dozen alias company names for making “prerecorded unsolicited advertisements to residential telephone lines” in violation of federal telecom law.
[…] Formella cited another company, Lingo Telecom, also of Texas, as involved in the robocalls, […] but declined to go into detail about their connection to calls.
[…] Formella said his office received “multiple complaints” and is working on the case with the FCC, an anti-robocall coalition of all 50 state attorneys general, and a telecom industry trade group that conducts call traces for law enforcement and others.
“Our message is clear,” Formella said, “Law enforcement across the country is unified on a bi-partisan basis and ready to work together to combat any attempt to undermine our elections. We are committed to keeping our elections free, fair and secure.”
With AI a growing concern not just in politics, the FCC last month moved to criminalize most AI-generated robocalls.
“Don’t try it,” Formella said. “If you do … the consequences for your actions are severe.”
Convoy riders came, in underwhelming numbers, and accomplished little beyond showing everyone how tragically gullible they are. That’s MAGA in a nutshell: loud and, in the end, impotent.
It’s time for non-brainwashed Americans and the media at large to accept something: Former President Donald Trump’s “MAGA movement” is a tissue-paper tiger.
This was on vivid display in Texas over the weekend. A much-ballyhooed convoy of MAGA patriots descended on a town near the southern border, ostensibly ready to protect America from what right-wing politicians like Gov. Greg Abbott cynically, dangerously and falsely call “an invasion.”
The “God’s Army” convoy was supposed to be a mighty force of 700,000 or more people from every corner of America. It wound up being maybe a couple hundred vehicles parked at a rural ranch in Quemado, Texas – basically a Trump rally without a Trump, but with plenty of hucksters selling MAGA merch and grifting the easily grifted.
[…] Some actually visited the border in nearby Eagle Pass, Texas, and were surprised to not witness the invasion they had been promised.
[…] “We are constantly being told that we’re being invaded, and that never felt true until today, when the convoy came to town in anticipation of the governors’ event,” Jessie F. Fuentes told WOAI NBC News Channel 4. “This is political theater by outsiders. The reality is that it has brought dangerous, violent groups into our beautiful, peaceful city. Eagle Pass is safer than most cities in America if you look at crime statistics. This is just a fact. We don’t appreciate these staged events that dramatically misrepresent our reality on the border and that invite extremist groups that pose a real danger to people in our community.” […]
@412:
With artificial intelligence technology becoming more accessible, Formella said he and other law enforcement agencies want to make an example of the case to deter others from trying something similar ahead of the November election…
“Don’t try it,” Formella said. “If you do … the consequences for your actions are severe.”
You want to deter people? Then quit with the C&D letters and the fines. PUT SOMEONE IN JAIL.
Perhaps in the hope of competing with some of the acclaim President Joe Biden received for showing solidarity with striking UAW members, Donald Trump staged a rally with fake auto worker union members, only to be exposed when local reporters talked to attendees who were not union members or not even auto workers. Rachel Maddow reports on new campaign finance filings that show Trump paid $20,000 to the nonunion auto parts plant he used to stage the event.
Rachel Maddow looks at the range of disarray in the Republican Party, from state parties with no leadership to poor election outcomes since 2016 and notes new signs from Donald Trump that he is considering replacing RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel. But if one part in a two-party democracy dissolves itself, what is left?
These are parts of the same segment, which was about 20 minutes long. She’s on one night a week and for some reason whoever’s responsible for putting these clips on YT just posts tiny clips or breaks them up like this. It’s annoying.
Also, I was reminded of it when reading Lynna’s #271 above – those “Union Members for Trump” and “Auto Workers for Trump” signs were hilarious. It’s the equivalent of people at a game with t-shirts saying like “Chicago Sports Team.”
A Michigan jury found the mother of convicted school shooter Ethan Crumbley guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of four students at Oxford High School in 2021.
[…] School officials raised concerns about a drawing the teenage gunman included on a math assignment, which depicted a gun pointing at the words “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” When school staff asked the parents to take their son home for the day and seek counseling for him, the parents declined to do so.
Crumbley was sent back to class later that day on Nov. 30, 2021, where he had a the handgun hidden in his backpack. He shot 10 students and one teacher, killing four of the students. His backpack was not searched.
[…] McDonald alleged Jennifer Crumbley knew the drawing of the gun was identical to the firearm they had at home.
“She knew it wasn’t stored properly,” the prosecutor said. “She knew that he was proficient with the gun. She knew he had access to ammunition.”
The parents, including father James Crumbley, were also accused of ignoring their son’s mental health needs.
“I have zero help for my mental problems and it’s causing me to shoot up the … school,” Ethan wrote in a journal found in his backpack.
[…] Jennifer Crumbley, 45, and James Crumbley, 47, are the first parents in the United States to be charged in a school shooting committed by their child.
They have both been in jail for more than two years as they were unable to pay the $500,000 bond. James Crumbley’s separate trial on his charges will be in March.
Ethan Crumbley, now 17, received multiple life sentences without parole in December. He had pleaded guilty to all charges.
Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) unveiled a resolution Tuesday that declares former President Trump “did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
The resolution — which spans one page and has more than 60 GOP co-sponsors — comes as groups across the country try to disqualify Trump from appearing on their 2024 presidential election ballots on claims that he engaged in an insurrection during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
[…] The resolution, which is nonbinding, would declare that it is “the sense of the House of Representatives” that Trump “did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
[…] Gaetz said he has not received any assurances from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) or GOP leadership that they will bring the resolution to the floor for a vote, but he alluded to the Louisiana Republican’s closeness to Trump.
“I sat next to him for seven years on the Judiciary Committee, though, so I’m pretty sure as to where he stands,” Gaetz said.
The Florida Republican also noted that he has spoken with Trump about the effort, who was “thrilled that so many members had signed on.” […]
Did you ever see a car advertisement that you thought was so ridiculously irresponsible it should be banned? Well, the people at Adfree Cities, an advocacy group based in the United Kingdom, did, and they decided to do something about it. They went up against Toyota over an ad for the Toyota Hilux SUV that shows drivers ripping through sensitive natural areas and cities—and they won, getting the ad taken off the airwaves and the streets. We talked with two members of the organization, Veronica Wignall and James Ward, about how they’re tackling the auto industry’s most egregious marketing campaigns, as well as their larger mission to create “happier, healthier cities free from the pressures of corporate outdoor advertising.”
Just a few weeks ago, Chris and his family visited the Big Island of Hawaii. While there, he was completely enthralled with learning more about how the first inhabitants got to such a remote place and surrounding areas. For more than a thousand years, Polynesians have called some of the most distant islands in the Pacific Ocean home. Where did they come from, how did they get there and how did a group of people conquer the largest ocean in the world a thousand years ago? It’s one of the greatest mysteries ever. Our guest this week, who has familial roots to the area, set out to understand more. Christina Thompson is editor of Harvard Review and author of “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” She joins WITHpod to discuss what drew her to this story, what makes this mystery so complex, the impact of the arrival of European explorers, the limits of our understanding and more.
[…]
“[…] all indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor,” Mr. Biden said. “Why? A simple reason. Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks this is bad for him politically.” The president added: “He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it” and has leaned on Republicans to block it. “It looks like they’re caving. Frankly, they owe it to the American people to show some spine and do what they know to be right.”
[President] Biden also said that history would judge Republicans if they abandon Ukraine during its war against President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. “We can’t walk away now,” he said. “That’s what Putin’s betting on. Supporting this bill is standing up to Putin. Opposing this bill is playing into his hands.”
He vowed to try to punish Republicans at the polls if they block the measure. “If this bill fails, I want to be absolutely clear about something,” Mr. Biden said. “The American people are going to know why it failed. I’ll be taking this issue to the country.”
Here are other key points:
[…] The legislation would also allocate almost $20 billion for more Border Patrol agents, asylum processors and immigration judges.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said his chamber would vote this week on an alternative bill that provides funding only for Israel. In a statement on Monday, the Biden administration called Mr. Johnson’s proposal a “cynical political maneuver” designed to erode support for the broader measure and threatened to veto it if it passes.
[…] Mr. Trump […] is expected to make border security a central part of his campaign for a second term in the White House.
President Biden referenced that opposing the bill would deny military assistance to Israel and humanitarian aid to Palestinian people, who he emphasized were “really suffering and desperately need help.” Biden has faced pressure — and protests — to acknowledge that there are two crises in the Israel-Hamas war, and it was striking to see him do it here.
Biden says he’s not going to go for a standalone Israel bill at this moment, instead of the full supplemental bill, which also addresses Ukraine, threats to the Indo-Pacific, border enforcement, and humanitarian assistance for civilians in global crises. […]
A 44-year-old man faces up to four years in federal prison after he flew a drone over a National Football League game in Baltimore, federal prosecutors said on Monday.
Matthew Hebert, from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, flew his drone over the M&T Bank Stadium on January 28, as the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs faced off for the AFC Championship, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Hebert flew the drone at around 330 feet for about two minutes, and took at least six photos of himself and the stadium, prosecutors said.
“During the game on January 28, 2024, the incursion of an unidentified and unapproved drone was deemed a serious enough threat that NFL Security temporarily suspended the game,” the statement said…
Dillon Dix was excited to compete this year in Starbucks’ North America Barista Championship, a company-wide contest in which the winner would receive a paid trip to Starbucks’ coffee farm in Costa Rica. But he found some disappointing news in the fine print about the contest: Unionized Starbucks stores are not eligible to participate…
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said Tuesday he had secured an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that he plans to publish in the near future.
The sit-down will mark the first time a member of the Western media will interview Putin since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine that sparked the ongoing war between the two countries…
A U.S. scientific publisher has retracted two studies, largely due to their methodology, that a Texas judge cited last year in his ruling suspending federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone in response to a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors and medical associations.
The retraction Monday by Sage Publications came less than two months before the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear an appeal by President Joe Biden’s administration in that case. Mifepristone, the first in a two-pill regimen for medication abortion, remains available while the appeal is pending.
The lead author of the studies, public health researcher James Studnicki, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Studnicki, a vice president at the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, previously told conservative publication The Daily Wire that the retractions of the studies published in 2021 and 2022 were “completely unjustified.” …
Sage said in its retraction notice that it had independent experts look at the two studies, as well as a third study led by Studnicki, in response to a reader’s concern.
The experts found “fundamental problems” that “invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part,” according to Sage, which publishes more than 1,000 journals including Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, where the retracted articles appeared.
The publisher also said that the authors’ affiliations with the Charlotte Lozier Institute and other anti-abortion organizations should have been disclosed as a conflict of interest, and that one of the original peer reviewers was also affiliated with the institute…
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has described Starbucks’s anti-union campaign as “the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country.”
AT&T’s application to end its landline phone obligations in California is drawing protest from residents as state officials consider whether to let AT&T off the hook.
AT&T filed an application to end its Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation in March 2023. The first of several public hearings on the application is being held today by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is considering AT&T’s request. An evidentiary hearing has been scheduled for April, and a proposed decision is expected in September…
Akira MacKenziesays
@428
I betcha they want their buggy whips back too.
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #428…
I have a POTS line. I think AT&T wants to convert everything to VOIP. That gets rid of the major safety consideration in having a POTS line in Earthquake Country. POTS tends to still work after a ‘quake (being dependent on power in the CO–which has pretty reliable backup power systems)), while VOIP will probably only work if you have power where you are (which probably won’t have backup power, or not for very long if you do have backup).
Whheydt @ 430
With deregulations and privatisations I am becoming conservative in the original sense of the word- changes are too likely to be negative!
whheydtsays
Re: birgerjohansson @ #432…
An conservatism I’ve developed is by being old (Charles III only has 5 months on me) and cynical.
“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
Obviously Mr. Rosenberg has very little contact with conservatives our he’d know that their “logic,” such as it is, revolves around freedom and individual liberty. And to these “libertarian’ knuckle-draggers, losing the ability to do whatever they want is far, far worse than any of the environmentalist threats that they think are communist-created hoaxes designed to trick us into submitting to them.
Well, I think there are several parties involved here: the fossil fuels corporations and the industry they comprise; the people who lead the corporations and the industry; Trump, his apparatchiks, the Republican Party, and corporate/industry propagandists; and Trump supporters.
The corporations and the industry don’t necessarily have an interest in destruction, but they’re inherently destructive (including self-destructive in the long term) because they’re part of the capitalist system. Trump, for different reasons, does want to “destroy everything” (not just any particular thing – everything) and couldn’t care less about anyone else’s fate. For every other party listed (other than those people who share Trump’s destructive impulses), supporting these actions and policies would be incredibly stupid and self-destructive and not in anyone’s real interest, whether they recognize it or not. It’s in humanity’s interest to limit the freedom of and ultimately to destroy or at least drastically reduce these corporations and this industry. It’s also in humanity’s interest to stop Trump and his movement.
It is about freedom for the corporations and the industry, which of course have no right to any freedom or even to existence. Trump, his apparatchiks, Republican politicians, and corporate propagandists are remarkably open – including in the article at the link – about their actions being in support of the freedom of corporations and industry to do what they want. Trump’s supporters, because our culture is so fucked up, are so identified with the interests of the industry that they’re stupidly acting to maintain the status quo and to further the freedom of the corporations and the industry to do whatever they want. This necessarily entails the reduction of their own freedom, the weakening of their collective power, and the further entrenching of the power of the industry over them. (It’s hard to think of anything Trump supporters claim as an individual freedom in this context that isn’t exactly what the corporations and the industry want them to do and have spent vast sums to convince them to want to do.) But they’re manipulated and their view of reality is clouded by propaganda and so they don’t recognize that they’re corporate stooges. You might even say they’ve been tricked into submitting to them.
Three Republicans — Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher and California Rep. Tom McClintock — joined the Democrats in voting against the resolution to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
GOP Rep. Blake Moore joined the no side to allow House Republicans to bring up the vote again.
The House GOP also has three vacancies after the departures of Kevin McCarthy and Bill Johnson, and the expulsion of George Santos.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise was not present for the vote, as he is still recovering in Louisiana from a stem cell transplant.
The separation of powers doctrine, as expounded in Marbury and its progeny, necessarily permits the Judiciary to oversee the federal criminal prosecution of a former President for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former President has allegedly acted in defiance of the Congress’s laws. Although certain discretionary actions may be insulated from judicial review, the structure of the Constitution mandates that the President is “amenable to the laws for his conduct” and “cannot at his discretion” violate them. Marbury, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) at 166. Here, former President Trump’s actions allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws, meaning those acts were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion; accordingly, Marbury and its progeny provide him no structural immunity from the charges in the Indictment.
When called upon to weigh in by Trump, the Supreme Court will have three likely options. First, it can deny the stay and refuse to take up the case. And it should. To grant a stay at this juncture, the court must decide that Trump has a significant shot at success on the merits. But he doesn’t, and it’s not even close, as the D.C. Circuit has shown. So granting a stay would require distortion of the usual rules to make a special accommodation for Trump only, a terrible look for a court already thrust into the vortex of politics.
And yet, there are good reasons to believe that many justices will feel that a lower court should not have the last word on this matter, and that the highest court in the land should step in with definitive resolution. This case is, after all, both a neutron bomb launched into a presidential election and a consequential assault on settled principles around the limits of the separation of powers. So the court’s second option is to grant a stay; take up the case on an expedited basis, as it did with the ballot disqualification dispute; hear arguments soon; and hand down a decision by June. Even this quick timeline, though, could make it very difficult for Chutkan to hold a trial before November. After all, the Justice Department has an unwritten rule not to take any action within 60 days of an election that could affect the election outcome. This trial could take at least two to three months, bringing the proceedings perilously close to Election Day.
Third, the court could summarily affirm, issuing a one-line decision that simply says the D.C. Circuit got it right, without holding oral arguments. If the court does want to issue the last word here, though, it seems unlikely to do so without lengthier consideration and explanation. It seems, as professor Steve Vladeck has noted, that the justices must either go all the way in or stay all the way out in this instance.
We are thus reduced to counting votes, as we did in the run-up to arguments in Bush v. Gore, and also to counting minutes, as we did after arguments in Bush v. Gore. Taking up a case requires four votes. Granting a stay requires five votes. Summary affirmance requires six votes (though in rare circumstances, the court will issue one with only five votes). If we assume the liberal justices want to deny a stay and rid themselves of this case fast, the case likely comes down to Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and perhaps Neil Gorsuch. Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife attended the rally that preceded and egged on the insurrection, and he, along with Justice Samuel Alito, has frequently voted to shield Trump from scrutiny. Thus, the less extreme conservatives hold the former president’s fate in their hands.
[…]
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi today as part of his trip to the Middle East to promote the framework of a hostage release and cease-fire deal. He is also set to meet with several Qatari ministers. Yesterday, he discussed an ‘enduring end’ to the war in Gaza with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
NBC News:
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told media today that officials received the first response from Hamas regarding a hostage deal framework and it indicated the group is open to negotiations.
NBC News:
For decades the United States has pushed a two-state solution to the conflict in the Middle East but not formally recognized an independent Palestinian state. That may be about to change.
The IRS is poised to take in hundreds of billions of dollars more in overdue and unpaid taxes than previously anticipated, according to new analysis released Tuesday by the Treasury Department and the IRS. Tax revenues are expected to rise by as much as $561 billion from 2024 to 2034, thanks to stepped-up enforcement made possible with money from the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August 2022.
Stronger and more destructive hurricanes fueled by climate change may require a rethinking of how storms are classified, according to a new study that suggests adding a Category 6 for ranking them to better convey damaging wind speeds.
A Tennessee man was arrested on gun charges late last week after the FBI alleged that he was scheming to violently attack immigrants and Border Patrol agents at the southern border.
While the man, Paul Faye of Montgomery County, Tennessee, had allegedly been plotting a potential attack for the past year, he was spurred on by talk of an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the FBI — the very rhetoric Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been using publicly to justify his standoff with the federal government there.
The arrest was first reported by a senior researcher at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, Seamus Hughes. […] here are some top lines:
– Faye was arrested and charged with possession of an unregistered silencer, which was attached to a Creedmoor rifle.
– The FBI first became aware of Faye after its indictment last March of a man named Brian Perry, a Tennessee militia member who was plotting to “go to war with border patrol” and kill immigrants at the border. Faye had been in “extensive” communication with Perry, according to an FBI affidavit.
– Faye was arrested after he revealed to, unbeknownst to him, an undercover FBI agent that he hoped to recruit militia members in Kentucky, Georgia and Tennessee to go along with his attack plan. He also allegedly told the FBI employee he’d been in communication with the North Carolina Patriot Party, a group the affidavit describes as a militia group.
– Faye believed that the U.S. was being “invaded” by migrants, that the federal government was “training to take on its citizens” and that the Biden administration was letting undocumented immigrants into the country “to help the government” oppress citizens. He planned to travel to the border on Jan. 20, according to what he told an undercover agent over the course of in-person meetings and phone communications.
– He hoped his attack would be just the beginning: He told the undercover FBI employee that he wanted to “stir up the hornet’s nest,” and inspire others. “What’s going to happen. What I hope happens. Is called a domino effect,” he said, according to court documents.
The arrest happened in the hours leading up to what was billed as a planned, mass citizen standoff across three U.S.-Mexico border towns, where, according to some right-wing influencers, hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters, part of “God’s Army,” planned to show up in force and stage a protest against the supposed “invasion” at the border. In reality, only a few hundred members of “God’s Army” showed up at the three planned locations for the event, Eagle Pass, Texas, Yuma, Arizona, and San Ysidro, California.
