U.S. journalist and author Masha Gessen was convicted in absentia Monday by a Moscow court on charges of spreading false information about the military and was sentenced to eight years in prison. The Moscow-born Gessen, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a columnist for The New York Times who lives in the U.S., is a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and an award-winning writer.
In other news, Link back to comment 493, posted by JM, “Special council to appeal Judge Cannon’s dismissal.”
Some followup to JM’s early comment:
[…] This morning, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the federal classified-documents case against Trump. And then, a few hours later, that story was bumped aside as the Republican National Convention started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Trump announced that he chose Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate. News from the RNC, covering both standard things (like the vice-presidential pick) as well as the inevitable craziness sure to erupt on the convention floor, will further dull this past weekend’s news from our collective memory.
That’s not to say the assassination attempt will be forgotten. God knows Republicans will harp on it, continuing their absurd efforts to pin the attack on Democrats, despite the attacker being a registered Republican and using an assault rifle that Republicans (including Trump) have fought tooth and nail to keep legal.
And across the aisle, Democratic attempts to push President Joe Biden out of the race haven’t ceased.
But the broader zeitgeist seems to have already moved past the assassination attempt. So don’t listen to anyone who says this or that single event has permanently and sweepingly changed the dynamics of the race. The news cycle moves at a dizzying pace, making it nearly impossible for any one event—even Biden’s disastrous debate performance—to significantly alter the race.
We are in unprecedented times, in an unprecedented media environment. Strap in.
Arrogant, ignorant and snotty behavior at the Republican convention:
Donald Trump Jr. called MSNBC “clowns” after he was asked a question about his father’s immigration policy on the floor of the national Republican convention on Monday.
The president’s son tried to dismiss a question from MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff during an exchange on the convention floor on Monday. He pressed Trump Jr. on whether there would be similar policies in a second Trump administration to those that separated migrant children from their families.
“I know immigration is important to him. I covered the family separation crisis closely. Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?” Soboroff asked Trump Jr. Monday while on the convention floor.
“You mean the Obama administration?” Trump Jr. replied.
“You know they didn’t do that, sir,” Soboroff responded before asking him again whether there would be another family separation policy.
“It’s MSDNC,” he replied. “See, so I expect nothing less from you clowns. Even, even today, even 48 hours later. You couldn’t wait. You couldn’t wait with your lies and with your nonsense, so just get out of here.”
Former President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the family separation policy was implemented during the Obama administration, but numerous fact-checks have debunked that claim.
The Trump administration implemented a zero-tolerance policy for those who crossed the southern border illegally in 2018, resulting in hundreds of migrant children being separated from their parents. The former president eventually ended the zero-tolerance policy after facing backlash over the practice. […]
Former President Donald Trump made his first public appearance since his assassination attempt at the Republican National Convention on Monday night, a dramatic moment with his injured ear covered in a bandage as the crowd chanted “fight!” — echoing his words after being shot.
The crowd chanted “fight, fight, fight” shortly after Trump appeared in the arena.
Trump had appeared to mouth “fight” when the Secret Service escorted him offstage after the assassination attempt.
Moments earlier, the crowd chanted, “USA! USA!”
Trump walked out to live performance of ‘God Bless the USA’
Lee Greenwood praised God for Trump’s surviving the assassination attempt as his band played live behind him.
“You will not take this man down,” Greenwood said.
Trump began walking out, with his ear bandaged, as Greenwood played “God Bless the USA,” the song Trump usually walks on to.
Earlier, Trump officially secured the GOP nomination for president. He selected Sen. JD Vance of Ohio to be his running mate.
Vance, once a vocal critic of Trump, has become a close and outspoken ally
In an exclusive interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, President Joe Biden dismissed criticisms about his political rhetoric and his mental acuity.
With respect to abiogenesis on the previous page I have thoughts, some already mentioned.
Cells reproduce slow. 20 minutes. Molecular reactions can be many orders of magnitude faster. The membrane allows control of chemistry and access so the relationship between nucleic acids and amino acids can make membranes and themselves.
I have this mental image of ribonucleic acid precursors and acetate, forming macromolecular communities in minerals. There is a set a things that are suggestive and this is where I am here in thinking about it.
3 polymers:
*Proteins (modified glycine chains)
*Nucleic acids (Ribose + Glycine and a bunch of single carbon and nitrogen additions)
*Fatty acids (a 3-carbon melavonate with sequential additions of a 2-carbon acetate) via fatty acid synthase.
Fatty acid synthase also makes the long carbon chain part of the cofactors biotin and lipoide. These cofactors function in macromolecular complexes involved in making a bunch of the small amino acids, and other things.
Lipoamide
dihydrolipoyl transacetylase (pyruvate dehydrogenase complex in glycolysis, branched-chain α-ketoacid dehydrogenase complex in leucine, isoleucine, and valine synthesis and degradation)
dihydrolipoyl succinyltransferase (oxoglutarate dehydrogenase complex, glutamate synthesis/TCA cycle)
H-protein (glycine cleavage system, glycine cleavage/biosynthesis, serine biosynthesis)
This is also in CODH, carbon monoxide dehydrogenase which can put 2 carbons together or take them apart. Very ancient metabolism.
Finally fatty synthase complexes are related to non-ribosomal peptide synthase complexes. A ribosome analog that makes things on a single polypeptide basis where the ribosome makes lots of peptides.
There’s a kludge in here. And acetyl-CoA (acetate and ATP) is all over the place in here too. LUCA is too old. I’m impatient.
Oops. acetyl-CoA is like ATP + a modified valine + aspartate + cysteine + acetate in metabolic terms
StevoRsays
Via DW news :
The enemy within – US veterans against democracy – Part 1
On 6 January 2021, hundreds of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington. Five people were killed and many injured. Some 15 per cent of those involved were former members of the US military or police.
CNN is giving wall to wall coverage to Trump. It’s absolutely disgusting.They even interviewed the first journalist who interviewed Trump after his ear got clipped, asking tough questions like “how was he like?” and shit like that.
Could anyone try to explain to me why no one is countering this “unlawful appointment” nonsense by pointing out that appointment of prosecutors is a power granted to the president by the congress, and not by the constitution? Again, circa the founding, many / most criminal prosecutors were the victims acting in their own private capacity, and the power to seek a grand indictment from a grand jury was a common law right, which was later slowly usurped by the legislatures of the States and by congress. This simple brute fact of history should demolish this stupid argument that it’s an improperly appointed prosecutor IMAO.
birgerjohanssonsays
Real superpowers
My sausage-like fingers are not sexy. But they have given me one incredible talent | Zoe Williams
birgerjohansson@14,
Irrelevant personal trivia: Zoe Williams’ father was briefly my line manager when I had a temporary Civil Service job, for part of which I worked in Wormwood Scrubs prison, interviewing prisoners about release procedure.
JMsays
@13 GerrardOfTitanServer: Special prosecutors are officers of the US and their appointment covered by Article 2 section 2 of the Constitution. Any objection really has to be grounded in that somehow.
Several objections to the office of special prosecutor have been raised before and the Supreme Court has upheld it’s legality. All of the lawyers that I have seen talk about this take it as a given that Cannon will be overturned by the Court of Appeals but a couple have said they are not confident about what this Supreme Court will do.
GerrardOfTitanServersays
Special prosecutors are officers of the US and their appointment covered by Article 2 section 2 of the Constitution. Any objection really has to be grounded in that somehow.
I disagree. This is not historically founded. Again, circa 1800, most criminal prosecutors were not executive officers. Most criminal prosecutors were the victim acting in their own private capacity.
xohjoh2nsays
@13,16:
And even assuming it is overturned, with extreme prejudice, with the removal of Cannon and reassignment to a different district judge, it is highly likely that it will have served its intended purpose of delaying the trial until after the election.
Also the polypeptide binding sites for biotin and lipoamide are related, and related to glycine cleavage system H-protein, parts of RNA polymerases, ATP synthase V, and cytochrome f. http://prodata.swmed.edu/ecod/complete/tree?id=325.1.7.1
It’s an interesting list of things, and there are some ribosomal proteins in related bins, as well as things in nucleotide biosynthesis in the CO dehydrogenase molybdoprotein N-domain-like bin.
That link might be a bit much for some so I’ll copy paste a little.
X – Possible homology level
H – Homology level
T – Topology level
F – Family level
X: alpha/beta-Hammerhead/Barrel-sandwich hybrid
H: alpha/beta-Hammerhead/Barrel-sandwich hybrid
T: CO dehydrogenase molybdoprotein N-domain-like
T: Molybdopterin synthase subunit MoaE
T: Pyrimidine nucleoside phosphorylase C-terminal domain
T: Nicotinate/Quinolinate PRTase N-terminal domain-like
T: Ribosomal protein L10e
T: Duplicated hybrid motif
T: Single hybrid motif
F: DUF2118 PF09891 CL0105
F: GCV_H PF01597 CL0105
F: AstE_AspA PF04952 CL0105
F: HlyD_3 PF13437 CL0105
F: Biotin_lipoyl_2 PF13533 CL0105
F: RPOC_hybrid PF21668 CL0105
F: RNA_pol_Rpb2_6 PF00562 CL0410
F: RnfC_N PF13375 CL0105
F: HlyD_3,Biotin_lipoyl_2 PF13437 PF13533
F: NQRA PF05896 CL0105
F: Biotin_lipoyl PF00364 CL0105
F: Apocytochr_F_C PF01333 CL0105
F: NusG_add PF18298
F: ATP-synt_ab_Xtn PF16886
F: Unmapped domains
Pseudo group of domains that do not map to PFam family profiles. Domains inside should not be considered as in one family.
T: Ribosomal L27 protein
As a senior EU official put it, JD Vance joining Donald Trump’s Republican ticket is “a disaster for Ukraine.”
The United States’ European allies were already feeling intense anxiety about the 2024 presidential election, fearing the prospect of having to work with Donald Trump again. Yesterday, those fears reached new heights after the Republican announced his new running mate.
A senior EU official, for example, told Politico that the selection of Sen. JD Vance is “a disaster for Ukraine.” To appreciate why, consider this recent column from The Washington Post’s Max Boot, which was published before the Ohio senator was chosen for his party’s ticket.
During his short time in the Senate, Vance has been a leader in opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he told Stephen K. Bannon in 2022. In a May speech to the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank, Vance said, “I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine.”
Vance isn’t the only opponent of U.S. support for Ukraine in his party — the Republican National Convention featured other such critics on the stage last night — but he’s arguably the most forceful voice in the GOP’s Senate delegation for abandoning our Ukrainian allies, as evidenced by his opposition to Congress’ bipartisan security aid package that passed in February.
An NBC News report added that the senator “has carved out a niche” on the issue, arguing that Ukrainian officials could help end the war by simply giving Russia parts of their country. Vance has also “dismissed concerns that Vladimir Putin would continue his territorial march through Europe if he takes Ukraine.”
As recently as April, Vance wrote a New York Times op-ed that argued that a Russian victory is inevitable — a line popular with the Kremlin — so the United States should adjust its policy accordingly.
Around the same time, the Senate Republican sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper and argued that the United States should encourage Ukraine to “take a defensive posture,” instead of launching counteroffensives against their Russian invaders.
It fell to the host to remind his guest, “The counteroffensive is within Ukraine, though. They’re not seeking land from Russia.”
There’s already evidence to suggest Vladimir Putin’s government has launched a “whole-of-government” effort to help boost Trump’s candidacy in the 2024 elections. With Vance joining the Republican ticket, it’s likely Moscow will be even more enthusiastic about helping influence the outcome of the race.
But there’s also a bigger picture to consider. In recent years, the Republican Party has struggled to settle on a new foreign policy vision, with one intraparty contingent sticking to a traditional GOP vision in which the United States remains a dominant voice in world affairs and takes an unyielding stance in support of democracy, while a Trumpified faction seeks a retreat while expressing sympathies for authoritarian regimes.
With Trump and Vance at the top of the GOP ticket, the latter group appears ready to leave the former group behind.
Every night of the Republican National Convention will have its own specific theme, and last night the was focus on “Making America Wealthy Again.” Before even hearing the party’s pitch, the label is at odds with the status quo: The United States has the strongest economy on the planet and is currently “the envy of the world.”
Nevertheless, that’s not what attendees and viewers heard from Republican convention speakers.
“Under President Trump,” Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas declared, “we had the greatest economy in our lifetime.” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama went further, insisting, “Under President Trump, we had the strongest economy in history. That’s right.”
Except, there’s nothing “right” about the claim at all. A Washington Post fact-check piece explained:
Britt is repeating one of Trump’s favorite falsehoods. Before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered businesses and sent unemployment soaring, the president could certainly brag about the state of the economy in his first three years as president. But he ran into trouble when he made a play for the history books to say it was the best economy in U.S. history. By just about any important measure, the economy under Trump did not do as well as it did under Presidents Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton.
The Post’s piece actually understates matters. The economy didn’t do as well as it did under Barack Obama, either.
Even if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic created a sharp and sudden recession, the story that Republicans prefer to tell about Trump’s economic record is at odds with the facts. The Post published a memorable analysis on this as 2019 neared its end.
There’s no telling Trump that the economy is anything but sensational under his stewardship, of course, and there’s no telling him that it’s doing well for any reason other than his stewardship. Generally speaking, the economy is doing well, though there are ongoing concerns that the economic boom is slowing. But given Trump’s habit of comparing his performance to history, we thought it was worth comparing economic metrics under Trump to the second term of the last guy to hold Trump’s job: Barack Obama.
It’s not what Republicans wanted to hear, but comparing the economy under Obama and Trump at the same points in their presidencies, the Post found that the economy grew faster under Obama, hiring grew faster under Obama, the S&P 500 grew faster under Obama, the unemployment rate shrunk faster under Obama, and the national debt grew slower under Obama.
The analysis concluded, “[I]f we are linking economic numbers to presidential performance, Trump’s insistence that his abilities are unparalleled are rendered somewhat suspect in that he ranks second out of the last two presidents on a lot of these indicators.”
Remember, all of this was true before the pandemic took a severe toll on the economy.
Trump, of course, also ranks behind President Joe Biden, who has a stronger record than his GOP predecessor on job growth, unemployment and economic growth.
In other words, at the opening night of the Republican convention, the party was eager to rewrite recent history — something Republicans do with unnerving frequency, […] but the facts are stubborn.
Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy was unusual in a great many ways, but there was one part of his resume that stood out as extraordinary. Up until January 2017, literally every president American history had at least some experience in public office, military service, or both.
[…] Before his inauguration, Trump had never served the public in any capacity. Nevertheless, 46% of the American electorate elevated the former television personality to the nation’s highest and most powerful office.
Soon after, the political world confronted a set of circumstances without precedent, at least in the United States: The head of the executive branch in the world’s preeminent superpower didn’t know the basics of how government worked. He sought the presidency without bothering to learn about his own country’s political structures and then arrived in the Oval Office with a child-like understanding of civic affairs.
We know this, not just because of Trump’s many failures, but because people close to him have said so on the record.
“I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government,” former House Speaker Paul Ryan told Politico’s Tim Alberta in 2019. “I wanted to scold him all the time.”
Five years later, Trump found himself in the market for a new running mate. The former president chose a young man whose political career is measured in months, not years. Fox News’ Brit Hume told viewers on Monday:
“[Vance] is 39 years old, yes. He is very smart. His inexperience is real. Don Jr. is wrong when he says experience is not important. It’s very important, and he has very little of it. People are looking at him and saying, is this guy a plausible president? You could argue that he is but also argue that he is not.”
The details are striking. While most modern running mates have extensive experience in elected office, Vance’s political career began literally last year.
The Ohio senator is the least experienced vice presidential nominee for either party in nearly nine decades. (In 1936, newspaper publisher Frank Knox, who had no background in elected office, joined Alf Landon’s Republican ticket. They soon after lost 46 out of 48 states.)
Vance was recently asked about his greatest accomplishment on Capitol Hill, and he pointed to funding from an infrastructure bill he voted against.
For Trump, none of this seems to matter. […]
birgerjohanssonsays
The target of God Awful Movies may be a relief after being exposed to the MAGA brand of surrealism.
“GAM465 The Animated Book of Mormon, Ep 1 and 2”
On Sunday afternoon, the day after being targeted by an assassination attempt, Donald Trump used his social media platform to promote a simple message. “UNITE AMERICA!” the former president wrote.
Those who saw this and hoped that the terrifying events in Pennsylvania on Saturday might force a shift in the political climate quickly learned otherwise.
On Monday afternoon, Trump published an angry and conspiratorial message that sounded an awful lot like the sort of content he published before the shooting. Soon after, the former president announced his running mate: Sen. JD Vance, a relentlessly partisan lawmaker who, just two days earlier, blamed President Joe Biden and his campaign team for the gunman who targeted Trump.
Then the Republican National Convention got underway. As a Washington Post report summarized:
After the assassination attempt, the Trump campaign and Republicans previewed what was supposedly to be a more unifying message. There was reason to doubt that would truly be what we’d get this week, and it proved a tough promise to keep.
Part of the problem with the opening night of the Republican gathering in Milwaukee was the speaker’s list: It included North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, an extremist who recently declared, in reference to his perceived political enemies, “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”
Attendees also heard from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a secession proponent who, as recently as this past weekend, said Democrats are “pedophiles” and “flat out evil.”
And then, of course, there was the junior senator from the great state of Wisconsin. HuffPost noted:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), for example, opened the slate of GOP speeches by attacking the “radical far-left agenda,” which he defined as a “fringe … that includes biological males competing against girls and the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.” He went on to call Democratic policies “a clear and present danger to our institutions, our values and our people,” drawing cheers from the audience.
So much for “UNITE AMERICA!”
[…] The Republican emphasis on “unity” was nice while it lasted, but it didn’t last long.
MAGA Republicans are united around the idea that it is okay to be batshit bonkers, while encouraging JD Vance and the Heritage Foundation to do what is required to destroy democracy.
birgerjohanssonsays
Myself @ 23
Let’s get the brass plates of the Old Testament…which has not been written yet… and sail to the New World in wooden…submarines?
And introduce barley to America. Not. And ride around on horses that are on a different continent.
Jeez, this is like the koran, but without the evil joos and christians.
Bits and pieces of campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
* The New York Times reported that Elon Musk is “likely” to offer “significant” support for a new pro-Trump super PAC created by Musk’s closest friends. The Wall Street Journal had a related report, noting that the conspiratorial billionaire is prepared to spend “around $45 million a month” in the hopes of putting Trump back in power.
* In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is allowing federal Veterans Affairs and Small Business Administration sites to be used for voter registration efforts. This, oddly enough, has led to a new lawsuit from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
* Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced at a White House briefing yesterday, “In light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.” The independent presidential candidate has made multiple requests for this protection in recent months.
* It’ll be a while before we know whether Donald Trump wins in the fall, but with Sen. JD Vance joining the Republican ticket, there’s already some jostling in Ohio over who might succeed the incumbent senator in the upper chamber. [JD Vance’s constituents had already complained that he worked mostly for Silicon Valley billionaires, and not for his constituents.]
* In the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, Dave McCormick, the Republican Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, asked Democratic Sen. Bob Casey to suspend negative advertising. Yesterday, I heard from Maddy McDaniel, a Casey campaign spokesperson, who said, “On Saturday evening after the shooting, the Casey campaign worked with stations to stop advertising temporarily. The campaign will work to resume communication with voters in the days ahead to educate Pennsylvanians on Senator Casey’s record, his opponent’s record, and the stakes of this Senate race.”
[…] Vance is more specific and literal about what he supports. Whereas Trump usually bundles his comments in a hodgepodge word salad that is hard to pin him to, Vance is direct. He is an anti-abortion hardliner. People don’t care about vice presidents. But Vance’s crystal clear and extreme positions provide a path into revisiting what should and may be again at the center of this campaign: whether abortion will be banned nationwide or whether Roe will be reestablished by statute, whether coups — which Vance whole-hog supported — and political violence are our future.
On a general level, Vance has embraced a version of conservatism significantly different from the roughshod laissez-faire of pre-Trump Republicans. He wants to weaponize state power against perceived cultural enemies. It is a piece of the cultural pessimism of the 21st century American right, which feels it is on the losing end of history. Getting government out of the way, as the old saw goes, is no longer sufficient. Government needs to be captured and harnessed to reverse course. That’s the core premise of the “national conservatism” that acolytes have built as a package or container for the raw rage energy of Trumpism.
Which brings us to the final point: At the most basic level, Vance is another angry and aggrieved white guy, very much a successor to Trump, with all the political momentum and vulnerability that comes with it.
I think Trump chose Vance for three reasons:
– Vance said he will do what Mike Pence was unwilling to do.
– Don Jr. and Vance are close friends.
– Vance did a 180 and subjugated himself to Trump. Trump loves that.
[…] In his swift public persona transformation from a Trump-bashing, moderate-appearing conservative to an all-out MAGA brawling, Don Jr.-emulating Trump loyalist, Vance has learned how to speak Trump’s language. (Trump’s love for repentance stories that involve people going from speaking badly about him publicly to groveling at his feet surely helped Vance get the Veepship, too.)
[…] perhaps the former president has known for some time that Vance would be his right-hand man. I’m thinking specifically of a moment earlier this year, when the Ohio senator completed his transformation into a human vessel/mouthpiece for Trump’s various grievances, specifically the one closest to his heart: his anger with former Vice President Mike Pence […]
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said during an interview with ABC News in February. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
[…] “They are celebrating that choice, both in Milwaukee tonight and in Moscow,” Kinzinger said Monday in an interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” referencing the locations of this week’s Republican National Convention and Russia’s capital city.
“JD Vance is the one that has … very loudly talked about how he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine. He has opposed aid to Ukraine,” Kinzinger said. “At a time where, since World War II, the biggest defense of a country, of freedom, that is happening right now.” […]
“And all we have to do is help finance that,” Kinzinger continued. “We are not even fighting. And JD Vance has aggressively parroted actual Russian talking points.”
[…] “To me, he’s a guy that was an anti-Trumper, that all of a sudden is the biggest pro-Trumper,” Kinzinger said. “He has no moral soul, no center. And how you can like Russia and what they are doing in Ukraine is beyond me. I think it was a terrible pick for the president.”
[…] And he’s called for engaging with Russia President Vladimir Putin to deliver for “American interests.”
[…] the fact that Putin is a bad guy does not mean we can’t engage in basic diplomacy and prioritizing America’s interests,” he added. “There are a lot of bad guys all over the world, and I’m much more interested in some of the problems in East Asia right now than I am in Europe.” […]
birger @23 and 25, The Book of Mormon reads like it was written by a teenage boy who quickly tired of anything resembling coherence. He did enjoy battles and tales of overcoming extreme hardships (like sailing long distances in submarines filled with animals … with no way to dispose of the animal excrement).
You can predict when the next battle that involves cutting off the arms of enemy will occur even if you don’t know the story. Joseph Smith (and his possible co-authors) had an obvious inability to tolerate exposition. A little bit of explication would be offered and then it was on to the next battle or on to the next trial and tribulation.
In Mormondom, an entire industry revolves around trying to find historical, archeological, or even anecdotal “proof” that every detail presented in The Book of Mormon is true.
Donald Trump had already announced his selection for vice president, removing 99.4% of the drama from the Republican National Convention before it even officially opened in the “horrible” city of Milwaukee on Monday. All that’s left is to see if angry beard guy can deliver a speech that doesn’t terrify America.
Soon after Trump made an appearance with a bright white square of gauze to cover his ear, there were images of him appearing to sleep through the speeches at the RNC. Based on the timing of the video, it seems likely that Trump was closing his eyes during a prayer. […]
the opening night of the RNC was hugely boring.
From an offkey rendition of the national anthem, to a series of speeches whose only redeeming feature was that they were mostly brief, the first night of the RNC was marked by low energy performances and a surprisingly disinterested response.
If Republicans were supposed to be coming into this convention fired up and ready to express their enthusiasm, they certainly didn’t show it on Monday night. [Except for Trump’s entrance, that was greeted with religious fervor.] And what they got onstage was a list of underwhelming performances from C-tier Republican celebrities.
Sen. Tim Scott, who failed to make the semi-finals of the vice president selection, was there to reassure racists that racism is fine. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem bragged about how she did nothing to fight COVID-19. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene brought with her only a moment of transphobia delivered like she was reciting a badly memorized poem.
House Speaker Mike Johnson retreated from the stage when the teleprompter broke down. Sen. Ron Johnson forgot his unity speech and instead delivered his plain-old theme of transphobia and hate before claiming that the teleprompter was loaded with the wrong speech. This suggests that the lesson of the night was that not enough Republicans joined the A/V club in high school.
Toward the end of Monday night, in what felt like a sad attempt to connect to the youth, model and TV personality Amber Rose spoke on how the media has lied about Trump. Of course, she, like many, wasn’t always a fan of Trump, saying in 2016, “He’s just such an idiot. He’s so weird. I really hope he’s not president.”
Trump entered the hall as a “wounded warrior.” And he had just given the MAGA-laden crowd a VP pick that caters to their worst demands. […] Maybe Republicans will turn it up on subsequent evenings when the “big names” appear. But last night was less watchable than the reunion show of a reality TV program you didn’t watch in the first place.
So far, the Republican idea of “unity” seems to be stopping North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson from explaining just who needs killing and calling Donald Trump “the Braveheart of our times.” Yep. That happened. […]
In selecting hardcore MAGA Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice president, Trump has thrown away any charade of seeking national unity or fulfilling the predictions of a media that seems eternally seeking the day when he becomes “presidential.” Boring is still within his grasp.
[…] Since the apparent assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, former Gov. Nikki Haley has reversed her previous position and said she will appear later in the convention.
But Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump are not on the published list of speakers. Neither is Mike Pence. Trump’s wife, daughter, and former vice president—all of whom spoke at the convention in 2020—are not slated to take the stage.
Who’s not there seems a lot more interesting than who is.
Bekenstein Bound @453:
The effect of drawing RNA sequences with replacement, as opposed to without replacement, is dwarfed by other incertainties involved. You don’t need to take my word for it; just calculate the approximate number of trials needed to have better than even chances with vs. without replacement, 99 vs. 100 bases, 1 vs. 2 successful sequences.
We’re back to the things they don’t like and not getting to force their beliefs on others is “state-run atheism”.
This after exclaiming “Oh yes they will!” In response to some saying they won’t be following his order about teaching about what amounts to historical propaganda and dishonesty about the Bible and history or fact.
There are a few more subtle mistakes up there. I should probably get them all as I see them. First amination is incorrect, the chemistry I’ve looked at is mostly imination (involves a different way of attachment of nitrogen), and amination involves the cofactor pyridoxal phosphate. The nitrogen transfers in the purine pathway and NAD biosynthesis are not aminations and don’t need pyridoxal phosphate. Which I think is suggestive (there is a glycine imination involved in the thiamine thiazole which is the part actively involved in moving often 2 carbon units, or grabbing them by acetate like parts).
Also I left out pyrimidines above (aspartate + carbamate then attach to ribose). Not exactly a mistake, the purines are older and connected to thiamine biosynthesis, but still…
There’s other interesting things already up there I haven’t pointed out too. The protein that attaches ribose to the ring on the way to making NAD is in that set and represents a larger group. The Nicotinate/Quinolinate PRTase N-terminal domain-like bin. Maybe proton and electron control came early and is connected to pyrimidines due to the similarity in how the ring is made and then attached to ribose? It’s like staring into the void.
Satire
Republicans take short break from blaming assassination attempt on Democrats who compared Trump to Hitler, to appoint VP nominee who compared Trump to Hitler –
Menendez was charged with 16 counts, including bribery, extortion, acting as a foreign agent, obstruction of justice and several counts of conspiracy.
Menendez didn’t testify in his own defense; his team argued that he was acting on behalf of his constituents, as any senator should, and that the government hadn’t proven that the cash or gold bars were given as bribes.
Yes, Menendez was reduced to claiming that the cash and gold bars were just gifts from friends. This is only a fraction of what Menendez is guilty of but the state only went after the clear cut easily proven charges. Menendez is a master of vacation bribery, where a friend/business associate flies him to some resort location on their tab and gives Menendez cash gifts.
“(The reporting) is causing me mental stress and affecting my family relations,” Edgington wrote. “I don’t need this.”
[…]
He was 18 when he pleaded “no contest” in Florida to a second-degree murder charge in connection with the beating and strangulation death of a motel charge.
Edgington and his co-defendant avoided more serious first-degree murder convictions by pleading no contest, accepting their prison terms without admitting guilt. Edgington maintains his innocence and told the Bulletin he was hiding in the motel bathroom during the murder. He served about eight years of his 25-year sentence. […] it is too late for him to withdraw from the race.
Okay, coercive plea bargaining IS a real systemic problem. A political run was foolish. OTOH, this was a rare Republican with shame… assuming he doesn’t win and take the seat anyhow. Let’s see what that prior reporting said…
A candidate running on fiscal responsibility
[…]
Edgington was initially charged with being an accessory […] Edgington then helped [the killer] escape to Florida and later lied to the police […] Authorities upgraded the charge to first-degree murder after someone reported to the authorities that Edgington had described having a bigger role
[…]
“I’m not claiming to have been innocent. I’m not saying that,” Edgington said. “I am saying I was charged inaccurately.
Bwahaha.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Arrogant, ignorant and snotty behavior at the Republican convention
You expected otherwise? Conservatives are all a bunch of spoiled brats. “Waaah! I don’t wanna pay my taxes! Waaaah! White straight men aren’t automatically the center of attention anymore! Waaah! I don’t wanna learn new pronouns for some people! Waaah! I stamp want stamp my stamp property stamp values! stamp I stamp want stamp my stamp PROPERTY stamp VALUES!!! No fair! Biden cheeeeeeeated!”
That’s the core premise of the “national conservatism” that acolytes have built as a package or container for the raw rage energy of Trumpism.
“National conservatism”. Well, it’s a bit more honest a name for it than “national socialism” was, I’ll grant it that.
birgerjohansson@40: Would you mind giving a brief precis of things like this, for those of us who prefer getting the gist by reading text to sitting through videos that require us to leave the site we’re currently on?
Taneli Huuskonen@35: To get the “efficient search on Earth” time down to 500 million years would require there to be a self-replicating RNA of 80 or fewer bases; even 100 seems a generously low estimate for something like that. And on the matter of “metabolism first”, until there’s a mechanism for heredity (which seemingly must be RNA, unless, unlikely, DNA came first), there’s no fitness landscape hill-climbing, just wholly blind searching. Metabolism first might get you a relatively more efficient search than otherwise, but it can’t and won’t shorten the minimum time to the first replicator calculated already assuming a maximally efficient search.
Abiogenesis is almost surely a “hard step”, and for reasons already outlined, it’s unlikely it would have happened as early as it did unless there were at least four or five more of those between it and us. It seems more plausible that there are two, one around two billion years ago (so very likely related to the development of eukaryotes) and one around now (language, or perhaps fire, or perhaps surviving technological adolescence … but that last, oft supposed, actually seems less likely to me, because then getting to civilization-building sapience from a paramecium must be an easy step and the geological record should be littered with lost pre-human civilizations that fumbled the technological-adolescence ball. There’d be a thin layer of odd metals, perhaps the eventual stable products of the decay of nuclear fallout as well as industrially useful stuff in weird concentrated patches, things like neodymium and depleted uranium. Plus otherwise-inexplicable climate excursions and extinction events. All the extinction events we’ve identified seem to be caused by impacts, flood basalts, or both and don’t seem accompanied by strange metal concentrations, save the Chicxulub iridium layer, which has a natural explanation. Also, we’ve passed the point of being able to send detectable radio transmissions at interstellar ranges, though few such transmissions have actually been sent).
Rosa Emily Clay became the first Black person to get a citizenship in Finland, 1898. She later migrated to USA where she thrived in the Finn community.
birgerjohanssonsays
Another history factoid.
Modern-style foldable parachutes were not invented yet during WWI.
There was only a clumsy tall umbrella- type parachute.
This could be used by soldiers under the observation balloons but were too unwieldy for the tiny aircraft of the era.
.
If tracer bullets set an aircraft on fire and the altitude was too high for a rapid emergency landing (pretty much 100% of the time) the pilot could either burn up with the aircraft or jump to his death.
.
As for ejection seats they did not become standard until Heinkel 219 and the Swedish SAAB J 21.
British company Martin-Baker was the first to patent it, post-war.
birgerjohanssonsays
RNC Night 2: Haley Endorses Trump
| Babydog’s Big Moment | Rudy Takes A Tumble
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=40BCMaQDRPk
Stephen Colbert makes the unendurable funny.
It seems more plausible that there are two, one around two billion years ago (so very likely related to the development of eukaryotes) and one around now (language, or perhaps fire, or perhaps surviving technological adolescence … but that last, oft supposed, actually seems less likely to me, because then getting to civilization-building sapience from a paramecium must be an easy step and the geological record should be littered with lost pre-human civilizations that fumbled the technological-adolescence ball. – Bekenstein Bound@49
More likely, once something similar to a bilaterian exists, there’s an asymmetrically bounded branching random walk among its evolutionary descendants with respect to social and behavioural complexity (and the anatomy and physiology underlying it). Provided no planeary-scale catastrophe wipes the slate entirely, sooner or later one of those descendants will reach a point at which technological innovations can both accumulate through cultural transmission, and themselves favour further biological evolution toward the ability to use the innovations. Then the technologically adept species discovers capitalism and promptly destroys its environment, and hence itself.
KGsays
To finish the thought@56: so “getting to civilization-building sapience from a paramecium” (or at least from a bilaterian) is neither an “easy step” nor a “hard step”, but a long, branching series of small steps in various directions.
birgerjohanssonsays
Ladytron – Seventeen (4Music 2002)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Bv8CsFAiVs
“They only want you when you’re seventeen,
When you’re twenty-one
You’re no fun”
birgerjohanssonsays
KG, Bekenstein, Brony et al.
I will once again do a plug for the book “Lucky Planet”.
It brings up many more critical obstacles on the path from accretion disc to hairy things banging rocks together to make fire.
Menendez is a fool. Once you reach a certain level of wealth and power there are multitudes of loopholes deliberately left open by legislators for those who want to do legal crimes.
Sounds interesting, but inevitably speculative. I’m not convinced by Bekenstein Bound’s version of panspermia, because I think a long RNA molecule capable of self-replication without a lot of additional molecular machinery is neither possible nor necessary as a first living thing. But evidence one way or the other could presumably be collected from around the solar system – if that version of panspermia is true, there should surely be bacteria-like organisms (fossil if not living) in lots of places – so it has the great advantage of a degree of testability. Not sure how you’d test the “Lucky Planet” hypothesis, but maybe the book suggests ways to do so.
At the 2004 Republican National Convention, some attendees put bandages on their faces as a way to mock then-Sen. John Kerry’s Purple Heart. Twenty years later, at the 2024 Republican National Convention, some attendees have put bandages on their ears as a sign of solidarity with Donald Trump.
From HuffPo:
On the second night of the Republicans’ convention, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice declared, in apparent reference to his fellow partisans, “We become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November.”
You mean they are not already totally unhinged? There’s still room to grow?
From Associated Press:
Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. JD Vance reportedly spoke yesterday and agreed to debate. The details, however, are still being negotiated.
[…] On the second night of the Republican National Convention, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik railed against President Joe Biden’s “violent crime crisis.” House Speaker Mike Johnson made similar comments, declaring, “We can’t survive the dramatic increases in violence, crime and drugs that the Democrats’ policies have brought upon our communities.”
Note the over-the-top hyperbole: To hear the Louisiana Republican tell it, crime hasn’t just reached crisis levels, it’s also reached the point at which the United States “can’t survive” such rampant crime.
For now, let’s put aside the irony of Republican officials denouncing crime rates while simultaneously nominating a criminal for the nation’s highest office. Instead, let’s focus on the degree to which Stefanik, Johnson and several other convention speakers turned reality on its head.
In fact, CNN reported a month ago on the latest statistics from the FBI showing a 15% drop in violent crime this year.
The new numbers show violent crime from January to March dropped 15.2% compared to the same period in 2023, while murders fell 26.4% and reported rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased during that period when compared to last year by 12.5%, according to the data, while robberies fell 17.8%. … Meanwhile, property crime went down 15.1% in the first three months of this year. Burglaries dropped 16.7%, while motor vehicle theft decreased by 17.3%. The declines in violent and property crimes were seen in every region of the US.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a written statement that the latest data “makes clear that last year’s historic decline in violent crime is continuing.”
The reference to last year was especially notable because of the encouraging results from 2023. NBC News reported in March, for example, “that crime in the U.S. declined significantly in 2023, continuing a post-pandemic trend and belying widespread perceptions that crime is rising.”
All of this, of course, follows a dramatic spike in the murder rate in 2020 — the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency.
[…] Prominent Republican voices likely know that crime rates are falling. That apparently doesn’t stop them from telling the public the opposite of the truth, working from the assumption that many voters will simply believe the falsehoods and never hear about actual crime data.
[…] The evidence makes clear that Biden has a compelling story to tell: Crime rates, most notably murder rates, spiked toward the end of his Republican predecessor’s term. Under the incumbent Democratic president’s leadership, Americans are now safer.
Common sense might suggest that GOP officials would see the news and try to move the public conversation away from this area of strength for Biden. But as it turns out, they find it far easier to effectively say, “Why don’t we just make stuff up and wait for the public to buy it?”
During her remarks at the Republican National Convention, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird delivered an odd boast about her party’s approach to law enforcement. “We put criminals where they belong: in jail,” Bird said to applause. “That’s why we need to elect President Donald J. Trump.”
[…] Vivek Ramaswamy, ignoring the former president’s crimes, insisted on the convention stage that Trump would “restore law and order in this country.” House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly declared, “We in the Republican Party are the law-and-order team. We always have been, and we always will be, the advocates for the rule of law.”
My personal favorite was the speech from House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who practically shouted this incredible message: “Donald Trump stands with the people and the police — our men and women in blue — not with the criminals and rioters.”
[…] A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t try to defund law enforcement agencies based on nonsensical conspiracy theories. A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t endorse retaliatory, politically motivated prosecutions against innocent people. A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t reward accused criminals, elevating them to positions in which they could help steer the party’s future.
A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t have a suspected criminal, indicted on election-related charges, oversee the party’s election-year legal efforts. A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t rally behind a presidential nominee who’s running on a platform of pardoning violent criminals and putting them back onto the streets. A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t nominate for president a criminal who’s surrounded himself with other convicted criminals.
A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t scramble to condemn one of its own after he encouraged voters to respect the legal process. A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t boo police officers for telling them inconvenient truths.
A party that cares about the rule of law wouldn’t invite a convicted criminal to speak at their national convention within hours of his release from prison. [Peter Navarro was released from prison yesterday and then spoke at the RNC convention.]
[…]
-What the hell is the body producing interleukin-11 for? If it is not essential, I vote for using CRISPR technology from blocking its production.
I don’t care if it would make me bald or grow tentacles, interleukin-11 sucks.
Eight years ago this week, Sen. Ted Cruz delivered remarks at the Republican National Convention. They were not well received.
The Texas senator had just wrapped up his own failed presidential bid, during which time he got to know Donald Trump fairly well. Their relationship, however, could’ve been better: The future president went after Cruz’s wife and suggested Cruz’s father played a role in the JFK assassination. The senator, meanwhile, told voters that Trump was a “pathological liar,” a “bully,” a “narcissist,” “utterly amoral” and a “sniveling coward” with “a consistent pattern of inciting violence.”
With this in mind, when Cruz spoke at his party’s 2016 convention, he couldn’t quite bring himself to endorse his former rival, instead saying, “If you love our country and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience.” The booing from attendees was relentless.
In the years that followed, the senator did what most Republicans did and became a Trump sycophant. It was against this backdrop that the far-right senator spoke again at his party’s national convention — and this time, he received a far warmer reception than he did eight years ago.
Cruz pleased attendees, not only by throwing his support behind the GOP ticket, but also by feeding the crowd the kind of anti-immigrant red meat that tends to generate strong reactions.
Pitching the idea that the United States has become a violent hellscape as a result of undocumented criminals, Cruz went so far as to declare: “How did we get here? It happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.” [Video featuring Rachel Maddow’s comments]
To the extent that reality still matters, Cruz combined a series of lies to create one larger lie. The senator told people to believe that non-citizen voting is rampant, which isn’t true. He told people to believe that Democratic officials want support from non-citizen voters, which isn’t true and doesn’t make any sense. And perhaps most importantly, Cruz told people to believe that Democratic officials are willing to sacrifice the lives of American children — deliberately — in order to benefit electorally from the support from non-citizen voters, which is transgressive madness.
A Washington Post analysis described the Texas Republican’s rhetoric as “grotesque.”
Cruz claimed not only that Democrats were encouraging immigration to gain power, but that they were callously sacrificing children to do so. What can you say about that? You can say it’s false. You can say it’s toxic. You can say it’s opportunistic or cynical or a degradation. But none of this really captures it. It doesn’t capture Cruz, standing on a stage at the convention, speaking on a night in which his party was purportedly demonstrating its commitment to safety, accusing his political opponents of letting boys and girls be murdered so that they can get a few more votes in some House races.
Cruz is not a dumb man. He surely knows that his ugly rhetoric is false. He pitched it to a national audience anyway.
So much for “unity.”
Watching the senator’s appalling speech, I was reminded of recent chatter about Cruz turning over a new leaf. The Texas Tribune reported in April, for example, that Cruz, as part of his latest re-election campaign, was “casting himself as a bipartisan lawmaker with a penchant for reaching across the aisle.”
The Wall Street Journal soon after published a related report, noting that Cruz is “rolling out a softer, bipartisan side,” and taking steps to “recast his image as a dealmaking lawmaker.” The article added, “His campaign even shot ads featuring ‘Democrats for Cruz.’”
His convention speech made fools of those who believed such talk.
President Biden unveiled a new proposal in Nevada on Tuesday to cap rental costs nationwide, according to three people familiar with the matter. … Biden’s plan — which would need to be approved by Congress — calls for stripping a tax benefit from landlords who increase their tenants’ rent more than 5 percent per year, the people said. The measure would only apply to landlords who own more than 50 units, which represents roughly half of all rental properties, the people said.
No one goes into a marriage hoping for a divorce. It’s an unhappy end to what should be a source of happiness. However, like abortion, divorce is a personal choice—one that is sadly sometimes necessary to protect life or health.
And divorce, like abortion, is something that conservative Republicans are now trying to take away.
Among conservatives, there’s a longing for a time when divorce was both difficult and shameful. Divorce, especially no-fault divorce, has long been fingered by some conservatives as the root of many, if not all, evils. Some of the worst in Congress, like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, have advocated the idea of ending no-fault divorce.
Now those conservatives think they have their champion in Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, who insists that women should be locked into “even violent” marriages.
In 1969, the first no-fault divorce law in the United States was signed by a divorced former actor turned governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Over the next forty years, no-fault divorce laws spread across the United States, with New York being the last state to sign on, in 2010. These laws ended a period in which any party filing for divorce had to not simply give some reason for the dissolution of marriage—like adultery, cruelty, or abuse—but also provide evidence to support these claims. Some couples would even risk faking adultery or subject themselves to unnecessary moves to achieve a divorce. In many cases, women facing domestic violence would be blocked by the financial or social costs of mounting a case for divorce, or forced to stay with abusers by judges who didn’t accept their pleas.
The result of no-fault divorce was immediately visible, not just in an increase in divorce but also in a sharp decrease in domestic violence. States where no-fault divorce laws were passed saw around a 30% drop in domestic violence between 1976 and 1985. In addition, the number of women murdered by domestic partners decreased by 10%. Even suicide among women declined once no-fault divorce made it possible to dissolve failed marriages without an extended legal fight and public shame.
But among conservative Christians, no-fault divorce was looked on as an enormous mistake. The Heritage Foundation, authors of the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda, have railed against no-fault divorce for decades, arguing that parents of children under 18 should not be allowed to divorce without proving it wouldn’t be harmful to the children or arguing more recently that it “was no-fault divorce, not same-sex marriage, that first redefined marriage in the United States.” According to Heritage, “No-fault divorce stripped marriage of its durability and security. Instead, marriage lasts until feelings depart or spouses decide it’s no longer allowing them to ‘live their best life.’”
Somehow, they view using state power to keep people in a relationship that they no longer want as a good thing.
As Salon reports on Tuesday, Vance has been among those with the harshest view of divorce, taking a position that might sound extreme even to extremists.
Speaking to an audience at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California, Vance called no-fault divorce “one of the great tricks … that the sexual revolution pulled on America.” According to Vance, ending marriages that were “maybe even violent” somehow harmed the children more than suffering through those violent marriages. [video at the link]
The result of no-fault divorce, Vance said, was that people were not “doggedly determined to stick it out” as they had been during his grandparent’s generation. Note that this is coming from the same man who wrote a book saying that his “family tradition” was poverty. Getting out of relationships involving unhappiness and abuse might not have changed that, but it certainly could not have hurt.
Spurred on by right-wing Christian groups, anti-divorce legislation is now spreading through red-state legislatures just as anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights bills did earlier. Proposals in Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas would eliminate no-fault divorce in those states. Missouri currently does not allow women to seek a divorce while pregnant, even when trapped in an abusive relationship.
While Project 2025 doesn’t explicitly call for an end to no-fault divorce, members of its advisory board and the primary authors at the Heritage Foundation have made that call.
Like abortion, divorce is an issue that should be settled by individuals, not the state. No one should be forced to enter into a marriage they don’t want. And no one should be forced to stay.
No-fault divorce has saved lives. But the same thing was true of safe, legal abortion. Those deaths aren’t an issue for the men who are more interested in imposing their idea of morality on those who do not agree.
As for Donald Trump, who—well, both of his divorces had a cause: Trump’s adultery. So that’s okay to conservatives. [Video at the link: top Trump advocate, echoing Project 2025, says divorce should be “outlawed.”]
Dark Brandon Wants To Minorly Tweak Supreme Court, And Trump Is FURIOUS
At long last, Joe Biden the institutionalist appears ready to announce that he supports some tweaks to the illegitimate Republican partisan hack Supreme Court. Expanding it to 19 and requiring that all the new justices are Black drag queens who love critical race theory and pronouns? No not that yet.
But he’s reportedly going to support an ethics code that has teeth, and enforcement mechanisms, and also term limits.
Good things, all!
And Donald Trump — who handpicked/stole the Supreme Court seats that are directly responsible for, among other things, confiscating the whole country’s bodily autonomy and abortion rights and giving them to a bunch of old white conservative fascist men — is SOFUCKINGMAD. [Screen grab of Trump’s post is available at the link]
[…] He said:
The Radical Left Democrats are desperately trying to “Play the Ref” by calling for an illegal and unConstitutional attack on our SACRED United States Supreme Court. The reason that these Communists are so despondent is that their unLawful Witch Hunts are failing everywhere. The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court. We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country. MAGA2024!
Thoughts:
– This nutsack is now putting capital letters in the middle of words? What kind of illiterate brain damaged tomfoolery is this?
– Haha, he is so mad.
– These white Nazi fascist Republicans think attacking/stacking/rigging/STOLLENing the Supreme Court is OK when they do it. But the things Biden is proposing, which would be very legal and very cool, are not OK, because they would interfere with white Nazi fascist Republican plans to continue attacking/stacking/rigging/STOLLENing the Court.
– Haha, so mad.
Oh well, maybe Trump should go fuck himself, that’d be our recommendation.
On Monday, in a move widely criticized by union members and labor advocates across the country, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien spoke to the Republican National Convention. He was very well received there, likely because he spent at least half of his speech talking about how lovely it was for Donald Trump — who, notably, stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union activists, stacked the courts with anti-labor judges, and overall supported policies and tax breaks that helped the rich and hurt the working class — to have invited him to come speak.
Also because, while Republicans may hate what unions actually do, they love it when members of groups they have historically screwed turn around and support them anyway. What better way to totally “own the libs” than to say “Look! We’ve spent decades weakening unions with Right-To-Work-For-Less laws and opposing any raise to the minimum wage and this union guy loves us!”
O’Brien’s speech itself was mostly about him giving the speech. How meta!
“Several months ago,” he said, “I asked the RNC and the DNC for the opportunity to speak. To be frank, when President Trump invited me to speak at this convention there was political unrest on the Left and on the Right. Hard to believe! Anti-union groups demanded the president rescind his invitation [no reaction from the audience], the Left called me a traitor [pause for boos] and this is precisely why it’s so important for me to be here today. Think about this, think about this — the Teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes in both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage.”
First of all — those people not “the extremes in both parties.” They are regular-ass Democrats and, frankly, your standard “Fuck The Poor” Republicans. As objectionable as I may find those Republicans, they are relatively mild in comparison to the Actual Nazis the party now embraces so wholeheartedly.
Second of all, the man has no business bringing the rest of the Teamsters into this […]
“We will not allow the working-class labor movement to be destroyed by a scab masquerading as a pro-union advocate after doing everything in his power to destroy the very fabric of unions,” James Curbeam, the national chairman of the Teamsters National Black Caucus, wrote in a statement back when O’Brien first started his bromance with Trump.
Dissatisfaction with O’Brien is nothing new. Since January of 2023, Teamsters have been voicing their criticism of O’Brien’s leadership on the teamsterlink.org forum. When he found out about that, O’Brien actually enlisted known union-busting firm Nixon Peabody (which also counts Donald Trump as a client) to try to take it down.
In his speech, O’Brien was also sure to give Trump the requisite tongue bath, effusively praising him for being such a very very very tough guy.
Trump had the backbone to open the doors to this Republican convention and that’s unprecedented. No other nominee in the race would have invited the Teamsters into this arena. Now, you can have whatever opinion you want, but one thing is clear: President Trump is a candidate who is not afraid of hearing from new loud and often critical voices …
I’m sorry, what?
And I think we all can agree, whether people like them or they don’t like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday he has proven to be one tough SOB.
[…] In a particularly baffling move, O’Brien began praising the Republican politicians he felt were coming around in terms of support for labor. Remember Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Senator with whom he nearly got into fisticuffs with last year?
“Now this will shock you,” he said, “This will shock you. To paraphrase Senator Markwayne Mullin, it’s time for both both sides of Congress to stand their butts up.”
More shocking than that, I’d say, is that he followed that right up with, “It needs to be easier for companies to remain in America” — clearly designed to appeal to those who want lower taxes and fewer regulations for companies, but who would also like to pretend that the reason they want those things is because they support workers, not because they love greedy corporations. That is not a pro-worker statement. O’Brien knows that companies manufacture goods overseas because they are greedy.
O’Brien presumably also knows that Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act has led to $270 billion in manufacturing investments so far, and 36,000 new manufacturing jobs. Right here. In America.
[…] It is very unlikely that Republicans are going to turn around and suddenly start supporting labor en masse, so all he did was go up there like a fool and sell out thousands of workers across the US for some rather tepid clapping.
Republicans want union support not because they support workers or support the existence of unions (certainly Donald Trump doesn’t), but because they like the aesthetics. They want to seem cool and pro-working class, as that will make it even easier for them to pass legislation designed to benefit the rich. Also because they want to “own the libs” and be able to say “See! The unions like us!”
And none of that is going to actually help any workers, anywhere.
On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reported that President Joe Biden is preparing to announce his support for major reforms to the Supreme Court. Rather than call for immediate expansion of the court or for the impeachment of justices clearly violating the court’s toothless ethics guidelines, Biden will seek to establish term limits and an enforceable code of ethics.
Biden is also considering whether to promote a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s recent decision giving presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
While not offering the prospect of immediate relief from the precedent-breaking rulings of this ultraconservative court, Biden’s proposals would bring serious (and overdue) changes to the court—and they’re some of the most consequential ever put forward. The proposals also have the advantage of not being overtly partisan or created to generate a particular end, unlike court expansion. They also have the advantage of being really smart politics.
Republicans would viciously fight any Democratic proposal to expand the court. […]
When polled by Gallup in 2023, Americans were roughly evenly split over the idea of expanding the court, with 51% opposing it and 46% supporting it. But the same poll shows overwhelmingly bipartisan support both for placing an age limit on members of the court (74% support it) and for placing term limits on Congress members (87% percent support it). The reported proposal from Biden would sort of combine those two ideas, using a term limit for justices instead of an age limit. This has advantages over putting an age limit on the court because three of the four youngest justices are Trump appointees, and an age limit would allow them to remain on the court for decades to come.
And while Republicans would assail placing term limits on justices, that proposal would likely garner high enough levels of public support to make Republicans think twice. Even if they don’t, Republican leadership would be on record opposing a popular proposal, while Biden would be on record as offering an innovative solution to a widely-recognized problem.
Smart. Politics.
This is even more true for an enforceable code of ethics. A May survey from Data for Progress shows 77% of likely voters say Supreme Court justices and their spouses should be required to follow a code of ethics. Just 10% of likely voters, including only 18% of Republicans, oppose this idea. Overall, 73% felt that members of the court should be held to the same ethics standards as other federal judges. Only 17% felt that the court should be allowed to set its own ethical standards.
That’s about as good a mandate as any idea is going to get […]
Republicans in Congress are sure to view any ethics proposal as a response to the escapades of Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito and their insurrection-loving wives. So would the public. However, not only do a majority of likely voters support impeaching both Thomas and Alito (after voters are informed about those justices’ ethical lapses), but putting Republicans in the position of opposing ethical guidelines is essentially the same as forcing them to stand there and declare themselves the party of corruption.
That’s also very smart politics.
Biden’s proposal for a constitutional amendment to reverse the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity is also likely to be popular. No one is particularly fond of the “Seal Team 6” scenario in which a president would be immune from having his political rivals assassinated. And it could be seen as a willingness on Biden’s part to surrender power and hold his office to higher standards at the same time that he is proposing such standards for the court.
None of this is to say that expanding the court is a bad idea. It may be the only way that the United States could gain relief from this court’s egregious rulings. Democrats should absolutely be ready to push that idea if this year’s election provides them the presidency and a majority in both chambers of Congress.
But right now, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin should be prepared to pounce on Biden’s court proposals as soon as they are announced.
[…] These are likely to be popular ideas. This is a very good fight to have in the months leading up to the election. So please, have it. Loudly and enthusiastically.
Now would be better than later. Getting this in public and forcing Republicans to react to it while the RNC is still going on would be just … peachy. Let Donald Trump deliver an acceptance speech in which he bombastically defends corruption. Put Republicans on the defense.
And deliver something the public not only wants but needs.
Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud
A federal jury found that Guo Wengui defrauded investors, many his own fervent supporters, of hundreds of millions of dollars. He could face decades in prison.
Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who transformed himself from a Beijing insider into a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party and a favorite of the American right, was convicted on Tuesday of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mr. Guo, also known as Miles Guo, was accused of using a number of schemes — club memberships, cryptocurrencies, a sale of private shares in his media company — to fleece his followers and maintain a lavish lifestyle. On the fourth day of deliberations, a jury in the Southern District of New York found him guilty on nine of 12 charges, including racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Set to be sentenced on Nov. 19, Mr. Guo could face decades in prison or the remote possibility of extradition to China.
In a trial lasting almost two months, government prosecutors highlighted rambling videos Mr. Guo had made for his thousands of supporters, often guaranteeing no losses on their investments. The proceeds helped pay for a mansion in New Jersey, a Lamborghini roadster and a $100 million investment in a hedge fund. Prosecutors also drew on bank records, invoices and the testimony of Mr. Guo’s former employees and jilted investors, who had been drawn to a wealthy Beijing expatriate dedicated to ending the seven-decade rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Is Miles Guo a real political activist or not? I don’t know, I don’t care, and neither should you,” Juliana Murray, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury on Thursday. “He’s an opportunist. He’s a fraudster.”
[…] When he came to the United States, he cultivated political relationships to burnish his image, but this time it was with members of the American right, especially Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump. By early 2017, shortly after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
[…] Throughout the trial, prosecutors worked to associate Mr. Guo with Mr. Bannon, named a co-conspirator by the government but not indicted. Mr. Bannon had a $1 million consulting contract with one of Mr. Guo’s companies and had a hand in creating three organizations that were central to the government’s case. On multiple occasions, his picture was shown on screens placed in front of the jurors.
[…] In June 2020, he appeared alongside Mr. Guo on a boat in New York Harbor to announce the formation of the New Federal State of China, which aimed to supplant the Communist government.
That August, Mr. Bannon was arrested on Mr. Guo’s yacht on unrelated federal charges of defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall. He was pardoned by Mr. Trump in the final hours of his presidency but still faces similar state charges in New York.
As Chinese officials began to seize Mr. Guo’s properties and bank accounts in China and Hong Kong, Mr. Guo turned to those supporters to fund his opulent lifestyle, according to witnesses at the trial.
[…] In a statement after the Guo verdict, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Damian Williams, said: “Thousands of Guo’s online followers were victimized so that Guo could live of a life of excess. Today, Guo’s schemes have been put to an end.”
A con-man flocking together with other con-men. Glad he was caught and convicted.
birgerjohanssonsays
Lewis Black’s Rantcast #182 | The United States of Insanity
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=lOjI0m-IlN0
Lewis Black sums up the craziness better than I could ever do.
The second night of the Republican National Convention was a who’s who of the GOP’s biggest losers. If you previously ran against Donald Trump in a primary, or were humiliated and debased repeatedly by the convicted felon, there was a very good chance you were speaking in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
Tech broseph Stalin wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy started things off by telling America that in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the Republican Party loves Black and Latino Americans. The memo going out to GOP speakers, if they happen to be one of the few people of color, seems to be that they must say Republicans like famous racist landlord Trump are not racist.
Next up was the world’s most humiliated man, Sen. Ted Cruz. You might remember how Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for attacking his wife and father? On Tuesday, Cruz came out to tell a terrible, and entirely fabricated, tale of how America is “facing an invasion on our southern border. Not figuratively. A literal invasion. 11.5 million people have crossed our border illegally under Joe Biden.” It isn’t true, but whatevs. Kiss that ring, Lyin’ Ted!
Then there was former Trump ambassador Nikki Haley. Haley took time away from pretending to have integrity and calling Trump “unstable and unhinged,” to receive a mixed reception from the RNC audience. She then bent the knee to the man that called her “BRAINDEAD” and “BIRDBRAIN,” and endorsed him. Always on brand, Trump didn’t even deem to clap for her ring kissing. [video at the link]
Ben Carson took time away from whining about people trying to cancel Dr. Seuss stories to expound upon how great a second Trump presidency would be. The man that Trump once said had a pathology similar to that of a “child molester” told the audience that ZZzzzzzzZzzzzz … sorry. Carson speaking just knocks you out. [Carson is an amazingly effective sedative. He even seems to be sleeping himself while he is speaking.]
The night of losers ended where losing nights always end: Florida. Sen. “Little Marco” Rubio and Gov. “Ron DeSanctimonious” gave speeches in support of the dear leader. Rubio, best known for justifiably calling Trump a “con artist,” did his best to genuflect to Trump, by whitewashing the racist origins of Trump’s “America First” campaigns.
DeSantis put on his best boots and showed the lack of charisma that led to his untimely exit from the Republican primary. Gone from his speech was the admission that Trump actually lost the 2020 election. In its place were attacks on President Joe Biden and revisionism. At one point DeSantis told the convention audience that the GOP supports “law and order, not rioting and disorder.” Anyone ever heard of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021?
In the end it made sense that Trump would parade his party’s biggest losers on the second day of the convention. They were there to tell Republican voters that not only did they lie when they called Trump all of those terrible things, they now believe he will make America “safe” again. Maybe most importantly, they now disappear from memory as Sen. J.D. Vance and Trump himself take center stage in the last two days of the convention.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has formally appealed a federal judge’s dismissal of criminal charges against former President Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified information after finding the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed.
Smith’s office filed a notice saying it would appeal Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling tossing out the 40 charges Trump faced to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
[…] A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office said Monday that Cannon’s ruling “deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a Special Counsel.”
We will watch for more developments in this story.
“Today marks a very historic day for the three tribes that we have here,” said Craig Andrews, vice chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council, at the signing ceremony.
“This is not just an Indian water settlement; it is an Arizona water settlement,” he added.
The agreement stems from the recently introduced Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2024, which would authorize the $5 billion to finance critical water infrastructure projects.
That sum, which still must receive Congressional approval, would also settle the unresolved water rights claims of all three tribes in Arizona.
Stressing the need to ensure economic prosperity and cultural preservation, Andrews described the terms as a “testament to the power of unity and collaboration in the face of water uncertainty.”
This collaboration was first made official last Monday, when Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D), along with bipartisan, bicameral colleagues, introduced the legislation.
If the bill becomes law, the funds will facilitate the acquisition, construction and maintenance of water development and delivery projects, including a $1.75 billion distribution pipeline.
In total, the tribes would gain access to more than 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water each year, as well as specific groundwater rights and protections, per the bill.
For reference, the average American household uses about one acre-foot of water on an annual basis.
“Securing water rights for these tribes upholds their sovereignty and lays the path for their growth and prosperity through increased investment in water infrastructure,” Kelly said in a statement.
“Ratifying this settlement honors our commitment to the tribes and helps secure our state’s water future,” he added.
I did enjoy how they confidently said that American parents are all really on their side, as shown by their many victories in school board elections that too many voters don’t pay attention to, at least not until the Moms’ candidates start wreaking havoc on the schools and accusing anyone who opposes book bans of being a pedophile. As we saw in the 2022 midterms and off-year elections last fall, once the schools get taken over by extremist christian nationalists, many voters can’t wait to toss them out.
Probably just goes to show how deeply the Marxist radicals have infiltrated society.
New Mexico’s attorney general announced an investigation Tuesday into Memorial Medical Center, the Las Cruces hospital operated by Lifepoint Health, to determine whether the facility, highlighted in a recent NBC News report, violated state laws by turning away indigent and low-income patients seeking care.
The attorney general, Raúl Torrez, said his office is examining Memorial’s patient policies for compliance with a state law and the hospital’s performance under the New Mexico statute governing provision of care to needy patients.
[…] “It is apparent to me that the management of this facility has failed to place the well-being and safety and care of their patients in the proper place and in the proper priority,” he said. “It is apparent to me that decisions have been made from a standpoint that is seemingly motivated by profit, by maximizing the bottom line and without due respect and due regard to patients under their care.” [Yep. That sounds about right.] He also warned hospital management not to retaliate against anyone speaking out about its practices.
An NBC News report last month described allegations that Memorial Medical Center turned away cancer patients under its operator, Lifepoint Health, which was acquired by Apollo Global Management, the New York-based private-equity firm. Physician records and interviews with 13 patients detailed denials of care by the hospital or demands of upfront payments to secure treatments.
Barbara Quarrell, a former nurse at Memorial, is one patient who said the hospital turned her down for care after she was diagnosed with cancer in 2022. […]
Lifepoint Health, the operator of Memorial, oversees the country’s largest chain of mostly rural hospitals — 62 acute care facilities in 16 states. Lifepoint is a subject of two U.S. Senate inquiries, along with other health care companies owned by private equity […]
Under Lifepoint, Memorial is a for-profit entity and highly profitable. It charged 6.7 times its costs for care in 2021, according to the most recent figures available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. The average charged among for-profit hospitals nationwide is less than five times their costs, according to Ge Bai, professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health […]
The CMS hospital comparison site confirms that Memorial’s Medicare costs per beneficiary are both higher than the national average and almost 20% higher than the state average.
Yolanda Diaz is a patient advocate at CARE Las Cruces, a nonprofit organization she founded that helps needy patients pay for health care and expenses. Diaz has been notifying county and city officials since 2021 that Memorial was turning away patients, a practice she said she found inhumane and unjust.