[…] a much-hyped dud. […] The events were planned by a man named Robert Agee, who is affiliated with Mike Flynn’s grifty “ReAwaken Tour,” and, according to Vice, speeches delivered at the various locations were reportedly “a soup of grievances, anti-government conspiracies, and dehumanizing language about migrants.” The activities undertaken by the smaller-than-expected group of demonstrators reportedly had a Christian nationalist bent, and some of those gathered were even baptized.
[…] Local and national news outlets alike described the planned gathering as primarily a MAGA grifting opportunity for those in the biz and an eye-opening experience for the true believers buying Abbott’s, Trump’s and other Republicans’ rhetoric about the “crisis” at the border. […]
It’s hard to understand how Elon Musk can be the CEO of two companies when he seems to spend all his time on X (formerly Twitter) boosting right-wing lies and acting out because his transgender daughter wants nothing to do with him. In the past day, Musk posted about migrants allegedly causing violence (twice), about how Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deserves to be impeached (twice), about how the border bill is unnecessary (three times), and about how there is a conspiracy to turn kids trans (three times).
He also posted a video claiming that using TikTok leads to the deaths of children … after it first convinces them to be trans. In between all this and a day of attacking the border security bill, Musk did slip in a tweet promoting his Starlink satellite internet service. So he’ll probably ask for a raise.
All this stuff has been left up, no matter how mean-spirited and simply wrong it is. But there is one Musk tweet that goes extra hard at supporting MAGA and Donald Trump—the one where he endorses every false claim about voting fraud. [Available at the link]
Musk’s claim that there’s a pipeline allowing illegal immigrants to vote without ever having to get their IDs checked is wrong at every point.
Driver’s licenses and other IDs don’t allow noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Yes, some states do allow citizens to automatically register to vote when they get a driver’s license, but the process for migrants to get a license is different, sometimes taking years, according to VERIFY, a fact-checking outlet. Migrants seeking a driver’s license have to provide a foreign birth certificate, foreign passport, or a consular card and are not registered to vote, even in states where this is automatic for citizens.
This has always been the case. For example, Massachusetts is one of the states that automatically registers voters. However, as the Associated Press reported in 2022:
The law passed by Massachusetts state lawmakers this summer prohibits immigrants without legal permission to reside in the U.S. from being automatically registered to vote. The law specifically mandates that the state Registrar of Motor Vehicles develop procedures and regulations to ensure that license applicants who are not citizens are not automatically registered to vote.
In his tweet, Musk also claims that votes cast by undocumented migrants are collected by “ballot harvesters”—a claim straight out of the “2000 Mules” school of voter fraud conspiracy theory. However, this is also a lie. As Reuters reports, there is no evidence of widespread “ballot harvesting” or anything similar. However, ballot collection—in which one person drops off ballots for a number of others—is critical to making voting possible in some areas, such as Native American tribal lands. Which is exactly why Republicans want to make the practice illegal.
It’s good to see that Musk is getting a lot of use out of his $44 billion purchase. On the other hand, with a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl running about $7 million, Musk might have gotten his MAGA talking points out a lot more cheaply by just buying up some time.
In fact, what Musk spent on Twitter would be enough to buy every ad slot on every Super Bowl for the next 63 years. Think of all the acting work that could have been generated for superstars like Kid Rock and Chachi.
There’s no reason that still can’t happen. Musk can always blow through another few billion. And it’s not like he doesn’t have time to handle this. [Elon Musk’s pinned tweet is a racist conspiracy theory]
“New analysis reveals many excess deaths attributed to natural causes are actually uncounted COVID-19 deaths”
The unnecessary deaths were even more numerous… thousands could have lived happily for many more years if not for conspiracy nuts and idiot politicians.
I recall Eli Bosnick from GAM suggested setting up a GoFundMe to pay anyone who kills Andrew Wakefield, the original anti-vaxxer (I approve, but it would have to be done in the jurisdiction of some extremely libertarian place).
The Russian government has a message for its citizens living in exile: nowhere is safe for you. For years, it’s made this threat clear by subjecting its critics abroad to intimidation, forced repatriation, and assassination attempts. And just as the Kremlin has taken increasingly draconian measures to silence dissent at home since launching the full-scale war in Ukraine, it’s also devised new tactics for targeting activists, journalists, and politicians far beyond its borders. For insight into how Moscow’s approach to transnational repression has changed over the last two years, The Naked Pravda turned to journalist and activist Dan Storyev, who serves as the managing editor of OVD-Info’s English-language edition, and Yana Gorokhovskaia, the research director for strategy and design at Freedom House.
This has really been going on, with only brief interruptions, for a century.
Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb believes he has new evidence of alien spacecraft.
Last June, he recovered small magnetic spherules from the Pacific Ocean and claims that the small, round objects were from a “watermelon”-sized object that collided with Earth in 2014 — in other words, a piece of alien-built technology.
“It raises the possibility that it may have been a voyager-like meteor, artificially made by another civilization,” Loeb said on GBH’s Boston Public Radio Monday.
He first put out a preprint with his findings last summer. Since then, several researchers unrelated to the expedition have pushed back on his analysis. One October 2023 paper deemed the spherules were made by human-produced coal ash.
Loeb put out new findings last week that he claims debunk that theory.
“What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash to those special spherules that we found,” he said. “And it’s clearly very different.” …
Because it’s inconceivable that there is any variation in the constitution of coal ash.
A Democratic lawmaker from Texas left the hospital briefly to cast a crucial vote against the impeachment of the homeland security secretary.
Al Green surprised the House floor by entering the chamber being pushed on a wheelchair and wearing hospital scrubs.
The 76-year-old’s trip from the emergency room where he was having abdominal surgery was decisive.
House Republicans ultimately failed to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas with the final tally at 216-214. ..
birgerjohanssonsays
It is interesting to compare the tenacity of Al Green with the no-show of the hundred thousand people expected to drive in a convoy to the Texas-Mexico border…
And the heroes waving tiki torches only to be upset when they were outed as nazis. Help, help, I’m being oppressed!
birgerjohanssonsays
The difference between Avi Loeb and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl is, both had crackpot theories but Heyerdahl was entertaining, even putting himself in jeopardy to make a point.
“This study documents the deadliness of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of public health interventions,” said Kristin Urquiza, who cofounded Marked By COVID, the justice and remembrance movement led by COVID grievers, after losing her father to COVID. “The least we can do to honor those who died is to accurately account for what happened.”
(I imagine Lynna’s not going to like the Bosnick bit.)
A security officer who worked as a contractor for the U.S. State Department was arrested on federal charges on Tuesday in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, an arrest warrant showed.
Kevin Michael Alstrup was arrested in Washington on charges of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building, according to the warrant…
Ronna McDaniel is expected to step down from her role as Republican National Committee chair this spring, according to a Republican operative familiar with her thinking. [She has now offered to resign.]
That Republican operative, however, added that the situation around McDaniel remains “fluid.”
McDaniel met with Trump on Monday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, amid growing questions about her future at the organization. Trump in recent days said he expects “changes” at the RNC, leading to widespread speculation that, as the Republican Party’s likely nominee, he will push for a shakeup in the committee’s leadership.
…
The former president in recent months has criticized the RNC for its decision to hold primary debates, which he refused to appear in,… Trump allies, meanwhile, have raised concerns about the RNC’s fundraising. The committee has less than half the amount in cash on hand as the Democratic National Committee.
Trump sidestepped the matter of how long McDaniel would stay on as chair in a Truth Social post following their meeting, saying that “Ronna is now Head of the RNC, and I’ll be making a decision the day after the South Carolina Primary as to my recommendations for RNC Growth.”
…
Should McDaniel step aside, her successor would need to win a majority of support from the committee’s 168 members. Trump would likely have a major say over who succeeds her. The former president would conceivably endorse a candidate, who would then need to win the support of a majority of the committee’s 168 members in an election. [IIRC this is a secret ballot, but on the other hand I don’t know who would run to oppose Trump’s handpicked enforcer.]
During the meeting with Trump and McDaniel, the former president mentioned North Carolina Republican committee member Michael Whatley as a potential replacement, according to the Republican operative and another person familiar with their conversation.
Another likely contender, Drew McKissick, the RNC co-chair and the South Carolina Republican Party chair, called Trump yesterday and told Trump he wanted the job, according to the Republican operative and two additional people familiar with their conversation.
Trump could make further changes to the committee, such as putting one of his campaign lieutenants at the RNC and ensuring they have operational control. [More thuggery.]
During an interview with Newmax on Monday night, Trump was asked if he thinks McDaniel should step aside.
“Well, I think she knows that. I think she understands that,” Trump said.
The sham caucus in Nevada is just a small indication of what Trump wants, which is a full takeover of the party (and its money) and functionally for the primaries to be ended and for himself to be anointed the Republican candidate. Every day that there’s any open democratic opposition to him within the party fuels his rage.
I can’t even imagine what an authoritarian nightmare (and utter shitshow) the Republican convention is going to be this year. It’s going to look like a dictatorship in miniature.
I recall Eli Bosnick from GAM suggested setting up a GoFundMe to pay anyone who kills Andrew Wakefield, the original anti-vaxxer (I approve, but it would have to be done in the jurisdiction of some extremely libertarian place).
On this thread we do not condone, promote or joke about killing people.
The odds of Democrats presenting Republicans with a comparable opportunity again on immigration and border policies are roughly zero.
As Senate negotiators prepared to unveil their compromise package on border reforms and security aid, Sen. Lindsey Graham warned his GOP colleagues […] “To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t,” the South Carolina Republican told reporters.
[…] The GOP doesn’t care about governing, and Republicans are directly responsible for not trying to address challenges at the border.
[…] Republicans have never before received an offer this good on one of their own priorities, and the opportunity is likely gone forever.
The Washington Post’s editorial board published a piece along these lines on Monday, under a headline that read, “Republicans will never get another border security deal this good.”
The Republican Party should take yes for an answer. By torpedoing the Senate’s bipartisan immigration deal, under pressure from former president Donald Trump to preserve his election-year advantage on a wedge issue, congressional Republicans would blow an opportunity to reduce undocumented immigration and curtail mass crossings at the southern border — along with save Ukraine before it runs out of ammunition.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which tends to be closely aligned with Republican politics, published a similar piece, which concluded, “If Republicans pass up this rare chance at border reform, they may not get a better one.”
Consider this from a Democratic perspective. GOP leaders said they’d make it easier for Russia to take part of Eastern Europe by force unless Democrats agreed to a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s border policies. Democrats, convinced that they had no choice, not only agreed to negotiate for months, they also gave up on the one thing they wanted in an immigration deal, and then grudgingly endorsed the most conservative reform package in decades.
At that point, Republicans then rejected the deal they asked for. The odds of Democrats presenting the GOP with a comparable opportunity again are roughly zero.
Making matters worse, Republican Sen. James Lankford invested a considerable amount of time, effort, and political capital into this endeavor. For his trouble, the Oklahoman discovered that his own ostensible allies subjected his bill to a misinformation campaign for petty and unserious reasons.
Will any GOP policymaker ever again volunteer to work on a bipartisan immigration deal? After Republicans have rejected four bipartisan offers in two decades? I rather doubt it. [Same here!]
[…] Republicans have killed a bipartisan compromise they said they wanted again.
McCain-Kennedy: After the 2004 elections, a bipartisan pair of longtime senators — Republican John McCain and Democrat Ted Kennedy — began work on a bipartisan immigration compromise. A version of their bill passed the Senate with strong Democratic support in 2006, before being rejected by House Republicans.
Gang of Eight: After the 2012 elections, an octet of senators — four Democrats and four Republicans — began work on another bipartisan immigration compromise. A version of their bill passed the Senate with strong Democratic support in 2013, before being rejected by House Republicans.
Trump Era: In 2018 and 2019, a variety of bipartisan compromises on immigration policy took shape on Capitol Hill, including one crafted by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin. The measures received strong Democratic support, before being rejected by Donald Trump and his White House team.
Lankford/Murphy/Sinema: As part of a radical hostage strategy, Republicans told Democrats to embrace a bipartisan compromise on immigration and border policy or the GOP would make it easier for Russia to take part of Eastern Europe by force. The resulting deal received strong Democratic support, before being rejected by Republicans in both chambers.
This last one is easily the most ridiculous. The first three of these four efforts had something important in common: Democrats agreed to tougher border security, while Republicans agreed to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrant families already in the United States. But in this year’s effort, Democrats abandoned their own priority, giving the GOP effectively all of what it wanted in exchange for no real concessions.
Republicans killed it anyway.
It’s long been tempting to explain the GOP’s opposition by pointing to the party’s contempt for concessions: Republicans likely rejected the other compromise offers, the theory goes, because they were only prepared to accept what they wanted — and nothing else. A pathway to citizenship was so offensive to so many GOP members, it necessarily doomed the initiatives.
But this year altered the landscape in dramatic ways: Republicans didn’t have to go along with a pathway to citizenship or anything the party could credibly characterize as “amnesty.” All they had to do was say yes when Democrats agreed to meet their demands.
The fact that Republicans balked anyway leaves us with an uncomfortable but increasingly unavoidable conclusion: GOP officials keep killing meaningful solutions because they don’t want to solve the problem. Instead, they want to keep exploiting the problem for electoral gain. [Yep.]
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which tends to be closely aligned with GOP politics, asked this week, “Do Republicans want to better secure the U.S. border, or do they want to keep what has become an open sore festering for another year as an election issue?”
Does anyone seriously doubt the obvious answer to that question?
Last March, police in Coralville, Iowa, investigated a bomb threat targeting a junior high school. Authorities brought in specially trained dogs to sniff for explosives and started looking into why someone might try to target the community’s teachers and students.
Law enforcement quickly determined that the threat was a hoax. Detective Hanna Dvorak from the Coralville Police Department arrived at a theory.
“It appears this all stems from a post made earlier this week by Chaya Raichik and her ‘Libs of TikTok’ account,” Dvorak wrote in a report to her superiors.
[…] about a day and a half before authorities responded to the threat at Coralville’s Northwest Junior High, Raichik posted that the school offers a “pornographic” book in its library that “teaches kids about gay sex.”
[…] The Coralville detective wrote in her report that one of Raichik’s supporters could have had a role in the bomb threat.
Coralville was not alone. Officers and government officials in four other jurisdictions — Burbank, California; Minnetonka, Minnesota; Oklahoma City; and Tualatin, Oregon — told NBC News they believe Raichik sparked threats in their localities with her posts on social media that digitally heckle people such as drag performers, LGBTQ teachers and doctors who treat transgender patients.
[…] the timing suggests that Libs of TikTok posts have been used to pick targets.
NBC News identified 33 instances, starting in November 2020, when people or institutions singled out by Libs of TikTok later reported bomb threats or other violent intimidation. The threats, which on average came several days after tweets from Libs of TikTok, targeted schools, libraries, hospitals, small businesses and elected officials in 16 states, Washington, D.C., and the Canadian province of Ontario. Twenty-one of the 33 threats were bomb threats, which most commonly targeted schools and were made via email.
[…] Raichik, the founder of the Libs of TikTok social media brand, has become an internet celebrity among some conservatives for her willingness to criticize teachers, doctors and other professionals who are LGBTQ or who are accepting of LGBTQ people. Raichik often posts their names and photographs alongside accusations of wrongdoing to X, where she has 2.8 million followers.
Konstantine Anthony, a City Council member in Burbank, said he received violent threats by email less than an hour after Libs of TikTok posted a video of him. The video showed Anthony, who at the time was Burbank’s mayor, getting spanked by a drag queen at a political fundraiser, and Libs of TikTok’s post said it happened “in front of children.” Anthony said no children were present. He was clothed and laughing in the video.
Anthony told NBC News that based on the timing, he believes he and his City Hall staff received at least two bomb threats “as a direct result of Libs of TikTok.”
[…] Elon Musk, who restored Libs of TikTok on X after it was suspended under previous ownership, frequently shares the account’s posts on his own X profile, and the account’s followers on X include a number of politicians such as Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Former President Donald Trump hosted Raichik for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in January 2023. Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, featured her on his show in December 2022. […]
On Jan. 23, Raichik was appointed to the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee by Superintendent Ryan Walters. At least one lawmaker has referred to the bomb threats when contesting Raichik’s appointment to the committee.
[…] She continues to post the identifying details and images of her subjects. She has rarely criticized the threat-makers or urged them to stop.
[…] “There are forces at work in our country that have fostered this sort of behavior, and that just needs to stop,” said John Sasaki, a spokesperson for the Oakland Unified School District in California.
One of the district’s elementary schools was targeted by Libs of TikTok for hosting an event to bring together Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and other families of color. In August, Libs of TikTok called the event racist against white people.
The next day, Aug. 29, someone emailed a bomb threat to the school’s principal, Sasaki said. The school canceled classes for the day and sent home its 570 students as police responded.
[…] Oklahoma’s Union Public Schools was the target of bomb threats for six days in August — a series that began one day after an Aug. 21 Libs of TikTok post criticizing an elementary school librarian. The librarian had said online that she emphasized social justice in her teaching. […]
NBC News projects that more voters chose not to pick a candidate at all than back Haley. Trump wasn’t on the ballot, since he’s participating in Thursday’s caucus, instead.
[…] It was a stinging rebuke of Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina governor — and one that some party leaders had encouraged. The outcome in Nevada was Haley’s third consecutive loss in an early-state primary contest.
Still, Haley’s campaign indicated that the results wouldn’t affect how long she’d stay in the race.
“Even Donald Trump knows that when you play penny slots, the house wins. We didn’t bother to play a game rigged for Trump. We’re full steam ahead in South Carolina and beyond,” spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said.
[…] Trump, far and away the front-runner for the Republican nomination, wasn’t on the same ballot as Haley because he is set to compete in party-run caucuses Thursday. Even if Haley had won the primary, it wouldn’t have put her any closer to the GOP nomination, because she wouldn’t have received any delegates. The state Republican Party decided that only candidates who take part in the caucuses can win delegates.
Trump is the only candidate set to participate in Thursday’s caucuses, putting him on a path to claim all of Nevada’s 26 delegates.
[…] “We have not spent a dime nor an ounce of energy on Nevada,” Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankney said in a media call Monday. “We aren’t going to pay $55,000 to a Trump entity to participate in a process that is rigged for Trump. Nevada is not and has never been our focus.” […]
MANHATTAN (CN) — New York Judge Arthur Engoron is demanding answers from Donald Trump’s lawyers amid rumors that one of the former president’s co-defendants is negotiating a plea deal for lying in his courtroom.
Last week, The New York Times reported that Allen Weisselberg, the former finance chief of the Trump Organization, was in talks with Manhattan prosecutors to plead guilty to perjury after his October testimony in Trump’s civil fraud trial.
Engoron caught wind, insisting Tuesday that the trial’s attorneys turn over anything they know about the possibility that Weisselberg lied on the stand.
“I of course want to know whether Mr. Weisselberg is now changing his tune, and whether he is admitting he lied under oath in my courtroom at this trial,” Engoron wrote in a Tuesday email.
Trump and Weisselberg are being accused by the state of inflating Trump Organization assets to short banks and insurers millions. After a 10-week bench trial that wrapped up late last year, Engoron is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Weisselberg’s potential plea could complicate things, however.
“By Wednesday at 5 p.m., please submit, as officers of the court, a letter to me detailing anything you know about this that would not violate any of your professional ethics or obligations,” Engoron wrote. “I would also appreciate knowing how you think I should address this matter, if at all, including the timing of the final decision.”
Weisselberg testified in October that he “never focused” on the size of Trump’s Manhattan triplex — which Trump had reported on financial paperwork to be about three times as big as it actually was.
After his testimony, Forbes reported that Weisselberg had lied on the stand, citing “a review of old emails and notes” that showed Weisselberg was actually instrumental in pushing the fabricated size of Trump’s penthouse to reporters.
Engoron said that, while the perjury rumors only surround the penthouse testimony, he’d consider dismissing Weisselberg’s broader testimony as well.
“Although the Times article focuses on the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, his testimony on other topics could also be called into question,” Engoron continued. “I may also use this as a basis to invoke falsus in uno.” [false in one thing, false in everything]
Last week’s Times report said that Weisselberg would have to admit to lying under oath during his testimony at Trump’s civil fraud trial, as well as in a pre-trial interview with state lawyers.
Russia used to try to exclude China from the region, but increasing economic and diplomatic isolation is forcing the Kremlin to change its approach, says a new report.
Reeling under the financial and diplomatic impacts of its war in Ukraine, Russia has stepped up cooperation with China to expand its foothold in the Arctic, with significant implications for U.S. national security, according to a new private intelligence report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long prioritized military and economic expansion in the Arctic as a key facet of his geopolitical strategy and ambitions, and after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, he began cooperating with China in the region. But after it sought to limit the involvement of the People’s Republic, Russia recently has invited much greater Chinese participation, says the report by Strider Technologies, a firm that focuses on open-source intelligence.
“Russia’s increasing willingness to allow the PRC in the Arctic demonstrates the realness of their ‘no-limits’ partnership and its potential counterbalance to U.S.-led alliances,” the report says.
For decades, the report adds, Russia actively excluded China and other non-Arctic countries from playing a role there, including denying Chinese scientists the opportunity to conduct research and refusing to help China build icebreakers or share designs.
[…] From January to July 2023, 123 new companies with Chinese ownership registered to operate in the Arctic, compared with 111 registered in 2022, 77 in 2021 and 48 in 2020.
The data also shows increasing Russia-China cooperation in several Arctic and Far East projects since 2013, especially in the areas of liquefied natural gas, mineral extraction and infrastructure.
Russia-China trade via the Arctic Ocean’s Northern Sea Route between Europe and Asia is also on the rise. At least 11 ships transported Russian crude oil to China via the route in 2023; in 2022, only one “trial” voyage to China was made.
The Strider report also found that Russian defense spending in the Arctic has stagnated, while private commercial investment has continued to increase.
“Moscow is also shifting conventional defense spending away from the region due to the war in Ukraine and is increasingly relying on state support mechanisms to attract private investment to maintain and expand Russia’s presence in the Arctic,” the report says. […]
That’s an odd characterization given what they go on to report in the same article. She was clear beforehand that she (correctly) saw it as a farce and wasn’t participating.
Trump’s focus on the heavily Republican state has become a bizarre subplot of the 2024 primary.
Donald Trump has spent much of the past week fixated, of all places, on Indiana, accusing elections officials here of conspiring against him to help his rival, Nikki Haley, in a Republican presidential primary that won’t take place until May.
The complaints are baseless, elections officials say.
Worse, they and Trump’s opponents warn, with the former president raising alarms even in a state like deep-red Indiana, they look like a test run by Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election in November.
“Trump is reinforcing a narrative where the only acceptable outcome is his victory, thus preemptively delegitimizing any electoral defeat,” said Joshua Claybourn, a Republican attorney from Evansville and former GOP delegate from the state. “It sets the stage for yet another crisis of legitimacy in the November general election.”
[…] The actual crux of the issue is pretty straightforward. For days, Trump has been suggesting that Haley failed to qualify for the Indiana primary ballot, saying she was “scrambling in Indiana with democrat county clerk offices to ‘verify’ signatures” after the fact, or even that she had “forgot to apply.” He has gone so far as to have his campaign’s attorney threaten litigation to challenge Haley’s ballot status.
But Trump’s allegation is based on a distortion of Indiana law. While signatures to get ballot access were due by Jan. 30, the filing deadline isn’t until this Friday, meaning that Haley is still on track to qualify for the state’s ballot.
Even the longtime Republican voter registration board member at the center of the dispute told POLITICO in an interview that Trump appeared to have false information and that the process is designed to prevent the kind of conspiracy the former president is alleging.
“I think somebody gave him incorrect information based on lack of knowledge, and he went with what he was told,” said Cindy Mowery, the Republican board member on the Marion County Board of Voters Registration. [Don’t make excuses for Trump.]
Haley has been less forgiving, with her campaign accusing Trump of being “confused” at best and “lying” at worst.
“This is more nonsense and confusion from Trump,” Betsy Ankney, Haley’s campaign manager, told POLITICO. “We have more than enough verified signatures in each congressional district, and we will be filing this week before the Feb. 9 deadline. You should be asking whether they are simply confused or whether they were lying and misleading people.”
[…] Trump’s calculus to wage war on Haley in a state he won by double-digit margins in 2016 and 2020 perplexed some Indiana Republicans, especially coming days before the deadline when it would become clearer whether she had actually qualified.
“Why put out the effort to challenge the Haley effort ahead of time when Trump knows he’s going to win Indiana no matter what?” said Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives. “The bottom line is he’s completely unhinged. He is literally off his rocker.”
Trump isn’t just talking about Indiana. Over the weekend, an attorney for Trump sent a letter, obtained by POLITICO, to Marion County’s Democratic clerk, Kate Sweeney Bell, accusing her of improperly accepting petition signatures for Haley and demanding she preserve all evidence during the certification process.
[…] Further complicating matters, Trump’s lawyer contacted the wrong official. Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell is one of six county clerks out of 92 in Indiana who don’t oversee the ballot certification process. Instead, it’s the voter board of registration, where Sweeney Bell told POLITICO she directed the Trump campaign attorney.
[…] “Making accusations that the Marion County clerk is attempting to assist Nikki Haley — that’s completely absurd and possibly libelous,” Tew said.
[…] By Sunday, Trump’s complaint had transformed into an even more dubious one, saying in an interview that aired on Fox News that Haley “forgot to apply” for the ballot in Indiana. “You don’t run and not apply for Indiana,” he said. “Great state.”
[…] Later, Banks [Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana] was still keeping the idea of a conspiracy to undermine Trump alive. He said that his sources told him election officials moved 40 signatures from the neighboring 6th district to get Haley over the finish line. Mowery confirmed that indeed happened but noted it was because they were tied to voter’s addresses who lived in that district, not the 7th. […]
Can’t keep their conspiracy theories on track. Incapable of paying attention to details. Proof that Trump and the Trump campaign are off their rockers … and incompetent.
SC @470, yeah that “stinging rebuke of Haley” was inaccurate. Looks like some media outlets working hard to make Haley look like a loser. Not good journalism.
The Christian right has long dreamed of tearing down the wall of separation between churches and public schools. Just look at Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who spent two decades advocating for “religious freedom” in public schools, government, and public places.
NBC News wrote on Johnson:
“The Bible is and should be an appropriate course of study in our public schools,” he wrote in another op-ed in 2007. “Because it is the most widely read, widely published, most influential book in all of history, censoring it from the classroom is as unwise as it is unnecessary.”
In 2017, Johnson and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, also a Republican, created guidelines for the use of religion in school, which argued that the study of the Bible or religion in public school is “perfectly lawful,” echoing an argument Johnson had made before.
So what’s happening in Nebraska shouldn’t be surprising.
School Ministries Inc., a South Carolina-based, Christian-oriented group, has been working to expand Bible education programs for public school students since 1991. The group maintains that “released time” spent in religious education in public schools is legal as long as it’s voluntary, the student’s parents give permission, instruction is held off school grounds, and no state resources fund the instruction.
Blue states like New York have long allowed students to get time off during the school day to receive religious instruction off school grounds. But at least six Republican-run states have now taken it a step further by offering academic credit for such religious instruction: Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah, according to School Ministries.
And now Nebraska has become the latest battleground in the religious right’s crusade to intertwine religion with public school curriculum.
The Omaha World-Herald reported that conservative lawmakers in the state’s unicameral state legislature have introduced a bill that would allow public school students to receive school credit for attending religious classes off school grounds. Other bills presented to the state legislature’s education committee would give parents more control over their local school’s library books and curriculum.
And in January, another bill was introduced in the state legislature that would enable the state to deposit $1,500 a year per student voucher into new state-managed savings accounts for parents of students attending private K-12 schools, including religious schools.
[…] The Nebraska Examiner, an independent nonprofit news outlet, wrote:
Legislative Bill 1066, introduced by State Sen. Loren Lippincott of Central City and 11 other senators, would allow a private entity approved by a public school board to offer elective courses in religious instruction. Students would be able to attend, at most, one period or one hour of such a course per day during a semester.
Lippincott said this method of instruction, or release time, could add a “valuable missing component” to Nebraska K-12 electives. “It would be no different than a kid working at the John Deere store or doing something like this,” Lippincott told the Nebraska Examiner.
LB 1066 would allow school boards to adopt policies authorizing students to attend such courses, as long as they do not “undeniably promote licentiousness,” lack legal, moral or sexual restraints, or go against other school policies.
[…] The Nebraska Examiner wrote:
Bender [John Bender, representing the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska] said the bill provides a preference for religious students with an elective option, while nonreligious students might not have similar electives available.
“While there may be a good reason for giving release time for students to take courses that are not part of the ordinary curriculum — courses the school district is not offering for one reason or another — that should be open to other kinds of courses than just religious courses,” he said.
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court ruled that Donald Trump is not immune to prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The 57-page ruling takes apart the claims that Trump made one by one, thoroughly dismembering his arguments to conclude that Trump’s declaration of “categorical immunity from criminal liability” is “unsupported by precedent, history or the text and structure of the Constitution.” […]
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
[…] There’s also the section where the court notes that during his second impeachment trial, Trump’s legal representative tried to have it the other way. In 2021, they argued that Trump shouldn’t be impeached because he was out of office and the proper place to deal with this was in court by writing “[w]e have a judicial process” and “an investigative process … to which no former officeholder is immune.’”
The judges also noted that Trump wasn’t alone in making this argument: Thirty senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also argued that once he left office, Trump was no longer the proper subject of impeachment and was subject to the courts.
But the portion of the ruling most likely to get wide play is one in which the judges point out the pure silliness of what Trump is suggesting.
It would be a striking paradox if the President, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity.
[…] Trump has responded to the ruling with numerous repetitions of his assertion that presidents must have a level of immunity that no president has ever enjoyed in real life. […] He’ll keep on demanding absolute immunity. Even if he’s doing it from a prison cell.
While sentencing a North Carolina man to prison for his role in the U.S. Capitol riot, a Republican-appointed judge issued a stark warning: Efforts to portray the mob of Donald Trump’s supporters as heroes and play down the violence that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, pose a serious threat to the nation.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth condemned the depiction by Trump and Republican allies of Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” and “hostages.” Lamberth also denounced attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the justice system for punishing rioters who broke the law when they invaded the Capitol.
“In my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in a recent ruling. The judge added he “fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”
As Trump floats potential pardons for rioters if he returns to the White House, judges overseeing the more than 1,200 Jan. 6 criminal cases in Washington’s federal court are using their platform to try to set the record straight concerning distortions about an attack that was broadcast live on television. A growing number of defendants appear to be embracing rhetoric spread by Trump, giving defiant speeches in court, repeating his false election claims and portraying themselves as patriots.
[…] Judges appointed by presidents from both political parties have described the riot as an affront to democracy and they repeatedly have admonished defendants for not showing true remorse or casting themselves as victims.
Over more than three years, judges have watched hours of video showing members of the mob violently shoving past overwhelmed officers, shattering windows, attacking police with things such as flagpoles and pepper spray and threatening violence against lawmakers. In court hearings, officers have described being beaten, threatened and scared for their lives as they tried to defend the Capitol.
Before sentencing a Kentucky man, who already had a long criminal record, to 14 years in prison for attacking police with pepper spray and a chair, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta admonished the man for propagating “the lie that what’s happening here in Washington, D.C., is unfair and unjust.”
“You are not a political prisoner,” Mehta, who was nominated by President Barack Obama told Peter Schwartz. “You’re not Alexei Navalny,” the judge said referring to the imprisoned Russian opposition leader. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice, who’s fighting against an autocratic regime. … You’re somebody who decided to take the day into his own hands, much in the same way that you have used your hands against others for much of your life.”
[…] “Little cannot bring himself to admit that he did the wrong thing, although he came close today,” Judge Lamberth wrote. “So it is up to the court to tell the public the truth: Mr. Little’s actions, and the actions of others who broke the law on Jan. 6, were wrong. The court does not expect its remarks to fully stem the tide of falsehoods. But I hope a little truth will go a long way.”
[…] In other cases, judges have said their sentence must send a message when rioters have promoted the notion that they are being unfairly prosecuted for their political views. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper told Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Arkansas man who propped his feet on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a widely circulated photo, that he seemed to enjoy the notoriety of becoming one of the faces of the Jan. 6 attack.
“You have made yourself one of the faces of J6 not just through that photo but using your platform and your notoriety to peddle the misconception that you and other J6ers are somehow political prisoners who are being persecuted for your beliefs as opposed to your conduct on Jan. 6,” Cooper, an Obama appointee, told Barnett before sentencing him to more than four years in prison.
“So to all those folks that follow Bigo, they need to know that the actions of Jan. 6 cannot be repeated without some serious repercussions,” the judge said.
It doesn’t seem like it should be really big news that Tucker Carlson has gone home to Russia, AKA the mother he never had. Maybe he’ll stay there.
He made the announcement on his little Twitter show, explaining why he was there to interview Vladimir Putin. [video at the link]
TUCKER: Here’s why we’re doing it. First, it’s our job.
Sorry, “job”?
TUCKER: We’re in journalism.
Objection.
TUCKER: Our duty is to inform people.
Or deliver whatever load Putin wants Tucker to bring back to America with him.
Tucker explains in the video above that [Tucker repeats Russian propaganda and lies that suggest the war on Ukraine is something other than a war of choice by Putin, a madman, a dictator, and all-around scumbag]. He talks about the war as if it’s just something that happened, as opposed to a decision that was made by one man […] He [complains] and moans that American media is nice to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but doesn’t extend the same courtesy to the little bald wannabe Hitler who invaded Zelenskyy’s country. (He refers to Russia as simply “the other country involved in this conflict.”)
“Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine,” says Tucker, who is ever so eager to regurgitate that information (Vladimir’s Version) for you. He says Americans have a right to know about a “war they’re implicated in,” as if America had a role in starting it. That’s a lie from Putin and his modern-day KGB that Tucker has been eagerly telling since the war started.
None of this is breaking news. Tucker Carlson was Putin’s goodest American boy back when he was at Fox News, and there’s no reason to think unemployment would change that. […]
We think the part we laughed at the hardest above is when Tucker said Elon Musk had graciously agreed not to suppress his interview with Vladimir Putin.
As if Elon is not also Putin’s [lapdog].
Tucker says other Western governments are going to censor his very important interview with Putin.[…] He says everyone is very afraid of this information.
The Kremlin’s official response to all this, as Rolling Stone reports, is to clear its throat about Tucker’s assertion in the video above that “not a single Western journalist has bothered” to interview Putin during his war on Ukraine. No, says Kremlin spox Dmitry Peskov, people try to interview Putin all the time. It’s just that they always say no.
“Mr. Carlson is not correct,” Peskov said in a statement on the interview — which has yet to be released — adding that Russia’s authoritarian ruler has received “numerous requests for interviews with the president, but mostly, as far as countries in the collective West are concerned, these are from major network media: traditional TV channels and large newspapers.”
Wonder why they’re willing to talk to Tucker, but not to others. Hmmm. A mystery.
Oh wait, Peskov said why:
“[Real journalists] don’t even attempt to appear impartial in their coverage. Of course there’s no desire to communicate with this kind of media.”
But Tucker is impartial, or at least he makes sure to lick both sides of Putin […]
The Russian media is cumming over all of this, obviously, and it’s so glad Elon Musk is also cumming over it. It’s amazing all the Twitter accounts in this screenshot aren’t being operated from the same computer, or at least the same room in St. Petersburg: [Screenshot at the link]
If you can’t see that, Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “Who were the American journalists who conducted even minimally adversarial interviews with Zelensky?” […]
Elon Musk responded, “To be fair, it’s hard for them to talk while giving a blowjob at the same time.”
RT, the Russian state owned network, quote-tweeted the exchange, adding, “First there was a question — and then there was an answer.”
So that’s cool.
In summary and in conclusion: [photo of actual journalist in prison in Russia]
That’s Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who is still in prison in Russia. Rolling Stone reminds us that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva is also in prison in Russia and also that Russia murders journalists all the fucking time.
In case you were worried Tucker might not be safe in Moscow. He’ll be fine.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as he tries to advance the cease-fire talks and pushes for a larger postwar settlement for the Gaza Strip. The meetings came after Saudi Arabia said it would not engage in diplomatic relations with Israel without recognition of an independent Palestinian state and an end to the assault on the enclave.
Hamas has proposed a cease-fire plan that would include the release of 1,500 prisoners, including 500 people serving life sentences, an Arab source has told NBC News. The proposal also includes that a three-year plan should be developed, with a roadmap for the rebuilding of homes and other infrastructure destroyed in the war, the source said. […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected demands from Hamas for a permanent cease-fire in response to a potential hostage deal, adding that Israel will fight until “absolute victory.”
The prime minister insisted that Hamas’ military power must be dismantled before Israel can consider a withdrawal.
Hamas responded yesterday to a proposed deal, which Qatari officials who helped mediate the conversations described as “positive.” But Netanyahu indicated the parties might still be far apart, noting today that he’s not committed to releasing Palestinian prisoners in the large-scale quantities that Hamas has asked for. […]
A strawberry dessert contaminated by her grandfather’s heart medication might have caused Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s positive doping test, her lawyers argued at sport’s highest court, which rejected the explanation and banned her for four years…
On Tuesday, things went so wrong for Republicans that the level of their dysfunction became the focus of the story. At Fox News, Steve Doocy was busy dressing down House Majority Whip Tom Emmer for his role in throwing away a border security bill that is the best Republicans might ever get. Meanwhile, The New York Times was reporting that “dysfunction reigns in Congress” as the Republican majority in the House showed an incredible ability to lose its way with a “humiliating series of setbacks.” […]
Now Republicans need someone to blame for those failures. Like all parties that revolve around a single authoritarian leader, the most important thing is not to fall under the baleful glare of the Eye of Donald Trump. And the best way to do that is … to point the finger at someone else.
After Republicans’ failure to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene made a bid to blame Democrats because Rep. Al Green turned up to vote in a wheelchair when Republicans thought they had safely scheduled this vote at a time when Green couldn’t appear due to emergency surgery. [video at the link]
But blaming everything on the old hidden Democrat trick was not enough for others. Rep. Greg Steube went on Newsmax to point at a Republican absence—House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who had the audacity to be out for cancer treatment. “If Scalise would have been here … the bill would have passed,” Steube said.
There were claims overnight that Scalise would return for a Wednesday vote, though his office said otherwise. Dragging Scalise out of cancer treatment so that Republicans can squeak out a sham impeachment with a one-vote margin would be a top entry in the annals of both cruelty and pathos.
Other Republicans widened the scope of their blame to take in the whole of Republican leadership in the House, which led to one of the strangest aspects of a strange day: nostalgia for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“Getting rid of Speaker McCarthy has officially turned into an unmitigated disaster,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie. “All work on separate spending bills has ceased. Spending reductions have been traded for spending increases. Warrantless spying has been temporarily extended. Our majority has shrunk.”
Massie wasn’t the only Republican suddenly longing for the Golden Age of Kevin, but the irony meter had to be definitively fried by this statement from Rep. Matt Gaetz.