[…] Almost one-quarter of New Mexico’s hospitals are controlled by private-equity firms
[…] independent academic studies show private-equity firms’ involvement in the industry results in significant cost increases for patients and payers, such as Medicare. Lower quality of care has been associated with the firms’ investments in health care, research shows, including 10% higher mortality rates at nursing homes owned by private equity and more incidents of infections, blood clots and falls at hospitals.
Biden tests positive for COVID-19, pulls out of scheduled appearance
20m ago
By Elissa Steedman
President Joe Biden has pulled out of a scheduled appearance at the UnidosUS annual conference after testing positive for COVID-19. Biden’s illness was announced by UnidosUS president Janet Murguía at the event.
Biden ‘experiencing mild symptoms’ of COVID
5m ago
By Elissa Steedman
The White House has confirmed President Joe Biden has tested positive for COVID-19. A statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre read:
“He is vaccinated and boosted and he is experiencing mild symptoms. “He will be returning to Delaware where he will self-isolate and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that time.”
Jean-Pierre said the White House will provide regular updates on Biden’s status while he isolates.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
Observations during day one of the Republican National Convention.
[Garrison Davis]: This has taken over almost all of the central area of Milwaukee
[…]
[Robert Evans]: the kind of people who vote for Republicans don’t tip […] every Uber driver, all of the waiters, waitresses […] say, “We’re just not getting tips.”
[…]
[Garrison]: events like the RNC and the DNC—cities campaign for this, under the notion that this will boost local business. […] And because of how the security’s set up […] many businesses can get no business because they’re completely inside this fenced perimeter […] Even hotels downtown are largely vacant because of weird scheduling errors.
[…]
[Sophie Lichterman]: [A restaurant worker said,] “They really tried to throw in our faces that this was going to be a good thing for all of us. We were all gonna make a bunch of money. And it’s just not happening.”
[…]
[Robert]: Milwaukee was on the verge of bankruptcy. […] A big part of why they took the RNC was […] sales tax. […] Everyone we have talked to who is a local and […] interfaces with the convention, or the convention goers, talks like they’ve been scammed.
whheydtsays
Re: CompulsoryAccount4476 @ # 88…
I really don’t understand why cities vie to host big events. They almost always get taken to the cleaners and lose massive amounts of money. Milwaukee is seeing this happen now. The French in Paris are already complaining about the loss of normal tourist income because of the upcoming Olympics.
Taneli Huuskonensays
Bekenstein Bound @49: The only thing I was addressing was this:
Two factors pull this in opposite directions: one, there might be more than one 100-base RNA capable of autocatalyzing, but on the other hand two, combinations will be tried randomly (drawn with replacement) rather than systematically (drawn without replacement). The latter probably greatly outweighs the former, making 1.6×10^22 iterations a weak lower bound, because it turns a linear search into, ultimately, a near-exponential one.
The effect of having even just two, instead of one, 100-base RNAs capable of autocatalyzing outweighs the effect of drawing with replacement, unless you’re talking about probabilities well above 1/2. That, in turn, is outweighed by the effect of changing the length of the RNA by just one base. So, your last sentence is completely wrong. (One could say it’s nearly exponentially wrong, both literally and figuratively.) I’m not denying it’s also moot, as you pointed out.
Bekenstein Boundsays
If the first replicator was a protein-RNA complex rather than a pure RNA, I doubt that moves the needle much on the search time. Maybe that can get away with shorter RNAs, but with the added proteins the number of carbon atoms involved is probably comparable rather than reduced. Unless there’s a way to get a replicator with well under 1000 carbons, or to rapidly “mutate” them with much lower activation energies (but that also makes the newfound replicator a lot less stable — though maybe it can quickly hill-climb out of the hazard zone?), search time is unlikely to be short enough.
In any event, we’ve already had one sample return from a comet. It won’t be long before we know if most comets do, or do not, contain H2-metabolizing acetyl-diddling bacterial mat type thingies.
Assuming we get through another decade or two without blowing ourselves up, of course.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Taneli Huuskonen@90:
I don’t think so. If there are two rather than one, that has the same effect as halving the size of the search space — it halves the expected time to find one. If it’s one base shorter, that reduces the expected time by a factor of four.
What’s needed, to find it quickly on a single planet without help from the rest of the galaxy, is a reduction by a factor of order of 10^12, which is near 2^40. That would require 20 fewer bases, or having 40 different 100-base replicators. Again, the shortest known autocatalyzing RNA weighs in at over 160 bases, and the shorter of the two main RNAs in an actual, from-the-wild, living self-replication-capable thing, a bacterial ribosome, is a whopping 1500 bases long. The RNA of the larger subunit is double that size, and the RNA’s whole “genome”, triple.
It would take strong evidence to convince me you can get a viable replicator in only 80 bases, or even fewer bases plus proteins weighing in at the same ~800 carbons or so.
Bekenstein Boundsays
Actually, it gets worse. Having 40 different 100-base replicators only shrinks the search time by a factor of 40, not 2^40. Though having 20 fewer bases (80-base replicator) does reduce it by a factor of 2^40.
Bekenstein Boundsays
And all of this is leaving aside that the smallest known self-sufficient unit of life is a whole ecosystem. The smallest estimated one of those would be a bacterial mat of LUCA and a few other prokaryotes, plus structural materials, doing all that acetyl H2 stuff from that article. It’s likely that the earliest self-reproducing system to begin evolving involved several related autocatalyzing RNAs and likely some other, mostly simple, molecules, possibly also primitive proteins (perhaps short peptides drawn from a small number of possible amino acids). That system, on the one hand, likely was way larger than 800 carbons, or even 1000 carbons, but on the other it may have been able to share some of those carbons with other concurrent “attempts” by overlapping with other prospective self-replicating systems. Whether the “carbons per concurrent attempt”, after accounting for overlaps, averaged to much below 1000 is then not obvious, but it still doesn’t strike me as particularly likely, though it’s no longer possible to do exact calculations to be sure. Below 10,000 seems fairly plausible (and above 10,000 probably makes most or all galaxies wholly barren anyway).
Biden wants to reform the Supreme Court. – Mark Sumner, quoted by Lynna, OM@78
A pity he didn’t do anything about it – and indeed, opposed the idea of doing anything about it – until now.
KGsays
SteveoR@86, 87
There are bound to be claims that what ails Biden is not a mild case of Covid, but something much more serious. They could even be true. My hunch (not more than that) is that despite the desperate attempts to shore up his position, he will indeed withdraw from the presidential race. And I think the assassination attempt on Trump strengthens the argument for him doing so: the appearance of vigour Trump showed in that event – however illusory – makes a stark contrast with Biden’s evident frailty.
birgerjohanssonsays
I am trying to cheer you up a bit.
.
If you are familiar with British comedy, you will be familiar with the British-German Henning Wein.
“Henning is one of a number of German comedians, that number being ‘one’. “
Are you in any way confident you’re not being anthropomorphic?
(This is all so very anthropomorphic and speculative!)
KGsays
If you are familiar with British comedy, you will be familiar with the British-German Henning Wein.
“Henning is one of a number of German comedians, that number being ‘one’. “ – birgerjohansson@98
Unfortunately, at least when I’ve heard him, he’s not actually very funny.
A majority of Americans believe President Joe Biden should withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, while a smaller yet sizable share also believe former President Donald Trump should do the same, according to new polling. The latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll asked respondents where they stand on both candidates following the first presidential debate in June, in which Biden’s halting speech drew concerns about his age and fitness.
On the second night of the Republican National Convention, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird boasted about her party’s approach to law enforcement: “We put criminals where they belong: in jail.”
She neglected to add, “And also on the RNC stage.”
One Republican speaker after another on Tuesday night denounced those who ran afoul of the law. “Cops are good, criminals are bad,” Montana Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy declared. “Donald Trump stands with the people and the police — our men and women in blue — not with the criminals and rioters,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer added.
The obvious problem with the rhetoric was the fact that a jury recently found Trump guilty of 34 felonies — which came on the heels of a different jury holding Trump liable for sexual assault — who’s running on a platform rooted in his support for rioters. The less obvious problem is who would speak to the convention the day after attendees were told “criminals are bad.”
As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, former White House adviser Peter Navarro was scheduled to speak at his party’s gathering, just hours after being released from federal prison. We now know that’s precisely what happened — and how he was received. NBC News reported:
Peter Navarro, an aide in former President Donald Trump’s White House, received thunderous cheers at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday as he spoke hours after having left a federal prison in Miami. … Navarro reported to prison in March after he was convicted of contempt of Congress. He was involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and defied a subpoena from the House committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the run-up to it.
For those who might’ve missed his appearance, convention attendees didn’t just give the released criminal a standing ovation, they also chanted, “Welcome home.” [video at the link]
Part of what made all of this notable was the jarring contradiction: Navarro, a member of the so-called “Team of Felons,” was celebrated as a hero at the Republican National Convention literally one day after the party pushed a “criminals are bad” message.
Complicating matters was the former White House’s adviser’s rhetoric. Navarro declared, for example, that the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee “demanded” that he “betray Donald John Trump” and “break the law.” [Talk about deceptive framing!] That wasn’t even close to being true.
But stepping back, there’s a larger context to consider. Why in the world would the RNC invite a criminal to the convention stage, just hours after his release and one day after touting a “law and order” message?
Because as Rubin’s piece explained, “The party’s embrace of Navarro fits well within its ‘law and order’ mantra, which doesn’t mandate a literal application of the law but is rather about maintaining a certain social order.”
Quite right. I’m reminded of a New York Times op-ed that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes wrote in 2018:
If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption. And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law.
Navarro is on the right “team,” which — as far as Republicans are concerned — transforms his criminality into nobility.
What Navarro said:
The J6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to save my own skin — I refused. Here’s the thing about the Constitution. They demanded that I break the law because they have no respect for it. I refused, and a Democrat majority in the House then voted to hold me in contempt.
Fact Check:
Navarro went to prison because he defied a subpoena to testify before the House Jan. 6 committee, claiming Trump had asserted executive privilege and told him to do so.
There’s nothing in the Constitution about executive privilege, which gives the president the right to withhold documents and information about deliberations. But U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against Navarro, saying he had not offered compelling evidence that Trump had specifically directed him to invoke executive privilege.
What’s more, the committee did not seek information about Navarro’s conversations with Trump; the subpoena requests evidence supporting voter fraud claims Navarro made in public writings, conversations he had with Trump’s lawyers and information relating to the Jan. 6 attack, among other things.
Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, gave his big VP acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.
Gone was any talk of Vance’s radical position on abortion. Gone was any talk of his equally radical desire to end no-fault divorce.
Instead, he told people to watch video of Trump being shot at over the weekend. He delivered a painfully generic speech about how he is a family man and a working-class Joe (who went to Yale Law School), and how Trump loves people like Vance. And it was … boooorrrrrrinnnggg.
So boring that the most enthusiasm from the crowd—who was clearly desperate for something to cheer, some small shred of inspiration—came when they started chanting for themselves.
J.D. Vance: You guys are a great crowd.
Crowd: Yes we are! Yes we are! Yes we are!
Seriously. [video at the link]
Posted by readers of the article:
One of the panel members on msnbc last night mentioned that JDV was instructed by the Trump campaign not to bring out his nastiest fascistic stuff for awhile, because it might be a turn-off for some of the donors and voters….I guess they want to warm up to the full on JDV’s visions for Gilead.
—————————
A guy who went to Yale Law School and then used those connections to “work” in venture capital in Silicon Valley and who owes his political career to tech billionaires is telling me about “elites”?
————————
He is a vulture capitalist. He despises his background. Now he is all populist? He can peddle this elsewhere, I am not buying it. Calling the Great Lakes States the “rust belt” after all these years, is a tone deaf insult. The economies are far more vibrant and resilient than painted by the GOP who seems stuck in 1982
———————
I made it out and you didn’t because you have the wrong mentality isn’t very inspiring.
———————
this is the Repub’s MO, the absolute nothing burger of their rhetoric. Their base believes every word, EVERY TIME. Toddlers with no object permanence. Sheesh.
—————-
J.D. is a sell-out. He comes from the working class, and people identify with that. Most of us probably grew up working class. However, the similarity with real people ends there.
He thinks he is special for climbing up the ladder to “success.” A self-made man. That fact that he’s had a lot of wealthy patrons/mentors might have helped too. Having the connections to get into Yale helped. As a rule, working class folks don’t go to an “Ivy.” He got out of Appalachia by joining the Marines (nothing wrong with that), but that’s not viable for everybody. He’s where he is right now thanks to hard work AND having friends in high places. Especially the man he used to loathe and now loves, tfg.
J.D. has essentially forgotten where he came from (despite his shtick) and thinks sucking up to the powerful is fine and dandy. He’s smart, but he is also damned lucky to live in America where he could have those opportunities. BUT freedom only goes so far–women shouldn’t have his advantages, they should just stay home and have babies! To paraphrase Pink Floyd, they “don’t need no education.” But doesn’t Mrs. Vance have a degree from Yale too? Good thing she had 3 kids for J.D. to make up for it./s
The whole GOPer platform is about turning back the clock to a better time for white, straight Christian men.
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Putin’s cuddly little trash panda.
————————
Peter Thiel! Dark money!
————————
Vance was hired by Thiel to work at two of his companies in SF, then set him up to have a venture capital company. Thiel introduced Vance in person to trump at mar a lago, poured 15 million into Vances senate race plus other dark money from wealthy tech bros.
Biden-Harris campaign:
JD Vance: Biden has forgotten about rural communities like the county where my family is from
FACT CHECK: President Biden visited this exact same county 2 years ago after it was devastated by floods. While Trump wants to give billionaires tax handouts, President Biden is investing billions of dollars to strengthen rural infrastructure, connect rural homes to high-speed broadband and clean water, and expand rural access to affordable health care.
Aaargh! I was quoting a statement at Youtube from OccupyDemocrats. But different polls give different results. Or they simply borked the poll quote (even more likely).
.
Sabine Hossenfelder
“Why don’t we have better robots yet?”
Consumers can now purchase $299 sneakers featuring an image of Donald Trump with his fist in the air after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
As difficult as this might be to believe, the Associated Press reported that people can now purchase $299 sneakers featuring an image of Donald Trump with his fist in the air after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
The white high tops are being sold as “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT High-Tops” for $299 on a website that sells Trump-branded shoes that is run by CIC Ventures LLC, a company that Trump reported owning in his 2023 financial disclosure. The company says the new shoes are limited edition with only 5,000 pairs available and estimated to ship in September or October. It also said 10 pairs will be randomly autographed.
As part of the pitch — which I am not making up — prospective buyers have been told, “These limited edition high-tops, featuring Trump’s iconic image with his fist raised, honor his unwavering determination and bravery. With only 5,000 pairs available, each one is a true collector’s item. Show your support and patriotic pride with these exclusive sneakers, capturing a defining moment in history.”
These are not to be confused with the $399 Trump-related gold high-tops, which are also sold by the same Trump-owned company, which the Republican candidate’s campaign officials have promoted online.
In fact, for consumers with a special fondness for the former president, there’s a seemingly endless stream of other products to choose from. [video of huckster Trump at the link]
Remember the “the only Bible endorsed“ by Trump? And the “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection”? All of which comes on the heels of the steaks and the board game?
How about Trump selling off pieces of the suit he wore while taking his mug shot after one of his criminal indictments? On a related note, after the Republican was arraigned in Atlanta, his political operation started selling mug shot-related campaign swag — including, but not limited to, mugs, sweatshirts and beverage coolers.
One could presumably wear the mug shot sweatshirt while also wearing “Victory 47” cologne and perfume — available for just $99.
I’m reminded of a recent Washington Post analysis with a great headline: “Trump used to sell the perception of opulence. Now he just sells Trump.” […]
Re: abiogenesis
Considering the different forms nucleotides take in metabolism allows other ways past polynucleotides may have functioned. Modern DNA and RNA maybe the result of a lot of past kinds of nucleotide and separation of functions to cofactors, many cofactors are mounted on or attached to ribose or nucleotides like ATP. (NAD, Coenzyme-A, thiamine, B12…).
A long string of these cofactors could operate like a conveyer belt. It’s imaginable that a preribosome could move to a new mineral, denature, and the nucleotide bases themselves could become participants in local chemistry and be changed by that chemistry into forms to do other chemistry. In fact the part of purine biosynthesis after the first ring closure (that is the metabolic connection with thiamine biosynthesis) turns that glycine into a 3 carbon molecule that could be released instead of going on to purines. Polyribose phosphate as conveyer belt.
Ultrawealthy corporate CEOs have a good reason to love Donald Trump’s 2017 tax policy, which was written with them in mind. But Trump’s rich-guy tax break didn’t deliver the promised economic benefits and has cost the nation trillions. If it’s extended, as Republicans want, it will cost trillions more.
The CEOs are okay with that. They are also likely just fine with the Project 2025 tax plan, which includes even more enormous gifts for the wealthy while settling the cost of government on working and middle-class Americans. That’s all good to the CEOs.
What seems to worry them is Trump selecting Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Vance has been selling himself as a populist. Not a racist who just finds “populism to be a more friendly label. But a real populist—one who has even teamed up with corporate bogeywoman Sen. Elizabeth Warren on a bill to claw back bonuses awarded to executives at failed banks.
Those CEOs don’t need to worry. Vance has proven himself a world-class hypocrite who was more than happy to burn his dignity to secure Trump’s blessing. There’s no reason to believe his economic populism is more real than anything else about him.
As CNN reports, labor leaders certainly don’t believe Vance is on their side. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called a potential Trump-Vance administration “a corporate CEO’s dream and a worker’s nightmare,” in a statement released on Saturday. “Sen. JD Vance likes to play union supporter on the picket line,” said Shler, “but his record proves that to be a sham.”
And there’s another reason why some of the wealthiest Americans may be supporting Trump. It’s not because Trump’s economic policies are good; it’s because they are bad. Bad in just the right way.
According to billionaire investor Mark Cuban, this is all a cryptocurrency play.
Elon Musk just announced that he was plowing $45 million a month into a pro-Trump PAC after previously promising to support neither candidate. He’s also gathering other tech billionaires around him, encouraging them to make sure all the money goes to Trump and none to Biden.
All this could be just Musk being an ego-driven racist and misogynist who fully clicks with the Heritage Foundation’s plans for a nationalist takeover. After all, he just declared that he would drag two corporations from California to Texas due to his extreme hatred of transgender people.
It’s worth noting that Musk has a trans daughter who wasn’t speaking to him as of last September. The billionaire seems to be taking his anger out on the whole nation, even if that means teaming up with people who have tried to destroy his core business. […]
But, according to Cuban, there’s a bigger reason why billionaires are willing to provide Trump with a campaign grubstake.
Trump’s economic policies—extending tax cuts and attempting to patch the budget using universal tariffs—can be counted on to cause inflation. Meanwhile, nations around the world are preparing for the chaos that would come if Trump squeezed back into the Oval Office.
High inflation. High instability. According to Cuban, these are exactly the kind of conditions that drive up the price of bitcoin.
“How high can the price go?” asks the investor. “Way higher than you think.”
Cuban points out that the number of bitcoins is limited by its underlying algorithm, but how much value those coins can be given, or how many fragments can be made from each coin, is unlimited. In an unstable America, cast adrift from allies and facing rising inflation at home, bitcoin could easily become the “safe haven” currency—especially if Republicans follow through on plans to devalue the dollar.
Combine that huge potential rise in bitcoin values with a decrease—or even elimination—of capital gains tax, and the ultrawealthy could see their investment in Trump’s campaign as a low-risk down payment on almost unlimited wealth.
This, all of this, may be no more than speculation on the part of Cuban. Musk and Cuban have argued repeatedly online, including Musk declaring that Cuban is a “racist” because he supports diversity programs and calling Cuban a liar for saying that Black airline pilots have to meet the same qualifications as anyone else. Cuban has also dismissed Trump as “a snake oil salesman.”
Cuban’s “boost crypto” theory is compelling, but it shouldn’t be taken as gospel. It certainly should affect how ordinary people should vote.
It doesn’t matter if billionaires ever make a fresh entry on bitcoin’s sacred blockchain. The trillions of dollars they’ll save from Trump’s promised tax breaks and the trillions more they would get from the Project 2025 plan are more than enough to justify their investment.
This is a tweet from billionaire investor David Sacks, who has hosted high-dollar fundraisers for Donald Trump. [X post and list at the link]
This election is the worst of the billionaires vs. ordinary Americans. If they win, the next one will be oligarchs vs. peasants.
And peasants don’t get a vote.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sex and gender are linked to different networks in the brain.
Jon Stewart explains how corruption works in congress.
Offering a senator concert tickets? Not proper. Golf lessons? Well, obviously that’s legit.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/hhBn9k-F56U
Video at the link. The video is 3:55 minutes long. It features Trump saying a lot of batshit stuff, and it showcases former Trump allies and officials saying how whacko and dangerous Trump is. It’s a good compilation.
Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, the multimillionaire rhinestone-cowboy transplant from Minnesota who is taking on Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, has apparently learned everything he knows about business from Donald Trump. That includes mythologizing his origin story and allegedly shafting his employees.
Take this example from a recent meet and greet in Missoula.
“As a small business owner, you know, you don’t balance the budget in your business, you don’t get paid,” Sheehy told the gathering in audio obtained exclusively by Daily Kos. “I’ve been there. I’ve gone years without a paycheck before, when I’ve made sure my team gets paid first, I’ll get paid later.”
Nice story. But some of his former employees would dispute that.
In a lawsuit filed in April, former employees John Wantulok and Weston Irr allege that Sheehy, his brother, and their companies defrauded them out of potentially millions of dollars.
Wantulok and Irr were early employees in the Sheehys’ aerospace venture, Bridger Aerospace. The former workers allege that they agreed to reduced salaries, unpaid overtime, and work on weekends and holidays in return for ownership interests in the form of Class C stocks in Bridger Management, the parent company for the companies the employees worked at. The suit says they signed contracts about those shares in 2017.
The suit also alleges that Tim Sheehy and his brother instructed Irr and Wantulok not to tell other employees about those stock holdings or they would lose both the stocks and their jobs.
Fast forward to 2020, when the Sheehys sold Ascent Vision Technologies, a subsidiary of Bridger Management at which Irr had previously worked. The suit alleges that the employees were told they “would be required to sell their ownership interests in Bridger Management prior to the sale.” That sale brought in “roughly $350 million,” according to the suit. Then, the suit alleges, the Sheehys’ Bridger Management merged Bridger Aerospace with another company and took it public with a valuation of “roughly $860 million.”
The former workers claim that these actions should have made their shares worth millions.
Except one thing: Their suit alleges that Sheehy improperly forced them to accept a buyout before dissolving Bridger Management, then failed to distribute the proceeds from the sale of Ascent Vision or from Bridger Aerospace’s public offering. The former workers also claim that the Sheehys refused to provide them with accounting or ownership records.
The suit says that Sheehy and his brother “never provided a legal or contractual basis for forcing Plaintiffs to sell their ownership interests in Bridger Management.” It also claims that the brothers “never provided a legal, contractual, or financial basis for the valuations of Plaintiffs’ ownership interests in Bridger Management,” and that the former workers “did not agree to the sale of their ownership interests of Bridger Management or agree to Defendants’ valuations of their ownership interests.”
Bloomberg News reports that Tim Sheehy made about $75 million off selling Ascent Vision in 2020. And that same year, he purchased millions of dollars of ranch land in Montana and, with assistance, started a cattle company, HuffPost reports.
Meanwhile, his company appears to be struggling, with reported losses of $77 million in 2023, though Sheehy reported earning more than $2.4 million from the company in his annual disclosure filed in June 2024.
Sheehy has also not committed to divesting from Bridger Aerospace if he is elected, despite that the company nets considerable revenue from federal contracts. Instead, he said he’d put his holdings into a blind trust—something else he has in common with Trump.
Screwing employees, running up huge debts, living in luxury—he’s apparently taken the gospel of Trump to heart.
The plaintiffs appear to have been smart to take the deal, but the offer, in typical trickle-down style stifles the realization of prosperity while the money men vault a wall of paper to unaccountability land.
Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the state’s practice of stripping voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
A majority of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.
[…] Nineteen judges of the appeals court heard arguments in January, months after vacating a ruling issued last August by a three-judge panel of the same court. The panel had said Mississippi’s ban on voting after certain crimes violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
In the ruling Thursday, dissenting judges wrote that the majority stretched the previous Supreme Court ruling “beyond all recognition.” The dissenting judges wrote that Mississippi’s practice of disenfranchising people who have completed their sentences is cruel and unusual.
Tens of thousands of Mississippi residents are disenfranchised under a part of the state constitution that says those convicted of 10 specific felonies, including bribery, theft, and arson, lose the right to vote. Under a previous state attorney general, who was a Democrat, the list was expanded to 22 crimes, including timber larceny—felling and stealing trees from someone else’s property—and carjacking.
To have their voting rights restored, people convicted of any of the crimes must get a pardon from the governor, which rarely happens, or persuade lawmakers to pass individual bills just for them with two-thirds approval. Lawmakers in recent years have passed few of those bills. […]
In March, a Mississippi Senate committee leader killed a proposal that would have allowed automatic restoration of voting rights five years after a person is convicted or released from prison for some nonviolent felonies. The bill passed the Republican-controlled House 99-9, but Senate Constitution Committee Chairwoman Angela Hill said she blocked it because “we already have some processes in place” to restore voting rights person by person.
Mississippi’s original list of disenfranchising crimes springs from the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who have sued to challenge the list say authors of the state constitution removed voting rights for crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit.
In 1950, Mississippi dropped burglary from the list of disenfranchising crimes. Murder and rape were added in 1968. Two lawsuits in recent years have challenged Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement.
Attorneys representing the state in one lawsuit argued that the changes in 1950 and 1968 “cured any discriminatory taint.” The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals court agreed in 2022, and the Supreme Court said in June 2023 that it would not reconsider the appeals court’s decision.
The 5th Circuit is one of the most conservative appeals courts. It is based in New Orleans and handles cases from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. […]
A summer covid wave has washed over most of the United States, bringing yet another round of gatherings turned into superspreaders, vacations foiled by illness and reminders that pandemic life has not been fully erased. Not even President Biden was spared.
Coronavirus activity in wastewater reached levels considered “high” or “very high” in 26 states, according to the most recent data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other metrics also suggest the virus is rising, including the prevalence of covid diagnoses in emergency rooms and the rate of tests processed at labs coming back positive, but not to the degree of the winter surge.
Biden has entered isolation in his Rehoboth Beach home in Delaware after testing positive with mild symptoms Wednesday, the most high-profile example of the virus’s reach.
[…] President Biden’s administration no longer treats covid as a public health emergency — instead, managing it as a routine respiratory virus to be blunted with an annual vaccination campaign. This strategy reflects how SARS-CoV-2 has established itself as a common pathogen that no longer overwhelms hospitals or the health-care system […]
“Covid is not gone. Covid is going to be around, probably forever, and we are going to typically see two to three waves a year,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health who stepped down last year as the White House coronavirus coordinator.
“It raises a question of how worried should we be,” Jha added. “It sounds scary, but it’s not, for most people.”
[Graphs at the link]
[…] Biden started a Paxlovid regimen Wednesday and received an updated coronavirus vaccine in October. White House officials did not respond to questions as to whether Biden received a second dose of the latest vaccine available to seniors.
[…] Covid has spiked every summer since the pandemic started, which experts attribute to increased travel, large gatherings such as weddings and conferences, the rise of new variants and even the heat driving people inside where the virus spreads more easily.
[…] The ongoing covid uptick coincides with the ascendancies of KP variants dubbed FLiRT and the closely related LB. 1, which accounted for 85 percent of new cases as of early July, according to CDC estimates. They have mutations that make it easier for the virus to spread than previous variants and to more efficiently infect people who have some level of immunity. But they do not appear to cause more serious disease.
[…] While covid does not hospitalize and kill people as often as it used to, even mild cases can still be disruptive and inflict illness that can feel nastier than the patient would expect.
[…] The current vaccine targets the defunct XBB variants. Updated vaccines won’t hit the market for at least another month, leaving patients and their providers to discuss the trade-offs of getting an outdated shot now that still offers some protection or waiting for the new version.
[…] The federal Bridge Access Program to offer free coronavirus vaccines to uninsured people ends in August.
[…] other Americans are having a harder time than the president getting Paxlovid. Many pharmacies do not have the medication stocked given previous low demand. And those who do manage to access the medication are sometimes hit with eye-popping bills.
Robyn DeChabert, 27, received a prescription for Paxlovid when the Virginia Beach resident went to an emergency department Sunday with difficulty breathing and a painful cough. She credited the antiviral treatment with hastening her recovery the last two times she contracted covid, when she received the medication free because the federal government had covered the costs.
But when her sister went to pick up the prescription for her this time, the pharmacy charged $1,700, which she could not afford. Her sister left without the medication. DeChabert is uninsured until she starts her service industry job next month.
“It is still baffling to me that a medicine that two years ago was very much accessible to a lot of people is now something that’s being priced out for many Americans,” said DeChabert, who was able to get Paxlovid from a friend. “I shouldn’t have to go into medical debt just to be able to live.” […]
Saturday’s shooting is the latest instance of right-leaning social media accounts trying to link diversity, equity and inclusion programs to deeply troubling news events.
The U.S. Secret Service said Wednesday that it stood by its female agents and was appalled by some of the criticism they’ve received on conservative social media since Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The Secret Service, in a statement to NBC News, said that the criticism from pundits and influencers was baseless. The agency also stood by its commitment to diversity in recruiting as helping, not hurting, the effectiveness of its protective teams.
The statement follows a multiday campaign of derision by some conservatives who accused Kimberly Cheatle, the Secret Service director, of being unqualified and who said that female agents assigned to Trump hadn’t been physically capable of protecting him. Some critics said the Secret Service should return to being all-male, which it hasn’t been since 1970.
Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service’s chief of communication, said in the statement: “We stand united against any attempt to discredit our personnel and their invaluable contributions to our mission and are appalled by the disparaging and disgusting comments against any of our personnel.”
“As an elite law enforcement agency, all of our agents and officers are highly trained and fully capable of performing our missions,” he said.
“It is an insult to the women of our agency to imply that they are unqualified based on gender. Such baseless assertions undermine the professionalism, dedication and expertise of our workforce,” he added.
[…] criticism of the female agents has been different. At least three female agents were among those protecting Trump in the moments after the shooting, according to videos, and in the days since, their actions have become popular targets of criticism and jokes among conservatives, with several posts on X receiving more than 10 million views.
The criticisms follow a pattern from other recent news events where conservative pundits and lawmakers, without evidence, cite “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) programs as a contributing cause in disasters as disparate as the Boeing-made airplane problems or the Baltimore bridge collapse.
It’s not clear what the exact roles were for the individual female agents who are appearing in memes and photos. Some photos and videos show female agents leaping toward Trump and fully covering the front of his body, while some conservatives online have picked out other photos of female agents at the scene that they argue show incompetence or inaction.
[…] Several groups that support women in law enforcement, including Women in Federal Law Enforcement and the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives, condemned the criticism and reiterated that their collective efforts have been to make sure that “the best possible candidates have access to the job they’re best suited for.”
“We must reject all bad-faith efforts that seek to score political points at the expense of our safety,” group leaders wrote in a group statement Tuesday. “These attacks are deeply disingenuous distractions from what matters most in the aftermath of fatal tragedies — in this case, mourning the senseless loss of life while investigating the actual factors that contributed to this tragedy and understanding how we can prevent such heinous acts in the future.”
[…] Valentine, the retired agent, said he thought that some agents in the video appeared to have more control over their adrenaline than others, but he disputed the idea that agents’ performance always fell along gender lines.
“As a team, they had a fantastic reaction. It was super fast,” he said. “If there was one person on the team who didn’t operate on the right level, I’m going to be reluctant to criticize that.”
He said that one female agent who had difficulty reholstering her handgun may be “memed forever because of her reaction,” but he added: “The fact of the matter is she was standing fully erect in front of that vehicle, exactly where she needed to be.”
But posts criticizing the female agents still spread widely. The account Libs of TikTok received more than 10 million views on a post criticizing the female agents and saying “DEI got someone killed.”
[…] The arguments weren’t only on X. On Instagram, a similar post received more than 1,000 likes arguing that female Secret Service agents would be better off “in the kitchen” making sandwiches. And on YouTube, a video from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia called out the “fumbling fumbelinas” protecting Trump.
[…] Elon Musk added fuel to the idea that Trump’s security detail was physically inadequate.
[…] Valentine, the retired Secret Service agent, said there’s a legitimate question of whether there should be a height requirement for agents — for example, perhaps they should be as tall as the person they’re protecting. But, he said, height is not always important because the first priority during a threat is generally to get the person on the ground rather than protect them standing up.
“I don’t think it should be along gender lines,” he said.
Almost 100 suspected heat deaths are attributed to a single week, from July 7 to 13, when temperatures reached 118 degrees.
[…] A heat report dashboard run by Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is the fourth most-populated county in the United States with 4.4 million people, showed 322 deaths are suspected to have been a result of heat-related illness in the year to July 13 — a huge increase on last year.
Almost 100 of those suspected heat deaths are attributed to a single week, from July 7 to 13, when temperatures reached 118 degrees. This came after parts of Arizona, Nevada and Texas experienced their hottest June on record.
There have been 23 confirmed deaths in the county related to heat this year, the data shows, 17 of which were directly caused by heat and 6 which were “heat-contributed.”
“We know that June was hotter than June last year,” Maricopa County Public Health’s Assistant Medical Director Nick Staab told NBC affiliate KPNX of Phoenix. “We know that the risk for heat related death increases with those higher temperatures,” he said.
There have been at least 73 heat-related deaths across the U.S. this year so far, according to an ongoing count by NBC News. […]
And there is still no end to the extreme heat in the Southwest, with temperatures expected to reach 116 degrees in Phoenix on Friday, prompting an excessive heat warning until Saturday night […]
39% of victims were unhoused […]
birgerjohanssonsays
“Anti-Trump Republicans STUN Trump Campaign With BRUTAL News”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=fq–SRdy_I0
George Conway’s video starts at the 3-minute mark. He presents his new anti-Trump PAC, the P.S.Y.C.O.PAC
He is not holding back.
John Moralessays
Trump Campaign is STUNNED!
(Is that the cry of the loon?)
John Moralessays
“He is not holding back.”
Surely he is. After all, Trump Campaign could be SMASHED TO SMITHEREENS!
John Moralessays
See, I have no clue what this alleged BRUTAL News may be, but I know damn fucking well that Trump Campaign is NOT STUNNED.
So, a bullshit headline and no actual information provided at all.
(bah. No context, no click from me)
birgerjohanssonsays
I usually alter the ALL CAPS to a less annoying format but it is half past one in the morning…(but I like Conway’s abbreviation)
This one is more humble:
(My mistake, I thought Britain was 66%, not 46%)
And I am not certain the link works as intended.
As I said, late at night. Best I sign off.
birgerjohanssonsays
…Basically, the higher the percentage the more people are vulnerable to jingoism. Sweden is at the lower end, but we still have a xenophobe party.
JMsays
@130 birgerjohansson: In Russia’s case I suspect it’s not so much that they are particularly subject to jingoism but rather that they have been fed a steady diet for the past couple of decades. This is one of the things Orwell depicted so well in 1984. Even though the average Russian citizen knows the government is lying they also have no other information or frame of reference. Over time the propaganda sinks in.
It occurs to me that Biden calling a press conference to step aside just when Trump is speaking could be one epic last troll of the evil old orange fascist here.. One way to turn media attention away and get people to refocus maybe?
StevoRsays
Because what would the media cover if these were suimultaneous?
Seems the breathless reporting that Donald Trump was a changed man who would give a different kind of speech at the Republican National Convention might have been a tad premature. Because after more than an hour of mostly reading from the teleprompter, Trump had to let it out. [The text read from the teleprompter directly contradicts a lot of the other stuff Trump said (is still saying), including all the plans to deport “illegal aliens.”]
[…]
video at the link.
Trump has taken to talking about Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail, and at his acceptance speech, he just couldn’t resist.
Excerpts from Talking Points Memo’s live coverage:
[from the intro}
[…] The question is both how long they can keep it up, and whether Trump himself will manage to maintain this facade during the 90 minute address he’s scheduled to deliver.
It’s no accident, then, that he’ll be preceded by three emissaries from the world of professional wrestling. Linda McMahon, a former Trump-era Small Business Administration leader and WWE CEO, and UFC CEO Dana White will speak. Hulk Hogan, himself a professional wrestler whose defamation lawsuit, funded by billionaire and Vance ally Peter Thiel, destroyed Gawker, will also give a speech.
We’ll be following along below:
[From the live coverage:] Eric Trump is channeling anti-immigrant anger, apologizing to all of the people who, in his mind, have been hurt under the Biden administration. That includes Border Patrol agents and an unnamed veteran, sleeping under a bridge as illegal immigrants are housed in New York City hotels.
This is an obvious falsehood, but I will say: the litany of apologies is not very Trumpian, even if meant as means to weave criticism of his opponents.
“I am proud to be your son,” Eric says to his father, up somewhere in the stands.
It continues to be stunning how Trump is also synonymous with family rule. You elect him, you get the whole bloodline.
After playing a soft ballet piece to accompany Melania Trump’s silent arrival to the RNC, we’re now watching a short film chronicling Trump’s biography in the most glowing possible terms. He’s described in this as a “folk hero,” dominant in every interaction, sought out by politicians and celebrities alike.
UFC CEO Dana White is introducing Trump to the audience. By now, the veneration is familiar: Trump is selfless, he cares deeply for others, and he’s here to save the country.
“I’m in the tough guy business, and this man is the toughest, most resilient human being I have ever met in my life,” White says.
What’s so stunning about the presence of professional wrestling fixtures to me is that, taken at face value, everything they say is meant to be a description of a performance. But for this, the performance is all you need to make reality.
Lee Greenwood sings “Proud to Be An American” as Trump walks onstage.
Next to Trump onstage is a firefighter’s uniform, sporting the last name “Comperatore.” That is the last name of the firefighter who was killed at the Trump rally on Saturday.
Trump is now narrating the assassination attempt that took place on Saturday, saying a bullet came within a quarter-inch of taking his life.
Trump says that he turned during his speech on Saturday and “felt something hit me really, really hard.”
His penchant for exaggeration never left him. He says that there was “blood all over the place,” and that he immediately knew “we were under attack.”
“There was blood pouring everywhere and yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that,” Trump says.
Trump is describing how, if he had not turned his head at the exact right moment, the bullet would have found its mark.
There’s an explicitly religious overtone to all this. Trump was saved, Trump was protected.
“Bullets were flying all over us, and yet I felt serene,” he says. He adds, later: “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” a statement that the crowd greets with chants of “yes you are.”
“I stand before you here thanks to the grace of an almighty God,” Trump says.
It’s a religious revival story. He dodged death, and is marked by God for a providential mission.
f the fantasy is death, then Trump is indulging it. He just took a moment onstage to go and kiss the helmet, before thanking Comperatore’s family for providing his “outfit.”
Trump is now making his call for unity, and demanding that the Democrats stop labeling their opponent the “enemy of Democracy.”
“In fact, that is not true, I am the one saving Democracy for this country,” he says.
What Trump is trying to do here is too obvious to have to explain, but suffice to say that there isn’t a lot of room in Trump’s concept of national unity for differing views.
Trump is exulting in Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of his Mar-a-Lago records case, and in his victories in fending off a number of other attempts at accountability: the two impeachments, the Supreme Court giving him an assist by finding that it’s nearly impossible to prosecute former Presidents for anything they did while in office.
he demanded an immediate end to the remaining criminal cases against him. It sounded like a call for surrender. And yet, just now, he dropped a reference to the 2020 election in a discussion of foreign affairs and how weak he sees the Democrats as having been. They’re only “fierce,” Trump said, when trying to cheat and steal elections.
Trump said just now, referring to the 2020 election that he lost, “we’re never going to let that happen again.”
At some point, it’s all the same. Trump is promising to finish the wall, he called Covid “the China virus,” he’s promising that he’ll reshore car manufacturing jobs and establish world peace.
With the exception of COVID, any of this could have been taken from his 2016 campaign, and with COVID, his failed 2020 reelection bid. It’s endlessly repetitive, and that’s part of the point: I’m reminded of sections from Maggie Haberman’s biography of Trump, Confidence Man, in which she describes how he would use exhaustion as a negotiation tactic while a businessman. It’s a bit of what he’s been doing to the whole country over the past eight years.
Trump says that if he loses, they’ll have to have the next GOP convention in Venezuela. The crime rate there, he suggests, will be comparatively low.
Trump just spent a few minutes accusing Bukele [El Salvador’s President Nayyib Bukele] of sending the country’s murders to the U.S.
Trump, a consummate ’80s man, promises his own version of Reagan’s Star Wars: “We’re going to build an Iron Dome over our country,” he says, referring to the Israeli missile interception system. It wouldn’t be Trump if he didn’t make it transactional somehow, and so he comes close to suggesting that Wisconsin will build the system.
Now, Trump says, Washington D.C. is a “horrible killing field.” He promises to fix that once elected.
Trump ends his speech, Castro-esque in duration, by proclaiming that it’s time to Make America Great Again.
While Trump was describing in detail the attempted assassination on Saturday, cameras panned the audience.
Many, many people in the audience were weeping. Yes, “strong men” were crying, but it was mostly lots of tears from many women. The whole thing looked like a religious experience for them.
Another telling detail: Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt during his sycophantic speech. He ripped off an outer shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance campaign sleeveless shirt underneath.
Tucker Carlson spoke at the RNC convention. He offered up pieces of red meat (metaphor for the worst of the Republican plans) … and the audience just went wild. They loved it.
Wednesday Was ‘Mass Deportation Now!’ Night At The RNC, Everything Totally Excellent For Sure
All the shiny fascism!
During coverage of the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, MSNBC talking heads pointed out that most of the speakers had “toned down” the usual GOP rhetoric, with little talk of the “stolen” 2020 election, weaponized government, and praise for the January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots” or “hostages.” The shift in tone — at least in primetime — was allegedly reflective of some imaginary desire to reach beyond the hardcore rightwing base and attract voters who aren’t stewing in MAGA rhetoric and conspiracy thinking.
It sounded like bullshit to us, especially since down on the convention floor, convention organizers had supplied the crowd with great big RNC-printed signs that demanded one of the few things the 2024 GOP platform is at all specific about: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” Inspired by an an appearance by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, any time a speaker mentioned “illegal aliens,” the crowd chanted “Send them back! Send them back!”
The crowd had plenty of reason to chant, especially when Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, warned all the undocumented immigrants in the arena or watching the RNC livestream, “You’d better start packing now because you’re going home,” which quickly became a bit of a meme, in case you’ve seen any “better start packing now” lines on social media.
On Twitter, more than one smartass called out the irony of a crowd full of people who want to deport all undocumented immigrants (including asylum-seekers, who they’re certain are just faking) and the signs and the chants, and the warm welcome for JD Vance’s wife Usha Chilukuri Vance, whose parents immigrated to the US from India. But of course they did it right, with the right papers, so they’re very good immigrants, while anyone who overstays a visa or crosses the border without papers is a CRIMINAL (it’s a misdemeanor) and obviously a huge threat to public order.
[…] “My background is very different from JD’s. I grew up in San Diego, in a middle class community, with two loving parents, both immigrants from India, and a wonderful sister,” she said. “That JD and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country.”
[…] The Trump and Vance spokespeople had clearly planned out their response to any questions about the sharply different takes on good immigrants living the American Dream and bad immigrants destroying the American Dream, as NBC News notes:
When asked to weigh in on the criticism, the Vance team sent a response from Jai Chabria, a JD Vance adviser and friend of the family.
“White liberals attacking a successful brown woman with such vitriol is exactly why the Democrats are bleeding so many minority voters right now,” he said.
You know, white liberals like Trump pal Stew Peters and Trump pal Nick Fuentes, white liberals like that.
Trump campaign spokestroll Steven Cheung attacked the very question with similar vitriol, pretending that even asking about Ms. Vance in contrast to the party’s view of most immigrants was a horrible attack on her:
“It is disgusting that out-of-touch liberals and far-left media lose their minds and self-implode when faced with a wildly successful diverse figure who they think should be blindly aligned with them,” he said.
Shame on anyone for suggesting there’s any contradiction at all. You must be a pedophile, and the mass deportations are definitely on the way.
Never mind that the logistics of actually deporting 11 million or 14 million people (or 18 million, according to Donald Trump’s lie-filled debate claims) would be nigh unworkable from a logistical standpoint. […] Republicans don’t see that as daunting, or a huge waste of money that could be used for other things, or even as something that could be bad for the economy. And it certainly wouldn’t be a human tragedy, because these aren’t people we’re talking about, they’re illegals. They broke the law. Republicans can’t stand people who break that one particular law (they may be more flexible on other ones).
And let’s be honest: Just the prospect of all those raids, the standing Army being ordered to drag “illegals” out of homes, workplaces, even schools, and especially the prospect that we might start shooting people trying to cross the border — it makes Republicans so hard.
So yeah, guess the tone has, yet again, not changed much.
In my opinion, way too long. Way too much time spent rambling around in Trump’s mind.
Bekenstein Boundsays
John Morales@100: What is anthropomorphic here? I’m not making any assumptions beyond “carbon-based” and “tool-using, social, with language”. The latter seems necessary to be relevant to the Fermi question (i.e., either able to generate signals or technosignatures that would be visible from Earth, or able to colonize and actually reach Earth). The former … well, I doubt it moves the needle enormously. There have been other proposed bases for life, though none with any real evidence to back them whereas there’s obviously plenty for carbon-based. They generally require a different set of environmental conditions, usually either significantly hotter or colder. It is likely that at most a few other viable combinations of solvent/chemical backbone/energy chemistry exist besides water/carbon/the small number of energy chemistries seen on Earth, and that including them would replace one search for a carbon-based replicator with a few parallel searches for a few comparably-difficult-to-discover replicators, perhaps knocking a factor of three or four off the search time. Which, again, looked to be needing a factor of 2^40 knocked off it. So including non-carbon-based is unlikely to move the needle substantially, while adding a lot more unknown-unknowns into the scenario that are hard to model.
There is one other thing. Of all the proposed alternative biochemistries, only three, water-ammonia/carbon, methane-ethane/carbon, and nitrogen/silicon could plausibly survive in outer solar system temperature/pressure environments. Two of those three are carbon based, while the third requires truly hyperlow temperatures (lower even than Pluto, which would be a Venus to them). It’s doubtful the methane-ethane/carbon or nitrogen/silicon cases could bootstrap to spacefaring technology, due to a literal dearth of metals in their habitats — there’s nothing on, say, Titan that a surface dweller could use to build a spaceship, and something living in a “roofed ocean” under its ice might have access to a rock/metal core at the bottom of the sea but wouldn’t have access to the damn sky. The nitrogen/silicon ones are even worse off, most likely, especially as their habitat will be rather poor in silicon! Meanwhile, the hot-chemistry ones (sulfuric acid/carbon, sulfuric acid/silicon, lava/SiOx, etc.) won’t have pre-technological access to the Oort cloud to seed a whole galaxy while still at the bacterial stage, giving them a giant disadvantage over good ol’ water/carbon. Most more exotic options (such as ammonia/nitrogen, at temperatures low enough molecules with lots of Ns don’t simply explode at the drop of a hat) suffer from the same difficulties as methane/carbon.
Put more simply, the possibility of cometary spread and the dearth of accessible silicon in places that naturally have liquid-nitrogen temperatures combine to make it very likely for water-ammonia/carbon and methane-ethane/carbon to take over a galaxy well before any other kind of replicator has even stumbled into existence anywhere. The latter won’t compete for real estate with the hot-silicon family of biochemistries, much (the only habitat on Earth for such is “inside an active volcano, or farther down”, and you could have carbon life in Venus’s clouds with silicon life on the ground tens of kilometers below, but that’s about it) so the hot-silicon types might eventually develop … in a few more tens of billions of years. When they do get tech they’ll probably end up borrowing most of it from us carbon-twiddlers. :)
Note, too: carbon is by a significant margin the most cosmically abundant potential biopolymer backbone element. Silicon’s a distant second (and related stuff like SiOx would be limited by silicon’s comparative rarity, not aided by oxygen’s abundance), if you don’t count twitchy nitrogen, with its need for ultracold environments if you want to make stable polymers full of it. Frankly, the only more abundant option than carbon would be using water as the backbone “atom”. At low enough temperatures, H2O’s ability to form four hydrogen bonds could substitute for carbon’s ability to form four covalent bonds, but with lowered versatility (no equivalent of double or triple bonds). This would also have to be a cold, outer-solar-system chemistry and wouldn’t tolerate much pressure (which would smush its polymers into plain old ice). Perhaps ideal for comets and such, but another bad bet for ever getting its mitts on a lot of refined metals to build rocket ships out of. It would also be in need of a solvent … N2 and methane/ethane, being hydrophobic, probably need not apply. That or it would have to make do with rarefied gases, like Pluto’s sorry excuse for an atmosphere, and I’m not at all sure that’d be viable. And if it ever did get to rocketeering it would have a hard time not denaturing under any significant accelerations during thrust …
-I look forward to many more plants being modified by CRISPR to thrive [I am aware this modification only is relevant for cultivars, but there are other kinds of changes possible].
Now, I wish those small American marsupials (possums?) could get an upgrade so they live as long as their Australian cousins.
(And non-primate mammals deserve better color vision)
(And other mammals deserve life spans like the bowhead whale)
John Moralessays
BB,
What is anthropomorphic here? I’m not making any assumptions beyond “carbon-based” and “tool-using, social, with language”.
Well, there you have it.
Those assumptions, right there.
John Moralessays
Sure, we monkey-types use tools and are social and use language.
I dunno how much SF you might have consumed, but (for example) non-technological hegemonic species are a thing in literature.
But hey, I suppose it depends on how one defines ‘life’ and ‘colonising’.
John Moralessays
… and ‘technology’, to be fair.
Breeding living spaceships and living weapons and living clothing and so forth is not something we monkey-types think of as technology, but it would basically achieve the same thing.
No?
birgerjohanssonsays
John Morales
Growing stuff.
If you read Stanislaw Lem’s satirical stories about Ijon Tichy, Lem was there in the 1970s.
birgerjohanssonsays
Myself @ 143
Chamaenerion angustifolium is a plant with fibruous parts that grows in temperate and nearly boreal climate zones. Linnaeus hoped it might be used as a substitute for cotton (it didn”t). With CRISPR we might one day modify it with a module of genes copied from cotton.
No need for irrigation; Chamaenerion angustifolium grows in places that will remind you of England.
A certain type of presidents* have a habit of making very long speeches. Like Fidel Castro.
*those with a lifetime presidency.
John Moralessays
Finally, a decent politician!
I suppose I have to click on your link to find out who this supposedly (allegedly) decent politician may be.
Who the hell uses FB any more, anyway? I sure don’t, and I sure am not going to click on a FB link to find out whether or not some pollly or other is supposedly decent by some sort of criteria.
Maybe I should quote, since it’s a dry government link, above:
“The record for the longest individual speech goes to South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.”
(Castro sure didn’t measure up to that!)
John Moralessays
BTW, birgerjohansson, I’m quite familiar with Lem’s stories (in English translation, of course!).
I’ve read most of them.
I remember in one (I think it was by him) astronauts for convenience emptied their ship’s biological waste on a planet; planet was Earth, and thus began life on Earth.
(Best of all is the Futurological Congress, of course; I like the linguistic conceits therein)
In the early hours of Friday, companies in Australia running Microsoft’s Windows operating system started reporting devices showing Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). Shortly after, reports of disruptions started flooding in from around the world, including from the UK, India, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US: TV station Sky News went offline, and US airlines United, Delta, and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all flights.
Crowdstrike seems to have put out a bad update, one bad enough to BSOD computers. This will cause problems for days trying to clean up the aftermath. If we are lucky a disaster of this scale will also drive some movement towards better procedures for updates but it isn’t likely.
KGsays
I remember in one (I think it was by him) astronauts for convenience emptied their ship’s biological waste on a planet; planet was Earth, and thus began life on Earth. – John Morales@154
The Star Diaries, Eighth Voyage. Two miscreants from Rhohchia named Gorrd and Lod were responsible. I agree that The Futurological Congress is his best – annoyingly, I can’t locate my copy.
We don’t need to wonder what Tucker Carlson genuinely believed about Donald Trump after the Republican’s 2020 defeat because we already know. As my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem noted last year, the since-settled Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News produced a treasure trove of communications from the network’s hosts, including candid messages from Carlson that his viewers weren’t aware of in real time.
In early January 2021, for example, Carlson texted, “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” He added soon after, “I hate him passionately,” and he confessed that he “can’t handle much more of this.” This came on the heels of Carlson telling a colleague, in reference to Trump, “What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that.”
The former Fox host went on to say that he found it “disgusting” how many Americans believe Trump’s rhetoric.
Reflecting on Trump’s failed term, Carlson also wrote, “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. … But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
That was three and a half years ago. A lot has changed since. In fact, Carlson has not only taken his shtick online, he’s also managed to position himself as an influential ally to the Republican he hated “passionately.”
It was Carlson who helped Trump choose his running mate. It was Carlson who seemed to be having a grand time at the Republican convention. And as a New York Times report noted, it was Carlson who made a return to prime time with remarks at the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Carlson is freshly embedded in former President Donald J. Trump’s inner circle, and he delivered an unscripted monologue straight out of his old Fox News show, complete with off-color jokes and dark visions of a nation at risk of falling into tyranny should Mr. Trump not prevail in November.
To be sure, more than a few prominent Republican voices have made the transition from Trump critic to Trump sycophant. In fact, I’m aware of only one current member of the U.S. Senate who has characterized Trump as “America’s Hitler,” and the former president just tapped him as his running mate.
Has Carlson experienced a genuine change of heart, or is he opportunistically sailing on the prevailing winds in Republican Party politics? Only the right-wing host knows for sure […].
Either way, however, a HuffPost report raised a point that stood out for me.
[Carlson] is poised to wield tremendous influence over a second Trump administration. When Trump … made a surprise visit to the convention on Monday, he waved at his adoring fans before making a beeline for Carlson, who was sitting in the stands, to shake his hand. Trump then walked a couple of seats over to greet his new running mate, Sen. JD Vance — a man whom Carlson told Trump to choose as the vice presidential nominee. The scene may have offered a preview of Trump’s inner circle if he is to win a second term.
We don’t know who the president will be next year, but if it’s Trump, it’s safe to say Carlson will have walk-in privileges in the Oval Office, his 2021 assessments notwithstanding.
StevoRsays
While it hasn’t received much attention, a second Trump administration is threatening a highstakes gamble to revive America’s economy by erecting walls around the country’s manufacturing base. For a nation almost drowning in debt, much of it accumulated during his first term, the potential for a misfire is huge and he runs the risk of creating a new and dangerous inflation outbreak. …(snip)…
..Despite having an overall negative impact on the US economy, Trump plans a radical expansion of his previously failed policies that could rewrite global trade conventions and cause serious political and economic dislocations. If everyone retaliates, goods will generally become more expensive which will make it difficult to bring inflation under control in the medium to longer term. But it won’t be an easy shift. Prepare for shocks, particularly if the US electorate discovers the promises can’t be kept.
It might seem like six months ago, but it was just six days ago when a gunman in Pennsylvania nearly killed Donald Trump. The outrageous assassination attempt wasn’t just supposed to have changed the 2024 election cycle, it was also supposed to have changed the shooter’s intended target.
“In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” the former president wrote on his social media platform the morning after the attempt on his life. Hours later, the Republican was even more succinct, adding, “UNITE AMERICA!”
As the week got underway, Axios reported that Americans should expect to see a different kind of Trump going forward. “Almost dying rocks perspectives — and people,” the report read.
Axios added, “Yes, Trump has shown little appetite for changing his ways, tone and words. But his advisers tell us Trump plans to seize his moment by toning down his Trumpiness, and dialing up efforts to unite a tinder-box America.”
During the Republican nominee’s convention address, some observers would be forgiven for thinking the assurances were true — at least initially. In the first part of his remarks, Trump spoke in a somber tone while describing the awful events of Saturday and at least paid lip service to the “unity” theme he’d promoted days earlier.
“Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed,” the former president said. “The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.” [Yeah. Somebody else wrote that for him. He read it off the teleprompter in an almost monotone.]
And then Trump ripped off the mask, abandoned the pretense and reverted to form. As a Washington Post analysis summarized:
The rest of the more than 90-minute-long speech was thoroughly confusing. It meandered between points, often going off-script with ad-libs that left a standard-issue Trump campaign speech without the kind of coherent, lofty theme that defines traditional presidential convention fare. And Trump’s initially subdued manner and calls for unity didn’t match the content of an often-divisive speech.
I’ve seen a great many convention speeches from presidential nominees, and I think it’s fair to say Trump’s was the worst. At times, it seemed as if he were trying to make himself even less popular with an American electorate that already holds him in low regard, reminding voters of all the things they don’t like about him. [video at the link]
The speech was breathtakingly dishonest. It was painfully long — to the point that even some of his loyalists left the convention floor before it was over. It rewrote recent history. It made fools of those who genuinely believed his “unity” rhetoric and took seriously the idea that Saturday’s shooting had changed him.
But most of all, it was familiar.
CNN’s Daniel Dale noted overnight that fact-checking the former president’s convention speech was surprisingly easy “because he’s told almost all of those lies before.” He added, “Trump is hardest to fact check because of the extreme volume of false claims but easiest to fact check because he does the same false claims dozens of times over years.”
This was partly a convention speech and partly a greatest hits package, filled with petty lies, conspiracy theories, cheap shots, juvenile taunts (“Crazy Nancy”? Seriously?), borderline incoherent asides about Trump’s overwhelming sense of grievance, praise for the authoritarian leaders he admires, and the latest in a series of weird references to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Meet the new Trump; he’s the same as the old Trump.
By some measures, this was the best news Democrats have received in weeks. If the former president had demonstrated real leadership on the Republicans’ convention stage, his opponents would have new reason to worry. Instead, in a rather literal sense, Trump simply couldn’t help himself.
Many here are aware of this, but I have had inquiries from some about the massive internet ‘outage’. We have not experienced it.
Microsoft defaults to requiring internet access to log on to your computer. Everyone who trusted that now has a bricked computer. We ran neighborhood computer clinics, I went to a neighbor’s house and used linux on a usb drive to start their computer, log onto the internet and access the data on their harddrive. It took less than 2 minutes.
Trust is earned. Gates and Microsoft have only earned our scorn, not trust.
Speaking with an image of the White House projected behind him, Trump retold the story of the attempt on his life last weekend in Pennsylvania.
He said that he turned during his speech and “felt something hit me really, really hard.” There was “blood all over the place,” and he immediately knew “we were under attack,” he said.
“There was blood pouring everywhere and yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that,” Trump said.
He praised the crowd on Saturday for its stillness after the shooting.
“This massive crowd — tens of thousands of people — stood by, and didn’t move an inch,” he said, with his customary need to exaggerate crowd size (and, in this case, lack of crowd movement).
He then mused on how, if he had not turned his head at the exact right moment, the bullet would have found its mark. There was an explicitly religious overtone to all this. Trump was saved, Trump was protected.
“Bullets were flying all over us, and yet I felt serene,” he said. He added, later: “I’m not supposed to be here tonight.”
“Yes you are,” the crowd chanted.
“I stand before you here thanks to the grace of an almighty God,” Trump said.
It was a religious revival story that earlier speakers teed up for him, and which he leaned fully into. He dodged death, he suggested, and is marked by God for a providential mission.
Trump bloviated on an on, including all of his old, nasty hits. This is Trump’s comfort zone.
For all of the articles touting New Trump and the talk during the convention of “unity,” a lot of Trump’s speech Thursday night consisted of playing the hits. There was election denial, and the promise that, referring to the 2020 election that he lost, “we’re never going to let that happen again.”
We heard “close our borders.” We heard “drill, baby, drill.” We heard “the China virus,” snarled with relish. We heard about immigrants coming to the U.S. from “jails” and “insane asylums,” and terrorists “coming in in numbers that we’ve never seen before.”
Much of it could have been taken from the 2016 or 2020 campaigns.
Text is quoted from same article as referenced in comment 161.
And, I’m sure all here realize that the RNC debacle was a circus. The only problem is that when addressing anyone outside their cult, tRUMP and the other clowns use flame throwers (in the name of jebus).
StevoRsays
Its been eleven years since Australia introduced its sadistic, unjust and unethiial offshore(non) processing policies as a supposed deterrent against refugees coming here by boat fleeing persecution today / yesterday.
The number of refugees being held on Nauru has increased sixfold in six months, raising questions about the future of the detention centre that was empty at one stage last year.
Despite the facility being vacant in June 2023, advocates say there are now 96 people being held on the Pacific island, up from 15 in February.The detention centre is holding dozens of people who have made it to Australia’s coastline by boat, something Opposition Leader Peter Dutton blames on “weak” messaging and a drop in air and sea patrols. Refugee Council of Australia figures show 273 people were either intercepted at sea or arrived by boat in 2022 and 2023, compared with 174 in the previous five years.
… (Snip!).. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre said Australia’s offshore processing policy had cost $12 billion. In its health report released today, it said of the 64 people on Nauru it is currently in contact with, 65 per cent had reported physical health conditions, while 22 per cent had severe mental health conditions.
“The impact that I got from Nauru offshore detention was mentally and physically, sickness, that I cannot recover, … (snip) — I’m traumatised. Mentally, I’m dead.”
Betelhem Tibebu, Ethiopian asylum seeker, sent to Nauru in 2013, where she lived in a tent for 15 months..Ibid.
tRUMP said “felt something hit me really, really hard.” There was “blood all over the place,”
I reply: what happened to the may news reports that he told someone ‘it felt like a bee sting’?
He has always proven he can never make it through two sentences without lying!
shermanj @162, thanks. I appreciate that. And, shermanj @160, thanks for that additional information. Useful. The Microsoft software snafu certainly created chaos in airports.
Returning to news about the Republican convention, behold the Cult of Personality:
Speakers praised Trump for his golf game, for his management abilities, for his divine protection, for his bravery, for his selflessness, for his modesty. If you can think of it, they were praising it. Policies were only mentioned incidentally, as features garlanding the core: praising Trump.
“Donald Trump: 21 club championships,” a golf professional from one of Trump’s clubs bragged from the stage. “Joe Biden? Zero.” [A gold pro was one of the guys introducing Trump? Yes.]
[…] “I’m in the tough guy business, and this man is the toughest, most resilient human being I have ever met in my life,” UFC CEO Dana White said.
[…] A reactionary media personality. A pro wrestler. [A golf pro] A televangelist’s kid. Kid Rock. And then Trump. The night was programmed, either intentionally or not, in a way that acknowledged the way Trump has changed 21st century politics, making it purely about entertainment and dominance […]
Habba [attorney Alina Habba] got religious and solemn, saying that Trump didn’t just take a single bullet in Pennsylvania, but that he “has and will continue to take them for each and every one of us.” […]
StevoR talked about: sadistic, unjust and unethiial offshore(non) processing policies as a supposed deterrent against refugees coming here by boat
I reply: I know this situation is serious and prevalent around the world with the millions fleeing horrible conditions in their country, but my warped sense of humor thought: Rats, I guess that rules out any ideas I had of getting aboard my friend’s boat and taking refuge in OZ from the rapidly (rabidly) increasing chaos and violence here in Scarizona.