“I also wonder, wouldn’t it have been nice to still have Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives,” Gaetz said on Newsmax. “Never thought you’d hear me say that.”
Is that even irony? Irony squared? Irony times hypocrisy over the reciprocal of karma?
Whatever it was, Gaetz went on to blame McCarthy for getting rid of former Rep. George Santos. This definitely did not happen, since Santos was expelled two months after Gaetz engineered the ouster of McCarthy from the speaker’s chair.
Still, Santos sent Republicans a little something to remember him by in their moment of darkness. [Tweet at the link: “Miss me yet?”]
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson kept it simple: He blamed everyone but himself. “I don’t think this is a reflection on the leader,” Johnson told reporters. “It’s a reflection on the body itself.” Sure. That’ll do it. [LOL]
Following the loss on impeaching Mayorkas, one senior Republican aide was pushing a hard line, writing, “If we lose the Israel vote after losing Mayorkas impeachment: VACATE.”
Then they lost the vote on Israel.
Rep. Mike Gallagher grabbed a pen for a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday, to take a swipe at every Republican in Congress who voted to impeach Mayorkas. “Impeachment not only would fail to resolve Mr. Biden’s border crisis,” wrote Gallagher, “but would also set a dangerous new precedent that would be used against future Republican administrations.”
But Gallagher was alone in trying to stop the bleeding. The remainder of the caucus had their eyes firmly fixed on what’s important: pleasing Donald Trump. After all, Trump doesn’t want issues at the southern border solved; he wants them front and center in the fall election. And in that cause, congressional Republicans are fully prepared to humiliate themselves all over again today, and tomorrow, to infinity and beyond. [LOL]
As The New York Times reports, Republicans thought they had set a trap for Democrats on the border issue, one that would give them a potent issue for the fall and powerful leverage to get policies they wanted. But Democrats “tripped them up,” in the Times’ words, by giving Republicans unexpected concessions on border security and tying it to military assistance for Ukraine.
Now Republicans are scurrying to explain how what they demanded is the wrong thing all along. Congress is flailing, multiple issues get ignored in the storm of finger-pointing, and no one wants to name the person primarily responsible for this mess.
Because that person is Trump. And if Republicans have to burn down their own house and throw their friends under buses to make Trump happy … just line up those buses.
Donald Trump has spent much of the past week fixated, of all places, on Indiana, accusing elections officials here of conspiring against him to help his rival, Nikki Haley, in a Republican presidential primary that won’t take place until May.
Over the weekend, an attorney for Trump sent a letter…to Marion County’s Democratic clerk, Kate Sweeney Bell, accusing her of improperly accepting petition signatures for Haley and demanding she preserve all evidence during the certification process.
By Sunday, Trump’s complaint had transformed into an even more dubious one, saying in an interview that aired on Fox News that Haley “forgot to apply” for the ballot in Indiana. “You don’t run and not apply for Indiana,” he said. “Great state.”
Later, Banks [Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana] was still keeping the idea of a conspiracy to undermine Trump alive. He said that his sources told him election officials moved 40 signatures from the neighboring 6th district to get Haley over the finish line.
Trump and his minions appear to be both practicing and projecting. If I were a journalist, I would be looking into the possibility that they’re scheming, possibly with local Trump loyalists, in Indiana and elsewhere to get Haley (and potentially later Biden and Harris) disqualified from the ballot and convince people that her candidacy is illegal.
birgerjohanssonsays
NB
This is BIG (If it can be translated into low-cost, large-scale use)
“Inexpensive, carbon-neutral biofuels are finally possible”
Lynna @ #472, I tried to find a report (other than Rachel Maddow’s @ #416) that offered some context for what was happening in Nevada. The only one I saw that looked potentially promising was an ABC piece called “What to know about Nikki Haley losing to ‘none of these candidates’ option in Nevada Republican primary”, but it was as bad as the others, if not worse. They quote her saying she didn’t campaign in the state, leaving the impression that she was just like “Fuck Nevada.” Then there’s:
Multiple state party officials told ABC News after the projection that this was an expected result based on the prevalent mood among Republicans in the state leading up to the primary.
“That was kind of the expected result,” Nevada Republican Party’s National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid told ABC News, noting Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, who recently endorsed Trump, had also suggested he would be casting his vote to “none of these candidates.”
“This is the third state to vote, and I haven’t seen any strength out of her [Haley] when ballots are actually cast yet,” DeGraffenried continued. [She got 43% of the vote in New Hampshire.]
Clark County Republican Party Chair Jesse [Law, presumably] echoed that. “This result was expected because Nikki Haley was running against the American people and Nevada voters noticed,” he argued. [Sounds unbiased!]
Many Nevada Republicans soured on Haley after she chose to partake in the state-run primary, which the state GOP aggressively opposed by sticking with their party-run caucuses and declaring that would be the only way to win delegates. These Nevada Republicans saw Haley’s move as a sign that she considered their delegates something she could ignore completely.
Among the fake electors is Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald, who has pushed to bypass the state-run presidential primary to nominate a Republican presidential nominee, instead opting for a party-run caucus, which would require voter ID and paper ballots.
He has remained a staunch ally of Trump, opening for the former president at a rally in Las Vegas by saying, “You give us a fair election [LOL], I’ll give you the next president of the United States — Donald J. Trump.” Trump and his attorneys also had a direct hand in the planning and execution of the fake elector scheme, including a conference call with McDonald, transcripts released last year show.
You’d think this information about the local state party officials might be relevant in a piece purporting to tell readers what to know!
birgerjohanssonsays
Alien Super Show February 7th.
“Trump Goes Medieval – Is Taylor Swift a PsyOp? – Fox Pitches Civil War & Biden Scandal Fan Fiction”
Grr at the first part of the headline (I loathe Nikki Haley, but the description isn’t accurate in this case and I hate it when people are described as “humiliated” in general – find it very upsetting and unhelpful), but he does provide some more information. Also: “Haley’s loss to ‘None of These Candidates’ might be a bit less embarrassing to the former U.N ambassador since she didn’t bother to step foot in Nevada to campaign.” Yes, the fact that she wasn’t actually competing would seem to make her “loss” a bit less “embarrassing.”
You’d think this information about the local state party officials might be relevant in a piece purporting to tell readers what to know!
Yep. It’s good that you noted that. What we have is a Trump (and trumpian cult followers) plan to rig the primary against Nikki Haley. Many media outlets are failing to properly report on this situation in Nevada.
They certainly managed to rig public opinion, and public reporting against Haley in this particular instance.
Of course the cult followers involved are indicted criminals!
Trump found a way to bypass the state-run primary.
Also, how many Republican voters would bother to vote in both the state-run primary in which Haley was on the ballot, and at the caucuses where Trump was king? That was allowed, legal … but how many would do it? Instead, most Republican voters are just going to do whatever Trump tells them to do. At least that way they are less confused. Trump caused a lot of chaos, and not for the first time.
The Senate voted 49-50 to shoot down a bipartisan border security and foreign aid bill after Republicans voted en masse to filibuster the agreement they had demanded, arguing that it didn’t do enough to crack down on an overwhelmed border.
Four Senate Republicans voted to advance the bill.
The failed vote on the $118 billion package tees up an alternative plan laid out by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who plans to force a vote Wednesday on an Israel and Ukraine aid package stripped of border security provisions after Republicans blocked the larger bill, a Senate Democratic aide said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the lead Democratic negotiator, said he was aghast that Republicans sank the legislation their leadership had negotiated and signed off on just three days ago. […]
Just four Republicans voted for it: Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican negotiator on the deal. […]
John Moralessays
Reginald @487, pullquote from your cited article:
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina had more details to share. The Waymo vehicle was stopped at a four-way stop, as an oncoming large truck began to turn into the intersection. The vehicle waited until it was its turn and then also began to proceed through the intersection, failing to notice the cyclist who was traveling behind the truck.
“The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path,” Ilina said. “When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.”
After the incident, Waymo contacted the police, but the cyclist left on their own, reporting only “minor scratches,” Ilina added.
known for having some of the highest living costs in the nation. The pilot sought to challenge the stigma […] to persuade state and federal lawmakers to implement some form of guaranteed income. […] more than half of families living in South Arlington cannot afford basic food, housing, medical and childcare expenses
johnson catmansays
re John Morales @490:
The Waymo vehicle was stopped at a four-way stop, as an oncoming large truck began to turn into the intersection. The vehicle waited until it was its turn and then also began to proceed through the intersection, failing to notice the cyclist who was traveling behind the truck.
I am not a fan of driverless vehicles, but the cyclist was in the wrong. Being a separate vehicle behind the truck, the cyclist was legally obligated to stop at the four-way stop and wait their turn. Probably why they left the scene of the accident, which would also be a violation.
Jazzletsays
John Morales @490
I know a couple of people who have had their arms broken by parts of parked cars, when occupants opened the door without looking giving the cyclists no time to break, and with traffic passing on the outside nowhere to swerve. I know plenty of people who have had lesser injuries in the same situation, I have myself. Nearly all in city streets without enough space to manoeuvre, most in London, but a lot in Oxford too – which is where it happened to me many years ago.
John Moralessays
Jazzlet, oh yes, that is certainly a hazard. Me, I’ve been a biker all my life — never got a car driver’s license — though mostly motorbikes after my twenties. Big ones, not the farty Harley-types, the howling Japanese types.
I hope it’s clear that my impetus for reacting was that I noticed the featured headline implies the problem was the driverless car, whereas in reality even a driven car could not really have done better. Thus, the pullquote.
Me, I am more than aware of cars’ blind spots and of being visible, as well as being super-aware and prudent. If anything, I’m a tad paranoid — I just assume car drivers are gonna be careless and dangerous and distracted.
I think of those boxes on wheels as unpredictable moving obstacles, actually.
I recommend that attitude for any bike rider; it may help avoid a shitload of pain and suffering.
(There are old bikers and there are bold bikers, but there are no old bold bikers, to borrow a phrase)
whheydtsays
Re: Jazzlet & John Morales @ #s 493, 494…
I have read that in Holland a driver is supposed to open the door by reaching across with the inside hand to force them to turn enough to see if anything, such as a bike rider, is coming where the door will be a problem.
A man who sued Buffalo police after being ticketed for shouting at an officer to turn on his headlights can move forward with his legal action, an appeals court ruled.
The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals last week reversed a ruling by a U.S. district judge in Buffalo who had dismissed the case. The new ruling sends the case back to district court for trial.
R. Anthony Rupp III, a civil rights attorney, said he did not intend to sue after his December 2016 encounter with two police officers. He said he changed his mind after learning the same officers were involved two months later in the arrest of an unarmed man who died of an asthma attack after struggling while being handcuffed…
Florida’s attorney general on Wednesday urged the state’s highest court to block voters from deciding whether to amend the state constitution to protect abortion, arguing the measure was misleading and unclear.
Nathan Forrester, a lawyer for Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody, told the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court that the amendment is a “Rorschach test.” He said it would effectively eliminate the state’s authority to regulate abortion, but that some voters might not realize how broad it was.
The proposed amendment, which last month gathered enough signatures to be put on the ballot in November, would ban laws that “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Abortions are currently illegal after 15 weeks in Florida.
Courtney Brewer, who is representing Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group sponsoring the measure, said the language in the amendment and its associated summary was clear…
Meduza – “Russian mayor orders quote from ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov on choreography school wall to be replaced by ‘words of a true patriot’”:
S C (Salty Current) @ 497 picked the same The Guardian articles that I found most interesting 😊
Re-energizing mitochondria to treat Alzheimer’s disease”
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-energizing-mitochondria-alzheimer-disease.html
BBC – “Kamila Valieva: Russian figure skater given four-year ban for doping”:
@ prev487
This was reported in the previous incarnation, but not the link to Ramaswamy. For someone who wants to be taken seriously, he sure has some really stupid ideas.
Vivek Ramaswamy says Super Bowl could be rigged to boost Taylor Swift — and Biden
Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents
birgerjohansson @ #2, :).
Guardian – “‘Seismic shift’: driving unaffordable for many in US amid push toward SUVs”:
This is related to what I posted about here a couple of weeks ago.
The Naked Pravda (Meduza podcast) – “How doomed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin rallied antiwar Russians”:
“Skepticrat 217 Court Marshall Edition”
This one is even more hilarious than usual.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=8mMkeNbouPc
@ 9
Addendum: It has previously unknown facts about Laureen Boebert, and it is ROFL time!
If Minnesota is getting shorter
https://xkcd.com/2887/
are eastern Manitoba and western Northern Ontario getting longer?
YT link – “TWiV 1079: Rock of phages”:
This is from two weeks ago but I couldn’t resist the title, and it didn’t disappoint. The whole episode is really interesting, but this section is especially so. (There’s a link to the show notes there and the show notes have a link to the 2023 Scientific Reports paper.)
In #12 I was referring to the travertine section, which begins around 18:30 (but the other one is also fascinating!).
@birgerjohansson xxxp2 #500
There’s no need to amplify a germ–theory–denying antivax queerphobe. Even if something agreeable comes out of his mouth, there will always be better options.
^ Maher’s next line in the video was: “It would be nice if we could get that immunity without having to get the disease.”
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous 500-comment chapter of The Infinite Thread:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-2/#comment-2209485
Guardian world news:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-2/#comment-2209454
Trader Joe’s Joins SpaceX In Arguing That The NLRB Is Unconstitutional
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-2/#comment-2209421
O.MG cables are USB cables that allow hackers to steal your information
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-2/#comment-2209488
“Trumps Throw Tantrum Over Court Monitor’s Financial Bombshell”:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/07/infinite-thread-xxx/comment-page-2/#comment-2209486
Trump Claims Credit For Record Stock Market Using Bogus Reasoning [Laughable]
NBC News:
Politico:
NBC News:
News Channel 5:
CNN:
Business Insider:
Commentary:
Link
“Systemic US reforms needed to prevent mass death in the next pandemic”
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-reforms-mass-death-pandemic.html
OK, this would require the US congress to make an effort, so no.
Compylsory accoynt7746 Sky Captain @ 14
He is an antivaxxer? Then I am fortunate he is at the Pacific while I am weĺl into the Eurasian landmass. I suppose ten billion vaccine doses will not convince his ilk.
My fat fingers keep pressing the wrong keys, my apologies for misspelling your name.
The total value of the Norwegian oil fund that is saving money for when the oil runs out is 1516 billion US $ = 1.516 million million $ The wossname return/dividend for 2023 was 213.65 billion $. It is good to be a Norwegian.
(Kuweit also set up such a fund)
🍾🎆🍻🎉
Now ask me how much Brits or Americans have saved in national funds for when the oil runs out.
Trick question! They never set up such national funds, because they know that taking money from the oil industry is communism or something. ☹
“New AI model designs proteins to deliver gene therapy”
Neural networks making gene therapy feasible!
.https://phys.org/news/2024-01-ai-proteins-gene-therapy.html
Tories in the House of Lords that were appointed prior to the era of Boris Johnson are unimpressed by the tory government and its suggested legislation.
“Tory peer rips apart government’s Rwanda bill in House of Lords”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XMD8ulY6bWU
Aussie TV channel ..
(Emphaisis for headline.)
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-30/victorian-mp-georgie-purcell-altered-image/103403664
Israeli forces kill three Palestinian fighters in West Bank hospital raid
‘It’s insane’: New viruslike entities found in human gut microbes
This is one to be careful with because while this is so basic that it’s likely to be shared, I want to confirm in humans. The innate visual threat (looming) is there.
I just can’t help but notice that innate visual threat shares territory with conditioned auditory threat. And bigots love their disease, crime (“illegals” as a label), vermin, and invasion insults labels. Little short symbols to tie to the feeling of a threat.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.10.523445v1
US Disabled Chinese Hacking Network Targeting Critical Infrastructure
Boebert finishes fifth in straw poll of new district
‘Pandemic of snow’ in Anchorage sets a record for the earliest arrival of 100 inches of snow
Rep Tenney nominates Trump for Nobel Peace Prize for ‘historic’ Abraham Accords
And that’s why we have peace in the Middle East today.
India’s navy rescues second Iranian-flagged fishing boat hijacked by Somali pirates
A friend of mine just hit me with the whole; “yeah, Netanyahu is bad and what’s happening in Gaza is bad, but the only reason bad people are doing bad things is because the Palestinians left them no choice!”, complete with the bog-standard platitudes about how Israel have “no partners for peace” since the Palestinians are “bad faith negotiators who have turned down every peace offer even when it gives them everything they want.”
The whole perception and narrative about this conflict and its historical roots is fucked in the US.
Re: my 31
And of course we do the same. It’s only good/bad in the specific.
WaPo:
Texas AG seeks transgender records in Georgia as part of his wider probe
By Maham Javaid and Molly Hennessy-Fiske / January 29, 2024
In the Guardian:
“Dive into the surreal: strange views of Cuba – in pictures”:
“‘He’s nothing’: E Jean Carroll says ‘we don’t need to be afraid’ of Donald Trump”:
Marina Hyde – “Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus?”:
Guardian – “Move to sustainable food systems could bring $10tn benefits a year, study finds”:
SC @40, thanks for the link to Cuban photographer Raúl Cañibano’s work. I really enjoyed that.
In other news, here’s Trump being both vindictive and stupid again:
New York Times link
Behind the Bastards – “Part One: Tech Bros Have Built A Cult Around AI”:
They note at the link that the episode is adapted from his recent Rolling Stone piece – “The Cult of AI”:
But Ify Nwadiwe has some insights to add, plus there’s a Part 2 on the way.
Non-animal “meat”.
Team develops a non-allergenic wheat protein for growing better cultivated meat
.https://phys.org/news/2024-01-team-allergenic-wheat-protein-cultivated.html
SC @43, I was recently told that my job as a writer would soon be obsolete, that I would be replaced by AI.
I mentioned that AI does not mind using sources known for posting misinformation. The person looking forward to replacing me was not bothered in the least by that prospect.
Quoted in Lynna’s #21:
Which kind of state does she think Georgia is?
Link
I notice all there dead soldiers were black. I suspect the labor market & economic prospects have something to do with their choice of profession… which reminds me of what MLK said about the Vietnam war.
Michael Tomasky, writing for The New Republic:
Meduza:
“Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza reportedly transferred to harshest prison punishment cell”:
“Russian Internet users report service disruptions amid ‘massive outage’ in Russia-specific domain”:
I don’t fully understand what that means, but it sounds bad. They say it’s a “developing story.”
Raw Story:
Daily Beast:
Link
NB!
‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show | Fossil fuels | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/30/fossil-fuel-industry-air-pollution-fund-research-caltech-climate-change-denial
E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer threatens to seek sanctions over Alina Habba’s “utterly baseless” claim
Secret Putin home on Finnish border revealed by drone – complete with £8,000 bidets and ‘stolen’ waterfall
The drone flew inside the bathroom to peek at the fixtures?
Ukraine hits Russian radar station for air defense in Crimea
Ukraine downs Russian Su-34 jet over Luhansk Oblast
Justice Department investigating Democratic Rep. Cori Bush for misuse of funds, sources say
Russia Hit With Widespread Internet Outage Across Country
Over the course of 17 days, the state Republican chairs in three battleground states either quit or were fired — and the party’s troubles don’t end there.
Nice to see the Republicans squabbling among themselves and rapidly firing their leaders. Schadenfreude moment.
Oklahoma GOP hates James Lankford. No they don’t. Yes they do!
At trendy Japanese cafés, customers enjoy cuddling with pigs
Texas is threatening civil war. So why isn’t it a bigger story?
Lawsuit: Citibank refused to reimburse scam victims who lost “life savings”
Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless
The God Awful Movies gäng has a new podcast.
“GAM441 The Exorcism in Amarillo”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7pgJmh8HbE8
Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation voided by judge, shares slide
This is really informative and important – ABC – “The COVID-safe strategies Australian scientists are using to protect themselves from the virus”:
NB:
“Google’s AI Makes Stunning Progress with Logical Reasoning”
Dang! I forgot to ‘secure’ the link again!
Re: birgerjohansson @ #71…
At least you’re consistent….
I know I’ve argued with SC about aspects of obesity, but FWIW I find this talk quite convincing:
The harsh reality of ultra processed food – with Chris Van Tulleken
—
whheydt, I too fuck up now and then when just posting naked links — this platform does that.
And not everyone knows how to wrap an anchor tag around videos.
(birgerjohansson, I know I seem nitpicky, but (again) thanks for trying hard, as you clearly do. Kudos)
Trump’s PACs Spent Roughly $50 Million on Legal Expenses in 2023
New York Times link
NBC News:
The ‘Take Our Border Back’ Convoy Is Already a Complete Mess.
WIRED link
Instead of immigrants, the group of extremists mostly battled each other, paranoia, and their GPS systems.
Intresting argments and no certainties here about the possible exomoons around Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708 b but fascinating and intriguing stuff :
https://www.space.com/exomoon-discovery-scientists-debate-kepler-hubble-study
Not that there was much doubt already how much Australia’s LNP was anti-environment and anti-Climate science and Cliamte action and well and truly had the big Mining Coroporations pulling their strings but :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-30/dutton-commits-to-defunding-environmental-defenders-office/103403866
Bernie Sanders recent interview on the 7.30 Report here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-29/bernie-sanders-on-why-trump-isnt-answer-to-inequality-crisis/103402638
18 minutes long and with transcipt.
@ #496 in the previous chapter of the Thread, Reginald Selkirk linked to this Yahoo!/HuffPo article: “Dozens Of Historians File SCOTUS Brief In Support Of Removing Trump From Ballot”:
It’s a lot of convincing evidence! Just one small bit from the brief:
(One of the references in this section is to “Trial of Jeff Davis,” New York Times, 4 December 1868,
p. 1. I’m trying to imagine the bothsidesism in that piece…)
First Lab-Grown Eel Meat Revealed
Guardian – “Japan’s former PM, 83-year-old Aso, piles insults on female foreign minister.”
Gets pretty dark:
Startups are raking in up to $85,000 per day by recycling gold and copper from electronics thrown in the trash — e-waste ‘gold mining’ efforts are expanding
I wish they were a little more clear whether “making” means revenue or profit.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/30/2220368/-As-teen-crime-plunges-juvenile-justice-interests-resurrect-crude-19th-century-racism
Meduza – “‘Do you think I’ve lost my mind?’ Meduza’s interview with Boris Nadezhdin, the man hoping to replace Putin and end Russia’s war in Ukraine”:
BBC – “Boris Nadezhdin: Putin challenger submits bid to run for Russian president.”
ReligionClause:
Florida Official Rules That Changing Gender Marker On Driver’s License Constitutes Fraud
January 30, 2024
What makes the 2024 race unique: The Republican candidate’s opponents and many of the Republican candidate’s former aides are saying the exact same things.
AXIOS link
Chart at the link.
Forbes: Biden goes around GOP’s block of Ukraine aid
Posted by readers of the article:
Lynna… @ # 78, quoting Wired: … the convoy was a complete mess.
Wow, it didn’t take long at all for DeSantis’s campaign crew to find a new gig.
Peter Thiel Is Funding a New Olympics, Steroids Not a Problem
California man who tried to blame his twin brother for two rapes is sentenced to 140 years
Gov. Tony Evers vetoes redrawn legislative maps Republicans passed last week
’Do NC voters have a right to fair elections?’ A new redistricting lawsuit says yes
Man accused of destroying Satanic Temple display at Iowa Capitol is now charged with hate crime
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #91…
One is reminded of the incident that occurred as part of the Tour de France many years ago. The practice used to be that, if a competitor was discovered to be using drugs, he would be listed as Mr. X in the race standings. One such collapsed during one stage of the race. The crowd put him back on his bike, he rode about another 100 feet, and fell over…dead.
One could speculate about how many “enhanced” athletes in Thiel’s games are going to die from the performance enhancing drugs.
“Musician’s Worst Nightmare Has Become Our New Reality”
Frank Zappa saw it coming 37 years ago.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=bjkp48XohbE
.
Brexiteer Doesn’t Understand Border Controls #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/oPIfO-Jl558
Another example of how the architects of Brexit did not bother to learn the nuts and bolts of how trade with EU works…
Now ordinary people suffer either trade delays or the risk of substandard food.
If the latest reporting is accurate, Donald Trump spent nearly $1 million per week, every week for a year, on his legal expenses — and he used donor money.
Most Americans want to see immigration legislation completed now, not later:
Link
Researchers find enzyme plays much larger role in preventing neurodegenerative diseases
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-enzyme-plays-larger-role-neurodegenerative.html
Since coffee increases production of this enzyme, I am on the right road. Too bad if you are a mormon…
Link
Christian Bale | First interview to ET [December 1987]
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=z8WKghxMDtg
Christian Bale had his 50th birthday this week.
Here is a very young Christian Bale, actor in Mio In The Land Of Faraway (1987), a film based on a story by Astrid Lindgren. Very different from his role in American Psycho…
https://www.wonkette.com/p/judge-tosses-elon-musks-55-billion
Study finds that once people use cargo bikes, they like their cars much less
Trump’s $50 Million Mystery Debt Looks Like ‘Tax Evasion’
The More People Know About Pregnancy, the More Likely They Are to Support Access to Abortion
Data Don’t Lie: Biden’s Economic Record is Much Better than Trump’s
RFK Jr. is still drawing more backing from Trump donors, even as an independent
Followup to comment 103.
Link
Reginald Selkirk @ #104, I was laughing at the graph in that article and about to post about it when I wondered if anyone else noticed. From the first comment I read:
Should you flush with toilet lid up or down? Study says it doesn’t matter
I haven’t read it yet but the title looked interesting.
“Dump the “dimorphism”: Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33621637/
Mishicot Girls Topple Random Lake
She knows what’s up. People at Tesla should pay close attention.
Despite the fact that he wasn’t the founder.
Hahaha.
The other day I listened to the latest episode of the podcast Surfing the Discourse, which is about Musk. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but among the topics he’s recently claimed to have expertise in: the history of battles (not specific to any war, country, or time period – all battles), manufacturing (about which he knows “more…than anyone currently alive on earth”), the video game Quake (I believe) (at which he was once “one of the best…players in the world), N95 masks, ventilators, life support systems on spaceships, consciousness, politics, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the psychological effects of social media. He’s a dangerous narcissistic fool.
@32
Chinese malware removed from SOHO routers after FBI issues covert commands
@Reginald Selkirk #111:
The study was interesting. Then the reporter added this.
NYTimes – How to Clean a Toilet the Right Way
90,000-year-old human footprints found on Moroccan beach
.https://phys.org/news/2024-01-year-human-footprints-moroccan-beach.html
What Evangelical really means in the Trump era
.https://youtube.com/shorts/w8qgvZMfVMg
This has bad idea written all over it.Peter Thiel wants to create the Enhanced Games where athletes are free to take whatever performance enhancing drugs they want.
I can see all of the chemically enhanced
cheatersathletes on cereal boxes, inspiring another generation of idiots with either too much money or time.“Researchers uncover source rocks of the first real continents”
‘Intra-crustal’ mechanism?
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-uncover-source-real-continents.html
An example of the Dune pop culture craze. The film really made an impression.
“Take a first look at how to build your base in Arrakis! #dune #duneawakening
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=7rnoY3Uyno8
Ukraine support package worth €50bn agreed by EU leaders
Ukraine ‘hits Russian missile boat Ivanovets in Black Sea’
Highly targeted CRISPR delivery system advances gene editing in living animals
.https://phys.org/news/2024-02-highly-crispr-delivery-advances-gene.html
.Mr & Mrs Smith review – Donald Glover and Maya Erskine’s romance feels like it makes the universe better | Television & radio | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/feb/01/mr-mrs-smith-review-donald-glover-and-maya-erskine-romance-feels-like-it-makes-the-universe-better
Living the dream
Police rescue toddler stuck inside claw machine
TikTok CEO Faces Off Against Tom Cotton
“Massive Strike on Crimea Airfield Catches Russia Unprepared!”
The clustering of aircraft on the satellite image certainly implies they did not expect to get hit.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=nqzg4oEs9e4
Here’s Part 2 of the Behind the Bastards episode (Part 1 @ #43 above) – “Part Two: Tech Bros Have Built A Cult Around AI”:
At the end he mentions Nightshade, which is a fascinating development. He earlier mentions similarities with evolutionary competition, and this seems like a prime example.
TechCrunch – “Nightshade, the tool that ‘poisons’ data, gives artists a fighting chance against AI”:
Much more at the link. The Mona Lisa transformation is outstanding.
RawStory – Kids terrified as Republican lawmaker flashes gun during school’s statehouse visit
IndyStar – Jim Lucas made U-turn on interstate
“A Tsunami Devastated Stone-age Britain 8200years ago. Could it happen again?”
The Storegga underwater slide
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XDvlp_UnBpw
Noah, Heath and Eli are back again.
“Scathing Atheist 572: Dry Aged Roast Edition”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=EbyLl9LaMJE7
Fur farm rescues: “More foxes saved!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HqZZ7Lhy9Yc
From SaveAfox at Youtube.
SC @129, the TechCrunch coverage of “Nightshade” was interesting. Artists do need to put a certain amount of work online where it is susceptible to being scraped by AI. It’s good that some people are developing protective software.
Reginald @122, that is such good news.
SC @114, thanks for that list of subjects for which Elon Musk claimed expertise. That shows, more clearly, than any other summary I’ve seen, what a trumpian, narcissistic dunderhead Musk is. Yes, Musk is dangerous. And he seems to be getting worse over time.
A conservative federal judge appointed by Donald Trump threw out Disney’s seemingly compelling case against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Link
Posted by readers of the article:
Cartoon: One Day on the Rio Grande
Christopher Steele: UK High Court throws out Trump ex-spy dossier case
Caitlin Clark’s quest to break Division I women’s scoring record: Clark moves to No. 2 in dominant win over Northwestern
Catalans face carwash bans, swimming pool restrictions over record drought
Indian police clear a suspected Chinese spy pigeon after 8 months in bird lockup
Plan to Restore Giza Pyramid Draws Anger and Mockery from Archaeologists
I found an annoying anachronism in Anne Rice’s ‘Queen of the Damned’. In what appear to be the predynastic time of Egypt, Jericho did indeed exist, but as a local polity, hardly a kingdom extendibg to mt. Carmel. And I am positive Niniveh did not exist; that area of mesopotamia would become known as Akkad before it became it became known as Assyria.
Most prisoners never receive visitors, and this may put them at a higher risk of re-offending
.https://phys.org/news/2024-02-prisoners-visitors-higher.html
Very poor information about the rules for visits make visits traumatic and deter family from making repeat visits.
Lupus and other autoimmune diseases strike far more women than men. Now there’s a clue why
Anna Stout, who was running in Boebert’s former district, drops out of race
Followup to Reginald @127
Republican senator turns hearing on child safety into display of racial profiling
Former Atlantic City politician charged with election fraud involving absentee ballots
Oregon high court says 10 GOP state senators who staged long walkout can’t run for reelection
Republicans aren’t spending money at Trump’s DC hotel now that he’s sold it
Cops arrest 17-year-old suspected of hundreds of swattings nationwide
Let’s Talk About The Extremist Lunatic Christian Creep Mike Johnson Invited To Pray In The House This Week.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-extremist-lunatic
Also, the National Prayer Breakfast was this morning.
Well, this is something new.
Biden imposes sanctions on Israeli West Bank settlers
Washington Post link
The move marks Biden’s first significant act against Israelis since the Hamas attacks and Israel’s military campaign.
GOP Pollster Suggests 3-Armed Black People Crucial To 2024 Win
The Parody project has a new song out here BATTLE HYMN OF THE TRUMPUBLIC – God Made a Dictator | Don Caron satirising the ‘God made Trump’ ad very nicely!
Mmm. That “nightshade” @129 thingy interested me, so I took a look.
(https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html)
“Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training.
[…]
In an effort to address this power asymmetry, we have designed and implemented Nightshade, a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into “poison” samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.
[…]
Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.”
Righto. It’s an effort to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, so people will pay for it.
Won’t work on humans, of course — they can look at any image they can look at and then be inspired by it, but AIs don’t get that ordinary benefit, apparently. For some reason.
I can instantly think of a way to bypass this, by merely generating a virtual image based on the image data and then incorporating the generated image data, instead of the unprocessed source data.
The mona lisa example in the original citation shows how, actually.
Obs, if I can do it, I’m pretty sure others can, too.
Bah.
“Trump and MAGA Allies Sabotage Border Deal, Sparking GOP Backlash, Infighting ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=PZYH5XENcwg
Rapid evolution in action!
“Something strange is happening to frogs in the Chernobyl exclusion zone …”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/lLrKvv6bHV8..
Ukraine Update: Ukraine sinks another Russian warship, by Mark Sumner
Followup, of sorts, to tomh @39.
Ken Paxton sues five Texas cities that decriminalized marijuana
The article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.
birgerjohansson, quite old news, if it’s this story, which it almost certainly is.
https://futurism.com/chernobyl-frogs-evolution
Something Cool Is Happening to the Frogs at Chernobyl
These little guys are as cute as they are fascinating.
Updated 10. 3. 22 by Noor Al-Sibai
(Because I utterly loathe and detest YouBute (heh) “shorts”, where they enforce aspect ratio, disable controls, limit content, and try to cash in on another platform’s schtick.
Obs, given current circumstances, I doubt there are many scientific teams out and about in that area.
(There are other stories, though, going back years and years about plants and animals and the ecosystem there after the departure of the population of people)
@156 Have you checked out their FAQ? They address most if not all of the “obvious” ways of defeating the tool (and why they don’t actually work).
This isn’t some random group of unknown nobodies popping out of nowhere with a wild, unsubstantiated claim; the people behind Nightshade have an established track record. Nightshade is a refinement/variation of a similar tool they released last year called Glaze, which got a lot of press and which many people tried to find a way to counter… without success. I honestly don’t understand what you mean by “generating a virtual image based on the image data” (huh?), but I am inclined to doubt there is really a simple, obvious way of bypassing these tools, just because if there were, someone else would have done it by now. The fact that after having been out for almost a year Glaze remains unbroken seems to indicate their methods aren’t nearly as fragile as you’re assuming they are.
JSNuttall:
JSNuttall, nope. I do appreciate your referral to the site, but that they have a FAQ does not dispute what I wrote.
Specifically, did they address what I wrote? You know, display the image in a virtual display in whatever encoding is not the encoding of the source image, then generate an image from the displayed image rather than from the source data for the displayed image. I ask because I suspect that, did you know they had so done, you would have mentioned it specifically.
Yes, I know. I went to the site, remember?
Well then, why refine/vary it since it’s such a robust thing that has never been countered? :)
(Hype is hype)
Mmmhmm. See if I can give an example of the type of thing to which I refer.
Say, take the source image and display it on a screen.
Then with a good camera take a photograph of the screen.
Generate image data from the camera capture of the displayed image.
Again: question is, does this technopoison seep through that sort of process?
Yes, I do get your objection. Glaze is already unbreakable, and therefore there’s a new and improved version out which is even more unbreakable. Utterly poisonous to AI data harvesters.
No worries, then. Problem is already solved.
They will release it for free for every one and no image data will ever again be harvested.
Hasn’t been harvested for almost a year, according to you, from participating parties.
(It will be for free, right? ;)
@John Morales #164:
Yes. Your own link at #156 said so.
That’s a variation of what the FAQ called pixel smoothing.
The fact that they have a FAQ does not dispute what you wrote. The content of the FAQ does.
I didn’t specifically mention their having addressed what you wrote because I didn’t understand what you wrote. I couldn’t figure out what you meant by “generating a virtual image based on the image data”. Now that you’ve expressed it more clearly with an example… yes, that is something they explicitly address. It is in fact the very first item addressed on the Glaze page.
Because Glaze and Nightshade serve different and complementary purposes.
Neither I nor the Glaze/Nightshade team made any claims about Nightshade being “even more unbreakable”.
You are asking a lot of questions that are answered in the FAQ, which I gather you still haven’t read.
I’m not particularly interested in arguing further about this; I have no connection to the Glaze/Nightshade team and no vested interest in defending them. I only responded to your previous post because I wanted to point out where there was some further information that might clear up what seemed to me to be a possible misapprehension. I do on the whole have a positive impression of Glaze and Nightshade and tend to think they’re probably a good thing, but then I think in general I’m much less cynical than you are, and perhaps less so than I should be. But if you do want to discuss this further for some reason, I would ask that you at least take the time to read the FAQ first, so you’re not just asking questions that are already addressed there. If after reading their FAQ you still think the Glaze/Nightshade team are a bunch of frauds and/or incompetents and that it’s all just a bunch of vapid hype… so be it. You may even be right. (I don’t think so, but perhaps I’m more of an optimist.) But at least it may offer answers to some of your questions.
CA7746, mmm. I was addressing JSNuttall, who offered the FAQ, not the link I cited.
Which seems odd to me given the prefatory remark to the quotation (my emphasis):
Apparently, taking a photo of a displayed image and resampling it is a normal change.
Anyway, fair enough. That’s definitely the claim at hand.
—
JSNuttall,
I actually looked at the paper itself, too; too much work to nut it out, what with its talk of curated datasets of text/image pairs to which the poison applies and how it’s designed to fool the current image scrapers in operation.
Be aware you are the one who introduced the terms “frauds and/or incompetents” and “vapid”; I wrote that I don’t believe it’s a general thing (it’s specifically addressed at the current harvesting software) and that it’s hype — that is, it makes grand promises for the future.
Not really. I know the claim, but an image is just an image, at the end of the day, and without metadata I can’t see how an image that looks like one thing to a person will look like something else to a scraper without metadata about it.
PS:
So, will it be for free, or will it not?
You are so very coy!
You’ve replied, but you have not answered.
I’m predicting: no.
Why would I not be aware of that? Of course you didn’t use those exact words, but they were a (perhaps mistaken) inference of your opinion based on what you wrote, larded of course with a pinch of rhetorical exaggeration.
Rereading your posts, I don’t actually see where you wrote anything about its being specifically addressed at the current harvesting software, but perhaps I missed it. In any case, I think the team is reasonably up front and realistic about the limitations of their work:
I don’t think they’re making any particularly grandiose claims? (Okay, that “easily” in the last sentence might be pushing it a bit.) But then I suppose that’s a subjective matter. I don’t fully understand the details myself of how the tools work (I am by no means a computer expert), but I don’t see it as inconceivable that the different way a generative AI system “perceives” and analyzes an image relative to a human could mean that it could be thrown off by details that a human wouldn’t notice, without any metadata needed.
In any case, though, I think most of the substantive matters have been cleared up now, and our remaining differences come down mostly to opinion and expectation, which there’s little point in debating. Again, I’m considerably more optimistic and less cynical than you are about these tools (and, well, probably in general, really), but of course I don’t know for sure they’re not just hype, and I suppose time will tell.
Huh? The answer was in the very next sentence in my post, after the one you just quoted. Here it is again, with emphasis added:
(It is also, again, in the FAQ, which is where this sentence comes from.)
JSNuttall:
Yeah, well, perhaps there was a touch of asperity about my comment.
There’s exaggeration, and then there’s ascribing claims to me that I never made.