StevoRsays
We are currently living in the largest global refugee crisis in recorded history. 37.6 million refugees are displaced around the world due to conflict, violence, and persecution. This is more than triple the number of refugees we had in the world a decade ago. As this crisis has grown, so has misinformation surrounding refugees. Here, we debunk six of the most dangerous refugee myths — and offer six facts about refugees to know in their place.
‘Six refugee myths, busted — and six refugee facts’, Jun 17, 2024 | By: Olivia Giovetti
Saturn appearing behind the moon, seen by Hubble.
Note that Saturn appears darker, despite Saturn reflecting most of the light that falls on it, while the moon -which is a very dark-grey object – appears quite bright.
This is because the intensity of the sunlight falling on Saturn is only 1 % of what it is at the moon.
. https://www.facebook.com/share/v/PZwcZoc81brctyYL/
I don’t know about windows 11, but windows 10 would let you create a local login process. It is not easy to find, but it lets you at least run windows and should allow internet access. (find the procedure searching for it on duckduckgo)
If you go to distrowatch, there is info about hundreds of versions of linux for all kinds of uses. I use puppy linux because it is small, quick, complete and is easily loaded on a usb drive.
Linux and I suppose Apple users probably avoid all this. Best of luck to anyone who is having headaches with windows.
[…] Jack Posobiec, the far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA rabble-rouser, tweeted a Bible verse. “The bullets were fired at 6:11pm,” Posobiec, who is Catholic, wrote. “Ephesians 6:11.” The Bible verse, which reads, “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes,” […]
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the far-right Turning Point USA and a fellow denizen of the conspiratorial fever swamps of X, chimed in on Posobiec’s tweet. “Armor of God,” he replied, just in case Posobiec’s meaning was lost on anyone. “The next verse is this: ‘For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’” For good measure, Posobiec replied to Kirk, quoting the next verse, Ephesians 6:13. “Therefore, put on the armor of God,” he concluded, “that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground.”
Adoring memes raced into Posobiec’s replies, including one depicting what appears to be Jesus with angel wings and body armor protecting Trump as he speaks to a crowd. [image at the link] Later that day, at the right-wing news site National Pulse, editor Raheem Kassam, a former editor at Breitbart, announced that his old boss Steve Bannon had sent a missive from his prison cell, where he is serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. “President Trump wears the Armor of God,” Bannon reportedly said. “Today, our leader showed total command presence, stood tall, and said ‘FIGHT’!”
[…] Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents a south Florida district, tweeted a cartoon meme of an angelic hand deflecting a bullet from Trump’s head. “Si Dios contigo, ¿quién contra ti?” she wrote. (If God is with you, who can be against you?)
[…] Beyond his post-Trump shooting tweet, Posobiec has been even more explicit that he sees this “spiritual” battle as one against democracy itself. In February, in speeches to the Conservative Political Action Conference, he pledged to “overthrow” democracy and support January 6 insurrectionists. “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it,” he said in one speech. In another, he said, “after we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.” [I snipped more blather along the same lines.]
A worldwide tech outage crippled industries from travel to finance on Friday before services started coming back online after hours of disruption, highlighting the risks of a global shift towards digital, interconnected technologies.
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike (CRWD.O), opens new tab appeared to have triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced some broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.
U.S. President Joe Biden had been briefed on the outage, a White House official said.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on social media platform X that a defect was found “in a single content update for Windows hosts” that affected Microsoft’s (MSFT.O), opens new tab customers and that a fix was being deployed.
Microsoft said later on Friday that the issue had been fixed.
“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz told NBC News’ “Today” programme.
“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz said. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover.”
CrowdStrike shares plunged as much as 14.5% shortly after the Wall Street open before paring losses to trade down 8.5%. Its cyber rivals were up, with SentinelOne 3.6% higher and Palo Alto Networks up 1.7%.
Microsoft was down 0.2%.
“Earlier today, a Crowdstrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of Windows systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery,” Microsoft chief communications officer Frank Shaw said in a post on X.
But even as companies and institutions began restoring regular services, experts said the cyber outage revealed the risks of an increasingly online world.
“This is a very, very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core Internet infrastructure,” said Ciaran Martin, professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government and former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre. While the core problem appeared simple, which should make it short-lived, its immediate impact was remarkable, Martin said.
“I’m struggling to think of an outage at quite this scale.”
[…] Early on Friday, major U.S. airlines – American Airlines (AAL.O), Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), and United Airlines (UAL.O), – grounded flights, while other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions.
Banks and financial services companies from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions and traders across markets spoke of problems executing transactions.
“We are having the mother of all global market outages,” one trader said.
In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports posted on X by medical officials said, while Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters, was taken off air and apologised for being unable to transmit live. Soccer club Manchester United said on X that it had to postpone a scheduled release of tickets.
Airports from Los Angeles to Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and Berlin said some airlines were having to check in passengers manually, causing delays.
Government agencies were also affected with the Dutch and United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministries reporting some disruptions.
[…] U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said transportation system issues appeared to be resolving and would hopefully be back to normal by Saturday, adding that the Federal Aviation Administration did not appear impacted.
[…] U.S.-based CrowdStrike, with a market value of about $83 billion, is among leading cybersecurity companies […]
[…] For a hot minute there, at the very opening of a speech that would go on to last a geologic age, it seemed like Trump was trying to be something different. Speaking with the same dull, plodding tone as a kid reading a book report that had actually been written by ChatGPT, Trump recounted the attempt on his life that happened less than a week ago. He read haltingly from a list of banalities suggesting that he could be a bridge between political extremes. It’s hard to recall now, so many years after the speech began, but he may have used the word “hope.”
Of course, the hope came with a side order of gore. “There was blood pouring everywhere and yet, in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side,” Trump said. “I’m not supposed to be here tonight. I’m not. And I stand before you in this arena by the grace of almighty God.”
It’s too bad for the others who were shot at Trump’s rally that he was hogging all the divine grace.
At one point during the speech, a macabre mannequin of the man who had died in the shooting appeared onstage complete with a fire department uniform on which Corey Comperatore’s name was misspelled. Trump gave the empty coat a bizarre embrace, then went on to kiss the helmet. It was probably meant to be endearing, but like a lot of the speech, it was simply strange.
[…] It took only about 10 minutes for Trump to run out of new material and return to the same dark statements and divisive attacks he’s been using since he entered the race in 2015.
Once unity time was over, out came the attack on Nancy Pelosi, Democrats, and Biden. Trump demanded that Biden end the three felony criminal cases pending against him. He spouted a list of statistics about the “greatest invasion in history” and repeated claims that other nations were emptying their prisons and mental institutions into the United States. He said that the next RNC should be held in Venezuela because it would be safer. [video snippet at the link]
He said that 107% of the new jobs under Biden had been taken by illegal aliens.
He promised to end an “EV mandate” that doesn’t exist.
He pulled out his lies about the 2020 election being “stolen.”
He promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” warned that unspecified “bad things are going to happen,” and declared that Biden had done “unthinkable” damage to the nation.
He even went for a deep cut by calling COVID-19 “the China virus.”
The more positive end of Trump’s speech involved whining that he wasn’t getting enough credit for his disastrous term in office. And he went down the list of autocratic leaders who love him, from Hungary’s Victor Orbán to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “I think he misses me,” said Trump.
Somewhere in all this, Trump got in a “we will not have men playing in women’s sports,” which seems to be a required element in every Republican speech.
Despite having a script and functioning teleprompter, an apparently exhausted Trump frequently wandered into rambling asides. There was a painfully long story about a letter he got from evangelist Franklin Graham that seemed utterly disconnected from what he had been talking about moments earlier. Then Trump seemed to find the script again and just plodded on. After reaching the point where he said “in conclusion,” Trump just kept speaking. And speaking. [video snippet at the link]
If there was any change in Trump’s tone, it was only that he delivered his usual grab bag of half-finished thoughts and 100% lies at a slower pace and in a more disjointed, desultory manner than normal.
That glacial pace is part of how Trump delivered the longest speech in RNC history … without offering a single new policy, idea, or even slogan. It just went on, and on, and on, and … is it over yet?
Finally, Melania put in her obligatory appearance, carefully dodging Trump’s attempts at a kiss, to stand beside him like the dead-eyed embodiment of the last hateful hour. [Yep. She had to dodge Trump’s kiss attempts twice, and she did that well.]
Somehow Trump managed to be nasty, weird, and astoundingly boring all at once. [Yep. That’s what I thought. I was horrified and bored at the same time.]
[…] Trump is an old, hateful, deeply strange man who can’t keep his thoughts straight long enough to just read a script.
Diagnostic criteria according to the DSM-5 (must meet five or more of the following):
(1) Grandiose sense of self-importance.
(2) Obsessed with fantasies of unlimited achievement or success, beauty, love.
(3) Believes they are “special” and should only associate with other high-status people or institutions.
(4) Requires excessive admiration.
(5) Has a sense of entitlement or has unreasonable expectations for favorable treatment.
(6) Is inter-personally exploitative, often takes advantage of others to achieve personal success.
(7) Lacks empathy toward others.
(8) Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her.
(9) Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
As one reader of the article quoted in comment 174 noted: “Trump also promised to end inflation IMMEDIATELY, and cure cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Trump also said he would end the war in Ukraine before he even took office. He said he could end or prevent wars with a single phone call … etc., etc.
Many photos of the weird shit Wonkette’s photographer captured at the RNC.
1) Peter Navaro in an off the rack suit after getting out of jail. 2) Nigel Farage yells at reporters for being mean. 3) Sen. Marco Rubio (left) and Rep. Byron Donalds (right) press some flesh. 4) Richard Grenell is SO MAD. 5) Speaker Mike Johnson has hungry eyes. [and lots more, including outlandish fashion choices]
Text excerpt:
[…] Trump’s speech, as you already know, went on more than 90 low-energy minutes. He did a tight (not tight) 20 on getting shot at and being resurrected as God’s vessel. He talked about Hannibal Lecter having a friend for dinner. He saw some people in the crowd and said “hey.” He bored his audience mercilessly. He called Star Wars (the missile system) “Starship Spaceship.” He talked about immigrants killing our beautiful white women. [yep, that’s what Trump did. He went into detail when it came to the white women being abused and killed. I got the distinct impression that he enjoyed that part.]
The Washington Post factchecked the fuck out of it with a whole lot of “This is obviously false.”
Van Jones nattered on about how the Trump family’s “overcome so much” to have three generations on the stage, a huge achievement the likes of which no one else has mustered. Somebody should ask Donald Trump the names of his grandchildren.
The New York Times helpfully pointed out it’s been a bad week for Joe Biden. […]
The Wall Street Journal reporter has denied any wrongdoing and said the allegations against him were false. The Biden administration considers him wrongfully detained.
American journalist Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security prison by a Russian court Friday after he was found guilty of espionage in a case that his employer, The Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. government have condemned as a sham.
Gershkovich, 32, denied any wrongdoing in the case, which went to trial last month in the city of Yekaterinburg more than a year after he was arrested in the southern Russian city on espionage charges.
The Sverdlovsk Regional Court’s press service told NBC News in a telephone interview that the state prosecutor had requested Gershkovich be sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment during closing arguments.
[…] His defense team has 15 days to appeal the sentence.
Russia has never published any clear evidence supporting its claims against Gershkovich.
And Jay Conti, executive vice president and general counsel for Dow Jones, WSJ’s publisher, told The Associated Press in a recent interview that the trial was a “sham” based on “bogus charges that are completely trumped up.”
[…] President Joe Biden has repeatedly called on his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to release the journalist, who was arrested during a reporting trip. In the weeks after Gershkovich’s arrest, Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference that the U.S. would do “everything in its power” to bring the journalist home.
Gershkovich’s detention also became a point of contention in the U.S. presidential race, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claiming in May that he could get Putin to free Gershkovich if elected. His comments drew swift backlash from Biden’s campaign.
Prior to Friday’s conviction and sentencing, Russia had repeatedly extended Gershkovich’s detainment, which has been condemned by journalists and government officials across the West, who see it as emblematic of the war Putin has waged against freedom of speech both in Russia and abroad. […]
As part of Fox Business’ coverage of the Republican National Convention, Maria Bartiromo sat down with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who claimed that officials believe there are now “terrorist cells set up around the country.” Not surprisingly, the host asked how many.
“I don’t know,” the Louisiana Republican replied. “It’d be conjecture on my part, but intuitively we know that this is a serious problem.” [oh FFS!]
[video at the link, plus comment from Aaron Rupar: "intuitively I know he's full of it."]
[…] No one has instincts about the existence of terrorists forming groups and/or networks on domestic soil. People in positions of power either have seen evidence or they haven’t.
But as relevant as these details are, there’s a larger problem: Johnson reference to what is “intuitively” known is part of an unfortunate pattern.
After Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, for example, Johnson insisted that “a lot of us know intuitively” that there were problems with process.
After the Senate rejected the House’s impeachment effort against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Johnson said “know already intuitively” that Mayorkas “had a fantastical breach of duty.”
When the House speaker unveiled legislation to ban non-citizens from voting — which is already illegal, and which effectively never happens — Johnson declared at a press conference, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” […]
Time and again, Johnson lacks the evidence to support his beliefs […]
Employees of a Texas-based nonprofit that provides housing to unaccompanied migrant children repeatedly subjected minors in its care to sexual abuse and harassment, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged in a new lawsuit.
From 2015 through at least the end of 2023, multiple employees at Southwest Key Programs, the country’s largest private provider of housing for unaccompanied children, subjected unaccompanied children in their care to “repeated and unwelcome sexual abuse, harassment, and misconduct,” the lawsuit said.
Minors housed in its shelters were subjected to severe sexual abuse and rape, solicitation of sex acts, solicitation of nude photos and entreaties for sexually inappropriate relationships, among other acts, according to the lawsuit.
The children range in age from as young as five years old to teenagers just shy of eighteen years old, and primarily come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Southwest Key employees allegedly discouraged children from reporting abuse, in some cases threatening them and their families, according to the lawsuit.
Employees “exploited the children’s vulnerabilities, language barriers, and distance from family and loved ones,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Texas on Wednesday.
Despite being aware of the “severe and pervasive harms,” Southwest Key failed to take appropriate action to protect the children in its care, the DOJ said.
“In search of the American Dream, children often endure perilous journeys on their migration north to the southern border,” Alamdar Hamdani, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a statement. “The sexual harassment alleged in the complaint would destroy any child’s sense of safety, turning what was an American Dream into a nightmare.”
In a statement, a Southwest Key spokeswoman said the complaint “does not present the accurate picture of the care and commitment our employees provide to the youth and children.” […]
Southwest Key is the largest private care provider for unaccompanied children in the United States and currently operates at least 29 shelters in Texas, Arizona and California that hold a total of 6,350 unaccompanied children.
[…] It’s a lucrative industry. Between fiscal years 2015 and 2023, Southwest Key received over $3 billion in funding from HHS, according to the DOJ.
During that period, Southwest Key received over 100 reports of sexual harassment or abuse of the children under its care, the DOJ alleged, but the company took no action.
[…] In another instance Southwest Key documented, a supervisor at a Texas shelter in 2019 would regularly switch assignments with other staff so that he could be alone with a teenage girl, who he repeatedly raped, abused and threatened.
She reported the abuse by passing a note to her teacher when the supervisor was on vacation, according to the lawsuit. Following her report, the child was transferred to a different shelter.
[…] In another, documents detailed an employee sexually touching boys during transport in May 2022.
In a 2020 incident detailed in “numerous” reports, per the lawsuit, a Southwest Key worker ran off with a fifteen-year-old boy from an Arizona shelter. The worker took the boy to a hotel room for several days where he paid the boy for sex acts. The worker was later indicted and pleaded guilty in March 2022 to felony attempted sexual conduct with a minor.
The DOJ alleged Southwest Key employees also threatened children into silence.
A Southwest Key employee at a Brownsville, Texas, shelter discouraged a child from pursuing a report of harassment by saying it would delay her reunification with her family or adversely affect her placement with a sponsor, according to the lawsuit.
In another case described in the lawsuit, a child with visible physical marks resembling hickeys on her body and breasts reported a sexual assault to a Southwest Key employee who instructed her to “cover up” the marks. The child reported to another, trusted Southwest Key employee, who notified a supervisor of the incident. The supervisor told the employee not to write an official report.
[…] The company has come under scrutiny before.
Videos from Arizona Southwest Key shelters in 2018 showed staffers physically abusing children. Two facilities lost their licenses. Around the same time, the state Department of Health Services moved to revoke the licenses of all Southwest Key’s Arizona shelters, citing a failure to provide proof that its workers had received required background checks.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s response to nearly being assassinated, calling his raised fist after the incident “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Zuckerberg declined to endorse a presidential candidate and said he would not play “a significant role in the election.”
But Zuckerberg went on to offer positive characterizations of Trump.
“At some level as an American, it’s hard to not, like, get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight,” Zuckerberg said about Trump’s response to the shooting. “And I think that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”
[…] Trump has attacked Zuckerberg several times over the years. On Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, Trump recently threatened to send “ZUCKERBUCKS” to prison if he were elected president.
Trump has also claimed that Zuckerberg has praised him in private. “Last week, the weirdo — he’s a weirdo — Mark Zuckerberg came to the White House, kissed my ass all night,” Trump said at a 2022 rally, according to Business Insider.
Facebook and Instagram reinstated Trump’s accounts last year after he was previously suspended following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Zuckerberg has supported Republicans in the past. In 2013, Zuckerberg hosted a fundraiser for then-governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, who ran unsuccessfully in this year’s Republican primary.
But during the 2020 election cycle, Zuckerberg donated $350 million to local election offices, a move that some Republicans accused of helping get President Joe Biden elected. In the 2022 midterms, the nonprofit that distributed the money said that it wouldn’t disburse similar donations anymore. […]
Florida originally arranged to fly the migrants to Massachusetts in September 2022.
Undocumented migrants transported to Martha’s Vineyard from the southern border may revive a lawsuit against Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top and former officials in his administration, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
Earlier this month, a lawyer for the migrants and a group helping them asked for permission to refile the legal challenge against the Republican governor, alleging that nearly 50 migrants were misled as part of a publicity stunt pushed by the DeSantis administration. That case against DeSantis had initially been dismissed back in April.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued an order granting the motion. Her decision comes a day after lawyers for the governor — as well as DeSantis chief of staff James Uthmeier — told the court that they would not object to a revamped lawsuit. But the stipulation drawn up by both sides says attorneys for DeSantis can file new motions to dismiss the case as well as file a new motion to transfer the case to Florida.
[…] DeSantis, who has sharply criticized the immigration policy of President Joe Biden, pushed to get money from the Legislature to transport migrants, and records showed that several top aides were deeply involved in the planning. Florida arranged to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts in September 2022, creating a political firestorm as the White House and Democrats blasted the governor’s actions.
DeSantis, who said he signed off on the transport to draw attention to Biden’s policies, repeatedly mentioned the Martha’s Vineyard flights in both his reelection campaign and during his failed bid for president. He highlighted them again during his speech this week at the Republican National Convention.
“Biden is just a figurehead,” DeSantis told Republicans gathered in Milwaukee on Tuesday. “He’s a tool for imposing a leftist agenda on the American people. They support open borders, allowing millions and millions of illegal aliens to pour into our country and to burden our communities — but just don’t send any to Martha’s Vineyard, then they get really upset.”
The revamped lawsuit filed against DeSantis by Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston — on behalf of some of those on the flight — as well as Alianza Americas, asserts that migrants picked up in Texas were lied to about where they were going and told they would have housing and jobs once they reached their destination. […]
At least now there is another chance to get justice through the courts.
Donald Trump’s presidency ended in chaos and disgrace, as a deadly pandemic ravaged the country and a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. In the years since, he has doubled down on the “rigged election” lies that helped incite the insurrection and proposed a nakedly authoritarian vision for the country. He’s also been indicted four times, convicted on 34 felony charges, and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud suit and $88.3 million after being found liable for sexual assault and defamation.
But on Thursday night, Trump once again accepted his party’s nomination for president after a series of runaway victories in the Republican primaries. His meandering address to the Republican National Convention featured more than 20 falsehoods, ramblings about his assorted grievances, repeated lies that Democrats stole the 2020 election — and a vow that “we’re never going to let that happen again.”
Trump owes his party’s total capitulation in no small part to the fervent support he received from the right-wing media apparatus. Outlets like Fox News are a powerful force within the GOP, and they could have tried to move on from the former president after he left office — but instead they bent the knee and helped him glide past his legal calamities, steamroll his opponents, whitewash the January 6 insurrection, and return to power.
Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire includes Fox, the propaganda network that aided Trump’s political rise and served as an adjunct of his White House, privately signaled in the days following the January 6 insurrection that Trump’s time was over. “Fox News very busy pivoting,” he told a former network executive a few days later. “We want to make Trump a non person.” Murdoch instructed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott: “Best we don’t mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him.”
This did not happen. Trump’s relationship with the network and the broader Murdoch empire went through a series of twists and turns over the next several years, including a reported “soft ban” from the Fox airwaves. But Murdoch never closed the door on a Trump revival — in the increasingly fractured right-wing media ecosystem, that would have left his outlets vulnerable to attack from rivals promoting themselves as more supportive of the former president. Instead, his network, in pursuit of the market share that Trump’s supporters bring, followed its competitors back into Trump’s fold.
Rather than break with Trump, right-wing conspiracy theorists, led by then-Fox star Tucker Carlson, concocted a January 6 counternarrative in which the rioting Trumpists were gentle patriots who had been victimized by the deep state, the Democrats, and the media. This revisionist history ultimately won over the Republican base, demolishing the initial consensus that a violent attempt to overturn an election was unacceptable.
Each Trump indictment also represented a potential offramp for his right-wing media supporters. Instead, they responded by rallying to him, baselessly denouncing the charges as politicized prosecutions akin to those in a “banana republic” whose real targets were their own Trump-supporting audience members.
By reinforcing Trump’s personality cult, his media allies helped make it impossible for his rivals to gain traction. When Trump began campaigning for president in March 2023, his core message was that he is an avatar of retribution against corrupt elites who are targeting him to get at his supporters, including the unfairly maligned J6 “hostages.” That aligned perfectly with what the Republican base had been hearing from the right-wing media for years, cutting off potential avenues that other candidates might have used to win over voters.
Trump ended up crushing his primary opponents, who spent the final days of the primary complaining about how his dominance of the right-wing press had hamstrung their campaigns. And with Trump triumphant, Fox and the rest of the right-wing press returned to their roles as his propaganda force.
[…] Their fixations are at the core of the vision articulated at the RNC, and would-be GOP leaders must truckle to their whims. Trump’s running mate decision amounted to a proxy fight between candidates backed by Murdoch and Carlson; the latter emerged triumphant when the former president settled on Carlson’s favored choice, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.
Now the right’s propagandists will spend the next few months doing everything they can to ensure victory for the Trump-Vance ticket. And if that ticket falls short, they’ve paved the way for another January 6-style attack on democracy. That effort would be unhindered by Republicans like former Vice President Mike Pence, who Vance replaced because he is more willing to put Trump’s interests over the Constitution. And it would have the full support of the right-wing media apparatus that powered Trump from national disgrace to the cusp of the presidency.
The UN’s top court has said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is against international law, in a landmark opinion.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Israel should stop settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its “illegal” occupation of those areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible.
In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the court had made a “decision of lies”.
The court’s advisory opinion is not legally binding but still carries significant political weight. It marks the first time the ICJ has delivered a position on the legality of the 57-year occupation.
The ICJ, based at The Hague in the Netherlands, has been examining the issue since the beginning of last year, at the request of the UN General Assembly.
The court was specifically asked to give its view on Israel’s policies and practices towards the Palestinians, and on the legal status of the occupation.
At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday, former President Donald Trump gave a rambling speech late into the night in which he demanded Democrats drop criminal investigations against him, pushed 2020 election conspiracy theories and said Democrats are “cheating on elections,” erroneously claimed that immigrants are “coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” and cracked incoherent jokes about Hannibal Lecter.
On Friday morning, many front-page headlines bought the campaign’s preemptive spin that Trump’s speech would be one of “unity” and healing.
The speech hit many of the usual notes heard from the former president over the last nine years, but media outlets spent the week previewing the Trump campaign’s spin that his speech would aim to unify and “bring the country together,” suggesting that the attempt on Trump’s life last weekend had turned him into a more “serene” person. Despite the reality of the former president’s remarks Thursday night, many newspaper front pages on Friday morning ran stories highlighting Trump’s recounting of the recent assassination attempt and claiming that his convention speech was “somber,” “unifying,” and “healing.”
[I think those media outlets wrote headlines before they heard all of Trump’s speech. And, it is likely that they based those misleading headlines on propaganda sent to them by the Trump campaign, as well as on the transcript of the first twenty minutes of the teleprompter-guided part of the speech. Journalistic malfeasance.]
The Detroit News: “Trump: We must heal discord”, Detroit, Michigan
Pioneer Press: “Trump takes a unity tone”, St. Paul, Minnesota
Las Vegas Review-Journal: “Ex-president uses convention to repeat call for unity”, Las Vegas, Nevada
The Tribune-Democrat: “Trump: Division must end”, Johnstown, Pennsylvania
@182 John Morales said: I myself run Windows, and am doing it right as I type this. No probs at all
I reply: I’m glad you aren’t having any problems. I installed win 10 for someone about 3 years ago and it did push internet logon at that time. Maybe enough people had trouble and they changed that. Not using windows, I wouldn’t know the current state of things. Also, I just read that there was a ‘fix it’ patch pushed out quickly. But, apparently there was a lot of uproar at banks and airports for a while.
John Moralessays
shermanj, quite so.
To be fair, W11 really wants you to log in to Microsoft (allegedly for your convenience, hah) but will let you just create a local account. One result is that, without being logged-in, you have to manually download and install updates from Microsoft.
(Still, it’s notable that banks and airports use Windows in the first place, no?)
John Moralessays
Or: problem was that particular update, not the system itself.
Posting to Twitter/X, the director of Crowdstrike’s threat hunting operations said the fix involves booting Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE), deleting the file “C-00000291*.sys” and then restarting the machine.
John @187, thanks for posting that news. Significant.
From NBC News:
Policies and practices used by Israel in its occupation of Palestinian territories are in breach of international law, the United Nations’ top court said in a landmark opinion Friday. The International Court of Justice said in its opinion, which was read out by Judge Nawaf Salam, president of the world body, that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as ‘the regime associated with them,’ were established and are being maintained in violation of international law.
Is this another guy that Trump would want to pardon?
From NBC News:
A far-right extremist who already served time for his role in the racist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison Friday for stealing a police shield and twice using it against officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tyler Bradley Dykes, who prosecutors say performed a Nazi salute during the U.S. Capitol attack, was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison.
[…] Tyler Bradley Dykes, who was previously discharged from the Marines for “participating in extremist behavior,” was accused by prosecutors of giving a Sieg heil! (Hail to victory!) salute during the 2021 Capitol attack. But Dykes, a 26-year-old from Bluffton, South Carolina, denied that his celebration on the steps of the U.S. Capitol after the mob broke through a police line had been the Nazi salute.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell didn’t find his claim believable, noting that he’d use the same salute during the Charlottesville rally and noted an extensive pattern of extremist behavior over several years.
Howell sentenced Dykes to 57 months in federal prison and fined him $20,000. During the sentencing hearing, Dykes said that he still stood with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and that he supports Trump “to be the next president of our country.”
Prosecutors noted that Dykes quoted Adolph Hitler before the Jan. 6 attack and said during the hearing that Dykes had participated in a training for the neo-Nazi accelerationist group, The Base.
“It was not impulsive conduct that can be explained by an underdeveloped brain,” Howell said.
Howell also took offense to the suggestion, from one of Dykes’ attorneys, that his use of the salute was inconsequential.
“You don’t think using a Sieg heil! salute makes a difference?” she asked, before encouraging the lawyer to move on from the argument that there was some doubt about whether it was actually a Nazi salute. “Facts are facts.”
Dykes, who prosecutors said went by “Nocturnal Wolf” in online chats and stored extensive extremist material, was charged in connection with the Capitol attack in July 2023 and pleaded guilty in April to two felony counts of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers who were protecting the Capitol. At the time he was taken into federal custody, he was serving a five-year sentence for his actions in Charlottesville, but 4.5 years of that sentence were suspended and he ended up only doing four months in connection with that case.
Dykes was prosecuted and convicted in Virginia for burning an object with an intent to intimidate, and federal prosecutors noted he “carried a lit torch, performed the Sieg Heil salute, and he marched with others to express his white supremacist views” during that 2017 march. They also said video showed that Dykes engaged in assaultive conduct in Charlottesville. His arrest in the Charlottesville case didn’t come about until 2023 and he was wearing the same Adidas baseball hat he wore on Jan. 6 when he was taken into custody, which helped the FBI confirm his identity and led to his arrest on Jan. 6 charges.
During Friday’s hearing, Dykes did not distance himself from extremist ideologies, nor did he say he no longer believes the former president’s lies about the election. His biggest expression of regret seemed to be for his elderly parents, who adopted him as a child and who are still providing him with a monthly allowance, he said. Dykes had set up a thriving computer business before his arrest and said even now he’s bringing in $9,000 a month, the equivalent of a six-figure salary. […]
Here’s a running list of top Democrats, including sitting members of Congress, who have called for Biden to pull out of the ticket:
Sen. Sherrod Brown, Ohio
Rep. Gabe Vasquez, New Mexico
Rep. Morgan McGarvey, Kentucky
Rep. Kathy Castor, Florida
Rep. Betty McCollum, Minnesota
Rep. Greg Landsman, Ohio
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California
Sen. Martin Heinrich, New Mexico
Rep. Jared Huffman, California
Rep. Marc Veasey, Texas
Rep. Chuy Garcia, Illinois
Rep. Mark Pocan, Wisconsin
Rep. Sean Casten, Illinois
Sen. Jon Tester, Montana
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Maryland
Rep. Adam Schiff, California
Rep. Mike Levin, California
Rep. Brittany Pettersen, Colorado
Rep. Scott Peters, California
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Washington
Rep. Eric Sorensen, Illinois
Rep. Jim Himes, Connecticut
Rep. Greg Stanton, Arizona
Rep. Ed Case, Hawaii
Rep. Brad Schneider, Illinois
Rep. Hillary Scholten, Michigan
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Oregon
Sen. Peter Welch, Vermont
New York Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado
Rep. Pat Ryan, New York
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, New Jersey
Rep. Adam Smith, Washington
Rep. Jerry Nadler, New York
Rep. Mark Takano, California
Rep. Joe Morelle, New York
Rep. Angie Craig, Minnesota
Rep. Mike Quigley, Illinois
Rep. Seth Moulton, Massachusetts
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, Arizona
Julián Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Texas
Former Rep. Tim Ryan, Ohio
The Congressional Black Caucus prides itself on its authority among Democrats and its influence with President Joe Biden in particular. So far, only one of its roughly 60 members have joined calls for Biden to drop his reelection bid due to concerns over his age and ability to win.
But the caucus’ broad backing of the president varies widely, ranging from enthusiastic support to outright skepticism […]
For now, the CBC remains a bedrock of Biden’s support. Several members have emerged as prominent defenders.
“President Biden, as I’ve said repeatedly, is our nominee,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a member of the CBC, told reporters on Friday, calling Biden “one of the most accomplished American presidents in our history.”
“He has the vision, I believe, the ability, the capacity and the track record to make a case to the American people that will result in us being successful in November,” Jeffries said.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, a former CBC chair, said Biden is fully capable of campaigning effectively enough to beat Trump.
[…] “I am a Biden delegate. I will only take directions from Joe Biden, not the Fourth Estate, not the billionaires, and not from my very influential colleagues,” said Rep. Gwen Moore.
Still, a crack emerged Friday as Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas became the first CBC member to call for Biden’s withdrawal. Ending his campaign, Veasey said in a joint statement with three other Democrats, is the “responsible and patriotic thing to do.”
[…] multiple Black Democratic strategists close to the CBC contended that depressed turnout will not be an issue once Black voters mobilize around the stakes of the election and opposition to Trump, who remains largely unpopular in Black communities.
“Because we know that not all progress is permanent, and because we know that old battles have become new again, everything that we have generationally fought for still remains a top of mind fight,” Seawright [Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist and senior advisor to Rep. Jim Clyburn] said.
JM@155, Lynna@173: Or better yet, de-monopolizing the tech industry. Monoculture brings uniform susceptibility, both to error and infection. Imagine if this had not hit Crowdstrike but Cloudflare instead. They have their tentacles in a truly huge portion of web sites — one must wonder about their data gathering capabilities; no amount of cookie crunching and incognito windowage will help you if every site you visit has Cloudflare as doorman. They must have a giant dossier by now of IPs and lists of websites those IPs visited. You don’t notice them most of the time, except when they screw up and you get a Cloudflare error page when visiting some random website … almost any random website. The privacy implications of this are bad enough, but now consider that if Cloudflare ever has an outage like Cloudstrike’s it could be almost as bad as if North Korea EMP’d everyone or there was another Carrington flare. It’s a huge, hidden Achilles heel of the modern internet, and it wouldn’t be there if we still had competent antitrust enforcement instead of Reaganomics.
Maybe it was for you, oh reader mine, if you have ever contemplated the idea of Biden stepping aside, but know with absolute confidence that for the donors that are actually trying to make this decision—and are trying to disenfranchise Democratic primary voters in the process—that it has never been about the debate, or Biden’s mental acuity, or saving democracy, or any of that which you would so dearly love to believe it was.
It has always only ever been about their wallets and bank accounts.
That is a fact. It is indisputable. It is non-negotiable.
So, if you continue to agitate for replacing Biden, know that you are the dupe, the patsy, the stooge, of a bunch of self-serving billionaires who only care about lining their own pockets by having more pliable candidates in said pockets. That is something you will have to live with every time you look at yourself in the mirror: as Mr. T once professed, you have a chance to be somebody or be somebody’s fool, and you chose to put on a big red clown nose and a jester’s cap out of fear.
You have been aiding and abetting a coup of, by, and for the wealthy.
And on the abiogenesis topic (cue groans), I don’t think that “talky tool-users” is much of an “anthropomorphization” when the topic is Fermi. Fermi is about a) the absence of apparent ETI signals and b) the absence of apparent technosignatures or past visits to the Earth/our solar system.
Signals, though, only make sense to come from the talky … and it would be rather difficult to send them with enough power to have interstellar range without some kind of tool use. Technosignatures, by their very nature, also presume tool use, and on a scale that probably requires highly coordinated social activity, with enough sophistication in their ability to learn and communicate their learnings that they would likely have to have language, or something fully analogous in the scope of its capabilities.
Colonization of the “usual” sort (spaceships land, aliens come out and start building stuff) also obviously requires these. Colonization without technology, as we generally understand the concept, could possibly occur in two forms.
1) Spread among low-mass objects, using low-thrust low-temperature systems that could in principle arise purely biologically.
2) The soft-landing of spores, or possibly occasionally larger but not much larger objects, on bodies like the Earth with deep gravity wells, and the possible lofting the other way of viable spores or small organisms with impact ejecta.
2) seems unlikely to be able to deliver intelligent life, even of the non-talking non-tool-using sort (e.g. dolphins). Organisms that big don’t generally survive unaided reentry or being near grounds zero of large impact events. There’s an outside chance of something with a distributed intelligence (say, a smart termite-colony-like thing made of individually dumb termites) getting a toehold as a small number of dumb components, which then grow to a larger and smarter colony with time, but the identity, knowledge, or culture of its progenitor won’t survive this transplantation. It would become a newborn infant of its kind, and without mommy around to teach it; a raised-by-wolves circumstance. And there’s no evidence for even that sort of colonization having occurred here.
As for 1, this also seems unlikely to matter to Fermi, beyond the extent that it could explain Earth’s rapid colonization by bacteria so early in the geological record. Any smartish space whales would avoid deep gravity wells like Earth’s and wouldn’t originate technosignatures aside from, perhaps, objects being seen in the outer solar system that seem to use cold gas thrusts purpusefully rather than randomly. Nothing of the sort has been observed, unless Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a pod of space whales purposely beaching themselves, which seems far less likely than an unintelligent comet getting tidally spaghettified by the Jovian gravity well and dragged down. It gets worse: the habitat for such things seems low likelihood for promoting getting smart. Spewing space spores at perihelion that the solar wind will loft back out to the outer system in a spray-and-pray wind-pollination strategy seems sufficient for comet-dwelling microbes, and the environment might not be conducive to much larger or more sophisticated organisms developing. Earth had nothing above microbial scale for many billions of years, and the trigger for finally going beyond that appears to have been high free-oxygen levels promoting more intensive energy metabolisms. The cometary environment does not seem conducive to developing high free-oxygen levels, somehow …
Even supposing something larger and smarter (animal-smart) emerged, the biggest advantage might be in being able to see and purposely jet spores at other cometary objects, and maybe even develop a rudimentary tacit understanding of orbital mechanics to better hit the targets. Sending spores is likely more effective than trying to physically go there, as moving large masses huge distances fast runs into the tyranny of the rocket equation, and doing it slow means being beaten to your target by your rival’s puff of spores and finding it already occupied by their kids by the time you arrive.
It seems unlikely to me that cometary clouds are a conducive environment for large, intelligent animal forms to evolve, then, though it might provide an otherwise-uncommon niche for “smartish plants” that aim and spit their seeds. Such would not be likely to produce obvious telescopically-obserbable biosignatures or “techno”signatures.
Significantly, too, none of these possibilities, from soft-landing space termites to smartish plants and space whales, would choke out the ecological niches for “talky tool users”, as the only such niches appear (for now) to be on Earthlike planets, and more specifically in “fringe of fecund forest” environments like the border between a reef and open sea, or between a forest and savanna, which provides opportunities for flexible omnivores to switch among two or several feeding strategies in different seasons or in response to instability of the climate and such, including the ability to cross either environment in search of another patch of the other (and its perimeter) so as to outlive any individual such patch. So, these things can’t explain the Fermi paradox through an argument of “most places where humanlike life could emerge got these things instead, except for some reason Earth”.
So, basically, a) space whales are unlikely and b) space whales would probably be Fermi-irrelevant anyway. If they did turn up, though, their very existence would make a nearly slam-dunk case for comets being teeming with space life and the likely source of Earth’s earliest organisms.
The only way the criticism of anthropomorphism remains, then, is if the criticism applies to the very assumptions underlying the Fermi topic. However, I don’t think that really applies. Even acknowledging that life, and even intelligent life, might exist elsewhere that wouldn’t colonize and spread in a technosignature-leaving way, or want to talk long-distance, does not alter the fact that a) life that is eminently interested in doing both of those things indubitably does exist but b) the one known instance of such hasn’t met, or stumbled on the remains or remotely-detected evidence of, even a single other instance, and that that fact needs explaining. Something makes such life very rare, or perhaps very short-lived. It might be a good idea to find out what, especially in case it might be the latter …
KGsays
Lynna, OM@195,
If it wasn’t impossibe for Biden to win immediately after the debate (I think it was – attempts to excuse his performance or dismiss it as a “bad night” were implausible), it surely is now, with so many prominent Democrats saying he should step aside. Either he agrees to do so, or we’re looking at a near-inevitable Trump win.
KGsays
it has never been about the debate, or Biden’s mental acuity, or saving democracy, or any of that which you would so dearly love to believe it was.
It has always only ever been about their wallets and bank accounts.
That is a fact. It is indisputable. – Beckenstein Bound quoting DailyKos@200
No, it isn’t indisputable. It’s about the debate, and the other mounting evidence that Biden has serious cognitive problems. If it was an ebil conspiracy among rich donors, why were they funding Biden up until the debate? They could have said a year ago – we won’t fund you, then backed a more pliable candidate in contested primaries. Holding the debate at that point was the idea of Biden’s own team – it was supposed to reset the contest in his favour. If it is claimed that somehow the donors forced that on his team as part of their ebil conspiracy, they would only have done so if they had good reason to believe Biden would likely crash and burn, as he did. And they could only have known that if they knew (and his team knew) that he has serious cognitive problems. Biden should have made clear at the start of his term that he would not run for re-election – the idea that someone in their mid-eighties was likely to be able to do the job was always implausible. If not then, he should have made it clear a year or more ago – and preferably, resigned the presidency to give Harris the chance to prove herself in the office. The whole mess is on Biden, and more particularly – since the ability to assess one’s own capacities is one of the first things to go in cognitive decline – those immediately around him.
KGsays
Further to #202, I’ve been following threads on Biden at DailyKos, and I see worrying signs that the majority there have fallen into both a conspiracist narrative (exemplified in the passage Beckenstein Bound quoted @200), and something approaching a Biden personality cult. The excuses for his lamentable debate performance have been absurd (the latest was that he became confused in the debate by Trump’s lies – as if there was any possibility Trump would not spew a torrent of lies), and the additional evidence of serious cognitive problems, both before and after the debate, has been simply denied, or excused as “That’s just Biden”.
John Moralessays
Fermi is about a) the absence of apparent ETI signals and b) the absence of apparent technosignatures or past visits to the Earth/our solar system.
As far as we apes can tell.
Sure.
Signals, though, only make sense to come from the talky … and it would be rather difficult to send them with enough power to have interstellar range without some kind of tool use.
Because the Fermi thingy is about actual visitations, not about signals?
(Hey, how if one could somehow modulate neutrinos, as an example?)
—
Anyway, you seem to be set on this idea that it needs to be baryonic matter conglomerates, rather than other thingies that might do this thing life does.
That is, local entropic reversal, homeostasis, replication.
John Moralessays
PS May I say I like your ‘nym, BB.
John Moralessays
As for 1, this also seems unlikely to matter to Fermi, beyond the extent that it could explain Earth’s rapid colonization by bacteria so early in the geological record.
Hm. A sample size of one, from an unknown distribution.
How do you justify this idea that it’s “rapid”, rather than “slow”?
(Again: sample size = 1)
John Moralessays
Something makes such life very rare, or perhaps very short-lived.
Um. n = 1.
—
OK. So, here’s a thought.
Is the universe in its early days, or its latter days?
I reckon the former.
Remember, n = 1.
This is all purely speculative, based on what we know. So far5.
John Moralessays
Of course, it’s complicated.
Back when, a shitload of stuff happened quickly, much more so than nowadays.
The quicker (and more likely to happen) things go, the “faster” the time flow, no?
(Is it really how many interactions per unit time, or is that the converse of how much time for a given number of events?)
Back in the day, Jerry Pournelle’s blog was part of my reading. Conservative side, of course.
So, this dude will always and forever be “the egregious Frum”.
—
He distinguished his conservativism from the alternative neoconservatism, noting that he had been drummed out of the Conservative movement by “the egregious Frum”, referring to prominent neoconservative, David Frum.
(Wikipedia)
John Moralessays
Ah, what the hell. Jerry was genuine.
Next paragraph (ibid):
Notably, Pournelle opposed the Gulf War and the Iraq War, maintaining that the money would be better spent developing energy technologies for the United States. According to a Wall Street Journal article, “Pournelle estimates that for what the Iraq war has cost so far, the United States could have paid for a network of nuclear power stations sufficient to achieve energy independence, and bankrupt the Arabs for once and for all.”
lotharloosays
One thing to note is that Biden has always 20-30% chance of winning but pretty much every Democratic nominee will have at least that much chance just for the sake of running against Trump. So focussing on his winning chances is a red herring because what is important is the difference between the winning chances of Biden who can’t campaign versus Harris who can. And it is very clear that being able to talk, debate and campaign is pretty important.
It has been nearly a week since gunfire erupted at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, resulting in an injury to the former president, the death of one attendee, Corey Comperatore, and severe injuries to two others.
And although the images we’ve seen of Trump since his attempted assassination have been those of a person who was barely injured and is now in high spirits, what we’ve been told by the campaign offers very little insight into the former president’s condition, what kind of care he received or how his medical team will monitor him in the days and weeks ahead.
A full public assessment of Trump’s injuries is necessary, for both the former president’s own health and the clarity it can provide for voters about the recovery of the man who could become president of the United States once again. The concern is that gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma. As a trauma neurosurgeon, I have seen how a thorough evaluation after any kind of gunshot wound can provide a complete picture and lead to a speedier recovery.
The first official communication about Trump’s health from his campaign came about 40 minutes after the shooting. It simply said Trump was “fine” and was “being checked out at a local medical facility.” It added that more details would follow.
Two hours later, in a post by Trump himself on Truth Social, he wrote: “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.”
In his speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, Trump described the moment of the shooting but didn’t shed new light on his condition or the care he received. Beyond that, most of what we know about his injury is based on what we’ve seen in pictures and video, and from secondhand accounts.
A source familiar with the matter told CNN on Sunday that Trump underwent a number of “routine” tests at the hospital, including a CT scan that came back normal.
CNN has repeatedly reached out to the Trump campaign and Butler Memorial Hospital, where Trump was treated, for more information but has not received further details about his condition or care. […]
What we know about Trump’s injury
In the moments immediately following the sounds of gunfire on Saturday, we saw Trump raise his right hand to his ear and the side of his face. He did not collapse but seemed to duck to the ground of his own accord.
With US Secret Service surrounding him, he stood up about a minute later, raised his right arm and was able to walk and speak immediately. We saw him rouse the audience, telling them to “Fight!” as he pumped his fist in the air. From a medical standpoint, these are all very good signs and, despite the visible blood on his face, provided evidence that he wasn’t severely injured.
US Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House physician, said during an interview Monday on “The Benny Show” podcast, that he “checked out” the wound to Trump’s ear and bandaged it himself. He added that “there was no concussive effect from the bullet” because it was far enough from Trump’s head.
“It just took the top of his ear off, a little bit of the top of his ear off, as it passed through,” Jackson said. “It was bleeding like crazy.”
Trump was transported to nearby Butler Memorial Hospital. Dr. David Rottinghaus, an emergency room physician there, said the hospital had been in contact with the Secret Service before Saturday’s rally. Rottinghaus, who did not treat Trump himself and would not comment on Trump’s treatment or condition, said he came to the hospital shortly after the shooting to help triage patients.
“We do prepare for incidents like this. We had had advanced visits in the past for rallies when Mr. Trump was here. The last was the end of 2020. We have worked with the Secret Service in the past and local and federal law enforcement to come up with plans about if an incident like this happened,” Rottinghaus told CNN.
Those plans included designating a bed in the ER in case it was needed, having clinical teams at the rally itself to treat patients on-site for minor medical issues, and avoiding overwhelming the hospital if there were a crisis.
When the unthinkable happened, Rottinghaus said, it took just minutes for Butler Memorial to put its plan into action, locking down the hospital and diverting patients to other health care facilities.
Although we were told that Trump had a CT scan and other routine exams, it is not clear when these tests were performed, who read the scans or whether his brain specifically was examined.
In the Monday interview, Jackson said Trump’s injury was “dressed up. He’ll be OK. … It’s going to granulate and heal in, and he’s not going to need anything to be done with it.”
On Wednesday, in an interview with CBS News, Eric Trump said that his father had “no stitches but certainly, certainly a nice flesh wound.”
And Trump has been moving around the RNC in Milwaukee this week, talking and smiling through speeches with a bandage on his ear.
What we don’t know
All of this points to a favorable prognosis. But it is still surprising that we have not heard more about the exact diagnosis and care of what may have been a catastrophic injury. And, while all the attention has been on his ear and right side of his head, that doesn’t mean other injuries may not be present. It’s not even clear that he was struck by a primary projectile from the rifle, a secondary projectile or a combination of both. Sometimes, it can be difficult to know without an in-depth evaluation.
We do know that the shooter used an AR-15-style weapon, and in my experience in the operating room, I’ve witnessed the kind of trauma this weapon can cause. The kinetic energy of it is significant: A rifle like the AR-15 can produce up to 1,300 foot-pounds of force. With that much power close to the head, there can be injuries beyond what’s visible.
For example, a fracture to the thin bone in that region of the skull, an epidural hematoma (or bleeding between the skull and the brain) and damage to the bones of the inner ear, which can result in hearing loss, vertigo or dizziness.
A CT scan can usually detect such injuries, but they aren’t always immediately apparent. As a result, sometimes patients are observed in the hospital and may even undergo a repeat CT scan.
The stress from a shooting can also have psychological effects.
“In the chaos that immediately follows being shot, these psychological impacts don’t always manifest,” said Dr. Kenji Inaba, a trauma surgeon with the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “It can come up later on, and it’s something that we always need to be acutely aware of.”
The good news is that most physical symptoms of an injury would probably have revealed themselves over the past few days. At this point, however, the Trump campaign hasn’t yet shared whether a full workup was done at the time or if there has been any follow-up since.
Presidents and presidential candidates are not required to share their medical histories with the public, but voters have said that the health conditions of their leaders matter to them in this election. More information helps everyone make better decisions.
Rottinghaus, the Butler Memorial physician, told CNN that after all the preparation for the unthinkable, “the unexpected happened” on Saturday. Still, the hospital considers it a successful day: Staff juggled the arrival of a former president with care for their other patients. What made it work, he said, was communication, clear planning and preparation to act.
In an intense political season for the country, that kind of collaboration and communication may be a lesson for the candidates, too.
Josh Marshall:
[…] Just to explain the meaning, the bullet is the primary projectile. A secondary projectile is another flying object put in motion by the bullet – so a metal fragment, a shard of glass, etc.
[…] Pennsylvania State Police initially told reporters on the scene that Trump had been struck by shards of glass. Then Trump himself said he’d been hit with a bullet and that was the end of the matter. There’s small detail from a local news report from last Sunday that suggests it as at least plausible that the initial report was correct, that Trump was struck by some flying debris.
A report from local TV station WPXI at 4:50 PM Sunday said this:
11 Investigates has learned that four Pittsburgh police officers assigned to the former president’s motorcade yesterday suffered minor injuries during the shooting.
The four motorcycle officers were part of Donald Trump’s escort to and from the rally in Butler.
Sources tell Chief Investigator Rick Earle the officers were just feet away from Trump when shots rang out. The four officers suffered minor injuries from flying debris caused by the bullets.
Sources say the officers were hit with either plastic or metal fragments when the bullets struck objects nearby.
This report certainly doesn’t prove Trump was also hit by flying debris. Trump was the target so the odds of him being struck by a bullet seem, by definition, higher. But it does appear to show pretty conclusively that the gunshots created a spray of flying debris in Trump’s immediate vicinity capable of causing minor injuries. That’s precisely what those initial reports from state law enforcement said happened to Trump, though we still don’t know why. This simply underscores the fact that both possible sources of the injury are very plausible and that we really need law enforcement and/or examining doctors to tell the public what they think happened.
[…] it’s a huge failure of the nation’s leading press organizations that they’ve been afraid to press the point because they’ve feared blowback from the Trump campaign.
Ever since I heard Trump’s description of the event, I thought he was either lying in some way or exaggerating. Trump being hit by flying debris doesn’t make as good a story as “Trump grazed by bullet.” The assassination attempt is already a horrific event, and we know that bullets flew close to Trump. That’s good enough for a story. He doesn’t have to push a lie, but my bet is that we are not hearing about the true nature of the injury because Trump is lying.
The Republican National Convention was dedicated to make-believe. Tall tales about how magical and wondrous things were four years ago when Donald Trump was president ruled the entire slate of soul-destroying GOP speeches.
But as long as four years ago may seem these days, it isn’t too long ago to remember. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to July 2020.
July 2020 began with foreign policy news that Russia’s president, a la authoritarian dictator, Vladimir Putin was able to secure a referendum on the country’s constitution in order to remain in power for at least another 12 years. In many ways this was indeed good news for then-President Trump, and the current Republican Party, who seem to want to make the Russian leader happy by any means necessary.
Also in July, we were about five months into this super-huge pandemic thing. Trump was in the middle of tragically mishandling our country’s response to the health crisis. Just a few weeks earlier, Trump had told Americans that the pandemic would simply “go away” soon.
The future convicted felon was tweeting that “Deaths from the China Virus are down 39%, while our great testing program continues to lead the World, by FAR! Why isn’t the Fake News reporting that Deaths are way down? It is only because they are, indeed, FAKE NEWS!”
July 2020 saw deaths from COVID-19 soar in the U.S. “The United States recorded 1.87 million new cases in July, bringing total infections to 4.5 million, for an increase of 69%. Deaths in July rose 20% to nearly 154,000 total. The biggest increases in July were in Florida, with over 310,000 new cases,” Reuters reported.
We were also facing some dire economic news. “Gross domestic product from April to June plunged 32.9% on an annualized basis,” which economists said “was the worst drop ever, with the closest previously coming in mid-1921,” according to CNBC.
More magical moments for Americans in July included an unemployment rate over 10%. The “good” news for the economy was that “permanent job losses” seemed to have stayed flat and hadn’t increased. So that was something we could put in the less dire column.
As for Trump’s “greatest testing program” claims—that was a lie as well. The New York Times reported that surging cases of coronavirus across the country far outpaced the Trump administration’s clunky efforts. Dr. Morgan Katz, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins Hospital, told the Times, “It’s terrifying, and clearly evidence of a failure of the system.”
At the same time, after weeks of civil rights protests for racial justice that grew in response to the murder of George Floyd, Trump was doing what he always does: stoking white America’s fears, and tweeting out support for Confederate flags at NASCAR races.
July ended, four years ago, with Trump holding a press briefing where he eulogized former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. Cain died after contracting the COVID-19 virus after attending a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he and others flouted mask precautions.
The Republican Party can tell themselves four-years-ago fairytales until they all fall asleep, but the story of Trump’s catastrophic leadership is simple. Seven million more American voters chose President Joe Biden over Donald J. Trump, four years ago. Watching Trump’s RNC never-ending acceptance speech—filled with his trademark divisiveness and lies—reminded everyone that Americans voted him out for good reasons.
Longtime U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who helped lead federal efforts to protect women from domestic violence and recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday, has died. She was 74.
Lillie Conley, her chief of staff, confirmed that Jackson Lee, who had pancreatic cancer, died in Houston Friday night with her family around her.
The Democrat had represented her Houston-based district and the nation’s fourth-largest city since 1995. She had previously had breast cancer and announced the pancreatic cancer diagnosis on June 2.
[…] Jackson Lee had just been elected to the Houston district once represented by Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman elected to Congress from a Southern state since Reconstruction, when she was immediately placed on the high-profile House Judiciary Committee in 1995.
[…] Jackson Lee quickly established herself as fierce advocate for women and minorities, and a leader for House Democrats on many social justice issues, from policing reform to reparations for descendants of enslaved people. She led the first rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act in nearly a decade, which included protections for Native American, transgender and immigrant women.
[…] Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said he had never known a harder-working lawmaker than Jackson Lee, saying she “studied every bill and every amendment with exactitude and then told Texas and America exactly where she stood.” […]
The U.S. Navy has exonerated 256 Black sailors who were found to be unjustly punished in 1944 following a horrific port explosion that killed hundreds of service members and exposed racist double standards among the then-segregated ranks.
On July 17, 1944, munitions being loaded onto a cargo ship detonated, causing secondary blasts that ignited 5,000 tons (4,535 metric tonnes) of explosives at Port Chicago naval weapons station near San Francisco.
The explosion killed 320 sailors and civilians, nearly 75% of whom were Black, and injured another 400 personnel. Surviving Black sailors had to pick up the human remains and clear the blast site while white officers were granted leave to recuperate.
The pier was a critical ammunition supply site for forces in the Pacific during World War II, and the job of loading those ships was left primarily to Black enlisted sailors overseen by white officers. Before the explosion, the Black sailors working the dock had expressed concerns about the loading operations. Shortly after the blast, they were ordered to return to loading ships even though no changes had been made to improve their safety.
The sailors refused, saying they needed training on how to more safely handle the bombs before they returned.
What followed affected the rest of their lives, including punishments that kept them from receiving honorable discharges even as the vast majority returned to work at the pier under immense pressure and served throughout the war. Fifty sailors who held fast to their demands for safety and training were tried as a group on charges of conspiracy to commit mutiny and were convicted and sent to prison.
The whole episode was unjust, and none of the sailors received the legal due process they were owed, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in an interview with The Associated Press.
It was “a horrific situation for those Black sailors that remained,” Del Toro said. The Navy’s office of general counsel reviewed the military judicial proceedings used to punish the sailors and found “there were so many inconsistencies and so many legal violations that came to the forefront,” he said.
Thurgood Marshall, who was then a defense attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, defended the 50 sailors who were convicted of mutiny. Marshall went on to become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, the 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago disaster, Del Toro signed paperwork officially clearing the sailors, who are now deceased. Del Toro handed the first pen to Thurgood Marshall Jr., the late justice’s son.
The exonerations “are deeply moving,” Marshall Jr. said. “They, of course, are all gone, and that’s a painful aspect of it. But so many fought for so long for that kind of fairness and recognition.”
President Joe Biden said the decision to exonerate is “righting a historic wrong.”
In the appeal of their courts martial convictions, then-NAACP attorney Marshall wrote that “justice can only be done in this case by a complete reversal of findings,” Biden said in a statement. “With this action, we are answering that call.”
The events have stung surviving family members for decades, but an earlier effort in the 1990s to pardon the sailors fell short. Two additional sailors were previously cleared—one was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, and one was cleared on insufficient evidence. Wednesday’s action goes beyond a pardon and vacates the military judicial proceedings carried out in 1944 against all of the men.
[…] The racism that the Black sailors faced reflected the military’s views at the time — ranks were segregated, and the Navy had only reluctantly opened some positions it considered less desirable to Black service members. [Historical photo of Black sailors unloading aerial bombs from a railcar.]
The official court of inquiry looking into why the explosion occurred cleared all the white officers and praised them for the “great effort” they had to exert to run the dock. It left open the suggestion that the Black sailors were to blame for the accident.
Del Toro’s action converts the discharges to honorable unless there were other circumstances surrounding them. After the Navy upgrades the discharges, surviving family members can work with the Department of Veterans Affairs on past benefits that may be owed, the Navy said.
North Korean Diplomat Defects to the South, Shares News of Political Purge
Ri Il-kyu, who fled to South Korea late last year, alleged that two North Korean officials who had been assigned to negotiate with the Trump administration had been punished.
Two senior North Korean diplomats who negotiated with the United States when the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, exchanged threats of war and later held summit talks with President Donald J. Trump were purged a few years ago — one executed and the other sentenced to a penal colony, a North Korean defector said this week.
There was no independent confirmation of the allegations nor was it clear whether the punitive actions stemmed from the failure of the diplomatic efforts. But the breakdown of the talks was widely seen as a major embarrassment for Mr. Kim.
The defector, Ri Il-kyu, 52, made the comments in an interview with a newspaper in Seoul, which was also the first time his defection became public. Mr. Ri was a political counselor at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba when he fled to South Korea last November. He is the most senior North Korean official known to defect to the South in nearly a decade.
In the interview, conducted by the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo on Sunday and published on Tuesday, Mr. Ri spoke about the fates of Ri Yong-ho and Han Song-ryol, the former a foreign minister and the latter a deputy. They were among the best-known North Korean diplomats dealing with Washington. But they soon disappeared from North Korean state media.
[…] “For days, those who watched it could hardly eat anything,” Mr. Ri said, adding that he did not attend the execution because he was preparing to travel to the North Korean Embassy in Cuba at the time.
The South Korean spy agency on Tuesday declined to comment on the allegations.
Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump held the first summit meeting between their two countries in Singapore in June 2018. But their diplomacy collapsed when their second meeting, held in Hanoi in February 2019, ended without an agreement on how to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or when to ease United Nations sanctions imposed on the North.
[…] Mr. Han was sidelined a few months before the Singapore meeting and, according to Mr. Ri, the defector, executed a couple weeks before Mr. Kim’s second summit with Mr. Trump.
[…] Since taking power in 2011, Mr. Kim has engineered a series of bloody political purges to remove or execute many senior officials seen as obstacles to his power or blamed for policy failures. Jang Song-thaek, Mr. Kim’s uncle, was executed in 2013 on charges of corruption and plotting a military coup against Mr. Kim. The leader’s half brother, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated by North Korean agents in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in 2017.
Mr. Ri told the Chosun Ilbo that he decided to defect to South Korea after his bosses at the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang demanded bribes and the ministry rejected his request to travel to Mexico for treatment for back pain. He was the most senior North Korean diplomat to defect to Seoul since Thae Yong-ho, a minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, fled to South Korea in 2016.
Mr. Ri said he once shared tea with Mr. Kim.
“When you see him in person, the first thing that comes to your mind is: ‘He must have a very high blood pressure,’” he said, echoing widespread speculation on Mr. Kim’s health. “His face is red as if he is always drunk. It is redder than you see it on TV.”
Adidas has dropped the supermodel Bella Hadid, who is half Palestinian, from an advertising campaign for retro shoes referencing the 1972 Munich Olympics….
The German sportswear company had chosen Hadid to promote its SL72 trainers, which were first launched to coincide with the 1972 Olympics.
Adidas recently relaunched the SL72 shoes as part of a series reviving classic trainers.
However images of the American model wearing the shoes prompted criticism, including on Israel’s official account on X (formerly Twitter).
“Guess who the face of their campaign is? Bella Hadid, a half-Palestinian model,” a post read on Thursday.
In a statement provided to the news agency, the company said it would be “revising the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect.
“We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events — though these are completely unintentional — and we apologise for any upset or distress caused.”
Yeah, what a fucking “offense” to pick a half Palestinian model for an event referring to 72 Olympics. The Israeli racists are making it too obvious that in their minds all Palestinians, even half-Palestinians, are terrorists.
As the saying goes, what’s good for the goose is good for the, erm, satanic goose, and one group of faux satanists is vowing to prove once again that theocracy is incompatible with the Constitution.
The Satanic Temple—the winsome wags who brought you Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic—are now fixing to test the limits of a new Florida law that opens schools to “additional counseling and support to students” from outside organizations.
That sounds innocuous enough, because who doesn’t want to support students? But the law is really just another in a recent spate of measures intended to beer-bong specific religious flavors down the throats of nondrinkers […]
The Guardian:
Although HB 931 leaves the implementation of chaplain programs to individual school districts, and only requires schools to list a volunteer’s religion “if any”, [Gov. Ron] DeSantis has made clear its intent is to restore the tenets of Christianity to public education.
Without the bill, DeSantis said at its signing in April: “You’re basically saying that God has no place [on campus]. That’s wrong.”
Is it wrong, though? Would it really be that awful if religious people confined their rites and rhetoric to the vast majority of the American landmass that isn’t school property? If parents want to take their kids to the Grand Canyon and tell them Noah’s flood made that ditch, that’s their right. But why should members of the marginally cognizant community be forced to hear it?
So as they’ve done numerous times before, satanists are coming to the rescue.
Members of the Satanic Temple say they’re poised to act as volunteer chaplains under Florida’s new law, which took effect on July 1.
The temple is really more secular than satanic, and uses the dark threat of “Satan” to make a point about religious pluralism. Its leaders see the new law as an entree—not for satanism, per se, but for reason and fairness. Satanic Temple members are ready to bring the good news of Satan and all his fictional works—as well as the Founding Fathers’ very real work product—to Sunshine State schoolchildren from the Panhandle to the Keys.
But this isn’t a joke or a prank. It’s a serious effort to wake America up to the theocratic cancer that’s currently metastasizing across the country.
“You have theocrats pushing further and further, signing unconstitutional bills into law, and they realize there’s no consequence,” Lucien Graves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, told The Guardian. “And they also realize that when people see these laws passed, and the outrage comes, they’re not even necessarily going to recognize or realize when those laws are later overturned by the courts.
“They’re giving everybody the impression that these types of things are legal, this is just the environment we’re living in,” Graves said. “And in that way they’re really numbing people to when these things actually do take effect, or when they are upheld by a corrupt judge who’s just playing partisan politics.”
Of course, Florida’s new law isn’t the only recent example of theocratic creep.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, recently announced teachers will be required to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into their curricula, citing their supposed historical importance. And now he plans to overhaul the state’s social studies curriculum with the help of a coterie of Christofascist kookaburras. These include Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, whose organization created Project 2025, the fascist kill-America outline whose architects Donald Trump never heard of, even though several of them were members of his administration. […]
Meanwhile, Louisiana passed a law in June requiring all schools receiving state funding to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. No doubt the Supreme Court will review this blatantly unconstitutional law, decide it’s just fine, and further order that Jewish, Muslim, and atheist kids be forced to eat a bug in front of the class.
In addition, several other states are currently allowing a Christian outfit known as LifeWise to bus kids to Christian celebrations and Bible studies during school hours. The off-campus sessions are legal under two Supreme Court rulings issued in 1948 and 1952, but the program has raised eyebrows among school officials and parents who think it puts undue peer pressure on non-Christian kids.
“Whether it’s happening on campus or not, this program is bringing religion into the school,” Demrie Alonzo, an English tutor who works at several Ohio schools with LifeWise programs, told NBC News. “It’s not fair to the kids of different religions.”
Of course, given that Supreme Court robes now reliably double as choir frocks, quaint throwbacks like the Constitution and stare decisis are unlikely to help us repair our crumbling wall of church-state separation. Democrats and other students of actual American history need to take back statehouses in order to do that.
Which means we need to fill out our entire ballots every time, and not simply vote for Democrats in the most high-profile races.
As the Sister District Project points out, “ballot roll-off,” which occurs when voters fill out the top of the ballot but stop there, is a bigger problem among Democrats than Republicans. And the difference is by no means minor.
According to SDP, “across 10 battleground states over 8 years, contested down-ballot Democrats experienced ballot roll-off 80% of the time, compared to only 37% for their Republican counterparts.”
As a result of this yawning discrepancy, Democratic voters are unwittingly giving theocrats the green light all across the country […]
“State legislative races and chambers hinge on razor-thin margins,” writes the SDP. “In prior work, we found that Democrats would have gained control of 14 more chambers in 9 states in 2020 if they had only been able to increase their down-ballot votes by 2% or less. And, those votes could have come from people who were already voting for Democrats at the top of the ticket.”
In other words, you already showed up to vote. Finish the job!
To paraphrase Smokey Bear, only you can stop out-of-control theocracy. And, happily, you don’t even have to rake the forests to do it.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #220…
I’ll say this about kookaburras…they are VERY, VERY LOUD.
[…] In a previous article the Washington Post pointed out the sexist, racist use of “Jezebel” as a biblical attack on Vice President Kamala Harris. Texas pastor Tom Buck justified use of the language, saying,
“My problem is her godless character. She not only is the most radical pro-abortion VP ever, but also most radical LGBT advocate.”
That earlier article also highlights the threat of violence, in that case surrounding the term Jezebel instead of millstone:
Jessica Johnson, an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William & Mary, said the term has historically been used as a justification for racial violence against Black women.
Another article this week, this one a Substack post from Tom Snyder, took the occasion of a Republican attack on a Republican presidential candidate to remind us that those who come to power through violent rhetoric should be the first we suspect of employing violence even when that violence targets someone on their own side.
If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?
No, we should not.
That sort of presumption, based on us-and-them thinking, is dangerous. It begins a chain of thinking that can lead to more violence. We are the victims, and they are the aggressors. We have been hurt, so it must have been them. No one thinking this way ever asks about the violence on one’s own side.
And this way of thinking is also very often erroneous.
On January 6, the crowd wanted to attack and kill Nancy Pelosi, but the rioters’ rage was just as much if not more focused upon Mike Pence.
[…] We’ve seen individually targeted violence gunning metaphorically for Pence and literally for Trump.
The point here is that the rightwing’s base sits upon a foundation of threats, and not just from Trump, not just from random street protesters. The North Carolina nominee for governor is running around saying, “Some folks need killin’.” Mike Johnson himself, yes, the Speaker of the House, told a “Christian women’s conference” in 2022,
“Obviously, this is an increasingly hostile culture. We all know that. We need to understand why that is, and we need to commit to do our part to confront it. The kingdom of God allows aggression.”
[Emphasis Wonkette’s.]
This did not begin with Trump and it does not end with him. The power of the GOP as a whole cannot be separated from their practice of threatening others. They have made money from it. They have made an institution of it. And so when the power of the GOP is threatened, it should be unsurprising that some people take those justifications for violence seriously and act violently. With the attempt on Trump’s life, the Right shows itself to be dangerously unstable, which should worry everyone. […]
[When] they move on to other enemies on their list. It is very difficult to say how it would stop.
On this July 20th… Name (1) a brand of baking soda, (2) a pesticide, (3) a mixed drink. (This originated with Karen Anderson, wife of SF writer Poul Anderson.)
On a somewhat more serious level…In July 1969 I was working in the Federal Summer Employment Program. Richard Nixon gave all Federal employees a paid day off work. Only good thing he ever did for me…
Interviews with former agents and an NBC News review of government documents and reports reveals an agency struggling to retain agents and keep pace with threats.
The arm of the Secret Service that protects presidents, vice presidents and their families is nearly 10 percent smaller than it was a decade ago despite warnings from Congress and a government watchdog that it needed to add agents or risk compromising its mission.
The latest Congressional budget figures show that the employee headcount assigned to protect the president and other senior officials and investigate threats against them dropped by roughly 350 staffers — down from 4,027 in fiscal 2014 to 3,671 in the current fiscal year.
At the same time, the number of people that Protective Operations had to protect grew and the potential threats it faced became more diverse. Today, the Secret Service faces chronic understaffing for its most high-profile roles and competition from the private sector, which routinely poaches agents for much higher paying and less punishing jobs.
As the agency is being roundly criticized for failing to adequately protect former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennyslviana, local and federal law enforcement officials say its widely known within policing circles that the organization whose agents would “take a bullet for the President,” is overwhelmed.
[…] The agency’s staffing problems do not appear to be due to a lack of funding. The budget of the Secret Service nearly doubled over the last decade. It jumped from around $1.8 billion in fiscal 2014 to more than $3 billion, according to government filings. During the same period, agency-wide staffing rose by nearly 25% with over 8,100 personnel. That includes roughly 3,200 special agents and 1,300 uniformed officers, according to the agency’s website.
Adding to the strain, both Presidents Biden and Trump, who are older presidents with grandchildren, had Secret Service protection for their large, multi-generational families. Legally, the Secret Service is required to protect presidents, vice presidents, and their immediate families, which include grandchildren under federal rules.
Secret Service agents must also guard former presidents and vice presidents plus their spouses and children under 16, as well as visiting heads of state. In election years, they must also protect leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates and their spouses.
[…] Budget documents reviewed by NBC News show that the agency requested more than $25 million in fiscal year 2018 to pay agents to work in New York to protect Trump Tower along with President Trump’s children and grandchildren. Three years later, the agency requested funding for extra vehicles to protect Trump after he left office.
[…] “Threats against the President and other protectees have grown in intensity and scale with the emergence of new technologies and the heightened level of violence in the country,” the report said.
Frank Loveridge, who spent 22-years with the agency including as a supervisor in the Presidential Protection Division during President Barack Obama’s second term, said agents were stretched thin.
“You’re being pushed so hard all the time. You’re on the road for three straight weeks with no days off, working 16 hour days traveling,” said Loveridge, now a director of corporate security.
[…] After the police murder of George Floyd, the Secret Service and federal and local law enforcement agencies struggled with recruitment. Working for the Secret Service is also known as both grueling and tedious, with agents standing on their feet and waiting for hours while officials meet.
The GAO found that agents were not always paid for all the extra hours worked. Congress stepped in and passed legislation that provides overtime for staffers who work in protection but the measure expires in 2028.
“We give up nights, weekends, holidays,” Robert McDonald, a retired Secret Service agent and now a lecturer at the University of New Haven, said. “That’s how we serve the public. So it’s very difficult to get people interested in this type of situation of protecting the community or going into the Secret Service.”
[…] In addition to agents who serve on protective details, uniformed officers within the agency stand post at the White House, the Treasury Department, and Foreign Diplomatic Missions in Washington D.C. Uniformed officers also screen the public as they enter high profile events when presidents speak.
Christopher McClenic, a retired 23-year veteran of the Secret Service who worked on President Clinton’s detail, said the responsibilities particularly of the uniformed division were “never ending.”
“You will be working 12 hour shifts pretty much every day into perpetuity,” McClenic said. “I don’t think the uniform division has ever been fully staffed.” […]
A very unusual carbon-burning white dwarf
Anton Petrov:
“Surprise! Ancient Supernova Remnant Is a Bizarre Object We’ve Never Seen Before”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=4tzx6wEpMCg
Not click bait this time. This object really is weird, and possibly unstable.
Solid State Batteries Are REALLY Here: Yoshino Power Station. Use my link [ ]
If there’s any doubt that solid state batteries are actually here, well … here’s your proof. You can actually buy this for yourself and get it delivered to your door in a day or two. No, solid state batteries aren’t everywhere and definitely not mass market yet, but they also aren’t vaporware and always five years away. Just like this Yoshino battery, there’s other solid state batteries right on the cusp of ending up in consumer electronics devices near you. But do these early versions live up to the hype? And who is this Yoshino battery really good for?
Bekenstein Boundsays
KG@202, 203: Perhaps you should quit ‘splaining and listen to what nonwhite Democrats are saying, from AOC down to the rank and file.
They are saying that a) they want Biden and b) the push to oust Biden is astroturf, not grass roots.
John Morales @20various:
As far as we apes can tell.
We can “tell” quite a bit. For example, nothing in the fossil record has cropped up that’s either an indisputable pre-human technosignature or biological but non-conformant with the indigenous phylogenetic tree. No Archaen nine-legged skeletons, no pre-Vendian cast from something with scales in no pattern any future fish or reptile ever had, no mystery fossil in the Phanerozoic that just plain doesn’t fit in, nothing. OK, that doesn’t rule out small visitations or temporary outposts that didn’t chance to fossilize, or were even careful to limit or avoid contamination, but it certainly appears to rule out world conquest and large scale industrialization.
Hey, how if one could somehow modulate neutrinos, as an example?
We can do that, to a very limited extent with poor efficiency. It’s been done in efforts to confirm neutrino oscillation as a-thing-that-happens. It could explain a lack of detected signaling, if there was no interest Out There in signaling to pre-neutrino civilizations, since it has some nice characteristics (basically zero attenuation, low dispersion, still almost the speed of light); it doesn’t explain the lack of colonization though, which is arguably the bigger issue.
Anyway, you seem to be set on this idea that it needs to be baryonic matter conglomerates, rather than other thingies that might do this thing life does.
Now you’re getting way out there. Dark matter, if it is not totally hobbled by its inability to shed heat other than by evaporative cooling, could conceivably give rise to whole shadow biospheres of invisible space whales and such that we couldn’t see. Whether they’d end up with complex enough habitats and resource logistics considerations as to create an evolutionary pressure for high levels of cognitivie sophistication is another question.
The whole thing is also, in a way, entirely beside the point. It might as well take place in a parallel universe: never the twain shall meet, outside of some entirely hypothetical high energy physics situations. The apparent lack of other generally-humanlike smart colonizers remains unexplained, and will continue to do so until there’s either good evidence that environments suitable for such arise only rarely, or else that something different usually outcompetes them and precludes them without having those same characteristics.
Notably, most of the “usual” explanations are themselves deficient in one way or another. Berserkers/apex predator civilization: where is the apex predator civilization? It has no reason to hide, and every reason to have simply eaten/overrun the Earth long before we could even arise. Dark forest: why has no one noticed the absence of the apex predator they’re hiding from? Even if everyone fears each other, and is prone to destroy each other out of fear, civilizations faced with destruction have no reason not to warn everyone else possible about what got them by sending out a loud message of some sort using the last of their strength. Though, maybe such death-cries are simply infrequent enough we haven’t had radio telescopes long enough yet to have heard one. This version of Dark Forest does however leave ruins, especially if very energetic superweapons are ever involved. Abnormal “supernova” remnants from too-small progenitor stars and suchlike would be technosignatures, and none are known. The zoo hypothesis posits a flawless illusion around the perimeter of the primate enclosure, not just good enough to fool chimps or barbarians but good enough to fool Arabic astronomers who knew a thing or two about parallax and even to fool astronomers armed with the Hubble and very detailed understandings of astrophysics. Short of setting much of the galaxy aside as a nature park this seems implausible.
Personally, I think it’s more likely that advanced civilizations simply don’t spread much. If you don’t learn to live within your means well before reaching the tech level to make a credible attempt at space colonization, you overshoot and collapse and have to try again or go extinct trying. If you do, you’ve no interest in overrunning the whole galaxy, just seeding two or three widely-dispersed colonies sufficient to no longer have all one’s eggs in one basket, and if this happens infrequently enough a planet like Earth can believably lie fallow for 4.5Gy without being colonized. If the lifetimes of such civilizations rarely overlap SETI signals would be likewise rare, as would exploratory-but-non-colonizing ships and outposts (and a small such outpost or occasional such visits to Earth in geologically remote times might not have left detectable residues, especially given any deliberate effort to limit disturbance of what they were observing).
How do you justify this idea that it’s “rapid”, rather than “slow”?
The elapsed time between “first stable bodies of liquid water” and “first bacteria” appears to have been effectively, on geological timescales, instantaneous. And I don’t mean “first replicator”, I mean “first bacteria“, i.e. way more complex and sophisticated than the simplest “wild replicator” plausibly would have been. Bacteria cannot possibly be the direct next step after abiogenesis. It simply doesn’t look like there was even close to enough time for a more basic replicating system to have evolved into LUCA … unless that evolution happened before it landed on Earth. (It took 2Gy for LUCA’s descendants to invent membrane-bound organelles, for Christ’s sake!)
OK. So, here’s a thought.
Is the universe in its early days, or its latter days?
The latter. Maybe 75-80% of all the stars that will form during the stelliferous era already have. Perhaps even more.
Back when, a shitload of stuff happened quickly, much more so than nowadays.
The quicker (and more likely to happen) things go, the “faster” the time flow, no?
(Is it really how many interactions per unit time, or is that the converse of how much time for a given number of events?)
That argument actually favors panspermia. a) Star formation was faster then than now, so the universe was making more Earths, more comets, and more stabs at “first replicator birth” then, overall. But b) Earth was colder (faint early sun), so chemical stuff (like said replicator-search) ran slower here than it would in the present day, particularly before suitable catalysts had been discovered/had evolved yet. Slower earth, faster rest of the universe overall favors off-earth origins.
Pournelle estimates that for what the Iraq war has cost so far, the United States could have paid for a network of nuclear power stations sufficient to achieve energy independence, and bankrupt the Arabs for once and for all.
(Of course it would be nuclear, not renewables, from that grizzled old Nazi.) Buh-buh-but … how would that have kept Northrup-Grummann’s gravy train on the tracks? Or Lockheed-Martins? Or Boeing’s? …
Lotharloo@212: Biden can campaign very easily. All he has to do is say “Dobbs. Project 2025. Supreme Court.” over and over again and he’s won. Just make Republicans lie in the bed they’ve made and it’s game f*cking over right there.
In any event, if a candidate can still read from a teleprompter, they can campaign … and even just on that score, advantage: Biden.
Lynna@213:
He added that “there was no concussive effect from the bullet” because it was far enough from Trump’s head.
I’m sure it also helped that there was nothing in there for it to concuss. :)
@222:
[When] they move on to other enemies on their list. It is very difficult to say how it would stop.
It would stop when they were bombed into submission, and not a minute sooner. Just look at 1945 Berlin.
If this isn’t nipped in the bud now, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, will die. Trump must lose in November, go to prison, or die, and must not lose in November only to weasel his way in anyway like he tried to last time.
Even that just kicks the can down the road. His followers will be fractured, but may eventually unite behind a new would-be Führer, perhaps a more competent, more dangerous one. I don’t know what to do to forestall that.
John Moralessays
Bekenstein Bound, I do very much appreciate your engagement.
This is the sort of discussion I very much enjoy.
We can “tell” quite a bit.
Sure. But not all.
Remember Newtonian mechanics?
OK, that doesn’t rule out small visitations or temporary outposts that didn’t chance to fossilize, or were even careful to limit or avoid contamination, but it certainly appears to rule out world conquest and large scale industrialization.
Indeed. “appears” being the operative word. ;)
Hey, how if one could somehow modulate neutrinos, as an example?
We can do that, to a very limited extent with poor efficiency.
Really? Not like I keep up or anything, but that’s news to me.
(Citation, perhaps?)
Now you’re getting way out there.
Indeed. Thus my original remark about anthropomorphism.
If the universe of possibility is not exhausted, that “out there” remains.
The whole thing is also, in a way, entirely beside the point. It might as well take place in a parallel universe: never the twain shall meet, outside of some entirely hypothetical high energy physics situations.
If you can’t rule it out other than by appealing to an unlikelihood argument, you’ve already conceded the possibility.
(Remember the dictum Doyle put into Sherlock’s mouth?)
How do you justify this idea that it’s “rapid”, rather than “slow”?
The elapsed time between “first stable bodies of liquid water” and “first bacteria” appears to have been effectively, on geological timescales, instantaneous.
My emphasis.
(Need I reiterate?)
The latter. Maybe 75-80% of all the stars that will form during the stelliferous era already have. Perhaps even more.
No, I’m serious. He retweeted that himself, not merely allowed it on his platform, so no Section 230 safe harbors for him, and I’m pretty damn sure that uttering a death threat at the sitting President is against the law.
Such a high-profile arrest would send a clear message that dangerous and illegal violent rhetoric from Republicans won’t be tolerated. Republicans claim to be big believers in “law and order” … time to speak to them in a language they allegedly understand.
John Moralessays
BTW, I like the conceit that biological life is a precursor to proper life.
[…] it doesn’t explain the lack of colonization though, which is arguably the bigger issue.
If ever there was a prime example of anthropomorphism, here it is.
Why colonise?
Any amount of gross matter is available in any reasonable solar system.
As is energy.
(Seriously. Stop thinking like a monkey!)
Bekenstein Boundsays
I think we’re arguing past each other here.
Non-baryonic and otherwise non-visible forms of life could well exist.
At the same time, the Fermi question is “why hasn’t something somewhat resembling us, or self-replicating robots, or suchlike already long since overrun our own cosmic neck of the woods, or at least made a big enough mess or noise that we’ve noticed it?” And again I suspect the answer is that you don’t get that level of capability without first learning to live within planetary bounds, suffering repeated overshoot-and-collapse boom-bust cycles until either that sinks in or you get unlucky and don’t survive the next bust phase of the cycle. And once you have learned that (we are so close, we have contraception and the ideas of Malthus and Turchin ferkrissake, if we can just get this damn capitalism fever-dream to break…) you might have no desire to rampage across the galaxy converting every scrap of real-estate into more copies of patches of Kenyan savannah or lumps of computronium or whatever; just enough bits, scattered widely enough, to Ragnarök-proof the stuff you value. A couple of off-site backups as it were.
But no, I was referring to the number of interactions per unit time as a metric for time
By that metric, the universe is winding down, getting slower the slower it forms new stars and the farther apart everything gets.
A consistent picture is emerging, whereby the star-formation rate density
peaked approximately 3.5 Gyr after the Big Bang, at z ≈ 1.9, and declined
exponentially at later times, with an e-folding timescale of 3.9 Gyr.
An e-folding timescale of 3.9Gy corresponds to a half-life of 2.7Gy (3.9 ln 2 to be precise). Of all the stars that will ever form later than 3.5Gy ATB, half formed by 6.2Gy, three-quarters by 8.9, seven-eighths by 11.6, and by now it is over 90%. Actually worse than my earlier off-the-cuff estimate. As far as star forming is concerned less than 10% of the universe’s history is left unelapsed … even if some of those stars will linger for a very long time, and a handful will even not be born yet for a very long time. It follows that, artificial megastructures or other such hypotheticals aside, probably over 90% of all the real estate that will ever exist already does (and much of that was blown up or has been cooked or frozen permanently, too).
This cosmos’s glory days are firmly in the rear view mirror and already were when the first smart-enough primate looked up at the night sky and wondered what those bright specks were rather than just seeing them as an inexplicable, occasionally-useful backdrop for everything actually important that ever happened.
That leads to another unusual but disturbingly plausible explanation for Fermi: we’re late to the party, and all the other guests have left. (But where is the mess? The soiled cocktail napkins, the unfinished drink or dessert here and there, the somewhat disarranged furniture, that one drunk guy curled up in a pool of his own vomit in the alley outside? The lack of technosignatures is still hard to explain, unless the party is so long over that most of those have crumbled to dust or been fried too.)
birgerjohanssonsays
Not as famous as the BMP, but important for the Russians.
“MT-LBs Quickly Approaching Zero at Russian Storage Depots”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=KSvawAjav1k
John Moralessays
BB, fair enough.
Dunno about past each other as such; I can be pedantic, at times.
At the same time, the Fermi question is “why hasn’t something somewhat resembling us, or self-replicating robots, or suchlike already long since overrun our own cosmic neck of the woods, or at least made a big enough mess or noise that we’ve noticed it?”
Perhaps a bit facetiously, if it’s something somewhat resembling us, then it’s just physically impossible.
I mean, it is for us, no? :)
—
Anyway. Surely we can agree that intergalactic colonisation is right out.
(Me, I think interstellar colonisation sounds plain silly, and I too am a monkey!)
KGsays
Surely we can agree that intergalactic colonisation is right out. John Morales @243
I see no reason to agree with that.
John Moralessays
I love this.
By that metric, the universe is winding down, getting slower the slower it forms new stars and the farther apart everything gets.
Ah, but it’s monotonic, no?
Also: “The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.”
John Moralessays
That leads to another unusual but disturbingly plausible explanation for Fermi: we’re late to the party, and all the other guests have left.
Begging the question, there.
Also, it’s a meta-paradox, no?
(Had guests been around, there would not be a Fermi paradox.
But there is, so guests can’t have been there.)
KGsays
Bekenstein Bound@241,
Planets and life anything like ours depend on prior generations of stars ending in supernova explosions, creating and scattering elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium that made up the vast majority of matter in the early universe.
John Moralessays
KG:
I see no reason to agree with that.
I like that you don’t want to commit to actually disagreeing with that.
I admit, other than the energy cost and the time cost and the resource cost and the future technology wishlist, I see no other reasons.
But I do see those reasons.
KGsays
Why colonise?
Any amount of gross matter is available in any reasonable solar system.
As is energy. – John Morales@240
Any amount?? Consider exponential growth.
As for “Why colonise?”, it only takes one technoculture capable of sending out Von Neumann probes or something functionally similar to decide to do so and your galaxy would be full of them within a few hundred million years at most. So if such technocultures arise frequently, you need some explanation for the failure to do so that applies universally.
KGsays
Perhaps you should quit ‘splaining and listen to what nonwhite Democrats are saying, from AOC down to the rank and file.
They are saying that a) they want Biden and b) the push to oust Biden is astroturf, not grass roots. – Beckenstein Bound@233
Perhaps you should quit being a condescending arsehole (if you can – I’ve seen no evidence of that ability yet), and answer my arguments.
John Moralessays
KG, tsk.
Why colonise?
Any amount of gross matter is available in any reasonable solar system.
As is energy. – John Morales@240
Any amount?? Consider exponential growth.
Um, I did not mean “an infinite amount”, only that any typical solar system has, like, a shitload of mass.
(Ours does, no?)
As for “Why colonise?”, it only takes one technoculture capable of sending out Von Neumann probes or something functionally similar to decide to do so and your galaxy would be full of them within a few hundred million years at most.
Um, having machines building machines somewhere is hardly colonising that somewhere, is it?
That’s just exploration.
(You do know to what ‘colonisation’ refers, surely!)
John Moralessays
KG:
So if such technocultures arise frequently, you need some explanation for the failure to do so that applies universally.
If, eh?
Well then, in that vein, I counter that if such technocultures don’t arise, there is no need for an explanation for the failure to do.
—
Seriously, consider the energy requirement for even a starwisp.
(Beyond our reach, as of 2024)
John Moralessays
For anyone who wants to colonise explore the galaxy via AI drollery, an oldie but a goodie:
Um. Fraught waters, but clarification is never bad, IMO.
BB, are you Black?
KGsays
John Morales,
#248
I suggest we have fuck-all idea what a galactic-scale technoculture could do, or would choose to do, if one came into existence.
#250
“Any amount” means as much as could possibly be wanted, not just “a shitload”. And considering that exponential growth at 2% p.a. produces a doubling in around 35 years, so approximately a billionfold increase in a millennium, a shitload could be used up pretty soon.
#251
Um, having machines building machines somewhere is hardly colonising that somewhere, is it?
Of course it is, if the technoculture has actually become a machine culture. But there’s no need to assume that whatever is sent out is a “machine” in anything like the sense we’d use that term of current technology. It could be partly or wholly biological in origin, grown rather than constructed, etc.
#252
I counter that if such technocultures don’t arise, there is no need for an explanation for the failure to do.
Of course. I think it likely that they are very rare, if not actually non-existent (our own is clearly not yet capable of sending out Von Neumann probes). I suspect life is quite common, but anything with more anatomical and behavioural complexity than bacteria very rare, that once such arises it is quite likely to give rise to a technoculture, but that these commonly discover capitalism and swiftly destroy themselves.
John Moralessays
This is fun, KG.
#248
I suggest we have fuck-all idea what a galactic-scale technoculture could do, or would choose to do, if one came into existence.
#250
“Any amount” means as much as could possibly be wanted, not just “a shitload”. And considering that exponential growth at 2% p.a. produces a doubling in around 35 years, so approximately a billionfold increase in a millennium, a shitload could be used up pretty soon.
I suggest that a galactic-scale technoculture is just a stupid conceit that feeble monkey-minds imagine is possible.
(cf. Douglas Adams)
Right, so we use up all the resources of planet Earth. The core is apparently rich in iron, no?
Then we dismantle the remaining mass in the Solar System.
Heh.
cf. Accelerando
As events progress in Accelerando, the planets of the Solar System are dismantled over time to form a Matrioshka brain, a vast solar-powered computational device inhabited by minds inconceivably more advanced and complex than naturally evolved intelligences such as human beings. This proves to be a normal stage in the life-cycle of an inhabited solar system; the galaxies are revealed to be filled with such Matrioshka brains. Intelligent consciousnesses outside of Matrioshka brains may communicate via wormhole networks.
Of course it is, if the technoculture has actually become a machine culture.
(Universe of possibility, remember? Gotta get exhausted)
John Moralessays
[It’s quite detailed. The waste heat from the inner layers power the outer layers.
And trillions of uploaded minds–exponentiation for the win!–live in the Matrix]
John Moralessays
Surely we agree that it’s a fair way from “darn I’ve used up all the mass in the solar system so I need to go to other solar systems” to “darn I’ve used up all the mass in the galaxy so I need to go to other galaxies”.
(Lotsa orders of magnitude, there)
KGsays
I suggest that a galactic-scale technoculture is just a stupid conceit that feeble monkey-minds imagine is possible. John Morales@256
I suggest you provide an argument for that, which you have so far conspicuously failed to do. And while you may admit to having a feeble monkey-mind, you should beware of invalid generalisation from a limited number of cases :-p
KGsays
John Morales@258,
Yes, it’s a fair way, but as you were arguing earlier, the future is long.
KGsays
Incidentally, yes, I’ve read Accelerando – which I took to be an amusing satire on neoliberalism.
John Moralessays
KnockGoats,
I suggest you provide an argument for that, which you have so far conspicuously failed to do.
Heh heh.
I was echoing your own phrasing, KG.
Obs, I can’t give an argument for that; it is merely my opinion.
Point being, you can’t give an argument for the contrary position, either.
Well, we could both adduce stupid types of arguments, where the premises are–ahem-just premised, rather than known. But that’s surely rather futile.
You know as well as I that the validity of an argument is not the soundness of that argument, and in this case the premises are not yet sufficiently established.
And while you may admit to having a feeble monkey-mind, you should beware of invalid generalisation from a limited number of cases :-p
Indeed I am, I am indeed.
To what supposed generalisation do you mean to refer?
(Care to quote me?)
Again: If the universe of possibility is not exhausted, that “out there” remains.
That is not a generalisation, but it is my very claim.
(Has been, all along)
John Moralessays
KG, nice.
My favourite conceit in that work was the channel timing attack to determine whether we live in a simulation.
KGsays
John Morales@262,
My position on the possibility/likelihood of intergalactic colonisation is: “Dunno”. I don’t think that requires an argument.
John Moralessays
My position on the possibility/likelihood of intergalactic colonisation is: “Dunno”. I don’t think that requires an argument.
Nothing wrong with admitting to ignorance.
My position on the possibility/likelihood of intergalactic colonisation is: “Whyever?”. I don’t think that requires an argument.
John Moralessays
Seriously.
What are you gonna get in another galaxy that you can’t get in your own?
(And why would you want it, anyway? A long way to go, no?)
John Moralessays
Far out!
I am rather amused when people talk about galaxies as if they were stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy and is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224. Andromeda has a D25 isophotal diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years)[8] and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth.
At his RNC speech on Thursday, Trump repeated his bizarre and farcical claim that migrants are “coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before,” before once again pledging “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country—even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower many years ago.” This latter bit is an explicit reference to Operation Wetback (yes, that was its real name), a 1954 initiative to round up and deport hundreds of thousands of presumed Mexican immigrants that not only violated their civil and human rights but, historians agree, also targeted U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. That was a military-style operation using an armed Border Patrol, but Trump seems enthusiastic to go whole hog and just use the military.
This shockingly fascistic design hasn’t really come into the public consciousness for a number of reasons, including its sheer breadth, but also because it’s easy to wave away as patently illegal. Troops are prohibited from conducting any domestic law enforcement under the longtime principle known as Posse Comitatus, and so this plan is dead before it can start, right?
Sort of. That picture has now been complicated by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, in which the justices decided that presidents are fully immune from prosecution for any conduct that involves a “core constitutional power.” In fact, such official actions can’t even be used as evidence in other investigations.
Regarding supercivilisations, Stanislaw Lem’s classic short novel His Master’s Voice tells the story of how humanity accidentally intercepts a message that is clearly intended for a higher-level civilisation than our own.
An enormous budget (not at all motivated by hopes for military-app tech, honest) is allocated to the task of untangling the message.
birgerjohanssonsays
Farron Cousins:
“Trump’s Idiot Sons Went Crazy And Forced Him To Pick JD Vance As Running Mate”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=suIi_wzBegA
This crowd remind me of the late-stage tories.
While most individuals are not personally responsible for addressing CloudStrike-related computer outages, the incident is ripe for exploitation because some of the IT professionals working on remediation could be desperate for solutions. In most cases, the fix for impacted computers involves individually booting and correcting each one—a potentially time-consuming and logistically difficult process. And for small-business owners who don’t have access to extensive IT expertise, the challenge may be particularly daunting.
Researchers, including those from CrowdStrike intelligence, have thus far seen attackers sending phishing emails or making phone calls where they pretend to be CrowdStrike support staff and selling software tools that claim to automate the process of recovering from the faulty software update. Some attackers are also pretending to be researchers and claiming to have special information vital to recovery—that the situation is actually the result of a cyberattack, which it’s not.
CrowdStrike emphasizes that customers should confirm that they are communicating with legitimate company staff members and only trust the company’s official corporate communications.
One of the last remaining birthing units in southern Alabama will close next month to qualify for federal funding that will save the hospital’s emergency services, but doctors warn the move may cost newborns and pregnant patients essential access to obstetric care.
Nestled in rural Clarke County, the small, nonprofit Grove Hill Memorial Hospital will discontinue its labor and delivery services in mid-August, the governing board announced earlier this month.
The board said closure was necessary for the hospital to qualify for much needed federal funding that is designated for rural emergency hospitals, defined as facilities with fewer than 50 beds that provide 24/7 emergency care and no inpatient services, including obstetrics.
But the federal funding comes at a steep cost. The closure marks the fourth labor and delivery unit to close statewide in less than a year, including a facility in a neighboring county that referred many patients to Grove Hill after closing in November.
In the coming months, a large part of southern Alabama will no longer have close access to hospital obstetric delivery services.
Dr. Max Rogers, the obstetrician-gynecologist who runs the labor and delivery unit at Grove Hill Memorial, sees an average of 300 women a month and delivers 10 to 15 babies. Rogers said the lack of local care could put some mothers and babies at risk.
“I used to say that outcomes are gonna be worse,” Rogers said. “And that’s a nice, polite euphemism for ‘babies are going to die and mothers are going to die in emergency rooms’ because of a lack of prenatal care and a lack of obstetrical care.”
This would apply to a small but significant fraction of births involving serious complications. Although emergency rooms are equipped to handle the vast majority of normal births, some conditions require rapid transportation to a facility with a doctor qualified to operate on pregnant patients, Rogers said.
Anna Retic, 26, has been driving 45 minutes from her home near Pine Hill to Grove Hill for all seven months of her pregnancy because it was the closest facility offering both birthing and prenatal services.
She considered herself lucky. She works as a bank teller and is able to take time off to make the trip to her monthly appointments, which were scheduled to increase to once every two weeks as her October delivery date gets closer.
Now, the closest option for her to give birth is a hospital almost twice as far away.
“It’s crazy,” Retic said. “If you’re in labor, you have to rush two hours away, you might have that baby in the car. I don’t know. I pray that doesn’t happen to me.”
Alabama’s delivery health outcomes already lag far behind the rest of the country. One study found Alabama had a maternal mortality rate of 64.63 deaths per 100,000 births between 2018 and 2021, nearly double the national rate of 34.09 per 100,000 births. That jumps to 100.07 deaths for Black women in the state.
[…] Alabama is one of 10 states nationally that has not expanded Medicaid.
Dr. Donald Williamson, president of the Alabama Health Association, said a major challenge for rural hospitals in the region is a significant number of patients that come through the front door are uninsured.
The expansion of Medicaid would improve reimbursements and hospital revenue, Williamson said, and until then he expects more hospitals across the state to make the same difficult decision made at Grove Hill.
Nationwide, 28 hospitals have converted to the rural emergency designation since the program was rolled out in 2023, according to the University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center for Health Services Research. But Grove Hill will be the first that will have to close a labor and delivery unit to become a rural emergency hospital, according to the National Rural Health Association.
While the program has offered a unique lifeline to rural hospitals on the brink of collapse, experts and legislators have warned it might come at the cost of essential services like inpatient psychiatric or other rehabilitative care.
U.S. Senators Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, and Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, introduced legislation in May to allow rural emergency hospitals to maintain some inpatient services, including obstetrics.
Ultimately, Rogers in Grove Hill said he supports the conversion to a rural emergency hospital, even if the change means closing the obstetrics department where he has formed close relationships with many patients. He believes it is the hospital’s only financial option and important in maintaining emergency services.
Still, Rogers has significant concerns about the future of the federal program.
“Every single one of us needs to understand that while this REH status may protect a lot of rural hospitals, it’s coming with a price. And that’s what I don’t want everybody to gloss over,” he said.
[…] The conservative rollback of child labor protections is being driven by a think tank called the Foundation for Government Accountability, according to The Washington Post. This Florida-based group, funded by Republican mega-donors, designed the law eliminating work permits and age verification in Arkansas, as well as the law in Iowa that allows 14-year-olds to work night shifts and 15-year-olds to work assembly lines. […] And in Florida, the group worked with lawmakers on a bill to roll back protections from 1913 on the number of hours that children can work.
[…] As it turns out, conservatives were right: Children do need protection. However, the real threat doesn’t come from books or the LGBTQ+ community. It comes from Republican lawmakers themselves.
[…] Since 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor has seen a 69% increase in children being employed illegally by companies. (These figures likely represent only a fraction of the actual violations.) And elected Republicans’ response to this crisis has been to introduce bills and pass legislation—to help out those companies. Since 2021, Republican lawmakers have pushed over 60 bills to dismantle critical protections for child workers. These bills would allow employers to have children work longer hours, to take away child workers’ lunch breaks, and to even permit kids to work jobs previously deemed too dangerous. […]
StevoRsays
@266. John Morales : “Seriously. What are you gonna get in another galaxy that you can’t get in your own?”
According to StarBlazers*, the Cosmo-DNA that repairs all the damage the Gamilons did to Earth.
.* A.k.a. Space Battlecruiser** Yamato, the old 80’s cartoon show* that took the idea of a spaceship rather literally…
Day One – Vance on tour with Felon; Donald Trump refers to him as ‘JD Wentworth’.
Imagine the wall-to-wall coverage for every Biden gaffe. Trump’s gaffe in which he apparently could not remember his running mate’s name gets almost no coverage.
[…] the former president used his Saturday speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to call President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris names, refer to Biden’s allies as “thugs,” argue without evidence that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election, and characterize migrants as coming from prisons, jails and mental institutions.
The bombastic, expressive intonation that has defined Trump’s political career returned, as well as his penchant for name-calling, referring to Biden as “Crooked Joe,” “feeble old guy,” “low IQ” and “stupid,” and Harris as “Laughin’ Kamala,” “crazy” and “nuts.”
He referred to Democrats as “enemies of the democracy” and bemoaned the “grossly incompetent people running our country.”
Trump railed against migrants, arguing that the U.S. was a “dumping ground” for the world, which is “laughing at us.” He called for a “big deportation” to “get them the hell out.”
The former president has long claimed without evidence that Democrats committed fraud in 2020, a false message that he reiterated on Saturday.
“That’s the only thing they’re good at,” he said, adding later that “they have no shame whatsoever.”
The name-calling and divisive rhetoric came just days after Trump said in his Republican National Convention acceptance speech that “the discord and division in our society must be healed.”[…]
A supporter at Trump’s rally summed up the former president’s running mate decision: “If Trump trusts him, I trust him,” Yvonne Beadle from Algonac, Michigan, told NBC News.
“I don’t know much about him,” said Mandie Kirkpatrick from Ludington, Michigan. “Of course there’s a lot of things flying around about him. I trust Trump’s decision, so if he says he’s good, then I trust that.”
[So Trump’s cult followers have already blocked any bad news they might be hearing about JD Vance.]
[…] Polling indicates that Biden and Trump remained locked in a tight race in battleground states. A July CBS News/YouGov poll found that in battleground states, Biden polled at 48% and Trump at 51%, though the results were within the margin of error.
What early bacteria? Fossils? Those could be micelles. Maybe early critters took advantage of non-enzymatically produced material to hide in, or maybe it was like spiderlings “ballooning”. Switch to making featureless balloons to move to new mineral systems.
Unless there is a piece of data I’m missing I don’t trust fossils like that.
President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 race, a stunning end to a 50-year-long political career that culminated in caving to pressure by fellow Democrats to end his bid for reelection, which never fully recovered from an abysmal debate performance on June 27.
Biden, 81, announced Sunday he will no longer seek another four years in office […]
The president said he would address the nation later in the week about his decision. He did not immediately endorse Vice President Harris or any other candidate to be the party’s nominee in November.
“For now let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected,” Biden wrote. “I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.” […]
If the Dems had asked Carter to hand the election over to his veep once it was clear the hostage rescue in Iran had failed, you and the world could have been saved Ronal Reagan and 40 years of Republican ideological hegemony.
Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, is an anti-abortion extremist, but like the rest of the GOP, he’s doing his damnedest to cover that fact up. First, he scrapped the anti-abortion screed from the website for his Senate campaign, then he falsely insisted Democrats and the media were twisting his words on abortion.
Before he was Republicans’ VP nominee, Vance declared on his website:
I am 100 percent pro-life, and believe that abortion has turned our society into a place where we see children as an inconvenience to be thrown away rather than a blessing to be nurtured. Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family.
Get that? “Eliminating abortion.” That’s his goal.
During an interview at the Republican National Convention on Monday, Vance told Fox News host Sean Hannity, “The Democrats have completely twisted my words” about whether he believes a pro-abortion-rights society thinks children are inconveniences. But what Democrats have pointed out is that he extends that label to pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. Abortions that he doesn’t think should be allowed.
Society shouldn’t view those pregnancies as inconvenient, he said in a 2021 interview, explaining his support for a federal ban on abortion without exceptions for rape and incest.
“I think two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live.”
There are also Vance’s words when he signed onto a letter telling Attorney General Merrick Garland to use the dormant 1873 Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide by ending access to abortion pills, calling for the prosecution of physicians, pharmacists, and others “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws” by providing the drugs through the mail.
Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota doesn’t believe Vance is backing away from his extreme position. “The threat that a future Trump-Vance administration will misuse Comstock to ban abortion nationwide is now a five-alarm fire,” she told the Washington Post. Smith is the lead sponsor in an effort to repeal the Comstock Act.
She’s likely right. The blueprint for a Trump-Vance administration is already written in Project 2025, which includes the resurrection of that ancient law. It is absolutely their intent to use it to ban abortion.
[…] Now Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, which is the primary force behind Project 2025, is trying to claim that the letter Vance signed onto to invoke the Comstock Act isn’t about banning abortion but “will likely be demagogued by the left to falsely claim it will lead to a national ban on access to chemical abortion pills,” Severino said.
This is part and parcel of the supposed softening of anti-abortion language in the policy platform Trump essentially dictated and the Republican National Committee adopted. It leaves out any mention of “unborn children” but embraces the radical position that the 14th Amendment gives full personhood rights starting with fertilized eggs.
Trump himself is insisting he wouldn’t need to sign a nationwide abortion ban, because his Supreme Court came up with the solution “that all legal scholars—both sides—wanted, and, in fact, demanded”—which is to say, leaving it up to the states to decide. Never mind that all legal scholars were definitely not demanding that. It also eludes the real threat: Trump could invoke the Comstock Act and ban abortion nationwide by fiat.
No Republican at the convention wanted to talk about abortion and the extreme position they have embraced. But don’t be fooled by the cover-up that Trump, Vance, or the Heritage Foundation are attempting.
At his latest rally, Trump also claimed that the “radical right” is behind Project 2025. What Bullshit. Trump is trying to back away from Project 2025. Both Trump and Vance are gaslighting the voters about their plans regarding abortion, and regarding everything in Project 2025.. They will repeatedly lie about it. Expect that.
Whatever the top Ds do they better do it competently. A contrast between Trump and whoever shouldn’t be hard. They have lots of viscerally awful things they can point out, if lots of the rest of the Ds and media continue picking at and hand-wringing over irrelevancies instead of focusing that on something useful I’ll be practicing such a shaming…if Trump loses or not.
[…] Biden just endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the new Democratic nominee.
“I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in a statement on X. “Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., says Vice President Kamala Harris should lead the Democratic party forward in his first public statement posted to X since Biden dropped out of the race.
“Now that President Biden has suspended his campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is the most qualified and best choice to lead us forward,” he said. […]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer praised President Joe Biden after he announced the decision to not seek a second term.
“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being. His decision of course was not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
“Joe, today shows you are a true patriot and great American,” Schumer said.
Here’s where we find out who had honest and misguided hand-wringing, and who has the urge that they’ll find something, anything to whine about. I don’t have any problems voting for Harris.
It’s like the paranoia about voter fraud. Without something real paranoia will never be satisfied. Get rid of mail in ballots and their fear is still there because it didn’t have a real basis to begin with.
Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a Nation.
Today, America has the strongest economy in the world. We’ve made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors, and in expanding affordable health care to a record number of Americans. We’ve provided critically needed care to a million veterans exposed to toxic substances. Passed the first gun safety law in 30 years. Appointed the first African American woman to the Supreme Court. And passed the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world. America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.
I know none of this could have done without you, the American people. Together, we overcame a once in a century pandemic and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.
It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.
I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision.
For now, let me express my deepest gratitude to all those who have worked so hard to see me reelected.I want to thank Vice President Kamala Harris for being an extraordinary partner in all this work. And let me express my heartfelt appreciation to the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me.
I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can’t do – when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America.
Joe Biden
Less than 30 minutes after announcing he would end his campaign, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.
So, yeah … what else did we expect from Hair Furor:
In a phone call with CNN minutes after Biden announced his exit from the race, Trump described Biden as “the worst president in the history of our country.”
A fucking lie.
Also from CNN:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer thanked President Joe Biden in a social media post moments after he announced he would not seek reelection in 2024. Whitmer also said her role in the election “will remain the same: doing everything I can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump,” she wrote in an X post.
“President Biden is a great public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes to defeat Donald Trump. His remarkable work to lower prescription drug costs, fix the damn roads, bring supply chains home, address climate change, and ensure America’s global leadership over decades will go down in history.”
Whitmer said Trump’s agenda of “raising families’ costs, banning abortion nationwide, and abusing the power of the White House to settle his own scores is completely wrong for Michigan.”
MSNBC pundit: “Biden was 100% in until he was 100% out.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat running for reelection in battleground Wisconsin, thanked President Joe Biden for making the decision to not seek reelection.
“It has been an honor to work with Joe Biden to deliver real, meaningful change for working Wisconsinites across our state. Today, seniors are paying less for their prescription drugs, our state has been put to work rebuilding our infrastructure, and millions of Wisconsinites with preexisting conditions have health care coverage because of the work we’ve done together,” she said in a statement.
“Throughout all of that work, I’ve been inspired by his decency, integrity, and dedication to service, and I am deeply grateful for that. Thank you, President Biden,” she continued.
Trump just wrote in a post on Truth Social that “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!”
Trump claimed that Biden “attained” the job as president “by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement.”
“All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t — And now, look what he’s done to our Country, with millions of people coming across our Border, totally unchecked and unvetted, many from prisons, mental institutions, and record numbers of terrorists,” Trump said.
“We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Quoted text is from NBC.
President Biden just made a decision that he thought was best for the country. Newsom agrees:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom praised Biden in the wake of the president’s announcement that he will not be seeking re-election.
In a post on X, the Democratic governor described Biden as a leader who delivered “astonishing results for all Americans” and called him a history-making president.
“He will go down in history as one of the most impactful and selfless presidents,” Newsom said. “Thank you, @JoeBiden.”
Various GOP assholes and Trump sycophants are not satisfied with President Biden’s announcement that he will step out of the 2024 Presidential race. The Republican doofuses are now demanding that Biden resign immediately.
Resigning immediately would be a mistake, in my opinion. We need time to transition to Kamala Harris in an orderly way. We have that opportunity, why not take it.
tomhsays
Republicans are so predictable.
Speaker Mike Johnson called for President Biden to resign from office if he is not capable of running for re-election. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” Johnson wrote on X.
Yeah, now all the doofuses are piling on. Looks like they have decided what their spin and propaganda will be for the foreseeable future:
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., called on Biden to resign as president in after arguing that Democrats “forced” him off the 2024 ballot.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” Johnson said. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”
tomh @305, yep. All too true. And now we can expect them to sound every misogynistic and racist dog whistle they have concerning Kamala Harris.
Looks like lots of Democrats are happy to back Kamala Harris:
Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said in a statement that Harris has “played a critical role in the progress we’ve made” and has demonstrated she can lead the Democratic Party.
“In the Senate, I saw firsthand what a fierce, committed, and effective champion Kamala is for the American people,” she said. “I’m proud to call Vice President Harris a friend and colleague, and I look forward to doing everything in my power to get her elected to the White House, so we can continue building on the progress of the last four years.”
Hirono, who served in the House during the last two years that Biden served in the Senate, said that she’s “extremely grateful for Joe Biden’s service to our country over the past five decades, and his leadership over the last four years.”
“As the only person to have defeated Donald Trump, President Biden understands as well as anybody how high the stakes are this November, and I respect his decision to pass the baton,” said Hirono, who was not among the few Senate Democrats who had publicly called on Biden to drop out.
Quoted text is from NBC.
birgerjohanssonsays
You know, the current batch of Royalists – no longer Republicans- are as predictable as the rulers of Russia or North Korea.
They spew filth that has been reused again and again.
I’m not a Democrat but I’m happy to support Harris. In fact, I could even get excited about that campaign. I’ve just been reading about possible running mates. Sen. Mark Kelly from AZ seems like he’d potentially be a good pick.
tomhsays
@ #309
“Sen. Mark Kelly from AZ seems like he’d potentially be a good pick.”
That is a good idea!
tomhsays
NYT:
An organization to watch carefully right now — Emily’s List. The Democratic big-money group has been a fierce defender of Harris over the years, and they could play a key role in getting big money behind a Harris presidential campaign.
birgerjohanssonsays
I know Maher is an asshole but this rant is fucking perfect.
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” – Liar Johnson
That obviously doesn’t follow: Biden could be fit to serve now*, but doubt whether he has four more years of being so. I hope the Democrats will swiftly get behind Harris, although it might be best nonetheless to have an open convention, at which I’m confident she would win easily.
Johnson is not running for the presidency either, but unlike Biden he has no legislative successes so he can bugger off to wherever he came from.
.
I am not even American but these petty bullies are incredibly annoying.
Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackaon Lee died this weekend and Laura Loomer (R) had some disgusting comments about it, starts at the five-minute mark.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sorry!
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Kamala Harris was on my short list in 2020, and her experience as V.P. helps her stature. I agree that Senator Mark Kelly would be a good running mate on first inspection.
Former President Barack Obama released a statement:
Joe Biden has been one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me. Today, we’ve also been reminded — again — that he’s a patriot of the highest order.
Sixteen years ago, when I began my search for a vice president, I knew about Joe’s remarkable career in public service. But what I came to admire even more was his character — his deep empathy and hard-earned resilience; his fundamental decency and belief that everyone counts.
Since taking office, President Biden has displayed that character again and again. He helped end the pandemic, created millions of jobs, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, passed the first major piece of gun safety legislation in 30 years, made the biggest investment to address climate change in history, and fought to ensure the rights of working people to organize for fair wages and benefits. Internationally, he restored America’s standing in the world, revitalized NATO, and mobilized the world to stand up against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
More than that, President Biden pointed us away from the four years of chaos, falsehood, and division that had characterized Donald Trump’s administration. Through his policies and his example, Joe has reminded us of who we are at our best — a country committed to old-fashioned values like trust and honesty, kindness and hard work; a country that believes in democracy, rule of law, and accountability; a country that insists that everyone, no matter who they are, has a voice and deserves a chance at a better life.
This outstanding track record gave President Biden every right to run for re-election and finish the job he started. Joe understands better than anyone the stakes in this election — how everything he has fought for throughout his life, and everything that the Democratic Party stands for, will be at risk if we allow Donald Trump back in the White House and give Republicans control of Congress.
I also know Joe has never backed down from a fight. For him to look at the political landscape and decide that he should pass the torch to a new nominee is surely one of the toughest in his life. But I know he wouldn’t make this decision unless he believed it was right for America. It’s a testament to Joe Biden’s love of country — and a historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders will do well to follow.
We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges. I believe that Joe Biden’s vision of a generous, prosperous, and united America that provides opportunity for everyone will be on full display at the Democratic Convention in August. And I expect that every single one of us are prepared to carry that message of hope and progress forward into November and beyond.
For now, Michelle and I just want to express our love and gratitude to Joe and Jill for leading us so ably and courageously during these perilous times — and for their commitment to the ideals of freedom and equality that this country was founded on.
Alexander Vindman, the former director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council:
President Biden’s selfless and courageous decision to not seek reelection is humbling. His career of service and accomplish deserves the highest praise and appreciation.
As far as I know, the “virtual roll call” planned for the first week of August is still on. Instead of confirming Joe Biden’s nomination during that roll call, delegates are likely to nominate Kamala Harris. There may be a few defectors, but I don’t think there will be many. If it goes like I think it will, Kamala will be the official nominee of the Democratic Party before the convention starts in Chicago. That would be nice.
At any rate, we are likely to hear process details soon:
[…] That process will be governed by the Democratic National Convention rules committee, which has almost 200 members and is chaired by Leah Daughtry, a longtime DNC insider and rules expert, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
In a statement, Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison didn’t directly address what happens next, but said an answer would come soon.
“In short order, the American people will hear from the Democratic Party on next steps and the path forward for the nomination process,” he said. […]
More details:
[…] To be in contention to win at the convention, candidates need a petition signed by at least 300 convention delegates and need to sign the document themselves, so a draft effort cannot be run on someone else’s behalf without their explicit approval.
And to make sure one delegation doesn’t try to anoint a favorite, a petition can’t include more than 50 delegates from one state, and delegates can only sign one nominating petition.
[…] Some key Democratic Party officials appear to be coming in line behind her candidacy. Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic Party chairman, told NBC News that he’s spoken to a handful of other state party chairs who have all agreed to get behind Harris.
“Everyone I’ve talked to right now agrees that we have to unify quickly,” Martin said. “The idea of having four weeks of turning the conversation inward is not something I’m particularly excited about. The quicker we can unify our party behind a ticket, the sooner we can get this campaign moving.”
The second advantage is that Harris is the only candidate with a direct line to the Biden campaign’s bank account, which ended June with almost $96 million in the bank. That’s because her name is on all the relevant legal forms alongside Biden’s. And hours after Biden dropped out Sunday, the committee filed paperwork changing its name to “Harris for President.”
[…] Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., even essentially endorsed Harris Saturday on MSNBC, saying she felt comfortable with the idea of Biden stepping aside because Harris is “ready to step up to unite the party.”
And finally, for a party that has made democracy a central pillar of its case, Harris has a stronger claim to democratic legitimacy than any other potential candidate.
After all, a majority of Americans have already voted for her as vice president in 2020, though most were obviously looking at Biden and Trump’s names on the top of the tickets. No other potential candidate could make such a claim.
“Remember, 80 million people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 knowing that Kamala Harris would be ready to step up if needed,” Warren added. […]
The right’s response to President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will not seek reelection is absurd, cynical, and self-discrediting. Reporters should not treat the resulting opportunistic hodgepodge as if it were credible.
[…] the president said on Sunday afternoon that he would drop out.
“While it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a statement.
Biden’s decision was a blow to President Donald Trump, whose campaign was built around a run against the president and reportedly believed Biden’s nomination gave Trump the best chance of winning in November. Republicans are flailing as they grapple with the prospect of a different opponent for their historically unpopular nominee.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments before and after Biden’s announcement are instructive.
Johnson claimed on Sunday morning that replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee would be “unlawful” and suggested Republicans would litigate to keep him on the ballot if the party tried to replace him.
“I think they would run into some legal impediments in at least a few of these jurisdictions,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “I think there’ll be a compelling case to be made that that shouldn’t happen, and so I think they’ve got legal trouble. If that’s their intention, and that’s their plan. So we’ll see how it plays out.”
The argument that Democrats can’t legally choose their own nominee at the party’s convention next month don’t deserve “any credence,” according to election expert Rick Hansen: “Joe Biden is not the party’s nominee now, and states generally point to the major party’s nominee as the one whose name is on the ballot.”
But in any case, Johnson’s argument that Republicans will sue to keep Biden on the ballot logically conflicts with his argument after Biden said he was dropping out.
On Sunday afternoon, Johnson said: “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately.”
(Johnson, a key figure in Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, also now claims the Democrats “invalidated” Biden’s primary voters in an affront to the democratic process.)
So Republicans are going to sue to keep Biden on the ballot to serve as president for four more years while simultaneously claiming that he should resign his office? That’s totally incoherent, a signal of obvious political desperation. [LOL]
The right’s leaders have benefited at times from the low standards the news media sets for them. But Republicans are telegraphing that the coming days will feature an avalanche of bad faith nonsense — and that’s how reporters should treat their arguments.
After all, a majority of Americans have already voted for her as vice president in 2020, though most were obviously looking at Biden and Trump’s names on the top of the tickets. No other potential candidate could make such a claim.
And the overwhelming majority (90+%?) of Democrats voted for the ticket in the primaries this year, knowing Biden’s age. I imagine many people had assumed well before today that a vote for the ticket could well be or was essentially a vote for Harris.
Right-wing media have claimed she is a “DEI hire” and launched sexist attacks
Right-wing media figures have spent years attacking Vice President Kamala Harris with unfounded claims that she is a “DEI hire,” assertions that she is uneducated or sounds intoxicated, and other racist and sexist attacks. […]
Here are just a few examples, excerpted from a much longer list:
Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “The Democrats made their bed when they picked Kamala Harris. Have to have a woman, has to be a woman of color.” Guest Horace Cooper replied, “If the test for president is, can you cackle? Is the test, can you laugh in the middle of your statement? Can you not be ever serious? She passes with flying colors. Her own party knows that she’s incompetent.”
——————–
On The Five, Watters said Harris “gets more favorable treatment because of her race and gender.”
———————–
Fox host Laura Ingraham said that Harris “knows nothing except how to play the race card to get ahead,” adding, “Selecting a VP based solely on diversity criteria and not objective merit is not only stupid, it’s really dangerous.”
———————
Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy called Harris “the affirmative action vice president” after Harris visited a historically Black college. Duffy: “Yeah, she was not dealing with the root cause. She was at a football game, because you know, as the affirmative action vice president who was selected because she was a woman and because she was the right color, she likes to go to these things. She went to her alma mater, Howard University, a historically Black college. This is the kind of stuff she likes to do. Stuff on the border, not so much.”
————————- In a 2020 article for Newsweek, John Eastman, who would reportedly go on to play a pivotal role in then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, resurrected the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to speculate that the Oakland, California-born Harris was not a “natural born citizen” and thus ineligible for office. Newsweek later issued a lengthy editors note for the article, apologizing and acknowledging that it was being “used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia.”
————————–
Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight, right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly called Harris “Willie Brown’s bratwurst bun.” Kelly added that Harris would “do anything to get ahead.”
————————–
In 2019 when Harris was running for president, right-wing media spread a sexist smear against Harris that she had “sle[pt] [her] way to the top with Willie Brown.” Conservative actor James Woods was a major promoter of a hashtag on then-Twitter that attacked Harris as “#HorizontalHarris.”
—————————-
In a segment on Harris, Newsmax host Greg Kelly said that “she just wants to flaunt it and I think she wants to flirt.” Kelly continued, “She just kind of likes to walk around like she’s some sort of beauty queen.”
—————————–
During and immediately after the first 2020 vice presidential debate, right-wing media figures called Harris “vile,” “[B-word],” “smug,” and a “clown.”
—————————-
On Fox News’ Hannity, Newt Gingrich called Harris a “shallow, uneducated and uneducable person.”
—————————–
In an appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime, Gingrich stated that Harris “doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know how to learn anything, she’s inarticulate, and she’s not sure what the big words mean anyway.”
—————————-
Right-wing media accounts on social media, including The Federalist’s Mollie Hemmingway and The Daily Wire, circulated a deceptively-edited soundbite from an interview with Harris to accuse her of having “kindergarten-level insight.” Harris had been asked to explain the war in Ukraine in “layman’s terms”; Harris’ response was then selectively edited to include only her description of the relative sizes of the countries, which right-wing media called “child-like.”
If you didn’t know the attack lines before, now you do. Republicans will probably recycle all of those lies.
I did not include the examples of right-wingers calling Harris a “whore,” but you can get an idea of that attack by seeing what was being said about her in relation to Willie Brown.
birgerjohanssonsays
Bacteria thriving inside rocks that have been isolated very long.
“Strange Life Forms That Appeared Alive Found Inside 2 Billion Year Old Rocks”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=a04eZawA35s
Earth abides. Even if the thug wins the election he will just be another bug, gone in an instant.
If you’re just joining us, senior Democrats, including some of those who have been named as possible contenders for the Presidential or Vice-Pesidential nomination, endorsed Kamala Harris for president on Sunday, within hours of Biden announcing that he would be dropping out of the race.
And Democrats rushed to donate to the party, with $30 million raised by Sunday evening. One strategist said it might be the “greatest fundraising moment in Democratic Party history”.
Democrats quickly rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris as their likely presidential nominee Sunday in a volatile and fast-moving political situation just months before the November election.
…
Would-be challengers for the job became instant Harris supporters. Among top potential contenders, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said she won’t run, and Govs. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Roy Cooper of North Carolina all endorsed Harris on Sunday….
She’s also now been endorsed by Pramila Jayapal (Congressional Progressive Caucus chair) and AOC.
StevoRsays
Aussie ABC news on Joe Biden -as old and frailas he might be -proving he can do something Trump is totally unable to ever do and that’s a selfless act putting the intrests of his country above his own ego and desires :
What stunning if not all that surprising given past days news to wake up to.
StevoRsays
@324. Lynna, OM :
As far as I know, the “virtual roll call” planned for the first week of August is still on. Instead of confirming Joe Biden’s nomination during that roll call, delegates are likely to nominate Kamala Harris. There may be a few defectors, but I don’t think there will be many. If it goes like I think it will, Kamala will be the official nominee of the Democratic Party before the convention starts in Chicago. That would be nice.
I really hope the Democratic party now settles quickly on Kamala Harris as the nominee and backs her 100%. Unity here is absolutely vital.
I’ve heard – although not 100% sure exactly where* that the funds raised so far for the Biden-Harris camapign can only be only be accessed if Kamala Harris is the nominee. I also fear that picking anyone else or engaging in any further infighting would be fatal to the chances of the Democratic candidate, whoever they are, beating Trump. To NOT pick Harris now would very likely be catastrophic and will definitely lose the ïncumbency key as political historian and elecetion forecaster with a 100% accuracy record Allan Lichtman has noted.
I really hope the last part of that happens as Lynna says here and that there are no defectors at all and everyone in the Democratic party unites behind her. Its the best -probly only -hope they have and we all have of stopping Trump and that needs to priority number one.
Surely we can agree that intergalactic colonisation is right out.
Of course we can’t. Intergalactic colonization is easy, even assuming no fancy new physics, supermaterials, or other sneaky tricks. If you’re patient.
a) Find a star with habitable planets (or whatever) orbiting it.
b) Get it aimed at the other galaxy at thousands of kps (Shkadov thruster springs to mind)
c) Establish a sufficiently stable (and sustainable) presence around that star.
d) Wait some several hundred million years until it reaches destination galaxy.
e) Rebuild the Shkadov thruster (after that long it won’t still be intact) and decelerate until gravitational capture.
Easy, peasy … if you can build a smallish megastructure (e.g. a planet-sized mirror or so) and can retain some sort of identity or culture over those timescales.
That last might require having a hierarchy of slower and slower “angels” and “gods”, deferred to by the faster lower tiers as a cultural norm, each layer working to maintain those norms over its own characteristic timescale, and the slowest ones (perhaps in full suspension) awaiting arrival at the destination. It’s obviously vulnerable to any revolution by a faster tier against the slower tiers above it. Figuring out a way to keep it stable would be paramount (it likely requires that the slower tiers guarantee lives of abundance and safety to their next-faster neighbors in exchange for nobody rocking the boat). Karl Schroeder’s “lockstep” might provide some hints as to how something like this might be implemented in actual practice.
As for why do it? Why fly to Andromeda? Why climb Everest?
Because it is there.
There have always been plenty who need no more reason than that.
As for what Andromeda, specifically, has, that the Milky Way doesn’t, well it has a gigasun mass black hole, large enough you could spend an hour or so inside it before being spaghettified. Of what value that is, I’m not sure. More practical is likely that it has an order of magnitude more energy stored up in its ergosphere than that piddly little thing in the heart of Sag A* has to offer …
Lynna@281:
the former president used his Saturday speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to call President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris names, refer to Biden’s allies as “thugs,” argue without evidence that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election, and characterize migrants as coming from prisons, jails and mental institutions.
Hmm … must have been a day ending in “y”.
tomh@284
Biden withdraws.
I withdraw my order for a half-dozen new LED lightbulbs, then. I’m not going to need them. By the time my current crop of bulbs start burning out I’ll be glowing in the dark.
Brony@293:
Whatever the top Ds do they better do it competently.
I place an order for massive quantities of iodine pills. Better get ahead of the rush (and attendant price hikes)!
SteveoR@332:
Unity here is absolutely vital.
Say, how do you say “Which way to the fallout shelter?” in Maori? I should probably start practicing right now.
Lynna@325:
Republicans are telegraphing that the coming days will feature an avalanche of bad faith nonsense
So, they won’t be any different than they otherwise would have been. Okay, then …
KGsays
I’ve heard – although not 100% sure exactly where* that the funds raised so far for the Biden-Harris camapign can only be only be accessed if Kamala Harris is the nominee. – StevoR@332
That appears to be the case, because the funds were raised for Biden-Harris. But in any case, there’s reportedly been a surge in donations – $50m since Biden’s announcement.
BTW I am European. I would not be aware Harris has some non-WASP ancestors if not Americans kept bringing it up.
The goddamn Tories have appointed leaders with darker skin than her.
Of course we can’t. Intergalactic colonization is easy, even assuming no fancy new physics,
supermaterials, or other sneaky tricks. If you’re patient.
For values of ‘patient’ exceeding 6 orders of magnitude of the lifetime of our species hitherto..
(What a silly claim!)
a) Find a star with habitable planets (or whatever) orbiting it.
By which you mean we have yet to find a star with habitable planets (or whatever) orbiting it.
b) .. e)
Blah blah.
Bah.
That last might require having a hierarchy of slower and slower “angels” and “gods”, deferred to by the faster lower tiers as a cultural norm, each layer working to maintain those norms over its own characteristic timescale, and the slowest ones (perhaps in full suspension) awaiting arrival at the destination [blah blah blah]
So silly!
You do get that “might require” and “might not require” are equivalent, no?
As for why do it? Why fly to Andromeda? Why climb Everest?
Because it is there.
There have always been plenty who need no more reason than that.
What part of ‘anthropormorphic’ was obscure to you?
Yes, monkey-types such as us might do such stupid things, pointless as they may be.
(The dregs)
As for what Andromeda, specifically, has, that the Milky Way doesn’t, well it has a gigasun mass black hole, large enough you could spend an hour or so inside it before being spaghettified. Of what value that is, I’m not sure. More practical is likely that it has an order of magnitude more energy stored up in its ergosphere than that piddly little thing in the heart of Sag A* has to offer …
Seriously, though, as your comment perhaps suggested, the symbolic importance of the surge in grassroots donations is at least as important as the stockpile itself.
We’re not 24 hours away from Joe Biden’s shock decision to quit the presidential race, but Donald Trump apparently has not woken up to the fact that he will not be facing the president in November.
On Truth Social, Trump continues to bash Biden:
It’s a new day and Joe Biden doesn’t remember quitting the race yesterday! He is demanding his campaign schedule and arranging talks with Presidents Xi of China, and Putin of Russia, concerning the possible start of World War 3. Biden is “sharp, decisive, energetic, angry, and ready to go!”
As with many things Trump says, this post is full of fibs….
For the first several days after a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, the former president and his political operation had surprisingly little to say about the medical care he’d received. What’s more, it wasn’t at all clear why they’d be tight-lipped about this.
An Associated Press report noted last week that public was “still in the dark over the extent of his injuries, what treatment the Republican presidential nominee received in the hospital, and whether there may be any long-term effects on his health. Trump’s campaign has refused to discuss his condition, release a medical report or records, or make the doctors who treated him available, leaving information to dribble out from Trump, his friends and family.”
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta also had a good piece along these lines last week, noting that a full public assessment of Trump’s injuries “is necessary,” adding, “The concern is that gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma. As a trauma neurosurgeon, I have seen how a thorough evaluation after any kind of gunshot wound can provide a complete picture and lead to a speedier recovery.” [More in comment 213]
Since I wrote about this a few days ago, it seemed only fair to note that Team Trump did, in fact, eventually provide some additional information — at least, sort of. The Washington Post reported:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump shared a letter signed by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) on Saturday detailing the care he has received since last weekend’s assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. … Jackson stated that Trump sustained a 2 cm wide wound from the track of a bullet “that extended down the cartilaginous surface of the ear.” No sutures were required for Trump’s wound, Jackson said, but “there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place.”
To be sure, some transparency is better than no transparency, and it’s good to know that the former president is recovering well in the wake of the shooting nine days ago.
But this doesn’t put the matter entirely to rest.
Under normal circumstances, we’d expect to receive information from the physicians who actually treated Trump after the incident. There might even be a press conference or two.
Instead, Team Trump waited a week before issuing a letter from a member of Congress — issued on Jackson’s congressional letterhead — who acknowledged two years ago that he’d allowed his medical license in Florida to expire. (Jackson’s medical license remains in “military active” status until early next year.)
This is the same Jackson who was slammed by the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office, which concluded in 2021 that he Jackson engaged in “inappropriate conduct” while serving as Trump’s White House doctor, adding that the congressman “drank alcohol, made sexual comments to subordinates, and took the sedative Ambien while working as White House physician.” The watchdog also found that Jackson mistreated subordinates and “disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated them.”
In 2022, the Navy demoted Jackson from admiral to captain as a consequence of his misconduct. The Washington Post’s report added, “Jackson worked in the White House medical unit under three presidents but drew scrutiny in a Pentagon inspector general’s report, which states that he provided prescription drugs without proper paperwork — a habit that allegedly earned him the nickname ‘Candyman.‘ Jackson has denied the report’s claims, describing them as politically motivated.”
He was nevertheless elected to Congress, where Jackson ran into ethics troubles.
Between Jackson’s record, and Trump’s longstanding record of problematic medical disclosures, Saturday’s statement didn’t exactly resolve the larger concern.
I have seen the concussive effects of even small caliber bullets, so the idea that a bullet fired from an AR-15, a bullet that struck so close to Trump’s skull, would cause no concussive damage doesn’t make sense to me. My bet is that Trump was struck by shrapnel of some kind (metal, plastic, glass?). That’s bad, but doesn’t make Trump sound as heroic as being struck (grazed) by a bullet.
Those who thought that President Joe Biden standing down from the 2024 campaign would lead to some kind of free-for-all are about to be disappointed. In the hours since Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, that announcement has been met with a level of Democratic enthusiasm that exceeds all expectations.
Back in May, Donald Trump’s campaign bragged that they had experienced Trump’s biggest fundraising day, hitting $52.8 million following his conviction on 34 felony counts. But Trump’s big day is about to be blown away.
Biden endorsed Harris shortly after 2 PM ET on Sunday. By 9 PM, ActBlue was announcing the biggest day of the election cycle, with $46.7 million. Later, Harris’ campaign reported that it had taken in $49.6 million, still on Sunday. But the night wasn’t over. By midnight, ActBlue had collected $66.8 million, with almost all of that coming after Biden’s endorsement of Harris. Since midnight, another $14.4 million has come in.
There’s a good chance that ActBlue will hit over $100 million in small donations within 24 hours of the endorsement. And Harris did it all without committing a crime.
Just as impressive as the funds streaming in to support the campaign is the list of officials, party leaders, and organizations that have lined up to express their support for Harris.
As of Sunday night, Daily Kos had identified these senators, representatives, governors, and organizations as standing behind Harris:
Governors (10)
Andy Beshear, Gavin Newsom, Janet Mills, Jared Polis, John Carney, Josh Shapiro, Kathy Hochul, Ned Lamont, Phil Murphy, and Roy Cooper.
Senators (20)
Alex Padilla, Ben Cardin, Bob Casey, Brian Schatz, Chris Coons, Chris Murphy, Debbie Stabenow, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Jon Ossoff, Laphonza Butler, Mark Kelly, Mark Warner, Martin Heinrich, Michael Bennet, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Kaine, and Tina Smith.
Representatives (130) [List available at the link]
Other party leaders and officials
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Pete Buttigieg.
Organizations
American Federation of Teachers, Congressional Black Caucus, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, and SEIU.
Former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller raged on Fox News Sunday about President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election, accusing Democrats of acting undemocratically.
The ex-White House advisor spoke to host Laura Ingraham about Kamala Harris’ weaknesses as a potential successor to Biden as the Democratic nominee, calling her “napalm for working class voters” and claiming that her party is “in crisis.”
“Well, they’re pretending it’s all exciting right?” Ingraham said, accusing Democrats of subverting their own “democratic process” after spending years “trashing Donald Trump for doing literally what you just did to your own voters.”
“There may be what, 25, 30 percent of the voters who still preferred Joe Biden to remain at the top of the ticket, right?” Ingraham added. “I mean, at least that? And they don’t care about those voters, Stephen. They don’t care.”
“They held a primary!” Miller squealed in response. “People—they had ballots! They filled out circles that went to the voting booths! They spent money on advertisements, and as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”
“Now they’ve just woke up one morning and said: ‘Never mind, we’re canceling the entire primary, we’re getting rid of our candidate, and we’re pretending the election has never even happened and we’re gonna let donors handpick a new nominee,’” Miller continued.
“They’re publicly admitting that they are an oligarchy,” he claimed. Miller, who reportedly helped prepare the remarks Trump delivered to followers at the Ellipse before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, went on to make an even bolder assertion: “This is as full-frontal an attack on American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major political parties.”
Always good news when Stephen Miller melts down and exhibits even more batshit bonkers “logic” than usual.
And … like Trump, Miller is really upset about the money spent on an ad campaign he helped to design: “as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”
Also, “donors” are not picking Kamala Harris.
Miller as master of projection: “They’re publicly admitting that they are an oligarchy,” he claimed. Miller, who reportedly helped prepare the remarks Trump delivered to followers at the Ellipse before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, went on to make an even bolder assertion: “This is as full-frontal an attack on American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major political parties.”
It’s kind of funny.
Also, MAGA cult followers are now calling Kamala Harris “Side Chick.”
Bits of campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
* For reasons that I do not understand, Donald Trump continued to rail against Biden Sunday night and Monday morning, including fresh allegations from the former president that the Democrat “never had Covid.” (If you’re confused about why the Republican keeps pushing this, you’re not alone.)
* The Associated Press reported over the weekend, “An initiative to ask voters if they want to protect the right to a pre-viability abortion in Montana’s constitution has enough signatures to appear on the November ballot, supporters said Friday.”
* Earlier this year, then-Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley declared, “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election.” The on-camera quote has suddenly taken on greater meaning
Trump will find a way to avoid a debate with Harris. She would make hash out of him.
USAToday
In a Truth Social post on Sunday evening, Trump called for Fox News to host the debate, rather than “Fake News ABC.”
“Now that Joe has, not surprisingly, has quit the race, I think the Debate, with whomever the Radical Left Democrats choose, should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC,” he wrote.
By popular request, here’s Trump’s full riff from yesterday’s rally in Michigan on President Xi being “brilliant” because he “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist” & why he thinks authoritarians more broadly are “smart” & provide the type of leadership we need in the US
[…] Ahead of the 2016 elections, [Trump] was on record praising Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and even China’s handling of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Seeing images of brave Chinese democrats standing in defiance in front of tanks, Trump sided with those who deployed the tanks.) Ahead of the 2024 elections, he’s doing it again.
Trump offers gushing admiration for Beijing’s “ruthless” control over China’s population. He struggles to contain how impressed he is with his benefactor in Moscow. He celebrates Orbán “because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. … He’s the boss.” He heralds Kim Jong Un as an “absolute leader.” He asks his followers to believe, “It’s nice to have a strongman running the country.”
This keeps happening for a reason: Trump expresses public admiration for dictators, not despite their authoritarian control, but because of it. In the process, the former president keeps raising the stakes in the 2024 race.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
Orbán is completely in bed with the Chinese and the Russians.
Politico reported overnight, “One GOP source tells me he doubts Trump will debate Vice President Kamala Harris — he’ll likely call her an illegitimate candidate.”
Former DeSantis campaign staffer and self-styled “wartime conservative” Will Chamberlain wrote Sunday on Twitter: “Really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President No children,” adding that “The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her” (good news for women ready for male legislators to stop passing abortion restrictions — it’ll always be abstract to them). [LOL]
This is straightforward “women who don’t have biological children aren’t real women” stuff that dovetails nicely with the right-wing yearning for tradwifery by fiat.
They’ve tried out this argument before […]
Here’s VP nominee J.D. Vance in 2022: “We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via the corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. It’s just a basic fact. You have Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does that make any sense when we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it.”
He slipped in some homophobia there too about Buttigieg’s children.
This was always going to be a huge challenge for MAGA: how to go after Harris without trotting out vile, sexist, racist arguments, when they are so baked into the movement. Still, it’s hard to imagine that “Harris is a miserable cat lady because she has stepchildren and not biological ones” will be a winner with anyone but the hardcore Trumpers.
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta also had a good piece along these lines last week, noting that a full public assessment of Trump’s injuries “is necessary,” adding, “The concern is that gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.
I suppose everyone has heard by now that Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi endorsed Kamala Harris. Here’s an excerpt:
Politically, make no mistake: Kamala Harris as a woman in politics is brilliantly astute – and I have full confidence that she will lead us to victory in November.
In the Democratic Party, our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power. Now, we must unify and charge forward to resoundingly defeat Donald Trump and enthusiastically elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States. Onward to victory!
Trump says he wants to charge Joe Biden with fraud … for prompting the Trump campaign to spend all that money campaigning against Biden, and then springing Kamala Harris on them at the last minute. LOL.
Also in the news, other Republicans saying stupid stuff:
[…] “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind, and if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like … Bikers for Trump on our side,” he continued. […]
Ohio state Sen. George Lang (R) said that at a Trump-Vance 2024 rally today.
After a long, long career serving our nation, Joe Biden has finally decided to retire by ending his campaign for re-election to the presidency. Given the circumstances, even Donald Trump supporters today are acknowledging the president’s love of country and the difficult nature of the decision he has made to stand aside in favor of Kamala Harris.
Ha ha ha, just kidding, they are freaking the fuck out that Biden just tossed a hand grenade right into the middle of Trump’s entire campaign strategy, which was basically “Biden old! Trump virile! Apes together strong! Vote Trump!” Now their candidate is the old one in the race, which is just not fair! Therefore, there must be something shady and/or illegal about the new circumstances.
The panic, added to their natural idiocy, has driven some of these wingnuts into the deepest of weird conspiracy swamps, where they are flailing around like waving inflatable tube dolls in a tornado. Come, let us take a quick tour through the muck! Keep your hands and arms inside the airboat, and we hope you have had all your shots.
1. Did Joe Biden even sign his own resignation letter???????
Here is the letter announcing his decision that appeared on social media on Sunday afternoon. Note that Joe Biden’s name appears to have been underlined. Has Joe Biden ever underlined his own signature before? No, or at least not in these half a dozen examples out of the literally tens of thousands of instances of Joe Biden signing his name in his 50 years in public life!
Boy, that was quite a detail for the conspirators to overlook! The entire coup, foiled because someone couldn’t resist this nonsensical flourish. We expect Fox to have “handwriting experts” appearing on all its shows by the end of the day.
2. Biden posted his endorsement of Harris to Xitter even though it is well known that he doesn’t even use social media!
Brace yourselves, folks, but politicians often have staff members who run all their social media accounts. Even Donald Trump doesn’t write all his own tweets.
Come to think of it, the wingnuts thinking this makes sense. Trump seemed to spend so much of his presidency on Twitter that his followers might genuinely consider it one of a president’s official duties.
3. Come to think of it, has anyone even seen Joe Biden since this news broke, HEEENNNNGGHHHHH?
Lot of that going around. Here is ass-headed self-promoter Bill Ackman, last seen wondering how a Black woman could possibly be put in charge of Harvard when she isn’t even white, incapable of believing that no one apparently thought to snap a picture of Biden signing his letter or rushing him in front of the cameras on a Sunday afternoon when he just made what was possibly the most wrenching and difficult decision of his life while fighting a bout of covid: [Bill Ackman’s tweet is available at the link]
[…]
4. Democrats did a coup!
Really more of a summation of earlier points than a new one, but we still find it funny to describe a political party convincing a nominee to stand aside for a different candidate as a “coup.”
Erick Erickson tweet saying “Y’all can argue over the word coup,” then claiming Biden stepping down is just like Putin tossing his enemies out of windows.
None of the people who fell out of windows in Russia were, to our knowledge, the incumbent president of Russia and standing for re-election. Also, political parties are private entities, which find ways to force out leaders legally and without killing them all the time. Otherwise, great tweet!
5. Biden is dying and his family is keeping it from the public!
[Tweet from Jim Geraghty is available at the link]
First the nuts are all screaming that Biden appears frail and senile at every public appearance. So his staff keeps him away from the public for a few days and they want to know why the White House isn’t throwing the frail and senile old man in front of every TV camera they can find. Make up your mind, Lauren Boebert! [tweet from Lauren Boebert is available at the link]
Yr Wonkette’s position is that if Joe Biden really was too sick to serve out the next few months, he’d have just fucking resigned and let Kamala Harris run as an incumbent president. At which point the wingnuts would be screaming about the unfairness of that.
6. Harris’s huge fundraising numbers since Sunday reflect Ukrainian money being laundered through straw donors to the DNC.
Remember Bill Mitchell? One of Trump’s nuttier online fans who grifted his followers into paying for him to move from his backwater home in North Carolina to glamorous Miami? Yeah, here he is spewing … whatever this theory is: [tweet available at the link]
7. Birther shit!
We can’t find any public statements by original Kamala birther John Eastman, but some of his winger allies are bringing up his old theory anyway.
Conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia bringing up the Kamala birther theory. [Tweet available at the link]
Kamala Harris was born in America. Ergo, she is an American citizen, even if her immigrant parents were not naturalized at the time of her birth. You would think that people who are always inveighing against “anchor babies” and have even made “ending birthright citizenship” an explicit goal of their party would get this, but it’s more profitable for them to pretend they don’t.
8. Soros! Drink!
You didn’t think we were going to get out of this without someone saying a member of the Soros family is the puppetmaster pulling all the strings, did you?
Elon Musk tweet accusing George Soros’ son Alexander of being Kamala Harris’s puppetmaster. [Tweet available at the link]
Conspiracism has been a GOP staple for decades, but in this case we think it’s safe to assume that much of it is coming from the panic of having spent months building up a campaign strategy of highlighting Biden’s age, and now seeing that go up in smoke.
Now, you’d think that a party continually making the point that Biden was a frail old man with one foot in the grave who was being propped up Weekend at Bernie’s-style by his staff would have a contingency plan in case all this caught up to Biden and he became incapacitated and had to drop out of the race.
And yet the GOP appears to have been caught utterly flat-footed by Biden’s move. Which makes it genius. Biden is very good at politics.
Anyway, Joe Biden is probably dead or comatose and Kamala Harris is already POTUS, the end. Or is it???
In a new letter, Joe Biden’s physician, Kevin C O’Connor, said the president was recovering well from Covid-19.
“His symptoms have almost resolved completely. His pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate and temperature remain absolutely normal. His oxygen saturation continues to be excellent on room air. His lungs remain clear. The President continues to perform all of his presidential duties,” O’Connor wrote.
Biden has no public events on his schedule today, and is recovering at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He still has not spoken publicly about his decision to end his re-election bid, but the White House said earlier this afternoon that he had received virtual briefings from his national security advisor and his homeland security advisor.
Harris campaign announces all-time record fundraising in first 24 hours of candidacy
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign announced it has raised $81m over the past 24 hours from hundreds of thousands of donors, most of whom were giving for the first time in this election. [I think I saw $90 million on MSNBC.]
The haul is the most money brought in by any candidate ever over a 24-hour period, her campaign said, and includes funds raised by the campaign, joint fundraising committees and the Democratic National Committee. More than 880,000 donors contributed, 60% of whom were making their first donation of the 2024 election cycle.
“The historic outpouring of support for Vice President Harris represents exactly the kind of grassroots energy and enthusiasm that wins elections,” Harris for president spokesperson Kevin Munoz said.
“Already, we are seeing a broad and diverse coalition come together to support our critical work of talking to the voters that will decide this election. There is a groundswell behind Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump is terrified because he knows his divisive, unpopular agenda can’t stand up to the Vice President’s record and vision for the American people.”
The Harris campaign says its war chest totals nearly $250m.
The biggest abortion rights groups in US politics are lining up behind Kamala Harris’s bid for president.
It’s a show of faith in a politician who has already become the face of the White House’s fight over abortion rights – which is not only one of the election’s biggest issues but one of the few where Democrats have the advantage.
Within hours of Joe Biden’s stunning announcement on Sunday that he would drop out of the presidential race and endorse the vice-president, Emilys List, which champions Democratic women who support abortion rights, and Reproductive Freedom for All, which advocates for abortion access and was previously known as Naral Pro-Choice America, officially endorsed Harris. Emilys List plans to pour at least $20m into the race in support of Harris.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund, whose endorsement must be ratified by local chapters, has not officially weighed in. However, its CEO and president, Alexis McGill Johnson, warmly commended Harris for keeping “the needs and experiences of patients and providers front and center”.
Harris has spent much of this year on a tour of the country in support of abortion rights, where she has proven to be a far more effective messenger on the issue than Biden. The president was infamously reluctant to even say the word “abortion” and fumbled answers to questions about it in the June debate that ultimately cost him his candidacy.
“Just right off the bat, she’s primed to run with the message around abortion rights,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “Her messaging around abortion and being out there forcefully on the issue is going to be a net positive for her.”
One of the world’s oldest cricket clubs has banned players from hitting sixes after complaints of damage from its neighbours.
Players at Southwick and Shoreham cricket club, near Brighton in West Sussex, face the unusual prospect of not being awarded the highest score from a single shot in the sport – which is achieved by hitting the ball over the boundary rope without it bouncing – after the club’s neighbours complained about damage to windows, cars and sheds.
In future those playing at the club, which was formed in 1790, have been warned that the first six they hit will not count for any runs – and if they hit a second one, they will be out.
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign announced it has raised $81m over the past 24 hours from hundreds of thousands of donors, most of whom were giving for the first time in this election. [I think I saw $90 million on MSNBC.]
Money is coming in so quickly that the news media is having trouble keeping up with the latest tally. It is significant that 60% of the people making donations are sending money to the campaign for the first time.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday a long-sought cease-fire between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas was within sight, saying negotiators were ‘driving toward the goal line.
The Biden administration is still governing effectively, as reported by the Associated Press:
The Environmental Protection Agency is awarding $4.3 billion in grants to fund projects in 30 states to reduce climate pollution. The money will go to 25 projects targeting greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, electric power, commercial and residential buildings, industry, agriculture and waste and materials management.
As reported by the LA Times:
President Biden announced a new goal Friday to phase out the purchasing and use of single-use plastics across the federal government by 2035. … The announcement follows a 2022 U.S. Department of Interior Secretarial Order aimed at phasing out single-use plastics in national parks and other public lands — including Yosemite, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon — as well as a rule issued last month by the General Services Administration to reduce single-use packaging in federal purchasing.
Biden’s historic decision to step aside and endorse VP Harris means Trump’s recent run of political good luck has finally come to an end.
(This is an adapted excerpt from a July 21 special episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”)
Three and a half years into his presidency, Joe Biden made American history with an act of profound political and personal sacrifice: stepping down from his re-election bid in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris.
In the instant Biden announced that news, at 1:46 p.m. on a Sunday, everything changed. The Democratic Party instantly ended its internal war — an emotional, intense, harrowing fight that has torn the party apart for the past three and a half weeks. That is over.
The expectation among Democrats, an expectation voiced more and more openly in recent days, was that the party was in for a historic wipeout in November — with not just the White House in danger, but the House and the Senate in danger as well. That expectation has also evaporated in an instant.
Shortly after issuing his statement, Biden voiced his strong and unequivocal endorsement of Harris. Harris confirmed immediately that she would indeed run and pledged to fight — to win. [video at the link]
When it came to commenting on the very difficult knockdown, drag-out fight within the Democratic Party, Republicans and Donald Trump had been uncharacteristically disciplined. They were being very reticent and very disciplined about not talking about the concerns over Biden showing his age.
That’s because they [the Trump campaign] were crossing their fingers and hoping Biden would stay in the race, expecting he would stay in. They were looking at the polls and bragging about their surely, absolutely guaranteed victory. Last week, Trump’s pollster said there were between 20 and 25 different paths to victory in the electoral map.
Biden, perhaps cannily, waited until the supremely self-confident Republican side locked in their ticket. He waited to announce his plans until Trump picked a running mate whom most Americans do not know, and who — they are discovering — is deeply committed to a nationwide ban on abortion.
Trump’s remarkable recent run of political good luck has finally come to an end. He is now the old man in the presidential race. A 78-year-old who is only occasionally coherent, with a record as president that is viewed by historians as the worst in the history of the country and a tenure that ended in violence. A man who refuses to promise there won’t be more violence from his supporters in the future.
Trump drags along with him not just the legacy of what happened the last time he was in office, but also the threat of a national abortion ban and a possible prison sentence — that all heads with him to the polls.
We now know Trump’s opponent will not be a man older than him. His opponent will likely be a 59-year-old former prosecutor, attorney general, U.S. senator, and vice president to Joe Biden — who cemented his legacy with a decision that will go down in history as one of the most selfless patriotic sacrifices of any sitting president ever.
At 1:46 p.m. on a Sunday, Biden changed everything about this race. In an instant, the old era is over and the new era is here. It’s go time.
Donald Trump’s response has been to continue to lie about Joe Biden and to insult Kamala Harris. Just a few minutes ago, Trump posted on his social media site that Kamala is “dumb as a rock.” Trump proves, minute by minute, that he is in over his head. He is not up to this fight.
Republicans have wasted so much: It’s not just the carloads of “Let’s Go Brandon!” merch now on its way to landfills, it’s a huge amount of time and money that is owed directly to Americans. As soon as they gained a small majority—and once they were past the first round of follies in naming a speaker—Republicans got right on their No. 1 priority.
That priority wasn’t passing legislation to help people. They’ve been one of the least effective Congress in history. Instead, they jumped right into the most important task of all modern Republicans: Showing their loyalty to Donald Trump by launching unfounded attacks on his opponents.
In the House, that meant not one, not two, but three simultaneous investigations into everything Biden. A car loan, his son’s private parts, anything was fodder for a mill meant to crank out a never-ending stream of Biden “scandal.”
All of this is completely worthless to the country. Now it’s not even useful to Trump.
The Republican grovel fest, headed up by Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan, was ridiculous from the outset.
There was the fake FBI document produced by a Russian mole whose repeated claims were originally pushed in 2019 by Rudy Giuliani and were debunked almost as soon as they appeared. That hasn’t stopped Jordan from repeating these easily disproved lies and pretending to seriously investigate Biden’s actions in helping to get rid of a corrupt official.
Meanwhile, Comer was busy trying to prove that Biden was the recipient of money from China, talking up a witness who could prove everything if Republicans could find him. Comer went after Hunter Biden for paying back a small loan when Biden wasn’t even in office. Then there was a small personal loan to his brother, also while Biden wasn’t in office. In the end, they turned on Attorney General Merrick Garland when they could find no reason to impeach Biden.
That was the biggest problem for these Republicans: Biden hadn’t done anything wrong. But that didn’t stop them from crowing over every false claim as if it were proof that Biden was the godfather of the “Biden crime family.” A crime family that is somehow so huge and corrupt and has netted Biden a beach home that isn’t even on the beach […]
Efforts to generate support for a Biden impeachment ran out of steam last fall, so Republicans were never able to present to Trump that “see, he was impeached too!” present they were so anxious to deliver. By spring, Republicans were looking for some way to escape this whole pointless exercise.
And now … all of it is a waste. […]
Want to see how important it really was? Just watch how quickly Republicans drop these investigations for vital hearings over plastic straws and whether or not Harris was too tough on crime.
But, even before Biden withdrew from the election, this was already a waste. For everything they had done, House Republicans never laid a finger on Biden. Nothing stuck to Biden because it was all malarkey.
But they did show that they were completely under Trump’s control so … job well done.
birgerjohanssonsays
Anton Petrov:
‘Definition of “Planet” May Change Again! Here’s What Astronomers Propose’
“Donald Trump Is Losing Tremendous Amounts Of Support From A Group He Needs…”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=eUHVZJ6cxik
Farron Cousins is usually free from hype, so this in encouraging.
John Moralessays
Why not just post the transcript, Birger?
Far, far quicker to get through than watching the video.
“Donald Trump has a huge problem with a very specific voting block that is going to be crucial for either candidate to win in this year’s presidential election. And that voting block is women, not just low income women, not just women of the 1%, but overall women voters here in the United States hold the key to victory in the 2024 presidential election. And according to the latest data, Donald Trump is actually hemorrhaging support from that specific demographic. And one of the weirdest things is one of the worst places that’s happening to him is down here in the state of Florida. Now, Florida is a red state. Don’t let anybody try to tell you that Florida is still a swing state because it is not. Trust me, most of these people claiming it’s a swing state, haven’t been here in a long time. We’re talking about a state that has not voted for a Democrat for governor since the mid nineties, folks.
Okay? We have a Republican governor, Republican controlled legislature, Republicans, uh, you know, hold both of our Senate seats. It’s a red state, but maybe it could shift again because Donald Trump has lost 4% of the support he had from women voters from the 2020 election to today. So his support among women here in the Sunshine State continues to plummet. And it’s not just happening here, of course, it is happening in other swing states, particularly in the Midwest. ’cause if Trump can’t win him over in a red state, he sure can’t win him over in a real swing state. So that is a massive problem for Donald Trump. Now, at the same time, Donald Trump, according to reports that came out on Sunday, is actually managing to increase his support among the white working class. But let’s be real, when these pollsters say white working class, what they typ typically mean is white middle-aged males.
Okay? So Donald Trump’s increasing his support with white middle aged males, but that’s not good enough. If he cannot win over women, if he loses even more support from this group, it’s over for him, which of course, he understands the entire Republican party does. That’s why they did not talk about abortion at their convention last week, even though they want to acting nationwide. Abortion ban, just like Donald Trump’s vp uh uh, JD Vance had said in the past. But Vance stayed away from that topic. So they thought not addressing the issue could attract more women voters. But it’s not. They thought picking another pasty white guy to be Donald Trump’s running mate might help them with women voters. I don’t know why they thought that, but of course it didn’t help.
Donald Trump is not doing anything to court this particular group of voters. So if he loses women, he loses the election. And I have said in many segments over the last few months, women are the key to saving this country. When you look at the fact that Kamala Harris is polling better against Trump than President Biden as hell, even Hillary Clinton is, Michelle Obama is, women are going to have to save this country. And I’m sorry it shouldn’t be on you, but apparently it is. Men have screwed this country up so badly that women are our only hope at this point. So hopefully come November, they can save us from ourselves, because if not, well, project 2025 is about to become a very disturbing reality.”
‘The baton is in our hands’: Harris gives energetic speech to campaign staff
From the Associated Press:
Speaking to campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware, Kamala Harris acknowledged the “rollercoaster” of the last several weeks, but expressed confidence in her new campaign team.
“It is my intention to go out and earn this nomination and to win,” she said. She promised to “unite our Democratic party, to unite our nation, and to win this election.”
She quickly leaned into the themes that will be prominent in her campaign against Trump over the coming 100 days, contrasting her time as a prosecutor with Trump’s felony convictions — “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said — and casting herself as a defender of economic opportunity and abortion access.
“Our fight for the future is also a fight for freedoms,” she said. “The baton is in our hands.”
The president called into the meeting from his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he is recovering from COVID-19, to lend his support to Harris. He planned to talk about his decision to step aside in an address to the nation later this week.
“The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn’t changed at all,” Biden said in his first public remarks since announcing his decision to step aside, promising he was “not going anywhere” and plans to campaign on Harris’ behalf.
Biden said of his decision to step aside, “It was the right thing to do.”
As he handed off the mantle of leadership to Harris, Biden added: “I’m watching you kid. I love you.”
It was the hottest room to be in last night — and it was all virtual.
A Sunday evening Zoom meeting organized on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris by political advocacy group Win With Black Women drew 44,000 people, raising over $1.5 million in just a few hours, according to Jotaka Eaddy, the group’s founder.
“We are united and fired up,” Eaddy told theGrio. “Ready to work to defeat Trump and his 2025 agenda and ensure that Vice President Harris is the next president of the United States!”
The interest was so strong that attendees who tried to join the call in the first hour couldn’t due to capacity restrictions, with some creating other spaces to listen in from, utilizing Google Meets, Twitch and listen-only phone calls. Win With Black Women organizers connected with Aparna Bawa, the COO of Zoom for support, and soon the floodgates opened as women and allies from across the country joined to strategize about how to support Harris’ run for president.
Win With Black Women is an intergenerational women’s group that has rallied support for Black women in politics, with a particular focus on getting Black women appointed to senior positions in the Biden-Harris administration. The group played a role in persuading President Joe Biden to select Harris as his vice presidential nominee in 2020.
While the Sunday night call itself was off the record, for many attendees, the assignment was clear: Get in formation and rally voter support for Harris by Election Day, Nov. 5….
…
“The call itself felt like winning — to be engaged, to be in community, to speak (and yell!) about what’s possible is where real change and progress begins — and to be in that moment with over 44,000 women, sisters, friends, strangers — it was truly priceless!” Margaret Anadu, an attendee who is also an impact investor, told theGrio.
“I have laughed and cried and prayed on this call. It has truly been an experience,” said an anonymous attendee who is also a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the same Black Greek-letter organization as Harris.
…
“I was one of the 44,000,” read the text of a social media graphic of Harris speaking that Win With Black Women created. The post started to spread like wildfire Monday morning, as attendees reflected on what the meeting meant to them.
If Win With Black Women’s remarkable Zoom call was any indication of how efficiently Black women can organize politically, the 2024 race for president could be historic in more ways than one.
“I am FED and LIFTED. I don’t have the words for tonight’s magic. 44,000 of us got on a Zoom, and it was life-affirming,” posted New York Times bestselling author Luvvie Ajayi Jones, reposting Win With Black Women’s social media graphic. “The mission is clear. … We move. #OneVoiceOneFight”
Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him is, from one angle, the final political act of an octogenarian who realizes that his power is coming to an end and who is sagely passing the torch to a younger politician in a last-ditch effort to save his party and his country from authoritarian defeat. But from another vantage point, the real story is one of a different octogenarian—one who has wielded power more effectively than just about any politician in the past half-century—who used her decades of accrued experience and authority to do what no one else apparently could: get a dug-in presidential candidate to drop out and give his party a fighting chance.
Both stories are real. But one seems much closer to the behind-the-scenes reality of Biden’s decision. The truth is: California Rep. Nancy Pelosi likes to win. And more than nearly any other Democrat in my lifetime, she knows how to. If Democrats do pull off a victory in November, it will be in large part because of her unsparing refusal to give into what felt like inevitable defeat.
As I posted on another thread, CNN and the NYT are reporting that with the vote of the giant California delegation Harris has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.
What an incredible turn of events from two days ago.
Bekenstein Boundsays
So, probably not a protracted nomination fight. We keep the party unity key. And if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, the foreign success key too, and avoid the biggest risk of losing the civil unrest key.
It’s starting to look like we might squeak through this after all. Biden’s was a gutsy, risky move but maybe, just maybe, it won’t turn out to have been a catastrophic mistake after all.
We shall see, in November.
birgerjohansson@344:
Top Trumper Sebastian Gorka Launches Racist, Sexist Attack At Kamala Harris
In related news, water still wet.
SC@363:
Trump said in 2020 that he didn’t consider US soldiers’ traumatic brain injuries sustained during an Iranian rocket attack to be “very serious.”
In fairness to Trump, it might be as difficult for him to empathize with people who suffered brain injuries as it would be for me to empathize with someone who suffered wing injuries.
<snicker>
John Morales: It is the nature of life to multiply and to colonize. Life that does out-multiplies life that doesn’t and dominates the numbers in subsequent generations. This is the basis for the Fermi paradox: life able to harness language and tool-use should be able to out-multiply everything else and find ways to spread from planet to planet and even throughout a small enough cluster of galaxies. There really only are four options:
It won’t get here. (Because it is very rare, because it tends to burn itself out, because the intelligence to travel on that scale leads inevitably to choosing not to and to go lotus-eater instead or something, because local conditions here are weird, or whyever.)
It just hasn’t gotten here yet. (Likely because it’s sufficiently rare.)
It’s already been and gone. (Late to the party hypothesis. We’re a weirdly late emerger in a cosmos way past its prime.)
It is here, but by the time anything like that is able to travel that far it’s also unrecognizable for some reason and looks nonliving, or at least non-sapient. (It blends in with the background, or it stays away from deep gravity wells and eschews megastructures, or it runs itself very slow to conserve energy, or it eschews rural real-estate for energy-rich galactic nuclei…)
Most of these have problems (e.g. eschewing rural real-estate — life doesn’t usually leave a niche unexploited even if it’s marginal; the existence of the Amazon basin didn’t lead life to wholly abandon the Sahara and Antarctica, nor did the breadbasket of Ukraine cause humans to decide against building the cities of Mecca and Las Vegas). That’s why it’s still considered an unresolved question.
My leaning is toward a mix of “rare earth”, “eukaryotes and language are hard, so sapients are rare on top of that”, and “living within your means is both necessary for getting out there and either impossible or leads to choosing not to colonize in a runaway fashion”.
As for the recurrent charge of anthropomorphism, I suggest going to nuts and bolts here.
A patch of environment can be in one of three known states vis-a-vis life:
Barren — nothing lives there at all. The Moon appears to be barren. The parts of Mars we’ve examined in any detail also do, without even a trace of microbes.
Fallow — there is life, but not the works of intelligence. No planning, no intentional anything. A patch of woods, or desert, or most other uninhabited spots on Earth lies fallow.
Cultivated/developed — intelligent life with planning and intention has modified the patch in some manner. Land containing cities, roads, cultiated crops, solar panels, and suchlike fall into this category.
If we attempt to apply these same categories to what we see in space, everything looks barren or, at most, fallow. If we apply it to pre-Pleistocene Earth, examining the fossil record and rock strata, it looks like Earth was barren for a very short time and then fallow all the way up until perhaps 200Ka. There’s nothing that looks intentional in all that time — despite the efforts of e.g. creationists to find evidence of such. No hand of God … or of LGMs, or whatever other form non-supernatural goal-seeking agents might have taken. Not so much as one lousy fingerprint.
That last seems to rule out a persistent conversion of a significant chunk to a cultivated/developed state here, and the absence of anything in nearby parts of the galaxy that can’t be explained as barren (just the mechanical workings-out of orbital mechanics and astrophysics, without so much as lichens making soil, let alone intentional cultivation) points to a lack of geologically-recent nearby widespread presence of sapients of any kind, and even casts doubt on the presence of life, at least above the microbial level.
In this categorization, the search for biosignatures is the search for evidence that some place is (at least) fallow, not barren. Something holding it chemically away from equilibrium, at the very least. The search for technosignatures is the search for evidence of cultivation or development: evidence of a field, a mine, a road, if not a city, or something that betrays planned and intentional modification of the environment to serve some kind of ends.
One type of indisputable biosignature would be evidence for an energy flow that cups and dams some energy in a way that shouldn’t happen by chance, and that would enable some structure to copy itself. Indeed, anywhere there is life there must be such a biosignature, for thermodynamics reasons. Likewise, an energy-damming phenomenon that a blind groping over a fitness landscape could hardly have hit upon in less than trillions of years, being already present after mere billions, is a good bet for a technosignature. Megastructures would be a subcase, as would any evidence for the interstellar replication of macroscopic life, at least if said transfer necessarily involved gentle entry or exit into serious gravity wells.
(Note that colonization on that sort of scale would not look like Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, or the Eagle landing at Tranquillity Base; it would look like succession ecology, aka “how land razed by a forest fire gradually goes back to being forest again over the next few decades”.)
John Moralessays
Bekenstein Bound:
John Morales: It is the nature of life to multiply and to colonize.
Life as we know it, that much I grant.
Life that does out-multiplies life that doesn’t and dominates the numbers in subsequent generations.
Too simplistic. Inconmeasurable niches; for example, we (ape-types) are vertebrates.
So, are we out-competing (say) archaeobacteria? Tubeworms?
There really only are four options:
Are you so very sure about this claim?
(my enumeration)
[1] It won’t get here. (Because it is very rare, because it tends to burn itself out, because the intelligence to travel on that scale leads inevitably to choosing not to and to go lotus-eater instead or something, because local conditions here are weird, or whyever.)
[2] It just hasn’t gotten here yet. (Likely because it’s sufficiently rare.)
[3] It’s already been and gone. (Late to the party hypothesis. We’re a weirdly late emerger in a cosmos way past its prime.)
[4] It is here, but by the time anything like that is able to travel that far it’s also unrecognizable for some reason and looks nonliving, or at least non-sapient. (It blends in with the background, or it stays away from deep gravity wells and eschews megastructures, or it runs itself very slow to conserve energy, or it eschews rural real-estate for energy-rich galactic nuclei…)
Way to entirely miss the whole point of the actual Fermi paradox.
As for the recurrent charge of anthropomorphism, I suggest going to nuts and bolts here.
Gotta love your mechanistic metaphor. Heh.
A patch of environment can be in one of three known states vis-a-vis life:
[1] Barren — nothing lives there at all. The Moon appears to be barren. The parts of Mars we’ve examined in any detail also do, without even a trace of microbes.
[2] Fallow — there is life, but not the works of intelligence. No planning, no intentional anything. A patch of woods, or desert, or most other uninhabited spots on Earth lies fallow.
[3] Cultivated/developed — intelligent life with planning and intention has modified the patch in some manner. Land containing cities, roads, cultiated crops, solar panels, and suchlike fall into this category.
Wow, you sure like your lists.
If we attempt to apply these same categories to what we see in space, everything looks barren or, at most, fallow.
(sigh)
As for the recurrent charge of anthropomorphism, you’re wallowing in it again.
Again: this thing about hegemonic expansionist colonising you go on about is basically monkeys wondering why other species don’t throw poo.
In this categorization, the search for biosignatures [blah]
(sigh)
Right. Biosignatures, just what we expect from life as we know it.
(It sure seems you don’t actually get to what I refer!)
—
You remind me of one of those phone scammers running through their script.
Doesn’t matter what I say, basically.
(Other than I have a super-power)
John Moralessays
[well, hippos do, but that’s a bit of a coincidence]
@386. birgerjohansson : Cheers! hadn’t heard of that. Hopefully expect similar effects in my hemisphere too!
StevoRsays
Israe;l is declaring UNWRA a terrorist organisation :
The Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval on Monday to a bill that declares the main United Nations relief organization for Palestinians a terrorist organisation and proposes to sever relations with the body. The vote against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) is the latest step in a Israeli push against the agency, which Israeli leaders have accused of collaborating with the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.
@386 -388 again : Of course Adeladie is 35 degrees South versus New York’s Cities 40 dgrees North FWIW making us that bit less likely, well 5 degrees latitide less likely, to spot it..
Donald Trump built his campaign on the idea of running against Joe Biden, including choosing a running mate more intended to stoke the base than broaden Trump’s appeal. Now that Biden has deferred to Kamala Harris, Trump is having to retool with his disadvantageous running mate already locked in. Tim Alberta, staff writer for the Atlantic, talks with Alex Wagner.
Just seen this myself – apologies if someone else has already posted here.
KGsays
Money is coming in so quickly that the news media is having trouble keeping up with the latest tally. It is significant that 60% of the people making donations are sending money to the campaign for the first time. – Lynna, OM@369
Astroturfing – pure astroturfing. The toiling masses demand Biden and only Biden!!!
/s
birgerjohanssonsays
Russian mercenaries in Africa
‘They turn our farms into rape centres’: Russian mercenaries accused of abuse in Central African Republic | Global development | The Guardian
At his first solo campaign trail event, JD Vance took aim at Vice President Kamala Harris, questioning her gratitude for the country and her qualifications. The Morning Joe panel discuss the potential impact comments like this have on the Republican campaign strategy.
Those seeking a lazy Sunday free of the anxiety-inducing onslaught of constant updates about the 2024 presidential election didn’t get the respite they desired. But there was an upside to the whole kerfuffle — plenty of great jokes on social media … and maybe a dash of hope.
For Democrats, at least….
My favorite:
Gotta say, as a Canadian, watching this season of America has been absolutely riveting. Kudos to the writers.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US politics liveblog. From there:
Kamala Harris to visit battleground state of Wisconsin in first rally since launching presidential campaign
Kamala Harris is travelling to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today where she will hold her first campaign rally since she launched her presidential campaign on Sunday with Joe Biden’s endorsement. Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes in the 2020 election, and recent polling had suggested a tight race between Biden and Donald Trump in the battleground state again.
Tuesday’s visit was scheduled before Biden ended his campaign, but took on new resonance as Harris prepared to take up the mantle of her party against Trump, who is scrambling to pivot his campaign against the vice-president.
According to Wisconsin Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, 89 of Wisconsin’s 95 delegates, including senator Tammy Baldwin and governor Tony Evers, had already pledged their support for Harris as of yesterday afternoon.
After confirming the state Democratic Party had officially backed Harris for the nomination, Wikler was quoted by Wisconsin Public Radio as saying:
And in hearing from elected officials across the state of Wisconsin, hearing from Democratic Party activists, hearing from donors, there is a surge of focus, of enthusiasm – a kind of flowering of the kind of unity that we’re going to need to defeat Donald Trump.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm, sent talking points to their members in competitive races warning of the difficulties of trying to define a presidential candidate in such a short amount of time before the November election.
“Republicans have never had less time to define the presidential nominee of our opponents,” the memo said, according to a copy seen by Punchbowl News. “Because of that, it is vital that our entire conference is on message and working together to present Kamala Harris as an extreme San Francisco progressive who is out of step with the American people.”
Kamala Harris has a strong record on the environment that will provide a vivid contrast with Donald Trump, who has vowed to rescind climate change policies should he return to the White House, according to green advocates who have welcomed the prospect of a Harris presidency.
“We are confident that she is ready to carry forward President Biden’s historic legacy and set a new high bar for climate ambition in America,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen, one of a raft of green groups, including Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, the NRDC Action Fund, and Climate Power, that has now endorsed the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.
Harris, as vice-president, cast the tie-breaking vote to pass Joe Biden’s landmark legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, which unleashes hundreds of billions of dollars into building clean energy and electric car capacity. Biden, in his Sunday letter confirming he will drop his bid to be re-elected president, called the bill “the most significant climate legislation in the history of the world”….
KGsays
Conspiracism has been a GOP staple for decades – Lynna, OM@366 quoting Wonkette
This is of course absolutely true, but it’s notable, and somewhat alarming, how much conspiracism has been apparent among those Democrats wanting Biden to remain the Democratic candidate (particularly at Daily Kos, but it has also appeared here). Pressure on him to resign because the debate made it clear he couldn’t campaign effectively, and the polls increasingly indicated that he couldn’t win, was supposedly all a conspiracy by billionaire donors who were scared he would increase their taxes. Why these same donors had been funding Biden up until the debate was left as an unfathomable mystery. It was possible, even probable, that some donors would try to push for a candidate of their own choice – indeed, Michael Bloomberg, among others, argued for an open convention, presumably in order to do so. But (a) they have already failed in that endeavour, and (b) the attempt to do so fits readily into the category of attempts to take advantage of unpredicted and unplanned events, which are extremely common in both politics and big business. No doubt attempts to push Democratic policies to the right will continue with Harris as candidate, and we must wait to see how she responds – but such attempts would have continued with Biden as candidate as well, and while he has proved somewhat more “progressive” at least in domestic policy than expected, he was hardly the progressives’ preferred candidate in 2020, nor was he immune to pressure from rich donors.
KGsays
Gotta say, as a Canadian, watching this season of America has been absolutely riveting. Kudos to the writers. – SC@398 quoting a comment at HuffPo
I dunno – with the debate, the assassination attempt on Trump, the bizarre Republican Convention, Biden’s Covid and withdrawal and the “coronation” of Harris all within less than a month, hasn’t this series already “jumped the shark” even before we get to the main action?
birgerjohanssonsays
Since “Jumping the shark” eventually led to Robin Williams debuting as Mork from Ork, I hope this season will see the introduction of some clever entertainers.
Stevo R @ 395
In the video with JD Vance the sign is wrong. Not ‘National Conservatism’ (NC). It is supposed to be (abbreviated to) NS . With a stylized eagle logo.
birgerjohanssonsays
KG @ 401
As long as there is no Star Wars Christmas Special after the election. Or that (quickly cancelled) TV ‘comedy’ about the Hitler family living in modern America.
(Lightbulb) Goddammit… it IS a Trump victory at the end of the season.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has begun speaking at the joint press conference with the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.
The Democratic party and the country are “brimming with excitement, enthusiasm, unity”, Schumer says.
He says Kamala Harris has done a “truly impressive job” securing the majority of delegates needed to win the Democratic party’s nomination, and that the vast majority of his senators “quickly and enthusiastically” endorsed her.
Democrats are moving forward “stronger and more united than ever before”, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, tells reporters as he endorses Kamala Harris.
Schumer says he has seen a “surge of enthusiasm from every corner of our party” in the last 36 hours, and that that enthusiasm is “contagious” among Democrats, with contributions pouring in “in ways even beyond our expectations”.
Harris has a “tremendous” record to run on, Schumer says, as he notes that “now begins the next chapter in our quest to make sure Donald Trump does not become president”.
Today, with one voice, we speak about the dangers he presents to working families, to our country and to our democracy. We see very clearly how nervous the Republicans are about our new nominee.
The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, paid tribute to Joe Biden, who he said had “showed the world what a great man he is, his true patriotism, his profound sense of decency”.
Biden’s “selfless” decision not to seek the Democratic presidential nomination “was not an easy decision”, Schumer says, but it “put our country, our party and our future first”.
At his core, he is an honorable man, a family man, a man of deep faith. We love him. We truly do.
The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, at the joint press conference with Chuck Schumer, said Joe Biden will go down in US history as “one of the most consequential presidents of all time”.
Jeffries said Biden is a “heroic American” because he made the “selfless” decision to pass the torch to Kamala Harris, who he says has “excited and energized” the House Democratic caucus, the Democratic party and the nation.
Harris has earned the nomination “from the grassroots up, not the top down”, Jeffries said.
She is ready. She is willing. She is able to energetically and emphatically lead America into the future.
Biden tests negative for Covid, says physician
Joe Biden has tested negative for Covid-19 and his symptoms have “resolved”, the White House physician Kevin O’Connor said.
A letter shared by the White House reads:
The President’s symptoms have resolved. Over the course of his infection, he never manifested a fever, and his vital signs remained normal, to include pulse oximetry. His lungs remained clear.
The president “continues to perform all of his presidential duties” and will “continue to be monitored for any recurrence of illness”, his physician said.
Biden returns to the White House today.
New poll shows Harris with small lead over Trump
Another poll of Kamala Harris’s support has been released, with this one showing the vice-president with a slight lead over Donald Trump.
The Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted on Monday and Tuesday – following Joe Biden’s departure from the race – showed her with 44% support nationally, above Trump’s 42%.
A previous survey taken before Biden suspended his campaign showed Harris tied with Trump at 44% support, which was within the poll’s margin of error. [To be sure, this one is probably within the MOE as well.]
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” Harris said, adding, “We got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?”
“Read it – it’s 900 pages,” she continued:
But here’s the thing, when you read it, you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and make working families foot the bill. They intend to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back then to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions. Remember what that was like, children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, and we are not going back.
At that, the crowd began chanting, “we are not going back!”
Harris concluded by getting the room ready to put in the work necessary to help her win Wisconsin – and reiterating a message from when Joe Biden was running, that this election is a choice between two different futures of the United States.
“Ultimately, in this election, we each face a question: what kind of country do we want to live in?” the vice-president asked.
“And to your point, do we want to live in a country freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate? And here’s the beauty of this moment, we each have the power answer that question. The power is with the people. We each have the power to answer that question, and in the next 105 days, then we have work to do. We have doors to knock on, we have phone calls to make, we have voters to register, and we have an election to win”
Harris concluded by saying:
So, Wisconsin, today, I ask you, are you ready to get to work? Do we believe in freedom, do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America, and are we ready to fight for it, and when we fight, we win?
Amid roars of the crowd, the vice-president said, “God bless you, God bless the United States” and left the stage.
birgerjohanssonsays
Swedish TV is broadcasting from the speech. The speech appears intended to fire up Biden’s base rather than appealing to undecided voters, which seems logical at this phase. Getting all sympathisers to actually vote is crucial.
Re: fossil “bacteria”.
To consider membranes and molecular evolution I’d want to find the fatty acid biosynthesis version of this.
“Non‐enzymatic glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway‐like reactions in a plausible Archean ocean” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4023395/
There’s a molecular pathway leading to attaching 1-3 fatty acids to a glycerol backbone. That all has to be considered alongside the nucleic acid biosynthesis pathways. My thoughts there are what life would do with just the fatty acid? Since it’s already using sulfur in mounting the carbon to be used, a fatty acid monolayer in hydrothermal (alkaline and magmatic, maybe that’s what separated bacteria and archaea) vent mineral systems is still usable by non-polar parts. And later membranes would be useful in plugging up the outsides of mineral homes.
As for chemistry in the solar system thiolin is similar to the purine pathway molecules and intermediates with the exception of ribose (and there’s the possibility of precursor backbones like erythrose phosphate and glyceraldehyde phosphate). So the thiolin made by earth chemistry was eaten up, or couldn’t become complex enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin
Here’s the fossil I’m interested in. It seems so contain vestigial things that are involved in it’s biosynthesis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778
Just look at that figure at the top. Yes it is a computer construct, but it can be compared to metabolism broadly as well as geochemistry and hydrochemistry.
That should be “… couldn’t become complex enough elsewhere.” at the end of the thiolin section.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Last night I watched MSNBC for the first time in years. (I had stopped watching TV news as it aggravated my health issues, which have since been resolved). Rachel Maddow announced that starting next week MSNBC will be going through the 2025 project on air to expose its extremism. The parts the rethugs want to keep quiet will be exposed for all to see.
I have little to base it on, but I’ve been unable to lose the idea of a transition from an erythrose nucleic acid backbone to a ribose one as related to why there are 2 families of amino acid tRNA synthetases, one for the 2′ carbon and one for the 3′ carbon.
And who, pray tell, will they be vetting? The answer is just now starting to come into focus. NBC News reported that the Harris campaign has requested vetting materials from five potential vice presidential contenders, according to two sources familiar with the list (in alphabetical order):
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz
It’s worth emphasizing that this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an exhaustive list. We know from previous election cycles that some who make short lists like these fall out of favor, while others are sometimes added to the list as the process unfolds. The eventual Democratic vice presidential nominee might very well come from this quintet, but there are no guarantees. […]
Whitmer suggested that she’s not interested in serving as her party’s vice presidential nominee.
A Reader’s Guide To MAGA’s Racist And Misogynistic Attacks On Kamala Harris
The initial round of GOP attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have so far been scattershot, inconsistent, self-contradictory, and often comical. But we’ve seen it all before, and we know how this works.
The volume and intensity of the attacks – deeply suffused with misogyny and racism – represent 1,000 trial balloons. Some will pop on their own and others will get shot down immediately, but eventually a few will get through the blitz of counterattacks. Those few will offer a clue as to what “works,” and they’ll form the basis for additional rounds of attacks playing off of the same theme or underlying premise, however false it may be.
Repeated often enough, the attacks will slowly accrete into a “thing” that unsophisticated editors and reporters notice. They start asking questions about it. Their questions may seem benign and the early round of stories often tepid (I promise you that before the week is out a reporter is going to grab ahold of the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” and use them as a peg to write more generally about DEI), but gradually the “thing” becomes a narrative.
The narrative, with more repetition, begins to be a problem. […] Or perhaps the candidate is caught off-guard and gives a casual or ill-thought-out response. There’s blood in the water. Now it’s gone from a problem to baggage that the candidate has to do something about.
What began as toxic, racist, misogynistic drivel is a now a trap that has ensnared the candidate. At each step of the way, the audience for the lie, mistruth, or innuendo has broadened. Each subsequent iteration repeats the attack again to everyone who already heard it before. What started as scattershot attacks has now become a sustained drumbeat that sneakily enters the public consciousness almost undetected.
What I’m describing – a stripped-down description of swift-boating as it has existed in the 20 years since John Kerry was filleted by it – is not easy to combat or to counter. Calling out the lies, or the racism, or the misogyny, while better than whitewashing it, isn’t sufficient, especially in a world where the bigotry is the point and legions of Trump supporters are lapping it up.
The urge to rebut each attack whack-a-mole style may be well-intentioned, but it’s a fool’s errand. […]
I don’t have the answers to this problem. What I can tell you is that in the relatively short 15 years I’ve been doing this job, the information environment has been radically transformed. What defined TPM in the early days was calling out these kinds of attacks for what they were, but that was back when Republican electeds were trying to soft-peddle this stuff into the mainstream and would awkwardly retreat when called out on it. Starting in 2010, with the Tea Party backlash to President Obama, that began to change. By the time we got to Trump circa 2016, any pretense of soft-peddling it, let alone shame, was long gone.
In general, mainstream outlets have gotten much better at being direct and not euphemistic about these kinds of attacks, but not all of them have. At the same time, Republicans have trained reporters so well that they now often anticipate and air the Republican attacks before they’re even made. Not the public service journalism we’re looking for.
One advantage TPM has that makes exercising good news judgment in these scenarios a little less daunting is that we serve a specific, defined, sophisticated audience. We know who our readers are. We can flag new lines of attack in their nascent stages, usually without acute concern that we’re fanning the flames. We can broadly reference the nature and subtext of the attacks without getting tied in knots over it because we share a common understanding and language with our audience.
But that isn’t true for every outlet. So while the first 48 hours of Harris’ candidacy have featured an almost cartoonish response from MAGA world, there’s a method to the madness. The effect over time is to work the refs – mainstream news outlets – and wait for them to break down and for the attacks to break through to a wider audience. One way to combat the effort is be a sophisticated news consumer who is aware of it and sees it for what it is.
way back at
@334 John Morales said: Of course. It’s the USA. Money talks.
I reply: So true. But, over the years, here, especially, it has been made stronger and louder by being nurtured by billionaires so that the still small voice of reason and honesty cannot be heard anymore.
The Republican Party’s tangled history as a supposed bulwark of “law and order” was already straining under the weight of supporting Donald Trump while ignoring his multiple indictments and felony convictions. […]
The law and order party … is getting law and ordered. The platitudes Republicans have been spouting for decades aren’t going to cut it in a race where their candidate is constantly playing defense.
In the two days that Harris has been at the head of the Democratic ticket, “prosecutor vs. felon” has quickly emerged as a theme of the 2024 campaign. As a former prosecutor and California attorney general, Harris’ primary run in 2020 often focused on her role in holding criminals accountable and, even then, centered on Trump as exactly the kind of perpetrator Harris had faced across a courtroom.
As The Washington Post reports, Harris leaned into this on Monday, telling staffers, “I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse.” Harris also referenced the Trump University scam and her role in busting similar frauds.
Harris is going to put Trump on the defensive. And he’s not going to handle it well.
During her 2019 campaign for the White House, Harris produced a commercial that could hit the airwaves today. In it, she contrasts herself as someone who prosecuted sexual predators and went after those behind phony colleges, while Trump is the kind of person she held to account. [video at the link]
The issues she brought up in that ad are only amplified in 2024. Not only has Trump lost a civil case in which a judge made it clear that he is an adjudicated rapist, but Trump is actually carrying around 34 felony convictions from his criminal trial in New York.
As The New York Times reports, Trump has gone from facing off against an older man he could deride for being frail and incompetent, to finding himself in a race with a dynamic Black woman who is nearly 20 years younger. That switch has Trump and his team rattled. They really thought that it was too late for Democrats to make a change and that Trump could carry on with the same attacks he’d been using for years.
Now Trump is off balance, facing someone who is everything that makes him uncomfortable all rolled into one: a Black woman prosecutor.
The Times worries that this will bring out the worst in Trump. His record of attacking female rivals is already terrible, but add the threat Harris represents as a prosecutor and Trump is likely to unleash something much worse than the “dumb as a rock” insult that he sent the vice president’s way on Monday. Since then, Trump has produced social media posts calling Harris “Lyin’ Kamala” or “Laffin’ Kamala.”
Trump already faces a deficit with female voters, and his selection of J.D. Vance as a running mate wasn’t made to woo women back to his cause. On the Democratic side, Harris is expected to broaden an already wide gap with Black voters.
The mythology of so-called law and order is central to the Republican Party’s identity. Trump’s campaign and the recent Republican National Convention were both full of talk about a nonexistent “immigrant crime wave.” But the GOP had zero problem overlooking Trump’s crimes while still holding to the pretense of being the law-and-order party.
Harris won’t allow them to live in that gray zone. Republicans are going to be faced with the intrinsic hypocrisy of their position over and over again.
The Times also worries that Trump will attack Harris in a way that only worsens his position with women and Black voters.
The prosecutor-versus-felon approach may appeal to undecided voters who had been sour on both Mr. Trump and President Biden. It may also goad Mr. Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called “racist” and attacked in personal terms.
He also called James “Peekaboo,” an explicitly racist nickname. It doesn’t seem unlikely that Trump might say something similarly awful about Harris.
As The Bulwark reports, Trump’s camp is combing over Harris’ record as a prosecutor with a plan to incorporate it into their attacks on the Democratic candidate. And while his team claims that these attacks will not be race-related, it’s worth noting that Trump adviser Tony Fabrizio was part of the team that developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used to attack Gov. Michael Dukakis during the 1988 campaign.
The question is: If Trump tags Harris with a racist nickname, as he did James, or follows Bush’s example in cranking out ads based on racist fears, will the press call him out? Or will they just do what they’ve done so many times in the past and repeat Trump’s bigoted, sexist remarks without comment?
[…] The Harris campaign pulled in $81 million in its first 24 hours. That includes:
– Over 888,000 grassroots donors.
– 60% of those donors were making their first contribution of the 2024 cycle.
– 43,000 donors signed up as recurring donors, with more than half pledging weekly donations.
– 1 Win With Black Women Zoom call on Sunday night, with over 44,000 participants, netting more than $1.5 million for the campaign.
That was just the first 24 hours. Look what happened next:
– $100-plus million in 48 hours.
– More than 1.1 million unique donors, including 62% first-time donors.
– 1 Win With Black Men Zoom call on Monday night, with over 40,000 participants, netting about $1.3 million for the campaign.
Then there are the endorsements. Here’s where she’s at so far:
– 23 governors (i.e., every Democratic governor).
– 43 senators.
– 191 representatives.
– At least 10 labor unions.
Oh, and probably Beyoncé, who allowed the Harris campaign to use her 2016 song “Freedom” at her first campaign meeting Monday.
What’s just as exciting is the response from volunteers:
– Over 28,000 people have signed up to volunteer—more than 100 times the average sign-ups per day for the erstwhile Biden-Harris campaign.
How about her progress toward the nomination?
– 2,887 delegates, nearly a thousand more than she needs to secure the nomination.
Eric and Don Jr. are pushing a narrative that threat experts say will fuel violence.
Since a 20-year-old gunman opened fire more than a week ago at […] Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI has conducted hundreds of interviews and scrutinized the deceased perpetrator’s background and activity—only to find that his motive for the attack thus far remains a mystery. He was a registered Republican voter, but as threat assessment experts confirmed to me, the shooting likely was not driven by partisanship or political ideology. (That’s the case with many assassination attempts in modern history […]) The experts I spoke with also warned that partisan exploitation of the assassination attempt is fueling rising danger for political violence.
None of that has stopped Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. from fanning the flames. Speaking on Fox News on Sunday, Eric Trump reiterated the partisan blame leveled by various MAGA supporters—without any evidence—immediately after the shooting. “I said that the Democrats would stop at absolutely nothing,” he told Maria Bartiromo, angrily reciting a litany of alleged political persecutions against his father. “I’ve said on this show before I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried something even worse, alluding to exactly what happened, and I was right.”
Donald Trump Jr. has also continued to push this narrative. “They’re trying to jail their political opponents. They’re now trying to kill him,” he said on the Megyn Kelly Show during the Republican National Convention, rattling off grievances similar to those from his brother. (In the interview, Don Jr. also said repeatedly that his father, whose ear was grazed by a bullet, was “shot in the face.”)
This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally. […]
“Extremist groups will take advantage of anything that fits into their narrative and this is a really big plot point for them,” said another threat assessment expert. An intelligence bulletin from the FBI and DHS sent earlier this week to law enforcement throughout the country warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory attacks.”
Notably, Don Jr. has participated in his father’s long-running political incitement also by spreading provocative memes and conspiracy theories on social media, and by mocking violence against Trump’s political adversaries. These tactics are part of the method of stochastic terrorism long used by Trump as president and after he left office, as I’ve documented ever since the runup to the January 6 insurrection.
Perhaps most infamously, Don Jr. ridiculed the home invasion and vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, right before the 2022 midterm elections. […] Since the assassination attempt, Don Jr. has posted a derisive meme targeting Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and another appearing to suggest that the shooter was related to Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
[…] feeding into a volatile atmosphere that former President Trump himself has done much to foment. […] this month, an Arizona man was charged for allegedly threatening on a MAGA website to shoot FBI agents indiscriminately. Investigators found he had an AR-15, a pistol, a pump-action shotgun, and more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition.
Trump’s relentless talk of a migrant “invasion” also has heightened concerns about political violence among security experts. In recent weeks, the ex-president has continued his theme of disparaging migrants as “terrorists” and “mental patients,” declaring again that they are “poisoning our country.”
This demagoguery marked the finale of the GOP convention last week when Trump gave a rambling, grievance-laden speech that lasted more than an hour and a half. He depicted an America under siege from bloodthirsty rapists and murderers “pouring into our country,” likening these alleged hordes to the fictional cannibalistic serial killer, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” In case his renewed message of American carnage wasn’t clear enough, he warned: “Bad things are going to happen.”
A federal judge in Ohio struck down parts of Ohio’s 2023 election law changes, ruling on Monday the law violates the rights of voters with disabilities in the state.
The League of Women Voters of Ohio — a grassroots voter organization — brought the suit challenging the law, which prohibited anyone but a few qualifying family members from assisting voters with disabilities in delivering or mailing their absentee ballots.
The law, which went into effect April 2023, barred anyone who is not an election official or mail carrier from possessing or returning the absentee ballot for voters with disabilities, with the exception of those family members.
Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan, in a ruling Monday, pointed to Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, stating it allows a disabled voter “to select a person of their choice to assist them with voting,” including the return of a ballot.
Brennan ruled federal election law supersedes Ohio’s law and ordered that the 2023 law no longer be enforced.
The plaintiffs argued that many voters with disabilities may be unable to travel to their polling place or access their mailbox or drop box, and do not have nearby relatives on the authorized list to help them do so.
Authorized family members included the voter’s spouse, parents, in-law parents, grandparents, siblings, adopted parents or children, stepparents, aunts, uncles, nieces or nephews. It did not include other potential helpers for those with disabilities, including roommates, professional caregivers or grandchildren.
“HB 458 prohibited such voters with disabilities from turning to other trusted people in their lives to assist them, including their professional caregivers, their neighbors, and even their own grandchildren,” the League of Women Voters of Ohio wrote in a statement.
[…] Freda Levenson, ACLU of Ohio legal director, celebrated the ruling, calling it a “win for democracy.”
“We are thrilled that the court ordered the state to stop denying Ohioans with disabilities the opportunity to cast their ballots via assistance from a trusted person of their choice,” Levenson wrote.
A win for democracy and for disabled people.
Being disabled does not automatically make one also stupid. Disabled people can make their own choices.
[…] Tim Alberta reported that Trump’s campaign has indeed been concerned about Biden dropping out and Kamala Harris taking over. But for some stupid reason, after the debate that actually set in motion Biden’s withdrawal, “they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed,” writes Alberta.
More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that [President Biden’s] stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.
[Yes, that sounds like a trumpian self-referential thought process.]
[…] How could Trump be so blindsided?
Allow us to revisit what Donald Trump thinks about the troops, veterans, and people who die in wars, because these two things are related.
Per John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump thinks “those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’”
“I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” asked Trump at the grave of Robert Kelly, John Kelly’s son who was killed in Afghanistan. It was Memorial Day.
He thinks those who died fighting for this country are “losers,” and he couldn’t be bothered to visit their graves in France because he was scared he was going to get his hair wet.
[…] Yes, what a mystery that Trump was completely blindsided by Joe Biden taking the honorable route, capping off 50-something years of service to this country by humbly exiting stage left and passing the baton when he realized it was likely that if he stayed in — if he let his ego win — then it might be the last democratic election this country ever sees.
Who possibly could have seen that coming, besides literally every person alive who’s even slightly more decent than Donald Goddamned Trump?
[…] JD Vance, in fact, has been whining about “childless cat ladies” for years, claiming that women who don’t have children are “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made” and have “no direct stake” in the future of the country. Here he is attacking Harris for that very reason just a few years ago. [video at the link]
Oh, you wanna talk about people with no stake in the future of the country? How about all those born-again Christians who, despite having 19 kids and counting, think it’s offensive to take care of the environment because Jesus is coming back to apocalypse us all any day now? Or Republicans who don’t want to spend money on childcare or healthcare or education? Because I don’t think they’re doing that “for the children.”
But I digress! All of yesterday, weirdos on the Right freaked out over the fact that Harris doesn’t have children and, uh, that she probably even had sex before she got married in 2014 (WOAH IF TRUE!). [LOL]They’ve been obsessed with this narrative that “she slept her way to the top” by having dated Willie Brown for about a year or so while he was separated from his wife. […]
One of the loudest voices on this front was one Laura Loomer — whom I might note is unmarried and childless her own damn self.
On social media, Loomer wrote:
It’s time for Republicans to start talking about Kamala Harris’s sexual history and the reason why she likely doesn’t have any children of her own.
I’m willing to bet she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.
A woman who has no biological children of her own should not be allowed to make decisions in the White House for your children.
Republicans need to run with this messaging and ask why a woman with no kids of her own and just a scarred up uterus is so obsessed with wanting to kill your babies.
Kamala has zero investment in the future but she wants to determine our future.
Yes, definitely. Republicans should absolutely run with this messaging. Look! Milo’s doing it! You know, that guy who has been so very relevant in the years since he went on Bill Maher and suggested that child molesting priests were no big. [X post available at the link]
Well, they are well on their way to capturing the votes of the 3.3 percent of Americans who abstained from sex until they were married — presuming that none of them have had fertility issues or chose not to have children for other reasons.
If these people were remotely capable of empathy, it might occur to them that there are, actually, a lot of reasons why a woman might not have children of her own. Sure, for one woman it could be choice. Perhaps for another, it could be that she really is an evil Jezebel whore who focused on her career and other things in her life instead of fulfilling her purpose as an incubator.
For another still, it could also be that, for whatever reason, she actually can’t have children.
Approximately 11 percent of women (and nine percent of men) in this country have fertility problems — which, coincidentally, is why the right’s flirtation with “IVF is murder” has gone over like a lead balloon.
This would not be new territory for Loomer, who has shown a fondness for attacking other women for their health issues. Previously, she attacked Casey DeSantis by accusing her of “exaggerating” her bout with breast cancer in order to win votes for her husband. Like, I really fucking hate Ron DeSantis. I do. I would argue that I probably hate Ron DeSantis a whole lot more than Laura Loomer hates Ron DeSantis. But I’m also not a psychopath who yells at people for not having cancer the way I’d prefer they have cancer. That’s fucking weird.
It’s not normal to care about people’s personal choices in this way, which is why you don’t see me chiming in with the criticisms of Loomer’s adjustments to her face. It’s not my face so it’s not my business. If she feels she looks good like that, if she’s happy, more power to her (in that area and that area only). I will also not criticize Loomer, who has never been married, for still being a virgin at the age of 31 (which she must be, given how she attacks other women who have had premarital sex). That, too, is a choice that does not affect me.
Isn’t it just so freeing to mind one’s own damn business?
That being said, I’m actually not mad at the fact that the Right is so terminally online that they think it’s normal to yell at women for having had sex or for not being baby factories. It shows how unbelievably out of touch they are. Next thing you know, they’ll be echoing the edgelords who want to #RepealThe19th or ban pornography or rail against masturbation […]
The [Vance “childless cat ladies”] clip has started to spread online, with Hillary Clinton sharing it in a Tuesday post on X and adding sarcastically “what a normal, relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms.”
SC @429, Vance is his own worst enemy. He shares that trait with Trump. Both of those guys continue to reveal who they really are.
In other news, as reported by USA Today:
Sunday, July 21 was Earth’s hottest day on record, according to a climate tracking agency based in Europe. … Unfortunately, Earth being hot is nothing new: Our planet has seen over 550 consecutive months with temperatures above the 20th-century average. A run of all-time temperature records, including over a year of months registering record heat, is unusual, perplexing and worrying
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., is pushing for the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether Elon Musk’s X improperly prevented users from following an official presidential campaign account for Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a feisty kickoff to her presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday challenged Donald J. Trump to walk down a ramp.
“The American people deserve a president who can walk down a ramp unassisted and without incident,” Harris said. “And so I put this challenge to Donald Trump: I will meet you anytime, anywhere, any ramp.”
Just minutes after Harris threw down the gauntlet, Trump responded with a note from his podiatrist, who asserted that a “Vietnam-era foot condition” would make walking down a ramp “an excruciating ordeal” for the former president.
Doubling down, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance lambasted Harris’s ramp challenge, calling it “deeply offensive to every American man who, like President Trump, bravely avoided serving his country.”
I saw people mentioning that yesterday in a comment thread (at the Cyberstuck subreddit, which I highly recommend). Who knows, but wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it turns out to be true.
Nadler’s letter included screenshots of accounts on X posting that they received an error message reading “Limit reached” and “You are unable to follow more people at this time” when they attempted to follow the “Kamala HQ” account.
NBC News found 13 X accounts that posted they were unable to follow “Kamala HQ” and received the “Limit reached” error message, in addition to the three accounts that Nadler identified in his letter to Jordan.
[…] “This suggests that X may be intentionally throttling or blocking Vice President Harris’ ability to communicate with potential voters,” Nadler wrote. […]
JMsays
Trump campaign files suit to block Harris from using Biden reelection money. Independent UK: block Harris from Biden’s $90 million war chest
The complaint is unlikely to work because the Biden campaign was technically the Biden/Harris campaign. Harris’s campaign may have to play some legal games and make sure they don’t refer to Harris’s VP candidate with that money but Harris had access all along.
I think it’s unlikely that Trump’s lawyers expect they will win. More likely they just want to delay Harris’s access to the money for a while. If they are lucky they can get a judge to block access until the case is resolved and then drag it out past November. At this point in the campaign just keeping Harris from using it for a couple of weeks is a big win.
Tethyssays
I don’t think team felon has any legal standing to file such a whiney assed complaint. It’s nonsensical that Harris can’t use the funds that were donated to the Biden/Harris reelection campaign.
Luckily she already has her own war chest that is well over 105 million in just two days, in addition to the more than 150 million that was raised for the Democratic Party in general.
I’m sure those numbers are going down very poorly with the troll brigade at Mag-a-lago.
StevoRsays
Via DW News – The world’s largest wetlands is on fire :
this thing about hegemonic expansionist colonising you go on about is basically monkeys wondering why other species don’t throw poo
<sigh>
Poo-throwers don’t inherently outcompete and outbreed non-poo-throwers; that’s very niche-contingent.
Hegemonic-colonizers do inherently outcompete and outbreed non-hegemonic-colonizers.
AFAICT, constraining my scope to “everything that is a plausible product of natural selection” constitutes “anthropomorphism” in your eyes. Despite the fact that “everything that is not” consists of gas, plasma, dust, and a smattering of rocks, served with ice and with some radiation on the side. (And whatever dark matter equivalents of these may exist.)
(And yes, cities and skyscrapers and the Apollo landing modules still littering the lunar surface are products of natural selection, as are your bones, teeth, and fingernails, or a turtle’s shell, or honeycomb. They wouldn’t exist without it.)
You seem to want to ask “why aren’t the non-colonizers here?” whereas Fermi asks “why aren’t the other colonizers here/why aren’t there any other colonizers?” The latter seems the inherently more interesting question, somehow …
Right. Biosignatures, just what we expect from life as we know it.
To recap, I suggested such to include:
evidence for an energy flow that cups and dams some energy in a way that shouldn’t happen by chance, and that would enable some structure to copy itself
… this is general to the point of covering any form of life that doesn’t flagrantly violate the laws of thermodynamics. I don’t know how much more general I can be to evade the charge of “anthropomorphizing”! Throw the physics books out the window? <smh>
SC@398:
Gotta say, as a Canadian, watching this season of America has been absolutely riveting. Kudos to the writers.
Nerve-wracking, too, I expect. 90% of Canada’s population is in the “WARNING: You are inside of the splash zone” part of the seating adjacent to the yank tank, the last time I checked.
Lynna@428:
It’s not normal to care about people’s personal choices in this way
Apparently, for evangelical Christians it is normal. Which says a lot about evangelical Christians. None of it good.
Lynna@430:
A run of all-time temperature records, including over a year of months registering record heat, is unusual, perplexing and worrying
Unusual and worrying I’ll grant, but it’s actually not perplexing at all. It’s exactly what we’ve been warned about by scientists for the last fifty freaking years.
this thing about hegemonic expansionist colonising you go on about is basically monkeys wondering why other species don’t throw poo
<sigh>
Poo-throwers don’t inherently outcompete and outbreed non-poo-throwers; that’s very niche-contingent.
Heh heh heh.
We are both monkeys.
But monkeys are a rather small subset of all possible life-forms, no? ;)
Hegemonic-colonizers do inherently outcompete and outbreed non-hegemonic-colonizers.
AFAICT, constraining my scope to “everything that is a plausible product of natural selection” constitutes “anthropomorphism” in your eyes.
Tsk. No.
Not “a plausible product of natural selection”, rather your boneheaded idea that it’s baryonic matter at hand, and that advanced life must be hegemonic.
cf. #204
Despite the fact that “everything that is not” consists of gas, plasma, dust, and a smattering of rocks, served with ice and with some radiation on the side. (And whatever dark matter equivalents of these may exist.)
(And yes, cities and skyscrapers and the Apollo landing modules still littering the lunar surface are products of natural selection, as are your bones, teeth, and fingernails, or a turtle’s shell, or honeycomb. They wouldn’t exist without it.)
Entropic gradients.
(You are a sad exemplar of your nym)
You seem to want to ask “why aren’t the non-colonizers here?” whereas Fermi asks “why aren’t the other colonizers here/why aren’t there any other colonizers?” The latter seems the inherently more interesting question, somehow …
Right. Biosignatures, just what we expect from life as we know it.
To recap, I suggested such to include:
evidence for an energy flow that cups and dams some energy in a way that shouldn’t happen by chance, and that would enable some structure to copy itself
… this is general to the point of covering any form of life that doesn’t flagrantly violate the laws of thermodynamics. I don’t know how much more general I can be to evade the charge of “anthropomorphizing”! Throw the physics books out the window? <smh>
The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life – Universe Today
<snicker>
Yeah, and the magical fairy life-pixies do their job, too.
heh.
John Moralessays
birgerjohansson, seriously.
You go by headlines, not by content.
(Weak)
birgerjohanssonsays
Republican politicians are urging their colleagues to avoid racist and sexist comments about Kamala Harris.
Even if Trump somehow restrains himself for… several hours, there is so much already on record to last well past November. And the likes of Sebastian Gorka, Sean Hannity and the morlocks in congress are not likely to show much restraint.
We should encourage them all to say the quiet part out loud.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US politics liveblog. From there:
Trump to turn fire on Harris in his first rally since Biden dropped out of race
Welcome to our coverage of the US presidential race with all the major players due to speak today.
Republican nominee Donald Trump will hold his first rally since it was announced that Joe Biden will drop out of the race. The former president will appear at an event in Charlotte, North Carolina, a state that will be an important battleground in the 5 November election. He will turn his fire on Kamala Harris, who is almost certain to run against him, amid fears from his aides of a “Harris honeymoon”.
Meanwhile, as Reuters reports, the vice-president will head to Indianapolis to speak at an event hosted by the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, which was founded at Howard University, the historically Black college that Harris attended.
She hopes to tap sororities’ multi-generational network of Black women to deliver strong voter turnout for Democrats in November.
Harris held an energetic first rally as the likely nominee on Tuesday in Milwaukee, telling the crowd that Americans were “not going back” to the “chaos” of the Trump years.
Joe Biden will also be speaking. He is set to make a case for his legacy on Wednesday night when he delivers an Oval Office address about his decision to bow out of the race and “what lies ahead.”
The Harris Campaign has announced that, as of Tuesday evening, they have raised $126m since announcing 2024 run.
Dozens of Democrats plan to skip Netanyahu address to US Congress
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address the US Congress on Wednesday as dozens of Democrats plan to skip the speech.
Protests over his arrival in Washington DC have already begun, including a sit-in at a congressional office building that ended with multiple arrests, according to the Associated Press.
He will speak to a joint meeting of the Senate and House of Representatives at 2pm (7pm UK time). This will be his fourth time making such an address, surpassing Winston Churchill’s record as the foreign leader who has made the most joint addresses to the US Congress. [good grief]
Dozens of Democrats plan to skip the speech, many expressing dismay over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza which has killed more than 39,000 people and led to a humanitarian crisis on the ground. Presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will not be in attendance as she is on the campaign trail outside DC but she plans to meet Netanyahu separately.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told reporters: “For him, this is all about shoring up his support back home, which is one of the reasons I don’t want to attend.”
“I don’t want to be part of a political prop in this act of deception. He is not the great guardian of the US-Israel relationship.”
The Democrats planning to stay away also include Senators Dick Durbin, the chamber’s number two Democrat, Tim Kaine, Jeff Merkley and Brian Schatz, all members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as Patty Murray, who chairs Senate Appropriations.
In the House, those staying away included progressives like Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Ami Bera, a senior member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Adam Smith, the top Democrat on Armed Services.
Smith said he never attends joint meetings but also described himself on Tuesday as “very, very opposed to what prime minister Netanyahu is doing in Israel.”
Murray normally would have presided, as the senior Senate Democrat, because Harris will not attend. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, who leads the foreign relations committee, will replace her.
Netanyahu is due to travel to Florida to meet with Donald Trump later this week. The meeting will be their first since the end of Trump’s presidency, during which the two forged close ties.
A Russian chef who has lived in France for 14 years has been arrested on suspicion of plotting with a foreign power to stage “large scale” acts of “destabilisation” during the Olympic Games in Paris.
The 40-year-old man was arrested during a raid of his apartment in central Paris on Sunday where a document linked to an elite Russian special forces unit operating under the command of the FSB, an heir to the KGB, was reportedly found….
Emmanuel Macron has said he will maintain the country’s centrist caretaker government until the end of the Olympic Games in mid-August to avoid disorder, dismissing an effort by a leftwing alliance to name a prime minister.
His announcement in a TV interview came shortly after the leftist coalition that won the most votes in this month’s parliamentary elections selected the little-known civil servant Lucie Castets as its choice for prime minister.
Macron said the current caretaker government would “handle current affairs during the Olympics”, which end on 11 August.
When asked about Castets, Macron told France 2: “This is not the issue. The name is not the issue. The issue is: which majority can emerge at the (national) assembly?
“Until mid-August, we’re in no position to change things, because it would create disorder.”…
(Here’s an article about the NFP picking Castets – who’s very chic from what I’ve seen :) – in Le HuffPost.)
Paul Ksays
I read this thread multiple times per day, but don’t post often. Lately, I’ve posted several times about not wanting Biden to drop out. I particularly was at odds with KG, whose views I typically agree with. I’m here to eat a bit of crow. I still think that the attacks on Biden were a ‘swift boat’ ploy (everyone should read comment 421), with the media not just constantly harping on it, but ignoring Trump’s similar age. I still think that race and gender are hurdles that Harris is going to face, and not just from the Republicans, who will find ways to push this. I worried that folks were calling for Biden to step down, but too often, those folks did not suggest an alternative. The in-fighting among Democrats caused me to think chaos could follow (which the media would love to pile on to). But, with Biden’s clear and almost immediate endorsing of her, Harris was off to an amazing start, and I hope this will lead to a trouncing of Trump. It’s not just the amount of cash raised so far, but the instant outpouring of support, enthusiasm, and volunteers that have me very happy to be proved wrong.
Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American lawmaker in Congress, said it was “utterly disgraceful” that Benjamin Netanyahu had been invited to address Congress, adding that the Israeli leader should be “arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court.”
New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she plans to boycott Netanyahu’s speech this afternoon, calling the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal”.
Florida congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost, said he would also skip the speech, adding that he “detest[s] what Netanyahu is doing, and I detest his leadership.”
Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, will also not be attending Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this afternoon, the New York Times’ Annie Karni reports. A statement by Pelosi reads:
Speaker Pelosi will not be attending today’s Joint Meeting of Congress. This morning, she will join a Members meeting with Israeli citizens whose families have suffered in the wake of the October 7th Hamas terror attack and kidnappings.
About 200 people were arrested on Tuesday during a pro-Palestinian protest in a congressional building ahead of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress today.
The demonstration, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, took place in the rotunda of the Cannon House office building.
Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has warned of a “zero-tolerance policy” for any signs of disturbances in the Capitol building during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this afternoon.
Johnson, in a letter to House members on Tuesday, wrote that there will be additional security measures and the note served as a “friendly reminder of the longstanding rules and decorum of the House.”
In the interests of all involved, we will enforce a zero-tolerance policy for disturbances in the building. All Members should kindly inform their guests that any disruption of the proceedings of the House is a violation of the rules and may subject the offenders to prosecution. If any disturbance does occur, the Sergeant at Arms and Capitol Police will remove the offending visitor(s) from the gallery and subject them to arrest.
“…And in closing, I would like to reiterate my full support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who instigated a violent attack on the Capitol in order to overturn the results of a democratic election and has praised and promised to pardon the attackers.”
KGsays
It’s not just the amount of cash raised so far, but the instant outpouring of support, enthusiasm, and volunteers that have me very happy to be proved wrong. – Paul K@454
I should in turn admit that I didn’t anticipate the scale of that “instant outpouring”: primarily, I thought Biden had to go (because even if I’m wrong about the extent of his cognitive problems, as long as he remained in the race, it was going to dominate the narrative), and that Harris was the only feasible replacement. She has clearly been ready for this (and so she should have been – even before the debate there was always the possibility Biden would have a health crisis and have to pull out).
Republican congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky said he will not be attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, writing that he didn’t “feel like being a prop” in “political theater”….
[Massie tweeted:
“Today Congress will undertake political theater on behalf of the State Department.
The purpose of having Netanyahu address Congress is to bolster his political standing in Israel and to quell int’l opposition to his war.
I don’t feel like being a prop so I won’t be attending.”]
…Netanyahu was originally invited by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to address Congress amid the protests and encampments that formed on college campuses this spring.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who as the president of the Senate would normally preside over such an event, will not attend….
Johnson said Tuesday that it is “inexcusable” that Harris is skipping Netanyahu’s speech and that she should be “held accountable” for it….
Palestinian factions including rivals Hamas and Fatah have signed an agreement on “ending division and strengthening Palestinian unity” in Beijing, China said Tuesday.
The announcement followed reconciliation talks hosted by China involving 14 Palestinian factions starting Sunday, according to China’s Foreign Ministry, which come as Israel wages war against militant group Hamas in Gaza and as Beijing has sought to present itself as a potential peace broker in the conflict.
The agreement makes some big promises but is short on how it will be done. It says Hamas should/will join the PLO but not how it will be represented in the organization. It ignores the issue of security in the Gaza strip or Hamas having it’s own private military. If this does bring the various Palestinian organizations together it is significant but it feels more like a bunch of symbolic puffery to me.
China is seen as an independent mediator in a way the US is not on this issue, letting them bring together parties that wouldn’t be involved with the US. At the same time China is inexperienced with these issues and does not have a good history with international politics. China sometimes focuses on insuring their negotiations produce something that can be taken to the press as a success rather then actually solving the underlying problems.
Despite fears of intraparty chaos and disarray, the Democratic Party’s election shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris has been impressive.
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, many of the Democratic incumbent’s supporters said he had to keep going with his re-election bid — because the alternative would be intraparty chaos, division, and disarray.
There was one important flaw, however, in the argument: Democrats were already dealing with intraparty chaos, division, and disarray. Nearly every day, more party officials called on the president to pass the torch, and there were multiple polls showing most rank-and-file Democratic voters wanting an alternative to Biden. It appeared unsustainable.
It also appears that the party has turned a corner. A Wall Street Journal report summarized:
Fearful of chaos and losing to former President Donald Trump, Democrats quickly fell in line behind the vice president. … Potential challengers to Harris backed her, and party leaders who could have stood in her way chose not to. Harris was well-positioned as Biden’s No. 2—she received the president’s endorsement within 30 minutes of his announcement. The vice president quickly built on that advantage, burning up the phone lines with calls to party leaders and activists from her home at the Naval Observatory. Behind the scenes, lawmakers and activist groups coalesced around her.
[More out in the open than “behind the scenes.”]
With extraordinary speed, a party that appeared fractured is suddenly united. A party that saw its fundraising efforts screeching to a halt is suddenly reporting record-breaking hauls. A party that cringed in response to every new poll is celebrating the latest national survey data.
This seamless handoff from Biden to Harris wasn’t inevitable, but it has been executed with striking skill.
It prompted Matt Compton, a veteran of the Obama White House, to note via social media, “Shout out to the staffers in Delaware who just lived through the most stressful five weeks in campaign history, then flipped every piece of branding and content on a dime, raised $100m, recruited 58,000 volunteers, and generally just lit the internet on fire for Kamala Harris.”
That’s certainly fair, though it’s also worth pausing to emphasize Biden’s role. The incumbent president didn’t just do the bold thing by standing aside, he also played a direct role in helping rally Democrats behind their likely new nominee.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) last week concluded the long anticipated Third Plenum of the 20th Party Congress, which brought together the Party’s top leadership, including all the members of the Central Committee and the Politburo.
The 3rd plenum is a big deal because it is where the government announces big changes. On that alone the 3rd plenum is disappointing, with few policy changes of significance. This meeting has been delayed for months but exactly why is unclear, a product of the obscurity of China’s power structure and actions at the high end.
What it does say will be problems down the road. China is doubling down on it’s export focused economic reforms, which means more trade conflicts down the road. It’s increasing it’s state organized and run economic structure, which will be bad for China. It emphasizes national security and party security, reflecting an increasingly paranoid government.
It does recognize that China needs to make reforms to deal with it’s economic crises. The proposals either put more power in the hands of the state or are anemic. China needs to reform their entire tax system, an herculean task they don’t begin to address. Their current system depends on fees for construction to fund local government, now that housing has reached it’s limits that simply won’t provide enough money.
The results of the meeting also make clear that Xi’s power is near absolute. Reading between the lines it suggests that Xi is in a horrible situation. His power is great but he doesn’t trust anybody around him. Unlike Putin, he doesn’t have a circle of people he at least partially trusts running things under him. He has tried to promote his own people only to have to remove them. Many of the major government offices are still run by people considered opposed to Xi.
JMsays
@402 birgerjohansson: Al Franken has been mentioned as an outside possibility for Harris’s VP, so it could happen. Trump would look silly trying to harp on the one somewhat tasteless sexist joke that got Franken in trouble. It seems to be a long shot hope from more left leaning Democrats but it would be immensely amusing. Certainly somebody I would support.
A group of voters who supported Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential bid this week created a political action committee called Haley Voters for Harris, which will back Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democratic candidacy. The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has now sent the PAC a cease and desist letter, demanding that they stop using Haley’s name.
In other campaign news, this is summarized from reporting by The New York Times:
President Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver a speech tonight, discussing his decision not to seek a second term. Donald Trump and his political operation have demanded equal time, though as best as I can tell, no network has agreed to the request.
The moderators of a popular Reddit forum dedicated to mocking Tesla’s Cybertruck have enacted a simple and blunt rule, different from the usual restrictions against spam and hate speech.
“No defending this hideous piece of road garbage,” a top rule of the r/CyberStuck forum says. “The sub is about how awful it is. Go post on a Tesla sub if you want to defend it.”
This ruthless directive has catapulted the subreddit to 110,000 members since its launch in December, making r/CyberStuck one of the fastest-growing large-scale forums on the platform. It now has more members than r/Cybertruck, an older, much more positive forum. The mockery’s swell has traced the initial rollout of Tesla’s boxy, stainless steel vehicle — when new customers double-park, get stuck on beaches or wrap their trucks in gaudy colors, r/CyberStuck’s disdainful posters are never far behind.
Alex Beattie, a 56-year-old who lives in Scotland, created r/CyberStuck in December. He’d been spending more time on Reddit since he found his experience on Twitter degrading under Elon Musk’s leadership and saw someone leave a “cyberstuck” comment under a video of one of the vehicles struggling to mount a snowy hill in Stanislaus National Forest. An electric vehicle aficionado, he told SFGATE he made the forum “as a joke,” saying it never crossed his mind that the subreddit would grow much at all.
“It’s not some gut-level push to get everybody hate the Cybertruck. It’s just general lighthearted mockery,” he said. “It’s not that there’s any great agenda behind it other than, ‘Haha, look what’s happened now!’”
Still, the pile-on has been dramatic, and there’s plenty of material for months, or more, of reliable jokes….
…
But more than Musk, Tesla’s huge network of devoted fans fuels the r/CyberStuck ridicule. Posts in the subreddit often cite CybertruckOwnersClub[dot]com, a forum packed with earnest praise and hyperspecific complaints about the $61,000-$100,000 trucks. And a flock of attention-seekers, particularly on YouTube and TikTok, have provided the subreddit with months of mockable gags — one let the trunk crush his finger, and another showed off his U-turn skills and then sped up to 83 mph on a residential street. A popular r/CyberStuck post from Sunday simply showed a series of wedding photos that starred a customized Cybertruck; the top comment said, “The douchebaggery is strong with these two.”
Then, of course, there are the car’s well-publicized issues, made starker by Musk’s boast that the Cybertruck would be “apocalypse-proof.”…
Republicans have filed seven impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. They’ve also now filed three measures targeting Kamala Harris — and counting
As this week got underway, House Republicans were all set to add to their rather extraordinary impeachment list. In the wake of the recent assassination attempt targeting Donald Trump, Rep. Greg Steube of Florida announced plans to file articles of impeachment against Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina soon after took steps to force a vote on the measure.
The efforts quickly proved moot: A day later, Cheatle announced her resignation. But impeachment fans didn’t have to wait too long for the GOP to move forward with a related gambit. The conservative Washington Times reported:
Rep. Andy Ogles began an effort Tuesday to impeach Vice President Kamala Harris, initiating the move shortly after she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Ogles, Tennessee Republican, accused Ms. Harris of high crimes and misdemeanors for her role as “border czar” in the Biden administration, arguing in his impeachment resolution that she has shown “extraordinary incompetence” in enforcing immigration laws.
At the outset, it’s worth emphasizing that the California Democrat has never served as the administration’s “border czar,” no matter how many times Republicans and their allies claim otherwise.
But that’s not the only area of concern here.
For one thing, as GOP lawmakers really ought to know, impeaching a sitting vice president over policy disagreements is ridiculous.
For another, if seeing the words “Ogles,” “Harris” and “impeachment” in the same sentence rings a bell, there’s a good reason for that: This same highly controversial congressman first introduced an impeachment resolution against the vice president last summer. The far-right Tennessean’s measure didn’t go anywhere, so he apparently decided to unveil a new one because —well, just because.
But stepping back, there’s a larger context to all of this: Much of the House Republican Conference seems to look at impeachment campaigns as toys to be pulled off the shelf when they’re bored. In fact, it’s time to update the big list:
President Joe Biden: There is absolutely no evidence uncovered by Republicans that the incumbent Democrat has actually committed any high crimes, but as of this morning, there are literally seven different impeachment resolutions pending in the House targeting the sitting president. [That’s a lot of time wasted … and taxpayers money.]
Vice President Kamala Harris: Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced an impeachment resolution targeting Harris in the last Congress (I still don’t understand why) and it picked up two co-sponsors. Ogles, meanwhile, has unveiled two resolutions over the last 13 months.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: For the first time in American history, the House voted earlier this year to impeach a sitting cabinet secretary, targeting Mayorkas despite lacking evidence of high crimes.
Attorney General Merrick Garland: Several GOP lawmakers, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have raised the prospect of impeaching the nation’s chief law enforcement official. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a pending impeachment resolution against Garland a while back, as did Rep. Scott Perry, who also unveiled a similar resolution.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken: For reasons that remain fuzzy, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman introduced an impeachment resolution last summer targeting the nation’s chief diplomat. Rep. Dave Schweikert also raised the specter of impeaching Blinken.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: Nearly a year ago, Rep. Cory Mills of Florida introduced a resolution to impeach the Pentagon chief, and it managed to pick up three GOP co-sponsors.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg: A handful of congressional Republicans have endorsed impeaching Buttigieg, though formal resolutions have not yet been introduced.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona: Though this effort hasn’t yet moved beyond the discussion phase, Cardona is apparently in the mix. The New York Times reported last fall that “some” GOP lawmakers would like to impeach the education secretary.
FBI Director Chris Wray: Schweikert also made behind-the-scenes comments suggesting the FBI director handpicked by Trump might face some kind of impeachment threat. Soon after, Greene introduced an impeachment resolution targeting Wray, which has picked up a half-dozen GOP co-sponsors.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia: Greene, apparently upset about criminal cases against accused Jan. 6 defendants, has also introduced an impeachment resolution going after the federal prosecutor. (It has four Republican co-sponsors.)
Taken together, the House Republicans’ broader impeachment list now includes the sitting president, sitting vice president, six Cabinet secretaries, the director of the FBI and a largely unknown federal prosecutor.
White House spokesperson Ian Sams told NBC News earlier this year, “House Republicans are treating impeachments like an Oprah audience giveaway. They are disregarding the Constitution for the sake of cheap, baseless political stunts, instead of focusing on the issues Americans care about, and it lays bare how extreme they have become.”
After President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign on Sunday and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the next Democratic nominee, Vote.org reportedly registered 38,500 new voters over the next 48 hours. This represents a 700% surge over the previous 48 hours, with most of those voters being ages 34 and younger.
That beats the previous best day of the 2024 cycle, which came on National Voter Registration Day in September when pop superstar Taylor Swift posted an Instagram story urging her followers to get registered. That message helped spur over 35,000 new voter registrations.
The latest surge in registrations comes as Harris and other Democratic candidates see a flood of donations. Since Harris entered the race, ActBlue has recorded $179 million in donations to Democratic candidates and causes. That’s just part of a historic flood of over $250 million that poured in since Harris became the nominee-apparent. [That’s a good summary of the donations.]
It all reflects a genuine, pent-up demand for something new. And Harris is meeting that demand.
[…] Democrats are excited about Harris. That’s reflected in the contributions.
Young voters, who tend to be more Democratic than other age groups, are excited about Harris. That’s reflected in the registrations.
Those young voters are particularly energized and enthusiastic over the change in the ticket. As WGBH Boston reported on Sunday, some young Democrats were willing to turn up for Biden. But they’re willing to work for Harris.
“This is the most energized I have felt as a young Democratic voter in so long,” 22-year-old Democrat Audrey Grant told WGBH. “I think this is one of the first times that the Democratic Party has seized control of a media narrative and really changed the tide.”
[…] That Harris could pull in the kind of registration numbers associated with someone like Swift is encouraging. But the real power that such cultural figures have to move the needle shouldn’t be ignored.
On Tuesday, Beyoncé gave Harris permission to use her popular 2016 song “Freedom” in her campaign. Harris made it her entrance song in her first campaign appearance in the swing state of Wisconsin.
Swift’s obvious political clout and concerns that she would endorse Biden drove Republicans to distraction earlier in the year, leading to a host of conspiracy theories. Since Harris kicked off her campaign, the surge of Democratic zeal is already generating speculation over what might happen if Swift publicly rallies around Harris.
If Swift did so, she’d be in good company among pop stars. British singer—and the summer’s it-girl—Charli XCX declared that “kamala IS brat,” referring to the title of her latest album, and the Harris campaign quickly adopted the album’s lime-green cover art as the backdrop on their X (formerly Twitter) account.
There’s plenty of room for more synergy between Harris and singers whose impact is great enough to shift economies. A 2018 post from Swift in which she endorsed two candidates in Tennessee helped propel a surge of roughly 65,000 new signups at Vote.org in just 24 hours. [Exceptionally good news at the time.]
Official endorsements from Swift, Beyoncé, and others might break the internet—and the will of Republicans who see the tide turning against them. […]
Link to a donation site for Harris is available at the main link.
Tethyssays
@462
Al Franken has been mentioned as an outside possibility for Harris’s VP, so it could happen. Trump would look silly trying to harp on the one somewhat tasteless sexist joke that got Franken in trouble.
A joke? Franken was forced to resign because of his very creepy tendency to grab women’s asses during photos. Multiple women came forward to attest that he had wandering hands, so we made him suffer consequences for sexual misconduct.
One of the few times over the past several months I was able to bring myself to read and comment was during the French elections a few weeks ago. I was concerned about what might happen, but I had some reason to hope when I saw that the NFP had formed and people (especially young people) had a sense of urgency and were organizing strategically to get out the antifascist vote. When I saw the outcome I thought “That’s what we need here,” but couldn’t even type it out because I just didn’t see any possibility, and in fact things seemed to be going in the other direction. Now that’s all changed, and it’s happening here!
Guardian liveblog:
March for Our Lives backs Harris in first-ever political endorsement
March for Our Lives, the gun violence prevention organization created by the student survivors of the 2019 Parkland high school shooting, has announced it is endorsing Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
“As one of the largest youth-led movements in the nation, we are clear-eyed about the challenge ahead, and we believe that Kamala Harris is uniquely suited to meet this moment,” the organization said in a statement, adding:
We need an ardent defender of democracy, a gun violence prevention champion, and a leader who will listen to young people, give us a seat at the table, and fight for our future. We believe that Kamala Harris is that candidate and the right person to stand up for us and fight for the country we deserve.
The organization’s endorsement of Harris comes as she oversees the White House office of gun violence prevention. As vice-president, Harris has met regularly with advocates and survivors of gun violence.
SC @ 466.
“Why would he get equal time with the president when the president isn’t a candidate?”
It may be true he is not a candidate, but I refer you to the W-era concept of truthiness, wich is truer than mere “truth”.
(Autocorrect wanted to spell it “witch” as a testimony of weird Youtube film stuff. I need to stay away from “so bad it is good” films)
birgerjohanssonsays
“treating impeachments like an Oprah audience giveaway”
In their defence, politics has been influenced by TV since McCarthy waived a list of names before the cameras. It has worked before, so lets push the limits further.
During one of the wildest times in American politics, former President Trump will mobilize his supporters Wednesday in an east Charlotte arena.
…
The last time Trump was in North Carolina, he was watching NASCAR in Concord over Memorial Day weekend.
But the last time he was at Bojangles Coliseum came during another pivotal moment in history. That was early March 2020, before we knew how much COVID lockdowns would shake the world and reframe national politics, from health care to public education.
…At the time, Trump was broadcasting that it was “very safe” to gather at his campaign rallies, like the crowd of roughly 10,000 in the coliseum. He was already pointing his finger at Democrats, claiming the virus was the party’s “new hoax.”
What we’re watching: How Trump will speak of his new, presumptive opponent: Vice President Kamala Harris.
Plus, what he and other Republican speakers potentially say about one of her prospective running mates: North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
…Cooper spoke to local reporters Tuesday for the first time since the vice president search shined a national spotlight on him. He again was cautious to talk about being open to or accepting the role. He instead diverted the focus to Harris.
“First, I endorse Kamala Harris 100% for this job as president. I’ve known her a number of years. We served as attorneys general together,” Cooper told WBTV. “She has to win. She has to stop Trump and I want her to get the very best person she can get as vice president. That being said, I respect her process and I’m not going to comment on it any further.”
Meanwhile, members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation are sending in their pro-Cooper references, as Axios’ Andrew Solender reports.
…
…The Harris for President campaign is hosting its first Charlotte event earlier in the day with popular local Democrats, such as Mecklenburg County Commissioner Mark Jerrell and former Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Braxton Winston. They’ll “sound alarm” on Project 2025, according to a press release.
Vance Trots Out Welfare Queen Trope Against Harris
In a speech he gave a couple days ago in Virginia: “What the hell have you done other than collect a government check for the past 20 years?”
Eek! “Collect a government check” is a pretty fascinating way to describe “holding various high-power political jobs.”
The welfare queen trope, most often weaponized against Black, single mothers, stretches back to the 60s, though was famously popularized by Ronald Reagan.
The dogwhistles (bullhorns) are going to be blaring this election.
…The predicament facing the Rutan-Rams could become more common under a second Trump administration. Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for the next Republican administration and the policy brainchild of the conservative Heritage Foundation, contains an explicitly sympathetic view toward “faith-based adoption agencies” like the one that rejected the Rutan-Rams, who are “under threat from lawsuits” because of the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers “cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage”. It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.
Though Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from the project, his campaign’s own 16-page policy agenda echoes many of its goals, and his ties to the plan’s architects are well-established. In Milwaukee last week, the Heritage Foundation’s role in the Republican national convention was on full display, both on welcome banners at the airport and in the millions of dollars invested in the event itself. Following Trump’s announcement of his vice-presidential pick, the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, said he was “good friends” with JD Vance, and effusively declared him “a man who personifies hope for our nation’s future”. Vance has previously said there were “some good ideas” in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is divided into four broad pillars, the first of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”. A conservative vision of family pervades the document, and the authors call on policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family”.
The plan envisions upholding “a biblically based, social science-reinforced [LOL] definition of marriage and family”. It would remove nondiscrimination roadblocks governing faith-based grant recipients, such as the agency that denied the Rutan-Rams. The authors argue that “heterosexual, intact marriages” provide more stability for children than “all other family forms”. In addition to calling for the passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act, which would allow adoption and foster care agencies to make placement decisions based on their “religious beliefs or moral convictions”, it also calls on Congress to ensure “religious employers” are exempt from nondiscrimination laws and free to make business decisions based on their religious beliefs.
To the Rev Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a queer parent, the image of family portrayed by the policy agenda is blatantly exclusionary. The Christian nationalist plan rejects unmarried parents, single parents and LGBTQ+ families.
…
The Rutan-Rams have become the face of a campaign led by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who are representing them in their lawsuit, that seeks to shed light on what they call the Christian nationalist goals of Project 2025. As part of the campaign, visitors to the Republican convention last week may have seen billboards reading “You gotta keep ’em separated,” in reference to church and state.
Project 2025’s vision is already law in a number of states. The Rutan-Rams are battling a Tennessee law, modeled after similar laws in at least 10 other states, that permits faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclusively work with prospective parents who share their beliefs.
Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and author of a book titled How to End Christian Nationalism, contends that the scale and reach of Project 2025 pose a far greater danger to democracy than a patchwork of state laws.
“What’s different about Project 2025 is the sweeping nature of its plan,” said Tyler. “It would really rewrite the federal government and change policies in so many different areas at once in a way that would hasten our journey down that road to authoritarian theocracy.”
…
Tyler worries that Project 2025’s deliberate erosion of the separation between church and state, a founding principle embedded in the first amendment to the US constitution, will get a helping hand from the US supreme court, which has handed a series of victories in recent years to Christian activists. She specifically mentioned the 2021 decision in Carson v Makin, which struck down a Maine law that banned the use of public funds for religious schools. It was “an earthquake of a decision that a lot of people didn’t really pay attention to that has really opened the door to government funding of religion”, said Tyler.
The threat of a theocracy doesn’t seem far-fetched to Washington-Leapheart.
“Project 2025 says that religion is a permanent institution that should influence American life,” said Washington-Leapheart. “That alone communicates the kind of arrogant way Christianity is situated as an inevitability. And it’s not. I say that as a Christian person who is firmly grounded in my faith. It is not an inevitable part of my identity, it is a choice I make every day.[“]
Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick is backfiring on him—big time. Appearing on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” Tuesday evening, data analyst Harry Enten dug into the polling and found bad news for Ohio Sen. JD Vance and the GOP. The numbers do not lie: Vance is the least liked running mate in 44 years.
“I have gone all the way back since 1980. He is the first guy immediately following a convention—a VP pick—who actually had a net negative favorable rating, that is underwater,” Enten told Burnett. “The average since 2000 is plus 19 points. JD Vance—making history in the completely wrong way.” [X post and video at the link]
“Frankly, I don’t really understand the pick,” Enten said. “And apparently, neither do the American voters because we take a look at the net favorable rating for JD Vance—that’s the favorable minus unfavorable. It’s in negative net territory. Look at that. Negative 6 points.”
Vice presidential candidates usually enjoy a nice bounce following their party’s convention, and polls reflect the favorable opinions. There’s sort of a “new car smell” shininess to them, thanks to their big introduction on the national stage in all the hoopla of a convention. But as Enten says, “in this case, he’s dragging Trump down.”
Tapping Vance for the Republican ticket was a questionable decision in the first place, Enten points out. He performed far below other GOP candidates in his Senate win two years ago, even among the voters he and Trump most rely on—working-class white men.
“He was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “He adds nothing there.”
It’s not likely to get better for the Republican ticket as the campaign continues and voters find out a lot more about Vance, who is a relative newcomer to the political scene.
They’ll be seeing things like this People Magazine headline at the checkout counter and in their dentist’s waiting room: “J.D. Vance Isn’t the Bridge-Building VP That Moderates Wanted: What He’s Said About Women, Voting and Project 2025.”
That article includes such gems as:
“Vance wants to end abortion, and once called rape and incest exceptions ‘inconvenient’”
“Vance suggested that people should stay in ‘violent’ marriages to preserve their kids’ happiness”
“Vance said he wants to ban pornography, and blamed it for low birth rates”
“Vance opposes LGBTQ+ rights and has pushed harmful ‘groomer’ rhetoric about gay people”
“Vance is the VP candidate that Project 2025’s leaders wanted”
(By the way, a shout out to People Magazine for putting Project 2025, the far-right government blueprint crafted by Trump cronies, out into the mainstream.)
It’s no wonder Trump allies are increasingly nervous about this pick.
New polling from Navigator Research shows a rapid increase in the number of Americans who say they have heard of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian plan for a second Donald Trump administration. And along with that awareness has also come a sharp increase in the number of Americans who disapprove of it.
Though articles about the plan have been circulating since the middle of 2023, a Navigator survey at the end of June showed just 10% of Americans holding a favorable opinion of Project 2025 and 19% holding an unfavorable opinion. The rest had either no opinion or no knowledge of the plan.
But by mid-July, those numbers had jumped to 11% favorable and 43% unfavorable. That increase in knowledge about the plan reflects broader reporting on Project 2025, as well as increased attention to the plan from Democratic politicians. It also likely reflects a spurt of media coverage that began in early July expressly because Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with the plan. [Chart at the link]
Project 2025, produced with the assistance of at least 140 former or current members of Trump’s campaign and White House staff, is meant to act as a guide to Trump’s actions in a second term.
[…] In May, Rep. Ayanna Pressley posted a widely seen video on TikTok detailing the plan’s desire to eliminate the Department of Education, among other goals. On June 11, Democratic lawmakers formed the Stop Project 2025 Task Force, releasing an announcement that warned against the plan as “dystopian.”
Then, on June 20, HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” made Project 2025 the central topic of the program. [video at the link, John Oliver is thorough and funny]
A week later, President Joe Biden launched a website focused on publicizing the contents of Project 2025.
On June 30, BET Awards host Taraji P. Henson warned those tuning in to the broadcast about Project 2025. “Pay attention,” Henson told the audience. “It’s not a secret, look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”
All of those factors generated interest, but the turning point in making the plan for an authoritarian takeover of the federal government more visible to the general public might have taken place on July 5, when Trump denied any knowledge of the plan. [Trump’s post is available at the link.]
Trump’s response was so obviously false, that multiple media outlets published responses to that denial, several of which included details about the contents of the plan. By July 11, it seemed like discussion of Project 2025 was everywhere.
While many of the actions proposed in the plan, like changing the status of federal workers to make it easier to insert Trump followers into critical positions, are not easily perceived as threats by the public, other parts of the manifesto are more clearly objectionable. That includes a tax plan that would cost working-class and middle-class families thousands while generating huge savings for the wealthy. [X post and graph at the link]
Trump may be denying involvement, but polling shows his false claims aren’t being believed.
People are learning about Project 2025. They know it describes Trump’s plans for when he retakes the White House. And they don’t like it.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has some dazzling guidance for attacking Vice President Kamala Harris now that she is considered the front-runner to face convicted felon Donald Trump this November. According to a memo obtained by Axios, the vice president should be described as a “radical” progressive and an architect of the border crisis. And she’s “weird.”
The memo also includes a “weird” category—mocking Harris’s “habit of laughing at inappropriate moments,” her self-proclaimed love of Venn diagrams and her call to ban plastic straws, among other things.
Trump’s policy record is garbage, his immigration record is one of human rights violations, and his tendency to be “weird” is off the charts. Here are 19 times Trump was … weird. [details are available at the link, along with supporting video snippets]
1. Praising “the late, great, Hannibal Lecter.”
2. His strange preoccupation with the “genius” of realizing that the word “us” appears in the acronym “U.S.A.”
3. Remember that photo, alongside the Saudi King, with his tiny hands on the glowing orb?
4. When Trump sorta curtsy-bowed before the Saudi King?
5. “Melania’s son.”
6. Humping the American Flag on various stages across the country.
7. Saluting a North Korean general.
8. Electric boat versus battery versus shark?
9. Trump’s toilet claim: Americans need to flush “10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”
10. Doctoring a weather map with a black Sharpie.
11. Making Clorox great again.
12. How do magnets work?
13. Does Trump not know who Frederick Douglass was, or did he just find out?
14. The time when the Continental Army took over the airports.
15. Trump hates windmills and thinks televisions turn off if there isn’t enough wind.
16. When Trump shoved a world leader out of the way in order to be in front for a photo.
17. When Trump asked a 7-year-old if he still believed in Santa.
18. Trump seems to believe we have invisible planes.
19. Robert E. Lee was a pirate shanty singer?
[…]
For many of those examples of Trump’s weirdness there are multiple repetitions/occasions. Trump repeats and repeats.
Newsweek reports on the Russia’s dissing JD Vance:
[…] In front of a screen showing Vance at a Republican rally in Michigan, Solovyov prompted laughter from his guests when he suggested the former president chose his running mate “to make sure that America prays for Trump to live.”
“God forbid something happens to him and his vice president steps in,” Solovyov said, chuckling at the prospect of Trump not making it to the end of his term, adding: “It would not be good for anybody.”
[…] Another guest, political scientist Dmitry Drobnitsky, chimed in with his take, saying: “You don’t pick this kind of a VP to get more votes.”
[…] Sidorov also appeared to disparage the American dream narrative portrayed by Vance as coming from a poor family to senator and then VP candidate, suggesting that the GOP ticket wants to bring the U.S. back to the conservative values of the 1950s. […]
birgerjohanssonsays
Britain / The Guardian
Armed police officer filmed kicking man in face as he lay on ground at Manchester airport
When his uncle Donald became president, Fred Trump III—whose son William, due to a rare genetic mutation, has seizures and an intellectual disability—saw an opportunity to advocate for disability rights.
In a Time excerpt of his forthcoming book All in the Family, Fred Trump revealed a disturbing conversation with the then-president following a White House meeting in which he discussed how expensive caring for people with complex disabilities can be. Donald Trump said of some disabled people, his nephew recounted, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Time said that it had reached out to Donald Trump for comment about his nephew’s allegations but received no response.
It wasn’t the only concerning conversation Trump’s nephew alleged that they had. When a Trump family medical fund for William’s medical and living expenses was running low, Fred said his uncle told him, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Donald Trump has made offensive comments about disabled people. He infamously made fun of a reporter’s disability at a 2015 rally. But it’s still even more shocking to hear from a close relative that he clearly does not value the life of his own disabled family member.
Pro-Palestinian protesters made their presence known around the Capitol on Wednesday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress.
Thousands of demonstrators demanded the arrest of Netanyahu, who has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
A number of Democrats are boycotting the speech, which comes at the invitation of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), as anger boils over Netanyahu’s refusal to end the war and inability to secure the release of hostages taken during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
However, nearly everyone in attendance stood for an ovation as Netanyahu entered the House chamber — with a couple notable exceptions.
Johnson sent a letter to House members Tuesday warning against “any disruption of the proceedings of the rules and may subject the offenders to prosecution.”
Follow along for live updates. [details at the link]
Excerpt:
Netanyahu thanked former President Trump for forging the Abraham Accords in 2020, which saw Israel establish relations with United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
He also thanked Trump for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and noted that the former president survived a recent assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13.
“Israelis were relieved that President Trump emerged safe and sound from that dastardly attack,” he said.
Much more at the link.
KGsays
However, nearly everyone in attendance stood for an ovation as Netanyahu entered the House chamber – Lynna, OM@484, citing The Hill
That is truly disgusting.
birgerjohanssonsays
Sabine Hossenfelder:
“Americans Sue to Remain Misinformed”
KG @485, and that’s what Israeli media is going to show to Netanyahu’s constituents.
Related:
Former President Trump on Tuesday posted a letter from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Truth Social ahead of a meeting he will have later this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“It is with grave concern that I have received news and later on watched footage of your attempted assassination,” the letter from Abbas to Trump reads. “Acts of violence must not have a place in a world of law and order.”
“Respect for the other with tolerance and valuing of human life is what must prevail,” Abbas continued. “Despicable acts of attempted or successful assassinations are acts of weakness with failed understanding of peaceful measures to resolve conflicts.”
In response, Trump thanked Abbas in writing on the letter and said “everything will be good.”
“Looking forward to seeing Bibi Netanyahu on Friday, and even more forward to achieving Peace in the Middle East! DJT,” Trump captioned the post. […]
Fact-check: Netanyahu says Israel is not blocking aid into Gaza
Benjamin Netanyahu said Gazans are not getting enough aid because Hamas is stealing it. Almost every major relief agency operating in Gaza has accused Israel of slowing the flow of aid into Gaza.
The inspection process for supplies entering the besieged enclave is onerous and opaque, officials say. Items ranging from lifesaving medical supplies to toys and chocolate croissants have been rejected or restricted in number.
The main entry point, near Rafah, is shuttered after Israel seized the city. When trucks do cross the border, Israeli regulations on access to the area mean that humanitarian workers do not always have permission to reach the delivery that awaits them, according to aid staffers. And once they get there, the ongoing conflict makes distribution difficult, and often dangerous.
At times this year, the volume of aid delivered to parts of Gaza has collapsed after Israeli airstrikes targeted police guarding the convoys, exposing the goods to looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians
Elon Musk attended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress as his guest. […]
Ahead of the speech, Musk was seen in the gallery, above the floor, seated near Netanyahu’s wife, Sara Netanyahu.
The Tesla Motors CEO’s visit to Capitol Hill came a day after he announced on X that his satellite internet company Starlink had been activated in a Gaza hospital, with the support of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. […]
A Toyota Land Cruiser exploded in the north of Moscow. Police claim the cause is ‘detonation of an explosive device’. According to local media, 50-year-old Andrei Torgashov, deputy head of a military satellite communications unit, was in the SUV, his legs torn off.
Thomas Crooks may have had a firearm with a collapsible stock and flew a drone around the campaign rally site prior to the shooting, Wray said before the House Judiciary Committee.
The gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump may have had a firearm with a collapsible stock, making it easier for him to carry and conceal the weapon, the director of the FBI testified Wednesday.
The gunman also had researched President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, FBI Director Christopher Wray said.
On July 5, Thomas Crooks, 20, traveled to the site of Trump’s July 13 presidential campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, for the first time, Wray told a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
The next day, Crooks searched “how far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” referring to the 1963 assassination, and registered for the rally, Wray said.
A series of Congressional hearings this week have begun to shed light on how Crooks was able to evade law enforcement and open fire at Trump. Wray’s testimony has offered the most clear timeline of Crooks’ activities on the day of the shooting and in the week leading up to it, highlighting the level of preparation carried out ahead of time.
On the morning of the rally, he went back to the campaign site, where he stayed for about an hour, and then left to purchase 50 rounds of ammunition that afternoon.
Wray said Crooks was back at the rally site shortly before 4 p.m., when he flew a drone about 200 yards away from the main stage area, Wray said.
Two hours later, witnesses began to shout about a suspicious man on the roof of a nearby building.
Wray said Crooks may have had a collapsible stock, which would explain why witnesses did not see Crooks walking around with a weapon beforehand and why the firearm was not spotted until Crooks was already on the roof.
Crooks began firing at least eight gunshots seconds after he noticed a local law enforcement officer on the ground had spotted him, Wray said.
The officer had gotten a boost from a colleague and pulled his head up over the roof. Crooks pointed his gun at the officer, causing him to fall, and then started shooting at Trump, Wray said.
The FBI director’s testimony comes amid frustrations from lawmakers that key questions have remained unanswered, particularly by Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned as director of the Secret Service on Tuesday after Republicans accused her of failing to fully cooperate with the House Oversight Committee in testimony the day before.
“We need to know play-by-play, moment-by-moment, second-by-second,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Wray on Wednesday at the start of the hearing.
Wray said the FBI recovered the drone in Crooks’ car, where they also found a drone controller and two explosive devices that could be remotely detonated.
Crooks had a transmitter on him, the director said, adding that it appears the remote detonation “would not have worked.”
Eight bullet cartridges were found on the roof with the gunman’s body, he said.
Wray said Crooks had purchased a ladder, about 5-foot tall, according to a bloodied receipt that he had on him, but the ladder was not found at the scene. The FBI director said it is unclear how Crooks got onto the roof.
Crooks was a “fairly avid shooting hobbyist,” who went to a shooting range the day before the assassination attempt, “probably” with the same AR-style rifle he used at the rally, Wray said.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania State Police Col. Christopher Paris told the House Homeland Security Committee that officers with the Butler County Emergency Services Unit had spotted Crooks from a second-story window and left their post to search for him.
Paris said Crooks was identified as suspicious before the shooting because he was hanging around but never attempted to enter the rally. That suspicion was later heightened, Paris said, when Crooks was seen with a rangefinder.
That day, three other people had been identified as suspicious, the state police commissioner said.
Crooks was not designated as an actual threat until seconds before he opened fire, Paris said. Trump was shot in the ear, one rallygoer was killed and two others were wounded.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a contender to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, tore into Republican Vice President nominee Sen. JD Vance on Wednesday, saying Vance would “abandon” Ukraine in favor of Russia.
“It’s pretty clear to me you’ve got JD Vance who wants to totally abandon Ukraine, and you’ve got Donald Trump who has been in the past rather pro-Russia and leaned in with Vladimir Putin in ways I would never expect the president to do,” Kelly said in a brief interview with POLITICO. “So again, we have a serious choice to make, and I’d be really concerned about what those guys would do to abandon an ally in favor of an adversary. And that would be a much more dangerous world.”
[…] As a senior Senate Armed Services Committee member and former Navy pilot, Kelly has been a staunch advocate for Ukraine and has taken a hands-on role on the issue of training Ukrainian F-16 pilots at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in his home state. […]
Kelly, who this week visited the Farnborough International Airshow in England, said he used the occasion to meet with U.S. diplomatic and military officials about how U.S. security assistance has helped Ukraine against Russia’s two-year-old invasion.
Asked if he’s being vetted for the presidential ticket, Kelly declined to discuss it, saying, “I don’t get into private conversations.”
“This isn’t about me. I mean, this is about Kamala Harris and making sure we win this election here in how many days, 100, less than 100?” he said. “This is really about her and Donald Trump — a prosecutor with all this experience running against a guy that’s been convicted of 34 felonies and a choice about the future, or are we going back to the past where we were less safe.”
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, recently named as Donald Trump’s running mate, wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, the proceeds for which will partly benefit Heritage.
The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a far-right staffing and policy initiative backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to remake the federal government into a vehicle for Trumpism and would severely inhibit protections around reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, and immigration, as well as climate change efforts.
Vance’s foreward for Dawn’s Early Light, set to be released in September, will also financially benefit the Heritage Foundation directly, according to the Publishers Marketplace deal report that Roberts posted on X (formerly Twitter) in March 2023. The report states that the book sold “in a six-figure deal, with proceeds benefiting Heritage Foundation and aligned non-profits.”
[…] Vance has his own ties to Project 2025 and Heritage. Reuters reporter Gram Slattery noted that “Vance is very close to Heritage,” and Politico described Project 2025 author Russ Vought as a “close ally” of his. On Newsmax, Vance told host Rob Schmitt that “there are some good ideas” in Project 2025, and he has previously praised Heritage for its “incredible” policy work. […]
A team of Australian scientists is genetically engineering a common fly species so that it can eat more of humanity’s organic waste while producing ingredients for making everything from lubricants and biofuels to high-grade animal feeds.
Black soldier flies are already being used commercially to consume organic waste, including food waste, but tweaking their genetics could widen the range of waste their larvae consume while, in the process, producing fatty compounds and enzymes.
In a scientific paper, the team based at Sydney’s Macquarie University outlined their hopes for the flies and how they could also cut the amount of planet-warming methane produced when organic waste breaks down.
“We are heading towards a climate disaster, and landfill waste releases methane. We need to get that to zero,” Dr Kate Tepper, a lead author of the paper, said.
The 2024 Republican nominee for president appeared on the professional golfer’s popular “Break 50” series, where they raised money for charity.
Former President Donald Trump missed 12 putts while playing a round of golf alongside Bryson DeChambeau.
Despite Trump’s misses, the pair played well together and finished 22 under par.
I have not seen a general assessment of Trump’s golf play. The articles are too short and too focused on the politics of the situation. What I got from the descriptions of the event is that Trump has a reasonably good drive for somebody his age but his putting is bad. Obviously outclassed by a professional golfer but that is to be expected.
Several commentators also focused on the politics of just having Trump but that isn’t entirely fair. DeChambeau made the offer to both before Biden dropped out. At the same time DeChambeau trying to say this wasn’t about politics is wrong, nothing a running candidate does is outside election politics and most things Biden does incorporate some element. This is a charity event but DeChambeau’s show make the donation, it costs Trump nothing.
Hello Infinite Thread! My gobbet of quasi-news is that David Futrelle’s blog of manosphere mockery, We Hunted the Mammoth, is back from hiatus… in an interesting way.
We Hunted the Mammoth is BACK from its hiatus. Only we’re looking a bit different, because now we’re a misogyny-busting YouTube channel instead of a blog. Yep, WHTM has awoken from uneasy dreams to find itself transformed in its bed into a gigantic insect. By which I mean a pretty butterfly rather than a dung beetle. […]
The YouTube channel is the usual address followed by @HuntedTheMammoth.
NBC News:
In other news, Link back to comment 493, posted by JM, “Special council to appeal Judge Cannon’s dismissal.”
Some followup to JM’s early comment:
Link
Arrogant, ignorant and snotty behavior at the Republican convention:
Link
Here are few tidbits of news, some updates:
Link
Much more at the link, which is NBC New’s live coverage of the Republican convention and of other new.
Video of Trump’s entrance at RNC.
Aussie ABC live coverage of theRepugs convention here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-16/donald-trump-live-updates-republican-national-convention/104100000
Plus their piece on who Vance is – other than just a douchecanoe :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-16/trump-vice-president-candidate-chosen-jd-vance/104101468
In addtiion to this artuicle on the ominous, horrific Trump :plans if he wins here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-16/trump-project-2025-plan-us-election-four-corners/104015688
With respect to abiogenesis on the previous page I have thoughts, some already mentioned.
Cells reproduce slow. 20 minutes. Molecular reactions can be many orders of magnitude faster. The membrane allows control of chemistry and access so the relationship between nucleic acids and amino acids can make membranes and themselves.
I have this mental image of ribonucleic acid precursors and acetate, forming macromolecular communities in minerals. There is a set a things that are suggestive and this is where I am here in thinking about it.
3 polymers:
*Proteins (modified glycine chains)
*Nucleic acids (Ribose + Glycine and a bunch of single carbon and nitrogen additions)
*Fatty acids (a 3-carbon melavonate with sequential additions of a 2-carbon acetate) via fatty acid synthase.
Fatty acid synthase also makes the long carbon chain part of the cofactors biotin and lipoide. These cofactors function in macromolecular complexes involved in making a bunch of the small amino acids, and other things.
Biotin
Acetyl-CoA carboxylase alpha (fatty acid biosynthesis)
Acetyl-CoA carboxylase beta (fatty acid biosynthesis)
Pyruvate carboxylase (aspartate biosynthesis)
Methylcrotonyl-CoA carboxylase (breakdown of small amino acids)
Propionyl-CoA carboxylase (leucine biosynthesis)
Adding a bicarbonate 1C to 2C and 3C molecules.
Lipoamide
dihydrolipoyl transacetylase (pyruvate dehydrogenase complex in glycolysis, branched-chain α-ketoacid dehydrogenase complex in leucine, isoleucine, and valine synthesis and degradation)
dihydrolipoyl succinyltransferase (oxoglutarate dehydrogenase complex, glutamate synthesis/TCA cycle)
H-protein (glycine cleavage system, glycine cleavage/biosynthesis, serine biosynthesis)
This is also in CODH, carbon monoxide dehydrogenase which can put 2 carbons together or take them apart. Very ancient metabolism.
Finally fatty synthase complexes are related to non-ribosomal peptide synthase complexes. A ribosome analog that makes things on a single polypeptide basis where the ribosome makes lots of peptides.
There’s a kludge in here. And acetyl-CoA (acetate and ATP) is all over the place in here too. LUCA is too old. I’m impatient.
Maybe the kludge involves follow the aminated and non-aminated acetate.
Oops. acetyl-CoA is like ATP + a modified valine + aspartate + cysteine + acetate in metabolic terms
Via DW news :
Source : https://www.dw.com/en/the-enemy-within-us-veterans-against-democracy-part-1/video-69641659 43 mins long.
New system enables intuitive teleoperation of a robotic manipulator in real-time
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-enables-intuitive-teleoperation-robotic-real.html
CNN is giving wall to wall coverage to Trump. It’s absolutely disgusting.They even interviewed the first journalist who interviewed Trump after his ear got clipped, asking tough questions like “how was he like?” and shit like that.
Harris vs. Vance
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxJDGickqyFxB5Y73WBJddCrAZKygBKBMd
Could anyone try to explain to me why no one is countering this “unlawful appointment” nonsense by pointing out that appointment of prosecutors is a power granted to the president by the congress, and not by the constitution? Again, circa the founding, many / most criminal prosecutors were the victims acting in their own private capacity, and the power to seek a grand indictment from a grand jury was a common law right, which was later slowly usurped by the legislatures of the States and by congress. This simple brute fact of history should demolish this stupid argument that it’s an improperly appointed prosecutor IMAO.
Real superpowers
My sausage-like fingers are not sexy. But they have given me one incredible talent | Zoe Williams
“I can carry four pints at once and am treated with awe and respect in every bar I enter”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/16/my-sausage-like-fingers-are-not-sexy-but-they-have-given-me-one-incredible-talent
birgerjohansson@14,
Irrelevant personal trivia: Zoe Williams’ father was briefly my line manager when I had a temporary Civil Service job, for part of which I worked in Wormwood Scrubs prison, interviewing prisoners about release procedure.
@13 GerrardOfTitanServer: Special prosecutors are officers of the US and their appointment covered by Article 2 section 2 of the Constitution. Any objection really has to be grounded in that somehow.
Several objections to the office of special prosecutor have been raised before and the Supreme Court has upheld it’s legality. All of the lawyers that I have seen talk about this take it as a given that Cannon will be overturned by the Court of Appeals but a couple have said they are not confident about what this Supreme Court will do.
I disagree. This is not historically founded. Again, circa 1800, most criminal prosecutors were not executive officers. Most criminal prosecutors were the victim acting in their own private capacity.
@13,16:
And even assuming it is overturned, with extreme prejudice, with the removal of Cannon and reassignment to a different district judge, it is highly likely that it will have served its intended purpose of delaying the trial until after the election.
Also the polypeptide binding sites for biotin and lipoamide are related, and related to glycine cleavage system H-protein, parts of RNA polymerases, ATP synthase V, and cytochrome f.
http://prodata.swmed.edu/ecod/complete/tree?id=325.1.7.1
It’s an interesting list of things, and there are some ribosomal proteins in related bins, as well as things in nucleotide biosynthesis in the CO dehydrogenase molybdoprotein N-domain-like bin.
That link might be a bit much for some so I’ll copy paste a little.
X – Possible homology level
H – Homology level
T – Topology level
F – Family level
X: alpha/beta-Hammerhead/Barrel-sandwich hybrid
H: alpha/beta-Hammerhead/Barrel-sandwich hybrid
T: CO dehydrogenase molybdoprotein N-domain-like
T: Molybdopterin synthase subunit MoaE
T: Pyrimidine nucleoside phosphorylase C-terminal domain
T: Nicotinate/Quinolinate PRTase N-terminal domain-like
T: Ribosomal protein L10e
T: Duplicated hybrid motif
T: Single hybrid motif
F: DUF2118 PF09891 CL0105
F: GCV_H PF01597 CL0105
F: AstE_AspA PF04952 CL0105
F: HlyD_3 PF13437 CL0105
F: Biotin_lipoyl_2 PF13533 CL0105
F: RPOC_hybrid PF21668 CL0105
F: RNA_pol_Rpb2_6 PF00562 CL0410
F: RnfC_N PF13375 CL0105
F: HlyD_3,Biotin_lipoyl_2 PF13437 PF13533
F: NQRA PF05896 CL0105
F: Biotin_lipoyl PF00364 CL0105
F: Apocytochr_F_C PF01333 CL0105
F: NusG_add PF18298
F: ATP-synt_ab_Xtn PF16886
F: Unmapped domains
Pseudo group of domains that do not map to PFam family profiles. Domains inside should not be considered as in one family.
T: Ribosomal L27 protein
Why Russia has reason to be pleased with Vance on Trump’s ticket
As a senior EU official put it, JD Vance joining Donald Trump’s Republican ticket is “a disaster for Ukraine.”
Speakers at the Republican National Convention insisted that Donald Trump created “the strongest economy in history.” That’s demonstrably ridiculous.
For the Republican Party, the pairing of the least experienced president and the least experienced running mate of the modern era doesn’t seem to matter.
The target of God Awful Movies may be a relief after being exposed to the MAGA brand of surrealism.
“GAM465 The Animated Book of Mormon, Ep 1 and 2”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=crNO4iKpxZw
Link
MAGA Republicans are united around the idea that it is okay to be batshit bonkers, while encouraging JD Vance and the Heritage Foundation to do what is required to destroy democracy.
Myself @ 23
Let’s get the brass plates of the Old Testament…which has not been written yet… and sail to the New World in wooden…submarines?
And introduce barley to America. Not. And ride around on horses that are on a different continent.
Jeez, this is like the koran, but without the evil joos and christians.
Bits and pieces of campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/taking-stock-of-jd-vance
I think Trump chose Vance for three reasons:
– Vance said he will do what Mike Pence was unwilling to do.
– Don Jr. and Vance are close friends.
– Vance did a 180 and subjugated himself to Trump. Trump loves that.
In Vance, Trump Finds A Man Who Says He’ll Help Do The Coups
Kinzinger: Moscow ‘celebrating’ Vance pick as Trump VP
The Guardian
“First black leader of any European country: Vaughan Gething’s political career”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/16/first-black-leader-of-any-european-country-vaughan-gethings-political-career
He is first minister of Cymru, or ‘Wales’ as the filthy Siche call it.
Trump Caught On Camera Falling Asleep At RNC Convention
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=8cgRl1G8Rws
.
Suddenly I am more hopeful about Biden’s chances.
birger @23 and 25, The Book of Mormon reads like it was written by a teenage boy who quickly tired of anything resembling coherence. He did enjoy battles and tales of overcoming extreme hardships (like sailing long distances in submarines filled with animals … with no way to dispose of the animal excrement).
You can predict when the next battle that involves cutting off the arms of enemy will occur even if you don’t know the story. Joseph Smith (and his possible co-authors) had an obvious inability to tolerate exposition. A little bit of explication would be offered and then it was on to the next battle or on to the next trial and tribulation.
In Mormondom, an entire industry revolves around trying to find historical, archeological, or even anecdotal “proof” that every detail presented in The Book of Mormon is true.
A lot was missing from Day 1 of the RNC, by Mark Sumner
Cartoon: Security detail
Bekenstein Bound @453:
The effect of drawing RNA sequences with replacement, as opposed to without replacement, is dwarfed by other incertainties involved. You don’t need to take my word for it; just calculate the approximate number of trials needed to have better than even chances with vs. without replacement, 99 vs. 100 bases, 1 vs. 2 successful sequences.
https://www.joemygod.com/2024/07/ok-schools-chief-trump-will-end-state-run-atheism/
We’re back to the things they don’t like and not getting to force their beliefs on others is “state-run atheism”.
This after exclaiming “Oh yes they will!” In response to some saying they won’t be following his order about teaching about what amounts to historical propaganda and dishonesty about the Bible and history or fact.
There are a few more subtle mistakes up there. I should probably get them all as I see them. First amination is incorrect, the chemistry I’ve looked at is mostly imination (involves a different way of attachment of nitrogen), and amination involves the cofactor pyridoxal phosphate. The nitrogen transfers in the purine pathway and NAD biosynthesis are not aminations and don’t need pyridoxal phosphate. Which I think is suggestive (there is a glycine imination involved in the thiamine thiazole which is the part actively involved in moving often 2 carbon units, or grabbing them by acetate like parts).
Also I left out pyrimidines above (aspartate + carbamate then attach to ribose). Not exactly a mistake, the purines are older and connected to thiamine biosynthesis, but still…
RFK Jr apologises after leaked phone call in which Trump seems to offer deal. What exactly Trump wants from Kennedy is unclear. The video, leaked by Bobby Kennedy III, shows Kennedy listening to Trump who is on speaker.
There’s other interesting things already up there I haven’t pointed out too. The protein that attaches ribose to the ring on the way to making NAD is in that set and represents a larger group. The Nicotinate/Quinolinate PRTase N-terminal domain-like bin. Maybe proton and electron control came early and is connected to pyrimidines due to the similarity in how the ring is made and then attached to ribose? It’s like staring into the void.
Shooting: British Reporters Find Disturbing Link Between Trump And His Shooter
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=i02XE2A29Z0
Satire
Republicans take short break from blaming assassination attempt on Democrats who compared Trump to Hitler, to appoint VP nominee who compared Trump to Hitler –
NewsThump
https://newsthump.com/2024/07/16/republicans-take-short-break-from-blaming-assassination-attempt-on-democrats-who-compared-trump-to-hitler-to-appoint-vp-nominee-who-compared-trump-to-hitler/
The Guardian:
Rishi Sunak ‘risked breaching legal responsibilities over prison crisis’ | Prisons and probation
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/16/revealed-sunak-was-warned-he-risked-breaching-legal-responsibilities-over-prisons-crisis-leaked-papers-show
Self-organizing drone flock demonstrates safe traffic solution for smart cities of the future
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-drone-flock-safe-traffic-solution.html
New technique to assess a general-purpose AI model’s reliability before it’s deployed
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-technique-general-purpose-ai-reliability.html
Scientists develop potential stealth cancer therapy
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-scientists-potential-stealth-cancer-therapy.html
NBC News: Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez found guilty on all counts
Yes, Menendez was reduced to claiming that the cash and gold bars were just gifts from friends. This is only a fraction of what Menendez is guilty of but the state only went after the clear cut easily proven charges. Menendez is a master of vacation bribery, where a friend/business associate flies him to some resort location on their tab and gives Menendez cash gifts.
Voter Polls PROVE Unexpected Results After Trump Assassination Attempt
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=qoDQ33eRb-k
New Hampshire House candidate suspends bid over media coverage of 1989 murder conviction
Okay, coercive plea bargaining IS a real systemic problem. A political run was foolish. OTOH, this was a rare Republican with shame… assuming he doesn’t win and take the seat anyhow. Let’s see what that prior reporting said…
Murder conviction. Bankruptcy. FBI sting. House candidate would like to explain.
Bwahaha.
You expected otherwise? Conservatives are all a bunch of spoiled brats. “Waaah! I don’t wanna pay my taxes! Waaaah! White straight men aren’t automatically the center of attention anymore! Waaah! I don’t wanna learn new pronouns for some people! Waaah! I stamp want stamp my stamp property stamp values! stamp I stamp want stamp my stamp PROPERTY stamp VALUES!!! No fair! Biden cheeeeeeeated!”
“National conservatism”. Well, it’s a bit more honest a name for it than “national socialism” was, I’ll grant it that.
birgerjohansson@40: Would you mind giving a brief precis of things like this, for those of us who prefer getting the gist by reading text to sitting through videos that require us to leave the site we’re currently on?
Taneli Huuskonen@35: To get the “efficient search on Earth” time down to 500 million years would require there to be a self-replicating RNA of 80 or fewer bases; even 100 seems a generously low estimate for something like that. And on the matter of “metabolism first”, until there’s a mechanism for heredity (which seemingly must be RNA, unless, unlikely, DNA came first), there’s no fitness landscape hill-climbing, just wholly blind searching. Metabolism first might get you a relatively more efficient search than otherwise, but it can’t and won’t shorten the minimum time to the first replicator calculated already assuming a maximally efficient search.
Abiogenesis is almost surely a “hard step”, and for reasons already outlined, it’s unlikely it would have happened as early as it did unless there were at least four or five more of those between it and us. It seems more plausible that there are two, one around two billion years ago (so very likely related to the development of eukaryotes) and one around now (language, or perhaps fire, or perhaps surviving technological adolescence … but that last, oft supposed, actually seems less likely to me, because then getting to civilization-building sapience from a paramecium must be an easy step and the geological record should be littered with lost pre-human civilizations that fumbled the technological-adolescence ball. There’d be a thin layer of odd metals, perhaps the eventual stable products of the decay of nuclear fallout as well as industrially useful stuff in weird concentrated patches, things like neodymium and depleted uranium. Plus otherwise-inexplicable climate excursions and extinction events. All the extinction events we’ve identified seem to be caused by impacts, flood basalts, or both and don’t seem accompanied by strange metal concentrations, save the Chicxulub iridium layer, which has a natural explanation. Also, we’ve passed the point of being able to send detectable radio transmissions at interstellar ranges, though few such transmissions have actually been sent).
A cheerful intermission to the political mayhem.
.
SAVEAFOX foxes enjoy their own playgrounds!
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=IVsrMmgs8CQ
Rosa Emily Clay became the first Black person to get a citizenship in Finland, 1898. She later migrated to USA where she thrived in the Finn community.
Another history factoid.
Modern-style foldable parachutes were not invented yet during WWI.
There was only a clumsy tall umbrella- type parachute.
This could be used by soldiers under the observation balloons but were too unwieldy for the tiny aircraft of the era.
.
If tracer bullets set an aircraft on fire and the altitude was too high for a rapid emergency landing (pretty much 100% of the time) the pilot could either burn up with the aircraft or jump to his death.
.
As for ejection seats they did not become standard until Heinkel 219 and the Swedish SAAB J 21.
British company Martin-Baker was the first to patent it, post-war.
RNC Night 2: Haley Endorses Trump
| Babydog’s Big Moment | Rudy Takes A Tumble
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=40BCMaQDRPk
Stephen Colbert makes the unendurable funny.
Finally, a practical use of toxic social media
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – Toxic
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/toxic
UK first European country to approve lab-grown meat, starting with pet food | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/17/uk-first-european-country-to-approve-cultivated-meat-starting-with-pet-food
More likely, once something similar to a bilaterian exists, there’s an asymmetrically bounded branching random walk among its evolutionary descendants with respect to social and behavioural complexity (and the anatomy and physiology underlying it). Provided no planeary-scale catastrophe wipes the slate entirely, sooner or later one of those descendants will reach a point at which technological innovations can both accumulate through cultural transmission, and themselves favour further biological evolution toward the ability to use the innovations. Then the technologically adept species discovers capitalism and promptly destroys its environment, and hence itself.
To finish the thought@56: so “getting to civilization-building sapience from a paramecium” (or at least from a bilaterian) is neither an “easy step” nor a “hard step”, but a long, branching series of small steps in various directions.
Ladytron – Seventeen (4Music 2002)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Bv8CsFAiVs
“They only want you when you’re seventeen,
When you’re twenty-one
You’re no fun”
KG, Bekenstein, Brony et al.
I will once again do a plug for the book “Lucky Planet”.
It brings up many more critical obstacles on the path from accretion disc to hairy things banging rocks together to make fire.
10 Ways Brits and Americans Use Numbers Very Differently
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=6hq5XAUX3JQ
Menendez is a fool. Once you reach a certain level of wealth and power there are multitudes of loopholes deliberately left open by legislators for those who want to do legal crimes.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Song (We Don’t Think We’ll Have to Kill You)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qwsi23FzOwM
“The Ballad of Marjorie Taylor Greene-O”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=gad85zYopJY
The Guardian
The American republic is crumbling before us – and Democrats must share the blame | Owen Jones |
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/17/american-republic-democrats-us-trump-demagogue
FORTY-FIVE! – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=MMRxhfYSdhc
birgerjohansson@59,
Sounds interesting, but inevitably speculative. I’m not convinced by Bekenstein Bound’s version of panspermia, because I think a long RNA molecule capable of self-replication without a lot of additional molecular machinery is neither possible nor necessary as a first living thing. But evidence one way or the other could presumably be collected from around the solar system – if that version of panspermia is true, there should surely be bacteria-like organisms (fossil if not living) in lots of places – so it has the great advantage of a degree of testability. Not sure how you’d test the “Lucky Planet” hypothesis, but maybe the book suggests ways to do so.
Summarized by Steve Benen, from NBC News:
From HuffPo:
You mean they are not already totally unhinged? There’s still room to grow?
From Associated Press:
Why do Americans believe crime is getting worse, despite the evidence? In part because Republican officials keep pushing demonstrably false claims.
Unintended comedy:
Link
“Scientists identify interleukin-11 as key driver of aging:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-scientists-interleukin-key-driver-aging.html
-What the hell is the body producing interleukin-11 for? If it is not essential, I vote for using CRISPR technology from blocking its production.
I don’t care if it would make me bald or grow tentacles, interleukin-11 sucks.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s anti-immigrant remarks at the Republican National Convention have been described as “grotesque,” and it’s worth understanding why.
Washington Post:
Cartoon: Lowering the temperature
Twice-divorced Trump’s new running mate wants to restrict divorce
https://www.wonkette.com/p/dark-brandon-wants-to-minorly-tweak
Dark Brandon Wants To Minorly Tweak Supreme Court, And Trump Is FURIOUS
https://www.wonkette.com/p/teamster-president-gets-his-scab
Farron Cousins:
“I Was Wrong – Trump Does NOT Get Post Shooting Poll Bump!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=dq0y4S_nJ7U
Biden wants to reform the Supreme Court. So do Americans, by Mark Sumner
New York Times link
Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Ally Is Convicted of Fraud
A federal jury found that Guo Wengui defrauded investors, many his own fervent supporters, of hundreds of millions of dollars. He could face decades in prison.
A con-man flocking together with other con-men. Glad he was caught and convicted.
Lewis Black’s Rantcast #182 | The United States of Insanity
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=lOjI0m-IlN0
Lewis Black sums up the craziness better than I could ever do.
Link
Jack Smith formally appeals Trump classified documents dismissal
We will watch for more developments in this story.
Water rights settlement:
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/wonkette-went-to-the-moms-for-liberty
Brief excerpt from a longer article:
Link
BREAKING NEWS – Biden tests positive for covid :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-18/live-updates-donald-trump-republican-national-convention/104109086
Just uupdated ibid
Observations during day one of the Republican National Convention.
It Could Happen Here Podcast – 2024-07-17 Make America Wealthy Once Again
(Roughly 26:09 to 29:27)
Re: CompulsoryAccount4476 @ # 88…
I really don’t understand why cities vie to host big events. They almost always get taken to the cleaners and lose massive amounts of money. Milwaukee is seeing this happen now. The French in Paris are already complaining about the loss of normal tourist income because of the upcoming Olympics.
Bekenstein Bound @49: The only thing I was addressing was this:
The effect of having even just two, instead of one, 100-base RNAs capable of autocatalyzing outweighs the effect of drawing with replacement, unless you’re talking about probabilities well above 1/2. That, in turn, is outweighed by the effect of changing the length of the RNA by just one base. So, your last sentence is completely wrong. (One could say it’s nearly exponentially wrong, both literally and figuratively.) I’m not denying it’s also moot, as you pointed out.
If the first replicator was a protein-RNA complex rather than a pure RNA, I doubt that moves the needle much on the search time. Maybe that can get away with shorter RNAs, but with the added proteins the number of carbon atoms involved is probably comparable rather than reduced. Unless there’s a way to get a replicator with well under 1000 carbons, or to rapidly “mutate” them with much lower activation energies (but that also makes the newfound replicator a lot less stable — though maybe it can quickly hill-climb out of the hazard zone?), search time is unlikely to be short enough.
In any event, we’ve already had one sample return from a comet. It won’t be long before we know if most comets do, or do not, contain H2-metabolizing acetyl-diddling bacterial mat type thingies.
Assuming we get through another decade or two without blowing ourselves up, of course.
Taneli Huuskonen@90:
I don’t think so. If there are two rather than one, that has the same effect as halving the size of the search space — it halves the expected time to find one. If it’s one base shorter, that reduces the expected time by a factor of four.
What’s needed, to find it quickly on a single planet without help from the rest of the galaxy, is a reduction by a factor of order of 10^12, which is near 2^40. That would require 20 fewer bases, or having 40 different 100-base replicators. Again, the shortest known autocatalyzing RNA weighs in at over 160 bases, and the shorter of the two main RNAs in an actual, from-the-wild, living self-replication-capable thing, a bacterial ribosome, is a whopping 1500 bases long. The RNA of the larger subunit is double that size, and the RNA’s whole “genome”, triple.
It would take strong evidence to convince me you can get a viable replicator in only 80 bases, or even fewer bases plus proteins weighing in at the same ~800 carbons or so.
Actually, it gets worse. Having 40 different 100-base replicators only shrinks the search time by a factor of 40, not 2^40. Though having 20 fewer bases (80-base replicator) does reduce it by a factor of 2^40.
And all of this is leaving aside that the smallest known self-sufficient unit of life is a whole ecosystem. The smallest estimated one of those would be a bacterial mat of LUCA and a few other prokaryotes, plus structural materials, doing all that acetyl H2 stuff from that article. It’s likely that the earliest self-reproducing system to begin evolving involved several related autocatalyzing RNAs and likely some other, mostly simple, molecules, possibly also primitive proteins (perhaps short peptides drawn from a small number of possible amino acids). That system, on the one hand, likely was way larger than 800 carbons, or even 1000 carbons, but on the other it may have been able to share some of those carbons with other concurrent “attempts” by overlapping with other prospective self-replicating systems. Whether the “carbons per concurrent attempt”, after accounting for overlaps, averaged to much below 1000 is then not obvious, but it still doesn’t strike me as particularly likely, though it’s no longer possible to do exact calculations to be sure. Below 10,000 seems fairly plausible (and above 10,000 probably makes most or all galaxies wholly barren anyway).
UK ‘turning a blind eye’ to threats to kill Saudi activists living in exile | Transnational repression | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jul/18/saudi-arabia-uk-exiles-threats-transnational-repression-human-rights
A pity he didn’t do anything about it – and indeed, opposed the idea of doing anything about it – until now.
SteveoR@86, 87
There are bound to be claims that what ails Biden is not a mild case of Covid, but something much more serious. They could even be true. My hunch (not more than that) is that despite the desperate attempts to shore up his position, he will indeed withdraw from the presidential race. And I think the assassination attempt on Trump strengthens the argument for him doing so: the appearance of vigour Trump showed in that event – however illusory – makes a stark contrast with Biden’s evident frailty.
I am trying to cheer you up a bit.
.
If you are familiar with British comedy, you will be familiar with the British-German Henning Wein.
“Henning is one of a number of German comedians, that number being ‘one’. “
Monsters that are not human. For a change.
Facehugger Alien embryo glass jar
https://www.zodernus.com/products/alien-jar-xenomorph-specimen-facehugger-embryo-glass-jar
Bekenstein Bound, ahem.
Are you in any way confident you’re not being anthropomorphic?
(This is all so very anthropomorphic and speculative!)
Unfortunately, at least when I’ve heard him, he’s not actually very funny.
Stephen Colbert makes the MAGA coverage funny.
RNC Night 3: Heartbreak & Loss | Never-Trumper J.D. Vance’s MAGA Pivot |Will Biden Pass The Torch ?
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=iqv_kCAAd30
“Why Connecticut is a model for reducing racial disparities in traffic stops—and why other states haven’t succeeded”
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-connecticut-racial-disparities-traffic-states.html
“The UK’s prisons aren’t just overcrowded—they need to be better designed”
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-uk-prisons-overcrowded.html
57% of Americans think Trump should withdraw from the race. Do not expect to read that in corporate media
http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxo3X4KOzURsZ6p9GOdoU9RPOcI4iSP2Mv
birgerjohansson@104,
Ahem:
and:
Most Democrats want Biden to drop out, but overall race is static, poll finds:
I’m not saying the corporate media are “fair and balanced” by any means, but your claim is simply not true.
Joe Biden reportedly more open to calls for him to step aside as candidate
Peter Navarro, a member of the so-called “Team of Felons,” was celebrated at the RNC one day after the party pushed a “criminals are bad” message.
What Navarro said:
Fact Check:
Link
Cartoon: Tom the Dancing Bug and the busy, busy day at the Republican National Convention
The highlight of JD Vance’s speech? The crowd chanting for themselves
Posted by readers of the article:
Biden-Harris campaign:
https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1813780315959128193
Photos and video at the link.
Biden-Harris campaign:
Not to mention Vance’s connections to Peter Thiel.
https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1813773712149155930
video at the link
KG @ 105
Aaargh! I was quoting a statement at Youtube from OccupyDemocrats. But different polls give different results. Or they simply borked the poll quote (even more likely).
.
Sabine Hossenfelder
“Why don’t we have better robots yet?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=um3G9DU5I5M
The first episodes with Tom Baker as the Doctor were “Robot”, 1974. So we are already 50 years behind.
Anyway, I will be content with just a single T-800. That way I am future-proofed against zombies, xenomorphs and The Purge.
Trump-owned company sells shoes with image from assassination attempt
Consumers can now purchase $299 sneakers featuring an image of Donald Trump with his fist in the air after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
Five Just Stop Oil activists receive record sentences for planning to block M25. 4 to 5 years for “conspiracy to cause public nuisance” by blocking a road. What on earth would you get* if you conspired to fill the rivers with sewage???
*Answer: A fat bonus on top of your already huge salary.
Re: abiogenesis
Considering the different forms nucleotides take in metabolism allows other ways past polynucleotides may have functioned. Modern DNA and RNA maybe the result of a lot of past kinds of nucleotide and separation of functions to cofactors, many cofactors are mounted on or attached to ribose or nucleotides like ATP. (NAD, Coenzyme-A, thiamine, B12…).
A long string of these cofactors could operate like a conveyer belt. It’s imaginable that a preribosome could move to a new mineral, denature, and the nucleotide bases themselves could become participants in local chemistry and be changed by that chemistry into forms to do other chemistry. In fact the part of purine biosynthesis after the first ring closure (that is the metabolic connection with thiamine biosynthesis) turns that glycine into a 3 carbon molecule that could be released instead of going on to purines. Polyribose phosphate as conveyer belt.
How America’s wealthiest people can hate populism but love Trump, by Mark Sumner
Sex and gender are linked to different networks in the brain.
“Research finds sex and gender identity are linked to human brain activity,”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-sex-gender-identity-linked-human.html
Jon Stewart explains how corruption works in congress.
Offering a senator concert tickets? Not proper. Golf lessons? Well, obviously that’s legit.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/hhBn9k-F56U
George Conway:
https://x.com/gtconway3d/status/1813894490454917338
Video at the link. The video is 3:55 minutes long. It features Trump saying a lot of batshit stuff, and it showcases former Trump allies and officials saying how whacko and dangerous Trump is. It’s a good compilation.
Link
Posted by a reader of the article:
Appeals court affirms Mississippi’s ban on voting after some felonies
Coronavirus activity in wastewater reached levels considered “high” or “very high” in 26 states, according to the most recent CDC data. Washington Post link.
Secret Service says it’s appalled by DEI rhetoric against female agents after Trump rally shooting
Saturday’s shooting is the latest instance of right-leaning social media accounts trying to link diversity, equity and inclusion programs to deeply troubling news events.
More than 300 suspected heat-related deaths under investigation in Phoenix area
Almost 100 suspected heat deaths are attributed to a single week, from July 7 to 13, when temperatures reached 118 degrees.
“Anti-Trump Republicans STUN Trump Campaign With BRUTAL News”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=fq–SRdy_I0
George Conway’s video starts at the 3-minute mark. He presents his new anti-Trump PAC, the P.S.Y.C.O.PAC
He is not holding back.
Trump Campaign is STUNNED!
(Is that the cry of the loon?)
“He is not holding back.”
Surely he is. After all, Trump Campaign could be SMASHED TO SMITHEREENS!
See, I have no clue what this alleged BRUTAL News may be, but I know damn fucking well that Trump Campaign is NOT STUNNED.
So, a bullshit headline and no actual information provided at all.
(bah. No context, no click from me)
I usually alter the ALL CAPS to a less annoying format but it is half past one in the morning…(but I like Conway’s abbreviation)
This one is more humble:
Online Maps Blog. ‘Percentage of population who think their culture is superior to others’.
Russia is, ahem, standing out. And Brexitland.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/vaKsJ4d9B8cFPf4p/
(My mistake, I thought Britain was 66%, not 46%)
And I am not certain the link works as intended.
As I said, late at night. Best I sign off.
…Basically, the higher the percentage the more people are vulnerable to jingoism. Sweden is at the lower end, but we still have a xenophobe party.
@130 birgerjohansson: In Russia’s case I suspect it’s not so much that they are particularly subject to jingoism but rather that they have been fed a steady diet for the past couple of decades. This is one of the things Orwell depicted so well in 1984. Even though the average Russian citizen knows the government is lying they also have no other information or frame of reference. Over time the propaganda sinks in.
Happening live right now What Should Dems do if Biden Steps Aside? (PLAN B) | Allan Lichtman Live #58
Aussie ABC live news coverage of United (lolsob!)States politics today too here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/live-updates-donald-trump-speech-republican-convention/104115224
It occurs to me that Biden calling a press conference to step aside just when Trump is speaking could be one epic last troll of the evil old orange fascist here.. One way to turn media attention away and get people to refocus maybe?
Because what would the media cover if these were suimultaneous?
Trump’s crazy slips out at RNC with praise for ‘late, great Hannibal Lecter’
video at the link.
Trump has taken to talking about Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail, and at his acceptance speech, he just couldn’t resist.
Excerpts from Talking Points Memo’s live coverage:
While Trump was describing in detail the attempted assassination on Saturday, cameras panned the audience.
Many, many people in the audience were weeping. Yes, “strong men” were crying, but it was mostly lots of tears from many women. The whole thing looked like a religious experience for them.
Another telling detail: Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt during his sycophantic speech. He ripped off an outer shirt to reveal a Trump/Vance campaign sleeveless shirt underneath.
Tucker Carlson spoke at the RNC convention. He offered up pieces of red meat (metaphor for the worst of the Republican plans) … and the audience just went wild. They loved it.
They also like Hulk Hogan: Republicans have nothing so here’s Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt for Trump. Video at the link.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/wednesday-was-mass-deportation-now
Wednesday Was ‘Mass Deportation Now!’ Night At The RNC, Everything Totally Excellent For Sure
All the shiny fascism!
Longest convention speech in modern history.
In my opinion, way too long. Way too much time spent rambling around in Trump’s mind.
John Morales@100: What is anthropomorphic here? I’m not making any assumptions beyond “carbon-based” and “tool-using, social, with language”. The latter seems necessary to be relevant to the Fermi question (i.e., either able to generate signals or technosignatures that would be visible from Earth, or able to colonize and actually reach Earth). The former … well, I doubt it moves the needle enormously. There have been other proposed bases for life, though none with any real evidence to back them whereas there’s obviously plenty for carbon-based. They generally require a different set of environmental conditions, usually either significantly hotter or colder. It is likely that at most a few other viable combinations of solvent/chemical backbone/energy chemistry exist besides water/carbon/the small number of energy chemistries seen on Earth, and that including them would replace one search for a carbon-based replicator with a few parallel searches for a few comparably-difficult-to-discover replicators, perhaps knocking a factor of three or four off the search time. Which, again, looked to be needing a factor of 2^40 knocked off it. So including non-carbon-based is unlikely to move the needle substantially, while adding a lot more unknown-unknowns into the scenario that are hard to model.
There is one other thing. Of all the proposed alternative biochemistries, only three, water-ammonia/carbon, methane-ethane/carbon, and nitrogen/silicon could plausibly survive in outer solar system temperature/pressure environments. Two of those three are carbon based, while the third requires truly hyperlow temperatures (lower even than Pluto, which would be a Venus to them). It’s doubtful the methane-ethane/carbon or nitrogen/silicon cases could bootstrap to spacefaring technology, due to a literal dearth of metals in their habitats — there’s nothing on, say, Titan that a surface dweller could use to build a spaceship, and something living in a “roofed ocean” under its ice might have access to a rock/metal core at the bottom of the sea but wouldn’t have access to the damn sky. The nitrogen/silicon ones are even worse off, most likely, especially as their habitat will be rather poor in silicon! Meanwhile, the hot-chemistry ones (sulfuric acid/carbon, sulfuric acid/silicon, lava/SiOx, etc.) won’t have pre-technological access to the Oort cloud to seed a whole galaxy while still at the bacterial stage, giving them a giant disadvantage over good ol’ water/carbon. Most more exotic options (such as ammonia/nitrogen, at temperatures low enough molecules with lots of Ns don’t simply explode at the drop of a hat) suffer from the same difficulties as methane/carbon.
Put more simply, the possibility of cometary spread and the dearth of accessible silicon in places that naturally have liquid-nitrogen temperatures combine to make it very likely for water-ammonia/carbon and methane-ethane/carbon to take over a galaxy well before any other kind of replicator has even stumbled into existence anywhere. The latter won’t compete for real estate with the hot-silicon family of biochemistries, much (the only habitat on Earth for such is “inside an active volcano, or farther down”, and you could have carbon life in Venus’s clouds with silicon life on the ground tens of kilometers below, but that’s about it) so the hot-silicon types might eventually develop … in a few more tens of billions of years. When they do get tech they’ll probably end up borrowing most of it from us carbon-twiddlers. :)
Note, too: carbon is by a significant margin the most cosmically abundant potential biopolymer backbone element. Silicon’s a distant second (and related stuff like SiOx would be limited by silicon’s comparative rarity, not aided by oxygen’s abundance), if you don’t count twitchy nitrogen, with its need for ultracold environments if you want to make stable polymers full of it. Frankly, the only more abundant option than carbon would be using water as the backbone “atom”. At low enough temperatures, H2O’s ability to form four hydrogen bonds could substitute for carbon’s ability to form four covalent bonds, but with lowered versatility (no equivalent of double or triple bonds). This would also have to be a cold, outer-solar-system chemistry and wouldn’t tolerate much pressure (which would smush its polymers into plain old ice). Perhaps ideal for comets and such, but another bad bet for ever getting its mitts on a lot of refined metals to build rocket ships out of. It would also be in need of a solvent … N2 and methane/ethane, being hydrophobic, probably need not apply. That or it would have to make do with rarefied gases, like Pluto’s sorry excuse for an atmosphere, and I’m not at all sure that’d be viable. And if it ever did get to rocketeering it would have a hard time not denaturing under any significant accelerations during thrust …
“Groundcherry gets genetic upgrades: Turning a garden curiosity into an agricultural powerhouse”
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-groundcherry-genetic-garden-curiosity-agricultural.html
-I look forward to many more plants being modified by CRISPR to thrive [I am aware this modification only is relevant for cultivars, but there are other kinds of changes possible].
Now, I wish those small American marsupials (possums?) could get an upgrade so they live as long as their Australian cousins.
(And non-primate mammals deserve better color vision)
(And other mammals deserve life spans like the bowhead whale)
BB,
Well, there you have it.
Those assumptions, right there.
Sure, we monkey-types use tools and are social and use language.
I dunno how much SF you might have consumed, but (for example) non-technological hegemonic species are a thing in literature.
But hey, I suppose it depends on how one defines ‘life’ and ‘colonising’.
… and ‘technology’, to be fair.
Breeding living spaceships and living weapons and living clothing and so forth is not something we monkey-types think of as technology, but it would basically achieve the same thing.
No?
John Morales
Growing stuff.
If you read Stanislaw Lem’s satirical stories about Ijon Tichy, Lem was there in the 1970s.
Myself @ 143
Chamaenerion angustifolium is a plant with fibruous parts that grows in temperate and nearly boreal climate zones. Linnaeus hoped it might be used as a substitute for cotton (it didn”t). With CRISPR we might one day modify it with a module of genes copied from cotton.
No need for irrigation; Chamaenerion angustifolium grows in places that will remind you of England.
“He tells it like it is ”
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/eaWj6hdyEd9yrjUJ/
Finally, a decent politician!
Lynna @ 141
A certain type of presidents* have a habit of making very long speeches. Like Fidel Castro.
*those with a lifetime presidency.
I suppose I have to click on your link to find out who this supposedly (allegedly) decent politician may be.
Who the hell uses FB any more, anyway? I sure don’t, and I sure am not going to click on a FB link to find out whether or not some pollly or other is supposedly decent by some sort of criteria.
Bah.
birgerjohansson, you’re sure?
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/overview.htm
Maybe I should quote, since it’s a dry government link, above:
“The record for the longest individual speech goes to South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.”
(Castro sure didn’t measure up to that!)
BTW, birgerjohansson, I’m quite familiar with Lem’s stories (in English translation, of course!).
I’ve read most of them.
I remember in one (I think it was by him) astronauts for convenience emptied their ship’s biological waste on a planet; planet was Earth, and thus began life on Earth.
(Best of all is the Futurological Congress, of course; I like the linguistic conceits therein)
Wired: Huge Microsoft Outage Linked to CrowdStrike
Crowdstrike seems to have put out a bad update, one bad enough to BSOD computers. This will cause problems for days trying to clean up the aftermath. If we are lucky a disaster of this scale will also drive some movement towards better procedures for updates but it isn’t likely.
The Star Diaries, Eighth Voyage. Two miscreants from Rhohchia named Gorrd and Lod were responsible. I agree that The Futurological Congress is his best – annoyingly, I can’t locate my copy.
At Republican convention, Tucker Carlson completes transformation
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-16/donald-trump-trade-policies-risk-fresh-inflation-breakout/104099454
By some measures, the former president’s long, dishonest and ridiculous convention speech was the best news Democrats have received in weeks.
Many here are aware of this, but I have had inquiries from some about the massive internet ‘outage’. We have not experienced it.
Microsoft defaults to requiring internet access to log on to your computer. Everyone who trusted that now has a bricked computer. We ran neighborhood computer clinics, I went to a neighbor’s house and used linux on a usb drive to start their computer, log onto the internet and access the data on their harddrive. It took less than 2 minutes.
Trust is earned. Gates and Microsoft have only earned our scorn, not trust.
Trump recounts the shooting:
Link
Oh, and thank you again, Lynna, for all the great info you provide as well as your work as moderator.
Trump bloviated on an on, including all of his old, nasty hits. This is Trump’s comfort zone.
Text is quoted from same article as referenced in comment 161.
And, I’m sure all here realize that the RNC debacle was a circus. The only problem is that when addressing anyone outside their cult, tRUMP and the other clowns use flame throwers (in the name of jebus).
Its been eleven years since Australia introduced its sadistic, unjust and unethiial offshore(non) processing policies as a supposed deterrent against refugees coming here by boat fleeing persecution today / yesterday.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/nauru-detainee-speaks-as-new-boat-arrivals-near-100/104114852
Betelhem Tibebu, Ethiopian asylum seeker, sent to Nauru in 2013, where she lived in a tent for 15 months..Ibid.
..
tRUMP said “felt something hit me really, really hard.” There was “blood all over the place,”
I reply: what happened to the may news reports that he told someone ‘it felt like a bee sting’?
He has always proven he can never make it through two sentences without lying!
shermanj @162, thanks. I appreciate that. And, shermanj @160, thanks for that additional information. Useful. The Microsoft software snafu certainly created chaos in airports.
Returning to news about the Republican convention, behold the Cult of Personality:
Link in comment 161.
StevoR talked about: sadistic, unjust and unethiial offshore(non) processing policies as a supposed deterrent against refugees coming here by boat
I reply: I know this situation is serious and prevalent around the world with the millions fleeing horrible conditions in their country, but my warped sense of humor thought: Rats, I guess that rules out any ideas I had of getting aboard my friend’s boat and taking refuge in OZ from the rapidly (rabidly) increasing chaos and violence here in Scarizona.
Source : https://concernusa.org/news/refugee-myths-facts/
Saturn appearing behind the moon, seen by Hubble.
Note that Saturn appears darker, despite Saturn reflecting most of the light that falls on it, while the moon -which is a very dark-grey object – appears quite bright.
This is because the intensity of the sunlight falling on Saturn is only 1 % of what it is at the moon.
.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/PZwcZoc81brctyYL/
I don’t know about windows 11, but windows 10 would let you create a local login process. It is not easy to find, but it lets you at least run windows and should allow internet access. (find the procedure searching for it on duckduckgo)
If you go to distrowatch, there is info about hundreds of versions of linux for all kinds of uses. I use puppy linux because it is small, quick, complete and is easily loaded on a usb drive.
Linux and I suppose Apple users probably avoid all this. Best of luck to anyone who is having headaches with windows.
JFC:
Link
In the angel-protecting-Trump memes, the winged angel is young, fit and blond.
Followup to shermanj @160 and 171.
From Reuters:
Link
Trump’s RNC speech shows exactly who he is, despite promises to hide it, by Mark Sumner
You should all enjoy this (it’s about being sciency):
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1721406030-20240719.png
Followup to comment 174.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Diagnostic criteria according to the DSM-5 (must meet five or more of the following):
(1) Grandiose sense of self-importance.
(2) Obsessed with fantasies of unlimited achievement or success, beauty, love.
(3) Believes they are “special” and should only associate with other high-status people or institutions.
(4) Requires excessive admiration.
(5) Has a sense of entitlement or has unreasonable expectations for favorable treatment.
(6) Is inter-personally exploitative, often takes advantage of others to achieve personal success.
(7) Lacks empathy toward others.
(8) Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her.
(9) Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
As one reader of the article quoted in comment 174 noted: “Trump also promised to end inflation IMMEDIATELY, and cure cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Trump also said he would end the war in Ukraine before he even took office. He said he could end or prevent wars with a single phone call … etc., etc.
Cartoon: Toned down
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rnc-crowns-donald-trump-king-of-america
RNC Crowns Donald Trump King Of America
Many photos of the weird shit Wonkette’s photographer captured at the RNC.
Text excerpt:
Journalist Evan Gershkovich sentenced to 16 years by Russian court in case U.S. slams as a sham
The Wall Street Journal reporter has denied any wrongdoing and said the allegations against him were false. The Biden administration considers him wrongfully detained.
Speaker Mike Johnson routinely lacks evidence to support his beliefs, so he references “intuition” as if it were a legitimate substitute for knowledge.
Abortion was not mentioned at the RNC.
KG @156, thanks!
—
shermanj @160,
No, it does not, and no, no bricking is involved.
(I myself run Windows, and am doing it right as I type this. No probs at all)
Link
That company does not really sound like it operates as a “non-profit,” let alone operating in an ethical manner. Very bad indeed.
Link
Lawsuit against DeSantis over migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard is back on
Florida originally arranged to fly the migrants to Massachusetts in September 2022.
At least now there is another chance to get justice through the courts.
Right-wing media brought Trump back from the brink. Now he’s the GOP presidential nominee.
Fairly significant news, I think:
Trump’s RNC speech was divisive, but front pages of mainstream media claimed it was “unifying” and “healing”
Images of the newspapers’ front pages are available at the link.
@182 John Morales said: I myself run Windows, and am doing it right as I type this. No probs at all
I reply: I’m glad you aren’t having any problems. I installed win 10 for someone about 3 years ago and it did push internet logon at that time. Maybe enough people had trouble and they changed that. Not using windows, I wouldn’t know the current state of things. Also, I just read that there was a ‘fix it’ patch pushed out quickly. But, apparently there was a lot of uproar at banks and airports for a while.
shermanj, quite so.
To be fair, W11 really wants you to log in to Microsoft (allegedly for your convenience, hah) but will let you just create a local account. One result is that, without being logged-in, you have to manually download and install updates from Microsoft.
(Still, it’s notable that banks and airports use Windows in the first place, no?)
Or: problem was that particular update, not the system itself.
This is an informative article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/global-microsoft-meltdown-tied-to-bad-crowstrike-update/
Anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_(electronics)
(If you can reboot it, it ain’t bricked)
John @187, thanks for posting that news. Significant.
From NBC News:
Is this another guy that Trump would want to pardon?
From NBC News:
Charlottesville tiki-torch rioter endorses Donald Trump at his Jan. 6 sentencing
Tyler Bradley Dykes, who prosecutors say performed a Nazi salute during the U.S. Capitol attack, was sentenced to more than four years in federal prison.
The list:
Most Black lawmakers continue to stand by Biden
Hey, @190 John Morales. Thanks for the additional info. I’m just not up-to-date on windows.
No worries, Sherman.
FWIW, I do appreciate your civility.
Thanks.
Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian – Shut Up About Project 2025, Y’all! 6 minutes long.
JM@155, Lynna@173: Or better yet, de-monopolizing the tech industry. Monoculture brings uniform susceptibility, both to error and infection. Imagine if this had not hit Crowdstrike but Cloudflare instead. They have their tentacles in a truly huge portion of web sites — one must wonder about their data gathering capabilities; no amount of cookie crunching and incognito windowage will help you if every site you visit has Cloudflare as doorman. They must have a giant dossier by now of IPs and lists of websites those IPs visited. You don’t notice them most of the time, except when they screw up and you get a Cloudflare error page when visiting some random website … almost any random website. The privacy implications of this are bad enough, but now consider that if Cloudflare ever has an outage like Cloudstrike’s it could be almost as bad as if North Korea EMP’d everyone or there was another Carrington flare. It’s a huge, hidden Achilles heel of the modern internet, and it wouldn’t be there if we still had competent antitrust enforcement instead of Reaganomics.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/19/2255934/-It-Was-Never-About-the-Debate?pm_campaign=trending&pm_source=sidebar&pm_medium=web
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/19/2255746/-Identifying-Media-Misinformation-AOC-Says-Out-Loud-What-We-Have-All-Been-Thinking?pm_campaign=trending&pm_source=sidebar&pm_medium=web
I <3 AOC. And I am scared.
And on the abiogenesis topic (cue groans), I don’t think that “talky tool-users” is much of an “anthropomorphization” when the topic is Fermi. Fermi is about a) the absence of apparent ETI signals and b) the absence of apparent technosignatures or past visits to the Earth/our solar system.
Signals, though, only make sense to come from the talky … and it would be rather difficult to send them with enough power to have interstellar range without some kind of tool use. Technosignatures, by their very nature, also presume tool use, and on a scale that probably requires highly coordinated social activity, with enough sophistication in their ability to learn and communicate their learnings that they would likely have to have language, or something fully analogous in the scope of its capabilities.
Colonization of the “usual” sort (spaceships land, aliens come out and start building stuff) also obviously requires these. Colonization without technology, as we generally understand the concept, could possibly occur in two forms.
1) Spread among low-mass objects, using low-thrust low-temperature systems that could in principle arise purely biologically.
2) The soft-landing of spores, or possibly occasionally larger but not much larger objects, on bodies like the Earth with deep gravity wells, and the possible lofting the other way of viable spores or small organisms with impact ejecta.
2) seems unlikely to be able to deliver intelligent life, even of the non-talking non-tool-using sort (e.g. dolphins). Organisms that big don’t generally survive unaided reentry or being near grounds zero of large impact events. There’s an outside chance of something with a distributed intelligence (say, a smart termite-colony-like thing made of individually dumb termites) getting a toehold as a small number of dumb components, which then grow to a larger and smarter colony with time, but the identity, knowledge, or culture of its progenitor won’t survive this transplantation. It would become a newborn infant of its kind, and without mommy around to teach it; a raised-by-wolves circumstance. And there’s no evidence for even that sort of colonization having occurred here.
As for 1, this also seems unlikely to matter to Fermi, beyond the extent that it could explain Earth’s rapid colonization by bacteria so early in the geological record. Any smartish space whales would avoid deep gravity wells like Earth’s and wouldn’t originate technosignatures aside from, perhaps, objects being seen in the outer solar system that seem to use cold gas thrusts purpusefully rather than randomly. Nothing of the sort has been observed, unless Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a pod of space whales purposely beaching themselves, which seems far less likely than an unintelligent comet getting tidally spaghettified by the Jovian gravity well and dragged down. It gets worse: the habitat for such things seems low likelihood for promoting getting smart. Spewing space spores at perihelion that the solar wind will loft back out to the outer system in a spray-and-pray wind-pollination strategy seems sufficient for comet-dwelling microbes, and the environment might not be conducive to much larger or more sophisticated organisms developing. Earth had nothing above microbial scale for many billions of years, and the trigger for finally going beyond that appears to have been high free-oxygen levels promoting more intensive energy metabolisms. The cometary environment does not seem conducive to developing high free-oxygen levels, somehow …
Even supposing something larger and smarter (animal-smart) emerged, the biggest advantage might be in being able to see and purposely jet spores at other cometary objects, and maybe even develop a rudimentary tacit understanding of orbital mechanics to better hit the targets. Sending spores is likely more effective than trying to physically go there, as moving large masses huge distances fast runs into the tyranny of the rocket equation, and doing it slow means being beaten to your target by your rival’s puff of spores and finding it already occupied by their kids by the time you arrive.
It seems unlikely to me that cometary clouds are a conducive environment for large, intelligent animal forms to evolve, then, though it might provide an otherwise-uncommon niche for “smartish plants” that aim and spit their seeds. Such would not be likely to produce obvious telescopically-obserbable biosignatures or “techno”signatures.
Significantly, too, none of these possibilities, from soft-landing space termites to smartish plants and space whales, would choke out the ecological niches for “talky tool users”, as the only such niches appear (for now) to be on Earthlike planets, and more specifically in “fringe of fecund forest” environments like the border between a reef and open sea, or between a forest and savanna, which provides opportunities for flexible omnivores to switch among two or several feeding strategies in different seasons or in response to instability of the climate and such, including the ability to cross either environment in search of another patch of the other (and its perimeter) so as to outlive any individual such patch. So, these things can’t explain the Fermi paradox through an argument of “most places where humanlike life could emerge got these things instead, except for some reason Earth”.
So, basically, a) space whales are unlikely and b) space whales would probably be Fermi-irrelevant anyway. If they did turn up, though, their very existence would make a nearly slam-dunk case for comets being teeming with space life and the likely source of Earth’s earliest organisms.
The only way the criticism of anthropomorphism remains, then, is if the criticism applies to the very assumptions underlying the Fermi topic. However, I don’t think that really applies. Even acknowledging that life, and even intelligent life, might exist elsewhere that wouldn’t colonize and spread in a technosignature-leaving way, or want to talk long-distance, does not alter the fact that a) life that is eminently interested in doing both of those things indubitably does exist but b) the one known instance of such hasn’t met, or stumbled on the remains or remotely-detected evidence of, even a single other instance, and that that fact needs explaining. Something makes such life very rare, or perhaps very short-lived. It might be a good idea to find out what, especially in case it might be the latter …
Lynna, OM@195,
If it wasn’t impossibe for Biden to win immediately after the debate (I think it was – attempts to excuse his performance or dismiss it as a “bad night” were implausible), it surely is now, with so many prominent Democrats saying he should step aside. Either he agrees to do so, or we’re looking at a near-inevitable Trump win.
No, it isn’t indisputable. It’s about the debate, and the other mounting evidence that Biden has serious cognitive problems. If it was an ebil conspiracy among rich donors, why were they funding Biden up until the debate? They could have said a year ago – we won’t fund you, then backed a more pliable candidate in contested primaries. Holding the debate at that point was the idea of Biden’s own team – it was supposed to reset the contest in his favour. If it is claimed that somehow the donors forced that on his team as part of their ebil conspiracy, they would only have done so if they had good reason to believe Biden would likely crash and burn, as he did. And they could only have known that if they knew (and his team knew) that he has serious cognitive problems. Biden should have made clear at the start of his term that he would not run for re-election – the idea that someone in their mid-eighties was likely to be able to do the job was always implausible. If not then, he should have made it clear a year or more ago – and preferably, resigned the presidency to give Harris the chance to prove herself in the office. The whole mess is on Biden, and more particularly – since the ability to assess one’s own capacities is one of the first things to go in cognitive decline – those immediately around him.
Further to #202, I’ve been following threads on Biden at DailyKos, and I see worrying signs that the majority there have fallen into both a conspiracist narrative (exemplified in the passage Beckenstein Bound quoted @200), and something approaching a Biden personality cult. The excuses for his lamentable debate performance have been absurd (the latest was that he became confused in the debate by Trump’s lies – as if there was any possibility Trump would not spew a torrent of lies), and the additional evidence of serious cognitive problems, both before and after the debate, has been simply denied, or excused as “That’s just Biden”.
As far as we apes can tell.
Sure.
Because the Fermi thingy is about actual visitations, not about signals?
(Hey, how if one could somehow modulate neutrinos, as an example?)
—
Anyway, you seem to be set on this idea that it needs to be baryonic matter conglomerates, rather than other thingies that might do this thing life does.
That is, local entropic reversal, homeostasis, replication.
PS May I say I like your ‘nym, BB.
Hm. A sample size of one, from an unknown distribution.
How do you justify this idea that it’s “rapid”, rather than “slow”?
(Again: sample size = 1)
Something makes such life very rare, or perhaps very short-lived.
Um. n = 1.
—
OK. So, here’s a thought.
Is the universe in its early days, or its latter days?
I reckon the former.
Remember, n = 1.
This is all purely speculative, based on what we know. So far5.
Of course, it’s complicated.
Back when, a shitload of stuff happened quickly, much more so than nowadays.
The quicker (and more likely to happen) things go, the “faster” the time flow, no?
(Is it really how many interactions per unit time, or is that the converse of how much time for a given number of events?)
David Frum on JD Vance
“Hear what JD Vance’s ex-boss thinks about him now”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIm2_GwPqmc
Heh heh heh.
Back in the day, Jerry Pournelle’s blog was part of my reading. Conservative side, of course.
So, this dude will always and forever be “the egregious Frum”.
—
(Wikipedia)
Ah, what the hell. Jerry was genuine.
Next paragraph (ibid):
One thing to note is that Biden has always 20-30% chance of winning but pretty much every Democratic nominee will have at least that much chance just for the sake of running against Trump. So focussing on his winning chances is a red herring because what is important is the difference between the winning chances of Biden who can’t campaign versus Harris who can. And it is very clear that being able to talk, debate and campaign is pretty important.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: There are still key questions about Trump’s injuries after attempted assassination
Josh Marshall:
Ever since I heard Trump’s description of the event, I thought he was either lying in some way or exaggerating. Trump being hit by flying debris doesn’t make as good a story as “Trump grazed by bullet.” The assassination attempt is already a horrific event, and we know that bullets flew close to Trump. That’s good enough for a story. He doesn’t have to push a lie, but my bet is that we are not hearing about the true nature of the injury because Trump is lying.
RNC speakers insist life was better 4 years ago. It wasn’t
Longtime US Rep Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas dead at 74
Cartoon: Just a touch-up
Cartoon: Make your own J.D. Vance comic
U.S. Navy exonerates 256 Black sailors unjustly punished in 1944
The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow.
New York Times link
North Korean Diplomat Defects to the South, Shares News of Political Purge
Ri Il-kyu, who fled to South Korea late last year, alleged that two North Korean officials who had been assigned to negotiate with the Trump administration had been punished.
Adidas proves once again that it is a shit company with shit morals. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqdwpv8vw1o
Yeah, what a fucking “offense” to pick a half Palestinian model for an event referring to 72 Olympics. The Israeli racists are making it too obvious that in their minds all Palestinians, even half-Palestinians, are terrorists.
When the GOP forces religion into schools, the Satanic Temple complies
Re: Lynna, OM @ #220…
I’ll say this about kookaburras…they are VERY, VERY LOUD.
Sigh.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/wapo-warns-of-right-wing-violence
On this July 20th… Name (1) a brand of baking soda, (2) a pesticide, (3) a mixed drink. (This originated with Karen Anderson, wife of SF writer Poul Anderson.)
On a somewhat more serious level…In July 1969 I was working in the Federal Summer Employment Program. Richard Nixon gave all Federal employees a paid day off work. Only good thing he ever did for me…
‘Agency in Crisis’: Secret Service has decade-old staffing shortfall
Interviews with former agents and an NBC News review of government documents and reports reveals an agency struggling to retain agents and keep pace with threats.
whheydt @221: “I’ll say this about kookaburras…they are VERY, VERY LOUD.”
LOL, well that’s appropriate.
Put a camera on cat and show you the complex social network of cats
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=WHHmIfog0Fs
My favv Scottish comedian
.Frankie Boyle – Humanity Doesn’t Deserve the Mercy of an Apocalypse !
.https://youtube.com/shorts/s45zuQ-fXac
Billy Connelly was my favourite.
A very unusual carbon-burning white dwarf
Anton Petrov:
“Surprise! Ancient Supernova Remnant Is a Bizarre Object We’ve Never Seen Before”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=4tzx6wEpMCg
Not click bait this time. This object really is weird, and possibly unstable.
Billy Connolly
– How To Write a Country Song
– Bites Yer Bum 1981
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPZHQ28iuaU
The Skull vs How Aliens Would Reconstruct the Animal vs the Actual Animal
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=FkydPcSufi8
Early days, of course, but…
KG@202, 203: Perhaps you should quit ‘splaining and listen to what nonwhite Democrats are saying, from AOC down to the rank and file.
They are saying that a) they want Biden and b) the push to oust Biden is astroturf, not grass roots.
John Morales @20various:
We can “tell” quite a bit. For example, nothing in the fossil record has cropped up that’s either an indisputable pre-human technosignature or biological but non-conformant with the indigenous phylogenetic tree. No Archaen nine-legged skeletons, no pre-Vendian cast from something with scales in no pattern any future fish or reptile ever had, no mystery fossil in the Phanerozoic that just plain doesn’t fit in, nothing. OK, that doesn’t rule out small visitations or temporary outposts that didn’t chance to fossilize, or were even careful to limit or avoid contamination, but it certainly appears to rule out world conquest and large scale industrialization.
We can do that, to a very limited extent with poor efficiency. It’s been done in efforts to confirm neutrino oscillation as a-thing-that-happens. It could explain a lack of detected signaling, if there was no interest Out There in signaling to pre-neutrino civilizations, since it has some nice characteristics (basically zero attenuation, low dispersion, still almost the speed of light); it doesn’t explain the lack of colonization though, which is arguably the bigger issue.
Now you’re getting way out there. Dark matter, if it is not totally hobbled by its inability to shed heat other than by evaporative cooling, could conceivably give rise to whole shadow biospheres of invisible space whales and such that we couldn’t see. Whether they’d end up with complex enough habitats and resource logistics considerations as to create an evolutionary pressure for high levels of cognitivie sophistication is another question.
The whole thing is also, in a way, entirely beside the point. It might as well take place in a parallel universe: never the twain shall meet, outside of some entirely hypothetical high energy physics situations. The apparent lack of other generally-humanlike smart colonizers remains unexplained, and will continue to do so until there’s either good evidence that environments suitable for such arise only rarely, or else that something different usually outcompetes them and precludes them without having those same characteristics.
Notably, most of the “usual” explanations are themselves deficient in one way or another. Berserkers/apex predator civilization: where is the apex predator civilization? It has no reason to hide, and every reason to have simply eaten/overrun the Earth long before we could even arise. Dark forest: why has no one noticed the absence of the apex predator they’re hiding from? Even if everyone fears each other, and is prone to destroy each other out of fear, civilizations faced with destruction have no reason not to warn everyone else possible about what got them by sending out a loud message of some sort using the last of their strength. Though, maybe such death-cries are simply infrequent enough we haven’t had radio telescopes long enough yet to have heard one. This version of Dark Forest does however leave ruins, especially if very energetic superweapons are ever involved. Abnormal “supernova” remnants from too-small progenitor stars and suchlike would be technosignatures, and none are known. The zoo hypothesis posits a flawless illusion around the perimeter of the primate enclosure, not just good enough to fool chimps or barbarians but good enough to fool Arabic astronomers who knew a thing or two about parallax and even to fool astronomers armed with the Hubble and very detailed understandings of astrophysics. Short of setting much of the galaxy aside as a nature park this seems implausible.
Personally, I think it’s more likely that advanced civilizations simply don’t spread much. If you don’t learn to live within your means well before reaching the tech level to make a credible attempt at space colonization, you overshoot and collapse and have to try again or go extinct trying. If you do, you’ve no interest in overrunning the whole galaxy, just seeding two or three widely-dispersed colonies sufficient to no longer have all one’s eggs in one basket, and if this happens infrequently enough a planet like Earth can believably lie fallow for 4.5Gy without being colonized. If the lifetimes of such civilizations rarely overlap SETI signals would be likewise rare, as would exploratory-but-non-colonizing ships and outposts (and a small such outpost or occasional such visits to Earth in geologically remote times might not have left detectable residues, especially given any deliberate effort to limit disturbance of what they were observing).
The elapsed time between “first stable bodies of liquid water” and “first bacteria” appears to have been effectively, on geological timescales, instantaneous. And I don’t mean “first replicator”, I mean “first bacteria“, i.e. way more complex and sophisticated than the simplest “wild replicator” plausibly would have been. Bacteria cannot possibly be the direct next step after abiogenesis. It simply doesn’t look like there was even close to enough time for a more basic replicating system to have evolved into LUCA … unless that evolution happened before it landed on Earth. (It took 2Gy for LUCA’s descendants to invent membrane-bound organelles, for Christ’s sake!)
The latter. Maybe 75-80% of all the stars that will form during the stelliferous era already have. Perhaps even more.
That argument actually favors panspermia. a) Star formation was faster then than now, so the universe was making more Earths, more comets, and more stabs at “first replicator birth” then, overall. But b) Earth was colder (faint early sun), so chemical stuff (like said replicator-search) ran slower here than it would in the present day, particularly before suitable catalysts had been discovered/had evolved yet. Slower earth, faster rest of the universe overall favors off-earth origins.
(Of course it would be nuclear, not renewables, from that grizzled old Nazi.) Buh-buh-but … how would that have kept Northrup-Grummann’s gravy train on the tracks? Or Lockheed-Martins? Or Boeing’s? …
Lotharloo@212: Biden can campaign very easily. All he has to do is say “Dobbs. Project 2025. Supreme Court.” over and over again and he’s won. Just make Republicans lie in the bed they’ve made and it’s game f*cking over right there.
In any event, if a candidate can still read from a teleprompter, they can campaign … and even just on that score, advantage: Biden.
Lynna@213:
I’m sure it also helped that there was nothing in there for it to concuss. :)
@222:
It would stop when they were bombed into submission, and not a minute sooner. Just look at 1945 Berlin.
If this isn’t nipped in the bud now, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, will die. Trump must lose in November, go to prison, or die, and must not lose in November only to weasel his way in anyway like he tried to last time.
Even that just kicks the can down the road. His followers will be fractured, but may eventually unite behind a new would-be Führer, perhaps a more competent, more dangerous one. I don’t know what to do to forestall that.
Bekenstein Bound, I do very much appreciate your engagement.
This is the sort of discussion I very much enjoy.
Sure. But not all.
Remember Newtonian mechanics?
Indeed. “appears” being the operative word. ;)
We can do that, to a very limited extent with poor efficiency.
Really? Not like I keep up or anything, but that’s news to me.
(Citation, perhaps?)
Indeed. Thus my original remark about anthropomorphism.
If the universe of possibility is not exhausted, that “out there” remains.
If you can’t rule it out other than by appealing to an unlikelihood argument, you’ve already conceded the possibility.
(Remember the dictum Doyle put into Sherlock’s mouth?)
My emphasis.
(Need I reiterate?)
But then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Time_frame_for_heat_death
Heh.
But no, I was referring to the number of interactions per unit time as a metric for time.
(Do you even realise you’ve just again presumed your baryonic matter conglomerates?)
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/20/2256211/-Elon-Musk-Shares-a-Video-of-Trump-Killing-Biden-Best-AI-video-to-date?pm_campaign=trending&pm_source=sidebar&pm_medium=web
Arrest Musk. Immediately.
No, I’m serious. He retweeted that himself, not merely allowed it on his platform, so no Section 230 safe harbors for him, and I’m pretty damn sure that uttering a death threat at the sitting President is against the law.
Such a high-profile arrest would send a clear message that dangerous and illegal violent rhetoric from Republicans won’t be tolerated. Republicans claim to be big believers in “law and order” … time to speak to them in a language they allegedly understand.
BTW, I like the conceit that biological life is a precursor to proper life.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center_Saga
I guess pragmatics is not your strength, BB.
On what basis?
Thoughtcrime?
Lèse-majesté?
—
Also, there’s this pesky due process type of thingy in places that at least ostensibly practice rule of law.
Normality…
Results from Juukan Gorge show 47,000 years of Aboriginal heritage was destroyed in mining blast
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-results-juukan-gorge-years-aboriginal.html
birgerjohansson, that is of course a misleading headline.
The items that were destroyed were 47,000 years (+/- within error bars) old, but Aboriginal heritage has not destroyed.
It’s pretty obvious, no?
If that heritage had been destroyed, it would be no more.
Yet, it remains.
It follows that it is not destroyed.
( Not always the case; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid )
OK, one more:
If ever there was a prime example of anthropomorphism, here it is.
Why colonise?
Any amount of gross matter is available in any reasonable solar system.
As is energy.
(Seriously. Stop thinking like a monkey!)
I think we’re arguing past each other here.
Non-baryonic and otherwise non-visible forms of life could well exist.
At the same time, the Fermi question is “why hasn’t something somewhat resembling us, or self-replicating robots, or suchlike already long since overrun our own cosmic neck of the woods, or at least made a big enough mess or noise that we’ve noticed it?” And again I suspect the answer is that you don’t get that level of capability without first learning to live within planetary bounds, suffering repeated overshoot-and-collapse boom-bust cycles until either that sinks in or you get unlucky and don’t survive the next bust phase of the cycle. And once you have learned that (we are so close, we have contraception and the ideas of Malthus and Turchin ferkrissake, if we can just get this damn capitalism fever-dream to break…) you might have no desire to rampage across the galaxy converting every scrap of real-estate into more copies of patches of Kenyan savannah or lumps of computronium or whatever; just enough bits, scattered widely enough, to Ragnarök-proof the stuff you value. A couple of off-site backups as it were.
By that metric, the universe is winding down, getting slower the slower it forms new stars and the farther apart everything gets.
As for star formation rates, to firm things up:
https://www.astro.umd.edu/~richard/ASTRO620/Madau_Dickinson.pdf
An e-folding timescale of 3.9Gy corresponds to a half-life of 2.7Gy (3.9 ln 2 to be precise). Of all the stars that will ever form later than 3.5Gy ATB, half formed by 6.2Gy, three-quarters by 8.9, seven-eighths by 11.6, and by now it is over 90%. Actually worse than my earlier off-the-cuff estimate. As far as star forming is concerned less than 10% of the universe’s history is left unelapsed … even if some of those stars will linger for a very long time, and a handful will even not be born yet for a very long time. It follows that, artificial megastructures or other such hypotheticals aside, probably over 90% of all the real estate that will ever exist already does (and much of that was blown up or has been cooked or frozen permanently, too).
This cosmos’s glory days are firmly in the rear view mirror and already were when the first smart-enough primate looked up at the night sky and wondered what those bright specks were rather than just seeing them as an inexplicable, occasionally-useful backdrop for everything actually important that ever happened.
That leads to another unusual but disturbingly plausible explanation for Fermi: we’re late to the party, and all the other guests have left. (But where is the mess? The soiled cocktail napkins, the unfinished drink or dessert here and there, the somewhat disarranged furniture, that one drunk guy curled up in a pool of his own vomit in the alley outside? The lack of technosignatures is still hard to explain, unless the party is so long over that most of those have crumbled to dust or been fried too.)
Not as famous as the BMP, but important for the Russians.
“MT-LBs Quickly Approaching Zero at Russian Storage Depots”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=KSvawAjav1k
BB, fair enough.
Dunno about past each other as such; I can be pedantic, at times.
Perhaps a bit facetiously, if it’s something somewhat resembling us, then it’s just physically impossible.
I mean, it is for us, no? :)
—
Anyway. Surely we can agree that intergalactic colonisation is right out.
(Me, I think interstellar colonisation sounds plain silly, and I too am a monkey!)
I see no reason to agree with that.
I love this.
Ah, but it’s monotonic, no?
Also: “The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.”
Begging the question, there.
Also, it’s a meta-paradox, no?
(Had guests been around, there would not be a Fermi paradox.
But there is, so guests can’t have been there.)
Bekenstein Bound@241,
Planets and life anything like ours depend on prior generations of stars ending in supernova explosions, creating and scattering elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium that made up the vast majority of matter in the early universe.
KG:
I like that you don’t want to commit to actually disagreeing with that.
I admit, other than the energy cost and the time cost and the resource cost and the future technology wishlist, I see no other reasons.
But I do see those reasons.
Any amount?? Consider exponential growth.
As for “Why colonise?”, it only takes one technoculture capable of sending out Von Neumann probes or something functionally similar to decide to do so and your galaxy would be full of them within a few hundred million years at most. So if such technocultures arise frequently, you need some explanation for the failure to do so that applies universally.
Perhaps you should quit being a condescending arsehole (if you can – I’ve seen no evidence of that ability yet), and answer my arguments.
KG, tsk.
Um, I did not mean “an infinite amount”, only that any typical solar system has, like, a shitload of mass.
(Ours does, no?)
Um, having machines building machines somewhere is hardly colonising that somewhere, is it?
That’s just exploration.
(You do know to what ‘colonisation’ refers, surely!)
KG:
If, eh?
Well then, in that vein, I counter that if such technocultures don’t arise, there is no need for an explanation for the failure to do.
—
Seriously, consider the energy requirement for even a starwisp.
(Beyond our reach, as of 2024)
For anyone who wants to
coloniseexplore the galaxy via AI drollery, an oldie but a goodie:https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Um. Fraught waters, but clarification is never bad, IMO.
BB, are you Black?
John Morales,
#248
I suggest we have fuck-all idea what a galactic-scale technoculture could do, or would choose to do, if one came into existence.
#250
“Any amount” means as much as could possibly be wanted, not just “a shitload”. And considering that exponential growth at 2% p.a. produces a doubling in around 35 years, so approximately a billionfold increase in a millennium, a shitload could be used up pretty soon.
#251
Of course it is, if the technoculture has actually become a machine culture. But there’s no need to assume that whatever is sent out is a “machine” in anything like the sense we’d use that term of current technology. It could be partly or wholly biological in origin, grown rather than constructed, etc.
#252
Of course. I think it likely that they are very rare, if not actually non-existent (our own is clearly not yet capable of sending out Von Neumann probes). I suspect life is quite common, but anything with more anatomical and behavioural complexity than bacteria very rare, that once such arises it is quite likely to give rise to a technoculture, but that these commonly discover capitalism and swiftly destroy themselves.
This is fun, KG.
I suggest that a galactic-scale technoculture is just a stupid conceit that feeble monkey-minds imagine is possible.
(cf. Douglas Adams)
Right, so we use up all the resources of planet Earth. The core is apparently rich in iron, no?
Then we dismantle the remaining mass in the Solar System.
Heh.
cf. Accelerando
As events progress in Accelerando, the planets of the Solar System are dismantled over time to form a Matrioshka brain, a vast solar-powered computational device inhabited by minds inconceivably more advanced and complex than naturally evolved intelligences such as human beings. This proves to be a normal stage in the life-cycle of an inhabited solar system; the galaxies are revealed to be filled with such Matrioshka brains. Intelligent consciousnesses outside of Matrioshka brains may communicate via wormhole networks.Ah, right, a Von Neumann machine culture.
It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it
Iit’s life, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, Captain
Well, then.
(Universe of possibility, remember? Gotta get exhausted)
[It’s quite detailed. The waste heat from the inner layers power the outer layers.
And trillions of uploaded minds–exponentiation for the win!–live in the Matrix]
Surely we agree that it’s a fair way from “darn I’ve used up all the mass in the solar system so I need to go to other solar systems” to “darn I’ve used up all the mass in the galaxy so I need to go to other galaxies”.
(Lotsa orders of magnitude, there)
I suggest you provide an argument for that, which you have so far conspicuously failed to do. And while you may admit to having a feeble monkey-mind, you should beware of invalid generalisation from a limited number of cases :-p
John Morales@258,
Yes, it’s a fair way, but as you were arguing earlier, the future is long.
Incidentally, yes, I’ve read Accelerando – which I took to be an amusing satire on neoliberalism.
KnockGoats,
Heh heh.
I was echoing your own phrasing, KG.
Obs, I can’t give an argument for that; it is merely my opinion.
Point being, you can’t give an argument for the contrary position, either.
Well, we could both adduce stupid types of arguments, where the premises are–ahem-just premised, rather than known. But that’s surely rather futile.
You know as well as I that the validity of an argument is not the soundness of that argument, and in this case the premises are not yet sufficiently established.
Indeed I am, I am indeed.
To what supposed generalisation do you mean to refer?
(Care to quote me?)
Again: If the universe of possibility is not exhausted, that “out there” remains.
That is not a generalisation, but it is my very claim.
(Has been, all along)
KG, nice.
My favourite conceit in that work was the channel timing attack to determine whether we live in a simulation.
John Morales@262,
My position on the possibility/likelihood of intergalactic colonisation is: “Dunno”. I don’t think that requires an argument.
Nothing wrong with admitting to ignorance.
My position on the possibility/likelihood of intergalactic colonisation is: “Whyever?”. I don’t think that requires an argument.
Seriously.
What are you gonna get in another galaxy that you can’t get in your own?
(And why would you want it, anyway? A long way to go, no?)
Far out!
I am rather amused when people talk about galaxies as if they were stars.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda)
From Earth, the nearest stars are in the single digits of light-years away.
(So, around 6 orders of magnitude, no?)
How would you know until you send someone/thing to find out?
John Morales@267,
In a few Gigayears, the Andromeda galaxy will be colliding with our own.
Cartoon: Wall helper
Felipe De La Hoz, writing for Slate:
The Supreme Court Just Supercharged the Scariest Part of Trump’s 2025 Agenda
How Jon Stewart Stays Hopeful In Uncertain Times | The Daily Show
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=j32Q4fJ67CE
Regarding supercivilisations, Stanislaw Lem’s classic short novel His Master’s Voice tells the story of how humanity accidentally intercepts a message that is clearly intended for a higher-level civilisation than our own.
An enormous budget (not at all motivated by hopes for military-app tech, honest) is allocated to the task of untangling the message.
Farron Cousins:
“Trump’s Idiot Sons Went Crazy And Forced Him To Pick JD Vance As Running Mate”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=suIi_wzBegA
This crowd remind me of the late-stage tories.
Scams associated with CloudStrike outage:
https://www.wired.com/story/crowdstrike-outage-support-scams/
More on JD Vance
Gross
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxmD-Ah4oJOeEo82L1NQ7nCVVwcHG6has9?si=SAVpes9wZ_rTvXlf
Consequences:
Link
Better than having the hospital close. A hospital with reduced services is better than no hospital. Still ….
Republicans want to bring back child labor. If Trump wins, they will
Much more at the link.
@266. John Morales : “Seriously. What are you gonna get in another galaxy that you can’t get in your own?”
According to StarBlazers*, the Cosmo-DNA that repairs all the damage the Gamilons did to Earth.
.* A.k.a. Space Battlecruiser** Yamato, the old 80’s cartoon show* that took the idea of a spaceship rather literally…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Blazers
Star Blazers Theme Season 1
.** Plus the later movie too Star Blazers The Movie – Teaser Trailer
.*** Technically, the historical Yamato was a battleship (as well as another name for Nihon / Japan) but still..
Day One – Vance on tour with Felon; Donald Trump refers to him as ‘JD Wentworth’.
Imagine the wall-to-wall coverage for every Biden gaffe. Trump’s gaffe in which he apparently could not remember his running mate’s name gets almost no coverage.
NBC News link
Followup to comment 280.
The coverage of the “JD Wentworth” gaffe came from The God Pod, which publishes satire. So … might be satire.
What early bacteria? Fossils? Those could be micelles. Maybe early critters took advantage of non-enzymatically produced material to hide in, or maybe it was like spiderlings “ballooning”. Switch to making featureless balloons to move to new mineral systems.
Unless there is a piece of data I’m missing I don’t trust fossils like that.
Biden withdraws.
Yep. Biden is withdrawing from the presidential race.
WHAT!!!!?
😶???
Sometimes, even Bill Maher is useful.
“Bill Maher Hits Trump Where it Hurts in Humiliating Monologue!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=QofTI0UHsLA
President Biden withdraws from the 2024 race
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1815080881981190320
Joe Biden’s letter to “My Fellow Americans.”
The letter can also be read here.
Maybe they have learned from history…
If the Dems had asked Carter to hand the election over to his veep once it was clear the hostage rescue in Iran had failed, you and the world could have been saved Ronal Reagan and 40 years of Republican ideological hegemony.
GOP really wants to hide its anti-abortion plans. Just look at JD Vance
At his latest rally, Trump also claimed that the “radical right” is behind Project 2025. What Bullshit. Trump is trying to back away from Project 2025. Both Trump and Vance are gaslighting the voters about their plans regarding abortion, and regarding everything in Project 2025.. They will repeatedly lie about it. Expect that.
President Biden just endorsed Kamala Harris!
Whatever the top Ds do they better do it competently. A contrast between Trump and whoever shouldn’t be hard. They have lots of viscerally awful things they can point out, if lots of the rest of the Ds and media continue picking at and hand-wringing over irrelevancies instead of focusing that on something useful I’ll be practicing such a shaming…if Trump loses or not.
Link
Same link as in comment 294.
Here’s where we find out who had honest and misguided hand-wringing, and who has the urge that they’ll find something, anything to whine about. I don’t have any problems voting for Harris.
It’s like the paranoia about voter fraud. Without something real paranoia will never be satisfied. Get rid of mail in ballots and their fear is still there because it didn’t have a real basis to begin with.
Link
A reminder, President Biden is still recovering from Covid. He tested positive again, so he still has to isolate for a few more days, most likely.
Brony @296, I also have no problem voting for Kamala Harris.
https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1815087772216303933
Nice photo accompanies this endorsement of Kamala Harris.
So, yeah … what else did we expect from Hair Furor:
A fucking lie.
Also from CNN:
MSNBC pundit: “Biden was 100% in until he was 100% out.”
Biden does intend to serve out his term.
From CNN:
OMFG, Trump just gets worse and worse:
Quoted text is from NBC.
President Biden just made a decision that he thought was best for the country. Newsom agrees:
Trump is fundraising … again.
Various GOP assholes and Trump sycophants are not satisfied with President Biden’s announcement that he will step out of the 2024 Presidential race. The Republican doofuses are now demanding that Biden resign immediately.
Resigning immediately would be a mistake, in my opinion. We need time to transition to Kamala Harris in an orderly way. We have that opportunity, why not take it.
Republicans are so predictable.
Followup to comment 304.
Yeah, now all the doofuses are piling on. Looks like they have decided what their spin and propaganda will be for the foreseeable future:
tomh @305, yep. All too true. And now we can expect them to sound every misogynistic and racist dog whistle they have concerning Kamala Harris.
Looks like lots of Democrats are happy to back Kamala Harris:
Quoted text is from NBC.
You know, the current batch of Royalists – no longer Republicans- are as predictable as the rulers of Russia or North Korea.
They spew filth that has been reused again and again.
I’m not a Democrat but I’m happy to support Harris. In fact, I could even get excited about that campaign. I’ve just been reading about possible running mates. Sen. Mark Kelly from AZ seems like he’d potentially be a good pick.
@ #309
“Sen. Mark Kelly from AZ seems like he’d potentially be a good pick.”
That is a good idea!
NYT:
I know Maher is an asshole but this rant is fucking perfect.
“New Rule: MAGA’s Magical Thinking” | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=i91mPb860ds
That obviously doesn’t follow: Biden could be fit to serve now*, but doubt whether he has four more years of being so. I hope the Democrats will swiftly get behind Harris, although it might be best nonetheless to have an open convention, at which I’m confident she would win easily.
*Although in fact I do have doubts about that.
Not politics.
“The Key to Being the BEST Cat Parent!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=gdl-uazSasM
Johnson is not running for the presidency either, but unlike Biden he has no legislative successes so he can bugger off to wherever he came from.
.
I am not even American but these petty bullies are incredibly annoying.
Daily Beast – “The Democrats Need a Hero. They Actually Already Have One.”
(I’m not campaigning for Kelly. I’ve thought about it seriously for like an hour. He just seems to have a number of strengths.)
Wow, Rachel Maddow is positively giddy.
Kamala Harris just got good polling results. 🙂
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CPI9fLLmK9I
Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackaon Lee died this weekend and Laura Loomer (R) had some disgusting comments about it, starts at the five-minute mark.
Sorry!
Kamala Harris was on my short list in 2020, and her experience as V.P. helps her stature. I agree that Senator Mark Kelly would be a good running mate on first inspection.
Former President Barack Obama released a statement:
Alexander Vindman, the former director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council:
Guardian – “Kamala Harris spurs meme frenzy on social media as Biden endorses her.”
As far as I know, the “virtual roll call” planned for the first week of August is still on. Instead of confirming Joe Biden’s nomination during that roll call, delegates are likely to nominate Kamala Harris. There may be a few defectors, but I don’t think there will be many. If it goes like I think it will, Kamala will be the official nominee of the Democratic Party before the convention starts in Chicago. That would be nice.
At any rate, we are likely to hear process details soon:
More details:
Link
The right’s incoherent response to Biden dropping out
Re the first meme @ #323, Edwin Diaz’s theme song is a banger. (Timmy Trumpet live version.)
Quoted in Lynna’s #324:
And the overwhelming majority (90+%?) of Democrats voted for the ticket in the primaries this year, knowing Biden’s age. I imagine many people had assumed well before today that a vote for the ticket could well be or was essentially a vote for Harris.
The long history of ugly right-wing media attacks against VP Kamala Harris
Right-wing media have claimed she is a “DEI hire” and launched sexist attacks
Here are just a few examples, excerpted from a much longer list:
If you didn’t know the attack lines before, now you do. Republicans will probably recycle all of those lies.
I did not include the examples of right-wingers calling Harris a “whore,” but you can get an idea of that attack by seeing what was being said about her in relation to Willie Brown.
Bacteria thriving inside rocks that have been isolated very long.
“Strange Life Forms That Appeared Alive Found Inside 2 Billion Year Old Rocks”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=a04eZawA35s
Earth abides. Even if the thug wins the election he will just be another bug, gone in an instant.
From the Guardian liveblog:
She’s also now been endorsed by Pramila Jayapal (Congressional Progressive Caucus chair) and AOC.
Aussie ABC news on Joe Biden -as old and frailas he might be -proving he can do something Trump is totally unable to ever do and that’s a selfless act putting the intrests of his country above his own ego and desires :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/joe-biden-steps-down-as-presidential-candidate/104086192
What stunning if not all that surprising given past days news to wake up to.
@324. Lynna, OM :
I really hope the Democratic party now settles quickly on Kamala Harris as the nominee and backs her 100%. Unity here is absolutely vital.
I’ve heard – although not 100% sure exactly where* that the funds raised so far for the Biden-Harris camapign can only be only be accessed if Kamala Harris is the nominee. I also fear that picking anyone else or engaging in any further infighting would be fatal to the chances of the Democratic candidate, whoever they are, beating Trump. To NOT pick Harris now would very likely be catastrophic and will definitely lose the ïncumbency key as political historian and elecetion forecaster with a 100% accuracy record Allan Lichtman has noted.
I really hope the last part of that happens as Lynna says here and that there are no defectors at all and everyone in the Democratic party unites behind her. Its the best -probly only -hope they have and we all have of stopping Trump and that needs to priority number one.
.* Think twas an episode of Planet America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_America ) but not sure and maybe a few places?
Added my pebble to the mountain of donations!
Of course. It’s the USA.
Money talks.
John Morales:
Of course we can’t. Intergalactic colonization is easy, even assuming no fancy new physics, supermaterials, or other sneaky tricks. If you’re patient.
a) Find a star with habitable planets (or whatever) orbiting it.
b) Get it aimed at the other galaxy at thousands of kps (Shkadov thruster springs to mind)
c) Establish a sufficiently stable (and sustainable) presence around that star.
d) Wait some several hundred million years until it reaches destination galaxy.
e) Rebuild the Shkadov thruster (after that long it won’t still be intact) and decelerate until gravitational capture.
Easy, peasy … if you can build a smallish megastructure (e.g. a planet-sized mirror or so) and can retain some sort of identity or culture over those timescales.
That last might require having a hierarchy of slower and slower “angels” and “gods”, deferred to by the faster lower tiers as a cultural norm, each layer working to maintain those norms over its own characteristic timescale, and the slowest ones (perhaps in full suspension) awaiting arrival at the destination. It’s obviously vulnerable to any revolution by a faster tier against the slower tiers above it. Figuring out a way to keep it stable would be paramount (it likely requires that the slower tiers guarantee lives of abundance and safety to their next-faster neighbors in exchange for nobody rocking the boat). Karl Schroeder’s “lockstep” might provide some hints as to how something like this might be implemented in actual practice.
As for why do it? Why fly to Andromeda? Why climb Everest?
Because it is there.
There have always been plenty who need no more reason than that.
As for what Andromeda, specifically, has, that the Milky Way doesn’t, well it has a gigasun mass black hole, large enough you could spend an hour or so inside it before being spaghettified. Of what value that is, I’m not sure. More practical is likely that it has an order of magnitude more energy stored up in its ergosphere than that piddly little thing in the heart of Sag A* has to offer …
Lynna@281:
Hmm … must have been a day ending in “y”.
tomh@284
I withdraw my order for a half-dozen new LED lightbulbs, then. I’m not going to need them. By the time my current crop of bulbs start burning out I’ll be glowing in the dark.
Brony@293:
I place an order for massive quantities of iodine pills. Better get ahead of the rush (and attendant price hikes)!
SteveoR@332:
Say, how do you say “Which way to the fallout shelter?” in Maori? I should probably start practicing right now.
Lynna@325:
So, they won’t be any different than they otherwise would have been. Okay, then …
That appears to be the case, because the funds were raised for Biden-Harris. But in any case, there’s reportedly been a surge in donations – $50m since Biden’s announcement.
Voiceless in Gaza | First Dog on the Moon | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2024/jul/22/voiceless-in-gaza
The party of family values.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/q7KJ16jGXDrZ9Ke5/
I would rather watch this than endless coverage of the election campaign.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/A6iYaCB8mLZ2CR1u/
BTW I am European. I would not be aware Harris has some non-WASP ancestors if not Americans kept bringing it up.
The goddamn Tories have appointed leaders with darker skin than her.
The Guardian
‘Dream come true’: study suggests drug could extend women’s fertility by five years | Women’s health |
Co-lead says rapamycin can be repurposed to slow ovaries from ageing and is safe for younger women.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/22/drug-women-fertility-study-rapamycin
BB,
For values of ‘patient’ exceeding 6 orders of magnitude of the lifetime of our species hitherto..
(What a silly claim!)
By which you mean we have yet to find a star with habitable planets (or whatever) orbiting it.
Blah blah.
Bah.
So silly!
You do get that “might require” and “might not require” are equivalent, no?
What part of ‘anthropormorphic’ was obscure to you?
Yes, monkey-types such as us might do such stupid things, pointless as they may be.
(The dregs)
<snicker>
Ah well, given your ‘nym, I had hopes.
(You really don’t get $bignum$, do ya?)
Such stupidity!
Every day ends with (not “in”) a ‘y’.
Was that supposed to be a witticism?
(Weak it was, if it was)
John Morales @ #334:
As opposed to Australia, where money prefers to remain silent. ;)
Seriously, though, as your comment perhaps suggested, the symbolic importance of the surge in grassroots donations is at least as important as the stockpile itself.
Top Trumper Sebastian Gorka Launches Racist, Sexist Attack At Kamala Harris
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=rygFacrST2w
The last sentence in #343 is a pre-tea production. Apologies. :)
Maddow on #Republicans tackling #mentalilness
.https://youtube.com/shorts/5-0bZMxhMog
Random thought: Living in interesting times is no fun.
From the Guardian US politics liveblog:
Farron Cousins
Trump Plans To Accuse Democrats Of Launching A ‘Coup’ Against Biden
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=pDNHh-XEtic
While simultaneously demanding Biden resign the presidency!
Followup to comment 213.
Some transparency is better than no transparency, but there’s a reason questions linger about Donald Trump’s post-shooting medical care.
I have seen the concussive effects of even small caliber bullets, so the idea that a bullet fired from an AR-15, a bullet that struck so close to Trump’s skull, would cause no concussive damage doesn’t make sense to me. My bet is that Trump was struck by shrapnel of some kind (metal, plastic, glass?). That’s bad, but doesn’t make Trump sound as heroic as being struck (grazed) by a bullet.
Kamala Harris rakes in endorsements—and dough
Stephen Miller Has Fox News Meltdown Over Biden Withdrawal
Video at the link.
Always good news when Stephen Miller melts down and exhibits even more batshit bonkers “logic” than usual.
And … like Trump, Miller is really upset about the money spent on an ad campaign he helped to design: “as President Trump said, the Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden.”
Also, “donors” are not picking Kamala Harris.
Miller as master of projection: “They’re publicly admitting that they are an oligarchy,” he claimed. Miller, who reportedly helped prepare the remarks Trump delivered to followers at the Ellipse before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, went on to make an even bolder assertion: “This is as full-frontal an attack on American democracy as we’ve ever seen in the history of America’s major political parties.”
It’s kind of funny.
Also, MAGA cult followers are now calling Kamala Harris “Side Chick.”
Cartoon: The sensible pundit meets Godzilla
Image of check is available at the link, check for $5,000 to the Re-Elect Attorney General Kamala Harris 2014 campaign.
https://x.com/themaxburns/status/1815116088633373038
Trump was probably not in such dire cognitive decline when he wrote that check in September of 2011.
Bits of campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
Trump will find a way to avoid a debate with Harris. She would make hash out of him.
USAToday
Aaron Rupar:
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1815011035650134471
Video is available at the link.
That video is also available here.
Excerpt from Steve Benin’s article:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
hmmm
Donald Trump said at a rally on Saturday, “You’re not going to teach a criminal not to be a criminal.”
Politico reported overnight, “One GOP source tells me he doubts Trump will debate Vice President Kamala Harris — he’ll likely call her an illegitimate candidate.”
OMFG
Link
Democrats should start talking right now about how Trump is afraid to debate Harris. Maybe they can goad him into it.
Quoted in Lynna’s #351:
Trump said in 2020 that he didn’t consider US soldiers’ traumatic brain injuries sustained during an Iranian rocket attack to be “very serious.”
SC @263, good point. Trump claimed that soldiers’ brain injuries from concussive blasts were just “headaches.”
In other news:
Link
I suppose everyone has heard by now that Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi endorsed Kamala Harris. Here’s an excerpt:
Trump says he wants to charge Joe Biden with fraud … for prompting the Trump campaign to spend all that money campaigning against Biden, and then springing Kamala Harris on them at the last minute. LOL.
Also in the news, other Republicans saying stupid stuff:
Ohio state Sen. George Lang (R) said that at a Trump-Vance 2024 rally today.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/democrats-did-a-coup-on-joe-biden
From the Guardian liveblog:
And now, for some news of actual significance:
Quoted by SC @367:
Money is coming in so quickly that the news media is having trouble keeping up with the latest tally. It is significant that 60% of the people making donations are sending money to the campaign for the first time.
NBC News:
The Biden administration is still governing effectively, as reported by the Associated Press:
As reported by the LA Times:
Team Trump wanted Biden to stay in the race. Then in an instant, everything changed, by Rachel Maddow
Biden’s historic decision to step aside and endorse VP Harris means Trump’s recent run of political good luck has finally come to an end.
Donald Trump’s response has been to continue to lie about Joe Biden and to insult Kamala Harris. Just a few minutes ago, Trump posted on his social media site that Kamala is “dumb as a rock.” Trump proves, minute by minute, that he is in over his head. He is not up to this fight.
House GOP sure wasted a lot of America’s time and money [“investigating”] Biden, by Mark Sumner
Anton Petrov:
‘Definition of “Planet” May Change Again! Here’s What Astronomers Propose’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=wDtl6nDl2XU
Already 18 years since they abolished Pluto as a planet! (In another 18 years, I will be 81. Or dead.)
“Donald Trump Is Losing Tremendous Amounts Of Support From A Group He Needs…”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=eUHVZJ6cxik
Farron Cousins is usually free from hype, so this in encouraging.
Why not just post the transcript, Birger?
Far, far quicker to get through than watching the video.
“Donald Trump has a huge problem with a very specific voting block that is going to be crucial for either candidate to win in this year’s presidential election. And that voting block is women, not just low income women, not just women of the 1%, but overall women voters here in the United States hold the key to victory in the 2024 presidential election. And according to the latest data, Donald Trump is actually hemorrhaging support from that specific demographic. And one of the weirdest things is one of the worst places that’s happening to him is down here in the state of Florida. Now, Florida is a red state. Don’t let anybody try to tell you that Florida is still a swing state because it is not. Trust me, most of these people claiming it’s a swing state, haven’t been here in a long time. We’re talking about a state that has not voted for a Democrat for governor since the mid nineties, folks.
Okay? We have a Republican governor, Republican controlled legislature, Republicans, uh, you know, hold both of our Senate seats. It’s a red state, but maybe it could shift again because Donald Trump has lost 4% of the support he had from women voters from the 2020 election to today. So his support among women here in the Sunshine State continues to plummet. And it’s not just happening here, of course, it is happening in other swing states, particularly in the Midwest. ’cause if Trump can’t win him over in a red state, he sure can’t win him over in a real swing state. So that is a massive problem for Donald Trump. Now, at the same time, Donald Trump, according to reports that came out on Sunday, is actually managing to increase his support among the white working class. But let’s be real, when these pollsters say white working class, what they typ typically mean is white middle-aged males.
Okay? So Donald Trump’s increasing his support with white middle aged males, but that’s not good enough. If he cannot win over women, if he loses even more support from this group, it’s over for him, which of course, he understands the entire Republican party does. That’s why they did not talk about abortion at their convention last week, even though they want to acting nationwide. Abortion ban, just like Donald Trump’s vp uh uh, JD Vance had said in the past. But Vance stayed away from that topic. So they thought not addressing the issue could attract more women voters. But it’s not. They thought picking another pasty white guy to be Donald Trump’s running mate might help them with women voters. I don’t know why they thought that, but of course it didn’t help.
Donald Trump is not doing anything to court this particular group of voters. So if he loses women, he loses the election. And I have said in many segments over the last few months, women are the key to saving this country. When you look at the fact that Kamala Harris is polling better against Trump than President Biden as hell, even Hillary Clinton is, Michelle Obama is, women are going to have to save this country. And I’m sorry it shouldn’t be on you, but apparently it is. Men have screwed this country up so badly that women are our only hope at this point. So hopefully come November, they can save us from ourselves, because if not, well, project 2025 is about to become a very disturbing reality.”
Meh.
Guardian liveblog:
The Grio – “44,000 attend Black women’s Zoom call for Kamala Harris, raise $1.5M”:
Might as well join in…
Stereogum – “CNN Tries To Comprehend Kamala Harris’ Brat-Themed Campaign Launch.”
As I posted on another thread, CNN and the NYT are reporting that with the vote of the giant California delegation Harris has the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.
What an incredible turn of events from two days ago.
So, probably not a protracted nomination fight. We keep the party unity key. And if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, the foreign success key too, and avoid the biggest risk of losing the civil unrest key.
It’s starting to look like we might squeak through this after all. Biden’s was a gutsy, risky move but maybe, just maybe, it won’t turn out to have been a catastrophic mistake after all.
We shall see, in November.
birgerjohansson@344:
In related news, water still wet.
SC@363:
In fairness to Trump, it might be as difficult for him to empathize with people who suffered brain injuries as it would be for me to empathize with someone who suffered wing injuries.
<snicker>
John Morales: It is the nature of life to multiply and to colonize. Life that does out-multiplies life that doesn’t and dominates the numbers in subsequent generations. This is the basis for the Fermi paradox: life able to harness language and tool-use should be able to out-multiply everything else and find ways to spread from planet to planet and even throughout a small enough cluster of galaxies. There really only are four options:
It won’t get here. (Because it is very rare, because it tends to burn itself out, because the intelligence to travel on that scale leads inevitably to choosing not to and to go lotus-eater instead or something, because local conditions here are weird, or whyever.)
It just hasn’t gotten here yet. (Likely because it’s sufficiently rare.)
It’s already been and gone. (Late to the party hypothesis. We’re a weirdly late emerger in a cosmos way past its prime.)
It is here, but by the time anything like that is able to travel that far it’s also unrecognizable for some reason and looks nonliving, or at least non-sapient. (It blends in with the background, or it stays away from deep gravity wells and eschews megastructures, or it runs itself very slow to conserve energy, or it eschews rural real-estate for energy-rich galactic nuclei…)
Most of these have problems (e.g. eschewing rural real-estate — life doesn’t usually leave a niche unexploited even if it’s marginal; the existence of the Amazon basin didn’t lead life to wholly abandon the Sahara and Antarctica, nor did the breadbasket of Ukraine cause humans to decide against building the cities of Mecca and Las Vegas). That’s why it’s still considered an unresolved question.
My leaning is toward a mix of “rare earth”, “eukaryotes and language are hard, so sapients are rare on top of that”, and “living within your means is both necessary for getting out there and either impossible or leads to choosing not to colonize in a runaway fashion”.
As for the recurrent charge of anthropomorphism, I suggest going to nuts and bolts here.
A patch of environment can be in one of three known states vis-a-vis life:
Barren — nothing lives there at all. The Moon appears to be barren. The parts of Mars we’ve examined in any detail also do, without even a trace of microbes.
Fallow — there is life, but not the works of intelligence. No planning, no intentional anything. A patch of woods, or desert, or most other uninhabited spots on Earth lies fallow.
Cultivated/developed — intelligent life with planning and intention has modified the patch in some manner. Land containing cities, roads, cultiated crops, solar panels, and suchlike fall into this category.
If we attempt to apply these same categories to what we see in space, everything looks barren or, at most, fallow. If we apply it to pre-Pleistocene Earth, examining the fossil record and rock strata, it looks like Earth was barren for a very short time and then fallow all the way up until perhaps 200Ka. There’s nothing that looks intentional in all that time — despite the efforts of e.g. creationists to find evidence of such. No hand of God … or of LGMs, or whatever other form non-supernatural goal-seeking agents might have taken. Not so much as one lousy fingerprint.
That last seems to rule out a persistent conversion of a significant chunk to a cultivated/developed state here, and the absence of anything in nearby parts of the galaxy that can’t be explained as barren (just the mechanical workings-out of orbital mechanics and astrophysics, without so much as lichens making soil, let alone intentional cultivation) points to a lack of geologically-recent nearby widespread presence of sapients of any kind, and even casts doubt on the presence of life, at least above the microbial level.
In this categorization, the search for biosignatures is the search for evidence that some place is (at least) fallow, not barren. Something holding it chemically away from equilibrium, at the very least. The search for technosignatures is the search for evidence of cultivation or development: evidence of a field, a mine, a road, if not a city, or something that betrays planned and intentional modification of the environment to serve some kind of ends.
One type of indisputable biosignature would be evidence for an energy flow that cups and dams some energy in a way that shouldn’t happen by chance, and that would enable some structure to copy itself. Indeed, anywhere there is life there must be such a biosignature, for thermodynamics reasons. Likewise, an energy-damming phenomenon that a blind groping over a fitness landscape could hardly have hit upon in less than trillions of years, being already present after mere billions, is a good bet for a technosignature. Megastructures would be a subcase, as would any evidence for the interstellar replication of macroscopic life, at least if said transfer necessarily involved gentle entry or exit into serious gravity wells.
(Note that colonization on that sort of scale would not look like Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, or the Eagle landing at Tranquillity Base; it would look like succession ecology, aka “how land razed by a forest fire gradually goes back to being forest again over the next few decades”.)
Bekenstein Bound:
Life as we know it, that much I grant.
Too simplistic. Inconmeasurable niches; for example, we (ape-types) are vertebrates.
So, are we out-competing (say) archaeobacteria? Tubeworms?
Are you so very sure about this claim?
(my enumeration)
Way to entirely miss the whole point of the actual Fermi paradox.
Gotta love your mechanistic metaphor. Heh.
Wow, you sure like your lists.
(sigh)
As for the recurrent charge of anthropomorphism, you’re wallowing in it again.
Again: this thing about hegemonic expansionist colonising you go on about is basically monkeys wondering why other species don’t throw poo.
(sigh)
Right. Biosignatures, just what we expect from life as we know it.
(It sure seems you don’t actually get to what I refer!)
—
You remind me of one of those phone scammers running through their script.
Doesn’t matter what I say, basically.
(Other than I have a super-power)
[well, hippos do, but that’s a bit of a coincidence]
Hugo awards organisers reveal thousands spent on fraudulent votes to help one writer win | Hugo awards | The Guardian
.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/23/hugo-awards-fraudulent-votes-paid-for-one-author-ntwnfb
FYI! Geomagnetic storm may make northern lights visible as far south as New York.
https://www.space.com/northern-lights-possible-july-24-geomagnetic-storm-warning
NB
HIV ‘vaccine’ could be made for just $40 a year for every patient | Global development | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jul/23/hiv-aids-prevention-vaccine-lenacapavir-sunlenca-pharmaceuticals-gilead-generic-licensing
@386. birgerjohansson : Cheers! hadn’t heard of that. Hopefully expect similar effects in my hemisphere too!
Israe;l is declaring UNWRA a terrorist organisation :
Source : https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-parliament-votes-label-un-relief-agency-terror-organisation-2024-07-22/
@386 -388 again : Of course Adeladie is 35 degrees South versus New York’s Cities 40 dgrees North FWIW making us that bit less likely, well 5 degrees latitide less likely, to spot it..
Rachel Maddow (and a larger MSNBC team) last night (YT link) – “Trump’s biggest nightmare: Switch to Kamala Harris leaves Team Trump with regrets about Vance”:
From SaveAFox:
‘Finnegan fox attack when he smells snacks!
.https://youtube.com/shorts/YyVGW3kpck4
Lovely to see the happy critters jump around.
Interview with Oklahoma State Sen. Nathan Dahm
| The Problem with Jon Stewart
.https://youtube.com/shorts/lkW3cPSXr4Q
-He is not holding back! 😁
Aussie TV program Four Corners – part 2 Trump and the future of the United States of America 55 minutes in length
Owen Jones interviews journo Ryan Grim – Is Trump VP’s Pick JD Vance MORE EXTREME Than Him? 20 minutes long.
Just seen this myself – apologies if someone else has already posted here.
Astroturfing – pure astroturfing. The toiling masses demand Biden and only Biden!!!
/s
Russian mercenaries in Africa
‘They turn our farms into rape centres’: Russian mercenaries accused of abuse in Central African Republic | Global development | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jul/23/central-african-republic-women-girls-rape-sexual-violence-conflict-food-security-wagner-russian-mercenaries-un
Mika Brzezinski trolling JD Vance with her gorgeous cat on set this morning (YT link).
Also on Morning Joe this morning, “‘Dog whistle calling her uppity’: Mara Gay calls out JD Vance’s attack on VP Harris” (YT link):
HuffPo – “Just 25 Hilarious Tweets About Joe Biden Dropping Out And Endorsing Kamala Harris”:
My favorite:
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US politics liveblog. From there:
This is of course absolutely true, but it’s notable, and somewhat alarming, how much conspiracism has been apparent among those Democrats wanting Biden to remain the Democratic candidate (particularly at Daily Kos, but it has also appeared here). Pressure on him to resign because the debate made it clear he couldn’t campaign effectively, and the polls increasingly indicated that he couldn’t win, was supposedly all a conspiracy by billionaire donors who were scared he would increase their taxes. Why these same donors had been funding Biden up until the debate was left as an unfathomable mystery. It was possible, even probable, that some donors would try to push for a candidate of their own choice – indeed, Michael Bloomberg, among others, argued for an open convention, presumably in order to do so. But (a) they have already failed in that endeavour, and (b) the attempt to do so fits readily into the category of attempts to take advantage of unpredicted and unplanned events, which are extremely common in both politics and big business. No doubt attempts to push Democratic policies to the right will continue with Harris as candidate, and we must wait to see how she responds – but such attempts would have continued with Biden as candidate as well, and while he has proved somewhat more “progressive” at least in domestic policy than expected, he was hardly the progressives’ preferred candidate in 2020, nor was he immune to pressure from rich donors.
I dunno – with the debate, the assassination attempt on Trump, the bizarre Republican Convention, Biden’s Covid and withdrawal and the “coronation” of Harris all within less than a month, hasn’t this series already “jumped the shark” even before we get to the main action?
Since “Jumping the shark” eventually led to Robin Williams debuting as Mork from Ork, I hope this season will see the introduction of some clever entertainers.
This seems pretty interesting
“Researchers create bio-inspired 3D-printed solar steam generators for desalination”
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-bio-3d-solar-steam-generators.html
Stevo R @ 395
In the video with JD Vance the sign is wrong. Not ‘National Conservatism’ (NC). It is supposed to be (abbreviated to) NS . With a stylized eagle logo.
KG @ 401
As long as there is no Star Wars Christmas Special after the election. Or that (quickly cancelled) TV ‘comedy’ about the Hitler family living in modern America.
(Lightbulb) Goddammit… it IS a Trump victory at the end of the season.
I would like the next season of ‘America’ to have a crossover episode with the narrative universe of Kung Fury
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury
Law Professor Suggests Judge Cannon Guilty Of ‘Judicial Malpractice’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=XFFE1C296C4
Harris will be speaking in Wisconsin soon.
From the Guardian liveblog:
Biden returns to the White House today.
Watching this speech after the past several weeks feels like waking up from a bad dream.
Guardian liveblog:
More:
Swedish TV is broadcasting from the speech. The speech appears intended to fire up Biden’s base rather than appealing to undecided voters, which seems logical at this phase. Getting all sympathisers to actually vote is crucial.
Re: fossil “bacteria”.
To consider membranes and molecular evolution I’d want to find the fatty acid biosynthesis version of this.
“Non‐enzymatic glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway‐like reactions in a plausible Archean ocean”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4023395/
There’s a molecular pathway leading to attaching 1-3 fatty acids to a glycerol backbone. That all has to be considered alongside the nucleic acid biosynthesis pathways. My thoughts there are what life would do with just the fatty acid? Since it’s already using sulfur in mounting the carbon to be used, a fatty acid monolayer in hydrothermal (alkaline and magmatic, maybe that’s what separated bacteria and archaea) vent mineral systems is still usable by non-polar parts. And later membranes would be useful in plugging up the outsides of mineral homes.
As for chemistry in the solar system thiolin is similar to the purine pathway molecules and intermediates with the exception of ribose (and there’s the possibility of precursor backbones like erythrose phosphate and glyceraldehyde phosphate). So the thiolin made by earth chemistry was eaten up, or couldn’t become complex enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tholin
Here’s the fossil I’m interested in. It seems so contain vestigial things that are involved in it’s biosynthesis.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519314006778
Just look at that figure at the top. Yes it is a computer construct, but it can be compared to metabolism broadly as well as geochemistry and hydrochemistry.
That should be “… couldn’t become complex enough elsewhere.” at the end of the thiolin section.
Last night I watched MSNBC for the first time in years. (I had stopped watching TV news as it aggravated my health issues, which have since been resolved). Rachel Maddow announced that starting next week MSNBC will be going through the 2025 project on air to expose its extremism. The parts the rethugs want to keep quiet will be exposed for all to see.
Kos – “All eyes are on the Harris veepstakes.” (Comments are also worthwhile.)
Yes, it was a rally.
I have little to base it on, but I’ve been unable to lose the idea of a transition from an erythrose nucleic acid backbone to a ribose one as related to why there are 2 families of amino acid tRNA synthetases, one for the 2′ carbon and one for the 3′ carbon.
Followup to SC @416.
As Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 candidacy advances, five Democrats have already been contacted as part of the vetting process.[…] multiple news organizations confirmed that former attorney general Eric Holder and his law firm would oversee an intense vetting process
And who, pray tell, will they be vetting? The answer is just now starting to come into focus. NBC News reported that the Harris campaign has requested vetting materials from five potential vice presidential contenders, according to two sources familiar with the list (in alphabetical order):
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz
It’s worth emphasizing that this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an exhaustive list. We know from previous election cycles that some who make short lists like these fall out of favor, while others are sometimes added to the list as the process unfolds. The eventual Democratic vice presidential nominee might very well come from this quintet, but there are no guarantees. […]
Whitmer suggested that she’s not interested in serving as her party’s vice presidential nominee.
@KG #401:
An image of Trump fleeing from Harris jumping a battery-powered shark, created by aprilsparkles1 on Twitter.
A Reader’s Guide To MAGA’s Racist And Misogynistic Attacks On Kamala Harris
Link
way back at
@334 John Morales said: Of course. It’s the USA. Money talks.
I reply: So true. But, over the years, here, especially, it has been made stronger and louder by being nurtured by billionaires so that the still small voice of reason and honesty cannot be heard anymore.
Prosecutor vs. felon is the theme for 2024. Trump is going to hate it, by Mark Sumner
By the numbers:
Link
Trump’s Sons Keep Falsely Blaming Democrats for the Assassination Attempt
Eric and Don Jr. are pushing a narrative that threat experts say will fuel violence.
Election law violates rights of voters with disabilities in Ohio, judge rules
A win for democracy and for disabled people.
Being disabled does not automatically make one also stupid. Disabled people can make their own choices.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/its-shocking-trump-was-blindsided
https://www.wonkette.com/p/the-right-is-freaking-out-about-childless
Guardian liveblog:
Hee.
SC @429, Vance is his own worst enemy. He shares that trait with Trump. Both of those guys continue to reveal who they really are.
In other news, as reported by USA Today:
NBC News:
Hmmm. A story to follow, as reported by NBC News:
I love that people are having fun with the Harris for President campaign.
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/harris-challenges-trump-to-walk-down
Kamala Harris looks like such a warm, friendly person when she smiles.
She’s going to kick Trump’s ass.
Lynna @ #432,
I saw people mentioning that yesterday in a comment thread (at the Cyberstuck subreddit, which I highly recommend). Who knows, but wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it turns out to be true.
Followup to comment 432.
Trump campaign files suit to block Harris from using Biden reelection money.
Independent UK: block Harris from Biden’s $90 million war chest
The complaint is unlikely to work because the Biden campaign was technically the Biden/Harris campaign. Harris’s campaign may have to play some legal games and make sure they don’t refer to Harris’s VP candidate with that money but Harris had access all along.
I think it’s unlikely that Trump’s lawyers expect they will win. More likely they just want to delay Harris’s access to the money for a while. If they are lucky they can get a judge to block access until the case is resolved and then drag it out past November. At this point in the campaign just keeping Harris from using it for a couple of weeks is a big win.
I don’t think team felon has any legal standing to file such a whiney assed complaint. It’s nonsensical that Harris can’t use the funds that were donated to the Biden/Harris reelection campaign.
Luckily she already has her own war chest that is well over 105 million in just two days, in addition to the more than 150 million that was raised for the Democratic Party in general.
I’m sure those numbers are going down very poorly with the troll brigade at Mag-a-lago.
Via DW News – The world’s largest wetlands is on fire :
https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-drought-and-fire-destroy-the-pantanal-wetlands/video-69711003
PBS Newshour interviews Minnesota guv & potential running mate for Harris here – good interview :
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/minnesota-gov-walz-says-gop-playing-with-fire-by-demonizing-harris
John Morales@383:
<sigh>
Poo-throwers don’t inherently outcompete and outbreed non-poo-throwers; that’s very niche-contingent.
Hegemonic-colonizers do inherently outcompete and outbreed non-hegemonic-colonizers.
AFAICT, constraining my scope to “everything that is a plausible product of natural selection” constitutes “anthropomorphism” in your eyes. Despite the fact that “everything that is not” consists of gas, plasma, dust, and a smattering of rocks, served with ice and with some radiation on the side. (And whatever dark matter equivalents of these may exist.)
(And yes, cities and skyscrapers and the Apollo landing modules still littering the lunar surface are products of natural selection, as are your bones, teeth, and fingernails, or a turtle’s shell, or honeycomb. They wouldn’t exist without it.)
You seem to want to ask “why aren’t the non-colonizers here?” whereas Fermi asks “why aren’t the other colonizers here/why aren’t there any other colonizers?” The latter seems the inherently more interesting question, somehow …
To recap, I suggested such to include:
… this is general to the point of covering any form of life that doesn’t flagrantly violate the laws of thermodynamics. I don’t know how much more general I can be to evade the charge of “anthropomorphizing”! Throw the physics books out the window? <smh>
SC@398:
Nerve-wracking, too, I expect. 90% of Canada’s population is in the “WARNING: You are inside of the splash zone” part of the seating adjacent to the yank tank, the last time I checked.
Lynna@428:
Apparently, for evangelical Christians it is normal. Which says a lot about evangelical Christians. None of it good.
Lynna@430:
Unusual and worrying I’ll grant, but it’s actually not perplexing at all. It’s exactly what we’ve been warned about by scientists for the last fifty freaking years.
Alzheimer’s disease: Study suggests targeting oligodendrocytes could help reduce amyloid beta production
.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-alzheimer-disease-oligodendrocytes-amyloid-beta.html
Alzheimer’s disease is a harder nut to crack than cancer. It is the Republican party of maladies.
Bekenstein Bound,
Heh heh heh.
We are both monkeys.
But monkeys are a rather small subset of all possible life-forms, no? ;)
Tsk. No.
Not “a plausible product of natural selection”, rather your boneheaded idea that it’s baryonic matter at hand, and that advanced life must be hegemonic.
cf. #204
Entropic gradients.
(You are a sad exemplar of your nym)
You have colonisation in your brain, doncha?
(It’s futile, it’s worthless, it’s pointless, it’s… monkeys flinging poo)
Stop generalising from a sample size of 1.
Not that complicated a concept, it is\t?
George Monbiot
Extreme wealth has a deadening effect on the super-rich – and that threatens us all |
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/24/extreme-wealth-super-rich-devon-society-planet
The Ultraviolet Habitable Zone Sets a Time Limit on the Formation of Life – Universe Today
https://www.universetoday.com/167714/the-ultraviolet-habitable-zone-sets-a-time-limit-on-the-formation-of-life-1/
<snicker>
Yeah, and the magical fairy life-pixies do their job, too.
heh.
birgerjohansson, seriously.
You go by headlines, not by content.
(Weak)
Republican politicians are urging their colleagues to avoid racist and sexist comments about Kamala Harris.
Even if Trump somehow restrains himself for… several hours, there is so much already on record to last well past November. And the likes of Sebastian Gorka, Sean Hannity and the morlocks in congress are not likely to show much restraint.
We should encourage them all to say the quiet part out loud.
Death Wish at 50: a reactionary and repugnant revenge thriller | Film | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/24/death-wish-50th-anniversary
-You don’t say? / s
If you feel exhausted by the coverage of the election campaign, I recommend that you relax with David Mitchell’s ‘The Unbelievable Truth’.
A Jewish couple was rejected as foster parents because of their religion. This is the future Project 2025 envisions
| US elections 2024
| The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/24/project-2025-adoption-fostering
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US politics liveblog. From there:
Also in the Guardian:
“‘I know we will win – and how’: Ukraine’s top general on turning the tables against Russia”:
“Russian chef arrested in Paris over alleged ‘large scale’ Olympic Games plot”:
I want to know more about this story!
“Centrist government to remain in power until after Paris Olympics, says Macron”:
(Here’s an article about the NFP picking Castets – who’s very chic from what I’ve seen :) – in Le HuffPost.)
I read this thread multiple times per day, but don’t post often. Lately, I’ve posted several times about not wanting Biden to drop out. I particularly was at odds with KG, whose views I typically agree with. I’m here to eat a bit of crow. I still think that the attacks on Biden were a ‘swift boat’ ploy (everyone should read comment 421), with the media not just constantly harping on it, but ignoring Trump’s similar age. I still think that race and gender are hurdles that Harris is going to face, and not just from the Republicans, who will find ways to push this. I worried that folks were calling for Biden to step down, but too often, those folks did not suggest an alternative. The in-fighting among Democrats caused me to think chaos could follow (which the media would love to pile on to). But, with Biden’s clear and almost immediate endorsing of her, Harris was off to an amazing start, and I hope this will lead to a trouncing of Trump. It’s not just the amount of cash raised so far, but the instant outpouring of support, enthusiasm, and volunteers that have me very happy to be proved wrong.
Guardian liveblog:
Guardian liveblog:
“…And in closing, I would like to reiterate my full support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who instigated a violent attack on the Capitol in order to overturn the results of a democratic election and has praised and promised to pardon the attackers.”
I should in turn admit that I didn’t anticipate the scale of that “instant outpouring”: primarily, I thought Biden had to go (because even if I’m wrong about the extent of his cognitive problems, as long as he remained in the race, it was going to dominate the narrative), and that Harris was the only feasible replacement. She has clearly been ready for this (and so she should have been – even before the debate there was always the possibility Biden would have a health crisis and have to pull out).
Guardian liveblog:
Political theater on whose behalf?:
CNN Hamas and Fatah sign agreement in Beijing ‘ending’ their division, China says
The agreement makes some big promises but is short on how it will be done. It says Hamas should/will join the PLO but not how it will be represented in the organization. It ignores the issue of security in the Gaza strip or Hamas having it’s own private military. If this does bring the various Palestinian organizations together it is significant but it feels more like a bunch of symbolic puffery to me.
China is seen as an independent mediator in a way the US is not on this issue, letting them bring together parties that wouldn’t be involved with the US. At the same time China is inexperienced with these issues and does not have a good history with international politics. China sometimes focuses on insuring their negotiations produce something that can be taken to the press as a success rather then actually solving the underlying problems.
Paul K @454, a lot of people are reacting just like you did.
Dems in array: Handoff from Biden to Harris appears seamless
Despite fears of intraparty chaos and disarray, the Democratic Party’s election shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris has been impressive.
CSIS: Third Plenum Hot Takes: Skepticism and Concern
The 3rd plenum is a big deal because it is where the government announces big changes. On that alone the 3rd plenum is disappointing, with few policy changes of significance. This meeting has been delayed for months but exactly why is unclear, a product of the obscurity of China’s power structure and actions at the high end.
What it does say will be problems down the road. China is doubling down on it’s export focused economic reforms, which means more trade conflicts down the road. It’s increasing it’s state organized and run economic structure, which will be bad for China. It emphasizes national security and party security, reflecting an increasingly paranoid government.
It does recognize that China needs to make reforms to deal with it’s economic crises. The proposals either put more power in the hands of the state or are anemic. China needs to reform their entire tax system, an herculean task they don’t begin to address. Their current system depends on fees for construction to fund local government, now that housing has reached it’s limits that simply won’t provide enough money.
The results of the meeting also make clear that Xi’s power is near absolute. Reading between the lines it suggests that Xi is in a horrible situation. His power is great but he doesn’t trust anybody around him. Unlike Putin, he doesn’t have a circle of people he at least partially trusts running things under him. He has tried to promote his own people only to have to remove them. Many of the major government offices are still run by people considered opposed to Xi.
@402 birgerjohansson: Al Franken has been mentioned as an outside possibility for Harris’s VP, so it could happen. Trump would look silly trying to harp on the one somewhat tasteless sexist joke that got Franken in trouble. It seems to be a long shot hope from more left leaning Democrats but it would be immensely amusing. Certainly somebody I would support.
As summarized by Steve Benen from an NPR article:
In other campaign news, this is summarized from reporting by The New York Times:
More re #435 (!) – SFGate – “‘Hideous piece of road garbage’: Inside the Tesla Cybertruck’s 110,000-member mockery club”:
Oh FFS.
New Republican impeachment measure targets Harris
Republicans have filed seven impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. They’ve also now filed three measures targeting Kamala Harris — and counting
Why would he get equal time with the president when the president isn’t a candidate?
Harris bid energizes young voters as registrations surge
Link to a donation site for Harris is available at the main link.
@462
A joke? Franken was forced to resign because of his very creepy tendency to grab women’s asses during photos. Multiple women came forward to attest that he had wandering hands, so we made him suffer consequences for sexual misconduct.
One of the few times over the past several months I was able to bring myself to read and comment was during the French elections a few weeks ago. I was concerned about what might happen, but I had some reason to hope when I saw that the NFP had formed and people (especially young people) had a sense of urgency and were organizing strategically to get out the antifascist vote. When I saw the outcome I thought “That’s what we need here,” but couldn’t even type it out because I just didn’t see any possibility, and in fact things seemed to be going in the other direction. Now that’s all changed, and it’s happening here!
Guardian liveblog:
As usual, Jon Stewart’s satire seems uncomfortably close to the real.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/XJ5TZsaiFQw
SC @ 466.
“Why would he get equal time with the president when the president isn’t a candidate?”
It may be true he is not a candidate, but I refer you to the W-era concept of truthiness, wich is truer than mere “truth”.
(Autocorrect wanted to spell it “witch” as a testimony of weird Youtube film stuff. I need to stay away from “so bad it is good” films)
“treating impeachments like an Oprah audience giveaway”
In their defence, politics has been influenced by TV since McCarthy waived a list of names before the cameras. It has worked before, so lets push the limits further.
Axios Charlotte – “North Carolina will be the epicenter of the unparalleled 2024 presidential race Wednesday”:
Link
From birgerjohansson’s link @ #451:
Cartoon: America’s infrastructure president
JD Vance is a huge drag on the GOP ticket—and it’s only going to get worse
Disapproval for Project 2025 is skyrocketing
Fruit fly study identifies gene that may reverse Parkinson’s disease
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-fruit-fly-gene-reverse-parkinson.html
GOP calls Harris ‘weird.’ These 19 moments prove Trump’s the weird one
For many of those examples of Trump’s weirdness there are multiple repetitions/occasions. Trump repeats and repeats.
Newsweek reports on the Russia’s dissing JD Vance:
Britain / The Guardian
Armed police officer filmed kicking man in face as he lay on ground at Manchester airport
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/24/armed-police-officer-filmed-kicking-man-in-face-at-manchester-airport
Trump Said Some Disabled People “Should Just Die,” According to His Nephew
Live updates: Netanyahu addresses divided Congress amid protests outside Capitol
Excerpt:
Much more at the link.
That is truly disgusting.
Sabine Hossenfelder:
“Americans Sue to Remain Misinformed”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=dL0CL_eoARQ
KG @485, and that’s what Israeli media is going to show to Netanyahu’s constituents.
Related:
Link
Fact-check: Netanyahu says Israel is not blocking aid into Gaza
Washington Post link
Link
Photo at the link.
https://x.com/uasupport999/status/1816032133443428463
Elon Musk attended as Netanyahu’s guest.
https://x.com/mediazona_en/status/1815999957742006757
Should’ve refreshed!
FBI director reveals new details on how Trump shooter carried out attack
Thomas Crooks may have had a firearm with a collapsible stock and flew a drone around the campaign rally site prior to the shooting, Wray said before the House Judiciary Committee.
Link
J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to the book of Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts — and proceeds will benefit his organization
50 years ago… Columbo, Season 4, Episode 3: “By Dawn’s Early Light”
Meanwhile:
Newsweek: Donald Trump Misses 12 Putts Playing Golf With Bryson DeChambeau
I have not seen a general assessment of Trump’s golf play. The articles are too short and too focused on the politics of the situation. What I got from the descriptions of the event is that Trump has a reasonably good drive for somebody his age but his putting is bad. Obviously outclassed by a professional golfer but that is to be expected.
Several commentators also focused on the politics of just having Trump but that isn’t entirely fair. DeChambeau made the offer to both before Biden dropped out. At the same time DeChambeau trying to say this wasn’t about politics is wrong, nothing a running candidate does is outside election politics and most things Biden does incorporate some element. This is a charity event but DeChambeau’s show make the donation, it costs Trump nothing.
Hello Infinite Thread! My gobbet of quasi-news is that David Futrelle’s blog of manosphere mockery, We Hunted the Mammoth, is back from hiatus… in an interesting way.
The YouTube channel is the usual address followed by @HuntedTheMammoth.