Not written by me, I mentioned that I’d looked at the paper itself.
In the abstract (my emphasis): “Finally, we propose the use of Nightshade` and similar tools as a last defense for content creators against web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives, and discuss possible implications for model trainers and content creators. ”
Their claims are fine; the hype is in the articles and the reaction to them.
I entirely concur. No worries.
—
In passing, I remember a particularly silly episode of the show Bones, where… ah, lemme clicketyclick… ah. https://bones.fandom.com/wiki/The_Crack_in_the_Code
(Image files are magical and execute code!)
JSNuttall, good grief! I can read, you know.
Heh. Thing is, that’s in https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/faq.html and the topic is Nightshade, not Glaze.
Sure, the Nightshade FAQ says Glaze is free, but does not say whether Nightshade (the actual thing it’s supposed to be addressing) is or will be free.
So it’s not an answer to the actual question (which was rhetorical initially, but which you took up as a real one), is it? :)
My apologies for that, then, if I leapt to an incorrect conclusion about your meaning; I didn’t intend to misrepresent your views.
That sentence is copied verbatim from the Glaze FAQ, and I presumed (and still do presume) that it is meant to apply to Nightshade as well, but they just neglected to modify the sentence accordingly. You’re technically right, though, that they don’t explicitly say that Nightshade is also meant to be free. I feel it’s fairly clear from the full context and from statements elsewhere on the page that they do intend for both Glaze and Nightshade to be free and it’s just a matter of slightly careless wording, but of course I can’t prove that.
The Republicans worked this out long ago. https://wwe.smbc-comics.com/comic/wolf-3
Solving the ‘trolley problem’ ! https://wwe.smbc-comics.com/comic/singed
Dang! Here are the correct links
The Republicans worked this out long ago. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/wolf-3
Solving the ‘trolley problem’ ! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/singed
Good grief, John. That was like Argument-from-ignorance-palooza. Thank you, JSNuttall.
You appear to have appreciated (@ #167) that your One Simple Trick to foil the tool wouldn’t work, although…
This is a textbook argument from ignorance. That’s really all there is to say about it.
With regard to whether or not it’s free, I won’t aim your cheeky “Let me Google that for you…” back at you, but yes, a few seconds of googling (or a closer reading of the article I had linked to) would have provided the answer.
artnet – “Demand for a New Tool That Poisons Generative A.I. Models Has Been ‘Off the Charts’”:
From the TechCrunch piece:
Here’s the link where it can be downloaded – for free.
Your implication has plainly been to insinuate that the creators have been hyping the tool to sell it, but in fact they’ve been remarkably circumspect and forthright in their communications about it. Nor, despite the fact that you later appeared to back off the developers and shift your insinuations to the article-writers and readers, have you provided any evidence of this alleged hype or these grandiose claims. The only grandiose claims made about it have been by you, ventriloquizing.
Indeed, I noted in my comment that it’s comparable to an evolutionary arms race, which is the opposite of suggesting the tools are “unbreakable,” that they’ve “never been countered,” or that “no image data will ever again be harvested.” Of course, as everyone recognizes, the larger ecological context is the legal/regulatory environment; as long as that fails to provide artists with adequate protection, this is one tool that can help them defend themselves.
I’m confused about your confusion regarding how these tools work. As I understand it, Glaze is a defensive tool – interfering with AI scraping of that particular work – and Nightshade is more offensive – corrupting the AI scraping process going forward. They complement one another, as JSNuttall explained. The developers are working on a combined tool they expect to release this year, which will also presumably be free. Of course they work against current harvesting software – what else would they work against? And I don’t see what you’re trying to suggest by highlighting that they defend against “web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives.” Artists don’t need a defense against the ones that don’t ignore those directives! It’s like reading an article about Ukraine developing drones to defend against the attack by Russia and saying well, they’re only designed to work against Russia or in this war, when of course Russia’s the only country attacking them. They don’t need drones against Sweden.
From the TechCrunch article – just before what I quoted @ #177 (my emphasis):
Unclaimed Property Day: How to Check if Your State Has Your Unclaimed Property
Tesla Cybertruck’s Aero Wheel Covers Are Chewing Up The Custom Tires, Will Likely Get Redesigned
Trump sees diminishing fundraising returns from combative court appearances
I’d say this just points up Biden’s hypocrisy: violent as these four may be, they are unlikely to have slaughtered 10,000+ children.
A ‘sexualized’ Jesus? Easter poster in Spain stirs controversy
Wisconsin redistricting experts tell Supreme Court Republican map proposals are gerrymanders
“Stunning”: Experts think Trump CFO perjury caused judge to “slam the brakes” on fraud trial ruling
Missouri abortion rights campaign raises $3 million as signature-gathering effort begins
Jim Jordan sent Fani Willis angry requests for information. She told him how “ignorant” he appeared. The result: a new congressional subpoena.
Link
New report points to blockbuster U.S. job growth as 2024 begins
By every metric, the latest jobs report points to an incredibly strong U.S. job market. The political implications have the potential to be dramatic.
What the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago was devastating for Donald Trump. But new reporting suggests there were spaces that investigators missed.
Brit corruption revisited # one million
Michael Gove lobbied by Covid VIP lane’s biggest winner of PPE contracts | Michael Gove | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/02/michael-gove-lobbied-by-covid-vip-lanes-biggest-winner-of-ppe-contracts
Judge throws out case against Greta Thunberg and other London protesters | Greta Thunberg | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/02/judge-throws-out-case-against-greta-thunberg-and-other-london-protesters
What the hell? A toupee for pubic hair?
“The latest high-fashion accessory? Say hello to the merkin” | Fashion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2024/jan/31/fashion-statement-merkin-maison-margiela-pubic-hair-cover
On the theme of pussy riot, here is an interesting title .
Cats of Catthulhu III – Joel Sparks, Caroline Jamhour
Meduza – “Russian authorities say anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin’s candidacy documents contain ‘surprising errors’”:
Link
Followup to comment 190.
Link
Guardian – “‘It’s unfathomable’: speed hump saboteurs join Italy’s pro-car vandals”:
Cartoon: Punxsutawney Stinky
‘That’s crazy’: Swing-state voters aghast to learn of Trump’s immunity claim
US to require cryptocurrency mines to report energy use data
George Monbiot in the Guardian – “In a world built by plutocrats, the powerful are protected while vengeful laws silence their critics”:
Remember Laura Loomer? Well You Weren’t Paying Enough Attention, So She Went Batsh*t Racist On Ilhan Omar.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/remember-laura-loomer-well-you-werent
This woman should be somewhere she can’t hurt herself or others.
Remember Laura Loomer? Well You Weren’t Paying Enough Attention, So She Went Batsh*t Racist On Ilhan Omar.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/remember-laura-loomer-well-you-werent
SC @201, This deserves to be repeated:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-pissed-off-as-british-court
I think Ilhan Omar is the most gracious politician I’ve seen.
Washington Post link
I think it is likely that Willis will be found to have not done anything illegal, but the “appearance of impropriety” charge will be pushed by Republicans to disqualify her.
A few campaign tidbits, as summarized by Steve Benen:
See also: Trump’s absence on the Nevada primary ballot fuels a ‘calamity’ among voters
Republicans get Ukraine demands met, so of course they change their minds
Tesla had a new recall today that has me worried.
The recall, due to too small a font used in a display of a warning.
Why the qualms?
Recalls were originally due to major issues involving safety, like oh, your car bursting into flames while you’re peacefully driving it.
Now, cars bursting into open, involving flames and dim illuminators or (OK, I complain incessantly about tiny text in my elderhood) small fonts are equal in public alarm views. The flame thing not being able to usually be addressed by a fucking software update.
Profanity driven by being an IT type…
Perhaps, re-terming it to “software recall”?
There is a wee difference between “your car will randomly burst into open flames with you and your extended family inside” and “your brakes are about to fail, so safely coast as best you can to the curb”.
Never had a car burst into flames, I have had a few cars whose brakes quit on me, hugely annoying, amazed at my low underwear replacement bill, coasted to a stop or pumped the living shit out of what remained to stop. Got a running a stop sign ticket once after one pumping like it was a brand new influencer event thing.
That cop, later arrested for conspiring with a biker gang, drugs and official misconduct of a similar vein.
I was eating dinner with a judge at the time.*
*I was. Literally. And yes, there was some personal involvement there, as the statute of limitations is long expired.
Having no siblings, I’ve retained an extensive network, “Christianity derived” of friends and contacts, my wife also enjoyed that environment and well, we even adopted entire families to shelter under our wings of advice. I also kept contact with some, rather unreasonable people, hoping to guide them to more fortunate pathways.
Really long story short, “hearts and minds” works, it just takes a while. Quick fix idiocy loses in any long term environment. Always.
Alien-Looking Fossil Trees Uncovered in Canada: ‘Unlike Any of Those That Live at the Present
Making a PDF That’s Larger Than Germany
Lebensraum.pdf
So Many People In Connecticut Are Gonna Get Their Medical Debt Canceled
https://www.wonkette.com/p/so-many-people-in-connecticut-are
Fox News’ Jesse Watters cites debunked claim to argue that climate scientists fabricated US temperature data
Life-threatening flash flooding, historic rainfall possible across California this weekend
Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles and Long Beach are all locations at risk for record-rainfall and potentially significant and damaging flash flooding Sunday and Monday.
@wzrd1 #209:
Windshield wipers get a recall.
SC @177:
Sorta; my opinion is what it is. I was expressing my opinion. That should have been clear.
This: “Zhao and his team aren’t trying to take down Big AI — they’re just trying to force tech giants to pay for licensed work, instead of training AI models on scraped images.” is fairly grandiose, in my opinion.
The image generative software, as suggested by the paper. Supposedly, the scraped images on which they train look like one thing to people and another to AI systems and so when they are asked to render X they instead render Y. Scrapers are just the collecting tools.
I’m not so much confused as ignorant about the process, and I lack the proper background to get what the paper is saying.
—
@178, I am convinced about their good intentions. Fair enough.
How’s that ‘God’s army’ caravan of truckers thing going?
When the “trucker convoy” first started out, it didn’t have any trucks. Zero trucks. Just cars. Now they have 50 trucks and Sarah Palin. They are begging “keyboard warriors” to join the fight.
True to form, the organizers put up banners with mistakes, like “February 3th”.
Random updates from Finland:
The border against Russia remains closed for the foreseeable future. The closure that began in December expired in mid-January and was renewed without fuss. The next time it will expire is in mid-February just after presidential election. Under the current law, the border can be only closed for “short periods of time” – a string of repeated one-month closures is really stretching the interpretation of the law.
There is no indication that Russia plans to stop exploiting the border and the asylum system for harassment and intimidation purposes. While the border remains closed, and the winter makes walking in the woods very difficult, only a few small groups of asylum seekers have crossed the border in that manner in recent weeks. When the snow melts, approximately in April and early May in southeastern Finland, the situation will escalate.
On the presidential election, I was planning to make the point that was just summed up in this Guardian opinion piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/02/finland-russia-us-election-president-vladimir-putin-donald-trump
Personally, I still don’t feel much sense of a threat from Russia – but then again I generally try to avoid thinking about such unpleasant prospects. I think the stress and anxiety is generally higher in Baltic coutries (and for a good reason) than in Finland or Scandinavia.
Anyway, I concur that the November US election will be more consequential for Finland’s national security than our own (and, for that matter, more consequential than the upcoming Russian election, lol). That’s quite remarkable, considering that the Finnish president, in addition to being a national figurehead, is supposed to participate in national security strategy and advance it via diplomatic activity. As it is, the two remaining candidates in this election have fairly similar experience and values, at least in respects that are relevant for the job. Meanwhile, the future security environment will depend on the decisions of United States and big West European countries.
US launches retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria
lumipuna @219, thanks for that update.
Speaking of Trump, Susan B. Glasser has a new piece in The New Yorker: The Senate’s False Hope of a Grand Bargain Meets Its Trumpy Demise
Whether folly, hubris, or denial, it was always going to end this way.
More at the link.
Followup to Reginald @220.
Link
I assume everyone have learned of the poll that puts Biden at 50% and Trump at 43%? It is the women voters that have turned things around. It is almost as if doing sexual assaults is frowned on
.
YouTube: Pat Robertson can’t get into heaven #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/4yUqkMENYGE
The actor who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky films has died. 😥
Abbie Richards at Media Matters (YT link) – “Russell Brand And The Conspiracy Grift”:
Heh. In BBC news: Misinformation spreads in China on ‘civil war’ in Texas
Carl Kasarda -who has the InRange podcast- is one of the more responsible members of the gun-owning community. I enjoy his podcasts about gun-related history and his humanitarian values. Here he is reaching out to help a black guy who was subjected to a racist assault. If all gun enthusiasts were like this, USA would be a very different place.
“Devin Jones was attacked at SHOT Show and needs our help.”
https://youtube.com/shorts/Is9v1emKNyY
“Morning routine of a crazy cat lady”
Purrrrrr.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/PHyfQlBcHlc
He is such a Real Housewife.
Just throwing this in for fun. Ian McKellen/Gandalf in a Pet Shop Boys video 1988.
Pet Shop Boys – Heart (Official Video) [HD Upgrade]
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=vlIsU7ImU0w
My pet peeve demands grooming.
Entitlements.
Remember that GOP buggerboo?
Entitlements are under section 8 of the US Constitution, hence inherent rights that are well, senior to the “Bill of Rights”.
Yet, oddly, deemed inferior by the right.
OK, spleen vented. Now, excuse me while I clean both my machine gun, howitzer and T-Rex, who all need a good pressure washer cleaning.
Rex demands it.
Global Tipping Points website :
https://global-tipping-points.org/
Worth a look – although seriously worrying stuff there.
Year 2038 problem
Imran Khan: Pakistan ex-PM and wife Bushra Bibi jailed for illegal marriage
In sequence, his previous two marriages ended.
The punk icon Wayne Kramer has died. His band infuenced many others, like The Clash.
Classy Donald strikes again.
E Jean Carroll lawyer says Trump used coded version of C-word against her | Donald Trump | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/02/robert-kaplan-trump-c-word-e-jean-carroll-lawyer
birgerjohansson @ #236, yes! I was going to link to the episode yesterday but didn’t have a chance:
“George Conway Explains: How Trump Lost $83M (with Roberta Kaplan!)”:
Hala Alyan in the Guardian – “‘I am not there and I am not here’: a Palestinian American poet on bearing witness to atrocity”:
AP – “Who freed Flaco? One year later, celebrity owl’s escape from Central Park Zoo remains a mystery”:
That couldn’t have been a leopard that ate my face.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/why-do-all-these-republican-supreme-court-justices-keep-overruling-my-reproductive-rights
The RNC chairwoman calls for unity as the party faces a cash crunch and attacks by some Trump allies
It is sad that they say this out loud and it is no longer even considered controversial. They don’t want to provide governance, or to pursue certain policies; their only goal is to put themselves in positions of power.
Harvard alumni backed by billionaires fail to make cut for board ballot
Apparently screwing up universities is the latest hobby of the ultra-rich.
Guardian – “Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill appointed first minister as Stormont reconvenes”:
LOL, sure.
In a Medical First, a French Bulldog Puppy Spontaneously Regrew His Lower Jaw
NBC News:
Link
Link
Link
Update on French farmers protesting:
Link
More at the link. I snipped quite a bit of the text.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/how-many-forests-did-the-new-york
A year after East Palestine derailment, rail industry blocks new safety rules (That’s a Washington Post link.)
The nation’s largest rail operators — including Norfolk Southern, the freight railroad behind the 2023 accident — have sought to weaken proposed regulations that might prevent chemical spills and other incidents
Sheesh. Same old fucking story. Anti-regulation lobbying in order to set themselves up to reap greater profits, all the while endangering the public.
More at the link.
Election Law Blog
Federal District Court Rejects Argument that North Dakota’s Acceptance of Ballots Postmarked by Election Day but Arriving After Election Day Violates Federal Law
Rick Hasen / February 2, 2024, 11:55 am
Sales of Digital World Acquisition stock triggered a widespread federal probe that involved a confidential informant, a secret airport phone scan and an elite anti-money-laundering squad. Three people were indicted, but the investigation continues.
Washington Post link
More at the link.
Sounds like Trump was involved with criminals who were smarter than your average trumpian associate.
NC nurse left a clue behind at Jan. 6 Capitol riots, feds say. It led to her arrest
I’m out! Former Republican Party loyalist says why he’s leaving the party
Biden can’t beat the MAGA meme machine online, kingmaker Clyburn says
But the “MAGA wall” reflects all that noise so it only deafens those inside the bubble. Dark Brandon knows how the game works.
Estonia sends military aid to Ukraine, including Javelin missile systems
Antarctica mysteries to be mapped by robot plane
See the ‘unholy’ so-called bagels causing a stir at a famous Montreal bagel shop
Will megaconstellations damage Earth’s magnetic field?
Sam Lawler
Sam Lawler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Carly Sagan (Plasma physicist, Author of research in #261)
Sam Lawler
Youtube shorts # Boy moms
.https://youtube.com/shorts/Nc6mklog6ow
More Stanzi Youtube videos:
Saw compilation
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=rExxFxxsHME
Serial killer dating advice (extended)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lreyf3-grWE
OK, this is brilliant. I am so stealing these arguments.
“Me vs gods plan” (extended)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=6unhNSgI7Jg
Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, bassist with Bob Marley and the Wailers, dies aged 77 | Reggae
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/feb/03/aston-family-man-barrett-bassist-with-bob-marley-and-the-wailers-dies-aged-77
Vale Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue. Huge Respect. Rest in Power. :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/celebrated-indigenous-leader-dies-aged-91/102277300
Not really surprsing but :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2024-02-extreme-wildfire-income-nonwhite-communities.html
Then there”s another reason to tackle light polution and a good conclusion here :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2024-01-insects-circle-night-track-sky.html
Plus inlight of our new understadning of neptiuné real colour we have
Source : https://phys.org/news/2024-02-neptune-exoplanets-cloudy.html
Link
Video of Trump saying anti-union stuff in 2008 is available at the link. Same as it ever was.
Better even than expected: Joe Biden got almost 97% of the votes in the North Carolina Democratic primary.
Link
South Dakota tribe bans governor from reservation over US-Mexico border remarks
‘SNL’ Faces Backlash After Nikki Haley Makes Surprise Appearance During Cold Open
American political commentator Tucker Carlson spotted attending ballet in Moscow
Huh – yet another short-term cludge!
New Mexico Democrats push to criminalize fake electors before presidential vote
“knowingly or recklessly” – sounds like it could be a challenge to prove in court.
National GOP to Arizona fake elector: Pay your own legal bills
Trump Claims He Was Kidding About Being a ‘Dictator’
Schrödinger‘s Douchebag: A person who says offensive things and decides whether they were joking based upon the reaction of people around them
U.S. and U.K. launch airstrikes targeting Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen
Reginald @279, one of the problems with Trump’s “it was just a joke” defense is that he repeated the same promise to be a dictator for a day on multiple media outlets … some of them on camera.
In other news, this is a followup to comment 280:
Link
California braces as threatening storm system set to deliver ‘life threatening flooding’ and heavy snow
Nikki Haley appears on ‘SNL,’ […]
Link for SNL sketches, as mentioned in comment 283:
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live
Voucher expansions have unleashed a flood of additional taxpayer dollars to the benefit of families already enrolled in private schools. In Ohio, some schools are now “strongly encouraging” parents to apply for vouchers, regardless of need or income.
More at the link.
Orlando Sentinel – “Florida grand jury investigating COVID-19 vaccines releases first report”:
A simulacrum of a grand jury investigation.
Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty | Carole Cadwalladr | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/04/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-us-congress-deep-fakes-disinformation-technology
From The Guardian
‘Gloom is good’: after my wife died I found solace in poetry and music | Life and style |
.https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/feb/04/gloom-is-good-after-my-wife-died-i-found-solace-in-poetry-and-music
How did life get started on Earth? Atmospheric haze might have been the key
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-life-earth-atmospheric-haze-key.html
Alas, this article is much too optimistic. A far more realistic option is a space tether. A refer you to the Internet if you want to explore the ‘space tether’ concept.
“Are space elevators possible? Physicist says they could transform humanity into a ‘spacefaring civilization’
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-space-elevators-physicist-humanity-spacefaring.html
Most of you will have read about how Asshole 45 disrespected the lawyer of the rape victin with the anagram “See you next Thursday”*
However, the Brit version of the word is unisex, and sometimes it can be very, very apt. Here is a song that is even more apt today, considering the tens of thousands of extra COVID deaths.
Boris Johnson Is A Fucking C*** (feat. The Kunts)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=uGwCykQwgTU
*an abbreviation? That is not quite correct unless you ignore spelling.
Glitch McConnell # Stanzi shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/BMOpvrDGp7I ” I hope he gets rabies and is cannibalized by drag queens” will be my motto!
Dang! Here is the link.
Glitch McConnell (extended)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=I8PNO1FAoIY&si=gVc11X8hV90g_Tua
Fox & Friends core viewers?
.https://youtube.com/shorts/zw0wUM1OTAA?si=V8sHRwbdhN77XsHM
George Stephanopoulos Shuts Down Interview With Sen. J.D. Vance
The Hells Angels Are Pivoting To Fatwas [headline a bit misleading]
https://www.wonkette.com/p/the-hells-angels-are-pivoting-to
This is weird as hell, y’all.
Nope. Knock it off, please.
SC @ 298
OK. Help me out here. What should I call BoJo and his band of merry sociopaths? “Fascist” is not apt. Some of them do not give a damn about ideology.
My list of invectives somehow falls short of describing monsters who sent old people from hospitals to elder care facilities without testing them for Covid (thus ensuring the epidemic spread like wildfire) …all because they might lose prestige by admitting the hospitals had a shortage of beds after their budget cuts.
I know “the triviality of evil ” fits the situation but it is way too anemic. Rolls-royce driving murderers?
“Understanding music-performance anxiety in children”
Goddammit. If you push kids, they will hate the activity the rest of their lives.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-music-anxiety-children.html
Hey! Teachers! Leave the kids alone! (guitar riff)
birger, SC is telling you that word still has power regardless of its usage elsewhere.
No more and no less.
(Takes me back to 2006 or so, where she was one of the people who shaped this blog’s tone)
—
As for suggestions, what about the classics, such as ‘a shit’?
Um… <clickety-click>
https://thinkinginenglish.blog/2022/01/14/a-guide-to-insulting-boris-johnson/
This is a rather theoretical article, but if the concept leads to mass production of car batteries it is very good news.
“A strategy to design lithium anode interlayer for all-solid-state lithium-metal batteries”
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-01-strategy-lithium-anode-interlayer-solid.html
Retraction Watch – “Book retraction surfaces long-standing feud between South African academics.”
World Cup 2026: MetLife Stadium in New Jersey to host World Cup final on 19 July
SC @ 303 -if Hossenfelder is right about AI fooling scientific journals in the future, we are all screwed over.
I can imagine bad-faith actors tailoring AI articles to deliberately drive wedges between researchers, instead of ‘merely’ publishing fake data.
Sabine Hossenfelder :”AI experts make predictions for 2040. I was a little surprised.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=g7TghURVC6Y
‘Incompetent’ Alina Habba dubbed ‘deep state plant to destroy Donald Trump’ in new theory
‘False Flag!’
Reginald Selkirk @ 306
We are living in a Philip K. Dick world…enabled by stupidity instead of high tech.
.
Every school kid should have to watch this Youtube short :
“I’m a biological male… born looking female? #intersexawareness #intersexawarenessday”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/A68-MCGq0EU
MAGA convoy confused by lack of invasion as they arrive at border.
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/maga-convoy-confused-by-lack-of-invasion-as-they-arrive-at-border
It is almost as if they have been …lied to!
I keep forgetting! – from the Wonkette link @ Lynna’s #251:
Which is here at Freethought Blogs! Worlds colliding! :)
Thank you, John Morales @ #301. birgerjohansson, apologies if I sounded snippy. As John alluded to, this was debated (to use the term generously) ad nauseam here a while back, which was exhausting and depressing and involved much toxic entitled petulance. Thank you for not digging in.
OK not going there again.
.
POV: Moving Someone’s Wheel Chair #disability #wheelchair #skit
.https://youtube.com/shorts/wvhqtLF2RQI
(Jeez, even I know better. Which is a pretty low bar)
“Asherah: Did God Have a Wife?”
(spoiler: yes)
Three-hour lecture, but worth your time.
.https://youtube.com/live/ODfqmq-iABU
Senate releases $118 billion bipartisan aid proposal for Israel, Ukraine, border security
You know how this works. Now they have to try to convince the House to pass it.
30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed
Hint: They’re pretty much all good.
ArsTechnica – Google Cached webpages are dead
The Messenger goes dark as bleak year for news industry gets worse
“Shocking! Content creator starts working in mines after being told get a real job”
https://youtube.com/shorts/ac1G0ykrWCs
Goddammit, I want that fake job.
Link
Taylor Swift is Ruining it for MAGA Folks — The Week in Editorial Cartoons
More news: Taylor Swift makes Grammys history
With “Midnights,” Swift became the first person to win album of the year four times.
Followup to comment 319.
Grammy winners (just some of them):
Miley Cyrus: Two Grammys out of six nominations.
The “Barbie” movie soundtrack: Three Grammys (with Billie and Finneas nabbing two of those) out of 11 nominations.
Taylor Swift: Two Grammys out of six nominations.
SZA: Three Grammys out of nine nominations.
Victoria Monét: Two Grammys out of seven nominations.
You can see all the winners (and nominees) here
I don’t normally do this, but since this Taylor is all over the news recently and now features here, a snippet from a convo here (my emphasis): https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/19/one-of-our-submarines-is-missing/#comment-2183211
“This conversation is weird. It’s normal to see John Morales choosing not to understand something in a pedantic way, but not so much Silentbob or flex.
Those of you who are smugly stroking your philosophy beards and saying “It is stupid to judge someone solely on wealth” are… not understanding the argument at all, acting like wealth is a totally arbitrary number that just beams out of nowhere like cosmic rays. It’s not. In order for monstrous ‘billionaire’ style wealth to have accumulated in a single place, a great deal of something immoral had to happen: massive worker exploitation, massive hoarding of life necessities (eg. real estate), massive middleman skimming, or some other form of massive rent seeking. This is the thing that Lotharloo et al are getting at; it is not merely an argument that it is immoral to sit on a dragon hoard of wealth while others suffer because their needs are not being met (though that’s an argument that can be made), rather it’s the argument that in order for that hoard to exist harm had to have been done, usually to thousands or millions of people.”
—
https://www.forbes.com/profile/taylor-swift/
“Musician
$1.1B Real Time Net Worth as of 2/3/24
#2315 in the world today”
[oops, I forgot the emphasis. Feel free to guess what it may have been.
Instead, an addendum, from the same comment]
“All of which is to say: Nobody is judging anyone on a meaningless number, you abnormally dense wankers! The wealth is not the crime, it’s a powerful near-certain indicator of the presence of many completed and ongoing immoral acts!”
(Gotta love a good rant, no?)
Mongabay Podcast – Can ‘degrowth’ solve our ecological, social & economic problems? (1:18:11)
Excerpts from the overlong episode.
They link a Nature article, “Wasted GDP in the USA“.
Silent fields: A cocktail of pesticides is stunting bumblebee colonies across Europe
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-silent-fields-cocktail-pesticides-stunting.html
Hungry sea otters are helping save California’s marshlands from erosion
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-hungry-sea-otters-california-marshlands.html
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain::
Um. USA is much, much, much bigger. Its geography is entirely different. Its location is diffferent.
Its trade patterns are different. Its climatic range is much different. Its culture is different. Its trading partners are different. Lots of differences, actually.
But somehow, all these things can be ignored and that simplistic comparison can be essayed.
Um, GDP per capita is not anything like income per capita, because income is not GDP.
Entirely different metrics, so this summary is automatically suspect.
(Surely the relevant metric is welfare per capita, no? ;)
Yeah, I know… I need to look at the original context, it’s all done by experts, blah blah blah.
I am a fool for imagining that intimates that GDP (per capita) equates to income (per capita) — presumably, from that snippet, average income/GDP rather than the median. That sort of thing.
(But hey, hyperbole, right? Works for you!)
“The impudent red guest of the panther Luna (Eng sub)”
Black leopard and rottweiler alarmed by fox incursion 😊
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=KuxmN76gaGw
[quietude]
But hey, CA7746, I did check out the site. FWTW.
In case I seem a bit cynical or negative, I’ll share my cursory check results, but not too shabby, is what I think.
So.
https://www.mongabay.com/about/
Admirable goals. And now I know about them.
Since I was curious, I did check further:
“Rhett A. Butler founded Mongabay.com in 1999 out of his passion for tropical forests. He called the site Mongabay after an island in Madagascar.”
Righto.
“The founder of the website explains that “mongabay” originated from an anglicized spelling and pronunciation of Nosy Mangabe, an island off the coast of Madagascar. He goes on to note that it is best known as “a preserve for the aye-aye, a rare and unusual lemur famous for its bizarre appearance”. ”
Again, admirable, and it explains why Googling the actual name only yields that site. Good.
“As of April 29, 2021, Mongabay.org had a 100/100 score on Charity Navigator’s Encompass Rating System, which evaluates a nonprofit organization’s financial health including measures of stability, efficiency and sustainability as well as its accountability and transparency policies. Mongabay.org had a Guidestar Platinum Transparency rating, which according to the Guidestar “[demonstrates] its commitment to transparency.”
Excellent moral credentials, there.
Of course, none of that vitiates the comparison for GDP/Welfare ratio they essayed between two entirely different countries. I reckon a comparison with Vatican City would be even more impressive… probably not too many people sleeping rough, there :)
Still. Gotta admire that sort of thing.
In Oz news: ‘Yes but I hate you!’ Trump and Turnbull’s explosive phone call
Re 262: On the effect metal space debris on Earth’s magnetic field. Specifically the part “nobody knows what adverse effects this might have”.
It’s been just over one page (500 comments) since I asked something about orbital physics, for fiction writing purposes. Now I’m still studying Wikipedia for the same story, on various space-related topics. The whole project is horribly out of proportion, but I’m learning a lot of amazing things.
Like Juggalos, I’m struggling with trying to understand magnets in general, and Earth’s magnetic field in particular. My story needs humans colonizing the inner Van Allen Belt, which is notorious for accumulating captured protons that bounce around in that area, resulting in dangerously high levels of proton radiation. It supposedly causes trouble even for electronics, limiting satellite activity.
Now, Wikipedia notes that some futuristic methods have been proposed for “draining” the Van Allen Belt of charged particles, which would greatly benefit humans using the near-Earth space. There’s only a brief note about possible unknowable unintended consequences. I’d rather not write that.
I’m trying to figure out potential other solutions. Like, could you install an orbital space station or space colony with its own magnetic field (well within Earth’s magnetic field) to deflect protons? What would it require, or look like in practice? Why isn’t this a thing already for satellites? There must be some catch.
“Spherical houses weren’t a great idea.”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kwDVw0u4Kw
Trump’s Criminal Stooge Reveals Secret Plans on Foreign TV
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gt63CgMhwE
Good news for maybe PZ and those approaching retirement.
Study finds new treatment to reverse inflammation and arterial blockages in rheumatoid arthritis
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-treatment-reverse-inflammation-arterial-blockages.html
Ian Lavender, the last surviving member of Dad’s Army has died.
☹
Scammer Poses As CFO in Deepfaked Meeting On Zoom, Steals $25 Million
Huge atom-smasher bid to find missing 95% of Universe
At least 6 Kurdish fighters are killed in a drone attack on a Syrian base housing US troops
Massive caverns dug 4,800 feet below surface ready to host neutrino experiment
Nevada Supreme Court Rules Surface Water And Groundwater Are One And The Same
Scientists Find Mysterious, Oozing Black Eggs Almost 4 Miles Below The Ocean’s Surface
Scientists have been able to transform transparent glass into a photovoltaic surface
lumipuna @329:
The catch is that, the smaller the object you want to protect, the stronger the required magnetic field*. The stronger the field, the more mass you need to create and sustain the field, and also protect the rest of the ship/station from that field. I’m guessing that research into that is ongoing.
*A quick and dirty calculation says you’d need a field of about 1T at the surface of the ship/station, if the size of the thing is on the order of 100m.
As Talking Points Memo noted:
See:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.277.0.pdf
Examples:
Yep. It is an educational document that demonstrates patience and attention to detail. The whole thing also comes off like a long sigh accompanying an unspoken “Do we really have to do this?”
Wildfires:
Link
Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs
‘I would get this any day’: Goodyear blimp pilot tries BLIMP sandwich at Diamond Deli
Legend Tracy Chapman Singing ‘Fast Car’ with Country singer Luke Combs Became a Grammys Moment
Good god the parade of cable news royal commentators.
New E. coli strain will accelerate evolution of the genes of your choice
@313
House Republicans announce bill that provides more military aid to Israel but leaves out Ukraine
Mysterious bright red squirrels lead to odd discovery in New York town, officials say
John Morales #321:
#325:
Close. Macroeconomic theory.
#327:
I now doubt the existence of Madagascar.
Reginald @346, Tracy Chapman is great. Her presence really made that moment.
Ann Coulter offers brutal advice for Trump: ‘Die’
SC @347, overkill for sure. I just stopped watching the news.
Reginald @349, as I expected. Still disappointing, still bad news. Sheesh. Followup:
Link
Too many dunderheaded Republicans spending all their time looking for ways to make the bill fail … or if not complete failure, at least the failure to send aid to Ukraine. It is mindbogglingly stupid and counterproductive.
Decades of research samples destroyed in Sweden cooler failure
.https://phys.org/news/2024-02-decades-samples-destroyed-sweden-cooler.html
Followup to comments 349 and 354.
Donald Trump has GOP senators flipping out over border bill
House leaders immediately dismiss border deal with lies
Unfortunately, many media outlets will not make it clear to the public that the Republicans are lying.
Britain. Home Office blames Windrush victim, 87, for not appealing his ban from UK
.https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/home-office-windrush-victim-reynold-simon-thompson-leave-enter-remain/?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=YouTubeCommunity
Josh Marshall: Make No Mistake. The House GOP is On the Ropes Here.
Followup to comment 346 and 352.
New York Times link
Video available here:
https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1754316946403709139
And here:
https://twitter.com/EZRideryoyall/status/1754317628661768555
New Hampshire town manager resigns after homophobic harassment
Ted Cruz, slated for controversial Cancun trip, now wants airport escorts for lawmakers
Cthulhu forbid he should have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.
Lauren Boebert abandoned her district and voters are rejoicing
@363 ibid
Rob Grigjanis at 342 – Thanks again!
I take it that the 100 m refers to how much mass/shielding would be needed to protect (to some arbitrary level) the inhabitants from the residual protons?
I was actually thinking about building an electromagnet around a potato-shaped orbital asteroid of about 10 km in size. Like, could you just coil a wire a few times around its longest axis and electrify the wire? What kind of power source would it take, and what kind of field (if any) would it generate?
@365: It would take more power than you could get from using the potato as a battery.
Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow to ‘root for Russia’ in person
CA7746:
Ah, right. Thus Portugal is comparable to the USA, because of that theory.
After all, an economy is an economy, right?
Let me reiterate the risible conclusion: “This means that the US economy could in theory be scaled down by a staggering 65% […] while at the same time improving the lives of ordinary Americans, if income was distributed more fairly and invested in public goods.”
Presumably, distributing “income” (they cite GDP) more fairly and investing in public goods can be achieved without scaling the economy (isn’t that proxied by the GDP?) by a staggering 65%, no?
(I notice the framing)
Scientists are calling for a new Category 6 for hurricanes — because they already exist
Reginald, huh. Here’s a pullquote you neglected to add:
See, there’s a “strongest” category already; adding a new “strongest” category seems rather pointless, since one can only do so much to prepare — knowing human nature, people would then think to the effect that “well, it’s only a 5” since there’s a 6 to be had — that is, what is now the most worrisome category won’t diminish in potency, but will be seen as lesser.
Why do Intelligent Design Creationists lie about junk DNA?
Habit?
Because they lie about everything?
Because they do not find the truth helpful to their cause?
Because they do not think they are lying?
Trio wins $700K Vesuvius Challenge grand prize for deciphering ancient scroll
lumipuna @365:
No, the 100m refers to the size (radius) of the station/spaceship. I assume a generator at the core of the vessel. The rest of your questions are beyond my competency and interest.
re #374, I can click: https://superdarn.thayer.dartmouth.edu/downloads/JSR09.pdf
A bit too technical for me.
Distant Objects In The Solar System May All Be Pancake Shaped Like ‘Oumuamoamoa’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MIzqUV4MSJg
Rob Grigjanis – OK, thanks.
Animal videos:
Panther Luna and Venza are happy to meet Vova 😂(ENG SUB)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=90wkD3_xzjw
Animals come to artificial water pool in garden
.https://youtube.com/shorts/Qy4zUR0Vx-k
“I abort competitively” #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/uzpiihqwbBg
I saw American Fiction. Absolutely recommend it.
As conservatives balk, U.S. Border Patrol union endorses Senate immigration deal
Error 321 Backend fetch failed
Backend fetch failed.
hneriergrd:
DPT: 321
Varnish cache server
NOVA (YT link) – “When Whales Could Walk”:
Birger you could try Stewart Lee’s version from his Guardian columns which in full is: “Boris P*******y Watermelon Letterbox Cake B*****s Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson”.
NB Yes there are offensive words in there all of which Boris himself used while in public, I’ve starred out the worst. Lee started off just using Johnson’s full name – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, then added bits as the oaf said unbelievably rude, condescending, horrendous things. Johnson chose to use just “Boris” as it made him sound more like an ordinary person than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Jazzlet @ 384
You should have some kind of award, but as it would be associated with BoJo it might smell as bad as the orange guy.
If there are any Canadians reading this maybe you can update us on the situation in Canada. I am told the party of former PM Harper -aka The Awful Horrible Bastard Party- is catching up with the government in the polls, now that people have had time to forget Harper.
“What’s in a Lichen? How Scientists Got It Wrong for 150 Years ”
Some lichen have two fungal species and one algae.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Fkw_VF5zDT0&si=RcHrYWeEJe5r5vtb
Enamel-building dental lozenges; the lowdown on toothpaste tablets
Bad bosses: “Working during the purge” #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/VKiizvvHDOo
NPR:
Federal appeals court rules Trump doesn’t have broad immunity from prosecution
Carrie Johnson /February 6, 2024
Some podcast links:
Our Hen House – “Who Are We Having for Dinner? w/ Molly Elwood”:
Species Unite – “S11. E3: Poorva Joshipura: Survival at Stake”:
Animal Law Podcast – “Animal Law Podcast #104: The Biogas Nightmare”:
Drilled – “Department of Homeland Security, the Manufactured ‘EcoTerrorist’ Panic, and Cop City”:
tomh @ #390, excellent news!
From the Guardian liveblog:
How a ruling that Dartmouth basketball players are school employees, can join union may change college sports
Taylor Swift Sends Cease & Desist to Jet Tracker … You’re Inviting Stalkers!!!
The information Sweeney is posting is perfectly legal. Elon Musk failed to shut it down.
Bluesky is now open for anyone to join
Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
“No Evidence that Social Media Affects Mental Health, Zuckerberg Says”
No one wants to be on the same side as Zuckerberg, but in this case he seems to be correct. (My comment: traditionally new media become scapegoats for problems caused by other things, and the statistics are on Zuckerberg’s side). Here is the link to Hossenfelder’s video:
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hlZTv5vGJIo
“Leaked: Ukraine Out-Killing Russia 20:1 in Avdiivka!”
(as Russia has mishandled everything from day one, I am prone to believe this)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Oy7atJ-6rlM
Guardian – “‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint”:
More on Trump decision.
The Court’s judgment requires Trump to seek a stay by Monday, Feb 12 from the Supreme Court or the case goes back to trial. Filing an en banc petition with the Appeals Court will not delay things,
Andrew Simms in the Guardian – “After Paris’s coup against SUVs, the UK should slam the brakes on these polluting monsters too”:
tomh @390 and 401:
I was glad to see that the ruling was unanimous!
“Setback” sounds too temporary. I suppose it is correct in that Trump can appeal, but I certainly wish the idea of Trump enjoying broad immunity could be killed outright.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/read-trump-not-immune-from-prosecution-dc-circuit-rules
re SC @400:
I think Sands has it backwards. The IRA attempts to level the playing field for green energy because the oil companies have been given subsidies and favored status for so long that they think fairness is unfair to them.
Senate GOP will block border deal, leaving Ukraine in limbo
[head/desk]
johnson catman @404:
Well said. Bears repeating.
Missouri Republicans Can’t Wait To Let Naturopath ‘Doctors’ Prescribe Both Crystals And Antibiotics.
Far too many states already allow this and it needs to end.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/missouri-republicans-cant-wait-to
A lot of potential for harm if state legislators give quacks a license to write prescriptions.
@ 400–I think it’s about time I came off my break.
“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
Obviously Mr. Rosenberg has very little contact with conservatives our he’d know that their “logic,” such as it is, revolves around freedom and individual liberty. And to these “libertarian’ knuckle-draggers, losing the ability to do whatever they want is far, far worse than any of the environmentalist threats that they think are communist-created hoaxes designed to trick us into submitting to them. Also, as others have pointed out, it’s easy to not give a damn about a world you’ve been convinced that the world is broken and evil, deserves to be destroyed, and that a new, better world awaits everyone who does what the child-molesting grifters wearing a clergy collar and clutching a Bible says.
Followup to comment 405.
Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik posted a tweet, boasting, “House Republicans have already passed HR2 — the Secure Our Border Act, which would actually secure the border.”
That’s a bogus argument. The earlier “Secure Our Border Act” was not a serious bill. See the comments below.
The Washington Post:
Commentary:
Link
Nikki Haley has applied for Secret Service protection. The Wall Street Journal reported that she made the appeal because she’s facing “increasing threats.” Those threats are coming from MAGA Republicans. While the threats increase, Trump continues to stoke animus against Haley.
Jim Jordan wants Congress to stop all work on matters related to immigration and border policy — for the next 11 months. WTF?
Sounds like something Trump suggested.
N.H. attorney general says he found source of fake Biden robocalls
Goofy ‘God’s Army’ convoy on Texas border shows Trump’s MAGA movement is just one long con
Convoy riders came, in underwhelming numbers, and accomplished little beyond showing everyone how tragically gullible they are. That’s MAGA in a nutshell: loud and, in the end, impotent.
Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks — botnet causes millions of euros in damages
You want to deter people? Then quit with the C&D letters and the fines. PUT SOMEONE IN JAIL.
Rachel Maddow last night (YT links):
“Trump paid $20,000 to rent plant for fake union auto worker event: filing”:
“The GOP is ‘dissolving itself’: Trump appears to set up RNC chair as fall guy for failures”:
These are parts of the same segment, which was about 20 minutes long. She’s on one night a week and for some reason whoever’s responsible for putting these clips on YT just posts tiny clips or breaks them up like this. It’s annoying.
Also, I was reminded of it when reading Lynna’s #271 above – those “Union Members for Trump” and “Auto Workers for Trump” signs were hilarious. It’s the equivalent of people at a game with t-shirts saying like “Chicago Sports Team.”
Jury finds mother of Michigan school shooter guilty of involuntary manslaughter
Laughable: Gaetz, Stefanik offer resolution declaring Trump ‘did not engage in insurrection’
Related to #s 7 and 402 above – The War On Cars – “119. Should SUV Ads Be Banned?”:
Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes (MSNBC link) – “Discussing the mystery and miracle of Polynesia with Christina Thompson”:
Notes from President Biden’s speech today:
New York Times link
More:
A Pennsylvania man who took drone selfies at a stadium and delayed an AFC Championship game now faces up to 4 years in prison: prosecutors
Meduza – “‘Focus on the apartment’s potential’: A Russian propaganda film explores the ‘unconventional housing market’ in war-ravaged Mariupol.”:
My blood is boiling.
Starbucks Is Sending 1 Lucky Barista To Costa Rica, But Not If They’re In A Union
Tucker Carlson confirms interview with Putin
U.S. publisher retracts studies cited by Texas judge in suspending abortion pill’s approval
Related to Reginald Selkirk’s #424 – Business Wire – “Starbucks Workers United Announces Filing of 47 New Federal Unfair Labor Practice Charges Against Starbucks, Showing Company’s Lawbreaking Has Continued Even After it Promised Workers a New Approach”:
“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan
@428
I betcha they want their buggy whips back too.
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #428…
I have a POTS line. I think AT&T wants to convert everything to VOIP. That gets rid of the major safety consideration in having a POTS line in Earthquake Country. POTS tends to still work after a ‘quake (being dependent on power in the CO–which has pretty reliable backup power systems)), while VOIP will probably only work if you have power where you are (which probably won’t have backup power, or not for very long if you do have backup).
God Awful Movies
GAM442 Best Friends Recycled
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=vSVnGasj1JQ
Aaaarghh. This was horrible.
Whheydt @ 430
With deregulations and privatisations I am becoming conservative in the original sense of the word- changes are too likely to be negative!
Re: birgerjohansson @ #432…
An conservatism I’ve developed is by being old (Charles III only has 5 months on me) and cynical.
Robo-dinosaur scares grasshoppers to shed light on why dinos evolved feathers
Akira MacKenzie @ #408:
Well, I think there are several parties involved here: the fossil fuels corporations and the industry they comprise; the people who lead the corporations and the industry; Trump, his apparatchiks, the Republican Party, and corporate/industry propagandists; and Trump supporters.
The corporations and the industry don’t necessarily have an interest in destruction, but they’re inherently destructive (including self-destructive in the long term) because they’re part of the capitalist system. Trump, for different reasons, does want to “destroy everything” (not just any particular thing – everything) and couldn’t care less about anyone else’s fate. For every other party listed (other than those people who share Trump’s destructive impulses), supporting these actions and policies would be incredibly stupid and self-destructive and not in anyone’s real interest, whether they recognize it or not. It’s in humanity’s interest to limit the freedom of and ultimately to destroy or at least drastically reduce these corporations and this industry. It’s also in humanity’s interest to stop Trump and his movement.
It is about freedom for the corporations and the industry, which of course have no right to any freedom or even to existence. Trump, his apparatchiks, Republican politicians, and corporate propagandists are remarkably open – including in the article at the link – about their actions being in support of the freedom of corporations and industry to do what they want. Trump’s supporters, because our culture is so fucked up, are so identified with the interests of the industry that they’re stupidly acting to maintain the status quo and to further the freedom of the corporations and the industry to do whatever they want. This necessarily entails the reduction of their own freedom, the weakening of their collective power, and the further entrenching of the power of the industry over them. (It’s hard to think of anything Trump supporters claim as an individual freedom in this context that isn’t exactly what the corporations and the industry want them to do and have spent vast sums to convince them to want to do.) But they’re manipulated and their view of reality is clouded by propaganda and so they don’t recognize that they’re corporate stooges. You might even say they’ve been tricked into submitting to them.
LOL, the Republican vote to impeach Mayorkas failed 214-216. Mike Johnson looked like he was fuming and it was fun. He’s no Nancy Pelosi.
Per CNN:
From the ruling:
I mean, yeah.
More on the Trump decision.
Election Law Blog
The Stay Order is Likely the Whole Ball Game on Whether Trump Goes to Trial Before the Election on Federal Election Subversion Charges
Rick Hasen / February 6, 2024
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern [Slate]
NBC News:
NBC News:
NBC News:
Associated Press:
!!!
NBC News:
Texas GOPers’ Border Cosplay Becomes Target For Violent Extremists And Grifters
Elon Musk is spreading MAGA lies about election fraud—again
Removing an invasive species!
“Shiela Darwin: Alpha Male Hunter” with @BrandonRogers @scumbagdad #shorts
.https://youtube.com/shorts/y9_CsbOz6Ms
Birger: https://blog.logrocket.com/product-management/why-youtube-created-shorts/
John Morales @ 446
Goddammit, I am a dopamine addict.
I will try to restrict myself to more cerebral shorts.
Newly discovered carbon monoxide-runaway gap can help identify habitable exoplanets
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-newly-carbon-monoxide-runaway-gap.html
Confirmation of what we knew 🤬
“New analysis reveals many excess deaths attributed to natural causes are actually uncounted COVID-19 deaths”
The unnecessary deaths were even more numerous… thousands could have lived happily for many more years if not for conspiracy nuts and idiot politicians.
I recall Eli Bosnick from GAM suggested setting up a GoFundMe to pay anyone who kills Andrew Wakefield, the original anti-vaxxer (I approve, but it would have to be done in the jurisdiction of some extremely libertarian place).
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-analysis-reveals-excess-deaths-attributed.html
Film
The Settlers review – ultra-violent study of Chile’s butchery of its indigenous people | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/07/the-settlers-review-ultra-violent-study-of-chiles-butchery-of-its-indigenous-people
Blazing Saddles at 50: the button-pushing spoof that could never get made today
| Mel Brooks | The Guardian
.https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/07/blazing-saddles-at-50-western-spoof-mel-brooks
The Naked Pravda (Meduza podcast) – “How Russia targets its critics abroad in wartime”:
This has really been going on, with only brief interruptions, for a century.
Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb thinks he has new evidence of alien spacecraft
Because it’s inconceivable that there is any variation in the constitution of coal ash.
@436, 437
Al Green leaves hospital to cast vote against Alejandro Mayorkas impeachment
It is interesting to compare the tenacity of Al Green with the no-show of the hundred thousand people expected to drive in a convoy to the Texas-Mexico border…
And the heroes waving tiki torches only to be upset when they were outed as nazis. Help, help, I’m being oppressed!
The difference between Avi Loeb and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl is, both had crackpot theories but Heyerdahl was entertaining, even putting himself in jeopardy to make a point.
birgerjohansson @ #449, thank you for that link.
(I imagine Lynna’s not going to like the Bosnick bit.)
US State Department security officer arrested over Jan. 6 Capitol attack
Politico – “Ronna McDaniel set to leave RNC in the spring”:
The sham caucus in Nevada is just a small indication of what Trump wants, which is a full takeover of the party (and its money) and functionally for the primaries to be ended and for himself to be anointed the Republican candidate. Every day that there’s any open democratic opposition to him within the party fuels his rage.
I can’t even imagine what an authoritarian nightmare (and utter shitshow) the Republican convention is going to be this year. It’s going to look like a dictatorship in miniature.
birger @449:
On this thread we do not condone, promote or joke about killing people.
Thanks.
GOP rejects the best border offer they’ve ever seen, will ever get
The odds of Democrats presenting Republicans with a comparable opportunity again on immigration and border policies are roughly zero.
Followup to comment 462.
Link
Cartoon: Tech support, in Chagrin Falls, USA
Trolling forced-birthers.
https://youtu.be/Hjp3Ld8Ty7s
After Libs of TikTok posted, at least 21 bomb threats followed
Followup to comment 207.
Nikki Haley loses to ‘none of these candidates’ in the Nevada GOP primary
NBC News projects that more voters chose not to pick a candidate at all than back Haley. Trump wasn’t on the ballot, since he’s participating in Thursday’s caucus, instead.
Courthouse News Service:
Trump fraud trial judge demands answers about Allen Weisselberg’s potential perjury deal
Erik Uebelacker / February 6, 2024
Russia’s isolation is forcing it to look to China for support in the Arctic, raising U.S. concerns
Russia used to try to exclude China from the region, but increasing economic and diplomatic isolation is forcing the Kremlin to change its approach, says a new report.
That’s an odd characterization given what they go on to report in the same article. She was clear beforehand that she (correctly) saw it as a farce and wasn’t participating.
‘Literally off his rocker’: Why Trump is fixated on Indiana
Trump’s focus on the heavily Republican state has become a bizarre subplot of the 2024 primary.
Can’t keep their conspiracy theories on track. Incapable of paying attention to details. Proof that Trump and the Trump campaign are off their rockers … and incompetent.
SC @470, yeah that “stinging rebuke of Haley” was inaccurate. Looks like some media outlets working hard to make Haley look like a loser. Not good journalism.
Nebraska is newest battleground in religious right’s crusade to infiltrate public education
Appeals Court cuts down every piece of Trump’s immunity claim—with flair, by Mark Sumner
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Speaker Mike Johnson
Claims that Jan. 6 rioters are ‘political prisoners’ endure. Judges want to set the record straight
Tucker Carlson Doing Performance Review In Person This Year, Vladimir Hate Zoom
This is news, but is it really?
https://www.wonkette.com/p/tucker-carlson-doing-performance
Israel-Hamas war live updates: Hamas responds to cease-fire proposal; Blinken meets with Israeli and Palestinian leaders
Russian skater’s strawberry dessert excuse was rejected by judges in Olympic doping case
House GOP forms circular firing squad over their epic failures
How long did Neanderthals and modern exist in Europe? Evidence suggests it may have been at least 10,000 years
.https://phys.org/news/2024-02-neanderthals-modern-humans-europe-evidence.html
Lynna @ #471:
Trump and his minions appear to be both practicing and projecting. If I were a journalist, I would be looking into the possibility that they’re scheming, possibly with local Trump loyalists, in Indiana and elsewhere to get Haley (and potentially later Biden and Harris) disqualified from the ballot and convince people that her candidacy is illegal.
NB
This is BIG (If it can be translated into low-cost, large-scale use)
“Inexpensive, carbon-neutral biofuels are finally possible”
Using tetrahydrofuran for pre-treatment of biomass, biofuels could replace 30% of US petroleum consumption.
.https://techxplore.com/news/2024-02-inexpensive-carbon-neutral-biofuels.html
Lynna @ #472, I tried to find a report (other than Rachel Maddow’s @ #416) that offered some context for what was happening in Nevada. The only one I saw that looked potentially promising was an ABC piece called “What to know about Nikki Haley losing to ‘none of these candidates’ option in Nevada Republican primary”, but it was as bad as the others, if not worse. They quote her saying she didn’t campaign in the state, leaving the impression that she was just like “Fuck Nevada.” Then there’s:
Nowhere do they mention that both DeGraffenreid and Law have been federally indicted as fake 2020 Trump electors. DeGraffenreid was earlier summoned to appear before the Georgia investigation and also subpoenaed by the J6 Committee (where he pleaded the Fifth). The Nevada State Republican Chairman, Michael McDonald, is also among the six indicted fake Trump electors.
You’d think this information about the local state party officials might be relevant in a piece purporting to tell readers what to know!
Alien Super Show February 7th.
“Trump Goes Medieval – Is Taylor Swift a PsyOp? – Fox Pitches Civil War & Biden Scandal Fan Fiction”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=_g3UFEp_u7U
Charles Jay at Daily Kos – “Haley is humiliated in Nevada, but the state GOP is the biggest loser.”
Grr at the first part of the headline (I loathe Nikki Haley, but the description isn’t accurate in this case and I hate it when people are described as “humiliated” in general – find it very upsetting and unhelpful), but he does provide some more information. Also: “Haley’s loss to ‘None of These Candidates’ might be a bit less embarrassing to the former U.N ambassador since she didn’t bother to step foot in Nevada to campaign.” Yes, the fact that she wasn’t actually competing would seem to make her “loss” a bit less “embarrassing.”
Waymo driverless car strikes bicyclist in San Francisco, causes minor injuries
SC @484:
Yep. It’s good that you noted that. What we have is a Trump (and trumpian cult followers) plan to rig the primary against Nikki Haley. Many media outlets are failing to properly report on this situation in Nevada.
They certainly managed to rig public opinion, and public reporting against Haley in this particular instance.
Of course the cult followers involved are indicted criminals!
Trump found a way to bypass the state-run primary.
Also, how many Republican voters would bother to vote in both the state-run primary in which Haley was on the ballot, and at the caucuses where Trump was king? That was allowed, legal … but how many would do it? Instead, most Republican voters are just going to do whatever Trump tells them to do. At least that way they are less confused. Trump caused a lot of chaos, and not for the first time.
Bad news, as reported by NBC:
Four Senate Republicans voted to advance the bill.
Reginald @487, pullquote from your cited article:
Next, ‘Parked car strikes bicyclist’.
(I seen it!)
In Virginia, Arlington’s first guaranteed income pilot boosted quality of life for poorest residents
re John Morales @490:
I am not a fan of driverless vehicles, but the cyclist was in the wrong. Being a separate vehicle behind the truck, the cyclist was legally obligated to stop at the four-way stop and wait their turn. Probably why they left the scene of the accident, which would also be a violation.
John Morales @490
I know a couple of people who have had their arms broken by parts of parked cars, when occupants opened the door without looking giving the cyclists no time to break, and with traffic passing on the outside nowhere to swerve. I know plenty of people who have had lesser injuries in the same situation, I have myself. Nearly all in city streets without enough space to manoeuvre, most in London, but a lot in Oxford too – which is where it happened to me many years ago.
Jazzlet, oh yes, that is certainly a hazard. Me, I’ve been a biker all my life — never got a car driver’s license — though mostly motorbikes after my twenties. Big ones, not the farty Harley-types, the howling Japanese types.
I hope it’s clear that my impetus for reacting was that I noticed the featured headline implies the problem was the driverless car, whereas in reality even a driven car could not really have done better. Thus, the pullquote.
Me, I am more than aware of cars’ blind spots and of being visible, as well as being super-aware and prudent. If anything, I’m a tad paranoid — I just assume car drivers are gonna be careless and dangerous and distracted.
I think of those boxes on wheels as unpredictable moving obstacles, actually.
I recommend that attitude for any bike rider; it may help avoid a shitload of pain and suffering.
(There are old bikers and there are bold bikers, but there are no old bold bikers, to borrow a phrase)
Re: Jazzlet & John Morales @ #s 493, 494…
I have read that in Holland a driver is supposed to open the door by reaching across with the inside hand to force them to turn enough to see if anything, such as a bike rider, is coming where the door will be a problem.
Police who ticketed an attorney for shouting at an officer are going to trial
Florida top court weighs letting voters decide abortion rights amendment
From Euromaidan Press:
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1755307378935762953
Video at the link.
From WarTranslated (Dmitri):
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1755287772863103265
Video at the link.
Izhevsk is about 1,100 km east of Moscow.
whheydt, oh yes, Holland definitely has a great rep for biking (well, Netherlands, technically).
I’m pretty sure it’s praised in the same Youtube channel where I learnt the concept of stroads.
(https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes)