Kastehelmi notes at the end: “Thanks for reading, this thread took forever to make. The images are from 1.-2.8.2023. They do not endanger Ukrainian OPSEC in any way.”
In her newest filling Fulton County DA Fani Willis has asked the court to advise the 19 defendants of the consequences a demand for a speedy trial would have for some of the rights they otherwise would have.
– The Defendants cannot now argue that they are entitled to the State’s discovery responses ten (10) days in advance of trial.
– The Defendants cannot now argue that they are entitled to notice of the State’s similar transaction evidence ten (10) days in advance of trial.
– The Defendants are now precluded from calling any witnesses whose statements were not provided to the State at least ten (10) days in advance of trial.
– The Defendants cannot now complain that they received less than seven (7) days notice of the trial date in this case.
The wording of her motion suggests that she wants to show the defendants that she sees through their tactic of trying to get an expedited trial and then having evidence excluded because it was not disclosed in time.
The State is entitled to a fair trial as well as the Defense. A defendant who does not possess discovery materials cannot file a statutory speedy trial demand and then claim that the State’s evidence should be excluded on the basis of this Court adhering to that same demand and scheduling accordingly. In other words, this Court should not be transformed into a forum for “Gotcha”.
That’s why she specifically asks the court to put them on the record.
Should the Defendants in this case desire to proceed to trial under these circumstances, then they should be required to confirm it, personally and on the record, prior to trial.
[…] To my knowledge there hasn’t been a ruling on severing one or more cases up until now. […]
It’s happening: Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee has confirmed that Donald Trump’s Georgia felony trial will be streamed via the county court’s YouTube channel and that a press pool will be arranged, allowing the trial to be televised. That news comes to us via The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Each of the 19 indicted defendants’ trials will be televised, in fact; current legal wrangling has yet to determine which of the defendants will have their trials split off from Trump’s, but a number of his co-defendants have already broken with Trump to request that their own trials happen much, much sooner than Trump’s current (non-indicted) lawyers are pushing for. Attorney Kenneth Chesebro was the first to request a speedy trial, receiving an Oct. 23 trial date from Judge McAfee. Trump’s trial is currently scheduled for next March. […]
Having a sitting state senator talking about the need to “draw his rifle” as the alternative to a lack of a legislative response to the Fulton County indictments is a threat of political violence better suited for nineteenth century redeemers than 2023.
The senator is Colton Moore. Video is available at the link. He is a rightwing doofus.
[…] Here is Brian Kilmeade, back safely from not sounding like an idiot for one (1) second during his interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, blubbering in fear that the US Open titles will be decided by a large bong. [video at the link]
Fox News idiot Sandra Smith was panicking that “we can’t have drugs away from these top athletes and let ‘em perform!” Thus beganneth Brian’s meltdown:
BRIAN: It’s unbelievable and it’s gonna get worse, because as maneuvers now, especially by this president and Chuck Schumer to legalize it for the entire country. And by the way, they stopped planes from going over the US Open under David Dinkins’ administration. They should be able to stop this from happening.
But it just goes to show you, this is what we experience, Sandra, walking to work every day! […] But the players are complaining, because it’s not so much it’s annoying. Cigarette smoke is annoying. But this actually affects your mind!
Do you want to, in the biggest tournament in your life, in matches that matter, that could outline your future, do you want to have somebody else’s decision to smoke pot affect that?
Hate ruining star tennis players’ careers by smoking a joint at the park next door. They’re going to be reminded of it, too, every time they walk by a homeless professional tennis champion.
“Your honor, I was going to win the tennis tournament, but then I forgot I was playing tennis because I was tripping on airborne pots,” said all the tennis players. “Now I’m addicted to airborne heroins, also from the park next door.”
BRIAN: Welcome to New York. We thought hecklers were the biggest obstacle, now it’s people with BONGS.
Love to put my whole bong in my pocket and take it to the US Open.
Fox News people are so good at druggie talking.
Remember the time a Fox News “expert” spoke of letting people “lay in the street having just shot up with marijuana”?
Remember this one? [video at the link: "Doing a marijuana by putting it in a spoon and then melting it down."]
With far-Right Numpties demanding a government shutdown unless all history since 1964 is erased, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has hit upon an argument that just might motivate the clodpate caucus to think twice: There’s no telling how long a government shutdown would last, so if they don’t pass a temporary funding bill, Congress would be closed too. And if that happened, Republicans wouldn’t be able to pursue the endless hearings, investigations, and armpit-snufflings needed to impeach Joe Biden and restore Donald Trump to the presidency. […]
The New York Times reports that McCarthy floated this brainstorm over the weekend on Fox News, where he said a shutdown would get in the way of all the poop-sniffing that the House must do to finally get Biden and his crime family, and to bite them real good on the ankle. This is, we’re told, a reflection of McCarthy’s “growing desperation” to talk wingers into approving a continuing resolution to fund the government past September 30, the end of the fiscal year.
[…] Also too, the article helpfully points out that it would likely be illegal for Rs to continue widdling and sniffing around Biden during an actual shutdown, even if they said it was on their own time, as patriotic volunteers. Beyond that, the optics wouldn’t be great, what with it being a “politically charged spectacle” while government employees are furloughed, with agencies closed, and a skeleton crew of essential workers doing air traffic control and border patrolling and the like, without pay.
Big surprise: The wingnuts McCarthy aimed his pitch at don’t believe a government shutdown would mean they have to turn right around and not go to Impeachment Disneyland.
“It’s not as if the investigators won’t be considered necessary or essential personnel,” said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who noted that as speaker, McCarthy would have authority to determine which parts of the House continue to operate. “He is the one who decides how much of the House we shut down.”
Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., Buck’s fellow member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, also dismissed the idea that the arch-conservative Republicans insisting on deeper reductions in spending would be persuaded to relent by the threat of slowing the inquiries.
“We are not going to be distracted by shiny objects, saying if you don’t get this continuing resolution passed, we won’t be able to pursue the impeachment inquiry,” Rosendale said in a Monday interview on Fox News. “That’s nonsense.”
Rosendale then cut the interview short so he could lunge after a bit of bright ribbon attached to a small card reading “Joe’s Emails!” in glitter pen.
Rightwing House members have made clear to McCarthy that they must shut down the government if they can’t repeal all legislation Joe Biden has ever had on his desk, or at least eliminate all funding for the DOJ’s prosecution of Donald Trump. The Times notes that McCarthy could always ask Democrats to vote on a temporary spending bill, but then of course his own caucus would skin and eat him, likely without pausing to cook him even a little bit.
Considering that this is the same crowd that voted down its own bills to punish McCarthy for not defaulting on the debt, we’d recommend that nobody schedule any visits to the Smithsonian, national parks, or most government agencies in October. Social Security checks will still go out, but you didn’t really need that Small Business Administration loan for a few months, did you?
House Oversight and Accountability Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) asked panel Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to subpoena Jared Kushner to produce documents about money his investment firm has received from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies.
In a Thursday letter to Comer, Raskin referenced Comer’s recent public comments expressing skepticism about the post-Trump administration activities of Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Trump who was a top White House aide. Raskin asked Comer to join the Democrats’ probe into Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners.
Formed in 2021, Affinity Partners reportedly raised $2 billion from an investment fund led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and millions more from other Gulf nations.
“I am encouraged by your recent acknowledgement that ‘what Kushner did crossed the line of ethics’ and your repeated assertions that our Committee is ‘investigating foreign nationals’ attempts to target and coerce high-ranking U.S. officials’ family members by providing money or other benefits in exchange for certain actions,’” Raskin said in the letter.
“In light of these concerns, I urge you to pursue a serious and objective investigation by issuing a subpoena to Affinity and requiring the firm to comply with my February 15, 2023, request for documents regarding its receipt of billions of dollars from Gulf monarchies shortly after Mr. Kushner left a senior White House position he used to reshape U.S. foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in Saudi Arabia’s favor — a request you have thus far allowed Mr. Kushner to ignore and defy,” Raskin wrote.
A GOP spokesperson for the Oversight Committee brushed off Raskin’s request.
…
In 2022, when Democrats controlled the House, Democrats on the House Oversight committee requested that Kushner produce various documents and information about Affinity Partners and his communications with Saudi officials. Raskin said that Affinity has ignored Democrats’ requests since October.
Raskin had asked Comer in February to join him in renewing that request to Kushner, writing in a letter not previously made public that the House cannot craft legislation to “set a line as to where you can be with relatives of high-ranking government officials with respect to doing business with adversaries overseas” without “examining the plethora of actual and potential ethical violations of the previous Administration.”
The Irish EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has deleted a tweet that encouraged people to cut down on red meat following backlash from farmers.
The agency tweeted the words: “Ready to be healthier, wealthier, and more fabulous? Cut down red meat intake.” It went on to point out that we throw away 10 percent of the meat we buy, and it also advised trying out Meat Free Mondays and veggie lunches. The post included a meme featuring a happy-looking Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones, alongside the words: “The planet when you reduce your meat intake.”
According to reports, the tweet was deleted after protests from the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA). The group said it caused anger among farmers, “who feel it goes beyond the remit of the EPA and is not consistent with Government dietary guidelines.”
Following a complaint from the IFA, the EPA released a statement explaining its reasoning behind the tweet. It said it had a responsibility to offer advice that “may help to protect and sustain our environment and lower carbon emissions”.
“We regularly share sustainable options on social media platforms that some people might like to explore and, from time to time, this includes advice on food and food waste,” the organization added.
It went on to say that its intention was to offer “helpful advice,” rather than to “cause any confusion.” The EPA said it made the decision to remove the tweet to “avoid any unnecessary attention on what is a complex area.” The group added that it’s “engaging with agricultural groups on this and we are confident that the engagement will bring clarity for all.”
Despite the backlash, the EPA is right to say that cutting down on meat is beneficial for the planet. While the environmental conversation tends to focus on fossil fuels, there is no doubt that animal agriculture is one of – if not the most – environmentally destructive industries there is.
Farming animals is responsible for at least 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (though some estimates put this figure much higher). A major issue is methane, which is around 80 times more warming than carbon in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Farmed cattle around a third of human-caused methane.
But emissions themselves are just the start of the problem. Arguably a more concerning issue is land use, which livestock farming is a leading cause of. Around 26 percent of the world’s ice-free land is used for grazing animals, while 33 percent of cropland is used as feed for farmed animals.
Animal agriculture is therefore driving deforestation, and has been responsible for around 91 percent of Amazon destruction. It’s also a significant contributor to biodiversity loss, with ecosystems and habitats being destroyed to make way for farmed animals.
Experts from bodies like the UN and University of Oxford have stated that shifts towards more plant heavy diets are essential to mitigate these issues. A major study published in 2018, for example, found that western countries would need to reduce beef consumption by 90 percent if we are to avoid climate collapse.
A number of people and groups have voiced their support for the EPA’s words. The Irish Wildlife Trust wrote that we need “open debate on how we can adapt and survive the biodiversity and climate crisis, not the shutting down of scientifically based arguments.”
Green Party councillor Eva Dowling slammed “appalling bullying tactics from IFA.”
“These stunts don’t help farmers and won’t help the planet,” she added. “All aspects of our climate footprint need to be addressed, including diet. Well done @EPAIreland on sharing this crucial information in the first place.”
StevoRsays
Hope this helps :
Do these Voice to Parliament claims raise an eyebrow? Here’s what you can do about it
ABC Investigations / By Kevin Nguyen, Michael Workman, and Pat McGrath
The Voice debate has been mired in misinformation, including unfounded claims around land rights, misleadingly edited videos, and accusations of voter fraud.
And these were just the warm-up act to what is expected to be a passionate campaign leading up to October 14, when Australians will decide whether to constitutionally enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.
Here are some common pieces of false information you may have seen floating around on social media or being repeated by politicians in the news.
ABC Investigations wants to know if you think you’ve seen or received materials containing misinformation.
You can let us know here or can use the the form at the bottom of this page.
A NASA orbiter has found the crater probably created by the crash of Luna 25.
KGsays
Spent around an hour this morning trying to release a terrified blue tit (small bird, I don’t know how far their range extends) which had managed to trap itself between the two panes of a sash window Ms. KG likes to leave slightly open at the bottom. It must have flown or hopped into the room, flown upward, tried to get through the glass of the top, closed pane, and fallen down between the two. We tried various strategies to get hold of it, which only resulted in the bird losing its tail-feathers. Eventually we managed to swing the lower pane inwards the wrong way (swinging it the way it’s supposed to swing would have squashed the poor thing) far enough for it to drop out of the trap and fly away. Hope it can manage without tail-feathers until they regrow!
Tomilinsky Electronic Plant research and production enterprise in Lyubertsy, Moscow Oblast, is reportedly ablaze after a drone attack on Sep. 1, according to our sister publication, Ukrainska Pravda.
The Tomilinsky plant is under sanctions by the Ukrainian government as it manufactures electronics for Russian missile systems.
The plant was attacked in an operation directed by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR), who believe they have achieved their aim, a well-informed source told Ukrainska Pravda…
An Alabama legislator will plea guilty to a felony voter fraud charge that he used a fraudulent address to run for office in a district where he did not live, according to an agreement filed Thursday.
Republican Rep. David Cole, of Huntsville, resigned from the Alabama House of Representatives on Thursday. He will plead guilty to a charge of voting in an unauthorized location, according to a plea agreement filed in state court.
Cole, a doctor and Army veteran, was elected to the House of Representatives last year. According to a plea agreement, Cole signed a lease in 2021 to pay $5 per month for a5-by-5 space in a home in order to run for office in House District 10. Cole had some mail sent there, but never “stepped past the entry foyer” on the two times he visited the location he claimed as his residence, according to the plea agreement.
Alabama law requires candidates to live in a legislative district for one year before they run for office. Cole signed the lease for the space two days after a redistricting plan was enacted that placed the home, where Cole had lived since 2014, in another House district. Cole provided an altered version of the lease — which specified he was renting a house and not a 5-by-5 space — when media questions arose about his residency, prosecutors wrote in the plea agreement.
Cole in 2022 signed another lease for an apartment in District 10, but he continued to claim a property tax break from the county by saying he resided at his house, according to the plea agreement…
Finland’s former Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who narrowly lost an election in April, stepped down on Friday as chair of the centre-left Social Democrats, hoping to take the focus off her personal life after an often turbulent four years at the helm.
Marin, who had announced her intention to quit soon after the election loss, was the world’s youngest prime minister when she took the post in 2019 aged 34, attracting attention around the globe and helping lift Finland’s profile.
After leading the country through COVID-19 lockdowns and the ensuing economic turmoil, Marin became a vocal supporter of Ukraine after Russia’s invasion last year and succesfully pushed to end Finland’s military non-alignment in favour of NATO membership…
birgerjohanssonsays
KG @ 20
Good work!
.
NB Real receipts: What my giving birth in Germany costs in the USA
A ban on rental electric scooters has come into effect in Paris in response to a rising number of people being injured and killed in the French capital.
Almost 90% of those who took part in April’s vote over the issue were in favour of the ban – but fewer than 8% of those eligible turned out to vote.
Paris is now one of the first capitals to have outlawed the rented electric vehicles, just five years after being one of the first to adopt them…
The 911 outage that impacted emergency centers across Nebraska appears to be fixed.
Agencies in Buffalo, Hall and Phelps Counties say service has been restored as of Friday morning.
The City of Grand Island shared a press release that said, “This morning we are still learning more about what caused this incident. Gratefully our lines have been restored and we remind everyone to use 911 only in an emergency. Please don’t test 911 and take up valuable lines from those who are in a true need.”
Another update from the Buffalo County Sheriff’s Office said, “It has not been determined what the exact cause may have been, but is believe to be due to a fiber optic line that was cut.” …
whheydtsays
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #29…
Probably a farmer with a backhoe.
On Thursday, April 13, 2023, Donald Trump gave a seven-hour deposition to prosecutors in the New York Attorney General’s office as a part of the state’s civil suit against him and his family for fraudulent asset inflation and other financial violations. NY AG Letitia James released the transcript yesterday. Here are a few highlights.
Q. Mr. Trump, are you currently the person with ultimate decision-making authority for the Trump Organization?
A. No.
Q. Who would that be?
A. My son Eric is much more involved with it than I am.
[…] In addition, Trump then explained he had put the business in a revocable trust and was not aware of what was going on.
“It, essentially, meant that I was not involved or at a very minimal — I can’t even think of anything where I was involved.”
Trump explained he set up the trust because he did not want to have a “conflict” — even though he did not have to. He said he could have been just like George Washington.
“I tell the story that George Washington actually when he was President had two desks. One for his business — he was actually a very wealthy man — one for his business and one for running the country. I could have had that.”
I doubt Washington would have appreciated being called a kindred spirit by a serially bankrupt rapist sporting four criminal indictments. Then he added a spot of whataboutism.
“If you look at Biden, he certainly does business and politics at the same time.”
What a toddler. Even if Biden were as corrupt as Trump, two wrongs do not make a right. Trump then mentioned he had a “highly respected man” who was the “overseer of the trust.” The prosecutor asked,
“Who was that?”
To which Trump replied. “I don’t know his name. He was an attorney from Washington D.C. I didn’t know him. I believe I met him once very quickly and — ”
Remember when Trump said he has “one of the great memories of all time?” His capacity for lying is such that he thinks people will believe his claim he put his family business in the hands of a man whose name he cannot remember.
Trump then spends time outlining why he was such a great President — and again explains that he has had nothing to do with the company since 2015. He also claims his properties are like great works of art and worth a fortune — including Mar-a-Lago.
“When I bought Mar-a-Lago, I paid $8 million for it and today I think we’re going to be bringing in people that will tell you it’s worth a billion 250, billion and a half, maybe more than that.”
It gets worse. Trump added, “I think Doral could be worth 2 and a half billion by itself.”
$1.25 to $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion? The most generous valuation of Mar-a-Lago was $350 million by Forbes. This number is probably way off, as the most expensive Florida home sale ever was $173 million — paid for an estate bought by Larry Ellison, with a residence the same size as MAL on a lot with the same acreage. [Wow, that really puts Trump’s lies in the spotlight. It is an illustration of him inflating the value of his properties.]
Trump then claims he has cash to burn.
“We have a lot of cash. I believe we have substantially in excess of 400 million in cash, which is a lot for a developer.”
No doubt James will ask him to prove that at trial. Expect crickets. Trump then offers that “the No. 1 branding person at the time” valued the Trump brand at $2.9 or $3 billion. Adding,
“That was back in 2000 and something. And now the brand is worth much more.” And now “I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”
This claim makes you wonder why so many Trump-branded properties are chiseling his name off the door.
Trump was not done. After some distraction about his NFTs, he circled back to his brand valuation. He told prosecutors that in his asset statements, he had not included the value of the brand.
“But if I wanted to show you a good statement, I would have added maybe $10 billion or something for the brand.” [!!! LOL.]
No wonder the guy is rich. He has tripled his money in five minutes while sitting in a lawyer’s office.
Next, the prosecutors are interested in an email chain involving four employees of the Trump Organization — who become four more people Trump hardly knows.
Q. First, can I ask you who is Patrick Birney?
A. A gentleman who works for the Trump Organization, I believe.
Q. Do you know him personally?
A. Not very well.
Q. Donna Kidder?
A. Likewise, I don’t know her.
Q. You don’t know her personally?
A. I know who they are, but I don’t really
Q. You don’t work with her closely?
A. No.
Q. Okay. Same question for Mark Hawthorn. Do you know who he is?
A. I think the same answer, you know.
Q. And I’ll ask one more; Mike Levchuck?
A. Similar answer, yeah.
His memory does not get any better. Trump claims people have told him that his properties are worth a lot of money, but he cannot remember who they are beyond the fact they are very rich — or if he does remember them, he will not identify them because he does not want to embarrass them. Nor can he produce anything in writing. [So effing trumpian]
Then followed a long discussion about debt, Doral, and rehabilitating country clubs. Trump does 95% of the talking, with his lawyers attempting to pile on. I have no idea if this helped Trump or the prosecution as much of what he said was in this form:
“Hey, I caught Biden making a mistake when he said — when he said, he’s going to close up gas at the end of the debate. I said, that was Perry Mason. Unfortunately, the election was rigged.” [WTF? Loony.]
Next, Trump claimed he was such a good credit risk that banks forced him to take money.
“We went to the closing and the bank said, I’m not going — we’re not going to close. We want you to take an extra hundred million dollars.”
And, “But the banks said, no, we want you. We feel you need more for this. We feel you could easily handle it. We’re not going to close unless you take more money.” [eyeroll]
He also claimed that Allen Weisselberg, his CFO, was the guy who made all the appraisals because appraisers could be wrong — and besides, they were expensive.
“Not much. I mean, they [Weisselberg and his comptroller, Jeffrey McConney] would do it, I think, standard ways. Nobody — nobody could ever be expected to go out and hire appraisal firms. It would be too expensive.”
This gets us to page 117 out of 479. Which I think gives us enough to get a flavor of the event. Reading the deposition is to see a man whose mind cannot construct a coherent thought and will not go three questions without ludicrous self-aggrandizement. Worse for him, he steamrolls his own lawyers, who are trying to run interference. And if he ever tells the truth, it is by mistake.
He claims he has created the world’s greatest brand while denying he has anything to do with running the company. And, if the NY AG needs a sacrificial lamb, she should take Eric.
The Defense Department on Thursday released a new website that will provide official declassified information on UFOs, including pictures and videos, for the public to easily parse through.
The website is the official page for the public to interact with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a relatively new Pentagon office tasked with reviewing and analyzing UFOs.
The site appears to still be under construction, but it can be found here. The Hill has reached out to the Defense Department for more information about when the full website will go live…
The Texas Supreme Court yesterday in State of Texas v. Loe, issued an Order allowing SB 14 to go into effect. The law prohibits treating minors for gender dysphoria with surgery, puberty blocker or hormones. According to an ACLU press release :
A Travis County District Court had granted a temporary injunction last week that blocked implementation of the ban, but the Texas Attorney General immediately appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, thereby staying the injunction. The Texas Supreme Court did not provide any written explanation for allowing the law to remain in effect.
If you ask grinning asshat Vivek Ramaswamy what is the most pressing problem in America, you get some rapid-fire spiel about wokism and diversity and teenagers choosing their pronouns and whatnot. And if you ask all us Marxist radicals here at Wonkette the same question, we’ll tell you that one of our most pressing problems is rapacious shitweasels like Vivek Ramaswamy earning obscene amounts of money by screwing over lots of people.
[…] this week we have been reading about how Ramaswamy drove up his biotech company’s share prices by hyping a drug to treat Alzheimer’s, then cashed out just before the drug failed its FDA trials and the company’s stock nosedived harder than Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane. Don’t worry, though, because Ramaswamy felt super-bad about it. Then he dried his tears with a thousand-dollar bill and went on to the next grift.
Here’s how it went: Ramaswamy had the idea to buy the patents for drugs that the Big Pharma companies had shelved for whatever reason (they didn’t work, they were too expensive to ever be profitable), then develop them and bring them to market for cheap. In 2014, he founded a company called Roivant (ROI, get it?) to carry out this plan.
Later that same year, he spun off a subsidiary called Axovant that bought from GlaxoSmithKline the patent for a drug intended to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. GSK had shelved the drug after it failed a whole bunch of FDA trials. Axovant paid $5 million for the patent, dirt-cheap for this sort of thing.
Axovant had all of eight employees, including Ramaswamy’s mother and brother. Nonetheless, he managed to hype the company enough to take it public only a few months later, before it was anywhere near ready to take the drug, intepirdine, back to the FDA. The IPO was huge, driven mostly by Vivek’s bullshit, and suddenly this tiny company had a market capitalization of around $3 billion. At that point, the parent company Roivant had a 78 percent stake in Axovant.
Ramaswamy then spent a couple of years raising billions of dollars from investors for Roivant, partly on the strength of intepirdine being some sort of “wonder drug,” even while the company was reducing its own stake in Axovant to around 25 percent. Conveniently, this sell-off happened just before intepirdine failed its clinical trials again. When that happened, Axovant’s stock crashed, going from around $200 a share to 40 cents. Investors who had bought into Ramaswamy’s hype got fleeced.
Let’s let Fortune tell us What This Means:
Clearly, the facts show Ramaswamy’s words did not match his actions as he was busy cashing out while shamelessly hyping Axovant’s prospects in media interviews–almost resembling a classic pump-and-dump scheme. Some $40 million in personal windfalls is hardly “tiny.” Ramaswamy was not “forced to sell” as that was clearly a personal choice without anyone holding a gun to his head. Amazingly, Ramaswamy’s spokesperson further confirmed to us that Ramaswamy was aware that 99.7% of all drugs tested for Alzheimer’s fail even though he was relentlessly hyping Axovant’s chances of success with nary a mention of that inconvenient truth.
During last week’s Republican primary debate, we made a crack about Ramaswamy reminding us of an old-timey traveling salesman selling miracle hair tonic out the back of his covered wagon. Hey, we weren’t too far off!
For his part, Mr. Pump ‘n Dump now claims he wasn’t hyping the drug so much as he was hyping the high-risk high-reward business model of a parent company buying up failed drug patents and reworking them to get them to market on the cheap. But small investors who listened to him lost actual money:
One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news.
Sorry, can’t hear you over the editrix Rebecca screaming in the chat cave that her poor mom, who has Alzheimer’s, relies entirely on her CALSTRS pension (see above), which is a pretty neat two for one for Ramaswamy. Somebody should give Rebecca some kind of a “pill.”
Ramaswamy claims that the failure of intepirdine eats at him. Though apparently not enough to learn from this failure that maybe America’s stupid health care system, which allows private companies to make gazillions of dollars by hoarding the patents for life-saving drugs while hyping their unproven effects, all in the service of relieving everyday investors of both hope and their life savings, might need significant reforms.
In fact, his stated goal of destroying the administrative state would increase opportunities for hustlers like himself to get extremely rich while screwing people who put their faith in him, all while facing absolutely no consequences.
Oh, to be an amoral sociopath with a desperate need for fame and money and the learning skills of a fudge round.
A new ordinance, passed in several jurisdictions and under consideration elsewhere, aims to stop people from using local roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion. [What?!]
No one could remember the last time so many people packed into City Hall.
As the meeting began on a late August evening, residents spilled out into the hallway, the brim of one cowboy hat kissing the next, each person jostling for a look at the five city council members who would decide whether to make Llano the third city in Texas to outlaw what some antiabortion activists call “abortion trafficking.”
For well over an hour, the people of Llano — a town of about 3,400 deep in Texas Hill Country — approached the podium to speak out against abortion. While the procedure was now illegal across Texas, people were still driving women on Llano roads to reach abortion clinics in other states, the residents had been told. They said their city had a responsibility to “fight the murders.”
The cheers after each speech grew louder as the crowd readied for the vote. […]
More than a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, many conservatives have grown frustrated by the number of people able to circumvent antiabortion laws — with some advocates grasping for even stricter measures they hope will fully eradicate abortion nationwide.
That frustration is driving a new strategy in heavily conservative cities and counties across Texas. Designed by the architects of the state’s “heartbeat” ban that took effect months before Roe fell, ordinances like the one proposed in Llano — where some 80 percent of voters in the county backed President Donald Trump in 2020 — make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within the city or county limits. The laws allow any private citizen to sue a person or organization they suspect of violating the ordinance.
Antiabortion advocates behind the measure are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports, with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their antiabortion state. These provisions have already passed in two counties and two cities, creating legal risk for those traveling on major highways including Interstate 20 and Route 84, which head toward New Mexico, where abortion remains legal and new clinics have opened to accommodate Texas women. Several more jurisdictions are expected to vote on the measure in the coming weeks.
“This really is building a wall to stop abortion trafficking,” said Mark Lee Dickson, the antiabortion activist behind the effort. [map of Texas counties and highways targeted by antiabortion ordinances]
Conservative lawmakers started exploring ways to block interstate abortion travel long before Roe was overturned. […]
“I hate abortion,” she [Chandler council member Janeice Lunsford] said. “I’m a Jesus lover like all of you in here.”
Still, she said, she couldn’t help thinking about the time in college when she picked up a friend from an abortion clinic — and how someone might have tried to punish her under this law.
“It’s overreaching,” she said. “We’re talking about people here.”
[…] “abortion trafficking” is the act of helping any pregnant woman cross state lines to end her pregnancy, lending her a ride, funding, or another form of support. While the term “trafficking” typically refers to people who are forced, tricked or coerced, Dickson’s definition applies to all people seeking abortions — because, he argues, “the unborn child is always taken against their will.” [Dickson is s director of Right to Life of East Texas.]
The law — which has the public backing of 20 Texas state legislators — is designed to go after abortion funds, organizations that give financial assistance to people seeking abortions, as well as individuals. For example, Dickson said, a husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could threaten to sue the friend who offers to drive her.
[…] While these restrictions appear to violate the U.S. Constitution — which protects a person’s right to travel — they are extremely difficult to challenge in court, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who focuses on abortion. Because the laws can be enforced by any private citizen, abortion rights groups have no clear government official to sue in a case seeking to block the law.
[…] A proposed ordinance would make it illegal for anyone to use certain roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion. [map at the link]
[…] Dickson recalled what happened in Odessa, a far larger city in West Texas that failed to advance an earlier version of a “sanctuary city” ordinance several years earlier. With help from antiabortion residents, he said to the group, some of the council members who opposed the measure were ultimately voted out of office.
“Now Odessa has a 6-1 majority that is in favor of this,” Dickson said.
Odessa passed the ordinance in December. […]
More at the link, including details like the fact that anti-abortion activists meet in gun stores in Texas, and in pizza joints with giant confederate flags on the wall.
Hundreds of people who participated in a recent Tough Mudder event—a very muddy obstacle course race—held in Sonoma, California, have fallen ill with pustular rashes, lesions, fever, flu-like symptoms, nerve pain, and other symptoms, local health officials and media outlets report.
The cases could be caused by various infectious agents, including Staphylococcus bacteria, but the leading culprit is the relatively obscure Aeromonas bacteria—specifically A. hydrophila, according to the Sonoma County health department. In a statewide alert this week, the California Department of Public Health said it is considering it an Aeromonas outbreak, noting that multiple wound cultures have yielded the hardy bacterium.
A spokesperson for the Sonoma County health department told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that, based on calls and emails the department had received, health officials estimate that the outbreak involves around 300 cases. Tough Mudder participants, meanwhile, have tallied as many as 489 cases in online forums.
The Tough Mudder event was held at the Sonoma Raceway on August 19 and 20, 2023, with symptoms of infection developing in cases within 12 to 48 hours afterward…
Re: Lynna 35
“the unborn child is always taken against their will.”
There’s the fetus puppetry. Spectral evidence and I’d say it to his face. Getting themselves all worked up with pretend people.
Where to start? Dan Friedman and David Corn have a piece up this morning at Mother Jones detailing a whistleblower complaint from an FBI agent, Johnathan Buma, who says he was stopped from investigating whether Giuliani was “compromised” by Russian intelligence when he was on his various “dirt” safaris marching through Ukraine and other post-Soviet states trying to drum up dirt on the Bidens to sabotage the 2020 presidential election. Friedman and Corn say other stymied agents may soon be coming forward as well.
[…] It’s important to remember, just as it was with those IRS agents and Hunter Biden, that it’s in the nature of line agents to get a kind of tunnel vision about what they’re investigating and what they think is out there. […] it’s an important caveat or reminder we should bring to any story like this. It’s not always the case that the line agent has the scent and the supervisor or the brass wants a coverup.
[…] Giuliani being fed garbage by Russian intelligence agents wouldn’t be a surprise. It’s basically the standing assumption. Anyone who followed that story at all closely could see that Giuliani was being fed all sorts of trash by operatives either close to the Russian government or formal agents of Russian intelligence. In that world it’s not clear there’s much of bright line separating the two. Whether Giuliani was ‘compromised’ raises a different set of questions and that word can mean a number of different things. The most generous read of Giuliani’s actions is that he was in Ukraine looking for anyone who claimed to have dirt on the Bidens and simply did not care who they were, whether it was true, where they got it or who they were working for. It’s a bit like Trump saying he was only acting on the advice of his lawyers. Giuliani would have been negligent not to know he was being fed garbage by bad actors, whoever it was they were working for. He didn’t care. Whether you could get a conviction on that basis is another story.
In other words, Giuliani acting as the conduit for Russian intelligence to sabotage the 2020 presidential election is hardly a controversial proposition. It’s basically a given. Indeed, it’s the predicate of the actions that got Donald Trump impeached back in 2019.
But this whole question brings me back to another related topic: Hunter Biden’s laptop. […]
Most reporters these days take it as a given that the laptop saga is one in which the disinfo-hunting crowd jumped the gun, labeling the laptop trove suspect, only to have it shown later that the laptop and the data on it was real. Indeed, this whole storyline is at the heart of current right-wing triumphalism about social media censorship and attacks on free speech. But this version of events is at best confused and flawed. There are actually significant questions about the chain of custody of the files purportedly on the laptop and whether some were altered or added. But let’s assume everything on the purported laptop is real; clearly most of it or much of it is. […]
This hardly ends the story, though.
The story is that Hunter Biden brought the laptop in for a repair in some sort of coked up or drunken stupor back in April 2019. He forgot about it and never came back to pick it up. He had the great misfortune to bring it to a repair man who, after 90 days Hunter being a no-show, promptly cracked it open and started reading the various documents and the viewing the photos it contained. And when that computer repairman found the various emails and nude photos and photos of drug taking he decided to call up Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. That was fortuitous since this was toward the end of 2019 and it just so happened that Biden’s father, Joe Biden, was the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
This story has simply never been plausible. […]
Obviously, this doesn’t change the fact that the hard drive image (we don’t know if it was really a laptop) did become public; it led to an investigation which found at least some evidence of criminal activity; and that is now the subject of on-going litigation and likely criminal charges.
But it should still figure into our understanding of what Giuliani was up to in 2019 and 2020, who he was up to it with and whether we’re ever going to try to get to the bottom of just what happened. My best guess is that the likely theft of the data if not the laptop itself was part of the Ukrainian/Russian shenanigans Giuliani was part of it in 2019. The Russians are the best bet for it. But as I noted back on Monday, we live in an oligarch age in which military grade hacking technologies are purchasable for a price and there’s a vibrant netherworld of oligarchs, foreign intelligence agencies and domestic bad actors, happy to cooperate or go solo with such an effort. […] Someone knew about Hunter’s life on the skids and got these into the hands of people who could advance Republican interests with them. It’s worth finding out who that was. And it’s almost certainly part of the Giuliani story.
Josh Marshall did not present a really clear picture of what may be going on here, but it is interesting that, “An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign,” according to the Mother Jones article.
That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau.
That news formalizes a complaint about Giuliani’s activities.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is making Kevin McCarthy look really, really pathetic
[…] Kemp’s willingness to stand up to the members of his party who want to rip up the legal system to defend Trump stands in stark contrast to America’s most spineless man, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Kemp appears to recognize that going after district attorneys just because they are prosecuting someone you support is more than a little problematic. On the other hand, McCarthy is not just failing to stand up to nonsensical demands in the House, but also he’s adding his own.
When Republicans started to worry that a no-investigation impeachment of President Joe Biden might not come off as planned, McCarthy offered up an impeachment of Garland for … whatever.
“I don’t know of a chargeable crime,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.
Neither does anyone else. Including McCarthy. The suggestion is just another in a long line of examples of how the barely-speaker is willing to toady to his party’s extremists to keep his fingernail-thin grip on his big office. As Vanity Fair notes, caving to threats from the same extremists who tried to keep him from being elected to begin with is what McCarthy is all about.
As MSNBC puts it, McCarthy might be expected to ignore “oddball bills” and calls to impeach members of the Biden administration. Instead, he has “expressed tacit support” for all these actions, no matter how off the rails. In MSNBC’s words, McCarthy is “taking orders from Mar-a-Lago” and “going along with absurd talking points about … ‘weaponization’ of agencies that haven’t actually been weaponized.”
Kemp is no hero. On many points, his positions are reprehensible. But at least he has enough self-respect to refuse to be the lapdog of extremists willing to sacrifice everything to save Trump. He shows the path that McCarthy might have taken if he actually wanted to lead the House, rather than just follow the worst actions of its worst members.
CNN has yet another story about the growing desperation of former President Donald Trump’s Georgia co-defendants […]
We’ve now got at least four co-defendants trying to crowdfund their legal expenses, by CNN’s count. That includes Trump’s crack legal team of John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Trump’s ex-Department of Justice cheerleader Jeffrey Clark, who were all a lot more central to the plan to overthrow the government than the crooked state Republicans they roped in for their fake “electoral slates.”
And we’re not going to lie: It is glorious that the fascist right-wing Claremont Institute’s John Eastman, the architect of the hoped-for sabotage of the republic, evidently went through this whole plan thinking that Trump might at least hand him bail money afterward. But Trump does not pay money to his allies. Trump allies become Trump allies by paying him money, and not even Rudy freaking Giuliani is going to squeeze money out of Trump once Trump has decided he’s too damaged a figure to be useful.
What Trump is willing to do, though, is agree that people who are not him should pay his allies money, and that’s where all of his co-defendants’ current begging is focused. Giuliani may not be able to convince Trump to chip in for his defense, but Trump will be hosting a $100,000-per-person fundraising event for the former New York City mayor at Trump’s Bedminster estate next week, according to CNN.
Psst … How much do you want a bet that this was booked as a standard event, and Trump is pocketing a good chunk of the proceeds in the form of “venue fees”? Dear Leader will take his cut. [Yep. Seems likely!]
Every other co-defendant appears to be out of luck, though. During and immediately after Trump’s presidency, Trump could often be coaxed into allowing donor money scooped up by his Save America PAC to be shoved toward allies’ legal bills after he’d gotten them tangled up into one of his many scandals. That’s just good mob-boss practice; you absolutely do not want underlings who’ve had access to your criminal decision-making to be broke and in a state of desperation when the nice prosecutors from the Department of Justice come to them to suggest that a few days of testimony about you might clear all their legal woes up real quick.
But that campaign money appears to have dried up now, and nobody quite knows why. It’s possible that because Trump is now actually running for a second term—rather than only theoretically—he’s decided that he needs all the money for himself. It’s possible that the coffers are running low after spending literally tens of millions of dollars on his own legal bills and those of select accomplices. It’s possible Trump is just being an asshole about it, which is a thing he often does and which can lead to unpredictable outcomes based on the momentary contents of his bee-filled head.
Whatever the case, it seems that Trump has decided that Eastman, Ellis, Clark, and all the others can be cut loose without too much damage. He’s almost certainly wrong, mind you, but his current lawyers won’t be able to explain that to him any better than his often-unpaid, sometimes-indicted former lawyers were. But it does make a bit of sense. Trump is now running for office not as a possible president but as an explicitly extralegal figure. His posters say things like “Never surrender,” and he talks about remaking the government in explicitly unconstitutional ways in an attempt to eliminate the safeguards that foiled his criminality the first time around.
So Trump may be indifferent to the outcome of all of these cases, banking instead on winning the presidency, then issuing blanket pardons to himself and whomever else he still finds useful. In this scenario, Trump might not even bother mounting a serious courtroom defense, because he deems it a more effective use of funds to win the presidency and erase the laws altogether.
[…] The Republican base doesn’t care whether he commits felonies or not, after all. It will likely be easier to convince GOP voters that he is allowed to break the law than it will be to prove to any of his future juries that he’s innocent of the charges.
Apparently Ron DeSantis has met the Javert to his Valjean, the Deputy Sam Gerard to his Richard Kimble, the Brock Samson to his Monarch … and it’s a 15-year-old kid who has to have a parent drive him to campaign stops.
Meet Quinn Mitchell, a New Hampshire resident who is passionate about politics. And since he lives in the First in the Nation state, he has ample opportunities to ask presidential candidates questions, since the vagaries of our system demand that anyone aspiring to the presidency has to spend months dragging themselves through the miserable New England cold to be inspected like a side of beef in every overheated middle-school cafeteria and retirement community between Portsmouth and Canada.
Ah, the majesty of American democracy.
Mitchell went viral earlier this summer when he asked DeSantis during a campaign stop in Hollis if the Florida governor believed Donald Trump “violated the peaceful transfer of power, a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold” on January 6. It’s a pretty smart and direct question. So naturally DeSantis dodged it as if it was Black history, secure in his knowledge that answering truthfully any Trump-related question is no way to earn the GOP presidential nomination.
The kicker is that Mitchell says he felt bad about the negative reaction DeSantis received. Imagine that: You ask a question of a candidate, the candidate steps all over his own dick while not answering it, resulting in a viral video that maybe hurts his campaign a tiny amount … and you care enough about the integrity of the process to want to apologize to him for causing him trouble.
Except you can’t apologize, because the candidate’s security detail has marked you as a skinnier Leon Czolgosz and won’t let you anywhere near him.
From The Daily Beast:
That’s when things went south: right after the handshake, Mitchell recalled his shock when he felt a firm tug on his shirt, pulling him away from DeSantis. Suddenly, all he could see were the outstretched arms of security guards and plain clothed aides. […]
If that were not startling enough, right after the fracas, a DeSantis security guard cornered Mitchell and ordered him not to move from the spot for another five minutes. In response, he did what almost any 15-year old would do.
He texted his mom.
A lot of teenagers would have recorded the encounter and put it on TikTok with some snarky commentary and weird music. DeSantis is actually lucky with this kid.
Instead of diffusing the situation, however, the Florida First Lady suggested to Mitchell’s mother that she was overreacting—and that her son was fibbing.
“Well, I’m a mother, too,” Casey said, according to Mitchell and other witnesses, along with multiple sources who shared contemporaneous communications on the incident with The Daily Beast. “I know what you’re experiencing, and we’re all very afraid for our children—even if they’re exaggerating.” [Well that’s slimy behavior.]
LOL, the wannabe First Lady and bargain bin Jackie Kennedy, Casey DeSantis, sure knows how to help her husband endear himself to voters. It’s hard to believe this campaign has been cratering.
It wasn’t just that he saw a pair of security guards flanking him as he made his way to the far side of the venue. The weird part was that Never Back Down staffers were taking photos of him. It was notable to Mitchell, even before he learned of the ominous caption—“got our kid”—that one staffer was seen attaching to a Snapchat photo.
[…] For his part, Mitchell says he won’t give up asking questions of all the candidates, and would even press DeSantis again if he sees him at an event.
He also says he probably won’t give up his ambitions of being a political reporter. Well, he’s young, he doesn’t have to pick a major for awhile yet.
A 58-year-old Tennessee woman has earned the title of the world’s longest competitive mullet for a female.
Tami Manis, from Knoxville, sports a flowing mane that is 5ft 8in (172.72cm) – nearly the height of the average man.
Ms Manis, a public health nurse, has had a mullet since the 1980s, inspired by a music video from American rock band ‘Til Tuesday, and has not cut her hair in 33 years. ..
A South Florida federal judge quickly dismissed a lawsuit against Donald Trump that sought to have the former president declared ineligible for another term as president.
U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg ruled that plaintiff Lawrence Caplan, and two other plaintiffs he added to his original lawsuit against Trump, lacked the legal standing to bring the case…
“Standing” is a bullshit excuse that gets applied arbitrarily.
The Biden administration will for the first time send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, according to a document seen by Reuters and separately confirmed by two U.S. officials.
The rounds, which could help destroy Russian tanks, are part of a new military aid package for Ukraine set to be unveiled in the next week. The munitions can be fired from U.S. Abrams tanks that, according to a person familiar with the matter, are expected be delivered to Ukraine in the coming weeks.
One of the officials said that the coming aid package will be worth between $240 million and $375 million depending on what is included…
In January 2022, space watchers were startled when a Chinese satellite suddenly moved from its usual path around the globe, docked with a derelict spacecraft and flung it into what’s known as a “graveyard orbit”. Shijian-21’s move to get rid of the defunct weather satellite, Beidou-2 G2, was done during daylight hours, when it’s hard for telescopes to observe satellites. It’s a manoeuvre that would typically be celebrated. Decades of space flight have left the area above earth’s stratosphere — the thermosphere and exosphere — increasingly cluttered, filled with dead satellites, abandoned pieces of rockets, and tiny pieces of spacecraft that have become dislodged.
… (Snip)… But some observers viewed China’s manoeuvre with deep suspicion. f China could tow a piece of space junk out of orbit, it could also do the same to other live satellite, giving it an edge if a conflict broke out on Earth. “Shijian-21 … could be used in a future system for grappling and disabling other satellites,” the head of the US Space Command, General James Dickinson, said at the time. With tensions building in the Indo-Pacific, there’s a new Space Race underway as major military powers try to safeguard their vital equipment floating around Earth’s orbit. There’s also a growing push to establish protocols and rules to reduce tensions and misunderstandings in what is a lawless domain.
Until this week’s battlefield advances around Robotyne and the breaching of at least one of Russia’s major defensive lines, Ukraine had been the target of outside criticism. Some of it was warranted, and much of it not. Still, Ukraine released a video yesterday firing back at critics, claiming, “Everyone is now an expert on how we should fight. A gentle reminder that no one understands this war better than we do.”
It might help Ukraine to get that off their chest, but as Russia starts jailing its online critics, it’s worth noting that criticism is part of operating in a free society.
Ukraine’s video is actually quite clever. [video at the link]
It points out how if they had listened to the “experts” in February 2022, they would no longer exist. It ends with, “But we need ammunition, not advice.”
It is, however, an odd message to deliver. Yes, it must be infuriating reading stories featuring unnamed officials saying stupid shit like, “Pentagon officials have also urged Ukraine to rely less on drones for battlefield awareness and more on ground reconnaissance forces,” which is so patently absurd that we have to pray The Washington Post reporter simply wrote down the quote incorrectly. [That is a stupid comment!]
Then there’s the deafening chorus of “the counteroffensive is moving too slowly” whines. Too slowly according to […] Yes, pre-counteroffensive expectations were too high, and I was one of those people raising them … and also trying to temper them. “There are two camps emerging. The first urges caution, arguing that combined arms warfare is incredibly difficult in the best of circumstances, and Ukraine is dealing with freshly formed units operating unfamiliar equipment. The other camp sees rank Russian incompetence and assumes a cakewalk,” I wrote on May 31. “It’s okay to hope for the latter, but it’s safest to assume the former, and to plan for it.”
My optimism was tempered by Ukraine’s lack of combined-arms capability, or the ability to have armor, infantry, artillery, engineering, intelligence, air support (drones), electronic warfare, air defense, and supply all work together in concert toward an objective. [One] pre-counteroffensive video shook me—a small eight-man Ukrainian squad could’t coordinate with engineering support, while a surrounded Russian soldier in a trench fought to the death rather than surrender, despite multiple opportunities to do so. If Ukraine couldn’t coordinate two branches of its military at the squad level, how could it mount a real combined-arms effort at scale, with hundreds (if not thousands) of soldiers? And if this Russian soldier would fight to the death rather than surrender, why would we assume that their lines would collapse at first contact?
On the first major attack of the counteroffensive, Ukraine pulled a Russia—driving a column of armor straight into a determined Russian defense, in daytime (obviating their Western gear’s superior night vision optics), losing half a dozen vehicles, and ending the dream that Russian forces would flee in panic at first contact.
Military analysts Michael Koffman and Rob Lee spent several weeks embedded in the front lines, and came back with a sobering assessment of the situation, including the observation that “Ukrainian forces have still not mastered combined arms operations at scale. Operations are more sequential than synchronized. This creates various problems for the offense & IMO is the main cause for slow progress.”
The criticism was also coming from inside Ukraine, as Ukrainian intelligence officer Tatarigami_UA has consistently assailed the continued use of incompetent Soviet-era officers, unwilling or unable to learn more effective tactics. [tweet at the link]
This tweet packs a brutal punch:
While minefields and insufficient supplies from the West undoubtedly contribute to drawbacks, it is essential to recognize that failures in planning and coordination at the commanding stage above the brigade level lead to far more significant drawbacks. In any war or military operation, there are both competent and ineffective commanders.
However, the main question is whether we will draw conclusions based on the performance of certain generals or simply lay blame on the West and minefields. Whether the assault concludes in Crimea or elsewhere in the South, it’s vital to acknowledge both victories and failures and hold individuals accountable for serious shortcomings.
No amount of NATO training for NCOs and privates can compensate for the absence of similar training and the right mindset among certain senior officers.
To conclude, I would like to share a brief radio interception between Russian servicemembers that I heard almost a month ago:
– How is it going for you guys? Are you holding?
– Yeah.
– What about Ukrainians? What do you think?
– I have a feeling that their assault was planned by [Russian commanders] Gerasimov and executed by Muradov.
Incompetently planned and executed attacks don’t just cost Ukrainian lives, but strengthen Russian morale, making them even more likely to fiercely defend their positions.
In any case, after that first botched attack, two things happened: Ukraine realized it didn’t have the capability to take on the lines with combined-arms fashion, and focused on infantry advances that avoided Russia’s deadly mine fields, while their sappers manually cleared lanes for armor behind them. These were painfully slow advances, but they minimized the loss of life and equipment. The slow pace wasn’t a problem, either, as it gave time for Ukraine’s qualitatively superior tube and rocket artillery to pound the hell out of Russian defenses and logistics. Russia’s numerical advantage in artillery was systematically erased, with dozens of howitzers destroyed every single day.
It helped that Russia couldn’t bear losing any territory and counterattacked every loss, giving Ukrainian forces the chance to eliminate Russian soldiers and equipment out in the open, rather than digging them out of entrenched defensive positions.
Ukraine’s tactical adjustments were smart, and anyone complaining about that slow advance, despite the obvious degradation in Russia’s fighting capabilities, was certainly off base. On the other hand, it was perfectly reasonable to wonder why Ukraine was wasting one-third of its combat capabilities around the strategically insignificant city of Bakhmut. The obvious strategic goal is to cut Russia’s land bridge connecting mainland Russia to the Crimean Peninsula. It’s where Ukraine chose to focus its counterattack, and it’s where Russia layered its most extensive defenses. Ukraine is hitting that southern approach along three different advances. The westernmost is south of Zaporizhzhia, toward Melitopol in the Vasylivka direction (currently stalled), the big one in the middle toward Tokmak through Robotyne (where last week’s breakthrough gains took place), and the easternmost one in the Mariupol direction, through recently liberated Urozhaine.
Those Ukrainian forces around Bakhmut could be used in all those directions, or could even be used to open up a new advance around Vuhledar. All those approaches serve Ukraine’s core strategic goal, which is why Ukraine’s British and American military advisers have been urging Ukraine to refocus the bulk of their forces to the south. That is sound advice, and by all indications Ukraine has been receptive.
So again, it’s weird for Ukraine to now say, “We need ammunition, not advice.”
It’s also weird because the British-led training effort for Ukrainian troops graduates 2,000 soldiers per month, which is the size of a Ukrainian brigade. Germany and the United States are training Ukrainians on a variety of specialized equipment and gear, and the U.S. spent much of the winter training Ukrainian officers on combined arms maneuvers.
F-16 training is now getting underway. What is all that, if not “advice”?
Finally, there’s the headline proclamation: “Everyone is now an expert on how we should fight. A gentle reminder that no one understands this war better than we do.”
It’s true, no one understands their war better than they do. They’re doing the dying. But tactics matter, no one is infallible, and mistakes cost lives. Unfortunately, they can’t do combined arms warfare, but they still have a lot to learn from NATO commanders who have faced combat. The equipment and situation (particularly with air support) might be different, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have wisdom to share. Former NATO Supreme Commander Mark Hertling, who commanded a tank division in combat in Iraq, has a great thread on that point, noting that, “After boneheaded comments by ‘anonymous sources’ & commentary by mostly uninformed who have never seen combat, there’s been increasing back-and-forth about how @NATO shouldn’t “lecture” Ukraine’s army on anything re their offensive. IMHO, none of this is helpful.” Speaking of advice he received from mentor retired generals when he was leading in combat, he writes:
[M]ost of their advice I took, some I didn’t. But the mentoring shaped my decision-making. While I had been a soldier for 30 years, commanding several times in battle, I had never been a Division Commander in combat with all the responsibilities of that higher command.
When I hear “NATO armies haven’t done these kinds of operations & [Ukraine’s top general Valerii Zaluzhnyi] has” I smile. Because truthfully, yes NATO has and no Z hasn’t. That isn’t meant to be contentious, or an insult to Zaluzhnyi. NATO has conducted large scale targeting, intel gathering… movement of forces, [reception, staging, onward movement, and integration of units], operational logistics, and headquarters staff planning and wargaming in training, exercises, and in combat. While GEN Zaluzhnyi is extremely talented, he has never before coordinated large scale offensive maneuver w/dozens of combat brigades.
He is conducting kinetic operations (multiple deliberate attacks requiring intense combined arms breaches), while also synchronizing intel gathering/targeting, operational logistics for multi-domain operations of conventional, SOF, territorials, rear area insurgents, while moving reserves to the right place, integrating newly mobilized & trained forces, overseeing humanitarian relief and movement of non-combatants out of operational areas, etc, etc, etc.
While executing multiple large scale deliberate attacks with breaches on different axes over a 400-600 km front is tough enough, it’s just one of his tasks. It’s the other things that are a combat commander’s real headaches.
Commanders don’t need nitpicking from cheap seats (the 1000-mile screwdriver), but he does needs advice & mentoring.
That’s a lot to deal with, without even considering the political challenges! […]
When people value something, they want you to succeed, and they care enough to share advice. That is not a bad thing!
No one on the outside is offering Russia advice, beyond “Get the hell out of Ukraine,” because no one cares. People care about Ukraine, and getting well-meaning suggestions is not a bad thing. It comes with the territory, and you want those people engaged. Indeed, their political support is critical to maintain the tens of billions of dollars from allied countries flowing into Ukraine. Ultimately, Ukraine has the final say anyway. The peanut gallery might be obnoxious, but it has no real power.
Sometimes, it even makes sense to respond to the critics. When people (like me) wondered why Ukraine was bleeding so much for the strategically irrelevant city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explained that it wasn’t just bleeding Russia dry, but if Russia took Bakhmut, they would simply devastate the next city down the road. The jury is still out if that was the wisest course of action, but the explanation had logic. As far as I know, Ukraine hasn’t explained why it is so obsessed with regaining territory around Bakhmut. We can guess and speculate, but the absence of an explanation merely invites more scrutiny.
What is the alternative to tolerating criticism? Russia has just arrested a blogger for criticizing his country’s war effort. “Andrey Kurshin, who runs the Telegram channel Moscow Calling, has been arrested in Moscow. State news agency TASS reports, citing a source in law enforcement, that the Russian authorities have opened a criminal case on spreading “fakes” about Russia’s Armed Forces against Kurshin,” reported the exiled Russian news outlet Meduza. “Independent news outlet iStories writes that Kurshin fought for the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” under the call sign Moskva in 2014–2015. He later adopted a more moderate position and started the Moscow Calling channel, which covered hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.”
Russia doesn’t handle contradictory “advice” very well. Heck, 17 of the 18 original 2014 leaders of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” are now dead, and the last one, war criminal Igor Girkin, is under arrest for criticizing the war effort. Don’t be surprised if he ends up poisoned before going to trial.
Ukraine has turned away from Russian-style repression, toward Western-style freedom. Putting up with critics, even the dumbest ones, is part of the price of admission. And it’s fine; Ukraine will be okay.
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[…] For all the talk that Ukraine can’t do combined arms because they lack airpower, the fact is that they absolutely have air power. It’s just different than what we’ve seen in every other war. Neither side has air superiority, and neither will ever gain it. So drones have filled that gap, and have become the most effective way to destroy each other’s equipment and soldiers.
China is making many of the drones both sides are using. If it’s US v China in drone warfare, right now…..we are screwed. I am a commercial drone pilot in the agriculture industry, and the offerings from China, specifically DJI, are so massively superior, that American drone manufacturers aren’t even a thought when we buy new hardware. It’s worrying.
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I think after this is over, NATO will have learned as much about modern warfare from Ukraine as they have from us.
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You don’t need to blow up a drone to take it out, just hobble it with a net, spray gummy glue on the props, any of a number of lightweight devices that can be deployed by other drones or from anti-drone weapons on the ground.
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The counter to most suicide and grenade drop drones is chicken wire.
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I imagine that the reaction to perceived criticism would depend on who it came from and how it is delivered. The “unnamed sources” and MSM pundits that are highly visible and make a lot of noise no doubt rankle the Ukrainians because those folks get the attention. The allied military folks that the Ukrainians work with regularly are more likely to get a more positive response to suggestions on how to improve things done privately between the parties. One hopes that the Ukrainians will listen to the ideas that their friends provide and, if sensible, are willing to implement them.
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Rachel Maddow did a brilliant and moving episode on Deja News about how the pre-WW II generation faced the problem of aggressive warfare and how it failed. There have certainly been plenty of errors on all sides of the defense of Ukraine , but I think we can all be proud that we learned from those errors and did it much, much better. We’re not through the crisis—Russia can always escalate it into World War III—but we have shown the aggressive power that we are in this together.
Ukraine does need ammunition, especially air defense (the deficiency of which I find inexcusable given the civilian casualties), but also artillery rounds. There are many times when they have been caught short and suffered for it. But Biden has done a good job of threading the political needle and getting them what they absolutely need against opposition from within the military and the political establishment.
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Ukraine has fought not just to a standstill but to (at this time) probable victory, not just a near-peer but a superior force. I struggle to think of the last time that happened. To me, Ukraine has more than earned the right to make its decisions and for everyone else to wait for more clarity and certainty.
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posting short snarky videos on social media is not a failure to “tolerate criticism”.
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Training is fine. Advice from general to general in private is fine. Anonymous pentagon “sources”, who may very well be left over Trumpers, talking to WaPo and NYT writers is not fine. The WaPo and NYT “journalists” spend their time spreading what government sources tell them. Sometimes this is accurate news; sometimes it’s just propaganda. Does anyone remember Judith Miller and the Iraq War? And most of the writers kvetching about how slow the offensive is going don’t even report what is happening on the battlefield. So I think Ukraine is right to tell them to stand down. That’s not censorship; it’s pushback.
Fox News is once again trying its hand at straight-up climate change denial, because it ain’t a real news network and nobody much cares if its hosts lie their well-paid asses off in ways that damage the country, the planet, or their own viewers’ chance of dodging a deadly illness or two. But were they always this bad at it?
It really does feel like the network is sinking to new lows, just in terms of raw laziness and pointless spite. […]
On Fox News’ “The Five,” a daily show in which five talking heads sit around having opinions and being generally unpleasant […], the Fivers were tasked with responding to President Joe Biden’s quite accurate assertion that climate change means we’re seeing more and worse natural disasters of late. The reason Fox bobbleheads would feel the need to turn that anodyne statement into the latest outrage is, as always, mysterious, but it boils down to conservatism’s contempt for book-learning in general, and for science specifically.
One of the five, however, was Jesse Watters, the host chosen to replace Tucker Carlson after the white nationalist conspiracy crank got too big for his britches and the Murdochs decided to show him who’s boss. And Jesse Watters got the gig by being … not a smart person.
So it is a pyramid scheme, climate change. If you think about – – you have the media, the politicians, and the academics at the top, and then at the bottom, you have all of us, the taxpayers. So academics realized early on that the more papers they put out saying that climate change was caused by humans and the world was going to blow up in two years if we don’t do something about it, they were going to get more grant money from the politicians.
And so, the media takes these research papers and then they report them and then they get big ratings because everybody gets scared and everybody gets nervous, and then the politicians scare the heck out of you and said, “Get rid of big oil, we need to go green,” and then they throw all of our money around at all of their donors and all of their investors.
Look, I think we’re all used to hollow-headed Fox News hosts denying climate change at this point. I’m a little more surprised that Fox News doesn’t appear to know what a “pyramid scheme” is.
Conservatives, not generally being members of scientific institutions because of the whole hatred for book-learning thing, have always had some truly amazing notions of what scientific grant-hunting looks like, with imagined scenes of jewelry-bedazzled Science Pimps walking into congressional offices to score some sweet, sweet brine shrimp research cash from Matt Gaetz or Dennis Hastert, and there is just no convincing these people that it ain’t that.
The notion that “politicians” give two craps about “academics” (much less want to be seen with any of them) is one thing, but the supposition that the “academics” are in league with the media? Buddy? Pal? You is the media. When “the media” wants a big scoop with big ratings, how many of them book f–king scientists on their airwaves?
Yeah, that’s it. The “media” is scooping up big ratings by talking about the latest research papers. That’s why network hosts hold big, raucous public debates in which a half-dozen college professors stand behind podiums and insult each other. That’s why Fox News and the other networks are just rockin’ with scientists saying things, rather than flooded with a sea of failed politicians and/or professional lobbyists called in by the networks to argue interminably at each other.
Pyramid scheme, he calls it. Lord.
Never let it be said that Jesse Watters has the worst take on anything, though, because if you say that, then you have to contend with the existence of fellow Fox talking head Jeanine Pirro. Pirro is best described as “what if a college sophomore’s spring break hangover became a real person” and can always, always be counted on to produce premium moments of double-yoo-tee -eff.
What’s so fascinating about this is one of the first hurricanes reported I think was in the 1400s. Now I would venture a guess that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, okay? But they’re certainly convinced that we’ve got something to do with all of this.
Wait … what? There was a hurricane reported in the 1400s so climate change ain’t real? […]
Let’s just think about this: Somehow, somewhere, Jeanine Pirro found out that “one of the first hurricanes” was reported in the 1400s, and she latched onto that as evidence that climate change now isn’t happening? Her language even implies that she thinks maybe hurricanes didn’t exist before European explorers ran into the first one, which is a hell of a theory and not one I’d put past anyone on a Fox News set.
Yeah, uh, we’re gonna give this one to you, Judge Jaegermeister. Hurricanes did exist back in the 1400s. What didn’t exist in the 1400s, however: 100-degree ocean waters available to boost their strength, and a more acidic ocean that’s wiped out over half of the coral reefs that existed on the planet the day Jeanine Pirro was born.
There’s no point in arguing any of this, of course, because Fox News isn’t seriously arguing any of it in the first place. “Climate change is a pyramid scheme in which scientists and the media are trying to trick you and get big ratings” is not an argument. “I once saw a hurricane back in 14-dickity-two” is not an argument. Nobody’s even trying; they’re just spewing random words to get through a segment without upsetting the Buford T. Flagwavers tuning in to Fox to get their outrage fix.
But it feels like Fox News’ arguments are actually getting worse with each passing month. Not just less serious, but more overtly ridiculous. More intentionally nonsensical.
Maybe that’s because they’ve realized they just don’t have to try—not with an audience already attuned to nibble up whatever Fox is willing to sprinkle into their little goldfish bowls. But I think it’s because Fox News hosts are in fact actively getting, well … stupider.
Maybe those two things are the same dynamic and maybe they’re not, but I don’t think any of us are imagining this.
[…] Hope I didn’t miss anything too important. Like maybe an unceasing cycle of increasingly inane culture war thinkpiece skirmishes over some rando’s country song? Or, I dunno, some former President and his dipshit co-conspirators getting indicted on a whole buncha felony counts?
I confess, despite years of reading and writing about these dorks, I was unprepared for the intensity of the shitfit the Children of the Candy Corn pitched at the sight of that mugshot. What a delightful meltdown. […]
Jesse Watters dry-humped the photo in Tucker Carlson’s old chair, moaning ecstatically about how “good” and “hard”inmate number P01135809 looked, in addition to super-convincing proclamations of his own “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” before inviting RFK Jr to join him in a rousing game of “soggy mugshot.”
Dinesh D’Souza thinks it makes the Dotard “the ultimate gangsta.” Laura Loomer expressed the agreed-upon view that getting booked in what she refers to as “the blackest jail (in) the state of Georgia” magically delivers the Black vote on a silver platter, which I think demonstrates the intellectual prowess of the white nationalist movement rather elegantly.
[…] And so we have a trial date. March 4th. rIGhT BeFOrE suPeR TuESDaY, so primary season in the land of bomb threats targeting libraries just got even zanier, which makes me extra grateful that so many of the Very Proudest of Boyz will be spending this election cycle (and the next one and the next one and the next one) in time out.
[…] Vivek Ramaswamy blathers endlessly on like a chatbot that’s been fed nothing but Breitbart op-eds, Ashley Madison profiles, and low-quality meth, so naturally, an increasing number of Republican primary voters want to invest him with the authority to launch nuclear strikes.
[…] Devastatingly, in the midst of this increased scrutiny, Ramaswamy will no longer be permitted to lose himself in either the music or the moment on the campaign trail, because he doesn’t own it, Eminem does, and it seems Mr. Mathers is understandably less than eager to see his work associated with a fashy little twerp’s bid for power.
[…] Yes, here in the most advanced nation in human history, damn near 40% of the dog-owning public thinks “vaccines could cause cognitive issues in dogs and may lead them to develop autism,” because it’s not enough anymore to simply take that suicide dive from our perch atop the food chain, we’ve got to drag everybody else down with us.
[…] What else, what else….CPAC and Project Veritas are rotting to death from within, and Mike Lindell had his line of credit cut off, but somehow the Consequences Fairy still has time to visit the Giuliani household damn near every day.
[…] Rudy’s been found liable for defaming a pair of Georgia election workers, and word is Jack Smith may charge him with operating an autogolpe with a blood alcohol concentration over the legal limit, oh, and also he was possibly compromised by Russian intelligence, according to an FBI whistleblower.
I do enjoy watching traitors squirm as the law closes in. Been a good week for that. Eastman, Meadows, Navarro…keep ‘em comin’, says I.
[…] I see Clarence Thomas finally fessed up to being Hitler-collecting American oligarch Harlan Crow’s sugar baby, allowing him to return, with a clear conscience, to the important work of imposing Harlan’s policy preferences on an unwilling public.
[…] The time away was, as I’d hoped, rejuvenating, and I suppose I’m as close to working my shit out as any of us ever are, so let’s get back to work. Ascendant American fascism isn’t gonna shovel itself onto the ash heap of history, y’know… […]
💪🏻🇺🇦 “Two enemy helicopters and a fighter jet failed to shoot down the Ukrainian drone during a long chase”, — GUR
Ukrainian UAV flying in the area of Tarkhankut is being chased by two combat helicopters and one fighter jet. Our drone left the “battlefield” unscathed
Ukraine has fought not just to a standstill but to (at this time) probable victory, not just a near-peer but a superior force. I struggle to think of the last time that happened. – commenter on a DailyKos Ukraine update, quoted by Luynna, OM@53
coughTalibancough
And before that Taliban (again) vs. USSR, Eritrean independence movement vs. Ethiopia, Vietnam vs. France, then USA, then China, Algerian independence movement vs. France, South Yemen vs. the UK, Kenya vs. the UK, East Timor vs Indonesia… Timothy Snyder has said somewhere that since WW2 it has usually been the smaller power that won. Presumably because it was fighting for its independent existence, and the larger power was not. Admittedly these are a highly disparate set of examples, and only Vietnam vs. China (which some claim was a draw rather than a victory for the smaller power) was a “conventional” war, with frontlines – but then, Ukraine hasn’t won yet, and if it does, it will be due to a lot of outside support.
India has successfully launched its first space-based solar observatory mission — just 10 days after the landing of its spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 on the lunar south pole.
Called Aditya-L1, the spacecraft, weighing over 3,264 pounds, blasted off from the spaceport Satish Dhawan Space Centre in South India’s Sriharikota using the 44.4-meter tall polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-XL) at the targeted time of 11:50am local time on Saturday. It will cover a distance of 932,000 miles and spend 125 days (or over four months) to reach its destination: a halo orbit around one of five Lagrangian points, which lie between the sun and Earth and allows spacecraft to track solar activities continuously, without any occultation and eclipse…
Joel Penton, the founder and CEO of LifeWise Academy, spoke to Fox News Digital about how his organization is providing Bible instruction for public school students during school hours.
Inside The Effort To Use The Disqualification Clause To Keep Trump Off The 2024 Ballot
[…] Those on the vanguard of invoking the seldom-used Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment, under which Trump’s role in Jan. 6 would preclude him from running for office again, acknowledge that what they’re doing is unprecedented in the modern era. But so is a president attempting to foment an insurrection.
[…] In interviews with TPM, some of the outside groups leading the charge to enforce the Disqualifications Clause acknowledged the legal realities and complexities involved in disqualifying a major presidential candidate in a country where each state runs its own election and has its own disqualification process. But they also hew to the belief that Trump’s attempt to stay in power against the will of the people not only should bar him from further office, but already does under the Constitution.
Their plans involve a mixture of public campaigning to apply pressure on the state-level secretaries of state and election boards who decide matters of disqualification. Accustomed to asking judges to rule on petitions involving the age or citizenship of local candidates, good government groups are now crafting bids to have these officials disqualify Trump.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Free Speech for People (FSFP), among the groups most active on the Disqualification Clause, are tight-lipped about where they plan to file formal legal challenges to disqualify Trump, though FSFP sent letters this week asking officials in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and New Mexico to drop Trump from the ballot. That, in turn, has prompted some other states to start examining the process.
The disqualification clause has been the subject of renewed buzz since two conservative scholars — associated with the Federalist Society, no less — published a preview paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review endorsing the argument that Trump is disqualified from running.
That buy-in forced a closer look from observers and even elected officials who might’ve been predisposed to shrug the argument off as the latest liberal wishcasting.
But while the proposal’s resurgence in the post-Reconstruction era is new, CREW and FSFP have already tested it in court.
FSFP, a Boston-based nonprofit helmed by attorney John Bonifaz, started filing in 2021 to disqualify candidates — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) — from the ballot.
The group’s legal director, Ron Fein, told TPM that FSFP is gearing up for a legal fight to disqualify Trump in several states before the Republican primaries begin.
[…] That will come down to formal petitions and lawsuits that the group is planning to file, asking whichever the relevant authority is in a given state to find that Trump is disqualified. Fein said that that will require FSFP to prove not only that Trump’s effort to reverse his loss in 2020 qualified as an insurrection, but that he undertook real acts to “engage” in it — thereby meeting a Reconstruction-era legal standard.
“Our predecessors wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution because they learned a bloody lesson from the Civil War,” Fein said. “When someone foments a violent insurrection against the U.S., they can’t be trusted with public office.”
[…] Each state runs its own election for presidential electors, and each one has its own disqualification procedures to navigate. The effect is that piecemeal, individual efforts are less likely to achieve an outsized effect than organizations which can coordinate nationally.
They also only need to knock Trump off a few swing state ballots before the electoral math becomes very difficult for him, meaning they don’t have to succeed in every state to effectively disqualify him nationally. That math will help inform the plan, as will homing in on venues where the challengers will have the latitude to collect and display evidence — something judges have blocked in other disqualification cases.
[…] In some states, that’ll play out in administrative court. In others, normal state court.
Sus told TPM that the group will file lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility on the Republican primary ballot by the end of this year.
That effort will encompass the idiosyncrasies of the various states, and will entail “a mix of both” complaints through election officials and complaints through the courts, befitting each state’s requirements. […]
“The odds that everyone is gonna agree that he’s eligible are pretty low,” Magliocca said. “As long as you have somebody saying he’s ineligible, this is going to the Supreme Court, and probably pretty quickly.”
[…] Your present this weekend is a flashback to 2018, when Jimmy Buffett really pissed off some Republicans who didn’t know he leaned left by coming out in support of Andrew Gillum’s gubernatorial campaign in Florida, tweaking two of his hits to take digs at the Right. He changed the lyrics of Margaritaville to say “Some people say that there’s a red tide to blame, but I know that it’s all Rick Scott’s fault,” and a song called “Come Monday” to “Come Tuesday, things will change. Come Tuesday, we’re making a change. It’s been two insane years and it’s time to really switch gears.”
His fan base was not happy! About that, or about a nice picture he took with Norman Lear and dared to post on his Facebook.
Choice quotes from Facebook and Twitter include:
He too is a wash out. Don’t give a rats arse about this turn coat. Never was as important as he thinks he is I. M. H. O.
Now that you have made millions from true hard working Americans, this is the tune you play now? Thanks for being clueless.
I feel bad for Jimmy Buffett. He must be forced to do this.
Why the hell are you giving the left airtime bashing trump?
Jimmy!! No one wants to hear your political agenda! They want to hear your music! Your pissing off the people who made you Millions upon Millions. Not good for Business…. I’ve listened to your music and have been a fan for 20 plus years, I’ve bought your merchandise, liquor, paid for concerts etc. But i won’t any longer! Adios Jimmy!!
Smoke one and chill, Jimmy. {It’s never a good idea to intentionally provoke a sizeable part of your fan base.} It’s a good thing you don’t need money, because you won’t ever see any from me.
It truly is amazing how they are surprised literally every time a musician turns out to be liberal. Still, that was a nice thing he did there, and also a nice thing he did for the manatees. […]
Hunter discusses the future of the No Labels political party.
A new article in Politico touts a megadonor “get” by No Labels, the would-be political party that believes the answer to all of America’s problems is for Democrats and Republicans to meet each other halfway on issues like “Do women have rights?” and “Should America abandon democracy in favor of a pasty, rich God-King?”
The story details that Allan Keen, a real estate developer and major donor to numerous Republican presidential candidates, including former President Donald Trump, is now “a leader in the Florida chapter” of No Labels. And I’m going to take a moment here to be nice: Keen deserves some respect on this one because he told Politico he abandoned his Trump support and left the Republican Party after “all the shenanigans” around Trump’s Jan. 6 coup attempt.
Keen is doing more than what the vast majority of Republicans have done: He thought Jan. 6 was unacceptable, and he left the party. Sen. Mitt Romney is still a Republican, and this guy isn’t. You tell me which of the two is really more concerned by a violent coup attempt.
But now we can dispense with the nice part. Florida Real Estate Man may have ditched the Republican Party, but he left it for No Labels, a gloriously vain enterprise premised on a certain slice of the Important Political Influencer class’s deeply held belief that what Americans really want is fervent corporatism paired with no other strong views whatsoever.
A look at the party’s would-be platform reveals a document heavy on the language of aspirational self-help gurus and conspicuously silent about how any of it would translate into actual new laws. But the group clearly has a core belief, and it’s all-encompassing: “America should do what rich people want.” Everything else comes second. And if that message just happens to be the one likeliest to make the rich rush in to prop up your operation, then wow, what a coincidence.
Some critics of No Labels believe that Republican megadonors are funding the pseudo-party so it can act as an election spoiler, stripping low-information voters from Democrats and swinging the election to Trump. But I think this undersells the extent to which our nation’s most wealthy people sincerely do not give a shit about what happens to the rest of us or to the country at large. They simply don’t think about it. The motivation for wealthy Republicans donating to No Labels this particular election cycle, however, is that it looks like the eventual Republican nominee may well be campaigning from a prison cell, which doesn’t bode well for his ability to return to them the favor of electing him.
If you’ve ever met a member of the filthy rich, Trump’s obsession with cheating people out of a few bucks and swiping whatever can be swiped is more avatar than outlier. There are a great many wealthy people who work themselves into fits about the rest of society having a say in what they do or how much taxes they pay, and the rich deeply feel that nothing else matters except for fixing that.
Rich people do not like President Joe Biden, because Biden says things that suggest he does not want rich people to be in charge. Rich people do like Republicans because Republicans have a proven history of wanting rich people to be in charge. However, some members of the donor class, like Keen, are increasingly upset that Republicans keep focusing on trying to overthrow the government when Republicans could instead be using that energy to put rich people in charge of more things. And these same rich people were willing to abide the most conceited, faux-billionaire asshole on the planet when they thought he was on their money-grubbing side. But now that the asshole has proved he’s on nobody’s side but his own, the smarter money is moving to their next-best options.
That’s why No Labels’ funding appears to be largely contingent on whether Trump is the nominee. If some other Republican starts leading in the polls, one who looks like they’ll put tax cuts and deregulation as their top priority, all the money will start flowing back to corporatist Republicans and No Labels will again be devoting the bulk of their time trying to find a new crop of sugar daddies.
It’s not that No Labels will strategically stand down if a not-indicted Republican starts looking like they’ll be the nominee. The donor money will collapse, and they’ll have to stand down.
From what I understand, the so-called Democrats involved with “No Labels” include Democrat-turned-Independent Joe Liebermann and Senator Joe Manchin. Both of these senators are greedy, geezer corporate shills. And that’s what “No Labels” really represents: a bunch of greedy geezers involved in a money grab.
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If No Labels is currently hoovering up Republican funding instead of it going to the actual Republican Party then I have no complaints. I think Democratic voters are smart enough to see through their shenanigans and the only real risk is that they might draw off some Independent voters
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A while back there was an article about the Christian Nationalists and what would happen if they achieved their fever dream of a Theocracy. Basically the infighting would be epic because which Christians would be in charge? Clearly the ones whose belief in the Jesus is the bestest.
For a fascist kleptocracy it would potentially be different. If Russia is the role model then whatever autocrat is in charge would need to gift public goods and institutions to the new Oligarchy which would then expedite the monetization of said good or service leaving the public with a hollow shell. If Saudi Arabia is the model then whatever autocrat is in charge would round up all the wannabe oligarchs and ….
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Many otherwise intelligent people do not understand the close alignment of corporatism with authoritarianism/fascism. They’re bedfellows.
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Biden’s old but with a couple of exceptions (all presidents have had some severe shortcomings) has done a great job, and Kamala Harris is qualified if she needs to step in.
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No Labels would sink whichever candidate it is more similar to and throw the election to the other candidate. No Labels is basically a RINO. Between Trump and Biden, a RINO is closer to Biden than Trump, so it being in the race would split the moderate vote and throw the election to Trump. […] it can only do harm…
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I think that No Labels will hurt TFG more than it helps. It gives Republicans who don’t like him a place to go other than with the Biden.
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No Labels? I went to their web site. It’s elaborate and wordy. And damned if I didn’t read for 20 minutes, clicking this tab and that, and still find myself unable to say where No Labels came down on the incendiary issues of the day. Ok, “We should all just be nice to each other and get along.” Good. Beyond that, No Labels doesn’t stand for anything. It’s a nothing-burger.
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Hunter- You generalized “rich people” quite a bit. While most are as you wrote, some (sadly indications are far fewer than half) are decent people
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No Labels will not have a candidate to run.
Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), “liked” and responded to posts from a known antisemite with ties to white nationalist Richard Spencer demanding that the Anti-Defamation League be banned from the platform after its CEO spoke with X’s Linda Yaccarino.
On August 30, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted that he had “a very frank + productive conversation” with Yaccarino and discussed what the platform needs to do “to address hate effectively on the platform.” [Tweet at the link]
Following Greenblatt’s announcement, Keith Woods — an antisemitic YouTuber who has associated with Spencer and who was seemingly reinstated to the platform under Musk after previously being banned — posted that “the ADL is an anti-White organisation which waged financial terrorism against this platform as soon as Elon Musk took over in an attempt to stifle free speech. It’s time to #BanTheADL.”
In response, other right-wing figures and far-right accounts, including white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, promoted the hashtag, contributing to “#BanTheADL” trending nationally on the platform.
Musk was among those who interacted with the hashtag, “liking” one of Woods’ tweets claiming the ADL is “financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech.” Woods subsequently bragged that “Elon Musk likes my call to #BanTheADL” and appeared to take credit for the hashtag trending. [Tweets at the link]
Musk also directly responded to Woods pushing the hashtag, writing, “ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” and responded with exclamation points to another right-wing figure who attacked the ADL and its CEO. [Tweets at the link]
Propping up anti-ADL attacks from a known antisemite after Yaccarino discussed hate speech on the platform with the ADL is the latest in a pattern of Musk undermining Yaccarino’s attempts to lure back advertisers with empty promises. (Lawyers for the company admitted that hiring the new CEO “will not result in a different content-moderation strategy for Twitter, a company that will still be owned by Musk and led by a person chosen by Musk.”)
After Musk took over the company, advertising revenue plummeted as advertisers have brand safety concerns over his behavior and policy changes. Media Matters and others have repeatedly found that the platform is plagued with hate speech, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (including in ads) — even after Yaccarino took over from Musk as CEO. Notably, Media Matters has found that ads for major brands have appeared on a verified pro-Hitler account and a leading neo-Nazi group that engages in violence, and next to content from white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.
DAVE PORTNOY (GUEST): Did you feel like at Fox, you could say whatever you want?
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Well, there was always internal — I mean, the Murdoch’s were always nice. They never got in my way at all. They were always super nice to me. But there were, you know, small-minded — It’s a company run by fearful women. You know what I mean? And they were always like, you know, second-tier people who were hassling my producers. But no one ever called me. I got along with everybody, but I mean, I think they knew that censorship is not — I don’t welcome that, you know?
Bill Richardson, a two-term Democratic governor of New Mexico and an American ambassador to the United Nations who also worked for years to secure the release of Americans detained by foreign adversaries, has died. He was 75.
The Richardson Center for Global Engagement, which he founded and led, said in a statement Saturday that he died in his sleep at his home in Chatham, Massachusetts.
“He lived his entire life in the service of others—including both his time in government and his subsequent career helping to free people held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad,” said Mickey Bergman, the center’s vice president. “There was no person that Gov. Richardson would not speak with if it held the promise of returning a person to freedom. The world has lost a champion for those held unjustly abroad and I have lost a mentor and a dear friend.” […]
With Ukraine’s Summer Counteroffensive in full bore for weeks, inevitably writers will focus on what Ukraine is accomplishing with the weapons and munitions it has received, or what might be termed the “outputs” side of the spreadsheet of war. However, no less than in the weeks before the counteroffensive began, what both Ukraine and Russia are receiving as “inputs” are important.
The Russian side of the equation is always difficult to track, but there are strong indications that Russia’s equipment is heading for the worse. Russia made a big fanfare of sending the T-14 Armata to the front line in April. The tank was quietly withdrawn from the supposed front lines without any footage of one in real combat in late July.
Instead, Russia has brought in ancient Soviet tanks that were designed as far back as WWII, including the T-54/55 and the T-10 Heavy Tank following the arrival to the front of the 60-year-old T-62, of which Russia has already lost a visually confirmed 62.
Russia has seen similar degradations of its artillery arm with a growing reliance on low-survivability 1950s-era short-ranged mortar systems like the 2S4 Tyulpan, as well as the increasing ubiquity of barely upgraded BMP1 Infantry Fighting Vehicles from 1966.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is trending in the opposite direction. In the leadup to the start of the Summer Counteroffensive, Ukraine famously received hundreds of modern Western tanks, and well over 1,000 armored fighting vehicles along with modern self-propelled guns and top-of-the-line Western air defense systems.
This process has not stopped since June. Of course, Ukraine continues to receive massive quantities of artillery shells, cluster munitions, missiles, and rockets of all types, but this article will highlight new capabilities Ukraine has received through her allies.
WOLFRAM BRIMSTONE II MISSILE LAUNCHER [Tweet and image at the link]
Ukraine has now gotten both the British Brimstone-2 antisurface missile and the American-made AGM-114 American Hellfire Missile. Both missiles share a great many design features, employing a combination of laser guidance and active radar targeting, making them highly accurate against both fixed and moving targets. The dual targeting system makes them resistant to electronic defense systems aimed at disrupting laser or radar targeting individually. They are available with a variety of warheads, including fragmentation (anti-personnel), shaped charge (anti-tank), and thermobaric (anti-bunker).
Both the Brimstone and Hellfire Missiles were originally designed to be deployed from rotary or fixed aircraft (“AGM” stands for “air to ground missile), but have since been modified to be ground-launch capable. Hellfires arrived in Ukraine with Swedish RBS-17 ground launchers on October 2022, and now the United Kingdom has provided the Wolfram Armored Truck, capable of launching both missiles.
The RBS-17 was intended as a mobile infantry anti-ship coastal defense weapon, but it was found to be an effective surface-to-surface missile platform in the absence of attack helicopters or aircraft capable of deploying the Hellfire missile, which is exactly the situation in Ukraine. Both Sweden and Norway supplied the launcher.
Meanwhile, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense engineers strapped an eight-missile Brimstone 2 launch system onto an armored 6×6 AWD Supacat modular truck (pictured above as the title photo). This newly designed vehicle was named the “Wolfram Armored Truck” and adopted as standard weaponry of the British Army. Several dozen Wolrams had reportedly been sent to Ukraine by early August.
Both missiles’ ranges are significantly shortened when fired from the surface compared to an aerial launch but are believed to approach a 20-kilometer range, making them deadly and sophisticated long-range anti-tank guided missiles. For context, the Javelin ATGM has a range of under 4 km.
Furthermore, compared to the RBS-17, which is a big heavy tripod, the Wolfram will provide far greater mobility. The Wolfram’s vehicle-mounted nature permits the mobile ATGM team to employ “shoot and scoot” tactics where the unit will quickly deploy the missiles, and then withdraw using the mobility of the unit. In a war where both sides have the power to bring massive firepower down on targets in short order, mobility is synonymous with survival. The armored design will further improve crew survivability in frontline combat.
Additionally, the Brimstone 2 Sea SPEAR variant was specifically designed to be launched from small boats and can target naval or land-based surface targets, further boosting Ukraine’s scrappy naval raid capabilities.
NEPTUNE CRUISE MISSILE’S SURFACE STRIKE CAPABILITY [image at the link]
On Aug. 23, 2023, an S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system, the Russian equivalent to a Patriot Missile System with a price tag to match, suddenly was engulfed in a massive explosion. With a range of at least 180 km and a claimed range of up to 400 km, the S-400 battery was located in Western Crimea but was a central part of Russian air defenses throughout the southern theaters of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Ukrainian sources were more cryptic, with Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov claiming an unnamed entirely new weapon had destroyed the S-400 battery. This was followed by a report from prominent Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov that the destruction was caused by the Ukrainian-manufactured R-360 Neptune missile’s first operational use as a land-attack weapon.
The Neptune missile became famous earlier in the war when it sunk the Russian Black Sea flagship Moskva in May 2022. There had long been rumors that Ukraine had been making what can be challenging modifications to a naval attack missile to permit it to strike land-based ground targets.
If true, these efforts may have finally borne fruit, giving Ukraine a new domestically produced long-range cruise missile with a 280 km range, comparable to the Storm Shadow missile.
ROSOMAK INFANTRY FIGHTING VEHICLES [photo at the link]
The KTO Rosomak (or “Wolverine” in Polish) is an 8×8 25-ton infantry fighting vehicle with the same powerful 30 mm autocannon that equips the Styker IFVs used by the U.S. Army. With excellent western digital day/night optics, a 500 horsepower diesel engine, and a 60 mile per hour top speed on roads, it is a high-mobility, high firepower IFV very similar to the American Stryker.
The only weakness of the Rosomak is its under-armored base model. The Polish army reportedly insisted that the Rosomak be capable of amphibiously fording rivers, placing sharp weight limits on the Rosomak’s design.
Subsequently, Polish military units have modified the Rosomak by adding additional applique armor plates that have substantially increased its protection at the cost of its amphibious capabilities. It’s not presently known which variant of the Rosomak Ukraine received.
However, even in its base form, it offers significantly greater protection than most Soviet IFVs in Ukrainian service like the BMP1 and carries offensive firepower that would only be exceeded by the best Western IFVs like the Bradley, Marder, and CV90.
Ukraine was pledged 200 KTO Rosomaks and began receiving deliveries in late July.
VAMPIRE WEAPON SYSTEM [photo at the link]
The VAMPIRE Weapon System is an American-manufactured rocket launcher firing small 70 mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System laser-guided rockets. The launcher has been adapted to a variety of platforms, but in Ukraine’s case, it has been bolted to lightly armored pickup trucks.
The great advantage of the APKWS II rocket is that it is incredibly cheap for a precision munition. Whereas the Excalibur GPS round or the GMLRS rocket for the HIMARS costs around $100,000 or more, each laser-guided APKWS II round costs just $27,500, making it significantly more cost-effective.
It is described as extremely accurate through its laser guidance system, capable of striking windows or other small stationary objects with minimal risk of collateral damage.
Furthermore, it is rated as a Group III anti-air weapon, meaning it is capable of engaging drones and other aerial targets up to 18,000 feet in altitude and up to a speed of 250 knots. This would make it capable of engaging a wide range of Russian drones and low-flying helicopters.
An electro-optical laser sighting tool assists the targeting and laser designation of fast-moving targets.
The VAMPIRE system has an engagement range of around 5 km, limiting its ability against helicopters. But that is ample range for anti-drone and anti-personnel fire support weapon.
VAMPIRE systems first arrived in early August 2023 and is believed to have consisted of 14 units for $40 million ($2.9 million per unit including ammunition).
VIKTOR SHORAD SYSTEM [photo at the link]
In contrast to VAMPIRE’s high-tech approach to countering the drone threat, the Czech Viktor Short Range Air Defense System is brutal in its simplicity. Czech engineers welded the abundantly available Soviet-manufactured dual-barreled ZPU-2 14.5×114 mm anti-aircraft machine guns on a swivel mount on the bed of the Toyota Landcruiser 70. With day/night optical sights and firing 600 rounds/minute, the system can engage drones up to a range of 2 km.
The result is a highly reliable, highly mobile, and extremely inexpensive anti-drone system. The Czech Republic and the Netherlands jointly funded the purchase of 100 units, and they were manufactured by the Czech Excalibur Army corporation. The first deliveries arrived on or around June 13, and the order has been completed with additional units on order.
These inexpensive and mobile units can provide critical anti-drone air coverage to protect Ukrainian units, supplies, and artillery behind the immediate line of contact.
Protecting against enemy drones is particularly important for Ukrainian artillery. The think tank RUSI assessed that the declining availability of Russian 152 mm artillery shells has forced Russia to increasingly rely on Lancet suicide drones to fill the role of counterbattery fire. Protecting Ukrainian artillery units from such Lancet drone strikes helps to maintain Ukraine’s hard-earned advantage in the counterbattery war.
ASRAAM SUPACATS [Photo at the link]
I previously wrote a bit about the ASRAAM launcher equipped 6×6 AWD Supacat modular trucks.
A vulnerability in Ukraine’s air defenses was identified through a deficiency of SHORAD (short-range air defense) units, cheaper highly mobile short-range anti-air units. Russia exploited this weakness in the early days of the counteroffensive by attacking Ukrainian armored columns with Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters.
The UK has helped address this deficiency by delivering Supacat heavy trucks with ASRAAM IR Anti-air missiles strapped to them. …
The ASRAAM is not radar-based, but is instead a heat-seeking missile, making it more autonomous than a radar-based anti-air missile. Thus it’s well suited to be used as an improvised SAM missile.
The system does appear highly improvised, with a simple launcher welded onto the rear of the high-mobility vehicle. It’s unclear if it has its own radar, but it’s likely a very inexpensive and weak system if so. the ASRAAM normally has a range of 25 km, but this assumes being fired from a fighter jet flying at Mach 1 or greater, and at high altitudes. But when the 50 km-ranged AIM-120A AMRAAM is fired from a NASAMS, its range drops to under half to around 25km. Thus, the 25km ASRAAM will likely only sport a horizontal range of 10-15km at most.
Russian Ka-52 attacks have sharply reduced in effectiveness since the early days of the counteroffensive in June. The introduction of additional SHORAD forces to help cover forward elements of Ukrainian advances from attack helicopters has been a key element of greater Ukrainian successes, and it appears ASRAAM Supacats may have played a role.
The ASRAAM Supacats appear to have arrived in Ukraine some time in mid-July, and were publicly covered by the press in early August.
GREEK SHORAD BATTERIES [Photo at the link]
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrived in Athens on Aug. 21 as part of a broader European diplomatic blitz. Three days later, the Greek government announced that it was terminating its maintenance contract with Russia for its Tor M1 and Osa-AKM SHORAD batteries.
A substantial proportion of Greek voters, particularly Greek conservatives, have strong pro-Russian sympathies. Among NATO nations, the Greek government had been among the most reluctant to provide overt Ukrainian support (though not to be equated with the overt hostility displayed by, say, Hungary).
Nonetheless, Zelenskyy appears to have successfully persuaded the Greeks to sever a significant spare parts and maintenance contract worth €102 million over the next few years. Furthermore, the Greeks intend to decommission their 21 Tor M1s and 38 Osa-AKM batteries and to give them to Ukraine through a third-party intermediary.
Greece also agreed to provide trainers for Ukraine’s F-16 training program.
F-16S AND F-16 TRAINING [photo at the link]
Denmark and the Netherlands have pledged a total of 61 F-16s to Ukraine. Unfortunately, Ukraine only had a reported nine Ukrainian pilots with sufficient English language skills to begin F-16 training. Others will require months of English language training before even starting pilot training.
The USAF has agreed to commence F-16 training with Ukrainian pilots and crews in Arizona as soon as October. These pilots are reported to have prior Soviet non-fighter aircraft flight experience, thus Ukraine appears to be aiming to expand its airpower rather than retrain its current fighter pilots on new aircraft. The initial pilot training is expected to take five months; a small handful of Ukrainian pilots and crews may be ready for action around March or April of 2024.
This is also partly due to the fact the USAF presently faces a shortage of F-16 training instructors to meet its own needs, let alone training a large number of Ukrainian pilots.
The bulk of Ukrainian pilots are expected to undergo a crash English-language course through January 2024, when F-16 training centers in Romania and the Netherlands will be ready to take on a greater number of Ukrainian pilots with instructors from a coalition of eleven nations.
These pilots likely will not be ready, however, until summer 2024. […]
OPERATION INTERFLEX [Photo at the link]
The U.K. government first began training Ukrainian soldiers shortly after the illegal Russian annexation of Crimea, in what was called Operation Orbital. From 2014-2022, Operation Orbital trained 22,000 Ukrainian soldiers, many of whom went on to become Ukrainian trainers themselves. Along with President Barack Obama’s initiative to send U.S. Special Forces trainers in 2015 to help Ukraine establish its elite special forces units in 2015, these efforts helped Ukraine prepare for its existential war against Russia.
Within days of Russia’s broader invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, Operation Orbital was replaced by a new multinational, British-led initiative to train Ukrainian soldiers to NATO standards called Operational Interflex.
From February 2022 to February 2023, Operation Interflex trained 10,000 Ukrainian troops, enough to staff three to five brigades with combat troops. The effort now has over 1,000 instructors from 10 nations. Operation Interflex aimed to roughly double its output and train over 20,000 additional troops in the last 10 months of 2023, or roughly 2,000 soldiers per month—enough to staff a completely new Ukrainian brigade every month.
Operation Interflex is the largest of the NATO-led training programs for Ukrainian soldiers, but not the only one. U.S. and German instructors are training Ukrainians on a wide variety of weapon systems in Germany, like the Bradley and Marder IFVs; various tanks like the Abrams, Leopard 1, and Leopard 2; the Geppard air defense system; the Pzh2000 self-propelled howitzer; and other U.S. and German weapons.
Other training programs are known to exist in Sweden, Spain, Poland, and Estonia, among others.
The scope of training operations for Ukrainian troops has not only continued from 2022, but it has substantially picked up in 2023, possibly as much as doubling the number of NATO-trained troops provided every month.
ABRAMS TANKS WITHIN WEEKS [photo at the link]
On July 27, Politico reported that American officials dispatched Abrams tanks to Germany, where they were expected to arrive in August. American officials commented that the Abrams tanks would undergo a further refurbishing process in Germany that would take about a month, before being sent to Ukraine for deployment.
Thus, the arrival of the first M1A1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine may be a week or two away, and likely no more than a few weeks.
The original plan had been to send 31 of the most advanced M1A2 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, but the procurement process for these tanks may have taken until summer 2024. Given a choice between receiving older M1A1 Abrams in fall 2023 or M1A2 Abrams in summer 2024, Ukraine chose to receive the M1A1s earlier.
Ukrainian tank crews and maintenance personnel have been training to operate the Abrams since May 2023.
Even more heavily armored than the heavily protected Leopard 2A6 tanks, the Abrams represents world-class armor protection, and some of the best day/night digital optics in the world. It will be an instant contender for Ukraine’s best tank alongside the Challenger 2 and Leopard 2A6 tanks.
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These are merely some of the highlights of weapons and ammunition provided to Ukraine to fuel the counter-offensive, focusing on purely new equipment. I discussed the importance of the German LUNA Reconnaissance drone, DPICM cluster munitions, Hensoldt COBRA Counterbattery Radars, Taiwanese HAWK SAM batteries, and more in the past months, without even getting into the Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Leopard 2s that have served as the spearhead of the offensive.
The U.S. ability to replace every Bradley Ukraine has lost and into the indefinite future means that Russia can’t attrit Ukraine into submission. Meanwhile, Western gear is both tough—only five visually confirmed destroyed Leopard 2 tanks in nearly three months of continual fighting at the front—and designed for crew survivability. Equipment can be replaced; crews cannot.
Ukraine’s arms, armament, and training continue to accumulate, while Russia trends in the opposite direction.
Another important weapon or should I say innovation not talked about much is thermal imaging to detect mines that were planted by russia. Just after dark the mines hold the heat from the day of sunshine and can be detected by thermal imaging from drones. The mines can then be destroyed. This may be one of the most important developments in the war. If the mine situation isnt dealt with then all of the other high tech equipment that approaches the mines is subject to destruction.
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The 82nd Brigade released what it claims to be combat footage taken from Challenger 2’s in action. https://twitter.com/front_ukrainian/status/1697923706356408351
[video at the link]
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Might be a good place to remind ourselves that those humans doing the fighting are what still matters.
David Garlick has a sunflower in his yard that just keeps on growing. It currently stands at about 4 metres tall, and he suspects it was planted by a squirrel.
Arizona will stage two presidential preference elections in March after a last-minute bid from Republicans in Maricopa County to conduct their own election failed.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties will participate in the taxpayer-funded March 19 preference elections, where voters registered with those parties will make their choices for the presidential ticket.
The Maricopa County Republican Party tried to get the state GOP to back an election that the party would run on its own terms, including in-person-only voting and hand counting of results.
But party Chairman Jeff DeWit, citing legal concerns and time constraints, said there wasn’t time to convene a meeting of the statewide executive committee to take up the county party’s plan.
The political parties faced a Sept. 1 deadline to notify the Arizona secretary of state if they would opt out of the March 19 election. The newly minted No Labels Party was the only one to respond. The Libertarian Party traditionally has eschewed taxpayer funded primaries…
A Ukrainian court ordered tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky to be held in custody for two months on suspicion of fraud and money laundering on Saturday, a striking move against one of the country’s most powerful businessmen.
The detention of Kolomoisky, who is under U.S. sanctions and is a one-time supporter of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy whose election he backed in 2019, comes as Kyiv is trying to signal progress during a wartime crackdown on corruption.
Defence lawyers said Kolomoisky would appeal the ruling, questioning its legality, but that he would not post bail of almost $14 million in order to secure his release, broadcaster Radio Liberty reported…
(58:04, Alex): [Tic-Tac 2004] we saw something unidentified that day. And we didn’t have a good process […] We need to do better as a team to give our air crew and operators a heads up before they go trundling into that situation again in the future. I mean, we have procedures for everything; we’re pilots. He have checklists […]
Hey, if you see an unidentified thing: turn your tapes on, call it out, separate the aircraft and get people in these different perspectives, look for these characteristics
[…] then when we got back, we didn’t have a standard debrief template. Which we have for everything else […] trigger that response from other agencies; maybe they’ve got a satellite
[…]
(1:13:24, Mick): Do you think this process is improving?
(Alex): I get the sense that they [AARO] are trying to resolve these cold cases. I’ve seen nothing to suggest that there is a systematic protocol going forward for the operators in the future. […] Maybe […] that’ll come after the NASA [UAP] Independent Study recommendations are published.
A former Italian premier, in an interview published on Saturday, contended that a French air force missile accidentally brought down a passenger jet over the Mediterranean Sea in 1980 in a failed bid to assassinate Libya’s then leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Former two-time Premier Giuliano Amato appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron to either refute or confirm his assertion about the cause of the crash on June 27, 1980, which killed all 81 persons aboard the Italian domestic flight.
In an interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Amato said he is convinced that France hit the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet.
While acknowledging he has no hard proof, Amato also contended that Italy tipped off Gadhafi, and so the Libyan, who was heading back to Tripoli from a meeting in Yugoslavia, didn’t board the Libyan military jet…
A Florida redistricting plan pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis violates the state constitution and is prohibited from being used for any future U.S. congressional elections since it diminishes the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice, a state judge ruled Saturday.
Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sent the plan back to the Florida Legislature with instructions that lawmakers should draw a new congressional map that complies with the Florida Constitution.
The voting rights groups that challenged the plan in court “have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida Constitution,” Marsh wrote.
The decision was the latest to strike down new congressional maps in Southern states over concerns that they diluted Black voting power…
After a group of employees resigned en masse from the American Conservative Union—which organizes the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—in spring 2022, its chairman Matt Schlapp, and his wife, Mercedes, reportedly felt there was only one thing that could cure the space of the bad resignation vibes: An unsanctioned exorcism.
The pair brought in a priest to “evict satanic spirits” from the group’s Virginia offices, according to a new report from the Daily Beast. And why did so many junior employees suddenly quit?
“Everyone disrespects what the Schlapps did to them. They left because they couldn’t get money,” a source said. “Matt has said, ‘Everyone is disposable,’ and says that they can always find someone else to do the job for that much.” Color me shocked…
The European Union’s Digital Services Act went into effect on Aug. 25, just as the European Commission released a study detailing how the act can be used to stem online Russian disinformation campaigns. According to the study, “Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.”
The results of the European Commission’s study are no surprise. Elon Musk’s buy-it-and-break-it tenure at X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has been well-documented. His general hypocrisy about being a “free speech absolutist” aside, the world’s richest man has spent a good amount of time misrepresenting facts about his new acquisition. Whether he is lying about the service having an anti-Trump bias before he bought it, or whether he’s lying about how many real-life followers he has on his platform, Musk’s X has been a relentless medium for misinformation.
Musk is not alone. Although he is responsible for crushing his company’s moderation team and allowing disinformation to flourish on X, Meta and other social media companies have failed as well.
According to the European Commission’s study:
In absolute numbers, pro-Kremlin accounts continue to reach the largest audiences on Meta’s platforms. However, their audiences only grew marginally on Facebook and Instagram compared to other platforms. The subscriber numbers of pro-Kremlin channels more than tripled on Telegram since the start of the war, more than doubled on TikTok and rose by almost 90 percent on YouTube.
The Digital Services Act will enforce unprecedented and broad regulations on the largest online tech giants. It requires enormous online companies like X, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Amazon, TikTok, Google, and others to be transparent about their data collection. The act also seeks to gain transparency in how a company manipulates its consumers, and how social media platforms moderate not only illegal activity but also potentially damaging disinformation.
The EU believes that if the Digital Services Act had been in effect last year, Russian disinformation efforts could have been mitigated by compelling big tech companies to demonetize and stymie the reach of many of these bad actors. This is good news for Europe and hopefully for Ukraine. Unfortunately, we have no such regulations in the United States, and the bills that have been suggested—usually focused on rolling back Section 230 protections—are not a solution.
While EU countries can look forward to more accountability from tech giants, Americans are bound to be dealing with even more disinformation. Services like Facebook and YouTube have begun stepping back their moderation efforts in advance of the 2024 presidential election. That means former President Donald Trump’s constant lies won’t be accompanied by a note pointing out that he’s lying.
Ukraine is set to receive 110 Slinger anti-drone systems manufactured by Australia’s Electro Optic Systems (EOS), according to the company’s executive vice president, Matt Jones, on Sept. 2.
The Slinger was developed based on the experience of the Russian-Ukrainian war and is reported to be particularly effective against kamikaze drones like Iran’s Shahed-136 UAVs.
“This technology is really going to Ukraine. The Slinger system was purchased by the United States for donation to Ukraine. The development of the laser technology is still being finalized, so it is not being considered at this time,” Jones stated…
Climate and anti-capitalism activists blocked the only entrance into the Burning Man Black Rock City Festival 2023 before gun-toting police roughed them up and rammed their positions. The cops (Paiute tribal officers) were not the only people aggravated at the activists; festivalgoers had plenty of outrage to heap scorn and venom on protestors (it is a global reaction toward climate strikers) as the action delayed their entry into the scorching Black Rock Desert event outside Reno for hours.
Protestors believe global calamity must be averted at all costs and that desperate measures are necessary to stop the irreversible scorching of the Earth. I feel them, though I believe tactics are not always productive.
[…] Once the activists were removed and the blockade demolished, a funny thing happened: later, the skies opened with rain bombs that flooded the event […] The flood ended the festival that had attracted anarchists, hipsters, and free spirits for over three decades but is newly discovered by the likes of Elon Musk technocrats and other celebrities. Many festival attendees gather to partake in hallucinogens and take it all in. [Tweets, images of officer pulling a gun on protestors, and video at the link]
[…] From The Guardian:
In recent years, Burning Man has drifted from its hippy roots and become better known for luxury RVs, wild orgies, and Silicon Valley bros. Protestors from the Seven Circles –a coalition of activists representing the climate groups Extinction Rebellion, Rave Revolution, and Scientist Rebellion – demanded that Burning Man ban private jets and single-use plastics, as well as unlimited generator and propane use. Signs painted with the slogans “Burners of the world, unite!”, “Mother Earth needs our help” and “System change” were erected around the blockade, while four activists chained themselves to the trailer and locked arms through PVC pipes.
The festival, which originated as an underground gathering in 1986 in San Francisco, has anarchist and countercultural roots. Unlike at a typical festival, participants build the event themselves, transforming a 4,000-acre dry lake bed into an ephemeral metropolis called Black Rock City, by bringing in their own infrastructure, food, water, and entertainment, in lieu of programmed musical headliners. Burning Man’s radical ethos also mandates that within the event’s grounds, no money can be exchanged, and brands are prohibited from advertising products.
However, in recent years Burning Man has gained a cultish popularity among Silicon Valley’s technocrats, as well as celebrities, influencers and others who treat the gathering as a photogenic opportunity to network, post selfies, and experiment with psychedelic drugs. Many in these moneyed ranks choose to spend the festival in gas-guzzling luxury RVs. Rising temperatures in Black Rock Desert, which hit a record 103F at last year’s edition, have led to an increasing reliance on air conditioning fueled by generators. Concerns over the illegal dumping of trash have led to federal officials capping attendance at 80,000, against the festival’s desire to continue growing.
“Burning Man attracts the elite of the elites to party and pretend they’re in a classless, moneyless society,” said Tommy Diacono, co-founder of Rave Revolution. “But more private jets than ever are flying to the Burn. We’re burning propane for fun. The air-conditioned domes are getting bigger every year.”
[Tweet and video showing an aerial view of the flooded Burning Man site.]
From the police to the festivalgoers, all were caught off guard. Burning Man event organizers declared a National Emergency, but they can’t. That is a government function. FEMA is on the ground now, however.
Mud and rock from the floods blocked the only road out. So why are they mad at climate activists instead of the fossil fuel companies and their consumption and trashing of the venue site? Well, you will have to ask them, but perhaps mud-soaked, hungry with disease rampant, they likely have had time to reflect on their plight.
There was a preposterous rumor that Ebola had broken out. Instead, hypothermia, stomach bugs, and foodborne illness are likely. The portable toilets are running over, ew. [Tweets and images at the link]
Every year, the counterculture festival Burning Man takes over Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where tens of thousands of people come to “lift the human spirit, address social problems, and inspire a sense of culture, community, and civic engagement,” according to the organization’s website. But each year, some festival-goers skip the leave-no-trace principles, and instead illegally dump their garbage and camping equipment in nearby cities, like Reno, for the locals to deal with. Now, even places two hours from the festival site, like Lake Tahoe, are being inundated with Burning Man waste.
In Truckee, a town near Lake Tahoe, local business owners and officials shared their frustrations with those passing through the area after Burning Man who were stopping to dump off their trash.
“What I’ve seen are large construction bags of trash, alcohol bottles, tons of food, tents and large aluminum poles from shade structures,” Mark Lowenstern, owner of Cross Roads Car Wash in Truckee, told SFGate. “People just unload their motor homes. I’ve seen people sometimes spend four to six hours pulling everything out of their vehicles, then wash their cars and their belongings. One camper can fill up half of my capacity.”
[…] The article is really lowballing the carnage, though. But it is truth-telling nonetheless.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts.
THE CDC DIDN’T SAY VACCINATED PEOPLE ARE MORE AT RISK OF A NEW COVID VARIANT THAN THE UNVACCINATED
CLAIM: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that a new COVID-19 variant is more contagious among vaccinated people than those who are unvaccinated.
THE FACTS: In a risk assessment summary published Aug. 23, the CDC wrote that the BA.2.86 variant may be more likely to infect people with existing immunity to COVID-19, either from vaccinations or prior infections, than previous variants. It did not say that vaccinated people are at a higher risk than the unvaccinated. […]
BIDEN DIDN’T GET SEGREGATIONIST THURMOND TO VOTE FOR THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT. WHITE HOUSE SAYS HE MISSPOKE
CLAIM: President Joe Biden “literally” convinced segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond to vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act.
THE FACTS: Biden had not yet been elected to the U.S. Senate when the landmark law was passed in 1964, and Thurmond was among the prominent southern Democrats to vote against the bill. A White House spokesperson confirmed the president misspoke in his remarks. Biden made the claim during a White House event Monday.
[…] White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden had intended to tout his work in the 1980s to win passage of a bill reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act. The landmark 1965 law followed the Civil Rights Act and outlawed discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests that were aimed at disenfranchising Black voters. “He was highlighting his role in gaining Sen. Thurmond’s support for reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act, which Thurmond had previously opposed,” Bates explained in an email.
The White House spokesman cited news coverage from the era in which Thurmond, the then-Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, threatened to eliminate parts of the 1965 law. Biden, as the ranking Democrat on the committee, promised at the time that he wouldn’t back down. “If Strom Thurmond is serious about eliminating the Voting Rights Act, I’m going to fight it,” he said, according to a Wilmington News Journal story from 1980. The legislation ultimately passed the Senate in 1982 by a wide margin. Thurmond, who died in 2003 at the age of 100, was among the Republicans who voted for it.
NO, A MEAT ALLERGY CAUSED BY TICKS IS NOT TIED TO A GATES FOUNDATION-FUNDED PROGRAM. HERE’S WHY
CLAIM: Increased incidence of a meat allergy linked to tick spit in the U.S. is connected to a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that involves genetically modifying cattle ticks.
THE FACTS: The program to create a modified cattle tick, with the goal of reducing their population and protecting livestock, has thus far been limited to lab work in the U.K. The ticks in question have been largely eradicated in the U.S. and do not bite humans, an expert said. But social media posts are baselessly tying that work to recently published government research estimating that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have an allergy to red meat because of a syndrome triggered by tick bites.
The reaction, called alpha-gal syndrome, occurs when an infected person consumes beef, pork, venison or other mammal products. It’s caused by a sugar in meat from mammals—and in tick spit—that, when transmitted through the skin via a tick bite, can lead to an allergic reaction.
[…] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson Kate Fowlie said in an email that the evidence “strongly suggests” that alpha-gal syndrome is primarily associated with the bite of the Lone Star tick, or Amblyomma americanum, in the U.S.—even if some other native species of ticks have not been ruled out. Researchers first published a paper tying alpha-gal syndrome to tick bites in 2011. That was a decade before the Gates Foundation funded Oxitec’s program on self-limiting cattle ticks. […]
SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEOS PUSH BASELESS CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT BLUE ITEMS WERE SPARED FROM MAUI WILDFIRES
CLAIM: Only blue items survived the Maui wildfires and lasers do not impact that color, suggesting the island was actually hit by a directed energy weapon “attack.”
THE FACTS: The wildfires didn’t spare only blue things, with photos and videos clearly showing that buildings and objects of many colors both survived and perished. More importantly, there is ample evidence that Maui was ravaged by fires, while the notion that a weapon or laser was involved has been repeatedly debunked.
[…] One post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, also points to several blue t-shirts found under some rubble that were relatively unscathed. “Unbelievable. Everything that’s BLUE survived the Maui DEW attack, including T-SHIRTS,” reads the post. DEW stands for directed energy weapons—which use technology like high-energy lasers instead of projectiles like bullets. But these videos are not evidence that they have anything to do with the wildfires. To start, they show just a handful of blue items in the fire’s aftermath, but other footage and photos show these were hardly the only things left standing. The blue car and umbrellas can both be seen in drone footage of the devastation—but the same video also shows red and green dumpsters and buildings painted various other colors that survived. […]
It’s not uncommon to see some items and structures still standing after wildfires, because the fires often spread through flying embers that don’t hit everything, experts previously told the AP. Images of the fire’s aftermath do not show anything abnormal, they said. […]
Elon Musk’s alleged penchant for not paying bills is catching up with him. In the wake of numerous lawsuits claiming the world’s richest man failed to pay severance owed to many of the 6,000 employees he fired after acquiring Twitter. On Monday, CNBC reported that the tech company now known as X is facing some 2,200 arbitration cases filed by ex-employees, which come with $3.5 million in required fees—an amount that doesn’t even include the actual severance owed to those Musk let go.
In October, shortly after taking Twitter’s reins, Musk laid off more than half of its employees, promising most at least two months’ salary plus a week’s pay for every year they’d worked at the firm. Thousands claim that they haven’t received a single dime, and ex-employees have since filed several lawsuits seeking their promised benefits.
One of these suits, filed earlier this year, invokes an arbitration clause in employees’ contracts that, according to Mashable, leaves Musk’s company on the hook for $1,600 in arbitration fees per two-party case, but only requires that former employees pay $400. With over 2,000 cases, the social media network’s arbitration bill alone comes in at nearly $4 million.
X has reportedly refused to pay those bills, either—arguing that it hasn’t required the former employees to move their disputes to arbitration. Now, ex-staffers have filed another lawsuit demanding the company pay the fees associated with their original filing. […]
The Nobel Foundation on Saturday withdrew its invitation for representatives of Russia, Belarus and Iran to attend this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies after the decision announced a day earlier “provoked strong reactions.”
Several Swedish lawmakers said Friday they would boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremonies in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, after the private foundation that administers the prestigious awards changed its position from a year earlier and invited representatives of the three countries to attend, saying it “promotes opportunities to convey the important messages of the Nobel Prize to everyone.”
Some of the lawmakers cited Russia’s war on Ukraine and the crackdown on human rights in Iran as reasons for their boycott. Belarusian opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on Friday called on the Swedish Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Committee not to invite representatives of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s “illegitimate regime to any events.”
On Saturday, she welcomed the Nobel Foundation’s decision. She told The Associated Press that it was “a clear sign of solidarity with the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.”
“This is how you show your commitment to the principles and values of Nobel,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oleh Nikolenko called the decision a “victory for humanism.”
“Thank you to everyone who demanded that justice be restored,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that “a similar decision” should be made regarding the attendance of Russian and Belarusian ambassadors at celebrations taking place in Norway following the ceremony in Sweden. […]
However, the Norwegian Nobel Committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize said it would follow its usual practice and invite all ambassadors to the ceremony in the Norwegian capital of Oslo where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.
“The Committee wishes the government authorities in every country officially represented in Norway to have the opportunity to take part in the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony and to familiarize themselves with the Nobel Peace Prize laureates’ important message,” the Committee said to the AP in a statement.
“This applies not least to countries with an authoritarian regime which wage war against other countries or against their own population, and which our Peace Prize laureates oppose.”
Saturday’s announcement was widely praised in Sweden by politicians. Even the Swedish Royal House reacted with spokeswoman Margareta Thorgren saying, as quoted by newspaper Aftonbladet, that “we see the change in the decision as positive.” She added that King Carl XVI Gustaf was planning to hand out this year’s Nobel awards at ceremonies in Stockholm “as before.”
This year’s Nobel prize winners will be announced in early October. The laureates are then invited to receive their awards at glittering prize ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums.
[…] At least five large U.S. property insurers — including Allstate, American Family, Nationwide, Erie Insurance Group and Berkshire Hathaway — have told regulators that extreme weather patterns caused by climate change have led them to stop writing coverages in some regions, exclude protections from various weather events and raise monthly premiums and deductibles.
Major insurers say they will cut out damage caused by hurricanes, wind and hail from policies underwriting property along coastlines and in wildfire country, according to a voluntary survey conducted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state officials who regulate rates and policy forms.
Insurance providers are also more willing to drop existing policies in some locales as they become more vulnerable to natural disasters. Most home insurance coverages are annual terms, so providers are not bound to them for more than one year.
[…] U.S. insurers have disbursed $295.8 billion in natural disaster claims over the past three years, according to international risk management firm Aon. That’s a record for a three-year period, according to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.
Natural catastrophes in the first six months of 2023 year in the United States caused $40 billion in insured losses, the third costliest first-half on record, Aon found.
“There’s no place to hide from these severe natural disasters,” said David Sampson, president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. “They’re happening all over the country and so insurers are having to relook at their risk concentration.” [Graph at the link]
[…] Rate increases for homeowners insurance are regulated by state agencies. That can prevent firms from pricing policies that accurately reflect risk, said Daniel Schwarcz, who studies insurance markets at the University of Minnesota Law School. Instead of setting much higher prices for policies in specific areas that might be more vulnerable — such as regions below sea level or on the edge of fire-prone areas — insurance firms must set prices that are relatively comparable across an entire state.
[…] even state-backed policies must face climate risks.
“When you see the insurance companies pulling out en masse because the cost of rebuilding homes in Florida is bankrupting them,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, “it’s either hubris or folly to think the state wouldn’t be bankrupted stepping in to help.”
Environmentally, economically and in terms of pure human suffering, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam unleashed untold damage. Months later, many communities are still reeling.
[…] On June 6, seismic meters hundreds of miles away detected an enormous explosion at the Kakhovka dam along the Dnipro River. The reinforced concrete walls, more than 60 feet high and as much as 100 feet thick, crumbled, and 4.8 trillion gallons of water gushed out.
Scientific evidence indicates that the dam was blown up from the inside, almost certainly by the Russian forces occupying it. In one stroke, they unleashed epic floods on Ukraine and an ensuing drought that, taken together, brought a stunning level of destruction to the environment, the economy and the lives of civilians already enduring the hardships of war.
[…] This summer, a team of New York Times journalists traveled hundreds of miles from Zaporizhzhia in central Ukraine to Odesa on the Black Sea to assess the full impact. What we found were homes still soggy and smeared with mud; dead fish lying in droves; underwater mollusk colonies destroyed; a drinking-water crisis; an irrigation crisis for farmers; entire communities without work; and a yawning sense of loss whose dimensions have not yet been established.
During this war, the Russians have deliberately bombed power plants and grain silos, leaving no shortage of scorched-earth brutality. But the destruction of the Kakhovka dam stands out as perhaps the single most devastating and punitive blow even if the military intent was to flood the area and slow down Ukrainian troops. The way Ukrainians see it, the invading Russians are simply expressing a hatred of the land — and the people — that they are claiming as theirs.
This was a “katastrofa,” Mr. Bezan said.
[…] Dmytro Neveselyi, the towering young mayor of Zelenodolsk, looks more like a professional basketball player than the city administrator of a small town in the Ukrainian heartland. One afternoon this summer, he leaned over his desk and unfurled a World War II-era map.
Mr. Neveselyi and other civic leaders have been combing old maps like this one to locate wells and other possible sources of water that this area used when there was no dam.
“This is from the Nazis,” he explained, with a hint of amusement. “It’s the last good image we have of this area before the dam was built.”
[…] When the reservoir ran dry, a huge swath of Ukraine was left without running water. People stopped doing laundry. Some even used plastic bags to go to the bathroom.
[…] Since then, some water service has been restored by connecting pipes to other, much smaller reservoirs. But thousands of people still lack clean drinking water and are at the mercy of water trucks that make the rounds.
So the search for alternative water sources goes on.
The map that Mr. Neveselyi opened on his desk was a surprisingly clear black and white aerial photo taken by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, which was eventually discovered by American researchers and posted online.
It all seems hard to believe, he said.
“I spent my entire life on this waterside,” he said, as he walked along the dried-up lakeshore. “I still don’t believe what I’m actually seeing.”
[…] The vast agricultural heartland around the reservoir produced more than eight billion pounds of wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers and 80 percent of Ukraine’s vegetables each year, the Ukrainian authorities said. The reservoir was greatly responsible for that, irrigating more than 2,000 square miles.
“I don’t mean to be too pessimistic,” said Volodymyr Halia, a commercial farmer near the town of Apostolove. “But I haven’t heard any solutions for irrigation. These farms will dry up unless we rebuild the dam.”
[…] Right now, that is impossible. The Russians still control the area.
So the losses keep stacking up. This area’s farmers used to export their grain on river barges that tied up along the reservoir’s shores. The docks are still there. But instead of overlooking water, they sit astride miles of mud.
It’s difficult to know how much of a “katasrofa” the dam breach will be. The Kyiv School of Economics, along with Ukraine’s government, believes the attack cost at least $2 billion in direct losses, a toll that will most likely increase as times goes on.
[…] ‘Ecocide’
The Kahovka Reservoir was a wonderland for birds. It served as a way station for migratory species on their journeys from northern climes to Africa. Islands in the lake and marshy areas downriver were nesting sites for great herons, glossy ibises, Eurasian spoonbills and others, said Oleksii Vasyliuk, an ecologist and zoologist.
But when the torrent of water cascaded downstream, it wiped out countless nesting sites, and the birds who used to nest near the lake have vanished as well.
[…] In Odesa, 90 miles west of where the Dnipro flows into the Black Sea, Vladyslav Balinskyi, an ecologist, walked along the shore, glaring at beachgoers.
“Nobody should be swimming,” he said. “They don’t know what’s in that water.”
He rattled off pollutants that the flood had dumped into the sea: cadmium, strontium, mercury, lead, pesticides, fertilizers and 150 tons of machine oil used in the hydroelectric plant’s massive gears.
Nearly every day he dives to survey the impact on marine life.
“Fifty percent of the mussels have already died,” he said.
[…] Mykhailo Puryshev, an experienced humanitarian worker, was one of the few Ukrainian civilians who dared to rescue people on the Russian side. According to video footage and an interview he gave, he sped across the river in a pink boat wearing a pink helmet.
“I wanted to make sure the Russians saw me so they wouldn’t shoot me,” he said.
When he arrived in Oleshky, in Russian-controlled territory, he saw people standing on their rooftops, surrounded by water, waving white flags and shouting, “Help!”
According to the Ukrainian and Russian authorities, dozens died on the east bank of the river. Mr. Puryshev said some were disabled people who had drowned in their homes.
He rescued 10 children and two dogs and then got out.
“The Russians didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t see a single soldier anywhere.”
Amidst recent Ukrainian battlefield gains, nothing says “Russia knows it can’t hold its ill-gotten gains” more than the sudden flurry of propaganda selling “negotiations” to end the war.
At the start of the war, Russia attempted to decapitate Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv, installing its own pro-Russia puppet regime. It famously failed to do so.
Russia further attempted to accomplish its Novorossiya dream—expanding Russia’s boarders through eastern and southern Ukraine to the Russian-held breakaway region of Transnistria in Moldova. That failed when Russia realized it wasn’t going to take Odesa in an amphibious assault, and its advances around Mykolaiv were beat back.
But there was one final strategic goal that Russia did pull off, and that was the creation of a “land bridge” between mainland Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, through portions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts. It is Putin’s biggest war success in Ukraine, and it’s where Ukraine decided to deploy its new Western-trained and equipped forces, despite softer targets elsewhere along the front lines. [map at the link]
Ukraine now aims to sever that land bridge by driving to the Azov sea to the south. If they manage to accomplish it, Russia’s forces in Kherson and Crimea will be severed from their largest supply lines from mainland Russia to the east. Furthermore, Ukraine will be in missile range of the Kerch Bridge, allowing it to sever Russia’s other major supply line to that region from the south.
It was always a risky gambit. Russia built its strongest defenses in the area, and Ukraine has attacked them head-on. But the reward, if they can punch through to the Azov Sea, would dramatically reshape the state of play, denying Putin his one current victory and threatening his hold on Crimea, his last big 2014 victory.
With Ukrainian breakthroughs at Urizhaine and Robotyne, Russia’s defenses are looking increasingly rickety. Russia has had to redeploy its best forces from its northern offensive to the south, which has now led to Ukraine retaking lost positions in that direction.
So with Russia suddenly on its back heel, we’re seeing a concerted effort by Russian propaganda to sell the idea of “negotiations” to freeze the conflict, allowing Russian to retain at the diplomatic table what it can’t hold on the battlefield.
Online, it’s a million useful idiots and bots making some variation of the argument that “NATO/Europe/America want more Ukrainians to die.” [Tweets at the link, all of them transparently spouting Russian propaganda.]
The same people that turn a blind eye to Russia’s daily terrorism campaign against Ukrainian civilians are suddenly pretending that they care about saving Ukrainian lives—unlike that dastardly NATO! It’s insultingly absurd, but provides these Putin-loving sociopaths a veneer of moral authority. They just want peace!
But of course, a peace in which Ukrainians remain in occupied territory, to be raped, murdered, and subjugated by the Russian occupation, is no peace at all. That can’t be tolerated any more than if Jason Voorhes from the Friday the 13th franchise moved into their living room, and everyone said, “let him keep it, for peace!”
Yet this is exactly what we’re seeing more and more these days, like Edward Luttwak, a military historian:
Ukraine cannot win-its forces cannot sweep the Russian army from the field. Putin cannot lose because a reversion to the status quo ante would lose him the Kremlin & then all. Needed: an all-out US diplomatic drive. Each US denial of something UKR wanted is a bargaining chip. Act
To be clear, Luttwak literally considers Putin to be a friend. This is a direct quote:
One of Putin’s virtues is that he never forgets his friends. For years, I was invited to his presidential conferences — he would send me business class tickets to go to the conference. He is a wonderful fellow in many ways, and I am very sorry that he tripped up over Ukraine. But, if he loses power, he should be allowed to have a decent life. Why not?
There is literally no way in which the murderous Putin is “a wonderful fellow.” But if you’re that far up his ass, then sure, you’re not going to want to see him disgraced by a military defeat in Ukraine. Best to lock in those gains today!
There’s this deranged a-hole, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who pretends to run for president as a Democrat while talking to Tucker Carlson. [video at the link. OMFG]
I’m so happy no one is fooled by him anymore. Well, other than long-gone QAnon/MAGA conspiracy types.
The New York Times gave voice to the poor, downtrodden plight of those who advocate for negotiations.
[Georgetown professor Charles] Kupchan knows of what he speaks. He and Richard N. Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs in April, urging Washington and its allies to come up with “a plan for getting from the battlefield to the negotiating table,” and were widely criticized for doing so.
That criticism worsened considerably when the two men, together with Thomas E. Graham, a former American diplomat in Moscow, had private conversations with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to explore the possibility of negotiations.
Oh noes, the guys conspiring with Putin’s government on a “peace plan” were criticized! The article notes that the two men got a “storm of criticism and abuse”! What has the world come to, when people can’t work in secret with a murderous regime to reward their blatant flouting of international norms and human rights?
Hungary continues to carry Putin’s water. [Tweet and image at the link. In Hungary, they urged not to take Ukraine into NATO, but to give Russia security guarantees, head of the office of the Hungarian Prime Minister Gergely Gulyás said.
The Hungarian official also doubts that Ukraine will be able to return the territories occupied by Russia, and, in his opinion, effective negotiations can only take place with the participation of the United States.]
Victor Orban’s authoritarian government in Hungary is an increasing threat from inside both NATO and the European Union. Neither institution has a mechanism for expelling members, which now seems like a glaring oversight.
Ultimately, with former Wagner CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin, we’ve seen how Putin operates: [Tweet at the link: For those slow to learn, Putin just demonstrated his approach to negotiations:
– When in a position of weakness, offer a deal;
– When a deal is struck, rebuild your strength;
– When you are again strong – spectacularly and performatively renege on the deal to send a message.]
And given that Russia’s opening bid in any negotiations is the recognition of their occupied territories, the notion of negotiations is patently absurd … unless you actively want to reward Russia. [Tweet at the link: The recognition of the referendums held in the Zaparozhye and Kherson Oblasts, the DPR and LPR, and the accession of Crimea to Russia is [sic] a key precondition for reaching an agreement on a comprehensive settlement of the situation in Ukraine. [Those referendums where Russia claims that the Oblasts “freely expressed” their will. Bullshit.]]
Anyone who thinks we or anyone else can negotiate with Putin is spectacularly blind to even immediate history. Why anyone would think negotiations would solve anything, at this point, is beyond me.
There are two factors that will play into Putin’s willingness to negotiate:
1) Can Russia’s armed forces hold on to their gains, or possibly make new ones, and
2) The 2024 United States presidential election.
At this point, the best chance of actual fruitful negotiations, the kind that get Russia out of all Ukrainian territory, is predicated on giving Ukraine what it needs to win, and winning the 2024 election. We can’t let Donald Trump bail Putin out. This is right: “We have to strengthen Ukraine’s position in every frontier,” before negotiations can happen, and Ukraine’s territorial integrity has to be a starting point to any future negotiations. [Tweet at the link]
In the meantime, Russia continues to strike civilian targets instead of military ones, reminding the world that it really doesn’t pay to negotiate with terrorists.
President Biden Sunday announced his five nominations for the U.S. representatives to the upcoming General Assembly of the United Nations (UN).
The nominees include Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), political consultant Janet Keller, former Georgia state Rep. Calvin Smyre (D), and Jeffrey Worthe, president of Worthe Real Estate Group.
Lee has represented California’s 12th District since 1998 and launched a bid earlier this year in the California Senate race in 2024 to replace retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)’s seat. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Policy and Steering Committee and also serves on the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee.
Hill has served in Congress since January of 2015, representing Arkansas’s 2nd Congressional District. He serves as vice chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and as chairman of the new subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Inclusion. He also serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Intelligence and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The president typically appoints one Democrat and one Republican to serve as U.S. representatives to the session, according to the Congressional Research Service. The nominees are then confirmed by a full Senate vote.
Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and James Risch (R-Idaho) served as the Congressional representatives in the latest UN General Assembly session.
Biden’s other three nominees bring experience in local politics, public policy and property development.
Smyre served for 48 years in the Georgia House of Representatives. He is currently the president emeritus of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and was formerly a member of the National Conference of State Legislators. In 2022, Biden nominated Smyre to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas.
Keller has over 30 years of politics and public policy experience, according to the White House. In 1990, she founded Keller Consultants, a consulting firm for candidates, campaigns and private clients, and later served on various leadership boards in California. She also advocated for survivors of disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar.
Worthe is the president of the Worthe Real Estate Group, a Santa Monica-based firm specializing in the development and refurbishment of office properties in Los Angeles. According to The White House, Worthe also has supported charities and local organizations throughout Los Angeles.
The 78th annual session for the UN General Assembly will open Tuesday and meetings and debates will begin Sept. 18. The General Assembly includes all 193 UN member states, including the U.S., which are each allowed one vote on key issues related to peace, security, admission of new members, and the budget.
According to a statement from the UN Foundation, this year’s General Assembly will take place “at a time of unprecedented setbacks on global progress.”
I get more excited seeing Russian logistics eliminated than tanks. [Tweet and video at the link: 44th Artillery brigade whom we have supplied with drones, are demolishing RU logistics. Support our work at http://vaukraine.com]
This was near Verbove, just on the other side of Russia’s main defensive line around Robotyne.
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Ukrainian artillery is absolutely pounding Russian defenses near Verbove. [Tweet and video at the link]
Remember when it was the Russian side that could rain this kind of steel? Yet here is Ukraine laying it down thick, with no apparent Russian counter battery response.
Must feel great to be those Ukrainians in that trench, seeing the other side get a taste of their own medicine.
—————————–
The now-nightly Ukrainian drone barrage against military targets in Russian cities has resumed: [Tweet at the link: Ukrainian suicide drones strike the FSB HQ in Kurchatov in the Kursk region of Russia. Russian air defenses seem to be non-existent.]
———————————
Albania’s prime minister laughing at Putin’s expense. [video, with subtitles, at the link]
[…] Former Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal also said he hiked through mud to get out of Black Rock City on Saturday.
“It was an incredibly harrowing 6 mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud, but I got safely out of Burning Man,” Katyal wrote on Twitter. “Never been before and it was fantastic (with brilliant art and fabulous music)…except the ending.”
[…] “No one should try this unless in good shape and part of a group,” he warned. “It was quite hard, and will get harder if/when it rains more. Talk your friends out of the hike unless you really think they can do it safely. There are treacherous places where it is worse than walking on ice.” […]
Russian high school seniors will return to classrooms this week to find history rewritten in the image of President Vladimir Putin.
A new textbook — churned out in just four months and touted as the first state effort to unify teaching of the subject since the Soviet era — echoes Kremlin propaganda justifying the war in Ukraine, the latest stage of a drive to shape the worldview of a new generation.
The book will be used by history teachers across the country, including in Russian occupied Ukrainian territories, to teach students in their final year of high school about the period from 1945 on.
They will read that the Kremlin’s “special military operation” is unifying society against an “ultranationalist” neighbor and its Western backers, who are to blame for instigating the conflict. Russian soldiers are profiled as heroes, with no mention of civilian casualties or war crime accusations. […]
NBC News spoke with Russian history teachers — both former and active — about the push to teach a version of history that matches the Kremlin’s propaganda. Some expressed anger and dismay about the new textbook.
“From the teaching perspective, it’s very primitive and boring,” said Tamara Eidelman, 64, who taught history for 40 years in Moscow and runs a popular history channel on YouTube.
“From an ideological point of view, it’s simply poison,” she said.
[…] And then there’s the textbook, which NBC News viewed online, where it’s now available for purchase.
The 36 chapters that precede the section on the war in Ukraine build up to it in a very strategic way, Eidelman said.
They extol the then-Soviet Union, even under Joseph Stalin — whose image as a brutal dictator has been rehabilitated under Putin — and paint its collapse as a great tragedy, just as Putin does. The Russian leader is presented as a man who saved the country from the ruins and is now left defending it from the same enemies who threatened the USSR, she said.
“And with that the children are led” to “the propaganda that hits you in the nose,” said Eidelman, who left Russia after the invasion and now lives in Portugal.
The chapter on the war in Ukraine repeats the Kremlin narrative that it had to attack its neighbor to avoid Ukraine joining NATO and risking a broader conflict.
“It would perhaps be the end of civilization,” the textbook says. “It could not be allowed.”
It accuses the West of instigating the war and trying to destroy Russia economically, while reiterating the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazism. The chapter also features profiles of Russian soldiers who fought or died in combat, but doesn’t mention how many have died.
Students are cautioned against consuming online information about what is happening in Ukraine to avoid being “manipulated” by what it calls a “global industry” of fakes.
“This has nothing to do with history. It’s hardcore propaganda, Soviet-era style,” said a former history teacher, who did not want his name published over fear of repercussions for his family still in Russia.
He said he was “in shock” after reading the textbook, whose tone often matches that of Putin’s speeches.
“It’s not just an attempt by the Kremlin to influence young minds, but pure indoctrination of the young generation,” said the teacher, who left Russia late last year and now teaches in another country. “It’s their way to form a society loyal to Putin.”
[…] Ukraine decried the use of the new textbooks in occupied regions, accusing Russia of “using education as a weapon.” The new textbook is “a new level of militarization of education and propaganda of war among children,” Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said.
[…] No country looks at history objectively, but this is different because “what they are doing is they are saying — it’s either this or prison,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whose time at the helm is also profiled in the textbook.
”That makes it a Stalinesque version of history,” she said.
Eidelman said she was worried about her colleagues remaining in Russia who might share her moral opposition to the new textbook, leaving them “in the most difficult circumstances.”
The history teacher who left Russia last year and wanted to remain anonymous also said he feared many would have to swallow their professional pride, unless they are willing to risk getting fired or prosecuted.
“There are fewer and fewer teachers who are ready to go against the system,” he said. “Many have left the country, and those remaining are just really afraid.” […]
[…] “You’re laughing?,” another viral X post read. “Influencers at Burning Man are unable to fulfill sponsored content agreements and you’re laughing?”
[…] Being trapped at Burning Man seems almost as bad as being trapped in a conversation with someone who went to Burning Man.
[…] “I think there’s a general perception that the people who attend Burning Man are very privileged and entitled,” Haberman said. “These are incredibly wealthy people who are able to go sit up in the desert for a week, have fun and party and then go back to their very comfortable lives. So the idea that they’ve been inconvenienced is, in some way, sort of humorous.”
[…] “If you dont want to be trapped in a flooded lake bed, dont have a festival in a dried out lake bed in the desert,” read the caption of one TikTok commentary video that racked up nearly 500,000 likes in a day. […]
StevoRsays
While the pace of the counteroffensive may have been slower than expected in the past three months, there is cause for optimism amongst western allies over Ukraine’s progress in this past week.
On Friday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was upbeat in his latest assessment.
“We have noted over the last 72 hours or so, some notable progress by Ukrainian armed forces … in that southern line of advance coming out of the Zaporizhzhia area,” he said.
The recent liberation of the village of Robotyne has been a huge morale boost for Ukrainian forces.
Mr Kuleba described it as the first step to cutting off the land bridge and strangling Russian supply lines.
“Pro-brith” (aka “subjugate women”), racism and eugenics is alive and well in the US. They’re staging a “Natal” conference in Austen, Texas: Revealed: US pro-birth conference’s links to far-right eugenicists. In case you don’t know, the say the world’s population is shrinking and that’s a bad thing.
The prosecution related to the Jan. 6, 2021 siege is the largest in American history, with approximately 1,100 criminal defendants from nearly every state. Though more than 600 of those defendants have pleaded guilty and dozens more have gone to trial, at least six became – or were — fugitives over the course of this summer. Some are still wanted by the FBI. Eric Bochene was one of them…
Yesterday’s update by Ukraine’s general staff was typical of recent months. Their claims of destroyed Russian personnel and equipment were relatively light with just four tanks claimed destroyed, and 460 Russian soldiers killed (almost assuredly inflated, but about half of what we were seeing during Wagner’s Bakhmut offensive). But it certainly wasn’t light on the two most important categories at this time—artillery (31 guns and MLRS), and trucks (47), which are used to supply Russian forces on the line of contact.
While big recent Ukrainian gains have slightly quelled the “Ukraine is advancing too slowly” kvetching, Ukraine is still mostly shaping the battlefield—that is, creating the conditions for future successes.
Remember, there is no longer such a thing as “surprise attack” in this age of drones, and Ukraine still hasn’t shown a real ability to move at night. As such, any advancing Ukrainian forces have been at the mercy of Russia’s big guns, which lay down a curtain of steel death on any advance. But take that artillery away? And suddenly you see the kinds of advances we’ve seen from Ukraine the last two weeks.
Same with supplies. Russians on the defensive line need food, water, fuel, lubricants, ammunition, and tons of things you don’t even think about (I assume they don’t get toilet paper, but they should). Look at video of overrun Russian positions and you see the mountains of trash, including piles of plastic water bottles.
All of those supplies got to that trench in a truck. Take away the trucks, and you have hungry, thirsty, and ineffective soldiers at the trenches. Better yet, their armored vehicles can’t move.
Thus, while people have complained about the lack of “progress” on the front lines, the artillery balance of power has completed shifted to Ukraine’s advantage. That kind of unheralded success makes scenes like this one possible: [Tweet and video at the link]
Ukrainian soldiers sit in their trenches enjoying the relentless artillery barrage on Russian positions. This was the sort of video that we’d see reversed the first year of the war, even at Bakhmut this year—non-stop Russian artillery pounding the crap out of Ukrainian positions.
Now, not only does Ukraine enjoy that newly earned artillery edge, but that artillery seems unconcerned with counter battery fire. Not only do Western guns outrange Russia’s Soviet-era guns, and not only are they more accurate and efficient, but Russia doesn’t have much left to strike back. […] about those Ukrainian soldiers. Nothing is hitting them.
There have been recent videos of Russian suicide drones taking out Ukrainian artillery, but all those hits are in daytime. At night, Ukrainian artillery can do whatever it wants unimpeded, with little fear of Russian countermeasures. (See image at top for what Ukraine has to do during the day to counter the suicide drone threat.) Not that daytime brings Russia any reprieve: [Tweet and video at the link]
Trenches are designed in those jagged lines to minimize the impact of a direct artillery hit. But that is cold comfort when getting pounding by tube artillery, mortars, and both suicide drones, and those carrying grenades.
So what we have is the return of the Soviet-style tactics that Russia used to get most of their gains—pound the bejeezus out of an enemy defensive emplacement, probe it to see if anything is left over, rinse, lather, and repeat until no defenders are left. The advances are slower, but once those lines are all breached, it’s off to the races. And unlike Russia that probed with recruited criminals, Ukraine can fly a drone to assess the damage.
Interestingly, we haven’t heard Ukraine complain about shell shortages lately, and that nighttime barrage suggests none exists at this time. Turns out that shipping several million cluster shells to Ukraine alleviated any immediate needs, while ramped up global production should feed Ukraine’s hungry artillery machine in the future. (Russia has serious “shell hunger,” and they seem ready to receive ammunition from North Korea alleviating their challenges.)
Want to see another consequence of “shaping the battlefield”? Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen Ukraine successfully destroy major Russian air defense systems all around the contact line. The biggest was the destruction of a half-billion dollar S-400 complex in Crimea, followed up with a special forces raid the next day that reportedly destroyed an air defense radar complex. [Tweet and video at the link]
Why does this matter? Yesterday, Ukraine released video of two attacks carried out by TB2 Bayraktar drones.
The first destroyed a small Russian landing boat trying to ferry a sabotage party into Ukrainian held territory. [Tweet and video at the link]
We also got this video of a TB2 taking out a supply truck. [Tweet and video at the link]
You’d be forgiven if you forgot all about the Bayraktar, the hero of the first few weeks of the war. They had been essentially limited to long-range reconnaissance, as they were too vulnerable to Russian air defense systems. Indeed, the only reason they had their moment at the start of the war was because Russia didn’t move air defenses in with their invading spearhead, thinking that light resistance and army defections would end the war quickly. There’s even been reports that Russia didn’t turn on the systems they did have out of some sense of “give Ukraine time to surrender” sentiment.
Once those air defense systems were turned on, Bayraktars disappeared from the battlefield, both literally (shot down) and figuratively (relegated to other non-visible roles, far behind enemy lines).
Ukraine might still have up to 20 TB2s, and they’re suddenly flying over Kherson oblast again.
Shaping the battlefield might not be sexy for those expecting video of big tank armies flying across open fields, but that’s how Ukraine wins this war. Doing the methodical work of degrading Russian artillery, defenses, and logistics, will pay huge dividends when Ukraine finally punches through Russia’s prepared defensive lines.
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A Ukrainian love sonnet to the British Challenger tank. [Tweet and video at the link: “A sniper rifle among tanks” – A Ukrainian tanker shares impressions of using a British Challenger 2 tank in battle. – “We could use a few more companies in Ukraine… russian tanks would be too scared to come out.” [More of the “sonnet” in the video, such as a description of hitting a Russian tank at a distance of 5 kilometers.]]
Quick observation. Lots of discussion of Ukraine hitting a convoy of supply trucks headed to Verbove, great example of DPICM at work. But what people should really pay attention to is WHERE the strike happened. Due south of Verbove, at least 6-7km behind the current front lines of combat, in the heaviest contested section of ground in the entire war.
If Ukrainian recon drones are freely flying 6-7km deep behind verbove, that means the entire sector is under observation by Ukrainian artillery spotting drones. No wonder it’s open season for Bayraktars and Ukrainian artillery.
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Sometime in the last week there was the question of an probing mission vs a breakout, and you and I both answered about the same: really didn’t matter, the more minimal incursion had broad implications anyway.
[…] the sacking of Oleksii Reznikov as the Ukrainian Minister of Defence […]
The straw that likely broke the camel’s back for Zelenskyy was the recent scandal involving the purchase of winter clothing for $33 million in Turkey, which turned out to be summer clothing made of inferior fabric and declared at highly inflated values in the customs documents […]
In January, it was already revealed that the Ministry of Defence, under the close associates of the minister, had entered into a food supply contract worth approximately 340 million euros at significantly inflated prices. At that time, Reznikov dismissed these allegations as a false story spread to undermine the confidence of the allied partners, but they were later confirmed. Similar reports spoke of subpar or undelivered fragmentation vests, helmets, and even weapons. First-aid kits were reportedly not initially procured, and those donated through international aid were not tested for their usability on the battlefield.
Reznikov, as an internationally well-connected former top-notch lawyer, was undoubtedly useful for a long time in maximizing assistance and weapons deliveries from the international community. However, at some point, the damage caused became too great, and the domestic outrage could no longer be ignored. Therefore, Zelenskyy had no choice but to finally dismiss him in the end. A risky affair in the midst of war, as a change in leadership is always associated with uncertainties and disruptions […]
At this time there are no allegations that Reznikov personally benefited from the corrupt acts of his subordinates, so it’s only logical to use him at a new post where he can put his international connections to the best use of his country and on the other hand is not involved in procurement decisions any longer. As an ambassador tho the UK he probably can even deepen the ties to one of its closest western ally and help getting Ukraine more of the technology it so desperately needs to win this war.
Personally, I believe that Zelenskyy has killed two birds with one stone with this move. On one hand, he is getting rid of a whole group of people who have tried to enrich themselves personally, as Reznikov’s closest confidants surely also will be shown the door. On the other hand, he has chosen a successor whom I believe can and will fulfill multiple roles.
His successor, Rustem Umierov, as far as I know, has no military experience, but as a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team he already had to deal with the Russians in March 2022. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in finance and spent one year as an exchange student in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, a borough 60 miles north of Philadelphia, so he is certainly well versed in Western culture.
Coming from a family of Crimean Tatars he is the first Muslim to serve as Ukrainian defence minister and getting appointed to his post by the first Jewish President of Ukraine is a constellation like no other. As a politician he is a member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine from the Holos (“Voice”) party, which is the party with the least members who overcame the 5% barrier and is in opposition to the pro-presidential party “Servant of the People”. So choosing a member of an opposition party as one of his ministers without needing the support of this party is also a thing that does not happen every day.
But now to the subject of why I think this move by Zelenskyy is genius: Umierov co-chairs the groups for inter-parliamentary relations with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. He speaks Turkish, which surely won’t hurt when negotiating with Erdogan and his former connections to the Saudis may even earn him some bonus points with MBS (which is short hand for “Mister Bone Saw”) and get Ukraine if not military support, then at least economic aid.
On 06/30/21 he wrote in an opinion piece about a law introducing the rights of indigenous people:
The history of my family comes from Crimea. My grandfathers were the first of the Crimean Tatars of Alushta who studied in the first Crimean Tatar school and knew Russian. After school, Seyt-Ibraim’s grandfather worked as a scribe, and then became the head of the Alushta village. Later, he engaged in international trade and even opened one of the first cafes in Alushta.
The second great-grandfather of Amet Mustafa was imam-hatib of the first Alushta mosque in the 18th century. In modern language, this is a consultant on legal issues.
The Crimean Tatars in Crimea have experienced a lot – several immigrations after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 1783, deportations in 1944, dispossession by the Soviet authorities. We have been experiencing the temporary occupation of our lands for the eighth hour.
The entire history of the Crimean Tatar people is concentrated in Crimea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Crimean Tatars were one of the most active pro-Ukrainian forces on the peninsula. For example, even now, of the more than a hundred political prisoners illegally arrested by the occupier today, two-thirds are Crimean Tatars. […]
Today, more than 350,000 Crimean Tatars live in Ukraine. Most of them stayed to live in the temporarily occupied Crimea.
Every day, the Kremlin continues its policy of repression and intimidation of the Crimean Tatars. Only in the first quarter of 2021, Russian security forces detained 146 people in Crimea, most of them Crimean Tatars.
More than 100 citizens of Ukraine, most of them Crimean Tatars, are still illegally imprisoned in Russian prisons.
Russia spreads propaganda and stereotypes about the Crimean Tatars, making them extremists and terrorists.
It prohibits communication in the Crimean Tatar language, publishing national media, prohibits religious activities and persecutes independent mass media.
For example, a few days ago the political prisoner Servet Gaziyev was taken out of the courtroom only because he spoke in the Crimean Tatar language.
Against the background of such a systematic destruction of the Crimean Tatar people, the Crimean Tatars need state support from Ukraine.
By appointing a Crimean Tatar with a family history like Umierov’s, Zelensky is probably sending the strongest signal to Russia that he never will back down from the fact that “Crimea is Ukraine”. Here’s to hope that Umierov will get the support of the armed forces of Ukraine and of their commander-in-chief, Valery Zaluzhny.
Seems like Zelenskyy has an ongoing battle rooting out the old system of corruption, but he is making a go of it.
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If the individual is an able administrator, lack of subject matter expertise isn’t necessarily a problem. A good administrator can work with experts in his own department to handle operational stuff, as long as they know enough not to get snowed by bullshit.
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A Jewish president and a Muslim Minister of Defense—watch out for American rightwing hysterics.
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[…] overcoming Turkey’s reluctance to accept Ukraine into NATO. Uprooting corruption is a key factor in achieving closer ties through Europe and the US. […] Hard to undo a Russian fostered system of corruption in just a few short years as well as fighting a war. Zelenskyy must be one hard man to say ‘no’ to.
——————–
Appointing a Crimean Tartar to this post is a big statement
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At this point I’m prepared to to give Oleksii Reznikov the benefit of the doubt in saying he was almost certainly not corrupt, but almost certainly not a good manager.
I wish Mr Umierov every success in rooting out the corruption…
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The fucking corruption of whoever was involved in those inflated prices for shitty products is just beyond disgusting when these people are literally fighting (and dying) for their lives.
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The new guy is younger. He was a school age kid when the USSR broke up. Reznikov was in his mid 20s, so he grew up with the corruption of the Soviet system. I’m not suggesting Reznikov is dirty, but it would have been hard for him to drop the hammer on business associates he’s been working with for several decades. There’s a good chance Umierov isn’t carrying that same baggage.
[…] The Washington Post recently reported on Trump’s future plans for our economy and—you guessed it—they’re nearly as simple and wrongheaded as he is.
Even in the face of growing personal legal peril, Donald Trump summoned his top economic advisers to his private golf club in New Jersey for a two-hour dinner last Wednesday night to map out a trade-focused economic plan for his presidential bid.
Trump and top aides, including former senior White House officials Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins, as well as outside advisers Stephen Moore and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, spent the dinner discussing how Trump could attack President Biden in the 2024 election on the economy, amid a recent spate of positive economic news that has buoyed Biden’s fortunes, according to three people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private event.
Indeed, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s rapidly improving economy may be a slight stumbling block to Trump’s dreams of reinfecting the White House. Biden’s economy has added more than 13 million jobs, the unemployment rate recently hit historic lows, and post-COVID-19 inflation—which has bedeviled nearly every grocery shopper in the nation—has recently plummeted, giving hope that prices might stabilize before the Fed can force a recession through its ongoing and aggressive interest rate hikes. And while Americans who remain pressured by higher prices are unlikely to care as much as economists do, inflation in the U.S. has generally come down much faster than in other countries—all of which were similarly derailed by the pandemic—even as job growth has continued at a healthy clip.
So did Trump assemble a team of Nobel Prize-winning economists to fashion a nuanced economic plan that addresses wealth inequality and the acute and escalating challenges presented by climate change? Of course not. He’s quadrupling down on one of the worst ideas from his first (and hopefully only) term in order to bedazzle his slobberingly ignorant hordes and stay out of jail. And he’s consulting the always wrong Larry Kudlow; goofball supply-sider Stephen Moore; and Newt Gingrich, who is divorced from reality […]
In a recent Fox Business interview, Trump told Kudlow that he’d set the 10% tariff “automatically” for all countries. “I think we should have a ring around the collar,” said Trump. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10% tax. … I do like the 10% for everybody.”
Is it actually possible that Trump still doesn’t know other countries don’t pay those tariffs? That, in fact, we do? Does he still not understand this basic bottom-line truth about tariffs and their immediate impacts? [Probably. Yes. Trump doesn’t understand, and he is incapable of learning.] Well, given that he once called Gen. Mike Flynn, his then-national security adviser, in the middle of the night to find out if a strong or weak dollar was better for the economy, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. But then there are still people in America who think he’s good at business.
Of course, most mainstream economists (i.e., not Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore) are flat-out horrified by Trump’s proposal.
Economists of both parties said Trump’s tariff proposal is extremely dangerous. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, called the idea “lunacy” and “horrifying” and said it would lead the other major economies around the world to conclude the United States cannot be trusted as a trading partner. Although aimed at bolstering domestic production, a 10 percent tariff would hurt the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on imports, while also crippling the thousands of U.S. firms that depend on foreign exports, Posen said.
Posen also noted, “You would be depriving American families of an enormous amount of choice, making their lives much more expensive, and putting millions of people out of work.”
Well, sure, but millions of out-of-work people might finally be enough to successfully storm the Capitol, leading to a Thousand Year Trumpian Reich. Score!
Posen was hardly alone, of course. “On net, this would harm the American economy substantially” and “would gum up our whole production process,” Chris Clarke, a Washington State University economist, told The Post. “Producers would have higher costs, and now all the consumers are paying higher prices for goods that used to be imported.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s effervescent brain farts are doing what many thought impossible: uniting red and blue America—or at least the economic wonks among us. “[Trump’s plan] would be a disaster for the U.S. economy,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It would raise prices for consumers and be met with considerable retaliation from other nations, which would raise the costs facing U.S. businesses. It would reduce employment among manufacturing workers. It would be very, very bad.”
And while President Biden left many of his predecessors’ tariffs in place—the Chinese tariffs are still reportedly under review—Trump’s new plan would likely result in a fresh, and outsized, blow to the economy. A January 2021 study pegged the job losses resulting from Trump’s China tariffs alone at 245,000.
Then again, job growth, domestic prices, and the overall financial well-being of Americans are not generally top-of-mind for Trump. But grifting sure as shit is. As Posen notes, a 10% across-the-board tariff would give Trump a chance to issue exemptions to countries he likes that pay him off. “It is a recipe for corruption,” Posen said. “They will decide that whoever cozies up to Trump, or whoever his commerce secretary is, will get the exception.”
[…] More corruption and absurd conflicts of interest. […]
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plans to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin this month to discuss North Korea possibly providing Moscow with munitions in the Ukraine war, according to a U.S. official. Russia’s military is trying to bolster its weapon supplies amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
After meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, Putin declined to rejoin the Black Sea Grain Initiative that Moscow abandoned in July, deepening a problem for global food security. Following the negotiations, Erdogan said Ukraine needed to compromise with Russia on the deal, Turkey’s state-owned Anadolu Agency reported. […]
Putin and Kim probably will meet in Vladivostok, a port city in eastern Russia not far from North Korea. The senior U.S. official who confirmed the meeting to The Washington Post spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. The White House said last week that it had intelligence showing Putin and Kim had swapped letters.
Russia intends to send 1 million tons of grain to Turkey for delivery to the world’s poorest countries, Putin said after talks with Erdogan, but the two leaders had not agreed to reinstate the larger grain deal that had been brokered by Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Nations. Putin instead reiterated that Russia would rejoin the grain deal only when restrictions on Russian exports are lifted.
[…] Ukraine’s foreign minister said the grain deal should not be restored by conceding to Russian demands. Dmytro Kuleba said Russia’s insistence that it would rejoin the deal when its demands are met was “blackmail,” according to the Ukrainian news outlet Ukrinform. He added that if Ukraine made concessions to Russia now, in a month Moscow might call for yet additional terms to stay in the agreement. […]
lumipunasays
Hello all, I’m losing track here.
The newly elected Finnish government is still rightwing and racist. Today was the start of parliamentary function after summer break.
Yesterday was a big demonstration against racism here in Helsinki. I was there, with a friend, though not for the whole duration (only a couple hours, including a march). The organizers estimate that 20,000 people attended for some part of the event, and 14,000 marched.
The existence of Mifepristone, commonly referred to as the “abortion pill,” presents a unique challenge to the anti-abortion lobby. Because it is normally used to terminate pregnancies within ten weeks, well before any semblance of “fetal viability” has occurred, and can be used without any medical intervention, the arguments usually employed by those who seek to control pregnant people’s reproductive decisions are far less persuasive. Consequently, forced birthers are themselves obligated to invent new and novel justifications for their position. In doing so, they inevitably reveal more about their true motivations, which are ultimately all about control: specifically, and most obviously, control over women and pregnant people.
On August 16, a three-judge panel for the staunchly right-wing U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld (in part) the decision of the Trump-appointed Texas District Judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who had, at the urging of several anti-choice organizations, unilaterally suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of use of mifepristone (known as the “abortion pill”) by women and others who might become pregnant. The appellate court, in a 2-1 ruling, permitted the drug to remain on the market, but affirmed the restrictions Kacsmaryk previously imposed, including a prohibition on prescribing the drug past seven weeks’ of pregnancy and forbidding the drug’s delivery by mail. Those restrictions, currently on hold due to a prior stay ordered by the Supreme Court, will almost certainly be taken up by that same Supreme Court for hearing and decision next year.
Both Judges in the Circuit Court’s majority were appointed by Republicans: Jennifer Elrod, appointed by George W. Bush, and Cory Wilson, appointed by Donald Trump. However, the third judge, James Ho, also appointed by Trump, dissented in part from the majority’s ruling while concurring with other aspects of its final opinion. In his dissent, Ho made clear he would have upheld Kacsmaryk’s ruling in the the lower court, which would have maintained an absolute ban on the drug mifepristone. In that separate dissent, Ho advanced what may well be the most disturbing rationale yet for prohibiting the right to abortion, as wielded by the the virulent forced birth lobby.
In essence, Ho would hold that Mifepristone, because it terminates pregnancy at such an early stage, would deprive doctors and medical practitioners of the “aesthetic” pleasure of peering into a woman (or pregnant person’s) body.
As observed by professor Rhonda Garelick of Southern Methodist University, writing for the Los Angeles Times, Ho held that doctors could bring an actionable claim against abortion drugs based on the “aesthetic injury” they impart—to the doctors:
In what seemed a baffling argument, Ho wrote, “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them. Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”
As reported by Laura Clawson for this site, to bolster his bizarre position, Ho cited to multiple environmental law cases in which courts held that tourists or other nature aficionados were permitted to sue government agencies and developers whose actions had deprived them from experiencing the pleasurable “aesthetic” enjoyment of the natural world. For example, Ho argued, “[I]f a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”
Leaving aside the crass comparison of women and others who become pregnant to wild (or captive) animals existing solely for the joy of viewing by others, Garelick recognizes in Ho’s opinion an even more sinister aspect about the forced birth movement in general:
To construe abortion as a crime against the privilege of looking inside women is to construe them as objects offered up for the visual consumption, pleasure and, of course, control of others.
This is not a new concept. Psychoanalytic critics use the term “scopophilia” to refer to a presumably male audience’s erotic viewing enjoyment of the prurient presentation of women’s bodies in film or television, for example. Scopophilia objectifies women, turning them into visual surfaces to be looked at, embellished, augmented or reduced, perfected and consumed — in a word, commodified.
As Garelick notes, mifepristone uniquely prevents this type of “commodification” at the outset by forestalling any opportunity for medical practitioners to surveil their female patients. […]
As Garelick sees it, the language and reasoning employed by Ho and others of his ilk is not simply offensive. It’s not only a scramble on the part of the forced birth lobby to justify restricting abortion by any means necessary, but a calculated and intentional repositioning of the abortion argument in response to the existential “threat” afforded by a drug that can terminate a pregnancy before even the watchful eyes of medical practitioners are involved.
Mifepristone in this way offers women a powerful mode of resistance to the kind of compulsory bodily visibility that Ho advocates. Perhaps that’s why the judge chose the seemingly bizarre grounds of “aesthetic injury” to argue against access to the drug. It allows him to reposition abortion in the very realm from which mifepristone effectively frees it: that of prurient visual surveillance.
As has been repeatedly emphasized by pro-choice activists (and confirmed by forced birth proponents), the movement to restrict or dictate the reproductive decisions of women and others who become pregnant did not end with the Dobbs decision. Right-wing Republican judges exactly like James Ho (who was—and presumably still is—on Donald Trump’s shortlist for a Supreme Court nomination) will continue to spin legal arguments out of whole cloth until they achieve their goal of complete control. They will not stop short of that goal until they are defeated.
This is why the 2024 election, and the next, and the one after, are so incredibly important.
In a recurring scene, meant to symbolize the inching along of the scientists’ efforts, Oppenheimer fills an empty glass bowl with marbles […] uranium […] But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: […] Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.
[…]
Initially, uranium was just a waste byproduct of digging for the more valuable radium […] Uranium was now coveted. […] 100 kilograms of Congolese uranium ore could yield about 1 kilogram of refined uranium. The same amount of ore from the other locations would yield only 2 or 3 grams
[…]
The mining company typically built fenced-in compounds that resembled prison camps for the workers […] gave each family about 43 square feet—the size of a small garage—and weekly food rations. […] unable to move freely without permits. Or to vote. Workers had to be home by 9 pm, lest they suffer harsh consequences. Pay was terrible. […] December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, […] Black employees organized a massive mining strike […] The next morning, the mine workers showed up to the local soccer stadium to negotiate […] Soldiers opened fire “from all directions.” […] Roughly 70 people died. About 100 were injured.
[…]
About a year after Pearl Harbor, […] the Manhattan Project [began and immediately called upon the mine]. […] both sides wanted the Congolese ore. The Shinkolobwe mine was “a freak occurrence in nature […] Nothing like it has ever again been found.” […] without Congo’s Black workers—terrorized and chicote-d into submission, digging essential war minerals 24 hours a day—the outcome of arguably the most consequential project in human history would have been very different.
(40:23): Shinkolobwe vanished from history. It continued to produce that material until at least the late ’50s. […] Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966 invented this character who’s an African king who ruled […] in self-imposed secrecy, because […] an African country with access to this powerful material would be instantly destroyed by by more powerful interests
[…] Black Panther. The incredible irony of this movie is that there’s a character who becomes an ally […] a CIA agent. […] The CIA spent the next several decades trying with great enthusiasm and desperation to control their deniability of Congo’s uranium […] which led to the arrangement—by America and Belgium’s intelligence and combined mining interests—of the assassination of Congo’s first prime minister. Kirby and Lee wrote […] in the aftermath of a US-sponsored coup that installed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who renamed the country Zaire […] my father was there […] as an employee of the CIA […] served as Mobutu Sese Seko’s personal helicopter pilot.
* Rest is mostly logistics of processing and irresponsible waste disposal in the US.
For the first time, the arm of St. Jude will leave Italy and tour churches, schools, prisons, and more across the United States beginning this month, a Catholic evangelization ministry announced this week.
The relic of one of Jesus’ 12 apostles, considered to be the patron saint of hopeless or difficult causes, is scheduled to first stop at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago on Sept. 9 and be on tour until May 2024. Local news outlets and church organizers said thousands of visitors are expected during various stops along its nine-month tour…
I just love it when people try to tell me how modern and science-friendly the Catholic church is because they didn’t oppose evolution to the extent the bottom-feeding Protestant churches did. Relics, miracles, exorcists – it is a very medieval organization.
Akira MacKenziesays
@116
Insert meme of Ken Watanabe from Godzilla movie saying “Let them fight.”
Akira MacKenziesays
WHOOPS! Please ignore that last one. When I read “ADL”, my buggy brain mistook it for the “Catholic League.” I thought that old Bill Donahue said something that pissed Elon off and it resulted in a flame war.
If global warming reaches or exceeds two degrees Celsius by 2100, University of Western Ontario’s Joshua Pearce says it is likely that mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century.The oil and gas industry, which includes many of the most profitable and powerful businesses in the world, is directly and indirectly responsible for more than 40% of carbon emissions—impacting the lives of billions of people, many living in the world’s most remote and low-resourced communities.
A new study proposes aggressive energy policies that would enable immediate and substantive decreases to carbon emissions and recommends a heightened level of government, corporate and citizen action to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy, aiming to minimize the number of projected human deaths.
“Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children,” said Pearce, Western’s John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and lead author of the study. “When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom. We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”
The major review of more than 180 articles from scientific literature, co-
StevoR quoting Joshua Pearce @ # 122: … no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom.
Dr. Doom hardly talks about anything but his plans for vengeance and/or world conquest. You don’t pass Climatology 101 if you don’t learn to keep that quiet (except possibly while dumping secret agents into vats of boiling piranhas).
Wisconsin lawmakers could not approve tax increases without the approval of a two-thirds majority of the Legislature under a constitutional amendment being proposed by Republicans…
A three-judge panel struck down Alabama’s new congressional map on Tuesday, finding the GOP-led state fell short of complying with the Supreme Court’s recent directive.
The ruling paves the way for a court-appointed official to instead draw the lines for the 2024 election cycle…
Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville) has announced a run to unseat Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn. Johnson’s campaign launched Tuesday with a multicity tour around the Volunteer State…
StevoRsays
@123. Pierce R. Butler : LOL! Yup.
.*
On a much more serious and grim note, there’s a photo here :
The second one down in that article that neatly sums up what Global Overheating is doing to Oz. A Snowy Mountains (See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains ) ski lift located about now in time. The last vanishing patch of melting snow amidst a burnt out bushcape from the Unprecedented Bushfires. (Remember them? Just a few Summers ago now :
It’s unclear when Death Valley National Park will reopen to visitors after heavy rains from Tropical Storm Hilary forged new gullies and crumbled roadways at the site of one of the hottest places in the world, officials said.
The storm dumped a furious 2.2 inches (6 centimeters) of rain Aug. 20, roughly the amount of rainfall the park usually receives in a year. This year’s rainfall broke its previous record of 1.7 inches (4 centimeters) in one day, set in August of last year…
An Australian who fell ill at a remote Antarctic base is returning home on an icebreaker following a daunting mission to rescue him, authorities said Tuesday.
The man was working at the Casey research station when he suffered from what authorities described as a developing medical condition that needed specialist assessment and care.
The icebreaker RSV Nuyina left Australia last week and traveled south more than 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles), breaking through sea ice to reach a location 144 kilometers (89 miles) from the base, the Australian Antarctic Division said in a statement.
From there, two helicopters were deployed from the deck Sunday and arrived at the base after nearly an hour to rescue the man.
“The first phase of the evacuation was performed safely and successfully and the ship is now on the return voyage to Hobart,” said Robb Clifton, the division’s acting general manager of operations and logistics. “Getting this expeditioner back to Tasmania for the specialist medical care required is our priority.”
The man is expected to arrive in Australia next week. Until then, Clifton said, he would be cared for in the icebreaker’s specially equipped medical facility by polar medicine doctors and staff from the Royal Hobart Hospital…
birgerjohanssonsays
Regarding Burning Man.
I am told it is 8 km (5 miles) from the area ro the nearest major road.
That is a long way to walk when you are up to your knees in mud.
Not so far if you are an entrepreneur in the business of making paved roads.
You would need more than two lanes and have decent ditches to carry away any rainwater, but it would not be a goddamn Apollo program.
Maybe make an extra, smaller paved road in a different direction, in case a serious accident blocks the first during a rain.
whheydtsays
Re: birgerjohansson @ #131…
The Burning Man site is a dry lake bed. If it rains, that’s where the water is going to go.
I used to have a US Geological Survey map titled “Pleistocene Lakes of the Basin and Range”. When things were wetter, there were a lot lakes across Nevada and Utah, and a few in California (Death Valley, for instance, was a lake). The really fun one was Lake Bonneville. It covered about a third of Utah at its maximum extent and was, in that condition, about 1000 feet deep. The Great Salt Lake is the remaining remnant. I leave to your imagination what would happen to Salt Lake City should Lake Bonneville come back, even if only to half its maximum depth.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 125
I fear that even most rank-and-file Democrats have bought into Reaganomics and that progressive tax policy will somehow destroy the economy and impoverish them, so I think this one will pass.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
The Zaporizhzhia region of southeast Ukraine is now the focus of fighting in the conflict, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu has said, as Kyiv’s forces press ahead with their counteroffensive.
Shoigu claimed without providing evidence that Ukraine has brought up reserve brigades there that were trained by Kyiv’s western allies.
The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, citing geolocated footage, said today that Ukrainian light infantry has advanced beyond some of the anti-tank ditches and dense minefields that make up Russia’s layered defenses in Zaporizhzhia.
However, it said it was unable to state that the defence was fully breached, because no Ukrainian heavy armour has been witnessed in the area. It is in the south that the Ukrainian brigades have made most recent battlefield gains as the counteroffensive inches forward under heavy fire.
Since the grinding counteroffensive began about three months ago, Ukraine has advanced 4.3 miles in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukrainian officials claim. Troops surmounted dense Russian fortifications last week to retake the village of Robotyne, reports AP. That was Ukraine’s first tactically significant victory in that part of the country.
Cuba has uncovered a human trafficking ring aimed at recruiting Cubans to fight as mercenaries for Russia in its war in Ukraine, its foreign ministry has said, as Moscow seeks to increase the size of its forces in Ukraine.
In a statement, the Cuban foreign ministry said that the authorities were working to “neutralise and dismantle” the network, which it said was operating within the Caribbean island nation and in Russia.
“The ministry of the interior … is working on the neutralisation and dismantling of a human trafficking network that operates from Russia to incorporate Cuban citizens living there, and even some from Cuba, into the military forces participating in war operations in Ukraine,” the Cuban ministry statement said.
“Cuba has a firm and clear historical position against the use of mercenaries … Cuba is not part of the war in Ukraine,” the ministry added.
The foreign ministry did not comment on whether any Cubans joined the war in Ukraine as part of the trafficking ring, or whether the ring had any connections to the Russian government.
…
The Ukraine war has resurrected a former cold war alliance between an increasingly isolated Russia and an impoverished Cuba. Havana’s public statements on Monday are a rare moment of friction between the two countries.
…
The Cuban allegations come amid Russian attempts to boost the size of its armed forces as it seeks to continue the fighting in Ukraine. Andrey Gurulev, a lawmaker and retired military officer, said on Monday that the defence ministry was aiming to recruit another 140,000 Russian soldiers by the end of the year.
To meet this goal, Russia has been luring migrants from central Asia to join the conflict in Ukraine with promises of quick citizenship and payments.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin on Tuesday declined to comment on reports that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, planned to travel to Russia this month to meet Vladimir Putin and discuss supplying Moscow with weapons for Ukraine.
…
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Kim plans to travel to Vladivostok, a port city not far from North Korea, where the two leaders would discuss Kim’s sending Russia artillery shells and anti-tank missiles in exchange for Moscow’s advanced technology for satellites and nuclear-powered submarines.
…
While Peskov did not comment on the reported meeting with Kim, the Kremlin did say Putin was planning to travel to Vladivostok next week to take part in the annual Eastern Economic Forum.
The US has previously voiced concerns that arms negotiations between the two countries were advancing.
…
Russia’s eagerness to engage with North Korea also suggests Moscow is running low on stocks of some advanced weapons, as the war in Ukraine enters its 559th day….
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US liveblog. From their latest summary:
It’s been a busy day in courts at various levels nationwide. A panel of federal judges has rejected an attempt by Republican lawmakers in Alabama to pass another congressional district map that dilutes Black voting power, in defiance of the US supreme court. In Georgia, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows pleaded not guilty to the charges he faces in the election subversion case, leaving only one defendant who has not yet entered their plea. And in Washington DC, jury selection has kicked off in the contempt of Congress trial of Peter Navarro, a former Trump aide who defied the January 6 committee last year, and was indicted for it. We are also waiting for the sentencing hearing of Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys militia group who was convicted of seditious conspiracy over the January 6 insurrection.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
The Capitol physician said there is no sign that top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell had a stroke or a seizure last week, when the 81 year old froze up while taking questions from the press.
Attorneys in Republican congressman and admitted fabulist George Santos’s fraud and money laundering trial asked to postpone a hearing. Might a plea deal be in the offing?
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton may be booted from office over corruption allegations in a state Senate trial that began today.
Because Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company with a public stock price there’s no straightforward way to assess its current value. But most market analysts estimate the company is now worth no more than a third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it a year ago. To be fair, Musk clearly overpaid for the company. He paid a premium over the company’s current stock price and even that price was probably inflated. But there’s no question Musk’s erratic and destructive reign has dramatically damaged the company, torching its public reputation and leading to a catastrophic decline in ad revenues which Musk and independent press reports have pegged at between 50% and 60%.
But Musk has found a new scapegoat: the Jews. Or rather, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to fighting not only anti-Semitism but all forms of racial and religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination. […] Over the past several days Musk has gone on a tear claiming that the catastrophic decline in his company’s value since he purchased it is mostly or entirely the fault of the ADL and churning up Twitter debates that at least big time anti-Semitic accounts think is clearly boosting their cause.
As is often the case, Musk’s attacks have evolved out of tag teaming with notorious anti-Semitic accounts on the platform. It kicked off on Friday when Musk responded to a tweet by Keith Woods, an Irish white nationalist and self-described “raging anti-Semite.”
“ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter,” Musk told Woods.
From here, Musk went on to gin up support for the #BanTheADL hashtag while alternately claiming that he should ban the group but might not, before rolling into claims that the ADL was responsible for tens of billions of dollars of Twitter losses. This all culminated with Musk announcing he was being forced to sue the ADL “to clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism.”
Discussing the defamation suit, Musk claimed the ADL could “potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.” Later he said that “giving them the maximum benefit of the doubt,” the ADL might only be responsible for $4 billion in damages.
Along with these claims of monetary damages came a storm of what can only be called the bullying hate speech we associate with … well, rabid anti-Semites. This included claiming that the ADL is actually “the biggest generators of anti-Semitism” on Twitter. That was in response to another Woods tweet calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve even seen.” Indeed, most of Musk’s five day tear was made up of jumping into the comments of notorious anti-Semites and toasting or agreeing with their attacks. He chimed in approvingly when alt-righter Mike Cernovich suggested that many anti-Semitic accounts are run by the DNC to justify advertiser boycotts of Twitter.[JFC!!!]
As is often the case with Musk he claims he positively absolutely isn’t anti-Semitic at all. But self-professed anti-Semites don’t seem to agree. When Musk angrily declared that since purchasing Twitter “the @ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” the anti-Semitic owner of the far-right Gab social media site chimed in, “Welcome to my daily life for the past seven years.”
Of course, it’s worth noting that even the narrow claims of monetary losses are absurd on their face. Musk bought Twitter on a self-declared crusade for his version of “free speech.” That meant welcoming back tens of thousands of accounts which had been banned for a mix of anti-Semitism, racism and various forms of harassing behavior. This rather predictably spurred a wave of hate speech and headlines which scarred off most advertisers. Again, it’s little more than 2+2 equalling 4 but Musk not liking the results. Various other controversies and firing half the company’s employees haven’t helped, either in reputation terms or keeping the site online. That was uncomplicated and predictable. Musk’s response is basically to sue math.
As a factual matter, U.S. courts have consistently ruled that calling someone or some thing an “anti-Semite” is subjective and protected 1st Amendment free speech. The same applies to racist, white supremacist and other related labels. Of course, there are other ways to get into court. And a bottomless bank account gives an almost endless number of ways to explore them.
But the key here is not really about lawsuits or the ins and outs of defamation. It’s that the richest man in the world who holds a commanding position in near-earth-orbit space delivery, electronic cars and global communications spent the weekend churning up hate against Jews as the source of his financial losses. Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company. And the comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.
“Robotyne has been liberated,” Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar announced on August 28.
Although the tiny village, which had a pre-war population of fewer than 500 people, may be of little importance in itself, it lies along a strategic road that leads to the Russian-occupied road and railway hub of Tokmak. From there, another road leads to the key city of Melitopol, which, prior to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, was known to Ukrainians as the “gateway” to the peninsula. Last week’s victory was therefore an important advance for Ukraine.
Just a few days earlier, however, fighters from Rusich, a small Russian neo-Nazi paramilitary group stationed at Robotyne’s front line, had threatened to lay down their arms – a move that may have contributed to Russia’s stinging loss there.
The official reason for the threat to lay down arms, Rusich explained in an August 25 statement on Telegram, was that one of the group’s top commanders and founding members, Yan Petrovsky, had been detained in Finland and faced extradition to Ukraine – and the Russian government was not doing much about it.
Petrovsky, a dual Russian-Norwegian national, co-founded Rusich back in 2014 to take part in the Russian occupation of Donbas and is believed to have been a contractor for the Wagner Group at one point. He faces various terrorism-related charges in Ukraine and risks being sentenced to between 15 and 20 years in prison if he is extradited.
In a series of messages screen-grabbed by the research project Antifascist Europe, Rusich members expressed frustration with their treatment by the Russian authorities.
“If the country cannot protect its citizens, why should the citizens protect the country?” asked one.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the group did indeed seem to be operating near Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast, describing it as “a critical area of the front line where the Russian military command likely cannot afford for any units to rebel and refuse to conduct combat missions”.
Soon after ISW issued its analysis, Robotyne fell to Ukraine.
There has been no official confirmation – either from Rusich or the Russian defence ministry – that the group’s fighters did stop fighting.
According to Jeff Hawn, a non-resident fellow at the Washington, DC-based think-tank New Lines Institute and an expert in Russian military matters, it would have been a credible scenario.
“There’s a very strong possibility” that the mercenaries laid down arms, which would likely have contributed to the fall of Robotyne, he said. Russia is so short of fighters it cannot replace units that give up, he said, adding that we likely won’t know “for years” what really happened.
Hawn said the reason for a revolt would likely have less to do with the detention of the group’s leader than with a loss of motivation among Russian mercenary fighters in general, coupled with Moscow’s increasing inability to keep them under control.
“These guys are likely just looking for an excuse to get out,” he said. “They’re realising that Ukraine isn’t just going to break and give up.”
The situation for paramilitary groups has been further complicated by Wagner’s attempted mutiny back in June and the death of the mercenary group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, late last month.
…
Even worse for Moscow, Hawn said, would be if they were willing to switch sides.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if some of these guys repent and suddenly joined the Free Russian Legion, especially if they’re getting paid in dollars,” he said, referring to a group of pro-Kyiv Russian fighters that claimed to have staged several attacks in Russia’s Belgorod region in recent months.
“I do think the incident in Robotyne is significant, and that it’s a sign of more things to come.”
A new story in Politico ponders why we didn’t hear much argle-bargle about Hunter Biden during the first Republican primary debate. Hunter is, after all, the only reason House Republicans continue to show up for work each day. […]
There are at least two reasons why Republican presidential candidates might not want to spend valuable debate time fluffing Rep. Jim Jordan’s latest conspiracy theories […] The first and most formidable reason is because Nobody Gives a Shit About Hunter Biden. The vast majority of the public knows that Hunter exists in the same way they might know Ivanka Trump exists, but your average person on the street has several thousand more pressing problems on their mind and has devoted very little daily thought to the life choices of either of them.
Even by the usual standards of celebrity failsons, nobody cares. The conspiracy theories that sedition-backing House Republicans have to tell about Hunter Biden are so convoluted for so little outrage payoff that only conspiracy theorists have any interest in following that shit. If the general public can’t be mustered to give a shit that Donald Trump’s son-in-law-turned-White-House-adviser scored a $2 billion “investment” from journalist-murdering Saudi royals immediately after finishing up his Saudi-friendly White House stint, they’re certainly not going to care that Joe Biden’s known-troubled son might have gotten a too-cushy gig somewhere trading on the family name.
Nobody. Cares. Or, to be more specific, only seditionists, congressional sex traffickers, coatless athlete abuse enablers, and Fox News opinion hosts care. As Politico quotes Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz-not-Gaetz: “If you do not have a Ph.D. in Sean Hannity studies or watch his show every night, it’s basically totally incomprehensible for a normal person.”
Now that is a good damn quote, and correctly identifies the problem: This is Republicanism’s Extended Universe canon, the QAnon conspiracy equivalent of arguing who would win in a fight between hero Stink Bug and supervillain Dry Rot. […]
And that, in turn, leads us to the second reason why Republican primary debaters aren’t spending any appreciable time polishing Jordan’s carefully sculpted turd: While this stuff may play well to the conspiracy cranks of the base, talking about it in mixed company will make you look like a crank. The Republican candidates do not want to look like cranks, not in nationally televised debates. That’s the stuff to save for rallies and lower-profile appearances on conservative television and radio shows where you can be assured of a rabidly partisan audience. […]
We also keep being told that Fox News is trying to hide their crank side to “redeem” themselves after settling a $787 million lawsuit for spreading hoaxes targeting Dominion Voting Systems, but that still might be overselling the case. […]
There’s one part of the Politico story that’s puzzling, though. A Republican strategist asserts that “the reason Trump’s opponents aren’t talking about it is because talking about Biden corruption and problems plays right into Trump’s entire narrative,” with another asking, “Do Republicans realize when they bring up the Hunter Biden stuff that they’re just helping Trump?”
That’s … a bit odd. While it’s definitely true that House Republicans and allied sedition-backers latched onto the Rudy Giuliani-spread Hunter conspiracies specifically as means of watering down a seemingly uncountable number of Trump corruption scandals that have now turned into a countable and large number of state and federal felony counts, is the “Hunter” fixation truly limited to Trump whataboutism at this point? It seems more intended as the broader defense for–say it with me now–the entire Republican Party’s willing support for criminal acts during the Jan. 6 attempted coup. Jim Jordan is looking to protect his own crime-ignoring behind just as much as he’s looking to protect anybody else’s.
And Trump isn’t the only one indicted at this point. There’s a good chunk of the Republican lawyer class, state officials, and other hangers-on who have been indicted in Michigan and Georgia as well, and it seems likely that federal charges still await at least a handful of them.
So what does it mean when strategists say that focusing on Hunter conspiracy hoaxes only helps Trump? […] Is it that other Republicans still want to pretend that they aren’t particularly attached to Trump’s corruption even though more than one person on that debate stage helped Trump be crooked plenty of times before deciding to compete against him?
I’m not sure. […] Mike Pence isn’t talking up theories like, “Well, the Trump administration may have been the crookedest administration ever and we may have attempted a bit of mild treason, but at least we didn’t try to sell art at inflated prices.” Why not? Why are the House sedition-backers and head coup kingpin Trump the ones beating the Biden conspiracy drum?
Do they … do they finally realize nobody gives a flying damn about Hunter?
In June 2023, a group of Finland’s most notorious neo-Nazis and a few of their international friends ventured to a lakeside cabin resort set against picturesque woodlands some 120 kilometres north of Helsinki.
They called the gathering ‘White Boy Summer Fest’ after an internet meme co-opted by far-right extremists. Bellingcat first investigated the phenomenon in 2021. Run by a far-right cultural collective and combat sports group, the event was first held last year, and organisers have indicated plans to make White Boy Summer Fest (WBS) an annual affair.
Over two days, attendees watched far-right bands perform, participated in combat sports, and mingled with other hate group members in hot tubs. Observers warn that neo-Nazi networks — including international ones like the Hammerskins, whose members attended WBS — use events like these to network, radicalise each other, recruit new members and raise money….
Two videos posted online on August 23 show Greek members of the extreme right illegally “arresting” migrants in Evros, a Greek region bordering Turkey. The footage shows the militants forcing one group of men to sit in the dirt. Another group of terrified migrants have been crammed into a trailer. While members of the far right have carried out this type of illegal arrest of migrants before, it is rare to have footage of it. The attackers accuse the migrants of being responsible for the widespread fires in the region. These militiamen feel empowered by the political context hostile to migrants, say our Observers….
We are in September now, which means the government-shutdown stopwatch is ticking. This congressional calendar is even more fraught than usual because there’s just so much that Congress needs to do—and yet, House Republican extremists remain intent on creating chaos. Making matters worse, the House remains on vacation this week, and has scheduled only 12 legislative days before the fiscal year ends and government funding expires on Oct. 1.
Government funding isn’t the only thing that’s supposed to be accomplished in the next three weeks. The end of September is also the deadline for the high-stakes farm bill and a reauthorization bill—the legislation that governs how funds are supposed to be spent by agencies—for the Federal Aviation Administration. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money and needs a cash infusion to keep responding to the recent disasters in Hawaii and Florida, much less what the remainder of hurricane and wildfire season may bring.
A few weeks ago, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated a possible deal with Democrats to pass a short-term funding bill to keep the government running while Congress continues to work on the regular appropriations bills. At least one hard-line Republican, Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has declared she won’t vote for it unless the House first votes to begin impeaching President Joe Biden.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is joining in, not necessarily on impeaching Biden as a condition of funding the government, but more so in opposition to having a functioning government. On Monday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn tweeted about the impending shutdown, obliquely chastising the House Republicans for being “universes” apart from Senate Republicans on funding government. Roy quickly responded by saying that Republicans shouldn’t fund “the things they campaign against – and then just shrug… border… DOJ weaponization… DOD wokeness… IRS abuse… COVID tyranny.”
That’s left McCarthy weakly arguing that if they shut down the government, then they won’t be able to keep investigating Biden. “If we shut down, all of government shuts down — investigation and everything else. It hurts the American public,” he said.
The White House has asked for a short-term continuing resolution, which is the only viable solution at this point to keep the government open. The Senate—Democrats and many Republicans—are on board. So now it all boils down to whether McCarthy will finally buck Republican extremists and work with Democrats on a stopgap bill to extend current levels of funding and likely add additional funding for disaster relief and Ukraine support.
The article is a good summary of all the amazing work that Marc Elias and the Elias Law Group have done. The group now has 60 lawyers working on cases like the recent one in Alabama. Elias’s work is essential to protecting voting rights in the USA.
As of September 4, Elias’s firm is litigating redistricting cases in:
Alabama
Florida
Louisiana
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New York
Ohio
Texas
And…Georgia!
The far-right media organization One America News Network has settled a defamation lawsuit brought against the company by Eric Coomer, a former executive of Dominion Voting Systems who went into hiding amid the proliferation of false conspiracy theories about him following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
In an August 30 filing in Denver County District Court in Colorado, Coomer and the defendants — OAN, its chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion, and parent company Herring Networks — said they jointly agreed to dismiss the case.
“Plaintiff Eric Coomer, Ph.D. and Defendants Herring Networks, Inc. dba One America News Network and Chanel Rion have fully and finally settled the disputes among them concerning Plaintiff’s claims against Herring Networks, Inc. dba One America News Network and Chanel Rion only,” the filing said.
Law360 first reported on the settlement. The terms were not disclosed in court filings.
Representatives for Coomer and OAN didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.
Coomer brought his defamation lawsuit in a state court in Colorado, where he lives, in early 2021. It was filed against OAN, as well as former President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, Newsmax, and a slew of other right-wing organizations and individuals he claimed pushed false claims about him. He has also sued, in a separate lawsuit, conspiracy theorist and pillow salesman Mike Lindell.
One false viral claim, which was perpetuated by OAN, alleged Coomer took part in an “Antifa conference call” to plan how to rig the 2020 presidential election results…
While some russians remain in denial, insisting that cope tires [LOL] on russian strategic aviation is just ‘Photoshop,’ I’ll keep demonstrating the consequences of building palaces for Shoigu over strategic aircraft hangars. More photos to come – I’m not getting TIREd of it.
…Election officials in some of the earliest primary states will probably have to soon make a decision on how to proceed with challenges to Trump’s eligibility, which several groups have promised to bring. They are likely to come under enormous pressure; in New Hampshire, the Republican secretary of state, Dave Scanlan, told NBC News his office was flooded with telephone calls from Trump supporters after the conservative personality Charlie Kirk falsely said Scanlan was trying to kick Trump off the ballot.
“Neither the secretary of state’s office nor the attorney general’s office has taken any position regarding the potential applicability of section three of the 14th amendment to the United States constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle,” Scanlan said in a joint statement with the New Hampshire attorney general, John Formella. “The secretary of state’s office has requested the attorney general’s office to advise the secretary of state regarding the meaning of section three of the 14th amendment to the United States constitution and the provision’s potential applicability to the upcoming presidential election cycle.”
La province de Soueïda, fief de la minorité druze, sous contrôle du régime syrien, est le théâtre de manifestations depuis la mi-août. Face au spectre d’une contagion au reste du pays d’une contestation nourrie au départ par la hausse vertigineuse du coût de la vie, mais qui a pris un tournant politique contre le pouvoir, le régime semble parier sur le temps. Espérant notamment que Moscou et Téhéran continueront à le soutenir….
Kim Jong-un is likely to seek missile and warhead technology in an expected visit to Russia, and he is already getting a public embrace he has long sought.
For Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, a rare trip to Russia this month to discuss military aid for President Vladimir V. Putin’s Ukraine war effort could provide two things the North has wanted for a long time: technical help with its weapons programs, and to finally be needed by an important neighbor.
North Korea has not been used to getting a lot of attention other than global condemnation for its nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests. But Russia’s urgency to make new gains in the war is offering Mr. Kim a bit of the geopolitical spotlight — and a new way to both irk the United States and draw closer to Moscow and Beijing.
Though Russia has long been a crucial ally for the isolated North, relations between the two countries have at times grown tense since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And Russia accounts for very little of the economic trade that North Korea needs; China alone provides nearly all of that.
Now, common interests and worldview are bringing the neighbors closer.
The White House has repeatedly warned that North Korea was starting to ship artillery shells and rockets to Russia and negotiating for more arms deals. And Western officials’ claims this week that Mr. Kim will travel to Russia soon indicate that they fear the process is moving forward with more intent.
For its part, North Korea faces critical technological hurdles in its nuclear and missile programs, as well as dire economic need, and Russia could help more on those fronts.
[…] In recent weeks, Mr. Kim has visited a series of munitions factories, exhorting the officials there to step up production, according to state media.
But Mr. Lee said the North may have a large surplus of ammunition already available, as it has not fought a war since the Korean War armistice in 1953. And with armaments largely based on Soviet weapons systems, North Korean munitions are widely compatible with Russia’s arsenal.
[…] Russia has crucial technologies that could help advance North Korea’s weapons programs. Although North Korea has launched multiple ICBMs since 2017, Western experts still doubt that the country has all the technology needed to make its nuclear warheads small and light enough to traverse an intercontinental range. […]
Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is demanding that Chief Justice John Roberts take action over an unusual interview conservative Justice Samuel Alito gave in which he questioned whether Congress has the power to impose ethics rules on the Supreme Court.
Whitehouse’s complaint, submitted Monday, focuses on a July 28 interview published by The Wall Street Journal, conducted in part by conservative lawyer David Rivkin, in the wake of recent news articles raising questions about Supreme Court ethics.
“No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” Alito said in relation to the power of Congress on the issue.
Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, said in his letter that Alito’s comments have bearing on legislation he has sponsored that would impose an ethics code. Whitehouse wrote the letter to Roberts in part to highlight how the Supreme Court does not have a formal mechanism for handling ethics complaints.
Alito’s comments violate the code of conduct that lower court judges follow in part because he gave an opinion on a legal issue that might come before the court, Whitehouse said. Justices have in the past said that although the code of conduct does not specifically apply to the Supreme Court, they use it as a reference on ethics issues.
“Making public comments assessing the merits of a legal issue that could come before the Court undoubtedly creates the very appearance of impropriety these rules are meant to protect against,” Whitehouse said in the letter.
He also highlighted Rivkin’s role, noting that the lawyer represents conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, who the Judiciary Committee has sought testimony from on ethics questions.
The Wall Street Journal interview came after a ProPublica story that revealed Alito had taken a luxury vacation in Alaska with a Republican donor who had business interests before the court. Leo was another guest on the trip.
“The timing of Justice Alito’s opining suggests that he intervened to give his friend and political ally support in his effort to block congressional inquiries,” Whitehouse said….
There’s a lot of discourse happening about free speech in the context of “cancel culture” these days, but precious little coverage of the push all over the world to criminalize protest…particularly environmental and climate protest. We’ll be digging into this trend in detail over the next several months, but first a look at what prompted extractive industries to start agitating for governments to crack down on protest, what tactics they use, and why they’ve been so effective.
Since the 2019 passage of the “Dangerous Attachment Devices” bill in response to anti-coal protests in Queensland, Australia’s states have moved quickly to follow suit.
Why does every social media platform seem to get worse over time? This week’s On the Media explores an expansive theory on how we lost a better version of the internet, and the systems that insulate Big Digital from competition. Plus, some solutions for fixing the world wide web.
1. Cory Doctorow, journalist, activist, and the author of Red Team Blue, on his theory surrounding the slow, steady descent of the internet.
2. Brooke asks Cory if the troubles that plague some corners of the internet are specific to Big Digital, rather than the economy at large– and how our legal systems enabled it all.
3. Cory and Brooke discuss possible solutions to save the world wide web, and how in a sea of the enshittified there’s still hope.
From the Guardian liveblog, reporting on Enrique Tarrio’s sentencing: “Federal judge Tim Kelly has ruled that the terrorism enhancement will be applied to Enrique Tarrio’s sentence, Politico report, a sign that he could potentially face a long jail sentence…”
In describing the difference between Russian and Western doctrinal views on the role of artillery, the Royal United Services Institute puts it succinctly:
‘Russian forces manoeuvre to fire, Western forces fire to manoeuvre’ is a neat encapsulation of Russian doctrine compared with the West. Put simply, Russia uses artillery as its primary form of lethality in the deep and close battles.
[…] Following the initial failure of an armored breach attempt in early June, Ukraine switched from NATO-style concentrated armored assaults to Soviet style small-unit infantry tactics to traverse the heavily mined areas north of Robotyne in southern Ukraine, in the direction of the strategic city of Tokmak.
Specifically, Ukraine has avoided large mechanized unit maneuvers involving dozens of vehicles and tanks. Instead, they’ve been mostly using infantry platoons (three squads of nine to 10 soldiers and their armored vehicles) supported by two tanks. Assaults are conducted sequentially. They start with an artillery barrage, then tank/armored vehicles further soften up the target, and finally infantry advance to take the position.
This permits, for example, Western tanks with superior optics like Challenger 2s to act like “snipers” in battle, supporting infantry from afar while maintaining concealment. This keeps them safer from Russian anti-tank defenses than they would be if they advanced alongside their infantry.
That’s why tank-on-tank battles have been so rare. Both sides have used their tanks primarily as fire support, as opposed to directly using them to assault enemy positions. Subsequently, most tank kills are credited to artillery or drones.
Given the limited company-level coordination training Ukrainian troops have received, many analysts argue that these tactics play to Ukraine’s strengths. The small size of the units deployed has slowed Ukraine’s advancements, but has also limited Ukrainian losses. And thanks to its well-trained artillery corps and Ukrainian advantages in counterbattery radar, precision munitions, long-range optics, and ammunition availability, Ukraine now has a significant advantage in artillery firepower, attriting both Russia’s combat and logistical capabilities. (Ukrainian kills four artillery guns for each one it loses.)
THE STAKES OF THE BATTLE OF TOKMAK
After penetrating Russia’s first defensive lines around Robotyne, Ukraine’s advances have gained speed. Yet the tactics remain the same: Ukraine continues to advance one platoon assault at a time, and one tree line or neighborhood at a time.
The most dramatic gains, currently, are north of Tokmak, near the town of Verbove. [map at the link]
Having liberated Robotyne on Aug. 27, Ukraine is now attempting to breach Russia’s second main line of defense. [map at the link]
Russia’s first two lines of defense are likely to be among the most formidable, as they were built into a pair of ridges that control the high ground in the area. The T0408 Highway does not pass within 20 kilometers of any other elevated ridges on the way to Tokmak. The elevation changes for the area west of Ocheretuvate are so gradual (sub-1% grade) as to not confer any military advantage. [topographical map at the link]
Rather than make the main effort straight down the T-0408 highway south of Robotyne, Ukraine launched major assaults toward both Hill 166 and west of Verbove. The area west of Verbove appears to be Ukraine’s primary effort to breach the defensive line.
UKRAINE’S ASSAULT ON THE SUROVIKIN LINE
On Aug. 30, Ukrainian forces breached the first of two portions of the Surovikin Line that link Verbove to Solodka Balka. The defenses are named after Russian Gen. Sergey Surovikin, who ordered them built after withdrawing Russian forces from Kherson last year. He is now under house arrest for being too close to Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whom Vladimir Putin just had assassinated. [map at the link]
Russia launched a series of failed counterattacks in the subsequent days, attempting to drive the Ukrainian advance back outside the outer defense line. These counterattacks failed.
Meanwhile, Ukraine began probing for weaknesses in Russia’s main trench line while unleashing a ferocious artillery barrage across the line. [video at the link]
In the subsequent days, it became increasingly clear that Ukraine’s focus on destroying air defense and radar units began to show an effect.
In boxing, body blows are akin to saving money in the bank. A strong shot to the head might knock out the opponent in one flashy blow, something a body blow would rarely do. However, repeated blows to the body gradually tire and slow the opponent. By the time the effects of the body blows are obvious to outside observers, it’s often too late for the weakened boxer to recover.
Like body blows, Ukraine’s systematic hits against Russia’s air defenses didn’t seem to be having much of an effect. But it is now apparent that so many air defense systems have been destroyed that fatal gaps are opening up.
Take this video, for example. [video at the link]
Everyone loved watching Ukraine successfully disable four Russian supply trucks with conventional and DPICM (cluster) artillery shells.
What most missed, however, was that the attack occurred 6 to 7 kilometers behind the front line south of Verbove—under observation by a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone the whole time. [map at the link]
These drones can provide Ukrainian artillery units with adjustments to their firing angles and ranges, helping “walk” shells onto their intended targets—dramatically increasing Ukraine’s artillery effectiveness. Seeing them operate that deep behind enemy lines means that Russia’s air defense systems and EW (electronic warfare/jamming) units are too weakened to keep such drones away.
Combined with the reemergence of the Bayraktar TB2 drones in a direct combat role, (drones which are otherwise highly vulnerable against well-prepared Russian integrated air defense systems), Ukraine has new and better tools to more effectively strike Russian targets.
Ukraine leveraged all of these tools and tactics to produce a highly significant result on Sept. 4, and overrun a portion of the Surovikin line west of Verbove.
The geolocation was provided thanks to the Russian Bobr Drone Group, which has consistently released video, like one yesterday, showing Ukrainian forces far beyond their last assumed positions (which, of course, isn’t helpful to Russia, but they don’t realize that).
Multiple conservative (as in cautious, not political) Open Source Intelligence sources including Emil Kastehelmi/Black Bird Group, Def Mon, @Geolocated, OSINT Technical, and Deep State assessed that Ukraine had breached Russia’s second defensive line while defending west of Verbove, representing a breakthrough of the Surovikin Line. [map at the link]
IMPLICATIONS
As of yet, it may be too much to call this a full breach of the Surovikin Line, as only light infantry squads were spotted past the trenches and dragon’s teeth. Ukraine would need to clear a path through the minefields, bulldoze a path through the obstacles, and bridge the anti-tank ditch to bring armored vehicles past the line to call it a full breach.
However, Ukraine couldn’t establish forward positions past those trenches without first securing the trenches. Furthermore, we have video and satellite confirmation that Russian artillery was shelling its own trenches, and even more video showing Infantry of the Ukrainian 82nd Brigade occupying a portion of those trenches, indicating with near certainty that Ukraine has already overrun the trench system in that area.
Ukraine even made advances directly south of Robotyne, driving the Russians out of a portion of trenches approaching Novoprokopivka (see the map above). [Tweet and images at the link]
All of these developments create a picture of Russian positions being gradually overwhelmed by Ukrainian firepower.
THE PICTURE IN THE NEAR FUTURE
[…] Aggressive Ukrainian targeting of Russian electronic warfare and radar assets, including counterbattery radars, anti-air batteries, and anti-drone jammers has left Russia with decisive weaknesses in the critical drone war.
General Ivan Popov, former commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army opposite Ukraine in the Tokmak theater, was dismissed for harshly criticizing Russian theater commander Valery Gerasimov for high casualties and lack of artillery support.
Analysts like Michael Kofman and Rob Lee at War on the Rocks assess that Russia spent the majority of its reserve combat power hurling largely unsuccessful counterattacks at Ukrainian gains in front of Russia’s main defense lines.
It’s unclear if Russia remains strong enough to hold its main defense lines. Breaching the main Surovikin Line less than two weeks after breaching the first line around Robotyne suggests that Ukrainian attrition has severely degraded Russia’s ability to resist.
Russia is now resorting to desperate measures to try and hold the line.
For example, Russia activated the all-new 25th Combined Arms Army, which wasn’t supposed to be ready until early 2024, and sent it to the northern front around Kreminna in order to free up the veteran elements of the 41st Combined Arms Army to be transferred to Tokmak. The 25th wasn’t scheduled to be fully staffed up until October, and even that was lagging as the all-volunteer unit struggled to fill its slots despite huge increases in financial incentives. That means the 25th CAA is almost certainly significantly understaffed, with most soldiers having received little to no military training.
Ukraine may thus be able to transfer some of its powerful mechanized forces from the north to the southern front, as the 25th CAA represents little to no threat.
It appears that a severely degraded Russia has fewer and fewer good options for even attempting to maintain the status quo. A full breakthrough hangs in the balance.
Surovikin has been released, according to Paul Sonne, Anatoly Krumanaev and Julian E. Barnes in the New York Times today. They write that it’s unclear whether there are remaining restrictions on his movement, and that he retains his rank but has no role.
I wonder whether his release was prompted by the big troubles in his line? It cuts both ways, if the breach occurred while he was under house arrest.
President Biden took a victory lap of sorts on Friday morning, boasting that the U.S. was in one of “the strongest job creating periods in our history.”
Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 170,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in August. […] CNBC reported:
Nonfarm payrolls grew by a seasonally adjusted 187,000 for the month, above the Dow Jones estimate for 170,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. However, the unemployment rate was 3.8%, up from July and the highest since February 2022, and nonfarm payrolls estimates for previous months showed sharp downward revision.
At first blush, the fact that the unemployment rate inched higher might seem discouraging, but let’s not forget that these shifts aren’t always bad news: Amid a surprisingly strong job market, more people seek employment, which has the effect of pushing the rate higher.
As for overall job growth, with revisions from June and July factored in, we’ve now seen roughly 1.88 million jobs created so far this year — and that’s after just eight months, not the entire calendar year.
[…] Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.
According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created roughly 13.9 million jobs since January 2021 — more than double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.
With this in mind, President Joe Biden took a victory lap of sorts on Friday morning, boasting that the U.S. was in one of “the strongest job creating periods in our history.”
In recent months, Republicans have responded to developments like these by pretending not to notice them. GOP officials kept the trend going last week. […]
The extension will give Digital World Acquisition another year to merge with Donald Trump’s start-up
Shareholders in Digital World Acquisition, the investment partner of former president Donald Trump’s media start-up, approved an extension of the company’s merger deadline, giving it more time to complete the deal, Digital World said Tuesday.
The extension will give the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, another year to finalize its long-stalled merger with the parent company of the pro-Trump social network Truth Social.
The approval follows an intense get-out-the-vote campaign and comes just three days before Truth Social’s Sept. 8 liquidation deadline. A failure of the vote would have required the SPAC to dissolve and return $300 million to shareholders, depriving Trump Media & Technology Group of funds from the deal.
The company must still meet closing conditions before the merger can be officially recognized. The Securities and Exchange Commission said in July that Digital World had misled investors in official documents filed for the merger process. The SPAC will need to correct those inaccuracies and resubmit the filings before the merger process can resume. The SPAC also has not filed required quarterly financial statements with the SEC covering its operations during the first half of 2023. […]
A prominent anti-vaccine activist, Joseph Mercola, yesterday lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels.
Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola’s complaint, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was “under no obligation to host” Mercola’s content after terminating his channel in 2021 “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines.”
“The court found no breach because ‘there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content’ or be a ‘storage site for users’ content,'” Beeler wrote.
Because Mercola’s contract with YouTube was found to be enforceable and “YouTube had the discretion to take down content that harmed its users,” Beeler said that Mercola did not plausibly plead claims for breach of contract or unjust enrichment.
Mercola’s complaint was dismissed without leave to amend…
A company that sold triggers that make semi-automatic, AR-15-style rifles fire like automatic weapons likely misled consumers that the devices were legal, and it continued selling them even after being warned by the U.S. government, a federal judge in New York ruled Tuesday.
The judge barred Rare Breed Triggers from selling any more of its forced-reset triggers until further notice — a blow to the company’s defense against the government’s civil fraud lawsuit, which remains pending.
“The Court concludes that the Government is likely to succeed on the merits of its claims,” U.S. District Judge Nina Morrison wrote, adding the company “placed tens of thousands of their customers at risk of criminal prosecution and the loss of their right to own firearms.”…
A new tropical depression formed in the Atlantic Tuesday morning, and it’s expected to strengthen to a powerful Category 4 hurricane by the weekend as it nears the eastern Caribbean.
The first forecast track by the National Hurricane Center points the storm toward the east coast, with a possible northern scrape for the Leeward and Virgin Islands.
The hurricane center’s cone only forecasts five days out. Some longer-range storm models suggest that the storm could bend north before it gets too close to Florida or the Bahamas, potentially setting Bermuda in the crosshairs — but it’s too early to stay if those projections will stick…
We’ll see how that goes when the entire peninsula goes underwater.
Jazzletsays
Some really good news for a change of pace.
The Brazilian government has launched its biggest ever operation to remove thousands of cows owned by illegal land grabbers from indigenous territory in the Amazon rainforest.
At his sentencing hearing, “Tarrio says that on Nov. 3rd something happened he didn’t expect: ‘My candidate lost’.” Earlier, he winked at some of his supporters in the courtroom, which I’m sure will endear him to the judge.
Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian helicopter pilot who has defected to Ukraine, will receive the hryvnia equivalent of $500,000 (approximately Hr 18.48 million), Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (HUR) spokesperson Andrii Yusov said on Sept. 5.
In April 2022, Ukraine’s parliament passed a law offering up to $1 million to Russian military personnel who manage to transfer equipment to Ukraine. The size of the reward depends on the type of equipment they hand over.
The 28-year-old pilot landed his Mi-8 helicopter fully intact at an airfield in Ukraine when he defected, Ukrainian media reported on Aug. 23.
He spoke at a press conference on the operation on Sept. 5 and explained that he defected because he “did not want to contribute” to the crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, which he believes is a “wonderful country.”
He said that he contacted the Ukrainian side himself, and was told he would receive security for himself and his family, payments, and new documents from Ukraine if he defected.
Kuzminov said that his parents supported his plans to defect and have joined him in Ukraine.
He added that he no longer has contact with other Russian soldiers he served with, but would like to convey to them that there are no fascists or Nazis in Ukraine, as Russian propaganda claims.
The defection was the result of a long-term operation by the HUR to bring the Mi-8 helicopter and its pilot to Ukraine.
The story was featured in the documentary “Downed Russian Pilots”, which aired on Ukrainian television on the evening of Sept. 3. The film revealed how the landing was planned and carried out and Kuzminov called on other Russian pilots to follow his lead.
“If you do what I did, this kind of thing, you will not regret it at all. You will be provided for the rest of your life with absolutely everything,” Kuzminov said.
Kuzminov provided “valuable evidence about Russia’s army aviation, communication systems, and airfield network,” according to the documentary.
“When Ukraine officially calls on the Russians to go over to our side together with the equipment, it is not propaganda. It is not a lie. It is the truth,” Yusov added during the press conference on Sept. 5.
A judge has sentenced Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, to 22 years in prison.
Tarrio, who once served as national chairman of the far-right extremist group, and three lieutenants were convicted by a Washington jury in May of conspiring to block the transfer of presidential power in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in the White House after the Republican president lost the 2020 election.
Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol riot itself, was a top target of what has become the largest justice department investigation in American history. He led the neo-fascist group – known for street fights with leftwing activists – when Trump infamously told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first election debate with Joe Biden.
The sentence is by far the longest punishment that has been handed down in the massive prosecution of the riot on 6 January 2021. The Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in a separate case, had received the longest sentence to date – 18 years.
During the sentencing, US district judge Timothy Kelly, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, said the evidence suggested Tarrio was “the ultimate leader” of the seditious conspiracy, “the ultimate person, who organized, who was motivated by revolutionary zeal”.
That conspiracy ended up with about 200 men amped up, encircling the Capitol, prepared for battle, led by his codefendants.
The judge said Tarrio not being present in Washington on 6 January served some strategic purposes in that it allowed him to attempt to “insulate” himself from what unfolded at the US Capitol. Despite this, Tarrio had an “outsized impact on the events of the day”, Kelly said.
The judge said he didn’t see any indication that Tarrio was remorseful for what he was convicted for, adding that there was a strong need to send a signal to others.
It can’t happen again.
However, the judge said he did not believe Tarrio intended to kill anyone and said he would not go as high as what prosecutors had sought.
A long-awaited metro rail service on Monday began operations in Lagos to help slash travel times and make commuting easier in the Nigerian commercial hub.
The 13-kilometre-long (8-mile) first phase finally carried its first passengers on Monday, four decades after plans for the rail service were proposed.
The Blue Line – built by China Civil Engineering Construction Corp – links the mainland part of the city where most people live with the more affluent Lagos Island, where many businesses are headquartered…
The Proud Boys’ former leader has been jailed for 22 years for orchestrating the US Capitol riot, the longest sentence so far for a ringleader of the raid on the seat of American democracy.
Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy, a US Civil War-era charge, and other counts in May.
Tarrio, 39, was not in Washington during the riot, but helped organise the far-right group’s involvement…
On June 4, Ukraine launched its long-awaited offensive. The operation has proven to be a test of Ukrainian determination and adaptation. Despite stiff resistance, Ukrainian forces have made steady gains in a set-piece battle against a heavily entrenched force. Ukraine’s main effort is a push from Orikhiv, with the goal of driving south past Tokmak and ideally reaching Melitopol. If successful, this would sever Russian lines along the Black Sea coast and endanger supply routes from Crimea. The second is at Velika Novosilka, a secondary offensive operation likely aimed at Berdyansk, also along the coast. The third is a supporting offensive along the flanks of Bakhmut further to the north. Ukraine has made gains here, pinning several Russian airborne units. The offensive is gaining momentum, and much remains undecided, but three months in offers an opportunity to take stock of the operation thus far….
New York Attorney General Letitia James has had enough of Trump’s same old losing arguments.
In a blistering court filing Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a Manhattan judge to impose $10,000 fines apiece on Donald Trump, his two eldest sons, and their lawyers for recently raising the same “frivolous” legal arguments in fighting her $250 million business-fraud lawsuit.
Over the past year, she argues, and most recently last week, lawyers for Trump have repeatedly raised these arguments in fighting the case, which is scheduled to go to trial October 2.
Among those losing arguments are claims that the case is a politically-motivated witch hunt, and that James has no legal standing or capacity to sue him because Trump’s alleged business frauds did not harm the public…
These cross-accusations of frivolity were set off last week, when James asked the judge to resolve part or all of the case pretrial.
In fighting this proposed preliminary injunction, Trump once again raised some previously-failed arguments, including questioning James’ standing and capacity to bring the case.
Trump also repeated another failed argument, claiming that disclaimers in his disputed bank filings warned banks not to rely entirely on his math – disclaimers the former president said in an April deposition made the filings “worthless.”
“This Court soundly rejected these three arguments” – standing, capacity, and the filings’ so-called “worthless” clause – in decisions going back to October, 2022, James said in a memorandum of law also filed Tuesday…
More than 650 academics have called on British universities to commit to 100% plant-based catering to fight the climate crisis, saying that the institutions have “for centuries, been shining lights of intellectual, moral, and scientific progress”. [Well, that’s debatable.]
The open letter, organised by the student-led Plant-Based Universities campaign, likened the move to meat-free food to the fossil fuel divestment to which 101 UK universities have already committed.
Cutting meat consumption in rich nations is vital to tackling the climate crisis, with scientists saying it is the single biggest way for people to reduce their impact on the planet.
The letter, sent to UK university vice-chancellors, catering managers, and student union presidents, said: “We are acutely aware – as you must be too – of the climate and ecological crises; not only this but we are also mindful that animal farming and fishing are leading drivers of them.
“Most universities have declared a climate emergency, with many taking steps such as fossil fuel divestment. [Students] deserve to know that their universities are actively working to create a future for them to graduate into.”
“Not vegan? That’s okay,” the letter said. “We are not asking for individual dietary changes. Students and staff can still bring whatever food they like on to campus. What we are asking for is institutional divestment [from meat and dairy].”
Prominent environment and health academics who have signed the letter include professors Frank Kelly, Simon Lewis and Chris Rapley. More than 200 other people have also signed the letter, including the broadcaster and campaigner Chris Packham and the Green party MP Caroline Lucas.
Dr Helen Czerski, an oceanographer at University College London and television presenter who signed the letter, said: “Universities should see themselves as microcosms of society, where a spirit of exploration encourages people to try new things, to test better options, and to assess the consequences.
“Whenever I’ve organised a university event recently I’ve chosen plant-based or vegetarian catering without mentioning it, and I’ve only ever had compliments about the food, never complaints about what’s not there. It isn’t nearly as scary as many people think.”
Another signatory, the Olympic canoeist Etienne Stott, said: “The need for universities to act on their own climate research could not be more pressing. The support of academics from over 90 institutions is incredibly powerful and I urge universities to listen to their calls for change.”
…
The Plant-Based Universities campaign is active in more than 50 universities. To date, the student unions’ at Birmingham, University College London, Stirling, and Queen Mary universities have voted to phase in 100% plant-based menus.
Related votes also have passed at Cambridge, Kent and London Metropolitan universities. Votes at Edinburgh and Warwick universities did not pass. The University of Cambridge removed beef and lamb from the menus of its 14 catering outlets in 2016, “dramatically reducing food-related carbon emissions”.
Chris Packham said: “The student campaigners of Plant-Based Universities are making incredible changes in their institutions and it’s only right to see hundreds of academics stepping up to support them.”…
StevoRsays
Elon Musk plans to sue Anti-Defamation League, blaming them for falling revenue
Elon Musk, the owner of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, said he is considering suing a leading civil rights group, arguing that its accusations of anti-Semitism have led the company to lose revenue.Mr Musk late Monday accused the US-based Jewish organisation the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of making unfounded complaints against him and X that have scared away advertisers.
“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!” Mr Musk wrote on X.
“Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” he wrote, adding that the group “would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly [US]$22 billion
Professor Marcia Langton AO is addressing the National Press Club right now – in SA timezone 12.30 noon – on TV c2, ABC. She’s worth listening to and a great speaker.
This also brings up things that have been somewhat bugging me. Most climate models only go up to 2100 whereas we know the warming is going to continue beyond 2100. The other thing is people’s unjustified faith in future magic technologies. Anyways, it’s worth watching, probably one of his best videos.
birgerjohanssonsays
Ha!
The management of tourist visits at Buckingham Palace is so bad, it turns royalists into (small-r) republicans.
😊
“I visited Buckingham Palace & regretted it” https://youtu.be/ORQd_Tg7Bgw
Coast Guard officials arrested a Florida man after they intercepted his unusual hamster wheel contraption that he was allegedly attempting to ‘run’ to London.
According to a criminal complaint, 44-year-old Reza Baluchi is facing federal charges after he was rescued 70 miles off Tybee Island, Georgia by coast guard officials. The marathoner was found on August 26 in his bizarre hamster wheel contraption and asked “standard questions.”
“Based on the condition of the vessel – which was afloat as a result of wiring and buoys – USCG officers determined Baluchi was conducting a manifestly unsafe voyage,” the criminal complaint says.
The “manifesting unsafe” vessel is a giant metal drum, with inflatable buoys on each side and paddles that are powered by a runner inside.
The complaint says that Baluchi was unable to provide officials with the required registration for his water vehicle and informed officials that he was running in his hamster wheel all the way to London, England.
When Coast Guard officers told Baluchi they were cutting his voyage short, Baluchi threatened to kill himself with a 12-inch knife if anyone tried to apprehend him, and claimed to have a bomb aboard, according to the complaint
After days of trying to get Baluchi to board Coast Guard vessels, he admitted that he did not have a real bomb and on September 1 officers were able to get him to disembark at the USCG Base in Miami Beach, Florida…
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
The situation along the eastern frontline remains difficult and the main task for Ukraine’s troops is to ensure reliable defence and prevent the loss of strongholds, Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said on Wednesday….
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has arrived in Kyiv, according to media reports on Wednesday morning. The visit, unannounced in advance, is Blinken’s first for a year to the Ukrainian capital. Blinken will be in the city for two days and is expected to announce a new package of US assistance worth over $1bn, Reuters reported. He is expected to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba.
…
In the hours before Blinken’s arrival, Russia launched a new wave of air attacks on Kyiv, with missiles shot down by Ukrainian air defences, Ukrainian officials claimed. Loud explosions could be heard in the capital shortly before 6am. “Another missile attack by the enemy on a peaceful city,” Serhiy Popko, the head of the Kyiv military administration, said on Telegram. Officials said there had been damage to buildings by falling debris but there were no casualties.
Following the collapse of the deal allowing grain shipments from Black Sea ports, Russia has ramped up attacks on Ukraine’s southern Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, home to ports and infrastructure vital for agriculture exports. Ukrainian forces downed 17 Russian drones over the Odesa region overnight into Monday. Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said Tuesday that the attacks had taken place “very, very close” to his country’s border.
…
Russian mercenary group Wagner is set to be declared a terrorist organisation by the UK, as British ministers condemned its “devastating” role across the world. Defence secretary Grant Shapps defended the time it has taken to proscribe the group, ahead of a draft order being laid in parliament on Wednesday, PA Media reports….
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Scuba #178,
I’m still around. I’ve had some health issues aggravated by stress. One of the stresses was trying to type with my left hand not fully cooperating due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Auto-correct didn’t help, and I spent too much time editing a post. So I reverted to just lurking, with rare posts. I do some volunteer work for ElderCare here in Lake County, driving other seniors to their medical appointments.
The Russians in the area of Robotyne are not responding to RU mil bloggers phone calls. They have most likely put the phones on silent mode while watching Netflix.
Nerd of Redhead @ #181, thank you for the update. I knew you did volunteer work and thought I had seen you comment on another thread in the not too distant past, but I couldn’t remember how long ago it was. Sorry to hear about your health issues, and hope they can resolve soon.
I have not paid detailed attention to this case. I was initially put off by mention of Paxton having a mistress, but it seems that was all tied in with the bribery and corruption.
At least 16 people including a child were killed and many wounded in a Russian attack on the city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday, officials said, as US secretary of state Antony Blinken visited Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the attack, saying a market, shops and a pharmacy had been struck in the industrial city close to the battlefield, and about 30 km (19 miles) from the city of Bakhmut, where fighting has been heavy for months.
Ukrainian officials posted a video on the Telegram messaging app which showed a loud explosion ripping through shopping alleys, with people falling to the ground and some running for cover. Local media described it as a missile attack.
“This Russian evil must be defeated as soon as possible,” Zelenskiy said.
Interior minister Ihor Klimenko said that in addition to the 16 killed, at least 28 people were wounded in the attack and said it was on the central city market, Reuters reported.
On the Telegram messaging app he posted pictures showing rescue workers sifting through the rubble and carrying out bodies in black sacks.
The office of the Ukrainian President released a horrific video of Russian missile strike in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk Region. It shows the impact of the missile in a market street.
So far, 16 people killed, among them at least one child, and another 28 wounded.
Another inexcusable war crime by the Russian invasion.
California could become the first state to ban discrimination based on someone’s caste after legislators on Tuesday approved the bill. This move gives added protections to people from countries like Nepal, India and Bangladesh, who weren’t included in pre-existing anti-discrimination law. Now that it’s passed, the first-in-the-nation bill will need to be signed by Gavin Newsom, the state governor, before becoming law.
In recent years, California has become a hotbed of anti-caste actions. In 2020, state regulators sued the technology company Cisco, alleging that two high-caste Indian managers had discriminated against a Dalit engineer by subjecting him to lower pay and inferior terms of employment. In 2022, California State University became the first university system to add caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination policy.
The state was also home to one of the most disturbing crimes committed against people based on their caste. In 2001 Lakireddy Bali Reddy, a wealthy Bay Area landlord, was convicted of sex trafficking after he sexually abused more than two dozen women in India over the course of 15 years. He spent eight years in state prison.
…
The bill, which was approved by the state senate 31-5, was sponsored by Aisha Wahab, a California state senator and the first Afghan American woman elected to public office in the US. “This bill is about workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights,” Wahab said in statement on Tuesday. “This bill is about ensuring the American Dream is accessible to all those who pursue it.”
Many major US colleges and universities have added caste to their non-discrimination policies. In February, Seattle became the first US city to ban discrimination based on caste.
Inspired by Jewish groups that cast criticism of Israel as antisemitism, Hindu American organizations are advancing a concept of “Hinduphobia” that puts India beyond reproach….
In search of a half-remembered passage among the French writer’s voluminous work, I turned to AI to help me find it. The results were instructive – just not about Proust…
A government watchdog group spearheaded the filing of a lawsuit Wednesday in Colorado invoking the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause to bar Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot due to his actions on and around Jan. 6.
The lawsuit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was filed in state court in Denver and names a handful of Colorado voters as the petitioners and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) as the respondent.
As detailed in recent interviews with TPM, CREW plans to file disqualification lawsuits in multiple states by the end of this year. While Colorado has become too blue to be counted as a true presidential swing state anymore, CREW’s director of strategic litigation Nikhel Sus told TPM that part of the calculation was filing in places where they could put on extensive, evidence-heavy trials.
All he wrote during the short week he was here was incoherent, unprofessional rages against feminism and the whole network he was on […] we kicked him off. And ever since he has been obsessed with howling about our perfidy.
[…] almost as soon as he’d been evicted, he snuck back onto our mailing list and has been reading all the confidential discussions […] He has leaked these to third parties as well. When we shut down the security hole last week, he then tried to hack back in, to no avail. […] It’s not just that he’s violated our confidence, but that he’s so goddamn stupid that he’s announced it to the world.
[…] The latest evidence of his extraordinarily poor judgment comes by way of a new report from ABC News.
In May of last year, shortly after the Justice Department issued a subpoena to former President Donald Trump for all classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump’s then-lead attorney on the matter, Evan Corcoran, warned the former president in person, at Mar-a-Lago, that not only did Trump have to fully comply with the subpoena, but that the FBI might search the estate if he didn’t, according to Corcoran’s audio notes following the conversation.
According to the report, portions of which have been confirmed by NBC News, Corcoran’s recollections were “captured in a series of voice memos he made on his phone” after speaking to his then-client.
Trump later said it was “shocking” to see the FBI execute a court-approved search warrant at his glorified country club, but there was nothing shocking about it: His own lawyer told him FBI would show up at his door and search the premises, and a few months later, that’s precisely what happened.
Corcoran apparently made this quite simple for the former president. “[T]here’s a prospect that they could go to a judge and get a search warrant, and that they could arrive here,” Corcoran recalled warning Trump as they spoke at Mar-a-Lago.
What’s more, this isn’t the first such revelation from the broader scandal. Remember this Washington Post report from June?
One of Donald Trump’s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022: The former president’s team could try to arrange a settlement with the Justice Department. The attorney, Christopher Kise, wanted to quietly approach Justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges, hoping Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former president. Kise would hopefully “take the temperature down,” he told others, by promising a professional approach and the return of all documents.
The smart move for Trump would’ve been to reply, “That sounds great, let’s do that.” But he did not choose the smart course.
Instead, according to the Post’s report, the former president talked to others — most notably Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch — “who urged a more pugilistic approach.”
Trump, the article added, “was not interested” in Kise’s strategy.
The problem, of course, is that Kise’s strategy likely would’ve worked. We can say this with some certainty because, as we’ve discussed, federal prosecutors gave Trump a pass on the documents he took but gave back. If the former president had returned all of the materials he improperly took, and cooperated with law enforcement, it’s easy to believe this whole mess would’ve gone away.
But Trump preferred to listen to those who said it’d be better to fight — instead of the lawyers who reportedly kept trying to explain that he’d be far better off if he didn’t need to fight. “Trump time and again rejected the advice from lawyers and advisers who urged him to cooperate,” the article added.
[…] In response to his indictment in this case, Trump has lashed out wildly, blaming a wide range of perceived villains for his dilemma. The former president has blamed special counsel Jack Smith. And President Joe Biden. And the Justice Department. And the media. And Attorney General Merrick Garland. At one point, he even blamed “mutants,” though it wasn’t altogether clear to whom he was referring.
[…] No one forced Trump to take classified documents to a glorified country club. No one twisted his arm, urging him to defy a federal subpoena. No one directed the former president to show sensitive materials to people without clearances, encourage those around him to lie, or engage in a clumsy cover-up. […]
NBC News ran a notable report last week on Dylan Quattrucci, the deputy state director of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire: “The No. 2 official in New Hampshire on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign told police to kill themselves in an expletive-ridden Jan. 6 video shot close to the U.S. Capitol, according to a recording posted this month by an X account associated with the ‘Sedition Hunters,’ a group of online sleuths who have helped authorities identify hundreds of people present that day.”
As Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade against U.S. military promotions has dragged on for months, the Alabama Republican has received overwhelming criticisms from multiple corners. [Tuberville’s] position has been rejected by every living former Defense secretary. And retired military leaders. And veterans. And congressional Democrats. And the White House. And military spouses. And his own Republican colleagues. And a majority of people living in Alabama.
But it’s the currently serving U.S. military leaders who stand out most, because of the unusual nature of the circumstances. As a rule, officials in positions of authority within the U.S. military go out of their way to avoid criticizing politicians — in part out of a sense of propriety, in part to remain apolitical, and in part because members of Congress ultimately pay the Pentagon’s bills.
[…] As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted, the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force wrote a joint op-ed for The Washington Post this week, pleading with him to be more responsible and explaining to the senator that he’s actively eroding “the foundation of America’s enduring military advantage.”
The publication of the piece raised eyebrows throughout the political world, but as Politico noted, one of the service secretaries went a little further during a CNN appearance.
The leaders of three branches of the U.S. military slammed Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) over his monthslong blockade of senior military promotions Tuesday, with one accusing the Republican senator of “aiding and abetting communists.”
“For someone who was born in a communist country, I would have never imagined that actually one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting communists and other autocratic regimes around the world,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro — a Cuban-born Navy veteran — said during the nationally televised interview.
Del Toro added that Tuberville’s radical tactics are “having a real negative impact and will continue to have a real negative impact on our combat readiness.”
[…] In July, for example, Lt. Gen. Andrew Rohling, the deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Europe-Africa, met with a bipartisan group of senators and urged them to break Tuberville’s blockade. Soon after, Rohling told Punchbowl News that Tuberville’s tactics are “reprehensible, irresponsible and dangerous.”
[…] Tuberville, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to care. In fact, as recently as three weeks ago, the Alabaman explicitly said he doesn’t care, and the senator told NBC News on Tuesday that he believes he’s in a “stronger” position now than ever before.
In a healthy political environment, Tuberville taking steps to undermine his own country’s military during a time of security uncertainty would be a career-ending fiasco. In 2023, the Republican expects to get away with his radical tactics without any consequences at all — and given the state of GOP politics and the prevailing political winds in Alabama, the right-wing senator might very well be correct.
Three active-duty U.S. Marines were arrested and charged this week with breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the latest in a line of current or former members of the military associated with the riot.
When an online legal newsmagazine asked North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita S. Earls in June about a state report showing that most lawyers appearing before the court were white men, she said the court should examine the reasons for that disparity and address what she called implicit bias in the judiciary. As a result, a state judicial commission opened an investigation — not of the issue but of whether Justice Earls’ remarks had violated the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.
[…] “When you have a criminal organization, [or] organized crime, you really need strong investigative and prosecutorial tools,” Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Salon in August. “So it’s tough to reach the godfather. The godfather tries to keep his hands clean.”
Prosecutors find RICO laws to be “powerful tools in targeting not only foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise, but also high-level decision makers,” as The New York Times reported. That’s expressly because RICO laws allow the actions behind a criminal scheme to be tied together. “One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story—not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an ‘enterprise,’ to engage in patterns of illegal activities,” wrote The New York Times.
By allowing prosecutors to show the full, sweeping story of a criminal enterprise, it’s not just those who commit individual, overtly criminal acts who go down. The godfathers and the foot soldiers are tied together in a way that makes getting convictions at the top much easier.
RICO cases also exert a lot of pressure on those foot soldiers to flip on their bosses. Cunningham noted to Salon that “if you indict a lot of people under the RICO Act, that creates a huge incentive for people who are kind of lower [in] the food chain to cooperate to avoid spending at least five years in prison.”
All of this is why Willis is fighting efforts by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and others to remove their cases to federal court, as well as pushing to prevent Trump and others who are attempting to sever their cases from the main trial. Some of those defendants, such as attorney Kenneth Chesebro, are seeking to sever their cases by asking for an accelerated court date under Georgia’s “speedy trial” laws. In response, Willis has asked the court to fast-track all 19 defendants in an effort to keep the case together.
Allowing jurors to hear the entire story, including how the 161 “acts” described in the indictment against Trump and the others fit together, is particularly important because many of those acts are not, in themselves, crimes. Setting up a meeting or leaving a voicemail on someone’s phone might seem innocent unless the jury hears how they fit into the broader scheme. They need that “whole story” that Willis described to understand why an action was in support of something criminal.
The power of RICO makes it very tempting to prosecutors—and easily misused. Even when used properly, the sheer scope of RICO cases can make them complicated and confusing to juries. When defendants are able to “sever” their case from the main case, the story can become fragmented and even more difficult to explain. That’s happening right now in the Young Thug case, where multiple defendants have had their cases severed. (But there is a lot happening in that case to add to the confusion).
For Willis, a single trial—with all defendants involved, at a single time—would be best. Best for avoiding the complexity of conducting multiple, likely overlapping, trials. The fewer trials the better when it comes to telling the full, sweeping story.
Four months after a jury found that Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that still more of the ex-president’s comments about her were libelous. The decision means that an upcoming second civil trial will concern only how much more he has to pay her.
The ruling stands to streamline significantly the second trial, set for January. It concerns remarks that Trump made in 2019, after Carroll first publicly claimed that Trump sexually attacked her in a luxury department store dressing room in the 1990s, which he denies.
[…] “The jury considered and decided issues that are common to both cases — including whether Mr. Trump falsely accused Ms. Carroll of fabricating her sexual assault charge and, if that were so, that he did it with knowledge that this accusation was false” or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in Wednesday’s decision.
The judge said the jury’s May verdict, by finding that Trump had indeed sexually abused Carroll, effectively established that his 2019 statements also were false and defamatory.
Carroll and her attorneys “look forward to trial limited to damages for the original defamatory statements Donald Trump made,” said her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who’s not related to the judge.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba said Wednesday that his legal team is confident that the jury verdict will be overturned, mooting the judge’s new decision. Trump, the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also is seeking to delay the second trial.
Let us once again check in on pimp-hatted ass barnacle James O’Keefe as he stampedes towards his destiny of 15 to 20 years with time off for good behavior.
A few weeks ago we mentioned in passing that the board of O’Keefe’s former employer, Project Veritas, had hired an outside law firm to audit the nonprofit’s books. This came in the wake of the board firing O’Keefe for profligate spending of company funds on personal matters. And also for being such a terrible asshole of a boss that he made Mussolini look like Robert Loggia in Big.
The audit is now apparently done, and someone slipped the Washington Post a copy so that the paper could publish some more details of O’Keefe’s antics for us to laugh at. Hey look, right in the first graf:
In August 2022, James O’Keefe needed to get to Maine for a sailing trip. Rather than take a commercial flight for roughly $200, the conservative undercover-video activist directed his employees to book a $12,000 helicopter flight direct from New York to the seaside town of Southwest Harbor, using funds donated to Project Veritas …
No word on whether he was sailing away on his infamous dildo boat, so we’ll just assume that a) yes, and b) how much of Veritas’s money did he requisition for batteries.
When bad weather forced the helicopter to make an unscheduled landing in Portland, O’Keefe booked a $1,400 black car for the three-hour drive from the helipad to the sailboat.
[…] There is so much more hilarity. The ride from Portland to Southwest Harbor was apparently just a small fraction of the $209,000 O’Keefe spent on black car service in a two-year period. There was $2,500 for DJ equipment because Filene’s Basement Skrillex there wanted to play a set at Coachella and was reportedly very irate when the Project Veritas staff couldn’t get him booked.
No word on what O’Keefe planned to use as a DJ name. GRFTR? Beatbox Willie? DJ Jak Off? So many possibilities.
Veritas’s new CEO, Hannah Giles, who was O’Keefe’s partner in the Project ACORN sting that got him on the map (and also a six-figure lawsuit settlement paid to one of his targets, as first broken by your Wonkette), had this to say:
“If you’re Bobby Axelrod from ‘Billions,’ it’s fine to live like that,” Giles said in an interview with The Post. “When you’re paying your bills from a little old lady’s Social Security checks, we’re going to have problems.”
Well sure, old lady Social Security checks, Donor Advised Funds used by the likes of Charles Koch and Robert Mercer, whomever.
But aside from going to Coachella to get rejected by 20-year-olds, did O’Keefe use any of those little old ladies’ Social Security for the time-honored pursuit of mashing his squishy bits against someone else’s squishy bits? You bet he did. It seems Mack Daddy was all hot and horny (EWWWWW) for Alexandra Rose, a real estate agent who starred on the Netflix reality series “Selling the OC” and lives in California. Which gave him excuses to use Veritas money to go on trips to Los Angeles and buy Rose gifts:
In another incident, O’Keefe allegedly demanded employees buy her what Project Veritas executives described to auditors as “many expensive bottles of tequila.” Rose did not reply to an email for comment.
To be fair, who wouldn’t need many expensive bottles of tequila to stomach spending time with James O’Keefe? And also, who would want to admit to spending time with James O’Keefe?
[…] ACORN was a community organizing group that became the locus of phantasmically baroque conspiracy theorizing in the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, first by the usual sad idiots, but inevitably by the seemingly rational journalists who must cover the sad idiots to pay their mortgages. ACORN attracted this negative attention, in part, because of its large and effective voter registration drives, which enfranchised record numbers of minority and low-income voters, who are demographically likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates. The sad idiots believed there was a collusion scheme between ACORN and a former employee of the group, who happened to be that year’s Democratic Presidential candidate: a ferocious IRA terrorist-sympathizer named Barrance Hussein O’Malley. In reality, ACORN’s decades-long campaigns to raise the minimum wage and their battles against predatory lenders had simply invited the animus of powerful business interests—who fund the media activities of sad idiots and rule the planet for like-minded reptilianoid pedophile Illuminatus from the 4th Dimension.
Juan Carlos Vera worked at the National City offices of ACORN in California.
In 2009, two twenty-something conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, hoped to expose criminal malfeasance at ACORN by filming Vera without his consent, themselves violating section 632 of the California penal code in the process. Vera sued both parties over this and the wild misrepresentation of his activities in the edited version of the undercover video, posted online. The episode is a quintessential example of a wholly original term, which we have just coined: journalistic malpractice. […]
I remember that part of James O’Keefe’s unethical activities. I typed “deceptively edited video” so many times! Republicans used ACORN to “prove” that Democrats were lying criminals … supposedly.
Following a high-profile visit by President Zelensky, troops deployed to the east of Ukraine’s main counterattack sector launched a new series of assaults and are gaining ground, according to reports from both Ukrainian and Russian sources.
Close-in assaults by Ukrainian Marine brigades under the new regional command, said to be operating south of the town Velyka Novosilka, have broken through Russian fortifications around the village of Novodonetske and are advancing. This was reported by Kremlin-affiliated military information platforms and the pro-Moscow “combat correspondent” Vladimir Rogov reported “Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have achieved tactical success.”
Russian troops stationed in the village of Novomaiorske, five kilometers east of Novodonetske, had withdrawn following very heavy Ukrainian artillery bombardment using cluster munitions, the government-linked Ukrainian military analyst Anton Geraschenko reported on his personal Telegram channel.
Russian military blogger Aleksandr Khodakovsky, a former Ukrainian special forces officer who transferred allegiance to Russia in 2014, said punishing Ukrainian artillery fire which outranged Russian guns allowed Kyiv’s forces to detonate defensive minefields and launch ground assaults with few Ukrainian casualties.
“After several days of artillery preparation, the enemy moved on to offensive operations in the Novodonetske – Novomaiorske sector…such intensive artillery work led to the fact that [Russian] minefields lost their effectiveness, and the continuous shelling made it impossible for [Russian] sappers to lay [replacement] mines and restore what was destroyed. As a result, the enemy was able to come close to our positions, and unload their infantry almost without suffering losses,” Khodakovsky wrote in his personal Telegram channel, on Tuesday.
Ukrainian control of the twin villages, each containing a key road bridge across the Shaitanka River, could provide Kyiv with greater momentum for its slow-moving counteroffensive against Russian forces on the southern front with a new axis of advance that could bypass its fortifications elsewhere. Launched in early June, Kyiv’s counter-offensive has advanced in key sectors about ten kilometers after three months of fighting.
Ukrainian control of the Novomaiorske-Novodonetske bridgehead has not been confirmed by all sources, some say fighting continues around Novomaiorske. The usually reliable Ukrainian military information platform DeepStateMap reported contact battles had taken place at both locations “and results are unclear”. The pro-Russian “military correspondent” Simon Pegov said of the Ukrainian attacks against the two villages “they [the AFU] have made moderate progress”.
The increase in Ukrainian offensive efforts, and the widely-confirmed reports of intensified Ukrainian artillery fire in the Velyka Novosilka sector, followed a Sep. 4 whirlwind tour by Ukraine’s leader to brigade command posts near the front line from which AFU launched its new attacks. Zelensky handed out medals and praised soldiers during visits to multiple units which, he said, were the reason Ukraine’s multi-axis offensive strategy against Russia was succeeding….
‘Mild’ compared to hospitalization or death, we guess.
Dr. Jill Biden, the first lady, has tested positive for COVID-19 again. The White House confirms that President Joe Biden has tested negative since his wife’s diagnosis, even though they seem like a couple that snuggles. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden will continue to “test at a regular cadence this week and monitor for symptoms.” It’s unclear why she said “regular cadence,” like she’s discussing a piece of music, instead of just “regularly.”
This is Dr. Biden’s second bout with the virus, which has reached the endemic phase where we all just have to live with it. That’s how it goes now so shut up and don’t even think of asking anyone to wear a mask, even in a crowded Barbie screening. Biden signed a congressional bill ending the COVID-19 national health emergency in April […]
The good news is that Dr. Biden’s symptoms are “very mild,” and she’s just going to rest a bit at the Bidens’ home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. COVID symptoms are often reported as “mild” for politicians, even the ones in at-risk groups. (Dr. Biden just turned 72.)
There is a reason why politicians probably say their COVID symptoms are either mild or even non-existent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you can end isolation five days after your positive test. Moderate symptoms, however, would extend your isolation period to 10 days.
That’s a big difference, as Dr. Leana Wen explained to CNN:
If [Dr. Biden’s] symptoms began on Sunday, that would be day zero, so day five would be Friday. She should not be around people until Friday. After that, assuming her symptoms are improving and she is fever-free, she needs to take precautions for another five more days, until the following Wednesday.
Specifically, she should wear a high-quality mask any time she is indoors around others, and she should stay away from those who are more vulnerable to severe illness, which would include her husband, who is considered higher risk by virtue of being 80 years old.
[Joe Biden is staying in D.C.]
There’s no reason to think Dr. Biden would lie about her condition like a common Trump, and maybe the White House doctor officially declared her symptoms mild and not any more severe. The reporting is unclear as to whether the president and first lady routinely test at a “regular cadence” or if Dr. Biden was only tested after experiencing “mild symptoms.”
What does “mild” COVID symptoms even mean, though? I’ve seen them described as “scratchy throat, stuffy or runny nose, occasional mild cough, fatigue, and no fever” — so a “bad cold” where you’re still able to work remotely like a productive citizen! However, I’ve personally never been as sick as I was with “mild” COVID. I know what a “bad cold” feels like and COVID ain’t it.
[Yes, that is a description that is so similar to how my friends and relatives have described their bouts of COVID. It is not “mild.”]
I’m not talking about when you’d curl up in bed with Chinese takeout and watch “Law & Order” reruns for a couple days at most. In my experience, COVID-19 symptoms can fluctuate maddeningly. You can feel like you have bad allergies one day and then a full-on sinus infection the next. This can go on for a while, like my most recent bout with COVID. It was almost two full months of existing at 80 percent, with nagging post-nasal drip and that metallic taste in your mouth as unwelcome companions.
Last year, health reporter Nina Feldman wrote about how COVID-19 symptoms can linger for weeks or months in some people, including herself. It’s not as debilitating as long COVID but it’s hardly “mild.”
FELDMAN: I got COVID over the holidays. I had a sore throat, was super tired and had to take more than a week off work. I tested negative after eight days and thought I was feeling better. But pretty quickly, it became clear I wasn’t. I started getting these waves of extreme fatigue. Soon, I realized they were brought on by physical activity — a walk in the cold, a ride on the exercise bike. I’d get bone crushingly weak a day after a workout. It would take days to recover. I couldn’t drink alcohol. Even one glass of wine made me feel like I’d partied all night. All of this lasted for weeks, and I wasn’t alone.
The US has recorded 103,910,034 million coronavirus cases to date. As Feldman notes, if even just nine percent of those individuals dealt with symptoms for roughly two months, that’s more than 10 million people.
“I was lucky,” Feldman wrote. “I could work from home and control the pace of my day. But what if I worked in a restaurant? Or any kind of job where I needed to be on my feet all day? I would have needed to take medical leave. And if that hadn’t been possible, maybe quit my job.”
I get that there’s no collective appetite for treating COVID-19 as anything but a minor inconvenience, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt for public figures to fess up when COVID is kicking their ass. For most people, even the best COVID case isn’t fun, and it’s certainly not “mild.”
[…] Existing pedestrian crossing time guidelines just don’t cut it for older walkers. Federal guidelines are based on a walking speed of 3.5 to 4.0 feet per second, but older pedestrians walk more slowly and have slower reaction times. To ensure older adults have enough time to cross the road, transportation agencies should use 2.5 feet per second or slower speeds when setting crossing times in areas with many older adults.
Beyond extending crosswalk time, there are a few different ways to make streets and crosswalks safer. One we know works: reducing speed limits in areas with high pedestrian traffic — an approach that’s even more effective when combined with speed bumps, narrower streets and roundabouts.
Left-turn traffic signals can also help, so pedestrians aren’t crossing the street at the same time cars are turning left. This can be especially important for older adults, who may have slower reaction times or difficulty seeing oncoming traffic.
But even a slight change in the existing traffic system can make a big difference in pedestrian safety. New York City introduced a traffic signal timing technique called the leading pedestrian interval at some intersections. That gives pedestrians a head start of about seven seconds to cross the street before cars are given a green light. Small as the change may seem, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and severe injuries fell 37 percent after the interval was added, according to a 2016 analysis. […]
more and more older adults need the kind of high-quality transportation that can reliably get them from one place to another. One program in southeastern Michigan solved this conundrum by allocating property tax funds and resources to help municipalities create their own transit systems. The initiative has made the sprawling suburbs of Detroit accessible to many people, with a constellation of door-to-door services and shuttle buses that connect older riders to express bus stops. […]
Sidewalks are one of the most undervalued parts of public infrastructure in the United States. Since the 1920s, when automobiles began to take over our transportation system, pedestrians are increasingly treated as an afterthought on roadways. Older cities on the East Coast have sacrificed sidewalk space to accommodate increasing car traffic, and newer cities in the West were built without much thought for pedestrian accessibility to begin with. Some have been left without sidewalks altogether. [Personal experience: Bozeman, Montana, where there are sidewalks in the older part of downtown, but no sidewalks whatsoever in the outer parts of the city …. big, wide highways, but no place for a pedestrian to walk. You have to be able to run and dodge to cross the highway.]
This situation poses a significant threat to older adults, who are particularly vulnerable to falls.
However, the issue is complex because it is not always clear who bears the responsibility for maintenance costs. In some cities, authorities assume responsibility, while in others, homeowners are left to tend their own, often leaving people to navigate a patchwork of sidewalks even on a single street.
The Safe Streets and Roads for All federal grant program, created as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, will provide $5 billion over five years to local governments to improve safety for drivers and pedestrians alike. With the help of this new funding, cities like Seattle, Philadelphia and Louisville, Ky., are making much-needed infrastructure improvements, such as building sidewalks and installing safety and accessibility features like pedestrian refuge islands and traffic signal modifications.
[…] Older adults who rely on public transportation have to navigate a number of difficulties on a daily commute: long wait times at unsheltered bus stops, which can be uncomfortable or unsafe, especially during extreme weather; getting on and off buses, especially if they use a walker or a wheelchair; and finding seats on crowded buses.
But many of these problems can be mitigated with small changes to transit stops. For instance, Boston has introduced the age-friendly bench program, which installs benches across the city with an eye toward areas with libraries and senior and community centers. The benches are designed with accessibility and comfort for older adults in mind, with raised armrests and supportive backrests that allow older commuters to sit comfortably while they wait for buses. This move not only encourages public transit use but also enhances the walkability of the community as a whole. […]
The shots could become available next week, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also signs off.
The Food and Drug Administration plans to green light updated versions of the Covid booster as early as Friday, according to four people familiar with the agency’s plans.
The latest shots are designed to target the XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant. Though this particular strain is no longer dominant, the boosters should still provide protection against current circulating subvariants, which are closely related, the drugmakers and experts say.
The Friday timeline for authorization is not firm and could slide into early next week, two of the sources said.
That could prompt further criticism from some doctors who say that federal health agencies are acting too slowly in the booster rollout as Covid cases and hospitalizations are once again rising.
Two sources who spoke to NBC News indicated the FDA is exploring the possibility of granting the boosters a full approval license instead of an emergency use authorization, a departure from the approach used for previous Covid vaccine authorizations. However, it remains uncertain whether this is still the intended course of action.
Following the FDA’s sign off, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its advisory committee will issue their own recommendations about who should get the shots and how they should be used. The agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is expected to vote during a scheduled meeting Tuesday. The CDC’s director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, could sign off on the boosters shortly after the meeting, allowing vaccinations to begin.
About 97% of adults have some level of protective immunity, according to data shared by government officials. However, since immunity from previous infections and vaccinations diminishes over time, officials are aiming to shore up protection as people spend more time indoors during the fall and winter months.
For the first time since Covid vaccines have been available, however, the cost of the shots will not be covered by the federal government.
I need the cost to be covered. This lack of funding is not good.
Reginald Selkirksays
But even a slight change in the existing traffic system can make a big difference in pedestrian safety. New York City introduced a traffic signal timing technique called the leading pedestrian interval at some intersections. That gives pedestrians a head start of about seven seconds to cross the street before cars are given a green light. Small as the change may seem, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and severe injuries fell 37 percent after the interval was added, according to a 2016 analysis. […]
I have one of these not far from my residence. I think the idea is that if the ped is already in the middle of the street, they are more likely to be seen.
birgerjohanssonsays
An elderly relative that was in poor health passed away last evening.
While it was expected, he was the last living sibling of my parents.
I just realised that – excepting cousins- I and my siblings are now the oldest living members of the family.
It feels strange. I feel sad for my uncle, but it also brings home the reality of my own mortality like a punch in the gut.
whheydtsays
Re; birgerjohansson @ , as is one of my sisters.205…
My condolences for your loss…and for your realization. Mine is the current senior generation, and being the second youngest (by about 3 months), while I haven’t kept track, I’m sure several of my cousins are dead by now, as is one of my sisters. My late wife’s family now only exists in our children and grandchildren.
[…] Rand Paul is unquestionably one of the biggest a&$holes in American politics in a way that entirely transcends politics or ideology. As Thomas Hobbes might have put it, the guy is nasty, brutish and short. But the article slips in this subtly devastating comment about Sen. Josh Hawley’s concerns about McConnell’s episodes. Hawley, the paper notes, “hopes the minority leader’s health is not a distraction for Republicans ahead of the 2024 elections, adding that the episodes make it difficult to criticize Biden for his age.”
That about captures the consequence of this issue.
With the comedy and politics out of the way, let me share a few thoughts about McConnell’s health issues themselves.
I’ve discussed this with numerous TPM Reader/doctors over recent weeks, people with various relevant areas of expertise: trauma specialists, neurologists etc. I’m not going to get into the specifics of their informed speculations since, as they would note, they haven’t examined McConnell. But they can rule in and rule out certain things based on what we’ve seen. The truth is there are many possibilities that are downstream from the fact that McConnell is a man in his 80s who suffered a severe concussion and is by definition still recovering from that trauma. My general takeaway from these conversations is that there’s a good chance that whatever is causing McConnell’s issues won’t affect him beyond these occasional episodes. There’s a good chance they’re stable, rather than an early sign of some rapid deterioration. In practice, they’re likely an optics issue more than anything.
But this gets to a more general point. Senate minority leader just isn’t a particularly mission critical job. To the extent McConnell isn’t up to fighting form — and there’s certainly a reasonable question about that — it’s largely coming out of the hide of his GOP Senate caucus colleagues. Is he able to strategize for them as good as he might? Can he make press comments well enough? No one’s calling Mitch McConnell at 3 AM to make a snap decision about a national security crisis.
This isn’t me pooh-poohing the issue. I’m trying to put it into some context. If I were a Republican senator, especially one up for reelection in 2024 I might well be saying it’s time for Mitch to step aside. Or maybe I still think he’s better at the job than the other contenders, even with these issues. I don’t know. Since I’m not a Republican senator I’m not spending a lot of time thinking about it.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s hard for me to take this seriously as a case where McConnell “owes the country some answers” when I don’t think the country particularly cares or really should care.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee said full speed ahead on Wednesday to an October trial for two key defendants in Fani Willis’ election conspiracy case.
Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell will go to trial alongside one another with jury selection scheduled to begin on Oct. 23. Both had asked to be separated from the other; a request which McAfee denied.
Willis’ prosecutors still want the remaining 17 defendants – including Trump – to start trial alongside the pair. McAfee said he was “skeptical” of that request for a mixture of reasons, many of them logistical, but ordered more briefing on the question.
That question will likely be resolved in the coming weeks. Until then, expect an early trial for Chesebro and Powell.
Prosecutors said during the hearing that they anticipated calling 150 witnesses in the course of a trial, and that they expected it to take four months, not including jury selection.
Now that we’re full speed ahead on an October trial start for at least Chesebro and Powell, there’s a gargantuan amount of work to get through until then.
So, McAfee ordered weekly motions hearings until then. Attorneys will be going though discovery issues, pre-trial evidentiary motions, and whatever else comes up. It’s worth keeping in mind here that Chesebro filed a long-shot motion to dismiss on Tuesday, one which entirely relied on his interpretation of the Electoral Count Act and nothing else. […]
[…] It’s amazing how the “do your own research” crowd will come up with the most fantastical, evil-villain schemes to explain stuff that is easily verified by the truth. Let’s dig in!
Hawaii is another test run to see how easy it is to murder civilians and watch and see if the masses will rise up. As of now it looks like it’s pretty easy. Kill everyone. Shut down your ability to say anything with a media black out. No internet. Nobody allowed to enter the scene of the crime. No investigations.
Of course, there are investigations. And more investigations. The state is even having a nonprofit investigate the government’s response. And there are private lawsuits that are also probing the causes of the disaster. This is deep-blue Hawaii, not Florida. No one is afraid to dig into the facts to find both who’s at fault and ways to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Media blackout? I guess no one is covering the “Jewish space laser” angle, which appears to be the only kind of coverage this crowd wants. And the internet works fine, thanks.
It’s just a wild fire believe us we are the government. We are here to help clean up the mess we made. It’s the Bill Gates playbook. Creat the problem fake the solution. Take everything. Make huge profits. Sick Sick world we live in. Wake the fuck up!!!
One thing is true: This was not “just a wild fire.” It’s the kind of climate-change-fueled disaster that is becoming increasingly common because people like this would rather believe in bizarre conspiracy than in the climate disaster that scientists have been warning us about for decades. We don’t need Jewish space lasers when we have unchecked carbon emissions.
And Bill Gates definitely gets it from the COVID-19 anti-vaxxers. “A thematic analysis of the first cluster found it to be dominated by comments alleging that Bill Gates is an evil person with a hidden agenda,” one study of Facebook disinformation found. “Comments also connected Gates to seemingly unrelated conspiracy theories, such as the theory that Covid-19 is caused by the rollout of 5G networks … Within this cluster, comments also posited a connection between Gates and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein … and proposed Gates is seeking to microchip people through vaccinations.”
And that’s not all! “A common theme was that Gates is motivated by a ‘depopulation agenda,’” the study found. “The population control theory was interwoven with ideas about Gates’s controlling individuals through microchipping and the ‘Mark of the Beast’ (a physical mark left by the smallpox vaccines).”
These loons literally think Gates created COVID-19 as a pretext to implant microchips via a vaccine […]
But of course, I would say that. I’m microchipped and under Gates’ control.
Everyone knows the blue car situation proof by itself.
Um, what? No, everyone doesn’t know about this, so I looked it up. And holy shit, they don’t just think a space laser destroyed the town, but they also believe that blue cars were spared!
“Social media posts [sharing the blue car conspiracy] typically include a video from a TikTok account that often shares clips of everyday items being burned by a handheld industrial laser in a workshop. The clip shows the laser burning yellow, red and green fabric, while a blue swatch is unscathed, with text saying it can be programmed for ‘different wavelengths,’” reported the Associated Press. “They contrast this footage with imagery from Lahaina, the historic Maui town that was largely leveled by the wildfire, noting a blue car and some blue beach umbrellas around Front Street, along the waterfront, were not destroyed in the inferno.”
Their “evidence” comes from drone footage of the devastation, and they claim only blue things were left unscathed. But if you watch the video (which they clearly haven’t), there’s plenty of green and red things left standing as well. Notably, we see a row of closed blue umbrellas and two blue cars seemingly unscathed while everything around them is burned. But that same corner also has a gray car and a white car, both unburned. And we see people walking down the street, so for all we know, those intact cars were driven in after the fire.
Furthermore, there are a lot of burned-out husks of cars. In Hawaii, 9% of cars are blue. There are undoubtedly blue cars among the husks.
But also … why? Why would the Jews or Bill Gates or “make huge profits” guys program their space laser to avoid some blue umbrellas? Was it our special, secret, blue Democratic armor to protect ourselves from our own weapon? And if so, why didn’t all the liberals in Lahaina get the memo to paint their roofs blue, trade in their cars for blue editions, and wear blue baseball caps?
And if that really was a liberal weapon, why would we strike a liberal city in one of the most liberal states instead of, say, Midland, Texas (where former President Donald Trump got 77% of the vote in 2020)?
But more importantly if you could take a second and think. I know that’s hard liberals. Here is my proof. Look through every picture of the cars burned to a crisp and realize that none of the car doors are open. If a fire so hot was coming to me I know I wouldn’t just sit in my car and roast. I would have ran for the ocean. Not one of the car doors are open. To me that means they were taken out so fast by ?????????? You all know by what. This is murder!!!!
[If you deploy 10 question marks and four exclamation marks it makes everything you write true.]
What a weird theory. Do you ever walk out of a car and leave the door open? It’s a second-nature instinct. No one consciously thinks, “Oh yeah, I forgot to close the door. Silly me!” It just happens. Walk out, shut the door. And I won’t fall into the trap of doing a frame-by-frame analysis of the video, but I can see at least one car with its driver’s door open. It means nothing.
When the fire swept into town, Maui was experiencing wind gusts of up to 67 mph. Lahaina is just a few miles long. At those speeds, it wouldn’t take long for fire to sweep through the town, which is exactly what happened.
It’s tragic that so many people would rather fit real-world disasters into their conspiracy frames than accept reality and embrace solutions that would mitigate a repeat in the future.
Oh, spare me. Yet another Republican threatening to shoot everyone who is not a MAGA Republican. Video at the link.
[…] Huckabee has no reverence for the Constitution, and nothing but contempt the rule of law. The 2024 election has to go Huckabee’s way, or he wants violence to erupt if his favorite criminal doesn’t win the presidency. How very “Christian” of him. […]
Internet meme: “What could be a more noble cause for a second Civil War than a litany of imaginary grievances?”
Internet meme: “Make us your masters or we will kill you.”
Mike Huckabee likes to inspire others to commit violence, but I don’t se him fighting the war himself.
After receiving a twenty-two-year sentence, a former Proud Boy acknowledged that he will be in prison until he is an Elderly Boy.
“Yes, I will eventually be an Elderly Boy,” Enrique Tarrio told reporters. “However, let’s be clear: while we Proud Boys are considering changing the name of our group, ‘Elderly Boys’ is not one of the options in the mix.”
Tarrio said that, because of the behavior of other former Proud Boys at their trials, “Despondent Boys,” “Weepy Boys,” and “Belatedly Remorseful Boys” were all names that the organization was considering.
“We’ve been holding focus groups, but so far there’s been no consensus,” he said. “We may have to bring McKinsey in on this.”
Willis seeks to shield jurors in Trump trial Move comes after online harassment of grand jurors who indicted former president
By Chris Joyner and Tamar Hallerman / September 6, 2023
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has asked the judge in the Donald Trump racketeering trial to shield the identities of prospective jurors to spare them the threats and harassment faced by the grand jury that indicted the former president and 18 of his allies last month.
In a motion filed in Fulton County Superior Court Wednesday, Willis asked Judge Scott McAfee to prohibit defendants, the news media or “any other person” from capturing any sort of image — from a photo to a drawing — of jurors or from distributing any identifying information about them.
Willis has previously disclosed that she has been the target of racist comments, vitriol and violent threats since she launched her investigation of Trump in Feb. 2021 and, later, the record label and alleged street gang Young Slime Life. She travels with an around-the-clock security detail at work and at her home, and last year gave her frontline staff members bulletproof vests and keychains with panic buttons.
But the filing on Wednesday revealed she had also been the victim of doxxing, in which personal information like her address, date of birth and phone number were shared online. Willis said that she had tried to get the material taken down but that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security determined it was being hosted by Russian company and could not be removed….
As some of you may recall, last year I had my right kidney removed due to a growth that turned out to be cancer. Even though I got away with just surgery, not requiring chemo or radiation, for the next five years I’ve got to go in for a chest/abdomen/pelvis scan to make sure nothing new is growing. I had my first today and got the results about an hour later:
“No evidence of metastatic disease in the chest, abdomen or pelvis.”
One down, four to go.
scubasays
Nerd of Redhead @181
Glad to hear you’re still here on the blog, dude! Was it all the lab work that gave you carpal tunnel? I have friends who that hapened to – years of repetitive motions.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agent preparing a missile attack on Ukrainian Railways (UZ) objects of strategic importance in the western Khmelnytskyi Oblast, the SBU reported in its Sept. 6 press release.
The suspect was detained while attempting to install a GPS tracking device near a target previously identified by the FSB. The signal from this device would have been used by the Russians to adjust their missiles to target the object. He hoped to receive a financial reward from his FSB superior after the successful completion of the mission…
Fani Willis, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia election racketeering case, on Tuesday slammed fake elector Shawn Still’s motion for removal of his case to federal court.
Still, now a freshman in Georgia’s Senate, was one of 16 Georgia Republicans who prosecutors allege falsely certified themselves as “duly elected and qualified” electors during efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Still’s indictment is part of Willis’ far-reaching racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and 18 associates.
In court filings advocating for his case’s transfer to federal court, Still’s attorneys argued that he “was, or was acting under, an officer of the United States” — specifically “acting at the direction of the incumbent President of the United States” — and thus satisfied the first requirement for case removal. Willis, however, smacked down that argument in a 27-page response seeking to remand Still in state court.
Still filed his removal motion “based on the improbable theory that he—a private citizen with no federal role, acting at the direction of the losing Trump presidential campaign—is entitled to removal as a ‘federal official,'” Willis wrote in the filing. “Yet he fails to clear even the initial hurdle—establishing that he at any time met the definition of ‘federal official.’ Defendant and his fellow fraudulent electors conspired in a scheme to impersonate true Georgia presidential electors; their fiction is not entitled to recognition by this Court,” she continued…
In the first days of the counteroffensive in early June, Ukraine launched an ill-fated assault at Novopokrovka which ended with a number of vehicles caught in an extensive minefield being hit by Russian artillery. Among the vehicles hit were the first Leopard 2 tank lost in the war and a Bradley fighting vehicle. That assault was paired with another at Robotyne, about 9 kilometers to the west. The string of losses there provided images and video that Russia would use for months. From all angles. And altitudes. Long after most of the vehicles had actually been hauled away for repairs.
Those early losses on the road to Robotyne appeared to come with very few gains. Very little ground exchanged hands, and if there were matching Russian losses, they were not obvious. The situation at Robotyne seemed, in technical terms, bad.
Meanwhile, Ukraine had extended its counteroffensive to a number of areas scattered across 150 kilometers of the Zaporizhzhia front. At some of these other locations, progress appeared to come much more quickly. Neskuchne and Novodarivka, Storozheve and Blahodatne, Makarivka and Rivnopil, Staromaiorske and Urozhaine: All of these towns were liberated by Ukraine. While progress seemed slow, that wasn’t bad work for three months of grinding it out toe-to-toe with the best defenses Russia could assemble.
So why, when it was time to double down, did Ukraine move back to Robotyne?
It’s not that the area south of Velyka Novosilka, where Ukraine made all that nice progress, was abandoned. Forces are still fighting there, and near Vuhledar, and at Pyatykhatky on the western end of the line (which Ukraine also liberated, along with Lobkove, in the first two weeks of the counteroffensive).
But when it came to sending in reserve units and concentrating force, Ukraine ultimately decided to focus on Robotyne, the scene of those early losses, rather than in any of the areas where they had liberated more ground.
So … why Robotyne?
As both Kos and RO37 have pointed out several times, Robotyne is along the clearest path to the city of Tokmak. At that location, just about every major highway and rail line in southern Ukraine meets, making Tokmak a critical distribution and transport hub. Whether they’re going east or west, just about everything Russia moves around southern Ukraine goes through this location and liberating it would easily be Ukraine’s biggest accomplishment since the liberation of Kherson.
But to get to Tokmak, Ukraine not only has to get through the multiple trenches of the so-called “Surovikin Defensive Line,” it would have to crack and additional ring of fortifications that completely encircles Tokmak like a medieval walled town. [map at the link]
And if all those highways and rail lines connect east to west through Tokmak, that means those transportation lines also exist to Tokmak’s east and west. So why doesn’t Ukraine just ignore Tokmak and take down Russian transportation at a location that doesn’t have a big encircling wall.
Why not somewhere easier?
The answer, according to the analysts at RUSI, may be that “easier” was something of an illusion all along. According to their latest report, those gains along the wider front were hard-fought. “Attempts at rapid breakthrough have resulted in an unsustainable rate of equipment loss. Deliberately planned tactical actions have seen Ukrainian forces take Russian positions with small numbers of casualties,” they wrote. “However, this approach is slow, with approximately 700–1,200 meters of progress every five days, allowing Russian forces to reset.
In other words, thanks to the protective nature of Western equipment and the tactics being employed by Ukraine, they are doing a good job of preserving their most valuable asset” Ukrainian soldiers.
But even if, in the best of all circumstances, soldiers who survive an encounter with a mine or drone in a Leopard tank or Bradley fighting vehicle are ready to go back to the fight within days, their equipment is not. Much of the damaged Western gear has to be laboriously retrieved from the field, and repairs may be taking place as far away as Poland or Germany.
Those areas south of Velyka Novosilka, while they may not have the clearly defined vehicle trenches and defensive pillboxes that are seen on parts of the Surovikin Line, still have a lot of treelines, small hills, and buildings, all of which provide cover for Russian forces. Andat every point on the line, Russia has seeded extensive mine fields, so the idea of a “fast breakthrough” anywhere is an illusion As that same RUSI report points out, the thing that would help Ukraine most would be a faster way to get through those fields where the danger is not only mines, but drones and artillery working on vehicles picking their way forward.
The Ukrainian General Staff said several times that the early part of the counteroffensive was a testing phase, a time for Ukraine to push Russian troops at different points of the line, feeling for a weak spot—like fishing around for a rotten tooth. If that was the case, the answer seems to have been clear enough: There are no weak spots. Or at least, there are no spots so significantly weaker than others that it makes sense to attack there, even if it means troops have to take longer routes to less valuable destinations.
So Ukraine attacked at Robotyne, where the Russian resistance was strong but the distance to the most valuable target was minimal. That attack has been costly, but it’s certainly possible to believe that it’s generated more value per equipment loss than attacks to the east or west of that location. It’s also likely that the more head-on approach of coming through Robotyne matches the advice that NATO generals have given Ukraine.
Since Ukraine doubled down at Robotyne, they have liberated that city and have moved rapidly beyond it. As RO37 reported yesterday, Ukrainian forces moved past the vehicle trench northwest of Verbove and Ukrainian forces have actually occupied the personnel trench behind it. Reports on Wednesday suggest that Ukraine may have extended that area of the captured line, or may have moved forces into the personnel trench at a second location. [tweet and maps at the link]
Progress is being made—important progress. It’s hard to say that on the cost/benefit curve, Robotyne turned out to be the sweet spot. But maybe it was the spot that offered the greatest promise.
———————
UKRAINE CONTINUES TO ADVANCE NEAR VERBOVE
Geolocated images of Ukrainian forces walking around in an occupied section of the personnel trench near Verbove have been confirmed. That means that Ukraine has pushed through the minefield, cleared the vehicle trench, and moved at least some forces right into the town. In the last few hours, analysts have reported that Ukraine has expanded their area of control, At least one source indicates that Ukrainian forces have moved past that trench and reached the edges of the town.
However, the advance in the area is still coming with a cost. [tweet and video at the link.] The burning tank in this video appears to be a British Challenger 2. If so, this would be only the second Challenger lost in combat. Reportedly it was hit by artillery fire while clearing a path to one of those defensive trenches. It seems unlikely that this tank is repairable, though the stowage system has prevented the kind of explosion lifting the turret off so many Russian tanks.
But the most notable thing may be that Ukrainian forces are moving past that burning tank. This is clearly now in the backfield. And it’s not like there weren’t losses on the Russian side because … проклятие. Would you look at that. [List at the link]
All the talk about how good Ukrainian counter-battery fire has become certainly seems to have paid off here. And if that was a convoy of fuel trucks, well, no Russian vehicle drinks tonight.
—————————–
RUSSIA REPORTEDLY CONDUCTING ANOTHER ROUND OF MOBILIZATION
Vladimir Putin has reportedly ordered defense minister Sergei Shoigu to launch another round of mobilization. This time the Russians are shooting for 200,000 more men. Based on past experience, it can be expected that some of those men will be hustled off to the front lines right away, while some luckier fragment is sent away for at least a few weeks of something approximating training.
In the previous round of mobilization, some of these crimps were used to construct whole new units. That seems less likely this time around, as Russia has a shortage of both forces and equipment. It seems more likely that these newcomers will be used to fill out the depleted ranks in units where a tank or armored vehicle still exists, but where seats are no longer full. Training any troops that remain in Russia will be made more difficult because at this point, not only has Russia sent training officers to the front, it has also kicked students out of its military academies early in an effort to fill depleted ranks.
So Putin will demand 200,000. Shoigu will get some fraction of that number. And some fraction of that fraction will come galumphing up to the front line in a few weeks wearing paintball masks and galoshes. If Russian logistics can supply those men with weapons, ammunition, and a helmet, they may find a place in the trenches south of Verbove in time to meet Ukraine’s next assault.
Or they may represent such a strain on Russia’s creaky logistics that they actually weigh down the Russian army’s ability to move anything else. We should know soon.
———————————
ANTHONY BLINKEN MAKES SURPRISE APPEARANCE IN UKRAINE
Sec. of State Tony Blinken was in Ukraine on Wednesday to discuss America’s support for Ukraine, and to meet with Ukraine’s most important ambassador. [Tweet and video at the link, shows amazingly appealing video of Blinken meeting famous bomb detection dog, Patron]
Blinken is also meeting with that other guy. The less cute one. [Tweet and images of Blinken meeting Zelenskyy]
During his visit, Blinken announced that the United States will send a new assistance package to Ukraine valued at approximately $1 billion. Of this, $665.5 million is military assistance. The announced list of items in the package includes:
– 120mm depleted uranium tank ammunition for Abrams tanks.
– Air defense equipment.
– HIMARS ammunition.
– 155mm and 105mm artillery ammunition.
– Anti-tank missiles.
– 3 million rounds of small arms ammunition.
– Secure communications gear.
– Spare parts and maintenance equipment.
——————————-
[Tweet and image: The rescue efforts in Kostyantynivka, Donetsk region, have been concluded after a russian S-300 ballistic missile hit an outdoor market. The russian terrorists planned the attack to take place while the market was at its busiest. 17 civilians were killed (including a child) and 34 were injured. Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine… Terrorist attacks against civilians are the kremlin’s preferred approach. We must put a stop to this evil in Ukraine so that it does not spread.]
[Tweet and image highlighting a new security package from the USA.]
[…] Step back and look at a map of life expectancy across the country and the geographic patterns are as dramatic as they are obvious. If you live pretty much anywhere in the contiguous U.S., you can expect to live more than 78 years, unless you’re in the Deep South or the sprawling region I call Greater Appalachia, a region that stretches from southwestern Pennsylvania to the Ozarks and the Hill Country of Texas. Those two regions — which include all or parts of 16 deep red states and a majority of the House Republican caucus — have a life expectancy of 77, more than four and a half years lower than on the blue-leaning Pacific coastal plain. In the smaller, redder regional culture of New France (in southern Louisiana) the gap is just short of six years. So large are the regional gaps that the poorest set of counties in predominantly blue Yankee Northeast actually have higher life expectancies than the wealthiest ones in the Deep South. At a population level, a difference of five years is like the gap separating the U.S. from decidedly unwealthy Mongolia, Belarus or Libya, and six years gets you to impoverished El Salvador and Egypt.
It’s as if we are living in different countries. Because in a very real historical and political sense, we are. [map at the link]
The geography of U.S. life expectancy — and the policy environments that determine it — is the result of differences that are regional, cultural and political, with roots going back centuries to the people who arrived on the continent with totally different ideas about equality, the proper role of government, and the correct balance point between individual liberty and the common good. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into Americans’ overall health and longevity are revealed, along with some paths to improve the situation.
[…] The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is precisely because our swath of the North American continent was settled in the 17th and 18th centuries by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state (or even international) boundaries.
Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England; the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-dominated upland backcountry of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They settled much of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the U.S. in mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant third party in-migration picked up steam in the 1840s. In the process […] they laid down the institutions, cultural norms and ideas about freedom, social responsibility and the provision of public goods that later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures (Mississippi, Vermont, Minnesota and Montana, for instance). Other states are split between the regions, propelling constant and profound internal disagreements on politics and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Oregon.
[…] we use this regional framework to analyze all manner of phenomena in American society and how one might go about responding to them. We’ve looked at everything from gun violence and attitudes toward threats to democracy to Covid-19 vaccination rates, rural vs. urban political behavior and the geography of the 2022 midterm elections. This summer we’ve been drilling down on health, including a detailed examination of the geography of life expectancy published earlier this week. Working with our data partners Motivf, we parsed the rich trove of county-level life expectancy estimates calculated from the Centers for Disease Control data for the years 2017-2020 by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s County Health Ranking and Roadmaps project. We wanted to answer the bottom-line question: Is your region helping extend your life or shorten it?
The results show enormous gaps between the regions that don’t go away when you parse by race, income, education, urbanization or access to quality medical care. They amount to a rebuke to generations of elected officials in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia and New France — most of whom have been Republican in recent decades — who have resisted investing tax dollars in public goods and health programs.
“We don’t have these differences in health outcomes because of individual behaviors, it’s related to the policy environments people are living in,” says Jeanne Ayers, who was Wisconsin’s top public health official during the Covid pandemic and is now executive director of Healthy Democracy Healthy People, a collaboration of 11 national public health agencies probing the links between political participation and health. “Your health is only 10 percent influenced by the medical environment and maybe 20 or 30 percent in behavioral choices. The social and political determinants of health are overwhelmingly what you’re seeing in these maps.”
I shared these maps with cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, a past president of the American Heart Association who chairs the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University in Chicago, who said they didn’t surprise him at all. “There’s a reason why the Southeastern portion of this country is called the Stroke Belt: It’s because the rates of stroke per capita are substantially higher there and mirrored by rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and other risk factors.”
“The places on your map where you see orange and red have structural and systemic issues that limit people’s ability to have socioeconomic opportunity, access health care, or achieve maximum levels of education,” Lloyd-Jones added. “All of these policies affect your health and these disparities in longevity absolutely reflect social and structural and historical policies in those regions.”
[snipped detailed discussion, with graphs, of how wealth and relative wealth was taken into account in the data “We used the prevalence of child poverty as our metric and compared the life expectancy of the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties — the “richest” ones, in other words — across the regions. As you see in the graphic below, the gaps persisted:”]
[…] the most impoverished quartile of U.S. counties in Yankeedom […] have a higher life expectancy than the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties […] in the Deep South by 0.3 years. […] And people in the Left Coast’s poorest quartile of counties live 2.4 years longer than those in the richest quartile counties in the Deep South.
[…] take New Netherland, the Dutch-settled area around what’s now New York City. Despite its density, diversity and income inequalities — and contrary to the “urban hell-hole” rhetoric of the extreme right — it’s one of the healthiest places to live in the U.S., with an overall life expectancy of 80.9 years. “You can have policies that can meaningfully change life expectancy: reduce drug overdoses, expand Medicaid, adopt gun control, protect abortion and maternal health,” says data scientist Jeremy Ney […]
Before you ask, yes, we also compared just rural and just urban counties across the American Nations model’s regions and the gaps persisted. […]
given that Black Americans have a nearly four-year disadvantage in life expectancy compared to whites, we looked at racial disparities across the regions. Echoing what we saw between rich and poor counties, there are big gaps in whites-only life expectancy across the regions, with whites in Greater Appalachia dying 3.6 years sooner than whites in Left Coast and 4.4 years sooner than those in New Netherland. In the Deep South, the region with the distinction of having had the continent’s most repressive formal slave and racial caste systems, the gap with the three aforementioned regions was almost identical — just a tenth of a year better than Greater Appalachia. Three centuries of formal white supremacy hasn’t served whites very well. [graph at the link]
The bottom line is that Black/white health disparities are real and enormous, but they don’t really explain the big gaps between U.S. regions. […]
[snipped detailed discussion of Hispanic life expectancy, which contain some interesting twists you might not expect]
This is a fascinating and deeply weird story just out from Politico about a little known character in the broader Trump coup story, a woman named Katherine Friess, who up until a bit more than a decade ago had a fairly conventional career in Republican politics. She’s a lawyer, or was a lawyer. (She claimed to practice law in Colorado but her license in the state is inactive.) She worked on Capitol Hill. Then she worked as a lobbyist for longtime GOP operative and lobbyist Charlie Black. Most people who knew her from those years […] had lost track of her. But somehow she pops up as a consultant working for Rudy Giuliani trying to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat.
Among the many weirdnesses of the story, Friess appears to have vanished. She had a lawyer fighting the Jan 6 committee’s efforts to get her emails. But since then she’s … well, vanished. Even the Georgia election workers who sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation weren’t able to find her and they seem to have tried pretty hard. Fittingly enough, before disappearing, Friess seems to have gotten stiffed by Trump for her fees working as a fixer for Rudy Giuliani. She got paid about a thousand out of the fifteen thousand or so she billed. Such is life in the Land of Trump.
(If you’re wondering whether Katherine Friess is the daughter of Foster Friess, the longtime GOP megadonor, well, me too. It turns out she’s not. This 2021 obituary identifies Foster Friess’s four children as Traci, Stephen, Carrie and Michael. No Katherine.)
Aside from the slice of life in Land of Trump part of this, another part of this story caught my eye. Friess was pitching some kind of paid media plan for Trump in the final days before January 6th. According to Politico, Bernie Kerik (ex-con and longtime Rudy muscle) was super into it even if Rudy may have been a bit iffier on the plan. Earlier this summer Josh Kovensky and Hunter Walker reported this odd story about Kerik excitedly pressing Mark Meadows for millions of dollars to fund some secret pressure campaign to push state legislators to get on board with the coup in the week or so before January 6th. So many bottom feeders and Trump hangers-on were pitching plans and grifts in those dying days before Jan 6th that I don’t think we can say Friess’s plan was the one Kerik was hitting up Meadows for millions for. But it was certainly the kind of thing they were trying to fund. They both appear to have focused on paid media, a sort of post-election political campaign. It could even be her plan directly. […]
Meanwhile whilst channel 7’s owner Kerry Stokes ain’t quite as horrendous as Murdoch’s malignant empire they’re alos pretty FN terrible to put mildly :
Following an Australian transgender content creator’s claims that Channel Seven used two photographs of her from before and after she transitioned without her consent, two more transgender people have claimed their photos and videos were also used by the program without their knowledge.
&
Gavranich said the move made her feel violated, and — like Grace Hyland — she said she did not agree with the story about people who regret transitioning as that was not her experience.
“All I could think was that this is out of my control and is going to hurt so many people in my community,” she said.
Transgender content creator Levi Ace Day also spoke out on their TikTok account about the program.
He also said the episode used a photograph of him without his knowledge.
“Now they’re using me so I’m just coming out here to publicly say I don’t support that obviously,” they said in a response video that has had more than 75,000 views.
Theer’s also a petition calling for Channel Seven to pull that disgustingly transphobic episode from its website and social media platforms.
StevoRsays
Meanwhile in better news and spaaace neeeews :
Japan launched a lunar exploration spacecraft on Thursday aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket, hoping to become the world’s fifth country to land on the Moon — but their mission is significant for another reason. … (snip)…”The big objective of SLIM is to prove the high-accuracy landing … to achieve ‘landing where we want’ on the lunar surface, rather than ‘landing where we can’,” JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa told a news conference. “By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the Moon.”The agency added there were no previous instances of pinpoint landing on celestial bodies with significant gravity such as the Moon.
Japan also launched an X-ray space observatpory on that rocket too so hopefully a lot of good science to come from that as well.
Oh & yes! Aussies are heading to the surface of Earth’s largest, most famous and longest orbiting natural satellite too :
Australia will send a rover to the moon for the first time just a few short years from now, if all goes according to plan.
The nation will put a robotic rover on one of NASA’s Artemis moon missions, with liftoff occurring as soon as 2026, according to the Australian Space Agency.
“Drawing on Australia’s world-leading remote operations expertise, the rover will collect lunar soil, known as regolith,” the agency wrote in a statement on Tuesday (Sept. 5). “NASA will attempt to extract oxygen from the sample. This is a key step towards a sustainable human presence on the moon.”
The rover does not yet have a name, but the Australian Space Agency is working on that. The agency just launched a competition to hang a moniker on the pioneering robot, and you can participate — if you’re an Australian resident.You have until Oct. 20 to submit your entry. The Australian Space Agency will select its four favorites from the public offerings, then submit the shortlist to a public vote. The winner will be announced in early December.
As we debate the Vocie and maybe Treaty and Truth when it comes to our First Australians :
New South Wales Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Harris says he is aware of an archaeological search conducted at one of Australia’s most notorious Aboriginal boys homes and is talking to survivors about the next steps.
WARNING: This story contains details that may be distressing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers
In December 2021, the Murrumbidgee Archaeological Heritage Company was engaged by a group of Indigenous people who lived at the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home, near Kempsey on the state’s Mid North Coast, to conduct a search.
The home, which was run between 1924 and 1970, has a notorious history of abuse involving First Nations people.
A spokesperson for Mr Harris said a ground-penetrating radar search at the site had been completed.
The spokesperson said due to the highly sensitive nature of the findings, a report on the search was presented to the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation only. Guardian Australia, which has seen the report, today claimed at least nine “suspicious” sites of possible graves had been identified by the archaeological experts.
Think I’ve mentioned this before but within walking distance (35 mins – hour or so?) of my home is Colebrook House where Indigenous Stolen generations were being taken up until the 1970’s.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Wednesday that poetry is proof the Navy needs to root out “wokeness.” (Watch the video below.)
“We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker,” he said to Laura Ingraham on Fox News Wednesday.
The right-wing senator has been widely criticized for blocking military promotions to protest the Pentagon’s policy of supplying service members with paid leave and travel costs to get an abortion in another state.
Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”
“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”
Del Toro this week accused the Alabama senator of “aiding and abetting communists” with his promotions blockade in an interview. Del Toro also wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece along with the secretaries of the Army and Air Force that Tuberville’s holdup is putting the nation’s security at risk and placing military families in limbo.
Tuberville did not specify the instance of Navy personnel reciting poetry on a ship. But he was likely referring to a spoken-word event on the USS Gerald Ford hosted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Supporting Sailors (G.L.A.S.S.) association in November. Tuberville previously griped about a nonbinary junior officer praising that gathering.
UPS delivery drones are now allowed to fly longer distance flights beyond the sight of ground operators, the Federal Aviation Administration revealed in a press release on Wednesday. This is the kind of move that opens the door for drone delivery companies like Wing, FedEx, and Zip to deliver packages across a wider area and service more customers.
UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft, using Matternet M2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond sight for commercial purposes. That includes uAvionix Corp. and, last week, infrastructure inspection company Phoenix Air Unmanned…
President Biden is set to travel to the Group of 20 (G20) summit on Thursday, a high-stakes meeting that will take on a new look with Chinese President Xi Jinping skipping the event.
The summit is an opportunity for Biden to show leadership on the international stages and further warm relations with India, the host of the high-profile summit.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to skip the event might be the biggest news at the G20.
Xi is sending the country’s premier, Li Qiang, to India on his behalf and China has not given a reason why while calling the G20 an important forum for international economic cooperation.
Biden, who met Xi at last year’s G20 meeting in Indonesia, said he was disappointed that Xi will not be attending. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the two leaders will meet “in the months ahead.”
[…] Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that the snub from Xi comes as “the rift between the U.S. and its allies on one side and China and Russia on the other is just huge and growing.”
[…] One of the administration’s top priorities at this week’s summit will be to win support for reshaping the World Bank — an effort meant to counter China by providing an alternative means of financing separate from Beijing for development projects.
Sullivan told reporters that U.S. officials will look to deliver on an agenda of “fundamentally reshaping and scaling up the multilateral development banks.”
The White House last month asked Congress to approve $3.3 billion as part of a larger supplemental funding request to expand infrastructure financing through the World Bank. Sullivan said he hoped to see other nations follow Biden’s lead in allocating more funds for World Bank financing.
World Bank CEO Ajay Banga, who Biden nominated to the post in February, has pushed for the institution to expand programs to fight climate change and address global hunger, and to increase the bank’s lending power.
[…] “Our perspective is that for a modest investment, from the point of view of the overall size of the U.S. budget, to put into ensuring greater stability, greater prosperity, greater capacity in the rest of the world, that is going to end up reducing the costs and burdens on working people in Scranton or Minneapolis or any of your all’s hometowns,” Sullivan told reporters.
[…] “The U.S. recognizes India as a pivotal part of its wider strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And India recognizes that it can only ward off a rising China with the help of the United States,” Dhume told The Hill.
India’s G20 presidency has also brought to light growing schisms within Indian society that may be difficult for Biden to avoid.
While the administration has concerns about human rights and press freedom issues, including the treatment of Muslims and LGBTQ minorities in India, U.S. officials have sought to downplay those differences in the interests of cultivating a strategic relationship with New Delhi.
[…] Biden’s travel to India and Vietnam comes on the heels of Vice President Harris’ own trip to Indonesia for the ASEAN Summit, a reflection of how the White House has put an emphasis on building relationships with nations in the Indo-Pacific region to counter China’s influence.
Besides Biden’s hosting of Modi during the official state visit, the White House has revived the Quad alliance of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia to strengthen its presence in the Indo-Pacific.
[…] Harris traveled to Jakarta this week, where she met with leaders from Southeast Asia and discussed efforts to boost the region’s economy, as well as develop more climate-friendly policies.
It marked Harris’ fourth trip to the Indo-Pacific since taking office.
Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb.
The Weizmann Institute team say their “embryo model”, made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo.
It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab.
The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives…
Ironically, it could accomplish precisely the opposite. If this “model” is viable, then you might have the ‘every sperm is sacred’ crowd demanding that every stem cell be respected as a ‘person.’
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #233…
To quote the head Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine, “They’re advancing in the wrong direction!”
Justice of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas finally released his 2022 financial disclosure forms this week […]
he had his partisan hack of a lawyer release a snarling, whiny, defensive statement that would embarrass everyone involved if any of them was genetically or emotionally capable of shame:
For several months now, left wing “watchdog” groups have been attacking Justice Thomas for alleged ethical violations largely stemming from his relationships with personal friends who happen to be wealthy.
Oh sure, Harlan Crow would be friends with Clarence Thomas even if he was still a low-level federal bureaucrat running the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not one of the nation’s most powerful people whose decisions can affect Harlan Crow’s vast fortune. Corruption? […]
Thomas’s 2022 financial filings address a couple of particular issues raised by the initial Pro Publica investigation that kicked off this whole blowup. One was Thomas and wife QAnon McGillicutty — sorry, wife Ginni — accepting rides on Crow’s private jet, trips on Crow’s private yacht, and relaxing vacations at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks for years, all without revealing them in his financial disclosure forms.
Now Thomas has categorized the flights he took in 2022 as reimbursements, not gifts. Which, as Slate explains, does not clear things up:
The difference in categories is significant because gift reports must include their “value” while reimbursements need not. Although Thomas claims that this unusual categorization is “consistent with previous filings by other filers,” he gives no examples. The other justices’ reported reimbursements were all for teaching or speaking engagements at law schools[.]
Hey, Clarence Thomas probably socialized with some of Crow’s other guests at his Adirondacks resort, that’s a kind of speaking engagement. As in, was he speaking? […]
No other justice listed an expense-paid vacation as a reimbursement, with the attendant concealment of its value.
Thomas’ motivation for the categorization seems obvious. The Financial Disclosure Committee’s rationale for apparently allowing it is, to put it politely, opaque. The Judicial Conference’s Guide to Judiciary Policy defines “reimbursement” as the payment or repayment for travel-related expenses “other than gifts.”
[…] Thomas also reports that his rides on Crow’s private plane were sparked by concerns raised by his security detail in the wake of the leak of the Dobbs opinion in May of 2022, which resulted in an explosion of anger directed towards the Supreme Court. People are so touchy when you take away rights.
But what about all the other rides on Crow’s private jet? The ones that occurred for years upon years before Dobbs apparently made it too dangerous for Clarence Thomas to fly commercial […] Those flights remain unaddressed. As do all the prior stays at Crow’s Adirondacks resort, where Thomas has reportedly vacationed for many years.
Then there is Thomas’s retconning of Crow purchasing his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia, in 2014, ostensibly to preserve it for possible conversion into a museum dedicated to the justice sometime in the future. Part of the deal was that Thomas’s mother got to live in the house rent-free for the rest of her life. Thomas’s lawyer’s letter describes this as “not a gift, but part of the overall transaction.”
Yr Wonkette is not a fancy lawyer, but “free rent for life” in a property that has doubled in value since you also bought a couple of properties around this one and redeveloped them in an effort to gentrify the area sure sounds like a pretty nice fucking gift to us. The excuse that it was a gift to Clarence Thomas’s mother and not Clarence Thomas personally? That’s not splitting hairs, that’s splitting the atoms that make up a hair.
Anyway, all these details are somewhat overshadowed by the main thrust of the statement from Thomas’s lawyer, which is that everything is everyone else’s fault. The Judicial Conference that oversees these matters for not previously giving clear guidance. The unnamed colleagues Thomas has asked for advice over the years who also steered him wrong. And of course the usual “left wing organizations with largely undisclosed supporters that stand diametrically opposed to his judicial philosophy” who are “abusing [the Constitution] and their own privilege to score cheap political points for a few slow news cycles.”
[…] obviously a stance of “combative hyperpartisan asshole” is not going to put anything to rest here. But if Clarence Thomas wants to spend his golden years dealing with ethics controversy after ethics controversy instead of airing out all of his dirty laundry, that’s his choice. Though he’ll still blame everyone else for his making it.
Ukraine’s military shared a video on Wednesday of the fiery destruction of what it said was a massive ammunition dump used for Russia’s Ka-52 helicopters, located near Bakhmut.
In the aerial footage, first shared by Ukraine’s Special Forces on Telegram, five trucks can be seen gathered around a small cluster of buildings by a body of water — the picture is clear enough to discern a single soldier transferring goods from one truck to another.
Within seconds, the pair of trucks are engulfed in an explosion, followed by several others. Soon, the entire surrounding area is blazing and charred.
“Greetings from HIMARS,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense wrote in a post on X touting the bombardment on Thursday…
Partial transcript from a recent Fox News segment, with Hugh Hewitt interviewing Donald Trump:
HH: So, but did you direct anyone to move the boxes, Mr. President? Did you tell anyone to move the boxes?
DT: I don’t talk about anything. You know why? Because I’m allowed to do whatever I want. I come under the Presidential Records Act. I’m not telling you. You know, every time I talk to you, oh, I have a breaking story. You don’t have any story. I come under the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to do everything I did. What is not the case is Biden. Biden didn’t come under it, because he was the vice president. And by the way, Mike Pence didn’t come under it, and he had very serious classified documents, and he didn’t come under, and nobody seems to be bothered by that. But I am totally protected by the Presidential Records Act.
Commentary from Wonkette:
[…] So amazingly angry and stupid and angry and stupid and angry (and stupid). “I come under the Presidential Records Act.” He repeats those words over and over again, because somebody likely said them to him one time and his brain latched on like they were a gun or a Bible or a hamberder. He doesn’t know what they mean. He doesn’t know what the Presidential Records Act is or that it says the opposite of what his damaged brain thinks it says.
Here is Trump earlier in the same interview, babbling about the same Presidential Records Act. Notice how he compulsively says “I come under the Presidential Records Act” like it’s the only way he was ever taught how to combine those seven words:
DT: Like the records case, I come under the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to do it. Biden’s not allowed to do it, because he wasn’t president. It’s a special act that was passed in great detail in 1977, in tremendous detail. It tells you everything you’re allowed to do, and it’s not criminal. It has nothing to do with the criminal. It’s not a criminal act. They don’t even like to mention it, because I come under the Presidential Records Act. Biden doesn’t come under that act, because it didn’t pertain to him, because he was vice president and a senator. And the boxes he has are loaded up, loaded up with material that’s the most classified material you can have.
[Trump sounds demented.]
They don’t even like to mention it, how he comes under the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in tremendous detail.
[…] In the same Hugh Hewitt interview, Donald Trump said he would like to debate Meghan Markle. And that if our election hadn’t been rigged and stollen, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. And that if he was worried about any of the cases against him, “I would be sitting in a corner someplace and saying mommy, take me home.” But he’s not doing that. […]
Hurricane Lee may strengthen into a Category 5 storm as it nears the Caribbean islands and eventually tracks toward the United States. At the very least, a significant risk of dangerous rip currents is expected along the East Coast…
It’s too far ahead to know if it will hit the U.S. mainland.
A judge struck down a provision of a federal program meant to help minority-owned businesses, a ruling that could imperil other programs that benefit underrepresented groups.
Thousands of Black, Latino and other minority business owners are scrambling to prove that their race puts them at a “social disadvantage” after a federal judge declared a key provision of a popular Small Business Administration (SBA) program unconstitutional, extending the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent retreat from affirmative action.
The SBA’s 8(a) Business Development program was meant to open a pipeline to billions in government contracting dollars for historically disadvantaged groups. But in July, a federal judge in Tennessee struck down a provision of the program that equated race with social disadvantage.
The decision — one of the first to affect the private sector in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision upending race-conscious college admissions — throws into disarray an SBA program that has served minority-owned small businesses for about five decades. Legal experts said it could signal trouble for other programs meant to help underrepresented groups win federal contracts, including veterans and women.
Under the new guidelines, being Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American is no longer enough to automatically qualify as socially disadvantaged — a key step in making it into the program. Instead, in a mass email distributed Aug. 22 by SBA officials, business owners were instructed to submit an essay demonstrating that race had hindered their success. […]
The SBA is proud of our work to promote equity and level the playing field in federal procurement to attract a diverse supplier base and ensure competition, innovation, and performance,” SBA Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman said in a statement, adding that the agency is working with the Justice Department to determine its next steps.
In the meantime, additional SBA staff are being trained to review the narratives, according to the agency, which is working with the Justice Department to create additional guidance for businesses and the agencies they work with.
Michael Rosman, general counsel of the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative public interest law firm that sued the SBA on behalf of a White business owner, Celeste Bennett, praised the court ruling. In a statement, Rosman said that “we and our client are pleased that we were able to achieve a significant goal of the litigation: eliminating the explicit use of race in determining who is entitled to participate in a very advantageous federal contracting set-aside program.”
The upending of the 8(a) program marks one of the first casualties in the business world of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision holding that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The 8(a) program’s reliance on the presumption of social disadvantage was similarly unconstitutional, District Judge Clifton L. Corker wrote in his July 19 order enjoining the SBA from using the presumption.
[…] The SBA changes come amid a broad legal assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the private sector […]
the Harvard-UNC rulings have essentially made no SBA program safe from scrutiny and legal challenges, including the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business program, Women-Owned Small Business program, the Small Disadvantaged Business program and the Historically Underutilized Business Zones program — all of whose certifications are key in helping disadvantaged business owners win contracts throughout the federal government.
[…] In 2019, court documents show Lusa was awarded two contracts from the Natural Resources Conservation Service worth $3.8 million through a women-owned small-business program.
Asked during her deposition why she chose to take advantage of the program for women but wanted to challenge a similar program for minorities, Bennett replied, “Because I don’t set the rules, and I need to play.”
Fani Willis could’ve simply ignored Jim Jordan. Instead, the prosecutor told the Judiciary Committee chairman that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
After Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis indicted Donald Trump and a striking number of his associates last month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan did what he always does: The Ohio Republican launched an investigation into the investigation.
In fact, the far-right GOP congressman wrote to Willis, directing the local prosecutor to hand over a series of documents and related information by Sept. 7, which is today.
It seemed quite possible that the Georgia district attorney might shrug her shoulders and put Jordan’s letter in the circular file, but as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Willis instead acknowledged the chairman’s deadline with a letter of her own.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Thursday blasted a congressman who has pledged to investigate her handling of an indictment of former President Donald Trump and others. … Willis fired back, saying Jordan’s Aug. 24 letter included “inaccurate information and misleading statements.” She accused Jordan of improperly interfering with a state criminal case and attempting to punish her for personal political gain.
“Its obvious purpose is to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous misrepresentations,” Willis wrote, referring to Jordan’s letter from two weeks ago. “As I make clear below, there is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.”
The Fulton County prosecutor went on to tell the Judiciary Committee chairman, “Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.”
Ouch.
[…] after Jordan sought information from Willis, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California, also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, described the gambit as “stupid,” and it’s worth understanding why.
At the heart of the Republican’s newest investigation is a conspiracy theory of sorts: Jordan and his allies apparently believe there are powerful federal officials who are secretly pulling the strings, helping orchestrate prosecutions across multiple jurisdictions. By way of evidence, the far-right chairman has pointed to … nothing in particular.
But Jordan nevertheless keeps launching investigations, sending letters, making demands, and setting deadlines, hoping that someday, he might uncover imagined proof that almost certainly doesn’t exist.
The trouble is, the prosecutors he’s tried to pressure know they can ignore him. As Jordan really ought to have learned after his foray into a separate case in Manhattan, the House Judiciary Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction to insert itself into criminal prosecutions at the state and local level.
Or put another way, if Jordan is eagerly awaiting a lengthy and substantive response from Willis’ office, he’s going to be disappointed.
CNN reports that a portion of author Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography of the man who made Twitter, the site now known as X, safe for antisemitism shows that Elon Musk had a direct hand in thwarting a Ukrainian attack on the Russian Navy. His actions may have prolonged the war and cost the lives of Ukrainian civilians. They certainly assisted Russia’s ability to terrorize both Ukraine and the Black Sea.
Russia’s illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine came just as satellite internet service through SpaceX’s Starlink system was becoming widely available. At first, access to this new means of communication seemed like a godsend for Ukraine. The terminals were relatively small, relatively secure, and easily set up in forward areas without a lot of infrastructure. With Russia regularly bombing Ukraine’s electrical grid and frequently targeting communications hubs, Starlink offered a way for Ukraine’s civilian and military agencies to stay in contact even when towers and lines were in rubble.
Then SpaceX began turning off terminals, blocking access in some areas of Ukraine, and limiting Ukraine’s use of the system. All of this may have culminated in Musk single-handedly deciding to prevent Ukraine from striking Russian warships off the Crimean coast.
Russia currently has a fleet of nearly 50 warships in the Black Sea. Those warships have frequently served as missile platforms for launching attacks on Ukrainian cities and are responsible for some of the most horrific attacks on civilian homes in the war. The ships have also been used to stop commercial traffic on the Black Sea and threaten ships hauling grain from Ukrainian ports.
Ukraine has successfully made use of drone boats to attack this fleet. That includes an attack last month in which a Ukrainian drone caused extensive damage to a Russian warship followed by an attack on the Kerch Bridge, which Russia uses to transport weapons and ammunition into Crimea and other areas in southern Ukraine. An attack last year succeeded in damaging the current flagship of the Black Sea Fleet.
Russia has managed to stop some of these surface drones, but Ukraine has developed something potentially even more effective in taking out Russian warships: submarine drones. These include the Toloka, which was developed last year, and the newer, larger Marichka. Operating with just a small camera and communications pod above water, these drones could be much more effective in getting past Russian defenses.
For Ukraine, taking out these ships is not a matter of offense. They’re not trying to conquer the Black Sea. They’re trying to end a threat that can, at any moment, throw hypersonic weapons into the middle of their cities, resulting in massive civilian casualties. The naval drones that Ukraine is employing in this task are designed specifically to address removing this threat.
According to the CNN report, Musk explicitly ordered engineers to “turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.” That left the drones, which had already been sent on their way toward Russian ships, drifting without targets or control. They reportedly “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”
In other words, Musk intervened in the battle and provided a big win for Russia, defeating months of construction and planning on the part of Ukraine. That action preserved Russian warships, which are regularly attacking civilian targets in Ukrainian cities.
According to Isaacson’s book, Musk claimed that he took this action because he was concerned that Russia would respond with a nuclear attack, a threat that is often made by Russian state media and propagandists. It’s not surprising that Musk would parrot this claim since he has admitted that he has directly spoken with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Apparently, phone calls with Putin are not the only contact Musk has with Russia. According to CNN’s reading of Isaacson’s book, those nuclear fears were “driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials.”
Last October, Musk provided his own plan for ending the war in Ukraine. That plan involved Ukraine giving territory to Russia, including saying that Crimea should be “formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).” Musk’s plan also included Ukraine agreeing to not join NATO or the EU. This plan absolutely mirrored talking points that have appeared on Russia propaganda outlets, and their use by Musk reportedly horrified both some of his fans and his employees.
When Musk ran a poll on Twitter asking about support for this plan, it lost decisively. Musk then blamed that loss on bots. His Twitter poll also brought a robust response from Ukrainian diplomat Andrij Melnyk. [Tweet at the link]
Musk made a big deal of donating Starlink terminals to Ukraine, insisting—even though Ukraine was paying for the service—that it was costing SpaceX too much to continue. Soon after, SpaceX turned off 1,300 terminals in Ukraine even though those terminals had been purchased by Ukraine, not donated. The Pentagon also pays SpaceX for the Starlink service as part of a contract specifically awarded to provide communication to Ukraine.
But Musk did more than whine about the cost: In February, Foreign Policy reported that SpaceX was limiting the use of Starlink in “offensive” operations, cutting off Ukrainian drones that had been designed around the service. SpaceX also used geofencing to wall off certain areas where Starlink would not operate, which reportedly affected Ukraine’s abilities to operate in some areas of the front. In a war where the use and significance of drones is constantly increasing and where secure communications are vital, this is a significant threat to Ukraine’s effectiveness.
[…] Musk looking like a villain from a James Bond film […] That a single man can determine the outcome of a military operation planned over months, one that could have resulted in saving the lives of Ukrainian civilians and possibly made a significant effect on the outcome of Putin’s illegal invasion, shows just how broken our system is. And it certainly shows the peril of allowing someone who is so prone to believing in conspiracy theories, who embraces white supremacy, and who is so supportive of authoritarianism to be in any position of power, much less one that could determine the future for millions of people.
Technically the US is not at war with Russia so it isn’t legally treason. But Elon Moscow has certainly taken sides, against the ally of the US, while being paid for vital supplies. I wonder if his Starlink contract has any clauses that he is violating, or if there is any crime that can be charged when a contractor interferes with the use of its products unilaterally against US interests.
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The DOJ is overwhelmed I’m sure. It’s called the Republican Crime Wave and looks to be the largest criminal enterprise in the free world.
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Talk about shocking and abhorrent- this is literally an act of war on Ukraine! Given that Ukraine is paying Starlink costs, and that Musk is acting in concert w/Putin & Russia, this raises some extremely important questions. For example, should he be sanctioned by the US Dept of Defense?? […] This goes far beyond freedom of speech.
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He’s counting on the government’s reliance on SpaceX to let him get away with it. So far, it seems to be working, but hopefully that changes.
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There is precedent, even in the anti-socialist “our business is business” US, for nationalizing companies that are vital suppliers during a conflict. SpaceX could be nationalized, with any non-Musk shareholders left as minority owners or compensated.
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At a minimum, he’s a willing dupe of Putin’s. At worst, he’s a knowing accomplice.
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Billionaire generals know more than military ones doncha know..
As a bonus they have no accountability and the blood is washed away by the subscriber base.
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there is another applicable statute, the Logan Act, which has made interfering in foreign affairs by an individual a felony since 1798.
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It is now obvious that he is a Fascist that supports a terrorist state. Time to remove him from control of any business that does work for the US Government. This guy committed an international crime by aiding and abetting murders.
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It’s time to remove all taxpayer support from Musk’s “private” businesses.
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I thought it was against the law for a private citizen (billionaire or not) to talk to officials of a foreign government with respect to anything that has to do with international relations.That is the job of the President and the State Department. I am outraged that Musk can manipulate a technology in a way that affects lives the way this post indicates. He is being paid by Ukraine and the US government for Starlink services. He launches and operates that network with the authorization of US Government agencies. He doesn’t have permission to be a one man decider or influencer of outcomes in the Russia-Ukraine war. He should be shut down.
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Sounds like he’s operating an independent foreign policy.
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We have an out-of-control narcissist, racist and antisemite mogul, with a penchant for authoritarianism and self-promotion, who believes he has the right to determine the diplomatic outcome of a major war by manipulating access to his technology.
Sigh. Polls and surveys. Chicanery is more like it.
New SRSS/CNN survey appears bad for Biden (CNN Poll: Biden faces negative job ratings and concerns about his age as he gears up for 2024), but what is going on in this thing? I am a professional applied statistician. I am not a survey expert but I have taken courses in survey methodology. So I *should* be able to understand exactly what they have done in this survey and why. […]
Here’s what it says in the CNN article.
“The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from August 25-31 among a random national sample of 1,503 adults drawn from a probability-based panel, including 1,259 registered voters and 391 Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters. The survey included an oversample to reach a total of 898 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents; this group has been weighted to its proper size within the population. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 points; among registered voters, the margin of sampling error is 3.6 points, and it is 6.0 for Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters.”
I checked the full SRSS press release and there is even less information there…
So let’s unpack this. first: Random national sample of 1,503 adults drawn from a probability-based panel, including 1,259 registered voters and 391 Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters.
So what does “probability-based panel” mean? It means that SRSS has invited a large group of folks to participate regularly in their surveys. These invitations are sent to a group of Americans thought to be representative of the population. But who accepts the invitations? People who are willing to provide a “battery” (SRSS’s term not mine) of information. How large is this group? SRSS doesn’t say. Are they still a representative group? Well, no. But SRSS just says that they are “weighted” and “calibrated” to assure representativeness based on consistency with American Community Survey averages when surveys are taken. I find this mildly suspicious but no huge red flags yet…
Next, they sampled 1,503 adults from this go-to survey group. And they got only “391 Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters”??! Here, this thing starts to get really weird. Who are the rest of the people?
Second: The survey included an oversample to reach a total of 898 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents; this group has been weighted to its proper size within the population.
So 898 Republicans make up most of the sampled voters. Why? So this is NOT a random national sample. It is a sample chosen by party affiliation.
But, no worries, supposedly, because the GOP oversampling is “weighted to its proper size within the population.” But how on earth does anyone know what the “proper size” is? National totals of party affiliation registrations? Previously stated opinions from the “battery” of demographic information. Of course, they don’t tell you.
The entire result that Biden and Trump are neck-and-neck hinges on this weight. If you weight R’s more heavily then Trump is the poll winner. If you weight them less heavily then Biden is the winner. Little of this has anything to do with the actual answers by the survey participants.
OK, folks… Am I missing something? Or are polls today worthless?
As someone who has worked many such polls its a very cursory way to describe the methodology behind the “forced sample” that they used. The days of “random” selection for polling are long gone. The decision you make about the demographics you want in your “forced” sample will 9 times out 10 drive the result — and make it a self fulfilling prophecy for your desired results.
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It’s CNN: they’re still trying to get Republican voters to like them.
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They’re flooding the zone with weighted polls to make Trump look better and Biden worse. The “average Joe” doesnt look below the headline, and the “average Joe” is swayed by hearing that Trump is a winner and Biden is a loser.
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Remember the polls talking about the Big, Red Tsunami coming in 2020? Yeah… polls have been officially twisted into partisan meaninglessness now. They’ll show whatever narrative the media outlet wants to show.
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One thing that should be clear from the methodology section — the breakdown of the surveyed population from which head-to-head contest results derive. From the SSRS document, page 23.
Among the en=re sample, 32% described themselves as Democrats, 32% described themselves as Republicans, and 35% described themselves as independents or members of another party.
So, whether or not we like the results, or the methodology, SSRS does report the central polled universe from which they give their Trump vs Biden data.
Also, I would set aside your concerns about the confusing wording regarding over-sampling (whether of Democrat/Democrat leaning or the converse) — over-samples in polls like this are used to get data about things like primary preferences within each tent, not for the full “representative” poll.
Where I think there are good reasons to express concern is on the question of whether the poll is actually representative of the current likely electorate (or of the actual electorate fourteen months hence). One factor that may be at play here is the considerable difficulty in getting engagement from the public in general, and from younger, more progressive leaning cohorts in particular.
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I think you have the basics of this correct but still the weighting by party is highly suspect. A poster down below made the excellent point that you should not be “controlling” or “weighting” for something so correlated (party affiliation) with the outcome you are ASKING ABOUT (support for Biden).
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Doesn’t it matter who paid for this poll? New Republic.
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I’m not arguing that Biden is likely doing better (or worse) than this. I’m saying that arbitrary weighting choices are driving these results far more than the actual replies of the participants.
Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro was convicted Thursday of criminal contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena related to the plot to overturn the 2020 election.
The jury deliberated for about four hours before finding Navarro, 74, guilty of two counts of contempt for refusing to testify before the House Jan. 6 committee and turn over subpoenaed documents.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta scheduled his sentencing for Jan. 12.
The two counts each carry a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in prison, in addition to a maximum fine of $100,000…
A judge sentenced “That ’70s Show” show star Danny Masterson to 30 years to life in prison Thursday for raping two women, giving them some relief after they spoke in court about the decades of damage he inflicted…
Ukraine analyst Def Mon on Twitter has a great overview of the situation around Robotyne. If that analysis is accurate, expect Ukraine’s progress to slow down again.
But that’s actually a good thing.
Both RO37 and Mark Sumner have given us great updates on the situation at Robotyne in the last two days. In short, Ukraine didn’t just breach Russia’s first major defensive line on the heavily guarded approach to the strategic city of Tokmak, but they’ve also breached the second—and seemingly strongest—of the lines.
What was once a slow, plodding advance picked up a great deal of steam, shocking observers with its sudden rapid gains. But if all goes well, things should slow down for a bit. And that’s not a typo—if things go well.
Here is Def Mon’s map of the current Robotyne situation. [map at the link] Let’s go through his notes from left to right.
[Russian armed forces] continues to counter attack from the south of Robotyne to be able to claim they have not lost the village
We’ve seen this time and time again, where Russia would rather lose troops out in the open in vain attempts to regain lost territory than reinforce their defensive positions. This is Russian doctrine, maybe because it was easier for commanders to sacrifice lives in militarily futile gestures than it was to inform Stalin/Lenin/Putin that they had lost ground.
In any case, we know Russia has moved reinforcements from both Kherson and Luhansk to try and stem the Ukrainian advance. In case anyone was wondering how they would use those troops, apparently it’s not to reinforce their defensive lines.
Instead, they’re back to sending them out in the open to get shredded by Ukrainian artillery, drones, and dug-in Ukrainians. These tactics have certainly managed to slow down Ukrainian advances, but at a stupid cost, thinning out their defenses behind these main lines and making Ukrainian victory ultimately more likely. There’s a reason Ukraine took two months to breach the first line, and only a week to breach the second line.
It’s in Ukraine’s interest to simply sit pretty and let Russia come to them rather than trying to ferret them out of their defensive lines.
Here’s another unexpected factor. “As the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive kicked off across southern Ukraine in early June, Russian commanders made an important adjustment to their defensive doctrine—one that had an immediate and profound effect on the Ukrainians’ operations,“ Forbes’ David Axe reported. “The Russians quadrupled the depth of their defensive minefields, from 120 meters to 500 meters—and also increased the density of mines within the expanded fields … But there’s a downside for the Russians. In expanding their minefields, they’ve depleted their minelaying resources faster than they might originally have anticipated. So the minefields are uneven.”
In other words, Russia successfully f’d the Ukrainian advance by layering a mind-boggling number of mines ahead of the first defensive line. But—and this is key—that means they don’t have the mines to properly cover territory behind that first line. It’s a big reason Ukraine was able to advance so quickly to the second line. Odds are good that the ground behind that next line has even fewer mines.
That would certainly explain why Russia has fought so hard to prevent Ukraine from even reaching those main lines.
Next Def Mon bubble:
[Ukrainian armed forces] took trenches in the woods south of Robotyne
This was covered in the previous two updates, and is still a big surprise. Russia is now counterattacking not just Robotyne itself, but is attempting to retake their own defensive trenchline, which is now occupied by Ukraine. Seriously, Ukraine can sit there for months mowing down approaching Russians and it would be time well spent.
All the while, Ukraine continues to “shape the battlefield” by eliminating the greatest danger to Ukrainian forces. It’s not mines, actually—it’s artillery. And Ukraine’s claimed artillery kills this week have been downright gaudy. [List of Russia’s losses is available at the link]
Last night, Ukraine claimed to have destroyed 37 artillery guns and five MLRS rocket artillery launchers. That means that over the past three days, Ukraine has claimed to have destroyed 111 artillery guns and 12 MLRS launchers.
The reason minefields are so deadly is it allows Russia to funnel advancing Ukrainians into “kill zones,” narrow lanes where artillery can easily zero in and wipe out anything inside. That forces anyone advancing to hurry through lest they get caught in the barrage, and that haste often leads to the kinds of mistakes that get vehicles destroyed and people killed.
Take out the artillery and Ukraine can advance at leisure, with combat engineers clearing wide lanes without fear of attack. The Ukrainian spearhead can occupy Russian trenches without facing relentless barrages. And Ukrainian artillery can operate more freely without fear of Russian counterbattery fire. (Though suicide drones are certainly an ongoing challenge.)
Moving on.
[Ukraine is] slowly advancing along the windbreaks NE of Novoprokopivka
Look at the satellite imagery of that area again: [map at the link]
Everyone is focused on the main defensive lines. Yet each one of those tree lines has trenches manned by Russian defenders. And despite our best hopes, those Russians are putting up a fierce defense.
That means Ukraine has to advance slowly, tree line to tree line, even if it’s just two or three Russians holed up with rifles.
[Ukraine] clearing up badly prepared RU infantry trenches west of Verbove, and have most likely established positions in them
This remains the most exciting news all week. Ukraine bypassed the anti-vehicle line (the first yellow line in the map above) and occupied the infantry positions behind it. That means Ukraine has the space to methodically clear the minefields ahead of that vehicle line without getting targeted by infantry, as well as bridging the anti-vehicle trenches, usually by dumping dirt and gravel inside them.
Ukrainian infantry can sit in those trenches until those vehicle lanes are opened up, and then proceed on their advance once their armor can join them.
At that point, they can decide whether to take Verbove and protect their flank, or begin rolling up that Russian defensive line from the rear. Remember that it’s at the top of a ridgeline, so whether they hit it from the front or the back, they’re attacking uphill. But once they take it, it’s all downhill to Tokmak.
All in all, expect progress to slow. Not because Russia is winning the tactical fight, but because it’s in Ukraine’s interest to degrade counterattacking Russian forces, destroy more Russian artillery pieces, and shore up that approach near Verbove so they can surround that defensive line from the east.
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This is amazing: [Tweet and video at the link: Efficient and precise shooting! This Gepard fires short bursts against two separate Shahed drones and brings both of them down.]
The German Gepard anti-aircraft gun was slated for decommissioning when the war started. Its rapid-burst gun was considered obsolete in the age of sophisticated missile air defense systems. Then drones changed the face of the battlefield, and the Gepard has become one of the most valuable anti-drone defenses.
Its ammunition hadn’t been manufactured in decades, and Switzerland blocked delivery of 12,000 rounds it had manufactured. Still, in less than a year, German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall AG miraculously created a whole new manufacturing line for the ammo. It began delivery this week.
Ukraine will get 40,000 rounds by the end of the year, which will go a long way since in the video, you will see the crew destroy two Iranian-made Shahed drones with just a handful of six-round bursts.
Germany has also promised to send dozens more Gepards by the end of the year. It is unclear where these are coming from, but we know that Jordan was phasing out the system, and both the U.S. and Germany were looking to purchase them for Ukraine.
Given their performance, it would make sense for Germany to resume production and sales of the system. It is a lifesaver on this drone-infested modern battlefield.
[…] “We really worry about the physical health of children when the temperature gets above 90 degrees,” Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, told the Globe. Those temperatures are entirely possible in classrooms: A Philadelphia teacher told NPR that his classroom had been at 86 degrees even on days when it was in the 70s outdoors, and he had seen temperatures as high as 93 in his classroom.
In many of the schools that don’t have air conditioning, it’s not as simple as just installing it—even if they had the funding to do so. Older school buildings may not have the electrical systems needed to support air conditioning, or may have other infrastructure problems, like one Maryland district where the existing pipes and insulation weren’t adequate for newly installed air conditioning.
While schools in historically cooler areas of the country are less likely to have air conditioning, climate change is increasing the need everywhere. According to a 2022 Washington Post analysis of heat closures, “Philadelphia averaged four such days in 1970; now the figure is eight. In Baltimore, it went from six to 10; in Denver, from six to 11; and in Cleveland, from one to four.”
The problems faced by older and less-funded schools signal that this is an equity issue as well. Kids in lower-income areas are more likely to be in old schools and buildings in need of significant repairs. It poses threats to their health—not just through heat but through mold and air- and water-quality problems—and to their learning. Learning takes a hit when kids are let out of school early but also when they’re sitting in sweltering classrooms, according to multiple studies. Hot classrooms literally contribute to learning gaps.
Climate change, poor U.S. infrastructure and education funding, and longstanding patterns of racial and income inequality are combining to create classrooms that are unhealthy and unsafe for kids and harm their ability to learn. This requires major, ongoing investment in infrastructure: It would take an estimated $1.1 trillion over the next decade to fully replace or modernize all of the schools in the country that need it in every way that they need it—but Congress didn’t even include the $100 billion in school infrastructure funding that President Joe Biden called for in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
HVAC systems aren’t the only urgent need in schools, of course, but the overall $1.1 trillion of need is a sign of the nation’s shameful lack of care for kids and their education. As the shortened school days in too many places across the country this week show, the problem is an immediate one. It’s time for elected officials at every level to get serious about this.
Today in “you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Tucker Carlson has slithered back into our consciousness. But there is a silver lining here, which we promise we’ll get to, just as soon as we finish scrubbing our skin with steel wool.
Anyway, Tucker Carlson. What a versatile journalist! (Sorry, “journalist.”) A week ago he was in Budapest interviewing Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. A head of state is a pretty good get for any journalist, even if that journalist is basically a propagandist and a cheerleader for Orban’s brand of fascism. And even if the resulting interview only streams on Tucker’s public-access-production-level Twitter feed. And even if the interview is so obsequious and fawning that Chuck Todd would have been embarrassed to conduct it.
So of course this week Tucker followed it up by reviving some old crack-smoking and gay sex pud-pulling accusations against Barack Obama. Emulating the career arc of 2008-era Glenn Beck is certainly a choice.
Larry Sinclair was a scammer, a convicted felon and a con man. In January of 2008, Sinclair was running around telling anyone who would listen (mostly Joseph Farah at World Net Daily) that he and Obama had had a crack-fueled gay sex orgy in the back of a limo in 1999, when Obama was a back-bench legislator in Illinois.
[…] Sinclair even managed to book time at the National Press Club in Washington DC to push his tale, which was fucking disgusting even by the “both sides” standards of national political journalism. Unfortunately for him, his speech at the club ended with US Marshals arresting him on an out-of-state warrant in what we feel comfortable labeling as the lamest episode of Justified ever.
He then proceeded to fail a polygraph test on the subject, then accused Obama campaign manager David Axelrod of paying $750,000 to rig the test. Subsequent investigations into his background revealed he had spent time in prison in three different states on charges of fraud and forgery. In 2004 he tried to get a warrant dismissed by claiming he had a terminal illness, yet here he is still going strong almost 20 years later.
Larry Sinclair is not exactly credible, is the upshot we’re trying to convey here.
Luckily other people watched the interview so we didn’t have to. And it sounds as if it went just about as one would expect. Like The Guardian, whose columnist should send us her Venmo details so we can buy her a beer:
The segment, which aired on Monday night, was full of racist dog whistles (at one point, for example, Carlson claimed nobody could pronounce Obama’s name despite it being really very easy to pronounce) and barely veiled homophobia. Carlson made sure he signaled to his audience that he was very, very heterosexual and if a man ever attempted to try it on with him he’d break his hand.
[…] But here is the silver lining we mentioned an eternity and a long swim through a river of shit ago. A year ago, Tucker Carlson had the highest-rated talk show in cable news. At one point, it was the highest-rated cable news talk show in history. […] [Tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene promoting “The Guy Who Banged Obama” fro CPAC 2023 FFS.]
Then Fox News fired Tucker, depriving him of the visibility that comes with an 8 p.m. timeslot. Now he’s reduced to trawling the dregs of ancient World Net Daily smear jobs that had been lost in the mists of time for 15 years and, upon rematerializing, sound just as implausible now as they did back when Dubya Bush was president and most of us thought of Donald Trump as being nothing more than an attention-starved real estate developer.
The point is: Deplatforming works. Hoo boy, does it work. No matter how many streams Tucker’s pathetic little Twitter video diaries rack up, he occupies nowhere near the cultural heights that he occupied at Fox.
It ain’t much in the face of (again waves hand in general direction of everything). But we’ll take it. […]
In a win for the Biden administration, a federal judge Wednesday ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to remove a floating barrier his state placed in the Rio Grande River to deter illegal migrant crossings. U.S. District Judge David Ezra, a Reagan appointee, issued an order for the swift removal of the 1,000-foot barrier near Eagle Pass, Texas, granting the Justice Department’s request for a preliminary injunction while the case is litigated.
The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday said it would cancel oil and gas leases in a federal wildlife refuge that were bought by an Alaska state development agency in the final days of […] Trump’s administration.
Federal authorities continue to arrest alleged Jan. 6 participants more than 2½ years after the Capitol attack, with a Virginia man being taken into custody Wednesday and charged with being part of a group that attacked D.C. police Officer Michael Fanone.
Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin American’s trend of widening abortion access. The high court ordered that abortion be removed from the federal penal code. The ruling will require the federal public health service and all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.
The Senate confirmed Anna Gomez to the Federal Communications Commission with a 55-43 vote, sending the body a 5th commissioner and restoring it to full strength for the first time in Joe Biden’s presidency.
And now there is a Democratic majority at the FCC.
SpaceX cut off Starlink satellite internet service to Ukrainian submarine drones last year just as they were launching an attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet, according to a new biography of SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
[…] The armed submarine drones were poised to attack the Russian fleet, according to a CNN report that cited an excerpt of a forthcoming biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, the former chief executive of CNN. Instead, according to the book, which goes on sale Tuesday, the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”
Ukrainian and American officials scrambled to get service restored, according to the report, appealing to Musk directly. Musk eventually agreed.
[…] Cutting Ukraine’s mission off in midstream “is a great example of the power of communications platforms being concentrated in the hands of a few private companies,” said Bret Schafer, an analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
[…] A study commissioned by the European Union found this week that Russian propaganda was reaching more people on X than before the war in Ukraine. And in the face of criticism about rising hate speech, Musk has sued one nonprofit and threatened to sue another […]
“It’s really scary to see him using his corporate resources to try to squash critics and skeptics,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
“You would expect people with this kind of corporate power to operate from self interest or to make mistakes. But you would not expect someone who provides an ally with crucial technology and then snatches it back when they are using it in the middle of a war. Whatever responsible corporate behavior is, that’s not it.” […]
StevoRsays
Clever, subtle and awesome work by some Indigenous Australians here :
Taught by her elders before her and passed down through generations, Ms Knapp explains how and why these trees look different. It’s a practice Aboriginal people have been undertaking for thousands of years, manipulating the tree for their own survival. By pruning and trimming parts of specific trees as they grow, traditional owners encourage them to take on a unique, bowl-like shape — helping collect and store rain water.
Iexpect they’ll be demonised for this despite being right. Noportest should ever inconvenience anyone or make apoint ina way that can’t be simply ignored by everyone right? (Does that really need a sarc tag?)
During the delay, tournament referee Jake Garner came out onto the court, while security headed toward where the four protesters were positioned in the stands. They were wearing shirts that read “End Fossil Fuels”. According to the US Tennis Association (USTA), one glued their feet to the ground, making it harder to be removed.
So much for the deterrent factor and “Do the crime = do the time” huh?
A former NSW Police officer has had his sentence for kicking and spitting on an Indigenous teenager reduced on appeal. Christopher Borg, 42, was given a 10-month intensive correction order and 100 hours community service after an incident involving an Indigenous teenager at Prospect in Sydney’s west on September 13, 2022.
Borg, who was a senior constable, pleaded guilty to two counts of common assault and failed to have the charges dismissed on the grounds of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety.
At the time of the offences, he was part of a team conducting plain clothes surveillance on a stolen car, when they saw three males walking towards the car and chased them on foot.
The 16-year-old teenager was arrested, handcuffed behind his back, and made to sit in the gutter. Police facts state that he was compliant throughout the arrest, but Borg approached him in the gutter and kicked him in the face with no provocation. The force of the kick pushed the teenager backwards onto the footpath. Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) footage also showed Borg, who had 11 years experience in the force, spitting on the teenager.
But hey, let’s not give Indigenous People a Voice even a non-binding advisory one because there’s no racism to see here already or anything and they already have too much money and power and say. yeah? For fucks sake!
StevoRsays
ABC factcheck because as the Voice debate here continues to prompt racist denial and hatred and lies from the Gestapotatos no side, this might be worth a read and help :
Speaking in parliament recently, Liberal National Party senator Gerard Rennick questioned whether Australian Aboriginal history dated back more than 60,000 years, as suggested by the opening lines of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
“It’s interesting, when I grew up, I was told that the Aboriginals were here for 20,000 years, then it got extended to 40,000 years,” Senator Rennick said, asking where the evidence was for a 60,000-year timeline. .. (snip).. According to historian Billy Griffiths, specific archaeological sites and timelines for the arrival of humans in Australia were debated by archaeologists, but 60,000 years was “not a contentious date”.
“There are now several archaeological sites over 50,000 years old and one that is dated at 65,000 years ago (Madjedbebe),” he told CheckMate in an email.
Florida Gov. and flailing presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R) dabbled in some light fetal personhood during a Fox News interview about women voters in which he endorsed the concept of making men pay child support to embryos and fetuses. The chyron blared, without a bit of irony: “WOMEN OF AMERICA VOTE: 2024 / DESANTIS ON PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT & SUPPORT FOR WOMEN.”
Former Donald Trump press lackey and current Fox host Kayleigh McEnany asked DeSantis about a bill Republicans unveiled in the wake of Roe v. Wade getting overturned which would require impregnators to pay child support starting “the month during which the child was conceived.” (It’s called the Unborn Child Support Act, and it’s co-sponsored by 10 Senators.) It’s a backdoor attempt to give embryos and fetuses legal personhood, a status that would enable even more prosecutions for pregnancy loss and drug use and subject women and pregnant people to second-class status more generally…
IF fetuses were considered ‘persons’, this would actually make sense.
But obviously that is not the case.
KGsays
Reginald Selkirk@266,
And they’ve brought it to the surface! If we were living in an SF/horror fictional universe (and the evidence for that has been growing pretty steadily since the 1980s: Thatcher, Reagan, AIDS, 9-11, climate disruption, Brexit, TRUMP FFS) these fools would be the first victims of the thing from beyond the beyond…
KGsays
Oh, and how could I forget SARS-CoV-2! My sincere apologies to the virus.
A report released on Friday revealed that a special grand jury investigating efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results recommended indictments against a much larger group than Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ultimately charged, including one current and two former U.S. senators.
The nine-page report showed jurors recommended charges against 39 people, compared to the 18 who were charged along with former President Donald Trump. The names of those not indicted included Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn…
South Dakota regulators on Wednesday denied a construction permit for a carbon dioxide pipeline project, one month after a North Dakota panel did the same to a similar project by another company.
Navigator CO2 Ventures wants to build a 1,300-mile (2,092 kilometers) pipeline network across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota, to carry planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from more than 20 industrial plants to be buried over a mile underground in Illinois.
The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to deny Navigator’s application for its Heartland Greenway pipeline. Chair Kristie Fiegen cited myriad reasons in her motion to deny, including the company’s lack of promptness and several objections to commission staff questions as well as struggles to notify landowners of routes and meetings. She detailed concerns related to safety, community growth, landowners and emergency responders, among other issues.
The proposed South Dakota route encompassed 112 miles (180 kilometers) and would serve three ethanol plants. The panel’s decision came after evidentiary hearing sessions in July and August…
The new ad will air this weekend during Biden’s trip to the G-20 Summit in India.
President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is highlighting the most high-stakes journey of his presidency — a surprise visit to Ukraine in February — to make the case for what it calls the “quiet strength of a true leader” while drawing a major foreign policy contrast with the GOP.
[…] Biden has based his foreign policy on the idea that the 21st Century will be defined by the contest between democracies like the United States and autocracies line Russia and China. Biden has said his ability to maintain support of U.S. allies for Ukraine is one of his most difficult but significant accomplishments, and now his campaign is aiming to elevate that ahead of the 2024 race.
The ad shows visuals of Biden’s surprise visit to Kiev, noting it was the first time in modern American history that a U.S. president traveled to a war zone where it did not have significant military assets. Biden was “standing up for democracy in a place where a tyrant is waging war to take it away,” the narrator says. […]
In a statement, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez says that “the MAGA Republicans running for president have sided with dictators over democracy,” but Biden “has shown time and again that America under his leadership will always be a beacon of democracy.”
[…] It’s the second time this week the campaign announced a new spot targeting a major prime-time audience.
On Tuesday the campaign announced an economic-focused ad will highlight the president’s jobs record during the first regular season NFL game Thursday night.
The “War Zone” ad will air in Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Philadelphia and Milwaukee television markets, the campaign said.
Elon Musk got caught with his hand in the national security cookie jar, sabotaging or blocking a major Ukrainian military operation after conversations with a Russian government official.
Last month I wrote about the rise of the global oligarchs and I made particular mention of Elon Musk. Even if you set aside the various things you may not like about Musk he has amassed a degree of economic power that is novel and dangerous in itself even if he had the most benign of intentions and the most stable personality. More than half the operating satellites in the sky are owned and controlled by him. Overnight we finally got confirmation of something that has long been suspected or hinted at but which none of the players had an interest in confirming. Last September Musk either cut off or refused to activate his Starlink satellite service near the Crimean coast during a surprise Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Navy at anchor at its Sevastopol naval port.
Ukraine has made extensive use of naval drones. But it at least sounds like this was supposed to be a massed attack that would have done extensive damage to the Russian Navy and the naval port itself and thus seriously degraded Russia’s ability to launch missile attacks against Ukraine. In other words, it doesn’t sound like this was just any attack, though the details are sketchy.
On its face you might say, they’re Musk’s satellites and he’s in charge of who gets to use them and how. But of course it’s not that simple. It’s a good illustration of how Musk’s economic power has crept into domains that are more like the power of a state.
Starlink is a network of satellites providing robust internet connectivity without reliance on any ground infrastructure. This is critical in Ukraine since the ground infrastructure has all been degraded or destroyed. Starlink is owned by and made possible by the launch capacity of SpaceX, Musk’s space launch company, which is currently the sole means the US has to launch satellites into space.
Musk made business and financial decisions that, under our economic system, entitles him to the vast profits of SpaceX. But he didn’t create it on his own. The company was built on the back of US government contracts. In essence the US government fronted the money to build SpaceX by awarding it contracts that made its business viable. Musk and SpaceX are also US military contractors. That comes with a big set of responsibilities and restrictions.
Raytheon isn’t at liberty to sell its high tech weaponry to Russia or China if the price is right. These contractors are legally and financially bound into the US national security apparatus. So is Musk and SpaceX. Or at least they’re supposed to be. A critical part of this story is that Musk took this action after conversations with an unamed Russian government official which, Musk claimed, led him to worry the attack could escalate into a nuclear conflict.
Of course the threat of escalation has hung over the Ukraine war from the beginning. Countless civilian and military officials in the US, Europe and across the globe have been analyzing and trying to manage that risk for 18 months. We should take Musk’s claim about fears of nuclear escalation with a huge, huge grain of salt. There are many other threats and inducements that could have come up in these conversations. But let’s assume for the moment that’s what the Russian official told him. It’s simply not Musk’s judgment to make. That’s not only the case as a matter of basic democratic accountability and national security law. Musk is the last person you’d want making such a decision. He’s a mercurial weirdo whose views visibly change by the day in reaction to whoever is giving him the most comments love on Twitter. His national security thinking is at best juvenile and fatuous. The idea that such a call was Musk’s to make as absurd as it is terrifying.
Let’s imagine a more generous to Musk scenario.
Maybe that Russian official said to Musk: Turn off your satellites over our naval base or we will start shooting down your satellites. In technical terms that is not an idle threat. You might say, well, war’s hell, Elon. But he might reply, was the US government prepared to reimburse me for the satellites and disrupted service contract fees that I incurred […]
That’s a good question and I’m not sure I know what the answer is. In fact, I suspect there is no answer. The whole situation is one that mixes and matches private sector and national security in very scrambled ways. And Musk who is someone who pushes every envelope and is more than happy to use his domestic celebrity and control of communication to reek serious havoc with any US government that calls him to account. Let’s not forget that it was just after these events that Musk suddenly started advocating his personal ‘peace plan’ on Twitter – which surprisingly seem to match all of Russia’s demands. [Yep. That’s what he did.]
Let me be clear that I don’t think that last scenario is what happened. But we don’t know that it didn’t. My point is discussing that possibility is to illustrate the fact that it’s not just that Elon Musk sucks, which he does. The whole situation sucks. You simply can’t have critical national security infrastructure in the hands of a Twitter troll who’s a soft touch for whichever foreign autocrat blows some smoke up his behind. But that’s what we have here.
As I said above, we’ve known or suspected for a long time that stuff like this had happened. Musk revealed at the time that he’d been talking with Russian officials. Indeed, at one point he said he had spoken to Putin himself on more than one occasion during this period. But we shouldn’t take anything he says at face value. The US hasn’t wanted to get into this publicly because they don’t want a public spat with Musk. (This is the subject of Ronan Farrow’s recent piece in The New Yorker.) This applies even more to Ukraine which still relies on as much Starlink access as it can get. In response to these latest revelations the Ukrainians’ gloves seem to have come off. One of President Zelensky’s top advisors went off on Musk on Twitter last night essentially arguing that Musk personally has blood on his hand for all the subsequent attacks launched from those ships and facilities into Ukraine.
We need to learn more details about just what happened here. A congressional investigation wouldn’t be a bad idea. But we know enough to know that a guy in charge of a lot of critical technology the US relies on is happy to cut deals with the other team.
Over the span of 24 hours, sustained wind speeds of Hurricane Lee increased from 80 miles per hour to 160 mph. Lee is now a large Category 5 hurricane, only the eighth such storm to form in the Atlantic since 2016. Lee is expected to maintain, or even increase, its intensity as it approaches the Caribbean.
Even though Lee is currently moving west on a seeming collision course with the U.S., its upcoming turn to the north has become more certain as both American and European models of the storm are in close agreement. Much of the East Coast is likely to see high winds and heavy surf as the storm sweeps north, but should be spared the damage of a direct impact. However, there remains a significant threat that Lee will strike maritime regions of Canada as a strong hurricane. [map at the link]
[…] Lee will continue on course, passing north of the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. All these areas can expect difficult weather from the storm’s passage, but it is expected to remain 200 to 300 miles north of land. Lee should begin its turn before reaching the Turks and Caicos.
Models are now suggesting that Lee will increase in intensity with sustained winds over 180 mph. That would make it one of the strongest storms ever in the Atlantic. [video at the link]
[…]
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she will run for reelection to another term in Congress as Democrats work to win back the majority in 2024.
Pelosi, 83, made the announcement before labor allies in the San Francisco area district she has represented for more than 35 years…
Like many of you, I was appalled to discover that Elon Musk shut down Starlink to protect the Russian navy from an attack by Ukraine. I can’t imagine how many lives have been lost as a result of those ships continuing to rain missiles down on Ukraine. Not only that, but every day those ships control the Black Sea, people throughout Asia and Africa are subjected to more and more suffering as a result of Ukrainian grain being kept from their ports. In short, every day that Starlink is controlled by Elon Musk and the private sector is a day that suffering is multiplied in the world.
To that end, I wrote my representatives to ask that they investigate the possibility of taking control of Starlink for the good of the American people. My letter is reproduced below. I urge everyone to write their representatives to push this issue to the forefront for the good of both the United States and Ukraine. The safety of democracy may very well hang in the balance, and I truly wish that was hyperbole. […]
Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake. By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. However, the question still remains: why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a problem. Okay, more than one. Okay, way more than one.
But specifically we’re talking about his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Which is going poorly! According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, his numbers have dropped by over one-third since the beginning of the summer. It’s hard to say what happened, exactly, but we’re going with the likelihood that Democratic voters heard him speak and realized within about two sentences that he’s nuttier than squirrel poop.
What’s the scion of a political dynasty supposed to do? Sue an anonymous blogger for (extremely Dr. Evil voice) one meeee-llllllllion dollars simply because the blogger once wrote something accurate about him?
Oh, it is? Beg your pardon.
Back in 2020, an anonymous DailyKos blogger — remember those? — wrote about Kennedy giving a speech to an anti-lockdown rally in Berlin organized by various right-wing groups, in a piece titled “Anti-Vaxxer RFK Jr. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-corona’ protests.”
Now, as related by the Daily Beast, a lot of outlets in a lot of places wrote up this appearance. The DailyKos blogger himself, who went by the name DowneastDem, was summarizing an article in the German daily Der Tagesspiegel.
Kennedy and his lawyer said no no no, everyone has it all wrong:
The crux of Kennedy’s claims is that, while Nazis and their collaborators abounded outside the Bundestag that day—and some even tried to storm the German parliament—the American jet-setter addressed a separate assembly elsewhere in the Tiergarten park organized by a group of wholesome folks called Querdenken.
Except, as the Daily Beast has also reported elsewhere, Querdenken (which loosely translates as “thinking outside the box”) is a right-wing QAnon-curious group that has been linked to neo-Nazi networks in Germany and thinks so highly of Vladimir Putin that it invited him to speak at the same event about “Peace in Europe.” (Putin declined, possibly because he was busy deciding to send the entire Russian military into Ukraine.)
In other words, DowneastDem, whose real name is David Vickrey, appears to have described the gathering accurately. Or else it was just a HUGE coincidence that the neo-Nazi-linked group just happened to put on an event protesting imaginary right-wing boogeymen at the exact same time that a bunch of other neo-Nazis were at the exact same park doing the exact same thing.
And Kennedy has a history of hanging out with the Nazi-adjacent. We just wrote about one instance two months ago. Just because the most generous interpretation here is that he’s too whacked out of his gourd to notice doesn’t mean we have to play along.
Kennedy’s lawsuit was rejected in courts in both California and New York. Nonetheless, around the time this spring that Kennedy officially declared he was running for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy’s lawyer Robert Barnes (a hardcore right-winger once represented Kyle Rittenhouse) sent Vickrey a menacing letter demanding the blogger settle for a minimum of $1 million. Otherwise, Kennedy and Barnes would revive the lawsuit.
Barnes gave Vickrey a deadline of May 22, then pushed it back to August 30, then requested a jury trial in Rockingham, New Hampshire, for some reason. Maybe so Kennedy will have an excuse to hang out in New Hampshire for the next few months.
The annoying part of this story, besides literally everything, is that Kennedy loves to posture as a free speech warrior. Apparently that principle does not apply to noticing that he gave a speech to a crowd that at a minimum contained neo-Nazis.
On a lark, we dug up the speech he gave that day in Berlin, and we would like to note that no one, not even Vickrey, is saying Kennedy needs to be prevented from going on 12-minute rants accusing world governments of using the pandemic as cover to control their populations, make 5G a widespread broadband standard, use it to gather data for Bill Gates and Jeff Zuckerberg (presumably he meant Mark but who knows) and Jeff Bezos, introduce digital currency that will lead to slavery, or flatter the neo-Nazi crowd by implying that Western governments are following Herman Goering’s playbook for using propaganda and fear to get the people on their side.
No no, we actually encourage Kennedy to say all that to the public and then file frivolous lawsuits when people notice. The sooner his poll numbers plunge into negative territory, the better.
A memo obtained by The Post says Beijing is working to enhance its armed forces by targeting Americans with specialized skills and training.
China’s military is conducting a sophisticated exploitation campaign designed to “fill gaps” in its capabilities by targeting current and former U.S. service members and harvesting specialized knowledge they’ve gained, a top general warned in a message obtained by The Washington Post.
The document was distributed to Air Force personnel on Friday. It marks the Pentagon’s most direct attempt yet to call out and counter what U.S. officials characterized as an aggressive ploy by Beijing to leverage international firms that hire Americans to teach advanced military skills and tactics.
Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who heads the Air Force and is President Biden’s nominee to lead the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in the message that foreign companies doing business with the Chinese government are “targeting and recruiting U.S. and NATO-trained military talent across specialties and career fields.”
“By essentially training the trainer, many of those who accept contracts with these foreign companies are eroding our national security, putting the very safety of their fellow servicemembers and the country at risk,” Brown wrote, appealing to the recipients’ sense of responsibility, even after leaving the armed forces, to protect “our national defense information.”
Officials declined to identify how many U.S. troops and veterans are thought to have been surreptitiously recruited by the Chinese, saying only that they have seen a worrisome rise in such activity. […]
[…] on Thursday, Mr. Musk responded on his social media platform to say that he hadn’t disabled the service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula. That was in effect an acknowledgment that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.
“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
That drew an angry response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Musk’s “interference,” he said, had allowed Russia’s naval fleet to continue firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.
[…] The account in the biography further confirms the ways in which Mr. Musk’s control over Starlink appears to be affecting Ukraine’s military. In July, The New York Times reported on Mr. Musk’s refusal to allow the service to work near Crimea, and the broader challenges Ukrainian officials were facing because of the country’s huge dependence on Starlink.
Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Musk sent Starlink terminals to the country in response to public pleas from Ukrainian officials. Throughout the war, the connectivity provided by Starlink has been pivotal for Ukraine to coordinate drone strikes and gather intelligence.
The more than 42,000 Starlink terminals are also in use by hospitals, businesses and aid organizations across Ukraine.
[…] In February, Ukrainian officials were angered after a SpaceX executive said that Starlink had taken steps to curtail the Ukrainian military’s use of the technology to control drones, a week after Mr. Musk said the company was “not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes.” SpaceX has also used a process called geofencing to restrict where Starlink is available on the front lines.
Because Starlink is a commercial product rather than a traditional defense contractor, Mr. Musk is able to make decisions that may not be aligned with U.S. interests, analysts have said.
Ukraine, concerned about over-dependence on Starlink, has consulted other satellite internet providers, but no other services come close to its reach, officials have said.
“Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, told The New York Times in a recent interview.
OMG, this praise for Elon Musk is disgusting. The over-the-top praise comes from Russia.
[…] Former president and deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, praised Musk’s decision not to allow Ukraine to use Starlink for the attack last year.
“If what Isaacson has written in his book is true, then it looks like Musk is the last adequate mind in North America,” Medvedevv, who has been one of the loudest pro-war voices in Russia, wrote on X.
“Or, at the very least, in gender-neutral America, he is the one with the balls,” Medvedev added.
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Saudi Arabia and Oil Prices
birgerjohanssonsays
Gaming and milbloggers.
Military podcasters LazerPig and Falcon have fun with in-jokes about Pierre Sprey and the infamous commenter of military matters Mike Sparks, as they design the absolutely most effective military combat vehicle ever.
Like the car Homer Simpson designed but a hundred times more awesome.
If you are into World Of Tanks or similar games, this is a good way to spend fifty minutes while consuming lots of alcohol. https://youtu.be/-7bbdt6ptDA
An appeals court Thursday stopped a lower court order that required Texas to remove the floating barriers it placed in the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing.
The temporary stay issued by the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit freezes a significant win by the Biden administration against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) from the day before.
The buoys were decried as violating human rights by civil society groups and Democrats, while Abbott’s allies defended them as an effective deterrent that prevented migrants from potentially drowning in the river.
The Mexican government, however, has recorded at least two migrant deaths due to the buoys, which are chained together parallel to the flow of the river and separated by serrated steel discs.
Mexico’s formal diplomatic complaints played a key role in District Judge David Ezra’s decision to order Abbott to remove the barriers.
The Department of Justice’s suit against Texas was based primarily on federal law concerning navigable waterways, which prohibit installing obstacles in said waterways without federal permission.
In his ruling, Ezra lambasted Abbott for saying he “was not asking for permission” to implement Operation Lone Star, writing “permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”
Ezra also ridiculed Texas for unilaterally labeling migration an “invasion” to justify the use of public force against migrants.
“Such a claim is breathtaking,” Ezra wrote.
Abbott quickly attacked the original decision, vowing “to take this fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
With COVID-19 cases rising across the country, you may be inclined to pull out one of those leftover at-home rapid tests received months ago from the Biden administration.
Even if the box says the tests have passed their expiration date, experts told ABC News you may want to think twice before throwing them away.
They say the expiration date may have been extended by the federal government and they could come in handy if you need them in a pinch…
Meh. When I got COVID at the end of June, the 6-month-expired tests I had failed to give a reading. Biochemicals decay.
A shadowy fight is playing out on three continents for control of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sprawling interests as head of the Wagner mercenary group. The biggest prize: his lucrative operations in Africa.
African leaders allied with Russia had grown used to dealing with Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the swaggering, profane mercenary leader who traveled the continent by private jet, offering to prop up shaky regimes with guns and propaganda in return for gold and diamonds.
But the Russian delegation that toured three African countries last week was led by a very different figure, the starchy deputy defense minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov. Dressed in a khaki uniform and a “telnyashka” — the horizontally striped undergarment of Russian armed forces — he signaled conformity and restraint, giving assurances wrapped in polite language. [Photo at the link. The undergarment, which shows at his open collar, makes him look French to my eyes.]
“We will do our best to help you,” he said at a news conference in Burkina Faso.
The contrast with the flamboyant Mr. Prigozhin could not have been sharper, and it aligned with the message the Kremlin was delivering: After Mr. Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash last month, Russia’s operations in Africa were coming under new management.
It was a glimpse of a shadowy battle now playing out on three continents: the fight for the lucrative paramilitary and propaganda empire that enriched Mr. Prigozhin and served Russia’s military and diplomatic ambitions — until the Wagner leader staged a failed mutiny against the Kremlin in June.
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials in Washington, Europe, Africa and Russia — as well as four Russians who worked for Mr. Prigozhin — portray a tug of war over his assets among major players in Russia’s power structure, including two different intelligence agencies. Many of those interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity, to discuss sensitive diplomatic and intelligence issues.
The fight is complicated, these people said, by the lingering allegiance to Mr. Prigozhin in his private army, where some are bridling at being subsumed within Russia’s defense ministry and instead backing a transfer of power to Mr. Prigozhin’s son.
“Wagner is not just about the money — it’s a kind of religion,” said Maksim Shugalei, a political consultant for Mr. Prigozhin, adding that he was proud to be part of the mercenary force. [Sounds like a cult.] “It’s unlikely that this structure will totally disappear. For me, this is impossible.”
The interviews also revealed more about President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to discredit Mr. Prigozhin after the rebellion, including his declaration to a group of media figures that the Wagner leader was a profiteer who had made billions from “gold and bling.”
The accounts suggest that even in death, Mr. Prigozhin remains a defining figure of Mr. Putin’s Russia — encapsulating the secrecy, infighting and contradictory tactics of the Kremlin as it wages war against Ukraine.
[…] The scramble for Mr. Prigozhin’s assets — which he assembled as he traded on his multifaceted ability to serve Mr. Putin in return for government contracts — has far-reaching implications. His paramilitary group was Russia’s most effective fighting force in Ukraine in the last year, and its dissipation raises questions about Russia’s ability to mount new offensives. His media group, complete with an online “troll farm,” was instrumental in undercutting democratic institutions around the world.
[…] Western officials briefed on confidential intelligence assessments say two Russian spy agencies — the foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and the military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. — are vying to take over key aspects of Mr. Prigozhin’s operations. Two officials, from different governments, said that the S.V.R. was likely to absorb Wagner’s propaganda and online disinformation outlets targeting foreign countries, while the Defense Ministry and the G.R.U. could take in Wagner’s mercenary operation. […]
A fentanyl vaccine be ready for human trials early next year, according to University of Montana researchers. The vaccine helps the body generate antibodies that prevent the opioids from entering the brain. Without the reinforcing effects of the high, it becomes easier for the user to kick the habit. At the same time, the vaccine reduces the likelihood that an overdose will decrease respiratory rate to the point of death…
The Federal Trade Commission’s chief administrative law judge ruled that Intuit violated US law with deceptive advertising and should be forced to stop promoting TurboTax as “free” unless all conditions imposed on the free offer are immediately and conspicuously displayed to consumers.
The initial decision by Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell was released today and is subject to an automatic review by the full commission. The FTC commissioners will likely rule against Intuit, which issued a statement indicating that it will take the matter to federal court. The order would be in effect for 20 years if it survives appeal…
A federal judge has rejected former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ attempt to move his charges in the Georgia election interference case to federal court.
The ruling was a broad rejection of arguments from Meadows that his case should be heard in federal court because he was acting in his capacity as chief of staff at the time.
[…] In a 49-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled that many of the allegations were instead political activities outside of the scope of Meadows’s job.
“Even under the ‘quite low’ bar for federal officer removal, the Court concludes that Meadows has not met his burden to show that his criminal prosecution can be removed under the federal officer removal statute,” Jones ruled.
Meadows was charged last month with two counts in Fulton County, both as part of a sweeping racketeering case brought against all 19 defendants along with another charge related to his participation in a call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in which former President Trump asked the state official to “find” additional votes for him.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about how the big Ukrainian advance from Robotyne toward Tokmak is likely to slow as: 1) Ukraine can sit back and destroy Russian forces at leisure as those forces continue to counterattack in the open rather than hunker down in their prepared defenses; 2) Ukrainian counter-battery fire has gotten particularly effective of late, and the less artillery Russia has, the quicker things will move down the road (literally); and 3) Ukraine has to consolidate the breach of Russia’s main defensive line outside Verbove, which will ultimately allow Ukraine to roll up the whole defensive line in an enveloping maneuver.
It is an article of faith that Ukraine is on a deadline. Fall rains and the return of “raputitsa” (in Russian) or “bezdorizhzhia” (in Ukrainian) will bog down any advancing army.
Indeed, the early arrival of mud season in 2022 was a major factor in Russia’s early war failures, with legions of images and video showing Russian tanks and other vehicles trapped in the sticky mud.
But don’t worry. Given the shape of current combat tactics and the location of the main fighting, the fall rains shouldn’t be much of a problem for the continued Ukrainian counteroffensive.
As I wrote recently, Ukraine’s advances are not based on maneuver warfare—using speed and deception to destroy an enemy’s ability to fight. Instead, they’ve adapted old Soviet-style attritional tactics, laying down a wall of artillery to soften up a defensive position, evaluating progress with drones and small-unit infantry probes, and finally occupying the position once Russian defenders are either dead or forced to flee.
Here are some Russians finally giving up their last grip on the Bakhmut-area village of Klishchiivka. [video at the link]
It’s not unlike the way Russia took Bakhmut, except that Russia used prisoner cannon fodder to probe forward. Ukraine’s probes are more respectful of their soldiers’ lives. Ultimately, it is an infantry and artillery war, with tanks used mostly as fire support, kind of like artillery, softening targets from kilometers away.
So it isn’t surprising that Ukraine’s first breach of Russia’s main defensive line has been (so far) just infantry. By holding those forward positions, Ukraine can shield its combat engineers as they clear vehicle lanes through the minefields, and their tanks can deliver fire support out of range of Russian anti-tank guided missiles (but not, unfortunately, suicide drones).
So guess what gets bogged down in Ukraine’s famous fall rains? Heavy armor. Actually, all vehicles do but to a far lesser extent than heavy tanks and armored personnel vehicles. Rain does nothing to stop or slow the artillery guns—they’ll keep doing their thing regardless of the weather. And infantry can move in the mud in light vehicles, or even on foot, facing Russian conscripts suffering from trench foot and pneumonia in flooded trenches.
Will moving up armor slow down? Sure, but movement is already slow because Ukraine has to clear every treeline it approaches anyway, and that takes time.
Ukraine can continue its methodological march toward Tokmak and the Azov Sea beyond it.
But that’s not the only factor that mitigates the effect of the fall rains. Another one is simply geography and terrain. Ukraine launched its Kherson counteroffensive last fall on Aug. 31, and the effort didn’t end until Nov. 11. Ukraine made many of its advances in light vehicles like Humvees, and I don’t recall ever seeing anything stuck in the mud (unlike up north, around Kharkiv). Russia pushed through Bakhmut from Aug. 1, 2022, through both the fall and spring rainy seasons, until May of this year. You ever see a Russian vehicle or infantryman stuck in the mud?
I won’t pretend to know the details, but the weather in southern Ukraine is different (hence, the greater need for irrigation once provided by the now-gone Kakhovka reservoir), as well as the soil type. It doesn’t negate the challenges of wet weather and mud, but they are heavily mitigated down south—and particularly so when most of the advances will be infantry.
There are other reasons Ukraine will be motivated to keep pushing. For example, their “shaping the battlefield” operations are dramatically increasing in effectiveness. Just yesterday, Ukraine claimed to have destroyed a whopping 23 tanks, 23 armored infantry vehicles, and 32 artillery systems, along with 47 trucks.
With Ukraine successfully degrading Russia’s air defenses and electronic warfare complexes down south, it has opened up more territory to drones. That means the TB2 Bayraktar is back in action, but other drones can penetrate deeper into Russian-held territory to strike their targets. Of course, these are claims, but an uptick in Ukrainian claims usually corresponds to an uptick in visually confirmed losses. It may not be an exact number, but it’s a good apples-to-apples comparison. And right now, Ukraine seems to have dramatically increased their ability to destroy Russian equipment.
With fewer artillery and armored vehicles in the line of advance, the easier it will be for infantry to continue moving forward, rain or no rain.
And finally, there’s this fascinating nugget, as reported by Critical Threats:
[Former Ukrainian Aidar Battalion Commander Yevhen] Dykyi stated that Russia’s “third” defensive layer in southern Ukraine is primarily comprised of command posts, communication points, and warehouses and mainly acts as a support line for the Russian defensive positions further north. […]
Dykyi argued that Russian forces will not be able to hold back Ukrainian advances at this “third“ series of Russian defensive positions, implying that a definitive Ukrainian breach of the current Russian defensive layer would be operationally decisive.
If this is true, and Ukraine is currently breaching the last major defensive line, and everything beyond that is a support line for defensive positions further north, then it means Ukraine may be closer to an “operationally decisive” breach.
Honestly, I wouldn’t count on that, but holy shit if it’s true.
—————————-
Elon Musk is like Donald Trump. You hear a rumor of something horrible he’s done, and you think “that’s bad.” Then he admits to doing the thing, and it turns out to have been so much worse. [Musk Tweet at the link]
There is a whole sordid story here of Musk talking to Vladimir Putin and then being so freaked out by an apparent nuclear threat that he’s making decisions of geopolitical import based on bad information and conspiracies.
The Black Sea Fleet has launched countless missiles at Ukraine targets, killing civilians and children. Musk now has their blood on his hands, because he’d rather listen to bloodthirsty dictators and defend their ability to commit further atrocities.
Mark Sumner is working up a deeper look into this story for Sunday.
On Friday, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee did the rounds on Fox News and Fox Business to attack her potential Democratic rivals in the 2024 Senate race. During her appearances, Blackburn created an entirely new Republican myth about abortion: the “after-birth” abortion.
While Blackburn didn’t call out any of the Democratic candidates by name (as of this writing they include Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson and community activist and organizer Marquita Bradshaw), she did lump all Democratic politicians together, calling them “socialists.” In both appearances, Blackburn spoke about how all of her Democratic opponents “believe” or “support abortion up to the minute before—and the minute after—birth.” [video at the link]
Blackburn is best known for being a gun fetishist backed by big NRA money. She’s a pretty standard out-of-touch conservative who is willing to lie in the most outrageous ways possible in order to cover up her ignorance of the world around her. The most forgiving read of her outrageous “after-birth” abortion claim is that she might be conflating abortion with newborn euthanasia laws in places like the Netherlands. Here are some of the criteria given by the Dutch government for the rare and tragic medical procedure:
– In the light of prevailing medical opinion, the child’s suffering must be unbearable and with no prospect of improvement. This means that the decision to discontinue treatment is justified. There must be no doubt about the diagnosis and prognosis;
– Both the physician and the parents must be convinced that there is no reasonable alternative solution given the child’s situation;
– The parents must have given their consent for the termination of life;
– The parents must have been fully informed of the diagnosis and prognosis;
– At least one other, independent physician must have examined the child and given a written opinion on compliance with the due care criteria listed above
– The termination must be performed with all due care.
The Republican Party seems to be stuck between its single-minded theocratic ideology and the fact that most Americans don’t like its single-minded theocratic ideology. While hard-liners like Blackburn are willing to say anything in pursuit of taking away half the country’s right to bodily autonomy, the rest of the party is trying to figure out the best way to pretend it isn’t an issue.
The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off mail-order access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.
In an unusual “statement” Friday, Alito lectured critics of his decision to grant two interviews to a right-wing commentator, advocate, and attorney with a case before the high court.
Those critics, who include Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), fail to understand “the circumstances under which Supreme Court Justices must work,” Alito explained in an addendum he wrote to orders issued by the court.
Alito went on for pages in the statement, explaining how the interview he gave to attorney and Wall Street Journal opinion contributor David Rivkin violated no ethical standards. Rivkin is representing plaintiffs in the Moore v. United States case, in which a couple is asking the court to redefine “income” for the entire U.S. tax code in order to avoid a $14,729 tax bill.
[…] Durbin had asked Alito last month to recuse from the case, saying that the Rivkin interview should serve as grounds for him to remove himself from the case.
Alito refused to concede in his statement not only that there was anything unethical about his decision to do the interview with a attorney on the case as the court mulled whether to take the matter, but also that there was anything unusual about his decision to do so.
“Over the years, many Justices have participated in interviews with representatives of media entities that have frequently been parties in cases before the Court,” Alito wrote, before citing media interviews which Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Roberts have done over the past 20 years.
Alito continued his lecture, saying that Durbin appeared to be under the mistaken impression that the Rivkin interview would somehow prejudice his treatment of the case. No, Alito averred. That would be incorrect.
Attorneys who practice before the court criticize and praise the “character” and work of justice all the time, he said. It’s not that big a deal that he gave the interview to Rivkin, even if it lavished praise on Alito as a plain-spoken justice and characterized him as willing to defend the court against political attacks. That referred to ProPublica’s extensive reporting on ethical lapses by Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas around their undisclosed relationships with wealthy benefactors.
Alito published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in June, preemptively rebutting an explosive article that ProPublica was about to publish about Alito’s relationship with billionaire Paul Singer. Rivkin said that he did two interviews with Alito; one in April, another in July.
“In all the instances mentioned above, we are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts,” Alito wrote. “And that is what we do.”
Alito refused to concede in his statement not only that there was anything unethical about his decision to do the interview with a attorney on the case as the court mulled whether to take the matter, but also that there was anything unusual about his decision to do so.
There is a certain kinship with factotums like the recently convicted Navarro here: a fantasy they are, if not in fact at least in spirit, members of the .1% aristocracy and protected thereby, a fantasy that actual members are happy to indulge as long as it serves them.
Alito and his soul mate Thomas are the least intellectually gifted members of the court and lack even the awareness that it is the norms of democracy, and the inertia of bureaucracy, rather than the aristocracy that protects them from the consequences of their insolent moral laxity.
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If one does not have the judgment to distinguish unethical behavior from ethical standards, they do not belong on a judicial bench.
Again, Hillary was right to speak out and vote against Alito’s appointment to the court. Senate must review their standards. Too many bad players and lawyers who have not demonstrated their competence (Barrett) getting through […]
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Alito logic. When you’re in a hole, dig it deeper.
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Alito’s argument is basically that there is no such thing as a conflict of interest because justices put the conflict out of their mind when they’re deciding cases. Stunning bullshit.
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It is astonishing and revealing that the phrase “appearance of impropriety” appears nowhere in this black-robed […], arrogant statement. Indeed, neither the word “appearance” nor “impropriety” appears in it.
The appearance of impropriety standard is universal in the ethical codes of every goddamn state. An attorney is required to withdraw from any representation that creates even the appearance of impropriety. The codes of judicial conduct that govern the activities of every single fucking judicial official from local magistrate’s to the federal bench all require judges to recuse from any case where sitting creates the appearance of impropriety. Every judge except, of course, SCOTUS, which decided to exempt itself from mandatory application of any code of conduct whatsoever.
Eric Munchel, the Nashville man known as “zip-tie guy,” has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Judge Royce C. Lamberth sentenced Munchel and his mother and codefendant Lisa Eisenhart at the U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday.
Lamberth sentenced Munchel to 57 months of incarceration and three years of supervised release, said U.S. District Court Judicial Clerk Jason Onyediri. Lamberth gave Eisenhart, from Woodstock, Georgia, a lesser sentence of 30 months of incarceration with the same three years of supervised release, her attorney Greg Smith of Washington said. Smith said both Munchel and Eisenhart were also ordered to pay $2,000 each in restitution.
Munchel’s sentence is among the longest of more than 1,000 Jan. 6 defendants. He received the maximum sentence prosecutors calculated under federal guidelines.
Prosecutors say on Jan. 4, 2021, Munchel and Eisenhart drove from Nashville, where Munchel worked as a bartender, to Washington to participate in election protest rallies scheduled for Jan. 5-6.
They arrived at the Capitol on Jan. 6 wearing tactical vests, while Munchel also wore a Taser holstered at his hip and his cell phone mounted on his chest. Munchel’s cell phone recorded a 50-minute video that captured most of their approach and entry to the Capitol building, which prosecutors used as evidence in their case against the pair.
Once inside the Capitol, Munchel and Eisenhart found zip ties that they carried around, which prosecutors argued they planned to use to restrain members of Congress. An infamous photograph captured Munchel holding the zip ties as he climbed over a railing in the gallery of the Senate chambers, where 30 minutes before Congress was meeting to certify the results of the 2020 election.
Originally charged mainly with trespassing charges, the charges against Munchel and Eisenhart expanded in October to include obstruction, conspiracy, disorderly conduct and unauthorized entry. Munchel was found guilty of additional charges for carrying a deadly or dangerous weapon on Capitol grounds for arming himself with a Taser…
The judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the raid of a newspaper office in Marion, Kansas, is facing a complaint about her decision and has been asked by a judicial body to respond, records shared with CNN by the complainant show.
Kansas resident Keri Strahler filed the complaint against Judge Laura Viar about a week after police raided the office of the Marion County Record, the home of the paper’s publisher and a county councilwoman, seizing reporters’ cell phones and computers, among other items, in a move that drew widespread condemnation from news organizations and press freedom advocates.
The complaint requests the Kansas Commission on Judicial Conduct to review “Viar’s mental capacity in her decision to seemingly circumvent federal and state law” when she signed off on the search warrant for the newspaper office, according to a copy of the complaint provided by Strahler…
California lawmakers on Thursday voted to raise taxes on guns and ammunition to pay for security improvements at public schools and gun violence prevention programs.
The federal government already taxes the sale of guns and ammunition nationwide. The government gives that money to the states, which spend it on wildlife conservation and hunter safety programs.
California’s proposed tax, if it becomes law, would be 11% — matching the highest tax imposed by the federal government on guns…
A man with ties to a right-wing extremist group advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government was sentenced this week on a terrorism charge relating to what authorities said was his role in a plot to firebomb a power substation near a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas.
A state judge sentenced Stephen T. Parshall, also known as “Kiwi,” on Tuesday to life with the possibility of parole for assisting, soliciting or conspiring to commit an act of terrorism as part of a guilty plea agreement.
Parshall, 39, is a former Navy enlistee and faces additional time for federal charges relating to sexual exploitation of children, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in March. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police originally charged Parshall with four felonies but boiled it down to one as part of the agreement…
Excellent if disturbing segment of this weeks MediaWatch with transcript and 5 minute long video here :
But now, to an extraordinary ruling in the courts in WA that could limit free speech and gag the media. And it follows an attempted climate protest in Perth last month outside the home of Meg O’Neill, the CEO of oil and gas giant Woodside.
..(snip) .. Four climate activists are now facing charges over that failed protest, which was thwarted by police from the anti-terror squad who were lying in wait.
And as you may recall, the drama also got the ABC into strife, because a crew from Four Corners was there to film the action: ..(Snip).. The orders obtained by Woodside from a WA magistrate – which are set to be challenged by the protesters – are actually VROs or Violence Restraining Orders.
Which are normally used in cases of domestic or neighbour violence, and can only be granted:
A rare, powerful earthquake struck Morocco late Friday night, killing more than 800 people and damaging buildings from villages in the Atlas Mountains to the historic city of Marrakech. But the full toll was not known as rescuers struggled to get through boulder-strewn roads to the remote mountain villages hit hardest…
[…] In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saw his maximal gerrymander — where he sliced up a Black majority district, to the chagrin of even some Republican legislators — go down in state court. Had he not been intent on humiliating Republicans and proving his governor-king bona fides, he may have accepted their (still gerrymandered!) map which left the Black majority district alone. Now, he faces the horrifying possibility that the map — one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in a very gerrymandered country — could be replaced with something (gasp!) even a little bit more fair.
These cases are important on their face: Voter suppression, particularly of Black voters, is one of the most grotesque historical legacies of this country. To the extent that courts can mitigate that disenfranchisement, they should.
Then there’s the political angle. Republicans currently hold the House of Representatives by the barest of majorities. If this round of court action ends with the creation of a handful of Democratic leaning seats — which experts expect — it could level the playing field come 2024. […]
Different morning memo section from the same link as above (followup to comments 295 and 296):
[…] It started in June with two incidents involving Alito’s relationship with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page which would be surprising if they weren’t already so familiar. In the first, Alito used the section as a platform to publish a preemptive rebuttal of a bombshell ProPublica investigation into his relationship with billionaire Paul Singer. In the second instance, a conservative movement attorney and right-wing commentator named David Rivkin scored a sprawling interview with Alito, publishing it in the WSJ opinion pages along with his co-author James Taranto.
As the interviews were being conducted, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case where Rivkin was representing the plaintiff: Moore v. United States, a matter seemingly about a $14,729 IRS bill which could rewrite the entire federal tax code. That caused Democratic senators to suggest that Alito alternately recuse, or that Chief Justice John Roberts do something about Alito.
It’s less that there’s some conspiracy here between Rivkin and Alito to throw the case in favor of Rivkin’s clients via a quid pro quo involving favorable coverage at the WSJ. Alito doesn’t need that, and it’s missing the point. What this episode shows is that at the commanding heights of the conservative movement really is a small club: the attorneys who rep the big cases, the writers who score the big messaging interviews, the Supreme Court justices who shove the country rightwards are a very, very small group, sometimes small enough to be counted on two fingers.
It’s too early to tell whether it’s a temporary blip or a longer-term trend, but House Republicans vowing to “impeach Joe Biden” seem to be hitting more public pushback than usual from their fellow Republicans. The portion of the party not completely devoted to Rudy Giuliani-style hoax-peddling appears to be getting more and more concerned that holding an impeachment trial of President Joe Biden that includes exactly zero evidence of Biden doing anything wrong would not, in fact, convince Americans that the party can be trusted with government power.
There’s probably going to be a real conflict there, because to House Republicans like Jim Jordan and James Comer, the thought of holding off on announcing an impeachment just because they haven’t been able to dig up evidence for one appears inconceivable—and to date, it’s not clear that anyone will be able to convince the House sedition caucus to back down.
As for the evidence that Republican patience with the impeachment carnival is wearing thin, the most colorful criticism comes from GOP political strategist Susan Del Percio, who allowed herself to be named and quoted by The Messenger as saying, “It’s stupid. It’s completely made up. They don’t have anything,” and, “This is not about impeachment for cause. This is a political stunt. And I have a feeling it’s going to go very badly for Republicans.”
That’s the sort of sharp critique that strategists start dishing out when supposed allies start suggesting really bad ideas, ideas on the level of, “Hey, let’s put Rep. George Santos in charge of the holiday gift exchange this year.”
Then we had the amazing sight of Fox News hosts taking the stuffing out of the still-unindicted Rep. Matt Gaetz’s impeachment threats. And not just any Fox hosts, mind you, but the “Fox & Friends” crowd. Do you have any idea how bad your conservative idea has to be to get “Fox & Friends” on the other side of it? […]
Responding to Gaetz’s threat to remove Kevin McCarthy from the House speakership if he stands in the way of an attempted Biden impeachment, host Brian Kilmeade roundly mocked him:
“Who would he put there?” he asked. “[House Majority Leader] Steve Scalise, who’s dealing with blood cancer right now? Is there anybody else?”
“Matt Gaetz is just speaking into the wind,” Kilmeade added dismissively. “Have Matt Gaetz pick up the phone and call some moderate Republicans and see if he can switch to his side. McCarthy would be more than happy to let him do that.”
You have to be way, way over the line to lose Brian Kilmeade. And Kilmeade wasn’t the only one dismissive of Gaetz’s threats. Noting that Gaetz’s fellow Republicans would probably be “all for” a Biden impeachment if Rep. James Comer and the other supposed investigators “can get proof” of Biden’s wrongdoing, co-host Ainsley Earhardt opined that “they definitely need that proof in order to start an impeachment.”
That is not what Comer and the others want to hear. They’ve been pushing to have an impeachment vote without ever finding proof of what largely at this point has devolved into the usual bizarre conspiracy theorizing. And in doing so, they’re going beyond even what the “Fox & Friends” morning crowd can stomach.
[…] MAGA remora and nationally renowned crappy parker Seb Gorka is fuming over Comer’s inability to deliver:
“Another press conference? I’ve had it, I’m sorry Comer, you don’t know how to do a press conference. You have a press conference on ‘Romanian businessman gave Hunter Biden $32’ […] And your oxygen thief members of the committee are standing in front of the visual aids! This is what we voted for? It’s a joke!”
Yeah, that’s what would have sold your press conference, James: being able to better see the visual aids for the $32 check. Forget evidence—first, y’all need to practice your choreography.
So things really do appear to be heating up as Comer and Jordan continue to produce substanceless circus performances with parades of clowns who still can’t come up with even the most basic evidence for the party’s conspiracy claims. The far right is mad because they don’t understand why Comer can’t find evidence that doesn’t exist, and the more sedition-agnostic members of the party are increasingly wary of attaching themselves to a show that consists of little more than Comer and Jordan continually tripping over their own feet.
Does it portend a shift in Republican tolerance for the House seditionists obsessed with impeaching Joe Biden out of sheer spite? Hard to say. But it’s something to keep an eye on.
Last year, when the right-wing Supreme Court majority ruled that public schools not only could allow employees to engage in public prayer while on the job but that they must allow it (never mind the First Amendment’s prohibition on state-sponsored religion), Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a scorching dissent detailing many of the false claims on which the majority decision rested. Now, another element of fraud in the case is clear: The coach who led disruptive public prayer on the 50-yard line of high school football games has definitively shown that he didn’t actually want his job back, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports.
Joe Kennedy had moved from Washington state to Florida before his case got to the Supreme Court, leading the school district he was suing to let the court know that the lawsuit was moot—a Florida resident wasn’t seriously looking to win back a job coaching high school football in Washington. But Kennedy insisted, through his lawyers, that even though he had sold his house in Washington, “The relocation to Florida is not permanent, and Kennedy stands ready, willing, and able to move back to Bremerton as soon as humanly possible should he prevail in this litigation and be permitted to resume his coaching duties.” [LOL]
That was an obvious lie, but this Supreme Court wasn’t going to let that get in the way of a case promoting its favored agenda. Can you guess what happened after the court ordered Kennedy reinstated?
Stern lays it out:
When a court ordered the school district to rehire him, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat reported, they initially did not get a response. While Bremerton students were preparing for a new season of football, Kennedy was meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence. On the night before their first game of the season, he was awarded an engraved rifle at an American Legion convention. Meetings with former President Donald Trump, and later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, crowded his calendar. (Kennedy dined with DeSantis but remains loyal to Trump.)
Kennedy finally returned to coach a single game last Friday—staying at a friend’s house, since he no longer had a residence in Washington—and then quit.
The court’s embrace of Kennedy’s lie about his interest in having his job back was matched by its embrace of his lies about just what he was doing when he prayed on the football field. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized it as “brief, quiet, personal religious observance.” In reality, as Sotomayor detailed:
While Kennedy’s letter asserted that his prayers “occurr[ed] ‘on his own time,’ after his duties as a District employee had ceased,” the District pointed out that Kennedy “remain[ed] on duty” when his prayers occurred “immediately following completion of the football game, when students are still on the football field, in uniform, under the stadium lights, with the audience still in attendance, and while Mr. Kennedy is still in his District-issued and District-logoed attire.”
The District further noted that “[d]uring the time following completion of the game, until players are released to their parents or otherwise allowed to leave the event, Mr. Kennedy, like all coaches, is clearly on duty and paid to continue supervision of students.”
In other words, this was anything but brief, quiet, or personal. It was a performance carried out while he was on duty working for a public school system, and while students remained under his authority. Of course a court that was willing to pretend his praying was brief, quiet, and personal was also willing to believe that Kennedy actually wanted his job back rather than raking in money on the right-wing speaking circuit and schmoozing with politicians.
And the Supreme Court has continued to embrace such lies in its quest to remove any guardrails on what Christians can do in the name of their religion. This year, the court ruled in favor of a website designer who claimed—falsely, as Melissa Gira Grant discovered—to have been asked to make a wedding website for a gay couple and wanted the court to say that she was allowed to discriminate, even though she had never faced any actual penalty for refusing to make such a website. Sure, the court’s right-wing justices said. There’s no need for you to have suffered a penalty for your actions: We’ll preemptively deploy a set of outlandish hypotheticals to conclude that you and other Christians have the right to discriminate.
Here is the thing: This Supreme Court majority doesn’t care. It doesn’t care about the facts of a case. It doesn’t care about legal precedent or the basic rules in which court decisions are supposed to be grounded. It cares about the far-right outcome. And that’s how it’s going to be for decades—unless Democrats get it together to reform the court.
Curt Brockway was at a Montana rodeo in 2019 when he saw a sight that infuriated him — A 13 year old boy didn’t remove his hat when the Star Spangled Banner was played over the loudspeakers. He did the only reasonable thing, and picked the teen up by his throat and threw him to the ground, fracturing his skull.
Brockway was arrested and charged with assault on a minor, but pled it down to criminal endangerment and got a ten year suspended sentence, which was to run consecutively with the ten year suspended sentence he already had from 2010 for assault with a weapon. He does, however, have live with his parents from now on and pay about $2300 restitution and all his boy’s medical bills.
Why did he get another suspended sentence when what anyone else would get jail time for committing a new crime? He’s a veteran who got brain damage in a car accident.
Finally, why did he attack the teenager for simply not removing his hat during the national anthem?
Brockway’s attorney, Lance Jasper, told the Missoulian that Brockway believed he was doing what President Donald Trump wanted him to do.
Prison officials were reportedly punishing children, most of whom were Black boys, with handcuffs, pepper spray, and extended time in solitary confinement.
On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the country’s largest maximum security adult prison, to relocate all incarcerated youths being held in the facility’s former death row building by September 15 after findings revealed that they were living in unsafe conditions and suffering inhumane punishments. US Chief Judge Shelly Dick, who reluctantly ruled in favor of the children’s detention last year, called the boys’ treatment “unconstitutional.”
“For almost 10 months, children—nearly all Black boys—have been held in abusive conditions of confinement at the former death row of Angola,” said ACLU attorney, David Utter, in a statement. “We are grateful to our clients and their families for their bravery in speaking out and standing up against this cruelty.”
Since their imprisonment in Angola started, boys between the ages of 14 and 18 were held in buildings with no air conditioning during dangerous heat waves, with temperatures reaching as high as 130 degrees, according to the Associated Press. They were given water from unsanitary faucets and poor quality food. Prison officials were reportedly punishing children with handcuffs, pepper spray, denials of family visits, and extended time in solitary confinement. They also allegedly failed to provide adequate educational or mental health services for the detained teens. […]
A massive quake near Marrakesh on Friday night has killed more than 1,000.
More than 1,000 people are dead after a powerful earthquake with a magnitude of at least 6.8 hit Morocco Friday night near the city of Marrakesh, the largest such quake to hit the country decades.
The death toll is rapidly climbing as rescue workers search the towns and villages around the epicenter in the High Atlas Mountains and make their way through the rubble of Marrakesh’s old city, located about 70 kilometers north. Morocco’s leader, King Mohammed VI, has called upon the military to conduct search and rescue efforts, and other nations including France, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey have pledged their support with the operation.
The area near the quake’s epicenter is known for its small, scenic villages tucked into the mountains while Marrakesh is an international tourist destination with a history dating back to the Middle Ages. The famous red walls representing the city’s boundary, as well as the Kutubiyya mosque in the old city, had both been damaged in the quake, but the full extent is still unknown.
Many Buildings in the old city are hundreds of years old; the Kutubiyya mosque dates back to the 12th century. Because earthquakes are rare in Morocco, structures are not built to withstand them as they might be in a city like San Francisco or Tokyo. Additionally, the quake was just 18 kilometers below ground, according to the United States Geological Survey, likely increasing the damage and portending a high death toll. “I would expect the final death toll to climb into the thousands once more is known,” Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London told the Associated Press. “As with any big quake, aftershocks are likely, which will lead to further casualties and hinder search and rescue.” […]
While speaking at a Thursday news conference for Gov. Ron DeSantis in Jacksonville, Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, that state’s surgeon general, advised people to steer clear of the updated booster vaccine for COVID-19.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved the new vaccine — which is reportedly designed to protect against the BA.2.86 omicron subvariant.
“There’s a new vaccine that’s coming around the corner, a new mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and there’s essentially no evidence for it,” Ladapo said during the news conference, according to local news outlets.
“There’s been no clinical trial done in human beings showing that it benefits people” he said.
“There’s been no clinical trial showing that it is a safe product for people — and not only that, but then there are a lot of red flags.”
In terms of specific concerns, Ladapo warned that the updated vaccines “actually cause cardiac injury in many people.”
The state surgeon general urged Floridians to make their own decisions based on their particular “resonance of truth,” rather than on “very educated people telling you what you should think.” …
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) went after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Saturday after court documents revealed that a grand jury in Georgia recommended that he be criminally charged for his actions doubting the result of the 2020 election.
Graham defended his actions on Friday, saying that the statements were “consistent” with his position as a senator. Georgia prosecutors did not end up pursuing charges.
“I think Lindsey Graham’s explanation doesn’t pass the laugh test,” Schiff said in a CNN interview. “You don’t — as a senator, a House member or another elected official — call a secretary of state in some other state and try to get them to toss out votes.”
“That is not the least part of the job description, and he’s lucky not to be indicted,” he continued…
Sen. Joe Manchin is keeping everyone guessing on his plans for 2024.
The influential West Virginia Democrat may run for reelection to the Senate, which would give the party their best chance of holding the seat.
He may run for the White House as an independent under a No Labels presidential ticket.
Or he could simply call it quits after a decadeslong political career in West Virginia, which in recent years has morphed from a Democratic redoubt to a Republican stronghold.
However, allies of Manchin told The New York Times of another potential option for the senator: retiring to become the president of his alma mater, West Virginia University…
Foreign language courses would be replaced by coal mining for credit.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.
The Democratic governor said she expects legal challenges but was compelled to act because of recent shootings, including the death of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.
Lujan Grisham said state police would be responsible for enforcing what amount to civil violations. Albuquerque police Chief Harold Medina said he won’t enforce it, and Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he’s uneasy about it because it raises too many questions about constitutional rights.
The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks… Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.
Lujan Grisham acknowledged not all law enforcement officials were on board with her decision…
“While I understand and appreciate the urgency, the temporary ban challenges the foundation of our constitution, which I swore an oath to uphold,” Allen said.
Lujan Grisham referenced several recent shootings in Albuquerque in issuing the order. Among them was a suspected road rage shooting Wednesday outside a minor league baseball stadium that killed 11-year-old Froyland Villegas and critically wounded a woman as their vehicle was peppered with bullets while people left the game.
Last month, 5-year-old Galilea Samaniego was fatally shot while asleep in a motor home. Four teens entered the mobile home community in two stolen vehicles early on Aug. 13 and opened fire on the trailer, according to police. The girl was struck in the head and later died at a hospital.
The governor also cited an August shooting death in Taos County of 13-year-old Amber Archuleta. A 14-year-old boy shot and killed the girl with his father’s gun while they were at his home, authorities said…
The top-ranked Republican in the state Senate swiftly denounced the governor’s actions Friday to restrict guns as a way to stem violent crime.
“A child is murdered, the perpetrator is still on the loose, and what does the governor do? She … targets law-abiding citizens with an unconstitutional gun order,” Sen. Greg Baca of Belen said.
Since 2019, Lujan Grisham has signed a raft of legislation restricting access to guns, including a 2020 “red flag” law allowing police or sheriff’s deputies to ask a court to temporarily remove guns from people who might hurt themselves or others, an extension of background-check requirements to nearly all private gun sales.
She also signed a ban on firearms possession for people under permanent protective orders for domestic violence.
Friday’s order directs state regulators to conduct monthly inspections of firearms dealers statewide to ensure compliance with gun laws.
whheydtsays
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #317…
Now there’s a decisive recommendation to get the updated vaccine if ever I read one. With Lapado against it, it looks to be a sure winner.
Reginald @317, and whheydt @321, Lapado’s advice and lies are going to put more Floridians in danger of being hospitalized (and other serious outcomes) if they catch COVID.
The buck stops with Governor DeSantis, who hired Lapado in the first place. More of DeSantis’ constituents will die.
If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. if you do not know your enemies, but know yourself, you may win or lose. If you do not know your enemies or yourself, you will be imperiled in every battle.—Sun Tzu, “The Art of War” Chapter III: The Strategy of the Attack
It is a military truism, since ancient times, that an army that cannot accurately assess its own capabilities will inevitably and unnecessarily imperil itself. And yet, at the heart of any true military disaster is almost always an army that overestimated what it was capable of accomplishing.
GERASIMOV IN DE FACTO CHARGE (FEBRUARY 2022—OCTOBER 2022)
Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov is the highest ranking soldier in the Russian Armed Forces. Although Vladimir Putin famously declined to name an overall theater commander over the Russo-Ukrainian War at the start of the conflict, it’s widely believed that Gerasimov was intricately involved and was central to the pre-war planning for the initial invasion of Ukraine.
The invasion was an unmitigated disaster. [map at the link]
Russia invaded Ukraine on four different axes of advance—five, if you count the Russian invasion towards Kherson oblast and Russian advances towards Zaporizhzhia oblast in the south (Axis 4) as separate advances.
What followed was a highly disorganized disaster for Russia, described by experts as nothing short of a “military catastrophe.”
Russia’s thrust towards Ukraine’s capitol of Kyiv (Axis 1) failed with massive losses, including the decimation of Russia’s most elite VDV airborne forces (and they still haven’t recovered to this day). Russia’s attack towards Kharkiv was halted (Axis 2), despite the Russian-speaking city (as well as Sumy) being literally across the border from Russia. Russia’s attempts to press through Ukraine’s fortified lines in Donbas failed to move any line of defense more than a few kilometers (Axis 3).
Only Russia’s attacks in the south succeeded, capturing Melitopol on March 1, capturing Kherson, likely by treachery on March 2, and Mariupol after a protracted siege on May 20.
A more focused attack towards Kyiv, cutting off its rail access to supplies from the West and encircling the city with greater forces might’ve had a far better chance of success—and decapitated the Ukrainian state. The dispersed nature of the Russian attacks, presuming Russian superiority and vastly underestimating Ukrainian strength and resolve, was widely analyzed to be the cause of Russian defeat.
Regrouping from the stinging defeat at Kyiv, Russia redeployed its forces to eastern Ukraine. Gerasimov’s plan B was was a massively ambitious encirclement plan aimed at engulfing Ukraine’s best brigades deployed on the eastern front.
These attempts quickly faltered. [map at the link]
Russia began progressively scaling down the size of its attempted encirclement (and the number of forces required to pull it off) in gradual steps from the initial encirclement attempt in March 2022, Gerasimov took personal command of the Izium forces in an attempt to encircle Ukraine’s Eastern Forces on April 27, 2022. This major encirclement attempt also failed, with minimal gains as Gerasimov’s forces at Izium were stymied just south of the town at tiny Dovhen’ke.
Russia finally began to make gains in late May after switching to more modest encirclement attempts, starting in late May through June 2022. This led to the capture of Lyman. However, further strategic gains were minimal, and by June the main thrust of Russian forces simply were making massed frontal assaults on Severodonetsk, which they finally took on June 25, 2022, at a massive cost to Russian soldiers and equipment.
By attempting unrealistically optimistic, grand, sweeping maneuvers, Gerasimov wasted time and resources, earning nothing but a costly pyrrhic victory at Severodonetsk. Russia was so decimated in this region, that just over two months later, Ukraine liberated most of Kharkiv oblast in a blitzkrieg-style attack. By Sept. 11, just about a year ago, Ukraine had liberated the strategically important rail hubs of Kupiansk, Izium, and Lyman. Ukraine was happy to trade Severodonetsk for those three cities.
Next, Ukraine trapped Russian forces in northern Kherson oblast. With their backs to the mile-wide Dnipro River at Kherson, Ukraine used HIMARS rocket artillery strikes to destroy the two bridges supplying their occupation, systematically degrading their logistics while directly pressuring their defensive lines.
As Russian positions got progressively weaker at Kherson, Putin finally made a change—on Oct. 8, 2022, he appointed General Sergery Surovikin the first official theater-wide commander of Russian forces in Ukraine.
SUROVIKIN IN COMMAND (OCTOBER 2022—JANUARY) [photo of General at the link]
One of Surovikin’s first and most consequential decisions was to withdraw Russian forces from Kherson, which he clearly saw as indefensible. He even managed to withdraw his forces in an orderly manner—something no other Russian managed before (or after). While Russia was forced to abandon some heavy equipment and ammunition that could not easily be taken across by pontoon bridge, it was a fraction of the haul Ukraine managed in its Kharkiv counteroffensive, when panicked Russians chaotically fled their positions. The Kherson retreat was considered a success by western analysts, despite the devastating symbolic blow the loss of Kherson represented. It was the only regional capital Russia had managed to capture the entire war, and it had even pretended to annex the city into Russia proper on Sept. 30, 2022.)
Under Surovikin’s command, Russia refocused on the Donbas. What had previously been a bloody stalemate in the Vuhledar direction for the Russians began moving in late October, overrunning Pavlivka in late November, and beginning to put pressure on Vuhledar. Russian forces suffered serious lopsided losses in this advance, but nonetheless gained ground. Russia would continue suffering massive losses in this direction, as Ukraine’s Vuhledar defenses occupy high ground. High ground matters.
Surovikin also switched tactics at Bakhmut, a battle that had taken on great symoblic importance to Russian morale. Surovikin relied mostly on well-supported Wagner attritional attacks targeting the city’s northern and southern flanks, taking the surrounding high ground, rather than the previous head-on direct attacks that Ukraine had managed to fend off.
Soledar to the north fell to Russian forces in early January, with Klishchiivka to the south falling a little more than a week later. With Russia controlling the heights and gaining “fire control” of the roads supplying the defenders, the bloody capture of Bakhmut was now inevitable.
Surovikin was also the architect of Russia’s cruise and ballistic missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure over the winter, but his efforts to break Ukrainian resistance failed. Although the attacks inflcited widespread misery in Ukraine’s civilian populace, and millions of damage, the attacks galvanized the West into stepping up their supply of modern air defense systems, including multiple batteries of the billion-dollar Patriot system. The political effects appear to have far outweighed any military gains through depletion of Ukrainian SAM missiles.
That said, Surovikin was also thinking well ahead.
In preparation for the presumed Ukrainian spring counteroffensive (which turned out to be a summer counteroffensive), Surovikin ordered the construction of a series of defensive lines; the most formidable of which came to be known as “The Surovikin Line.” [map at the link]
Surovikin correctly identified Tokmak and Melitopol as the likely primary goals of the Ukrainian offensive, and placed the heaviest defenses in this sector. By implementing this “defense in depth” strategy, he was taking a harshly pragmatic and realistic view of Russian military capability, assuming that Russia could not stop the Ukrainian advance cold.
Rather than focusing all his resources on the construction of the densest possible strip of defensive structures right behind the front lines in an all-or-nothing gamble, Surovikin layered defenses, assuming Ukraine had the ability to breach any single line. Otherwise, there would be no need to build a third or fourth line.
In other words, Surovikin’s defensive construction layout presumed Russian weakness in the face of a Ukrainian assault. Thus, Surovikin’s plan was for Russia to gradually grind down Ukrainian brigades as they were forced to breach line after line of Russian defense, until Russia fell back to its final defense lines with as much of its combat power preserved as possible.
However, Surovikin would not be permitted to put his plan into action.
GERASIMOV TAKES CHARGE OF THE OFFENSIVE (JANUARY—MAY)
Just three months after Surovikin’s appointment, on Jan. 11, Putin replaced Surovikin with … Gerasimov again. [Photo at the link]
Russia endured a series of costly military engagements from January to June. Vuhledar was a continuing fiasco, as Russian armored units repeated attempted to overrun Ukrainian positions atop Vuhledar’s high ground. [videos at the link]
In March, Russian attacks at Bakhmut shifted back from those flanking efforts around Bakhmut’s high ground, to bloody all out frontal assaults on the city. Russia would finally capture the city on May 22.
Russia’s massive personnel and equipment losses at Bakhmut and Vuhledar, for little to no real gain, weakened Russian preparedness against the Ukrainian counterattack.
Russia also lost its most successful offensive force as animosity between the mercenary Wagner Group and Gerasimov culminated in Yevgeny Prighozin’s short-lived rebellion in late June. [Photo at the link]
The rebellion failed to remove Gerasimov—a key Prigozhin demand, and much of Wagner was disarmed or banished to Belarus. Prigozhin was dead within two months. Gerasimov’s inability to work with Prigozhin cost him his most successful tactical asset.
Meanwhile, Surovikin was accused of helping Prigozhin plan the uprising, placed under house arrest, removed as head of Russian Aerospace Forces, and reassigned to a backwater post in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—a dumping ground for disgraced generals.
GERASIMOV’S DEFENSE PLAN (JUNE—PRESENT)
Construction had already begun on the Surovikin Line by January, and for whatever reason, Gerasimov did not bother to fundamentally rework Surovikin’s defensive lines. Existing work was mostly finished, though some lines—like the one Ukraine just broke through near Verbove, were reported to be in poor shape.
However, Gerasimov made three big changes fundamentally changing Surovikin’s defensive strategy:
– Russia committed most of its available landmines to the first line of defense;
– Russia committed much of what could have been an operation reserve to an offensive in the Northern and Eastern Fronts; and
– Russia committed nearly all its operational reserves to the defense of the first line of defense.
In other words, Gerasimov abandoned Surovikin’s defense-in-depth strategy, in favor of what retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan notes is an active defense strategy. So rather than defending from the well-placed defensive lines and holding back his reserves to plug any potential breech, Gerasimov had deployed them aggressively in front of the lines, while launching new attacks on the eastern front.
Furthermore, Gerasimov committed the overwhelming majority of his landmines to the first line of defense, in front of Robotyne, at quadruple the density that Russian doctrine required. [map at the link]
That ridiculous minefield vexed the Ukrainian attack for months, but that temporary Russian success was therefore achieved by cannibalizing resources that would ordinarily have been committed to the second, third and fourth lines. Given that Ukraine successfully breached the second line barely two weeks after liberating Robotyne, Russia’s minefields in front of that line were nowhere near as formidable as those north of Robotyne.
Furthermore, Russia’s repeated counterattacks against every Ukrainian advance has bled it of its operational reserves, leaving them little to respond with after the first line was breached. As a result, Gerasimov was forced to respond by stripping units from the eastern front.
Perhaps due to Russia’s lack of reserves on the eastern front, Ukraine has intensified its attacks south of Bakhmut, and launched a new offensive around Avdiivka, just outside of the Russian-occupied regional capital of Donetsk. [map at the link]
Not that these shifted reserves are gaining Russia much, as Gerasimov is once again using them in a series of furious but futile counterattacks to try and recapture Robotyne and the plug the second-line breach near Verbove. [map at the link]
GERASIMOV’S REPEATING PATTERN OF MISTAKES
It is not unfair to describe Gerasimov’s performance as “abysmal.”
Each step of the conflict, Gerasmov has consistently and significantly overestimated Russian military capabilities and underestimated Ukraine’s. The Battle of Kyiv, The Battle of Donbas of summer 2022, the Vuhledar Offensive—each were emblematic of Russian misreading of its strength relative to Ukraine.
While hardly perfect, Surovikin seemed to acknowledge Russian weaknesses and Ukrainian strengths. Ukraine’s difficulties advancing south are, in large part, Surovikin’s legacy. We didn’t see Gerasimov dig any similar defenses in Kherson or Kharkiv before the Ukrainian counteroffensives.
Reappointing Gerasimov, despite his obvious failures, reversed a moment of Russian competence, nowhere more apparently than in Gerasimov’s seeming all-out efforts to stop Ukraine at the first line of defense. With the first defensive line breached and Russia nearly out of operational reserves, Gerasimov is left reacting to the crisis of his own making (just like last year), allowing Ukraine to seize the initiative and leaving him with fewer and fewer strategic options.
Gerasimov may personify “If you do not know your enemies or yourself, you will be imperiled in every battle.”
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #322…
Yup. Absolutely agree with you. For myself, I’ve been expecting, and planning for, a booster this fall ever since last spring. The rather grim “upside” to deSantis and Lapado is that is their own people (i.e. those that believe them..and Trump) that are going to get sick–possibly very sick and possibly die–because they believe what they are told. The even grimmer downside is that they’re going to fill up hospital beds that could be put to better use caring for people who have a decent chance to recover if they can get decent treatment.
While it would probably be considered medical malpractice, one might almost support a policy–when space gets to be at a premium–to deny hospitalization for COVID if the patient hasn’t been vaccinated (except where other medical conditions preclude vaccination).
[…] Since 1980, the U.S. has run up a tab of $2.59 trillion to address the damages caused by climate disasters. In 2022 alone, the bill ran to $165 billion, making it nearly three times as costly as the average year over the past four decades. That’s because the effects of the climate crisis are constantly compounding. Record heat, record moisture, record fires, and record storms are all record costly. And only a fraction of that cost can be measured in dollars.
That’s an excerpt from a much longer presentation that is replete with photos, videos, and statistics.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
CLAIM: Officials confirmed an Ebola outbreak at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, where a national emergency was declared.
THE FACTS: Federal health officials told the AP they have not received any reports of Ebola cases at the Nevada event. A screenshot of a supposed post from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirming such cases was fabricated. And there is no record of a national emergency being declared. […] “So it was announced earlier that Burning Man was declared a national emergency because it was flooded, and so they sent in FEMA,” a woman claims in a TikTok video shared on Instagram, suggesting the development was suspicious. The AP found no record, including on federal websites and in White House announcements, of a national emergency declaration and FEMA confirmed that it was not involved in the situation. “No FEMA personnel or assets have been deployed to the Burning Man festival and there are no requests from local or state authorities for our assistance,” FEMA spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said in an email. The TikTok video, like other posts, goes on to relay baseless rumors of reported cases of Ebola, […] The purported X post from the agency reads, “Ebola outbreak confirmed at Black Rock City, NV. It is recommended that all Burning Man attendees remain in their dwellings until further notice. Current State of Emergency in progress.” But the CDC’s X account published no such post. “CDC has not received any reports of Ebola at the Burning Man Festival and has not issued any warnings or had any requests for assistance from the state and local health departments either,” […] also noted the CDC had not received reports of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, or Marburg, a rare but severe hemorrhagic fever, in relation to Burning Man. A representative for the Burning Man Project organization also refuted the online claims. […]— Associated Press writer Angelo Fichera in New Jersey contributed this report.
CLAIM: Arkansas is switching to election ballots that are marked by hand rather than by machine.
THE FACTS: There’s been no statewide change in how voters cast ballots, elections officials and voter rights groups in Arkansas say. Residents will still continue to use voting machines in nearly every county in the state. One rural county recently approved a plan to start using paper ballots that voters must mark by hand, and a final vote on that decision is expected later this month. But social media users are claiming Arkansas as a whole is ditching voting machines. […] Chris Powell, a spokesperson for Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston’s office, in an email called the claim “100% false information.” […] Efforts to bring back hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots gained momentum after the 2020 election, fueled by conspiracy theories that voting systems were manipulated, leading to former President Donald Trump’s defeat. But election experts say hand counts take longer and are far less reliable than counting with machines. In Arkansas, just one of the state’s 75 counties has so far decided to switch back to more traditional voting methods, according to Powell and Reynolds. Election commissioners in Searcy County, a rural district with a population of less than 8,000, voted last month to begin using paper ballots that voters fill-in by hand. However that decision still requires a second vote to be finalized. Meanwhile, Cleburne County voted earlier this year to adopt a similar hand-marked ballot process, but the county of nearly 25,000 residents rescinded the decision just months later. Arkansas lawmakers also passed a law this year requiring any counties that switch to hand-marked paper ballots to first tally ballots by machine in order to quickly turn around the initial election results. The ballots can be counted by hand later for the official results. — Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo in New York contributed this report.
CLAIM: Vaccines for the flu, measles, mumps and rubella were developed decades ago, yet the diseases haven’t been eradicated, proving that the immunizations don’t work.
THE FACTS: Cases of measles and rubella have been virtually eliminated in the U.S., thanks to vaccines, according to public health agencies and experts. Flu and mumps vaccines, meanwhile, have helped drastically reduce the incidence of serious illness and death from those diseases. Other once-deadly illnesses, such as smallpox and polio, have also all but been eliminated in the country by vaccinations. Still, social media users are casting doubt on the COVID-19 vaccine by sharing a misleading meme that suggests the flu, measles, mumps and rubella still exist even though inoculations against those diseases have been around for decades. “The flu vaccine was invented 78 years ago. The MMR vaccine was invented 60 years ago,” the meme reads. “I might not be a smart man, but I don’t think those vaccines are working.” “How many years will we continue to pretend the COVID (vaccine) works, too?” wrote an Instagram user who shared the meme, using an image of a syringe instead of the word ‘vaccine.’ But the notion that vaccines haven’t had an effect on the four diseases doesn’t hold up. For one thing, measles and rubella have been considered eliminated in the U.S. for almost two decades now because most people in the country are vaccinated against the illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile mumps cases have dropped markedly since the country rolled out vaccines, from more than 150,000 cases a year in 1968 to about 320 last year, according to the CDC. The flu has been more challenging for vaccine developers, because the virus constantly mutates and there are multiple strains of it circulating during any given year, said William Schaffner, a spokesperson for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. But that doesn’t mean the shot is ineffective. “So what we have is a vaccine that can mitigate the worst aspects of influenza, but cannot eliminate the infection completely,” Schaffner explained. The widely shared meme plays on a common misconception that for vaccines to be effective, they must fully eradicate a disease, says Nicholas Pullen, a biology professor at the University of Northern Colorado. Fundamentally, vaccinations are meant to reduce the likelihood of someone getting the disease and lessen its severity and prevent death if contracted, he said. […] the social media posts are conveniently ignoring the role vaccines played in virtually eliminating in the U.S. two other once deadly illnesses: smallpox and polio, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “In short, no it is not a fair argument,” said Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization. “Vaccines work very well, but they only work if they are in arms, not on shelves.”— Philip Marcelo
Mike Lindell is known for many things — his great love for Donald Trump, his wild conspiracies about how the 2020 election was stolen, his apparent inability to modulate his voice and, of course, his pillows.
Luckily for you, there is now video of Lindell losing his absolute shit in some depositions with former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, who has brought a federal defamation lawsuit against him over his aforementioned bizarre claims about the 2020 election being rigged. Specifically, Lindell brought someone on his Frankspeech site who claimed to have somehow infiltrated an “antifa conference call” Coomer participated in, in which Coomer confessed to having rigged the election so Trump couldn’t win.
It’s not clear exactly how Coomer was meant to know these election rigging antifa activists. Perhaps, when he’s not doing corporate executive stuff, he’s going to basement shows and volunteering with Food Not Bombs?
In a motion filed this week, Coomer asked a judge to sanction Lindell for his behavior in three separate depositions, which Coomer described as “vulgar, threatening, loud (and) disrespectful.”
“Mr. Lindell refused to provide a direct answer to virtually every question asked, instead opting to shout over Dr. Coomer’s counsel and then provide lengthy, meandering filibusters that each consumed substantial amounts of time and several pages of transcript,” the motion said, as per the Colorado Sun. “Counsel objected to these non-sequiturs as non-responsive no less than 33 times.”
The Daily Beast reports that Coomer and his attorneys felt they had to include videos of Lindell’s meltdowns in the motion as “the video record of these events is provided herein and is demonstrably worse than any attempt to describe the conduct.”
And, admittedly, there really are no words. There just are no words. This was, it seems, Lindell’s measured response to a comment about people calling his company’s customer service number to complain that their pillows are “lumpy.” [video at the link]
“No, they’re not calling about lumpy pillows, that’s not what they call on,” Lindell said. when you say lumpy pillows, now you’re an asshole! You got that? You’re an asshole is what you are!”
Lindell then called the attorney an asshole several times, an ambulance chasing attorney and, perhaps worst of all, accused him of not having his own MyPillow at home.
He would later repeat this burn in another deposition, shouting “How do you guys sleep at night? You obviously don’t have a MyPillow! That’s a fact!”
[…] But are the pillows lumpy? Well, according to 472 reviews of the MyPillow premium Queen size pillow on Amazon, 366 of which are verified purchases, they are, in fact, “lumpy.” And they come that way, it’s not just that they get that way over time and with wear and washings. […]
I thought the MyPillow pillows looked quite lumpy in the ubiquitous advertising on TV. Yes, they look lumpy.
From Mike Lindell’s reaction, I would guess that his company gets many calls about lumpy pillows.
(photo at link)
Hakone Heuckeroth, who lives in Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, was cooking her breakfast when suddenly the batter formed and Trump appeared in her frying pan.
As soon as Hakone saw it she gushed: ‘Donald Trump!’. ..
In the race to hoard lithium, a metal crucial for creating the batteries that power electric vehicles, the US may have fortuitously stumbled on the world’s biggest deposit yet.
A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, estimates that the McDermitt Caldera, a volcanic crater on the Nevada-Oregon border, harbors a colossal 20 to 40 million metric tons of lithium…
Hurricane Lee’s top winds strengthened to 110 mph late Sunday morning, bringing the storm near major hurricane status again as it continued toward an expected turn to the north.
Aircraft and satellite reports indicated that the storm’s eye has become more distinct again, with the hurricane expected to continue strengthening over the next few days, according to the 11 a.m. Sunday update from the National Hurricane Center. The storm’s winds are expected to top out Tuesday at 130 mph, putting the storm at the upper edge of Category 3 strength.
As of 11 a.m. Sunday, Lee was about 270 miles north-northeast of the northwestern Caribbean islands, moving west-northwest at 8 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. Its top winds put it just below the 111-mph threshold for Category 3, or major hurricane, strength…
Lee is expected to pass well to the north of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Lee’s curve north will spare Florida, according to the forecast.
“It remains too soon to know what level of impacts, if any, Lee might have along the U.S. East Coast, Atlantic Canada, or Bermuda late next week, particularly since the hurricane is expected to slow down considerably over the southwestern Atlantic,” forecasters wrote in the 5 p.m. advisory Saturday…
Editor’s note: While this isn’t specifically Ukraine-focused, it provides the necessary background to understand why Elon Musk’s power extends to controlling key decisions in Ukraine—decisions that have gotten people, including children, killed.
Elon Musk is neither an engineering nor business genius. He didn’t found Tesla. He didn’t design the motors, or the batteries, or the cars. He did found Space Exploration, more familiarly known as SpaceX, but again, he never set his hand to an engineering design, much less a wrench.
What Musk did do was recognize that both the automotive and space launch industries were hugely stale, completely populated by people whose policies and technology were relics of glory days long past, and that a determined—and lucky—run at these targets just might kick their asses.
No matter what people think of Musk’s failures at self-driving, or the post-apocalyptic design of the extremely late-to-the-party Cybertruck, the truth is that Tesla now holds a position in the automotive industry that its century-plus-old competitors can only envy.
Over at SpaceX, Musk has a near monopoly in an industry that others are only starting to understand. This week we got a glimpse of what that means. And that glimpse looked like Musk being able to single-handedly determine who lives and who dies.
People love to snicker about the badly fitting doors on a Tesla, or his exploding Starship prototypes. How seriously can you take someone who brought a dancer in a suit onstage to announce his new “Tesla bot,” especially when that someone has spent the last year very publicly turning a $44 billion investment into Nazi’s R Us?
Musk just spent the week declaring that it wasn’t his fault that X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, failed—it was the Jews being all … Jewy. And he’s going to sue the Anti-Defamation League. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Advertisers will flock back now.
It’s absolutely clear that Elon Musk is an asshole. A bigoted, racist, transphobic, antisemitic blockhead who thinks his own poop smells like lilacs and his every thought is the Goddam Best Idea Ever, sliced bread included.
But, as has just been vividly demonstrated in Ukraine, he’s also a guy who happens to control the space over our heads in a way that no individual, no company, and no country has done before. [Tweet at the link: “An American citizen and US government contractor acknowledges that he personally sabotaged a military operation of a US ally.”]
How did that happen?
It happened because the existing space launch providers are a bunch of pre-Apollo-era dinosaurs whose major occupation over the last four decades has been trying to figure out how long they can stretch a government contract before breaking. Just like the auto industry, they figured that the barriers to entry were so high, and their connections with both NASA and the defense industry so good, that there was absolutely no reason to do anything that even resembled innovation. Just last year, United Launch Alliance (i.e. Boeing and Lockheed Martin) launched government satellites on a booster that’s an upgrade of a 50-year old design with an upper stage that has been flying since 1962). Outside of updated electronics, there are fish that evolve more quickly than the launchers the industry has been providing. The names alone—Atlas, Delta, Soyuz—are enough to tell that these things are old. Because I knew those names in grade school.
Launch providers were wedded to a system where they handcrafted only a small number of launch vehicles, with only the tiniest incremental changes, for staggering amounts of money. And on each flight, they threw those vehicles away and started over … only to build the same thing again.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is not particularly large. It’s not particularly groundbreaking. Except for one thing: After launch, the biggest part of the rocket lands back on Earth and can be used again. That has allowed SpaceX to massively undercut launch costs. Massively. As in, an order of magnitude cheaper. Want to put something into space on a Delta II? That’ll be $38,800 per kilogram. Or you can do it with a Falcon 9 for $2,600/kg. Heck, send several at once on a Falcon Heavy for $1,500/kg.
Even that cost differential didn’t really bother the CEOs back at Space Dinos Inc. After all, there were only so many satellites that needed launching in the first place. They had their government contracts with NASA and the Defense Department, and they had contracts with the big telecom customers and … what else really needed to be in space anyway? Besides, was someone going to send their $1 billion satellite to space in a design that hadn’t been personally patted by Alan Shepard? Who cares about saving a $50 million or so per launch?
As it turns out, a lot of people care. Yet the industry “giants” didn’t notice because while there weren’t a lot of people signing up for launches at their asking prices, there were a lot of people ready to sign up if it was cheaper. People like not-so-giant telecom companies. Smaller nations who never developed their own launch capabilities. Companies who (rightly) figured they could sell up-to-date imagery to militaries and industry. Universities eager to test new technologies. People who thought it would be cool to send Pop-Pop’s ashes into orbit.
There were a total of 186 space launches last year; 87 of those were in the United States. Of those, 61 of them were SpaceX. By the end of this year, it will almost certainly have launched more rockets than everyone in the U.S. did last year—SpaceX included. Musk’s company plans on a minimum of 100 launches next year, and is very likely to get it.
The reusable Falcon 9 has given SpaceX an essential monopoly on access to space, turning every defense contractor and traditional launch provider into an also-ran. Other providers exist in the U.S., only to the extent that the government tosses them the occasional bone to maintain the pretense that SpaceX isn’t the only game in town.
But the biggest thing that SpaceX’s aging competitors missed was this: If you make space cheap enough, there are a lot of things you can do. Things like launching your own 4,500-satellite communications system, with plans to expand that system to 45,000 satellites that can provide high speed internet access to every person on Earth, no matter where they are located.
Cheap space is so intrinsic to that idea, that competing service OneWeb also launched many of their satellites on Falcon 9s. Even more humiliating, Amazon shareholders are now suing CEO Jeff Bezos for failing to put satellites of Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper internet service on Falcon 9s. Bezos awarded the contracts to United Launch Alliance and a little company called Blue Origin instead, which he also happens to own. Bezos started that company before Musk created SpaceX, but they’ve yet to put a single rocket in orbit. (Next year, Jeff, there’s always next year.)
Anyway, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the engineers at Boeing or Lockheed. There’s absolutely no reason that either, or both, of them couldn’t have built reusable rockets decades ago. No reason except that they 1) benefited from high costs, and 2) saw no market for expanded access. Don’t worry. I’m sure CEOs at both companies are doing fine.
But for SpaceX, Starlink is just a first step. Falcon 9 both made Starlink possible and helped SpaceX generate the funds to launch its internet network. Now that internet network is funding the development of Starship. That’s the giant spaceship that Musk has been knocking together out of stainless steel on the Texas coast. While multiple prototypes of the ship performed an explosive bellyflop and the first attempted orbital launch ended up with an enormous rocket doing very scary pinwheels across the Texas sky, Musk already has another Starship sitting on the pad ready to go. Like, literally ready. Tested and waiting. And on Friday, the FAA moved a step toward approving that second flight.
It’s very likely another Starship will head for orbit some time in the next month, and this time, the odds are much better that it will get there. This is just the first step. There are a lot of hurdles before Starship is flying commercial payloads, much less rated for human passengers. But SpaceX is working very hard, and very fast, to make that happen for one reason: SpaceX estimates their cost to get a kilogram to orbit with Starship will be $20.
What can you do when orbit costs $20/kg? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s a good bet that Musk doesn’t know either. But launching another 4,500 (or 45,000) satellites certainly becomes a lot simpler. So does putting anything else up there.
To be honest, I love all things space. I will be cheering when Starship flies again. But I will also be scared shitless for what I believe are some pretty good reasons.
Back in the 1960s, both the Pentagon and NASA were able to wrangle well-nigh endless dollars for space by making scary noises about Russia controlling the “high ground.” It was ridiculous then. Maybe such threats are still ridiculous now. Maybe. But if Starship works, space will not mean the same thing it has meant until now.
Last week, we learned that Musk personally intervened to cut off communications to areas in Ukraine to thwart an attack that was intended to sink Russian warships docked off occupied Crimea. That attack could have played a significant role in determining the outcome of the war. On Friday, Musk admitted that he took direct action to prevent communications in the area of the attack, which reportedly left Ukrainian drone ships floating helplessly. Some of those ships washed ashore near the Russian fleet and were studied by Russian authorities eager to block future attacks.
The Russian Black Sea fleet has fired hypersonic missiles into civilian structures across Ukraine, resulting in some of the most horrific war crimes of Russia’s unprovoked, illegal invasion. Those attacks continue today due to the decision of one man.
Musk pretends that by preventing Ukraine from using the communications gear they had mostly purchased, that he was refusing to play a role in a military attack. But he played a role. He chose sides. He chose to protect the Russian warships because, he claims, he believed Russian propaganda about a nuclear threat.
Musk chose to put his own opinion over not just the strategy, but the lives of Ukrainians. They are still paying for his decision—in blood.
Perhaps most astonishingly, just two months after Musk decided to pull the plug on that attack, SpaceX announced the “Starshield” service, which it advertises as featuring “additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.”
How many governments will trust Musk to host their secure communications when he has already demonstrated a willingness to become a one-man arbiter of who wins or loses a war?
Yet Musk’s actions in Ukraine with Starlink are just a fraction of the issue. Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already given SpaceX an enormous edge over its competitors. Unless something changes to alter the market radically in just the next couple of years, Musk’s ability to dictate to governments through his monopoly control of access to space will grow exponentially.
Things could change. Maybe Bezos will finally get its giant New Glenn flying. Maybe an innovative startup like Stoke Space will disrupt the disrupter. But it’s going to be hard, because Musk and SpaceX are not parked on their asses, planning how many golf outings it will take to make sure the next defense contract comes their way. They’re actually continuing to innovate.
The designs aren’t from Musk, but the ego and the willingness to create chaos certainly is. Right now, his actions have an outsized effect on labor, the environment, government policy, and national defense—for the U.S. as well as Ukraine. He represents a larger threat to national stability, the future of the nation, and to the whole planet than anyone seems willing to realize.
And did I mention he’s a bigoted, racist, transphobic, antisemitic jackass? Yeah? Well it was worth saying again.
The conservative activist behind the U.S. Supreme Court case and June decision rejecting race-conscious admission policies at colleges and universities has now set his sights on diversity initiatives in the private sector. Edward Blum, a former stock broker, is not a lawyer. He is a legal strategist who matches plaintiffs and lawyers to set up cases to advance the conservative agenda of eliminating affirmative action programs and voting rights laws across the country. He draws most of his funding from several conservative foundations: DonorsTrust, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the 85 Fund.
Blum set up the case that led to the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder that gutted key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Blum, who is now 72, also founded and led the group Students For Fair Admissions. This group was the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision confirming affirmative action policies that consider a student’s race for college admissions are unconstitutional.
[…] Asked whether he believes that systemic racism exists in the U.S., Blum gave this outrageous response:
“No, I do not believe in it. What your question implies is that in the American DNA there is racism. It was founded upon racism. It is part of what this country is. I reject that.”
And he said that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs can be challenged if they “involve a racial preference,” citing the SCOTUS decision on college admissions:
“What is actionable is a corporation that says, “We are putting a ‘help wanted’ sign on the office door, and here’s the kind of employee that we’re looking to hire. We’re looking to hire those of this race, but not that race.” So all of these preferences, whether it’s in the employment arena, contracting arena, internships—all of that I think will be energized by this Supreme Court opinion. And we’re blessed to have this Supreme Court opinion.”
Blum told Reuters that an organization he founded, the Texas-based American Alliance for Equal Rights, plans to file lawsuits challenging race-based policies used by private corporations. The Washington Post reported that since late June, “there has been a rush of legal activity aimed at translating the court’s race-blind stance to the employment sphere.”
The Post wrote:
In July, 13 attorneys general sent a letter to the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, warning that the overturning of affirmative action could have ramifications for corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In recent months, America First Legal, the conservative nonprofit organization backed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has filed complaints against Nordstrom, Activision Blizzard and Kellogg’s, alleging that their DEI policies constitute racial discrimination.”
Last month, the American Alliance for Equal Rights filed two anti-affirmative action lawsuits. The first was against a venture capital firm that supports small businesses owned by Black women, and the second was against two prominent law firms over their diversity fellowship programs.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Blum’s group claimed that the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund is violating the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in contracts, by making only Black women eligible for its grant competition. Reuters reported:
Fearless Fund was launched in 2019 by three prominent Black women—actress Keshia Knight Pulliam, entrepreneur Arian Simone and corporate executive Ayana Parsons—and counts as investors Bank of America, Costco Wholesale, General Mills, Mastercard and JPMorgan Chase. […]
The lawsuit centers on Fearless Fund’s Fearless Strivers Grant Contest, which awards Black women who own small businesses $20,000 in grants, digital tools to help them grow their businesses and mentorship opportunities provided in conjunction with Mastercard.
Prominent civil rights attorneys, including Ben Crump, held a news conference in New York to announce that they would join the defense for the Fearless Fund, The Associated Press reported.
“Today, the playing field is not level — that is beyond dispute,” Alphonso David, a civil rights attorney who serves as president & CEO of The Global Black Economic Forum, said at the news conference. “Those targeting Fearless Fund want to propagate a system that privileges some and shuts out most. They want us to pretend that inequities do not exist. They want us to deny our history.”
Blum’s organization also filed lawsuits last month against two law firms alleging that their diversity fellowship programs for law school students excluded applicants based on their race […] The lawsuits again cited the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
Kenneth Davis, a professor of law and ethics at Fordham University, told the Post that “it’s the height of irony” that “federal laws that were intended to ensure equal opportunity and rights for people of color are now being used as a weapon to deny them rights.”
[…] The lawsuits seek temporary restraining orders barring the firms from selecting fellows, as well as permanent injunctions ending the programs. The fellowships pay as much as $50,000 and provide an opportunity for fellows to be hired for full-time associate positions after graduation.
[…] Blum’s lawsuit cited paid diversity fellowships offered by Perkins Coie to first- and second-year law students, which the firm says are intended for members of groups “historically underrepresented in the legal profession, including students of color, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and students with disabilities.”
Perkins Coie spokesman Justin Cole told the Post that the firm has been “a leader in efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the legal profession” and that its “commitment to those values remains steadfast.” Cole said the firm “will defend this lawsuit vigorously.”
As for Morrison Foester, The Washington Post reported Wednesday that after the lawsuit was filed, the corporate law firm opened its Keith Wetmore Fellowship for Excellence, Diversity and Inclusion to students of all races, according to a change on its website.
[…] The lawsuits come at a time when diversity remains a problem in the legal profession, and the lawsuits by Blum and others could make the situation even worse.
[…] It’s not clear how successful conservative legal activists will be in restricting corporate DEI programs through the courts, but Republican politicians across the country are already taking aim at these programs. In April, The Associated Press reported:
Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states have proposed more than 30 bills this year targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education, an Associated Press analysis found using the bill-tracking software Plural. The measures have become the latest flashpoint in a cultural battle involving race, ethnicity and gender that has been amplified by prominent Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, potential rivals for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.
In May, DeSantis signed a bill banning Florida’s public colleges and universities from spending money on DEI programs. He then upped the ante by saying that as president he would mandate the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to quash DEI programs nationwide in corporations, government, and academia. [!!]
A day after SCOTUS issued its ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions, […] Trump […] told a Philadelphia rally of the conservative Moms For Liberty group that he would continue this path of destruction. He explained, “I will eliminate all ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs across the entire federal government.”
Conservatives are not going to be happy now until they scare corporations into hiring only straight white Christian men, for fear of being sued for “discrimination” if anyone else is hired.
————————
I would love to see the rational put up by one of these people as to why the ratios in ANY area, public or private, do not match population percentages in general. They never do state the real reason behind what they are doing, which is racism.
We’re in that political silly season when too many Democrats bemoan their looming doom, nervous that their current standard-bearer (in this case President Joe Biden) is too damaged by unfair attacks—and the regular fusillade of GOP ratf*ckery—to perform the way an incumbent really should in the upcoming election.
And that’s fair. I get it. […] most of all, I worry that we’ll see the mother of all October surprises and end up with four more years of Donald Trump. […]
We have an election to win next year, and while it’s human (and especially Democratic) nature to worry, the best approach is to put our heads down, work hard, donate whatever crumbs we can, and understand that we have the inside track. Really.
Yes, some recent polls show Biden in a dead heat with the four-times indicted guy, but good God, the election is roughly 14 months away, campaigning hasn’t yet started in earnest (nor have Trump’s numerous criminal trials), the post-pandemic economy finally appears to be getting its sea legs, the abortion issue is still galvanizing pro-choice voters like never before, and, oh, did I mention that the election is 14 months away?
So it’s a good idea to keep things in perspective while also taking a quick peek in the rearview mirror from time to time as we plan for coming election season. To that end, I want to share some excerpts from a recent column by Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton, who’s telling us nervous Nellies in no uncertain terms to chill the fuck out already. […]
I’m reminded of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who wrote in September of 1995, “There is little unity among Democrats or on the center-left on the desirability of reelecting President Clinton.” He was right. At the time there were pitched battles going on among the centrists and the progressives which made the prospect of solidarity in the party a distant dream. The huge Republican win in the midterm election of 1994 as well as the non-stop scandal-mongering and investigations by the congressional Republicans had Democrats everywhere wondering how Clinton could possibly win re-election. The only thing that seemed to unite the party at the time was a mutual loathing of Newt Gingrich. 14 months later, Clinton won a decisive victory.
Similarly, at the same point in the 2012 election, there were rumblings from certain quarters that it might be wise to run a primary challenge against President Barack Obama after his approval numbers fell to the 30s in some polls. It had been a very rough three years trying to recover from the financial crisis, not to mention the rise of the Tea Party and a political massacre in the 2010 midterms. The New York Times reported in September of 2011, “Democrats Fret Aloud Over Obama’s Chances” […]
Just two years ago there were endless stories about Democratic hand-wringing in advance of the 2022 midterms, mostly due to the off-year win by Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia gubernatorial race that supposedly portended a red wave like no other. In December of 2021, Thomas Edsall of the New York Times wrote a story headlined, “Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock.”
You get the point. Despite all our fear and loathing, everything turned out okay. Not that we shouldn’t have a healthy fear of Republican ratfuckery—and a vigorous loathing for those increasingly fascist fuckwits—but running around screaming like our hair’s on fire, when at worst it’s a bit dry and fraying, simply won’t help.
As Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, recently told Politico’s Playbook, Donald Trump remains a real threat—to Democrats, the country, and the world—but things are not nearly as dire as they often seem.
“I thought it was important to say to my friends and clients and other people, let’s just take a step back and try to be really number-specific and really sort of who has what cards in their poker hand,” said Messina. “And you would just rather be Joe Biden than Donald Trump. […] Democrats had their hearts deeply broken when Hillary lost and people didn’t see that coming. And so, you know, we continually believe every bad thing people say.”
So as folks like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris show up on the Sunday shows—along with young-ish Republican candidates who can occasionally manage to put a sentence together without complaining about low-flow toilets or endemic windmill cancer—it seems natural to wish for a younger leader who can ride in on a white, or even beige or ecru, horse to save us and finally allow me to soften my resting existential terror face.
But you simply don’t give up the advantage of incumbency, and another candidate would have their own baggage to deal with.
So we’re ridin’ with Biden into yet another most important election ever. Luckily, we’re still in pretty good shape. Let’s campaign like we’re supremely confident of victory, but vote like we’re scared shitless.[…]
CHUCK TODD: “Do you think another four years of Donald Trump will break us?”
NEWSOM: “I hope we don’t have to experience that. But I worry about democracy. I worry about the fetishness for autocracy that we’re seeing, not just from Trump, but around the world, and notably across this country. I made the point about [Ron] DeSantis. I think he’s functionally authoritarian. I’m worried more, in many respects, about Trumpism, which transcends well beyond his term and time and tenure …”
TODD: “Do you think Trump or DeSantis would be a greater threat to democracy?”
NEWSOM: “I’ll leave that to more objective minds; I’m concerned about democracy fundamentally.”
TODD: “I understand you say for more objective minds … but tell me what’s in your mind.”
NEWSOM: “I think the vengeance in Donald Trump’s heart right now is more of a threat.”
Hey, I agree. Newsom gets it. […]
[But] also, Newsom is saying Trump is a grave, existential threat to the nation, but RFK Jr.’s barmy anti-vax bullshit is just a trifling concern? And RFK Jr. is clearly a MAGA plant meant to weaken President Biden. What was Newsom just saying about the threat Trump poses?
And if you’re worried about Biden’s age, how much more worried should you be about Newsom’s judgment? […]
Sticking with the theme of “everyone sounds better than the incumbent until you really start listening to them,” I give you former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. […]
JAKE TAPPER: “One of President Biden’s biggest achievements he’s touting on the campaign trail is a $35 price cap on insulin for American seniors on Medicare. Some companies have extended that price, $35, to all their patients. As president, would you keep that $35 price cap on insulin, or would you try to reverse it?”
HALEY: “I think what Biden did was a Band-Aid. Do we need to do something about health care? Absolutely. My dad just got out of the hospital. I know the cost, but the way we deal with it is we need to start exposing the insurance companies, the hospitals, the doctors, the PBMs [pharmacy benefit managers], the pharmaceutical companies, make them all transparent. Why should anyone go to the hospital and have an insurance company and the hospital negotiate the cost for the patient with the patient not having anything involved? Why are drugs so expensive? Why do pharmaceutical companies get to decide this with government and not have patients at the table? Why don’t we have more competition and transparency in this? When I’m president, we will go through and expose all of that. If we just dealt with the insurance companies alone, we would cut health care in half. So, yes, it’s great when you can say we’re going to lower the cost of these drugs because people cannot afford them, but it’s a Band-Aid. It’s not fixing the real problem. Let’s do the hard work and fix the fact that we are the best country in the world with the most expensive health care, and regular, normal Americans can’t afford it.”
There’s more, but you get the point. Expect to see insulin costs go back up if Nikki Haley ever becomes president.
[…] Establishing those price caps on insulin was hard. Why? Republicans. And here’s what’s frustrating. Yes, Haley is right about the high cost of health care in America compared to the rest of the world. Why is it so high? Because we have the most conservative health care system in the developed world.
[…] a recent Yale study found that more than 335,000 lives could have been saved during the pandemic if we’d had the kind of universal health care plan progressives have been advocating for years now.
But just as Republicans had no viable replacement for Obamacare when they took control of the federal government in 2016, despite having relentlessly whined about it for the better part of a decade, Haley has nothing but words. Whereas Biden can clearly point to results.
Yes, Biden is old. But so is Donald Trump. And while Biden regularly exercises and does his best to stay fit and trim, Trump would have trouble winning a footrace with a blotch of shower mildew. Also, Biden doesn’t brag about passing kindergarten-level dementia tests they tend to give to patients who are suspected of suffering from dementia.
But we can also rest easy knowing that Biden’s top lieutenant, Kamala Harris, is ready to step in at a moment’s notice—whereas Trump’s VP (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, or someone equally as absurd) would need to be dislodged from his sphincter with a Jaws of Life, hydraulic pulley, and team of Bud-besotted Clydesdales before they could even take the oath of office.
[…] did I forget to mention how much Biden has accomplished in less than three years, particularly with regard to infrastructure? Guess he wasn’t too “distracted” to do his job. Unlike the last guy, who turned “infrastructure week” into a running (or, to be more precise, sedentary) joke.
[…] Hey, it’s longtime “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s last day! […] The supremely capable Kristen Welker will replace Todd […] Good luck, Kristen. […] Something tells me you’re more than up to the challenge.
The group of the world’s 20 leading economies is welcoming the African Union as a permanent member, a powerful acknowledgement of Africa as its more than 50 countries seek a more important role on the global stage.
U.S. President Joe Biden called last year for the AU’s permanent membership in the G20, saying it’s been “a long time in coming.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed the current AU chair, Comoros President Azali Assoumani, with a hug on Saturday at the G20 summit his country is hosting, saying he was “elated.”
“Congratulations to all of Africa!” said Senegal President Macky Sall, the previous AU chair who helped to push for membership. The AU had advocated for full membership for seven years, spokesperson Ebba Kalondo said. Until now, South Africa was the bloc’s only G20 member. […]
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR AFRICA?
Permanent G20 membership signals the rise of a continent whose young population of 1.3 billion is set to double by 2050 and make up a quarter of the planet’s people.
The AU’s 55 member states, […] have pressed for meaningful roles in the global bodies […] They also want reforms to a global financial system—including the World Bank and other entities—that forces African countries to pay more than others to borrow money, deepening their debt.
Africa is increasingly courting investment and political interest from a new generation of global powers beyond the U.S. and the continent’s former European colonizers. China is Africa’s largest trading partner and one of its largest lenders. Russia is its leading arms provider. Gulf nations have become some of the continent’s biggest investors. Turkey’s largest overseas military base and embassy are in Somalia. Israel and Iran are increasing their outreach in search of partners.
[…] Granting the African Union membership in the G20 is a step that recognizes the continent as a global power in itself.
WHAT DOES THE AFRICAN UNION BRING TO THE G20?
With full G20 membership, the AU can represent a continent that’s home to the world’s largest free trade area. It’s also enormously rich in the resources the world needs to combat climate change, which Africa contributes to the least but is affected by the most.
The African continent has 60% of the world’s renewable energy assets and more than 30% of the minerals key to renewable and low-carbon technologies. Congo alone has almost half of the world’s cobalt, a metal essential for lithium-ion batteries, according to a United Nations report on Africa’s economic development released last month.
[…] The gathering in Nairobi ended with a call for fairer treatment by financial institutions, the delivery of rich countries’ long-promised $100 billion a year in climate financing for developing nations and a global tax on fossil fuels.
[…] the AU itself has long been urged by some Africans to be more forceful in its responses to coups and other crises. The body’s rotating chairmanship, which changes annually, also gets in the way of consistency, but Africa “will need to speak with one voice if it hopes to influence G20 decision-making,” Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, a former prime minister of Niger, and Daouda Sembene, a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in Project Syndicate this year.
African leaders have shown their willingness to take such collective action. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they united in loudly criticizing the hoarding of vaccines by rich countries and teamed up to pursue bulk purchases of supplies for the continent.
Now, as a high-profile G20 member, Africa’s demands will be harder to ignore.
[…] IPCC reports are conservative, something to keep in mind.
It is sea level rise. That will affect shipping port operations. Shanghai, Houston, and Lazaro Cardenas (in Mexico) are some of the top ports that will be useless no later than mid-century. Only Rotterdam was mentioned as one of several unidentified ports already facing sea-level ramifications. They describe utter disaster will result with as little as fifteen inches of rise.
Reuters writes:
[…] Ports highly susceptible to rises in sea levels such as Shanghai could establish flood defense systems similar to Holland’s Maeslant Barrier and London’s Thames Barrier, the LR spokesperson said.
“This would negate the need to constantly raise existing floodwalls every decade, which is a short-term and costly solution,” the spokesperson added.
Shipping accounts for nearly 3 percent of global CO2 emissions.
The industry is actively cutting its emissions by reducing its fossil fuel consumption, the LR spokesperson said, adding that it remains fragmented.
[…] Yale 360 always has compelling stories on the fuckery we find ourselves as climate change bears down on our civilization.
Scientists say that such climate-related disruptions are bound to intensify in coming years as the world warms. In addition, ports, rail lines, highways, and other transportation and supply infrastructure will be threatened by increases in sea level of an estimated 2 to 6 feet — and perhaps more — by 2100. Around 90 percent of the world’s freight moves by ship, and, according to Becker, inundations eventually will threaten most of the world’s 2,738 coastal ports, whose wharves generally lie just a few feet to 15 feet above sea level. But to most port managers, the threat still feels remote. The rate of future sea level rise is so uncertain and solutions so elusive that only a few port managers have taken action to counter the threat, and only a fraction have tried to assess it.
[…] The leap in the cost of shipping a container across the Pacific Ocean as a result of the pandemic — from $2,000 to $15,000 or $20,000 — may suggest what’s in store.
A 2020 paper in Maritime Policy and Management even asserted that if current climate science is correct, “global supply chains will be massively disrupted, beyond what can be adapted to while maintaining current systems.” […]
Antarctica’s bitter cold air temperatures have shattered some records this year. What they don’t seem to be able to do is wrap their simple minds around the fact that the melting is all taking place below the surface where warm ocean bottom water is creating Swiss cheeseification in glacial ice and, with help from changing winds preventing the growth of sea ice. […]
The main driver of ice loss in West Antarctica is relatively warm ocean water that amplifies melting underneath the ice shelves, which are the floating extensions of the grounded ice sheet […]
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is not shutting down. It is driven by the westerly winds and jet stream that spin around Antarctica. They are driven by the strong temperature gradient between the south pole and the temperate zone north of the ACC. The strong temperature gradient is not going away.
What is collapsing is the deep water formation in the Weddell sea and it’s declining in other critical locations on the Antarctic continental shelf where the coldest waters in the ocean form. This is a climate catastrophe in its own right because it will lead to more upwelling of intermediate waters , more melting of Antarctic glaciers and more sea level rise.
The ACC has intensified as the winds and currents have tightened up around Antarctica and that’s increasing sea level rise to the north of the southern ocean.
Maps, videos and many more details are available at the link.
whheydtsays
Kilaeua is erupting…again. I haven’t seen any announcement, but you can see it on their live feed here https://www.youtube.com/usgs/live Must have started within the last 30 to 60 minutes.
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Kilauea volcano is erupting, according to Hawaii Volcano Observatory.
At 3:15 p.m. on Sunday, the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory observed eruptive activity in the Kilauea summit.
Through webcam images and a field reporter, USGS reports that an eruption has commenced within Halemaʻumaʻu crater and on the down-dropped block to the east in Kīlauea’s summit caldera, within Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.
HVO Kilauea RED/WARNING – Kīlauea is erupting; status upgrade to RED/WARNING https://t.co/ftGF6dDgw9
— USGS Volcanoes🌋 (@USGSVolcanoes) September 11, 2023
The eruption was preceded by a period of strong seismicity and rapid uplift of the summit.
USGS is elevating Kilauea’s volcano alert level from WATCH to WARNING, and its aviation color code from ORANGE to RED as this eruption and associated hazards are evaluated.
According to officials, the opening phases of eruptions are dynamic.
The activity is confined to Halemaʻumaʻu, and the hazards will be reassessed as the eruption progresses.
HVO will continue to monitor this activity closely and report any significant changes in future notices.HVO is in constant communication with Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park as this situation evolves. The activity is confined entirely within the park.
birgerjohanssonsays
Today is the 50th anniversary of a massacre and coup d’etat that Henry Kissinger and the Republicans would want ja to forget.
They would prefer we remember 2001 9/11… which became possible because a Republican president who lost the election ignored the intelligence warnings about a terrorist attack… twice.
A fugitive who escaped from a Pennsylvania prison just days after being sentenced to life without parole in the fatal stabbing of his ex-girlfriend was captured early Wednesday, Pennsylvania State Police said.
Danelo Cavalcante was captured at 8:14 a.m. Wednesday, officials said. He was found hiding in a large pile of logs behind a John Deere store in South Coventry Township, about 30 miles from the prison he escaped from on Aug. 31…
Back on Christmas Eve of last year […] he was in drastic “stop paying bills” mania […] and the Sacramento data center was costing […] $100 million/year. […] He had asked […] about moving the servers in Sacramento to one […] Twitter had, in Portland, Oregon.
[…] The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.
“This is making my brain hurt […] What a pile of f—ing bulls—. Jesus H f—ing Christ. Portland obviously has tons of room. It’s trivial to move servers one place to another.”
[…] a cousin of Musk suggested […] they just do it themselves […] and Musk literally had his plane diverted to go to Sacramento and try […]
[…] “These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about 2,500 pounds and was eight feet tall.
“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.
Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.
The story gets dumber. […] Note the pattern: a willingness to ignore the details of what could go wrong, YOLO it and just test it out, and the assumption that if nothing goes wrong when you do that, it means that everything is fine and nothing else could possibly go wrong.
So glad to see that PZ and team managed to talk their provider into fixing the FreeThoughtBlogs server problem. It was difficult to do without PZ’s thoughtful posts for a couple of days. Yes, I am addicted.
We can now get back to updating The Infinite Thread. Yay!
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on the Biden impeachment inquiry
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was not at the G20. That’s partly because if he steps foot outside his own country, he stands a decent chance of being arrested and hauled off to the Hague. Of course, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said that Putin is welcome to G20 next year … maybe. “If Putin decides to go to Brazil, it’s the justice system that will take the decision over whether he should be arrested, not the government or congress,” said Lula. “I didn’t even know this court existed.”
The court in question is the International Criminal Court (ICC). As it happens, Brazil is a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, meaning that should a wanted criminal like Putin step on their soil, they are obligated by law to arrest him. Someone probably informed Lula of this fact and caused him to do a serious rethink.
But definitely, I think that Putin should test this. And why wait for next year? Just hop on the nearest state airlines flight and get off wherever it happens to come down. If he’s still intact at that point, Putin could explain to the nearest police officer how he believes he’s immune to international arrest warrants because Russia doesn’t believe in the ICC.
Just make sure someone has a camera rolling first.
On Tuesday, Putin didn’t engage with Russia’s diminishing fleet of airliners. Instead, he slouched in the chair of Russian media outlet Meduza to explain how Russia is winning the war in Ukraine so much. So, so much. Even if that “winning” seems to be in the form of Ukraine building momentum and advancing at almost every point of contact.
According to Putin, Ukraine has lost 71,000 people, 543 tanks, and almost 18,000 armored vehicles just since the counteroffensive began in June. That’s about 180 armored vehicles a day—quite an accomplishment. It’s even well above what Russian propagandists had proclaimed.
The number that Putin gives for Ukrainian tank losses is not just more than all the Western tanks that have been donated to Ukraine—even if you count those which have still not arrived—it’s more than a third of all the tanks Ukraine is estimated to have (including its own tiny collection of ancient T-55s, like those Russia has recently been sending into combat). The number for armored vehicles that Putin reports lost in the past three or so months is more than twice as many as Ukraine ever had. Admittedly, 250% is some pretty heavy losses. [Dark humor, I like it.]
But there is one way in which Putin’s massive numbers might make some sense. While Ukraine may not have an extra 11,000 extra APCs on hand, it might have that many fake APCs. Ukraine has been sending out whole new battalions of decoy weapons to draw in Russian drones and artillery.
Ukraine has been using such faux weapons from the beginning of the invasion, both homegrown versions and some provided by allies. Earlier ones were generally inflatable, which made them cheap and quick to deploy, if sometimes hilarious in the results. [photo at the link]
Those early decoys were good enough when imagery was limited to high-altitude flyovers and Russia’s miserable stock of satellites. But as the action has largely switched to FPV drones, wrinkly balloons with droopy barrels can’t quite hold up to close scrutiny.
That’s where a Ukrainian firm called Metinvest comes in. According to CNN, the metalworking firm has stepped up production of higher-quality decoys, delivering to the Ukrainian military at a cost of about $1,000 each. Even from fairly close at hand, these things are pretty convincing. [Tweet and video at the link]
These are good enough that I kind of want to put an order in. If it’s okay to plant a giant Home Depot skeleton in my lawn for Halloween, surely it’s just as okay to park a few fake HIMARS. Right? My neighbors may not agree.
Here’s some more of Metinvest’s work. And seriously, if we can’t order some for ourselves, we should figure out how to send more to the front lines. [Tweet and photos at the link]
So maybe Russia has been blowing up these $1,000 decoys with their roughly $1,000 drones. Even if the Russian drones are significantly cheaper, the return on investment for Ukraine is inestimable. [List at the link]
For weeks now, analyst Andrew Perpetua has been running his own count of losses on each side, but his list of losses includes a crucial new column of data—reason for loss. Sometimes the reason why a vehicle is left smoking at the side of the road isn’t clear. It could even be a simple mechanical breakdown. But in other instances, the reason something stopped running—or blew into a thousand parts—is pretty darn obvious because someone captured the moment on video. Over the period that Perpetua has been keeping these lists, there is one reason that most equipment has been taken out, and that reason is the same every day: drones. [Tweet and video at the link]
It may be military drones like the Russian Lancet damaging an M777 towed howitzer, a Ukrainian FPV taking out a T-72B3 tank, or a Russian motorcycle with the bad luck to drive beneath a hovering quadcopter with a grenade and an incredibly skilled operator. But drone, drone, and drone are the top ways that equipment is being lost on both sides.
There are, of course, still vehicles and other gear being lost to artillery and longer-range weapons like HIMARS. Some of these aren’t showing up simply because they are well away from the front and no one is being nice enough to flip a camera on to record a “look what we just lost!” video. But the front lines are now the place where infantry takes ground and everything else moves in fear of the hovering swarm.
Which raises a question: Could Russia even wage the same kind of war they waged just a year ago in capturing cities like Severodonetsk? The Russian tactic—once it became clear that those scary “40 mile convoys” were just ringing the dinner bell for Ukrainian forces—has been to advance their artillery, eliminate anything that resembled cover, move everything else forward, and do it again.
But really, an artillery gun seems like about the worst place to be on a modern (meaning Ukrainian) battlefield. This is a war where drones are essentially everywhere, no piece of equipment can consider itself hidden, and a weapon whose operation involves several minutes of setting up, then firing from a fixed position seems like it might as well be sending a graven invitation for some air-delivered misery.
Artillery crew has always seemed like a bad choice for anyone seeking a long lifespan since electronics became sophisticated enough to calculate reverse trajectories. Even with the tricks available to make the source slightly less obvious, assuming the opponent has as good or better range, artillery should be a fire-once weapon (or, at best, fire a few times), then deal with the incoming shells/drones/precision-guided missile.
Right now, Ukraine estimates that Russia has lost 5,872 artillery pieces since the war began. That’s roughly 10 a day. But looking back up at the numbers in that latest estimate, Ukraine shows 33 such systems taken out on Monday—it was 28 the day before that. High levels of artillery losses have been reported for some time now, suggesting that Ukraine has raised its counter-battery game since the invasion began. Whether that’s happening thanks to more sophisticated electronics and longer range on artillery and MLRS systems, or its drones making these kills, we don’t know. But it’s a hard time on those Ukrainian fields for a Russian gun.
Good.
However, Ukraine has still been making good use of artillery in its own advances since the counteroffensive began in June. Does that mean Russia lacks that counter-battery prowess, or has Ukraine already moved on to the next step in the game, finding ways to protect their guns long enough to make progress.
We don’t know. But there’s a good chance the strategies that worked at the beginning of the invasion would create an instant disaster in this more “highly evolved” conflict.
A small group of Russian forces held on in the northeast corner of Klishchiivka some weeks after the rest of their troops had been routed. But with the bridge to the north smashed and repeated Russian attempts to reenter the town thwarted, those Russian troops made a run for it this week, departing across fields that were directly under the fire of Ukrainian troops positioned on the heights to the west. It did not go well for them.
Now Ukraine has cleared the area and Russian attempts to retake the strategic high ground appear to be over. [Tweet and video at the link: taking down the Wagner flag]
Multiple images today have suggested that Ukraine is working very methodically in the area around Verbove, southeast of Robotyne, to clear an extended area of the second (personnel) trench that was reached by Ukrainian forces last week. One of the advantages of a trench system is that defenders can press in from both sides to dislodge any opponents who make it over the lip, but Russian seemed to make little or no progress in shaking Ukraine out of the relatively small area that Ukraine took on its initial push toward Verbove.
Now Ukraine is extending that area in both directions. It would be nice to think that Ukrainian engineers are also clearing vehicle lanes so that armored forces could move closer and support the next leapfrog, but that’s not yet clear. The whole area so far appears to be much more lightly mined than the fields north of Robotyne. [Tweet and map at the link]
Ukraine has also been bringing helicopters forward more frequently to launch missiles into Russian positions, as well as using cluster munitions over trenches. The combination appears to be working. [Tweet and screen grabs at the link: Russian VDV are crying about Ukrainian aviation that is attacking their positions in the Robotyne-Verbove axis every day. Yes, that aviation that the Russians claimed to have destroyed in the first 24 hours of the invasion.]
There are continuing reports of Ukrainian advances northwest of Donetsk. Tomorrow would be a good day to update all the maps.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been “leading” the House on borrowed time. The Freedom Caucus and allied members have made it clear that he serves at their pleasure. This week, chaos agent and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tried to shorten McCarthy’s leash, threatening to force a vote on ousting him.
Now Axios poses the question of “How Democrats could save Kevin McCarthy.” The better question for Democrats is, “Why would you bother?” The assumption—always—is that Democrats will step up to try to make things work, to help clean up messes, and to prop McCarthy up in this fight. That they’ll help save his bacon.
So why would Democrats help him and vote against Gaetz’s motion to oust McCarthy? Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee gives one justification: “If we vacated the chair, I don’t see a better speaker. So I don’t foresee that happening.” That’s a given. There isn’t a better speaker option.
That’s the kind of thinking that McCarthy is counting on from Democrats to help him. But there isn’t really a worse option, not one who’s a viable candidate. There are a lot of truly horrible people in the GOP conference, like Paul Gosar or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they’re never going to be elected. Worrying about someone worse in the job is pointless.
And why would Democrats help McCarthy when he regularly gives them the middle finger? He just did it again on Tuesday by moving forward on a wholly illegitimate impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. It was the same earlier in the year when some Democrats were trying to reach across the aisle to protect McCarthy in the debt ceiling fight: His staff said that effort was “garbage” and that he had “zero interest” in it.
The other argument is that he’s got to be propped up to avoid chaos. One anonymous Democrat told Axios, “No love for Kevin. But [there is] concern about more chaos, and who might take his place if he is booted.”
Spoiler alert: Right now the House is in chaos. More of it is inevitable, and there’s nothing House Democrats can do about it. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Let them defeat themselves. The No. 1 rule: When Republicans are drowning, throw them an anchor.
Posted by readers of the article:
If I were a House Democrat, I’d help McCarthy to this extent and this extent only: If McCarthy finds that there is no possible way to pass any budget bills with Republican votes (which is almost certain), or if he can only pass bills that can’t pass the senate, and he’s tired of having the government shut down—if he introduces the Senate budget bills, un-amended, I’d give him the vote to open the government over Republican nihilism.
—————————-
The worst case is that McCarthy ends up exactly where he is now, impotent and useless, but the chance exists that he comes out of the fight with some strength. Since he doesn’t give the slightest shit if the world slides further into chaos there is no real downside for him to either losing the speakership and no one runs the House or retaining it with at worst the status quo.
[JWST] may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). […] 120 light years away […] Researchers have also detected methane and CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere. Detection of these gases could mean the planet, named K2-18b, has a water ocean. […] “On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of it in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments,” […] more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.
[…]
What makes the planet even more intriguing is that it is not like the Earth-like, so called rocky planets, […] K2-18b is nearly nine times the size of Earth. […] “We have obtained the most detailed spectrum of a habitable-zone sub-Neptune to date, and this allowed us to work out the molecules that exist in its atmosphere.”
[…] Congress’ summer break is wrapping up, with senators returning to Capitol Hill this week, and House members getting back to work next week. Collectively, they’re confronting a lengthy to-do list — along with some tough deadlines.
At the top of the list, of course, is funding federal operations and preventing a government shutdown by the end of the month, but it’s not the only task lawmakers have to complete in the coming weeks. There’s also work on a new farm bill, the need to reauthorize the FAA, funding for domestic disaster relief, and a new round of aid to our Ukrainian allies.
But for some Republican members, there’s an entirely different priority weighing heavily on their minds.
Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declared her intention to move toward a government shutdown unless GOP leaders advanced an impeachment push against President Joe Biden. “I’ve already decided I will not vote to fund the government unless we have passed an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden,” the Georgia Republican said.
On Tuesday, as The Hill reported, one of Greene’s cohorts made related comments, which were likely noticed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Tuesday forecast upcoming moves to force House votes on impeachment, while sending a warning shot to Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). […]
“I worked very hard in January to develop a toolkit for House Republicans to use in a productive and positive way. I don’t believe we’ve used those tools as effectively as we should have,” Gaetz told a conservative radio host, adding that when the lower chamber gets back to work next week, the GOP majority has to “seize the initiative.”
“That means forcing votes on impeachment,” the Florida Republican said. “And if Speaker McCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long.”
[OMG. Matt Gaetz is such an irritating twit.]
Have I mentioned that there’s literally zero evidence of Biden having done anything wrong? And there’s no reason whatsoever to begin an impeachment inquiry? Because there’s literally zero evidence of Biden having done anything wrong and there’s no reason whatsoever to begin an impeachment inquiry.
Gaetz didn’t go into specific details about the strategy he has in mind, but the unsubtle threat directed at his party’s House speaker was almost certainly a reference to motion-to-vacate-the-chair rules that were tweaked in January to make it easier for GOP members to try to take McCarthy’s gavel away.
Gaetz’s comments also came just a few days after Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said that House GOP leaders would likely have to work with Democrats to prevent a shutdown, which would complicate the larger partisan dynamic. […]
Looking ahead, there’s no obvious path for the House speaker. If he tries to satisfy Greene and Gaetz by holding a floor vote on an impeachment inquiry, it would likely fail. If McCarthy doesn’t hold the vote, some of his members would likely push Congress closer to a government shutdown. [Sheesh]
If the speaker tries to advance appropriations bills to prevent a shutdown, they’d likely fail. If he tries to pass a stopgap spending measure, members of the House Freedom Caucus have already said they’ll balk unless Republican leaders agree to meet a series of outlandish demands. [Sheesh … again.]
All the while, McCarthy is trying to navigate these waters knowing that if he pursues a course some of his members don’t like, they’ll try to fire him — and as Gaetz’s rhetoric helped demonstrate, such talk has advanced beyond mere whispers.
[Republican Presidential candidate] Vivek Ramaswamy apparently thinks he can, if elected president, shut down the FBI, ATF, U.S. Department of Education, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services — all without congressional approval.
During Congress’ lengthy summer break, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy dropped unsubtle hints about what to expect when members returned to Capitol Hill. The question wasn’t whether he’d launch a baseless, evidence-free impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, but rather, when and how the California Republican would begin the process.
On Sept. 1, the House speaker told the public exactly what to expect. “To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter, and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives,” McCarthy told Breitbart News. “That’s why, if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.”
The language was categorical. It left no wiggle room. If an impeachment inquiry were to happen, the House speaker declared, it’d have to be approved by a majority of House members. Period. Full stop.
Eleven days later, McCarthy did the opposite. As The New York Times summarized:
Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday directed top congressional Republicans to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, reversing his previous stance that such an investigation should be initiated only with a vote of the House.
McCarthy’s original position was the one he’d espoused for years. In fact, the GOP leader published a tweet in September 2019 — a missive that’s still online as of this morning — that insisted Democratic leaders couldn’t simply make a unilateral decision to initiate an impeachment process, because it “requires a full vote of the House of Representatives.”
Soon after, McCarthy wrote that the House must “intend to hold a vote of the full House authorizing an impeachment inquiry,” or it “would create a process completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy.”
The funny thing is that the House speaker had a rhetorical way out of this: McCarthy could’ve simply said he would follow the precedent House Democrats set during Donald Trump’s first impeachment. It would’ve been easy for the Republican leader to say, “Well, I pushed for a system that relied on an authorization vote, but I lost that fight, and we’ll move forward accordingly.”
But McCarthy didn’t say anything of the kind. Instead, he did the opposite, insisting he’d stick to his principles — right before the House speaker cast those principles aside.
I kept waiting for the GOP leader to at least try to justify the brazen flip-flop, but he didn’t. There were no talking points. There was no explanation. In fact, at McCarthy’s announcement in the late morning, he told reporters about his plans, but he refused to answer any questions.
There is no great mystery about what happened here: McCarthy discarded his principles because he didn’t have the votes from his own members. But the House speaker doesn’t want to come right out and say that, and he can’t think of a credible defense, so he’s instead said nothing. [Actually, he did sort of say something. He tried to blame the whole thing on Nancy Pelosi.]
[…] Postscript: Politico published a report that raised a few eyebrows late yesterday: “Joe Biden has a literal Trump card to play against the House’s new impeachment inquiry. In January 2020, the Donald Trump-led Justice Department formally declared that impeachment inquiries by the House are invalid unless the chamber takes formal votes to authorize them.” [!!]
That’s interesting, but its practical value is limited: Opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel don’t carry any real legal weight for Congress, which tends not to care what the executive branch thinks about the legislative process.
Update: This morning, McCarthy insisted he “never changed” his position, despite the fact that he obviously changed his position.
Ummm, Republicans don’t have a legitimate reason to proceed, but they’re going ahead anyway. While they proceed, they are stumbling all over themselves, fighting with each other, and demonstrating their ignorance at every turn.
When it comes to the Republicans’ new impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, there are basically three categories of GOP members. One contingent, made up of many senators and House members such as Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, concedes that the party doesn’t have any incriminating evidence against the incumbent Democrat.
A second faction, which includes members such as Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, acknowledges the absence of evidence, but argues that an impeachment inquiry might somehow uncover relevant information.
But perhaps most interesting is the third group: Republicans who pretend that they really have uncovered incriminating evidence, despite what the other two GOP contingents say, and despite reality.
When announcing the new impeachment inquiry yesterday, for example, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pointed to a series of details, presented as if there’s a legitimate underlying controversy. A Washington Post analysis took a closer look at each of the California Republican’s claims and found that McCarthy’s case amounted to little more than “exaggerations, irrelevancies, and dishonesty.”
Soon after, a group of far-right Republicans held a press conference of their own, and a reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, what “actual evidence” GOP members have that would “merit an actual impeachment inquiry.” He didn’t seem to appreciate the question, responding:
“You can see that the homes that the Bidens own can’t be afforded on a congressional or Senate salary. You also understand that it’s not normal for family members to receive millions of dollars from overseas interests. Those things aren’t normal.”
Growing visibly agitated, the right-wing congressman continued to reference a series of related claims, including a renewed focus on the Viktor Shokin firing in Ukraine, before telling the reporter, “If you can’t see that, if you are that blind…” at which point he turned the microphone over to someone else. [Tweet from Aaron Rupar, with video, is available at the link.]
The problem, whether Perry appreciates this or not, is that he was speaking in such a way as to suggest Republicans have uncovered meaningful evidence of wrongdoing. That has not happened.
The president’s homes are entirely affordable given his personal finances. It may not be “normal” for a politician’s relatives to get money from overseas interests, but (a) none of this money appears to have ended up in the president’s pocket, making his relatives’ incomes irrelevant; and (b) if Republicans were serious about this point, they’d probably take a greater interest in the billions Jared Kushner got from Saudi Arabia following his White House tenure. [LOL]
As for the Shokin matter, we’ve known for years that in 2015, the Obama administration, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund, and other international organizations leaned on Ukraine to fire the prosecutor because he refused to investigate corruption. Biden has bragged about this because he successfully implemented U.S. policy, which enjoyed bipartisan backing at the time. This isn’t scandalous in the slightest. [All correct!]
As part of his tirade, Perry declared yesterday, “That’s what we have.” Right. Exactly. […]
no better than a dummy pill […] the key drug found in popular versions of Sudafed, Dayquil and other medications
[…]
If the FDA follows through on the panel’s recommendations, […] drugmakers could be required to pull their oral medications containing phenylephrine […] That would likely force consumers to switch to the behind-the-counter pseudoephedrine products or to phenylephrine-based nasal sprays and drops.
[…]
an FDA scientific review […] found numerous flaws in the 1960s and 1970s studies that supported phenylephrine’s original approval. […] grandfathered
[…]
phenylephrine is metabolized [quickly] when taken by mouth, leaving only trace levels that reach nasal passages […] The drug appears more effective when applied directly to the nose, in sprays or drops
Ukraine’s overnight attack on the shipyard at Sevastopol Bay has resulted in severe damage to the Kilo-class submarine Rostov-on-Don and the large landing ship Minsk that were in drydock for repairs. [Also caused severe damage to the facility.]
It was the biggest attack on the Russian Navy since the sinking of the Moskva. [many tweets and images at the link, some of the images show before/after photos of damage]
Once the attack was underway chaos unfolded after there were reports of saboteurs in the city and there was a friendly fire incident that killed three soldiers and a policeman. [Tweet and image at the link]
Coincidence? “#Starlink Very strange. In the middle of an Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol.” Starlink outages reported, showing a significant spike in outages during the Ukrainian attack. [Chart at X/twitter link embedded in the article, but you have to navigate to the tweet to see the whole chart.]
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was escorted out of a Denver theater on Sunday night after several people seated near her in the audience complained she was creating a disturbance.
In an incident report shared with NPR, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts said it had to remove two guests from a performance of Beetlejuice, the musical, for violating viewing policies….
The report said the people removed were seen vaping and using a cell phone to record the performance, against theater rules.
Theater staff received three different complaints about the behavior, prompting security to issue a warning to the two patrons during intermission. But five minutes into the second act, the staff received a fourth complaint, and mobilized to remove the two patrons.
One of the ushers reported that the guests resisted leaving.
“They told me they would not leave. I told them that they need to leave the theater and if they do not, they will be trespassing. The patrons said they would not leave. I told them I would be going to get Denver Police. They said go get them,” the usher said in the report….
Boebert turns back several times to speak to security guards as she’s escorted through the theater’s lobby. According to the incident report, the pair were saying things like “Do you know who I am?,” “I am on the board” and “I will be contacting the mayor.”
Those dry-docks are pretty much fixed in place . . . like at a street address. And when a ship is in one, neither the dock nor the ship ain’t gonna move anytime soon. All a cruise missile needs is the location exactly on the ship where they want to hit . . . like the Captain’s stateroom, or those missiles mounted on the stern. Starlink is only for communication, not for navigation.
Maybe Poots got word there were incoming missiles and had Elon on speed dial (out of habit) and demanded a Starlink shutdown before they realized a couple of their gooses had already been cooked.
—————————-
1. Starlink wasn’tn isn’t enabled for Crimea.
2. Once bitten, Ukraine wasn’t dumb enough to rely on it to support this attack (hence the attack succeeded in spite of the outage elsewhere).
3. Highly unlikely that missiles would ever use/need Starlink anyway.
Hence the Starlink outage outrage on this occasion is just nonsense.
———————–
The Storm Shadow family of missiles use satellite and inertial navigation confirmed by terrain radar in their cruise phase. IR or optical systems are used to confirm the target.
The USV (sea drones) do need Starlink or similar for comms and operator target confirmation.
————————
1) Russia/Musk would be worried about a multi-vector attack (missiles then drones), even if they knew it was storm shadow missiles already, and the situation could well be confused enough that musk or those in contact with musk would not know that immediately.
2) They might hope that disrupting ukranian communications in general could cause some problem for the attack. Either directly by disabling some unit directing it from Ukraine or just in general by causing a bit of extra chaos within Ukraine’s military.
Reginald Selkirksays
@355 Phenylephrine
It is true, phenylephrine, the ingredient in Sudafed PE and similar products, is entirely ineffective.
So why don’t they switch to using pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed? It works great! The problem is that pseudoephedrine can be used to manufacture meth, which is why they moved it behind the counter a decade or more ago.
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert and her date were escorted out of an evening performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in downtown Denver on Sunday night. The Colorado Sun obtained an incident report, which does not name Boebert, but alleges that two patrons were “causing a disturbance.” What kind of disturbance? There were “multiple complaints” that the two were vaping, using their phones, singing, and generally making merry in a purely obnoxious way. This led to Boebert receiving a warning during the intermission.
About five minutes after the start of the second act, a new complaint came in about Boebert’s behavior, and an usher saw them using a phone to record the performance—a huge no-no when watching live theater. At this point, they were asked to leave. When Boebert and her date reportedly refused to leave, they were told that they would be trespassing and that police would be called to remove them. According to the incident report, Boebert and her friend told security to go call the police. The two were then escorted out of the theater, but not before trying to throw their entitlement around further:
I speak to the patrons in the vestibule, again telling them they have to leave the property and they argue. They say stuff like “do you know who I am” “I am on the board” “I will be contacting the mayor.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) announced Wednesday he will retire from the Senate at the end of his term, dealing moderate Republicans and those opposed to former President Trump a major blow. […]
An “armed, dangerous person” was reported Wednesday afternoon at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, less than three weeks after a gunman shot and killed a faculty member on campus.
UNC Chapel Hill sent out an alert at 12:54 p.m. Wednesday reporting an armed and dangerous person on or near campus.
The alert told individuals to go inside and avoid windows. UNC police shared the same alert on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. […]
Former President Trump has been keeping close ties with House Republicans as they barrel toward an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Trump has privately discussed the inquiry with members of the House Freedom Caucus and other top Republicans, The New York Times reported. These discussions come as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) directed committees Tuesday to open a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden based on House probes into his family’s foreign business dealings and the prosecution of his son Hunter Biden.
Just two days ahead of McCarthy’s announcement, Trump met with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey. Greene said in an interview with The Times that she told Trump that she wanted the impeachment inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful” for Biden. […]
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the House Republican Conference chairwoman, also spoke with the former president shortly after McCarthy gave the impeachment inquiry the green light.
“I speak to President Trump a lot. I spoke to him today,” Stefanik told reporters on Tuesday, adding that she believes the Biden family’s business dealings are “the biggest political corruption scandal of our lifetime.”
The Times also reported Stefanik has spoken weekly with Trump over the past month, and she has discussed impeachment inquiry strategies with the former president. A person familiar with the conversations told the newspaper Trump thanked Stefanik for supporting the inquiry. […]
In one of the more puzzling political columns I’ve read in a long time, Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius calls for Joe Biden to drop his 2024 reelection campaign — but only after an impressive catalogue of what Biden has accomplished in his first term. If you didn’t see the headline — subtly, “President Biden should not run again in 2024” — you’d be forgiven for thinking the first few paragraphs are making the case for Biden’s reelection.
Ignatius notes that while plenty of Democrats were skeptical of Biden in 2020, he turned out to be the right guy to fight what Biden called “a battle for the soul of our nation” — as Ignatius says, Biden “was a genial but also shrewd campaigner for the restoration of what legislators call ‘regular order.’”
Ignatius ticks off a list of Biden’s political wins, starting with the 2020 election and continuing through last fall’s defeat of Trumpers in the midterms, plus the Justice Department’s prosecution of insurrectionists from the creepy January 6 Capitol mob to their ringleader, former “president” Donald Trump. Ignatius’s admiration of Biden is entirely sincere:
What I admire most about President Biden is that in a polarized nation, he has governed from the center out, as he promised in his victory speech. With an unexpectedly steady hand, he passed some of the most important domestic legislation in recent decades. In foreign policy, he managed the delicate balance of helping Ukraine fight Russia without getting America itself into a war. In sum, he has been a successful and effective president.
Ignatius, a damn good writer, knows exactly what he’s up to: The praise and appreciation, all genuine, is scaffolding for a heavy sigh as Ignatius gets to his real point:
But I don’t think Biden and Vice President Harris should run for reelection. It’s painful to say that, given my admiration for much of what they have accomplished. But if he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.[FFS]
Biden wrote his political testament in his inaugural address: “When our days are through, our children and our children’s children will say of us: They gave their best, they did their duty, they healed a broken land.” Mr. President, maybe this is that moment when duty has been served.
David Ignatius is a serious writer, so he wouldn’t stoop to quoting the tearjerker line from a kid’s movie, but I have no such scruples: with the removal of Trump, he thinks it’s time to say, “That’ll do, Joe, that’ll do.” (No, we don’t think Joe Biden should move to the Big City for a sequel.)
Ignatius argues that two liabilities could drag Biden down in a likely rematch with Trump: his age, and his choice of Kamala Harris as vice president. Ignatius cites the recent, very flawed AP/NORC Poll which found that 77 percent of Americans consider Biden too old to serve another four years, including 69 percent of Democrats. (Ignatius conveniently leaves out the bizarre response from Republican cultists, of whom only 28 percent consider Trump too old, even though he’s just three years younger than Biden.)
Ignatius posits that “Biden’s age isn’t just a Fox News trope; it’s been the subject of dinner-table conversations across America this summer,” although we suspect that most of those conversations outside Fox households have also included a healthy dose of “fuck Fox News, though, it’s OK if Joe pets a dog.”
This is where we back up a moment and acknowledge that even though “Joe’s a senile meat puppet” is bullshit on par with “Hillary had 14 strokes and is unable to walk up stairs” in 2016, that bullshit did stick to her with at least some swing voters […]
If a lot of Americans are concerned about Biden’s age, Ignatius says, then naturally they may be more attuned than in most elections to who might succeed him, and Ignatius thinks Kamala Harris may be a liability too, although he adds that trying to replace her would probably hurt Biden more than it might help.
We guess David Ignatius has met the KHive.
Here’s the thing, though: Ignatius doesn’t really make a strong case that most voters will decide any of that is worth casting Biden aside for, especially not at this point in the neverending election cycle. Biden’s approval ratings may not reflect what he’s accomplished, but people can’t stand Trump either, and the prospects for the guy with 91 felony indictments don’t seem likely to improve with time.
Most importantly, Ignatius is making these arguments in September 2023, which seems a bit late in the game to be thanking Biden for his service and taking him to the Amtrak station with a gold watch. Ignatius acknowledges that, sort of, but he claims there’s still time to start a fresh Democratic primary now — or even next month? Um. What?
Time is running out. In a month or so, this decision will be cast in stone. It will be too late for other Democrats, including Harris, to test themselves in primaries and see whether they have the stuff of presidential leadership. Right now, there’s no clear alternative to Biden — no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings. That might be the decider for Biden, that there’s seemingly nobody else. But maybe he will trust in democracy to discover new leadership, “in the arena.”
Or maybe we should keep our focus on the flawed but capable guy who pleasantly surprised us with his decency and ability to govern, because the fellow in the first half of Ignatius’s column still sounds like a hell of a guy, a candidate I’d be happy to vote for again. I just don’t see any advantaged in tossing the Democratic Party into a brand new primary chaos pit like the other party has been wallowing around in all this time.
Too many media outlets are making “Joe Biden is old” into the “Hillary’s emails” propaganda of the 2024 election.
The floods that ravaged eastern Libya destroyed a quarter of the coastal city of Derna and left bodies lying in the street, said an aid official Wednesday as the government raised the death toll to 5,300.
The Interior Ministry from the affected eastern region announced the new toll Tuesday night as rescue and aid operations gained steam and the rival governments of Libya appeared to be setting aside their long-simmering hostilities to deal with the devastation. […]
“There are neighborhoods in Derna that we have yet to reach,” Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Qatrani of the eastern-based government told Libyan TV channel al-Masar, adding that everyone must evacuate the city to better allow the army, which is taking over the relief effort, to do its work.
Derna, the city most affected by the Mediterranean’s devastating Storm Daniel, was covered with red-stained pools after raging torrents of water broke through two dams Sunday night and swallowed whole parts of the city, sweeping away buildings filled with an unknown number of inhabitants.
The International Organization for Migration reported that 30,000 people in Derna have been rendered homeless by the flooding, which also blocked many of the roads into the city and caused widespread power and communication outages.
Masar TV said a hospital in Derna is overflowing with corpses and has begun placing them in the square outside. It showed a video of a classroom, the seats pushed against the wall and the floor covered with black body bags.
Thousands remain missing. The Libyan Red Crescent, which has focused efforts on search and rescue missions, has been pulling bodies out of the muddied waters that have submerged the town.
[…] International aid organizations put out calls on Wednesday for funds to deal with the huge numbers of people displaced. [maps and images at the link]
[…] Libya has also become a “key springboard” for migrants from over 40 countries hoping to take the perilous sea route to Europe; these migrants have most likely been severely impacted by the floods, the International Organization for Migration warned.
The civil war that has raged in the country since the fall of Gaddafi has forced the population to suffer through intermittent fighting as political stalemates and uneasy cease-fires were peppered with outbursts of violence. Much of the infrastructure and public services are decrepit or absent.
The dams in the hills above Derna that collapsed are believed to have been in poor condition and couldn’t handle the unprecedented amount of water that crashed against them in some of the worst flooding in over a century.
[…] The Norwegian Refugee Council, or NRC, said its team in Libya is reporting “a disastrous situation for some of the most impoverished communities” along Libya’s northern coast. […] The NRC put out a call for aid to set the country on a long, arduous path to recovery. “Humanitarian aid groups in Libya have been chronically underfunded,” it emphasized.
What were alleged to be 1,000-year-old “non-human alien corpses” were presented in glass display cases before the Mexican Congress Tuesday during its first hearing on UFOs.
“They are non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution*,” Mexican journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan testified under oath.
As two small, mummified specimens – seen with three fingers on each hand – were unveiled, Maussan said researchers at the Autonomous National University of Mexico have conducted Carbon 14 analysis that determined the corpses are around 1,000 years old…
Through testing, Maussan claimed, Mexican scientists determined more than 30% of the specimens’ DNA was “unknown.”* One specimen allegedly was discovered to have what appeared to be eggs or ovaries inside, while another had implants of rare metals, such as Osmium.
The Independent noted that Maussan, an investigative journalist who has been researching extraterrestrial phenomenon for decades, has been connected to previous claims of debunked alien discoveries, including five mummies discovered in Peru in 2017 later determined to be remains of human children…
There’s a couple photos. They look like they were sculpted out of sand or something.
If these things are truly extraterrestrial, it is amazing that they have DNA at all, let alone 70% similarity to humans.
We have come a long way since the early days of 2020. Back then, I was the head of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and working alongside Gov. Roy Cooper to navigate the uncertainty, the challenges and the fear around Covid-19. My extended family was in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. I didn’t realize then that it would be over a year until I saw them in person again. All I wanted was for them to be safe.
Now, as I lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we are in such a different place — no federal mandates, no travel restrictions. With vaccines, testing and treatment, we are once again enjoying fun-filled family vacations and celebrating milestones together.
While we would all love to leave Covid-19 in the rearview mirror for good, the virus is still here. And it will probably always be with us. The good news is that we have the tools to help people avoid serious illness, hospitalization, death and long Covid symptoms. We can minimize the virus’s damage to our lives by using one of our most effective tools in combating the virus: updated Covid-19 vaccines.
Covid-19 vaccines are the best way to give the body the ability to keep the virus from causing significant harm. Extensive studies and real-world experience have shown that they are safe and they work. And most Americans take them. Since the Covid-19 vaccines became widely available in 2021, more than 270 million Americans have received shots, preventing countless deaths and hospitalizations.
Some viruses, however, change over time. This coronavirus is one of them. It finds ways to evade our immune systems by constantly evolving. That’s why our vaccines need to be updated to match the changed virus. Even though many Americans have been exposed to previous versions of the virus because they’ve been infected, that protection decreases over time. This is partly why you can get Covid more than once and why you can still get very sick even if you had it before. That’s why the C.D.C. is recommending an updated Covid-19 vaccine, which is better matched to the currently circulating virus, for everyone age 6 months and older.
[…] anyone who gets infected with Covid can develop long Covid, and I don’t want any American to experience that if it can be avoided. People with long Covid can have many ongoing symptoms — like extreme tiredness, shortness of breath and headache — that diminish their quality of life. So far, studies have found that the people who may be more likely than others to get long Covid were unvaccinated against the virus, got severely ill from Covid (though even mild cases can also lead to longer-term symptoms) or had underlying health conditions.
[…] like the annual flu vaccine, manufacturers can now focus on developing the best match for circulating strains.
The Biden administration has been working to ensure easy and convenient access to the updated Covid-19 vaccine so that most people will still be able to get free ones. For people with health insurance, most plans will cover the Covid vaccine at no cost. People who don’t have health insurance or with health plans that do not cover the cost can get free vaccines from their local health centers and pharmacies participating in the C.D.C.’s programs. To find a participating location, visit Vaccines.gov.
[…] The more people who get the shots, the bigger difference it can make in how many Americans are sick and the ability of our health care system to handle influxes of patients.
As a doctor, a mother and the head of the C.D.C., I would not recommend anything to others that I wouldn’t recommend for my own family. My 9- and 11-year-old daughters, my husband, my parents and I will all be rolling up our sleeves to get our updated Covid-19 vaccines along with our flu shots soon. I hope you and the people you care about will do the same.
The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) against Oklahoma Children’s Hospital after a woman was denied an abortion for her life-threatening, nonviable pregnancy.
The complaint was filed on behalf of Jaci Statton, a 26-year-old Oklahoma woman who was diagnosed with a partial molar pregnancy—a condition where a nonviable embryo develops with a tumor that may become cancerous, and lead to severe bleeding, high blood pressure, preeclampsia and death.
According to the complaint, Jaci was sent to the University of Oklahoma Medical Center for an abortion, but was denied because there was still fetal cardiac activity.
That hospital then transferred her to Oklahoma Children’s Hospital, which also refused to perform an emergency abortion despite confirming that Jaci faced a threat to her life without treatment, according to CRR.
Staff made it clear why they were refusing to treat Jaci, telling her, in sum and substance, that they believed that they were prevented from providing care due to Oklahoma law until Jaci was near death.
Stratton and her husband eventually travelled to Wichita, Kansas, to receive care…
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist running a long-shot campaign for president, tried to warn about vaccine risks during a podcast interview in the early days of the pandemic, he used a rhetorical device known as data dumping that is commonly used by conspiracy theorists.
In a dizzying three-minute monologue, he offered a litany of acronyms, numbers and obscure methodologies to falsely conclude that vaccine injuries were remarkably common.
Mr. Kennedy often communicates with such flourishes, giving his misleading claims an air of authority, according to experts who study disinformation and language. That has helped him share his misleading views on vaccines, 5G cellular technology and global farming.
The New York Times analyzed dozens of hours of interviews, including nearly 200 podcast transcripts collected by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, to uncover the rhetorical tricks Mr. Kennedy has often relied upon.
[…] the findings show how a high-profile figure can spread false and misleading ideas at a large scale.
[…] Here are some of the rhetorical devices used by Mr. Kennedy that researchers helped identify:
‘Data Dumping’
In a podcast interview with “The Highwire With Del Bigtree” in the first summer of the pandemic, Mr. Kennedy argued that vaccine injury rates were far higher than officials suggested.
Mr. Kennedy’s data-dumping anecdote about vaccine risks appeared well researched. However, it relied on a misleading interpretation of a 2010 study, according to Michael Klompas, a doctor involved in the research.
[snipped long quote] Dr. Klompas said researchers were not examining the rate of vaccine injury, as Mr. Kennedy had claimed. Instead, they wanted to see if a tool that monitored changes in a patient’s medical condition after vaccination could improve the completeness of a vaccine event reporting system. Nor, he said, did researchers use the techniques Mr. Kennedy described, like machine learning or artificial intelligence.
The study’s ultimate finding: The tool showed that it was possible to boost vaccine event reporting by tracking health records, but that most of the reports probably had nothing to do with vaccine injuries. Mr. Kennedy’s conclusion was wrong.
[…] ‘Semantic Switching’
Conspiracy theorists often play with the meaning of words to make their beliefs sound more in line with mainstream thinking, a technique called “semantic switching” or “equivocation.” Mr. Kennedy often misuses medical jargon in his anti-vaccine claims.
He has repeatedly claimed that vaccines are not tested using “placebo trials” — a type of study where some participants receive medication while others receive a substance that does not confer immunity, called a placebo. [snipped quote]
Vaccine trials almost always use placebos, a fact that Mr. Kennedy disputes. The placebos can include water, salt and other ingredients found in vaccines that are unrelated to immunization. In cases where using a placebo instead of a proven vaccine would put a patient at a serious disadvantage, researchers may test newer vaccines against older versions whose side effects are known.
“It’s really disingenuous because their goal is to just scare people about vaccines and make them think that they’re unsafe, that they’re not properly tested,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, in an interview.
It is also untrue that children are mandated to receive 72 vaccines, as Mr. Kennedy has claimed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends administering closer to 17 vaccines, spread out over dozens of doses over 18 years.
“Like most conspiracy theories, it’s incredibly pernicious because there is a grain of truth,” Ms. Kelley-Romano said. “But it’s wrapped up in speculation, conjecture and hyperbole.”
‘Reluctant Leader’
Mr. Kennedy has risen to prominence as an anti-vaccine activist despite having no medical training. He has claimed in multiple interviews that he felt compelled to take up the fight after mothers who have said their children were injured by vaccines asked him to do so. [snipped quote]
Positioning oneself as a “reluctant leader” is common among conspiracy theorists, who tend to present their group as underdogs in an existential battle between good and evil, according to Karen Schroeder Sorensen, an associate professor at Winona State University and the author of “Fringe Rhetorics: Conspiracy Theories and the Paranormal.”
Staking a position outside mainstream institutions lets them “claim that they have not been indoctrinated, that they are able to speak openly and truthfully about the topic,” Ms. Schroeder Sorensen said. “It’s the inverse of what would establish a voice of authority in traditional circles.”
The Mysterious ‘They’
Many of Mr. Kennedy’s views display patterns universally found in conspiracy theories. Central to many claims is a mysterious figure in the center — often described as “they” — who orchestrated a cover-up to hide their true intentions.
In podcast appearances, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made arguments about the dangers of vaccines and 5G cellular technology, blaming a mysterious figure in the middle. [snipped quote]
‘Webbing’
Conspiracy theorists often build their narratives by connecting multiple plots into a larger master plan, a technique Ms. Kelley-Romano has called “webbing.”
In multiple media appearances, Mr. Kennedy has falsely claimed that Bill Gates, the billionaire tech mogul, was the mastermind of several projects divined by conspiracy theorists, including a global farming takeover, deadly vaccine production, weaponized medicine and spy technology powered by 5G cell towers. Mr. Gates was mentioned in nearly 15 percent of the podcasts reviewed by the Brookings Institution. [snipped quotes]
Technology surrounding 5G, the next generation of cellphone infrastructure, has become a target of conspiracy theorists who falsely believe that radiation emitted by 5G towers is dangerous or that governments are pursuing the technology for sinister motives.
Beware the smooth-talking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who sounds (superficially) more intelligent than Trump, but who is, nevertheless, a conman promoting conspiracy theories.
birgerjohanssonsays
The catastrophic flooding of the town Derna in eastern Libya has killed at least 6000 and 10,000 are still missing.
KGsays
Lynna, OM@368,
Good that all Americans will be able to get updated Covid vaccines. That really should be the case for everyone worldwide: 3 1/2 years into the pandemic, it would surely have been possible to build and staff the facilities needed for this if there had been a will to do so. The UK government is limiting the latest round of boosters (and I think they are not even the most recent update) to a few groups: over-65s, front-line health workers, and people under 65 but extremely vulnerable. So I’ll get one (I’m 69), but Ms. KG, who is 64 and has asthma (but not severely enough to qualify under the “extremely vulnerable” heading), won’t. And they are getting effectively no pushback from any opposition party on this.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
I want to get the annual flu shot with the new RSV vaccine and the latest Covid booster in one pincushion sitting. If Medicare won’t pay, I’ll pay for it. Better safe than sick.
tomhsays
Re: #373
Medicare will pay for RSV vaccine for over 60, since that’s what’s recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Medicare also covers the updated COVID-19 vaccine.
KG, sorry to hear that such essential health care is limited in the UK. That is not good.
Nerd @373, right. Same here, except that if they decided to charge me for the vaccines, I would not be able to pay for them. Luckily, Medicare will cover the costs. Local clinics here still usually manage to slip in a “facility fee” or “clinic fee” that I will end up paying for in part or in whole. We’ll see.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called his country’s relations with Russia his top priority and pledged full support to President Vladimir Putin and his government amid the war in Ukraine, as the leaders met Wednesday for the first time in four years at a space facility in Russia’s far east.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding an investigation into SpaceX after Elon Musk acknowledged he had blocked Ukraine from extending the private Starlink satellite network for an attack on Russian warships near the Crimean coast.
Followup to comments 244, 247, 262, 274, 277, 279, 282 and 283.
Once considered stable, The Brunt Ice Shelf is accelerating rapidly into the Weddell Sea, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which monitors Brunt at its Halley Research station. Halley Station recorded the retreat after two massive icebergs calved.
The surge of glacial ice occurred shortly after Iceberg A81 when it snapped off the 500-foot thick ice shelf. The floating shelf has moved from half a mile in January to almost one mile today. The abstract notes, “Initially, the rate of acceleration increased by a factor of ten, with a second, smaller calving at the end of June 2023 leading to further tripling of acceleration. The acceleration is caused by reduced buttressing at the McDonald Ice Rumples due to losing contact with the sea floor. It has led to high strain rates to the south, with potential consequences for the stability of the remaining ice shelf.” The shelf has given researchers no reason to believe that the remaining shelf will disintegrate anytime soon. They believe the glacier will be grounded again at some point. Where that would be was not identified; it could be another ridge at the McDonald Ice Rumples. The BAS monitors the glacier daily.
[…] CNN on the Weddell Sea deep ocean water:
Deep ocean water in the Antarctic is heating up and shrinking, with potentially far-reaching consequences for climate change and deep ocean ecosystems, according to a report.
“Antarctic bottom water” is the coldest, saltiest water on the planet. These waters play a crucial role in the ocean’s ability to act as a buffer against climate change by absorbing excess heat and human-caused carbon pollution. They also circulate nutrients across the ocean.
But in the Weddell Sea, located east of the Antarctic Peninsula, this vital water mass is in decline, due to long-term changes in winds and sea ice, according to the study published Monday by the British Antarctic Survey. […]
They found that the volume of the cold bottom waters has shrunk by more than 20% over the past three decades. They also found that ocean waters deeper than 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) have warmed four times faster than the rest of the global ocean.
“We used to think that changes in the deep ocean could only occur over centuries. But these key observations from the Weddell Sea show that changes in the dark abyss can take place over just a few decades,” Alessandro Silvano from the University of Southampton in the UK, a co-author of the study, said in a statement.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) didn’t respond to warnings from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) about the Jan. 6 insurrection in the days before the riot, according to a new biography on the Utah Republican.
In an excerpt of the biography by McKay Coppins published in The Atlantic on Wednesday, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) reportedly texted Romney, requesting a call about something “important” on Jan. 2, 2021.
King warned him of threats of violence — including some specifically against Romney — during the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College votes, citing a conversation with a high-ranking Pentagon official.
“Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back,” the excerpt reads, paraphrasing King’s conversation with Romney.
“There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty,” it continues. “Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe.”
Romney passed the message on to McConnell, typing him a text message.
“In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th,” Romney wrote, according to the book.
“There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require,” he said.
But Romney never received a response, per the book. The attack on the Capitol building occurred just four days later.
In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots, McConnell blamed then-President Trump for the violence. In a speech nearly a year later, despite voting to acquit Trump on impeachment charges related to the riot, McConnell again placed the responsibility on the former president.
“There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day,” McConnell said. “A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags and screaming their loyalty to him.”
However, McConnell has avoided saying whether Trump should be held criminally liable for the riots.
Romney was one of seven Republican senators who did vote to convict Trump on impeachment charges related to the Jan. 6 riot.
Romney announced Wednesday that he will not run for reelection in 2024. […]
Bad news for the world and bad news for Ukraine: Vladimir Putin is tickling Elon Musk’s nipples and calling him a good dog again. So Ukraine might want to save its work and fire up its mobile hotspots. Wouldn’t want that needy loser to turn off Ukraine’s internet again.
These were more of Putin’s words from the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, where he already scolded the United States for failing to meet the high standards for democracy and freedom set by Russia, by holding Donald Trump accountable for being a lifelong criminal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin praised SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk Tuesday as an “outstanding person” and “talented businessman” in remarks at the Eastern Economic Forum, according to Russia 24. “As for Elon Musk’s private business… He is definitely an outstanding person, it must be recognized,” Putin said. “I think this is recognized all over the world. An active and talented businessman.”
Oh God.
Now Elon is going to think he has a friend who’s a really cool guy who loves him for who he is. That is the worst message you can send to a guy like Elon. And that’s exactly why Putin is sending it. (It’s the same reason he flatters lonely, self-esteem-deficient loser Trump so much.)
This flattery from Putin is coming directly after the world learned that Elon prevented the use of Starlink in Crimea in September 2022 — either ahead of time, or in the thick of the action, there are conflicting stories — to prevent Ukraine from mounting a potentially crippling attack on the Russian navy. Elon let Putin confuse his dumb ass and convince him that letting Ukraine do that would escalate the war. Elon let Putin scare him and make him think if Ukraine mounted that attack, Putin might do nuclear bombs. Elon didn’t want to be “complicit” in letting Ukraine defend itself from the genocidal maniacs in its living room. […]
For more on how Elon let Putin scare him, read Anne Applebaum. For an explanation of why, in stupidly believing Vladimir Putin, Elon’s idiot move “likely extended the war” and also itself “made a nuclear war more likely,” read Timothy Snyder. Oh yes. That’s how out-of-his-league stupid Elon Musk is here. Both articles are good sources for explaining the very real and devastating consequences for Ukraine when people let Putin manipulate and frighten them.
Here’s a bit of the Applebaum, explaining just how abjectly stupid it was for Elon to let Putin whisper in his ear, and what a moron he was for mouthing off that allowing the Ukrainian attack on Russia’s navy would result in a “non-trivial possibility” of nuclear war.
We’re excerpting a lot because it’s crucial information, and because Applebaum is such an elegant writer:
These are details that you may have already heard. Many of them were first reported in May, by Oliver Carroll at The Economist. Since then, The New Yorker has also described how Ukrainian soldiers abruptly lost their access to Starlink on the battlefield during a different set of land operations. Isaacson’s version of the maritime story implies that all of the drones in the operation washed ashore that evening. But recently in Ukraine, I met some of the engineers who helped design the unmanned sea vehicles, including an engineer who was involved in the first attempt to hit Russian ships in Sebastopol. They told me that not all of the drones involved were lost. Some returned back to base, undamaged.
Here is the part you might not have heard, or not registered: The same team launched a similar attack again a few weeks later. On October 29, a fleet of guided sea drones packed with explosives did reach Sebastopol harbor, using a different communications system. They did hit their targets. They put one Russian frigate, the Admiral Makarov, out of commission. The team believes that they damaged at least one submarine and at least two other boats as well.
And then? Nuclear war did not follow. Despite Musk’s fears, in other words—fears put into his head by the Russian ambassador, or perhaps by Putin himself—World War III did not erupt as a result of this successful attack on a Crimean port. Instead, the Russian naval commanders were spooked by the attack, so much so that they stuck close to Sebastopol harbor over the following weeks.
Huh. No escalation. No nuclear war. Huh!
Applebaum adds that “Instead of inspiring World War III, the sea-drone attack helped reduce violence, protected commerce, boosted Ukrainian farmers, and maybe even ensured that some people outside Ukraine didn’t go hungry.” Moreover:
If not for Musk’s hubris, those effects might have been felt earlier. Maybe the first attack could have eliminated more of the ships whose missiles have been killing civilians in Ukrainian cities. Maybe fewer people would have died as a result. And maybe the war, which will be over when Ukraine takes back its own territory, and ends the torment of its own citizens on that territory, would be closer to its end.
Toward the end of her piece, Applebaum writes, “Death, horror, and terror have been the result every time outsiders hesitated to aid Ukraine.”
Hey, remember what Putin did when Yevgeny Prigozhin led a Wagner march to Moscow that people thought might be a coup in progress, and instead of greeting the threat head-on, Putin gave a speech and ran away to another city to hide? Timothy Snyder wrote about that at the time. Wonkette wrote back then that we “Might want to bookmark that [Snyder article] for safekeeping, next time some asslicking Republican sycophant for the Kremlin starts whining about how our support for Ukraine is going to force poor Putin to start World War III.”
Maybe the asslicking Republican sycophant for the Kremlin in question should go ahead and print all these articles out and put them on his refrigerator.
Here’s an interview with Applebaum from “Morning Joe”: [video at the link]
#374 Thanks for the info. I’m over 70 so I didn’t think it would be a problem. I’m a firm believer in vaccines. Back in the nineteen fifties when I was a pre-teen, polio was a real problem. After the Salk and Sabin vaccines came out, everybody got vaccinated and polio just seemed to disappear.
tomhsays
@ #381
Good to see you pop up again, Nerd. Stay well. I left the seventies behind on my last birthday so we both remember the vaccines of the fifties. Nobody was happier about them than all the parents at the time.
whheydtsays
Re: #374, #381, #382…
Another over 70 here who remembers the advent of numerous vaccines. Not surprising that my late wife and I saw to it that our kids were vaccinated. What pleases me is that the lessons sank in and the grandchildren are all getting their vaccinations.
Reginald Selkirksays
@352 Things Ramaswamy says he will get rid of if he gets elected
The list includes birthright citizenship, which will be awkward because
1) If elected, he will take an oath to the constitution
2) birthright citizenship is clearly spelled out in the constitution
On Wednesday the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation announced it is accepting applications for grants to improve electric vehicle charger reliability. The Joint Office has $100 million to spend in this area to fund grants to repair or replace malfunctioning or broken EV chargers. The money was set aside as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which allocated $5 billion for a national network of EV chargers by 2027…
Norway’s Princess Martha Louise will marry her American partner, self-styled shaman Durek Verrett, next summer, the couple has announced.
King Harald V congratulated the pair, saying he was happy to welcome Mr Verrett to his family.
The princess relinquished her royal duties last year to run the alternative medicine business she shares with her fiance.
Mr Verrett is known for promoting unfounded medical practices.
He has suggested cancer is a choice and sold medallions online said to ward off Covid-19, while Princess Martha Louise has claimed she is able to communicate with angels…
The Hollywood guru, who describes himself as a “6th Generation Shaman” – has claimed to have risen from the dead and to have predicted the 9/11 attacks in the United States two years before they took place…
Meanwhile Princess Martha Louise has attracted controversy in Norway for decades for her involvement in alternative treatments, including starting a school that aimed to help people “get in touch with their angels”.
She has said that she was “aware of the importance of research-based knowledge”, but that she believed alternative medicine can be “an important supplement to help from the conventional medical establishment”…
Jenna Ellis was censured by a disciplinary judge in Colorado Wednesday, in the latest effort to hold accountable attorneys who boosted former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election reversal gambits.
Ellis signed a stipulation stating that several comments she made about the 2020 election violated professional ethics rules barring reckless, knowing or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys, according to documents posted by Colorado’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. As part of the stipulation, Ellis agrees to pay $224.
Among the false statements highlighted in the stipulation were comments by Ellis on social media and in TV appearances claiming that the Trump campaign had evidence the election was “stolen.” …
$224? Wow, what a huge deterrent to similar crimes. I hope this opens her up to further damages from individuals or corporations who feel they were harmed by her statements, they can use this judgment as evidence.
Pension funds for New York City and the state of Oregon sued Fox Corp. in Delaware on Tuesday. They allege that as shareholders they were negatively impacted by Fox News’ decisions to air falsehoods, which resulted in a $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and other legal claims.
They argue that Fox’s leaders “consciously disregarded defamation risks” in an effort to stay in viewers’ good graces, including by spreading claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race that they knew to be false…
The lawsuit, filed under seal in Delaware’s Chancery Court…
On the radio the other day and quite intresting with the Voice Referendum and Dutton the Gestapotatoes motive sand lose lose situation and more.
Antarctic helicopter mission helps confirm Totten Glacier melting from below due to warm water
By Clancy Balen Posted Yesterday at 5:35am, updated Yesterday at 8:22am
Totten Glacier, the biggest glacier ice shelf in east Antarctica, is enormous, difficult to reach by conventional means, and thinning faster than any other part of the region.
Research, conducted in 2019 and published this week, has shown why and how this is occurring — and may prove fundamental to understanding the impacts of Antarctic ice-melt. “The key research from this project is trying to understand the bigger picture in this Totten area,” Pat Wongpan, a scientist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership (AAPP), said. “It’s melting slowly, but it’s melting from its base, and we’d like to find out how this warm water flows into the bottom of the ice shelf.” The Hobart-based biogeochemist and ecologist, along with a research team from the 61st Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition, used a novel method to work out why.
[…] it seems like the time to start casting a new movie about Russian submarines. Except this time the submarine’s story can probably be told in a one-minute commercial—a spectacular, flame-filled commercial.
On Tuesday evening, Ukraine launched an attack against drydocks associated with the naval port at Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea. In that attack, the Rostov-on-Don, a Kilo-class submarine, was reportedly destroyed. A surface ship, reportedly a Ropucha-class landing ship that has been identified as the Minsk, was also heavily damaged and is also likely to be destroyed.
Unlike Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities, Ukraine used its long-range precision weapons to strike vital interests of the Russian military. And this single attack cost Russia assets worth well over $300 million. [Tweet with several video segments and image at the link]
At the beginning of the week, Ukrainian special forces recaptured a pair of oil rigs in the Black Sea, in a clash that reportedly included Ukrainian troops scoring a hit on a Russian fighter jet during high-speed action on small boats. These platforms were not taken as part of Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion; they had actually been under Russian control since 2015, when Russia took them following its occupation of Crimea.
Russia has used the oil rigs to support military operations, including operating surveillance equipment and stockpiling helicopter munitions. Their capture by Ukraine makes it harder for Russia to operate in the western area of the Black Sea, and offers Ukraine a better position from which to observe and attack Russia’s fleet.
Early comments on Telegram and other social media outlets claimed that these platforms had been the source of the Ukrainian attack on the Sevastopol dry docks. However, more recent statements indicate that the attack was made using Storm Shadow missiles provided by the U.K., along with naval drones created by the Ukrainian military. Since the Storm Shadow has a reported range of 500 kilometers, the targets were well within range from many locations in southwestern Ukraine.
Russian state-owned media issued statements on Wednesday insisting that both the submarine boat and the surface ship will soon be returned to service. But to say that seems unlikely is being very conservative. Both vessels appear to be extremely heavily damaged, if not utterly destroyed. [Tweet and image at the link]
The base price on a Kilo-class submarine is somewhere between $300 million and $350 million. And the Rostov-on-Don wasn’t just a Kilo-class, but one of just 11 “Improved Kilo II” subs built since 2010. This is a new, expensive boat that is—or rather, was—regarded as one of the most effective and stealthy subs in operation.
In addition to its primary role in attacking surface ships, the Kilo-class can also carry up to four Kalibr missiles. Some of the strikes against Odesa and other Ukrainian cities may well have originated from the Rostov-on-Don.
For a nation with a navy that consists almost entirely of small boats, Ukraine is running up a remarkable record against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It may be time to issue some new postage stamps.
And it seems only appropriate that having turned the former flagship of the fleet into a submarine, Ukraine has now made sure that one of the submarines remains permanently on the surface. That’s how they keep the balance in the Force. [Heh. More dark humor.] [Tweet and illustration showing destroyed Russian vessels.]
Loss of any submarine is a pretty rare thing these days. This represents the first-ever combat kill of a Kilo-class sub. […]
With the destruction of the Rostov-on-Don and the Minsk, Russia still has two more submarines and 11 surface ships left to harass commercial traffic and threaten Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea. However, it’s not clear they’ll be conducting that harassment from Crimea from here on out. Elon Musk may still be defending his asinine choice to protect Russian warships that were regularly bringing death to Ukrainian civilians, but since Ukraine has made it clear they can reach out and touch Sevastopol without Musk’s help, Russia may decide to vacate.
Earlier attacks had raised the idea of Russia moving its remaining ships to the port in actual Russian territory at Novorossiysk. That port doesn’t have either the capacity or the facilities of Sevastopol, but it is over 500 km from Ukrainian-controlled territory, and that may be the most important feature for any Russian port at the moment.
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[…] Ukrainian FPV drone flying directly into the barrel of a Russian T-90M tank. It looks like this tank is also an honorary member of the Black Sea Fleet. [Tweet and video at the link] The location of this hit is near the town of Poima in Kherson oblast, about 7 km from positions on the west side of the Dnipro River. That’s a pretty long trip for this kind of drone, especially for such precise control, which may indicate additional Ukrainian positions along the left bank of the Dnipro.
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Because we could all do with another image … [Tweet and image showing damage at Sevastopol shipyard]
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Ukrainian adviser Anton Gerashchenko explains why hitting those landing ships is more important than it may seem. Landing ships have been serving as back-up logistics as Russia seeks ways around Ukrainian hits on bridges and rail lines. It’s a route that could be even more important as Ukraine moves toward Tokmak. [Tweet and images at the link: Why is Ukraine focused on striking Russian landing ships?
The ships are designed to save Russian logistics at the moment when the Ukrainian Defense Forces cut the railway line running through Tokmak. After that, the Russians plan to supply fuel to their army group in the occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia region (and in the southern part of Donetsk region) via occupied Mariupol, transferring fuel and heavy cargoes with the help of seacraft.
By the way, that’s why the Russians are now working on restoring the railroad branch at the Mariupol port. If Ukraine is able to cut the artery running through Tokmak (it is already used very little due to the approaching frontline), and deprive the Russian Black Sea Fleet of transportation opportunities, this, in fact, creates a kind of A2AD zone (anti-access and area denial zone) for Russian logistics. And without fuel (and a regular supply of ammunition, medical supplies, equipment, etc.) it is quite difficult to fight, mildly speaking.]
StevoRsays
On discovering aliens :
These are just two of the latest cases of a long list of examples of such initially promising phenomena. But although a few of the examples are still controversial, most have turned out to have other explanations (it wasn’t aliens).
So how can we be sure we’ve come to the right conclusion for something as subtle as the presence of a certain gas or a strange looking space rock? In our new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, we have proposed a technique for reliably evaluating such evidence.
The word “possible” is strange, with a rather unfortunate degree of flexibility. There’s a sense in which it is possible that I’ll meet King Charles III today, but at the same time it is extraordinarily unlikely. Many shouts of: “It might be aliens!” should be interpreted in this (strained) sense. By contrast, we often use the word “might” to express something that has high probability, as in “it might snow today.”
The concept of possibility incorporates these extremes, and everything in-between. Newspapers might capitalize on this flexibility with a cheeky headline that appears to indicate that something is a bit more exciting than it actually is. But the scientific world needs to express itself with rigor, transparently conveying the degree of confidence justified by the evidence.
There might – or might not – be a Black Hole or two or three in the Hyades cluster 150 ly away :
A paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster—the closest open cluster to our solar system—which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected. .. (snip).. The observed properties of the Hyades are best reproduced by simulations with two or three black holes at present, although simulations where all the black holes have been ejected (less than 150 million years ago, roughly the last quarter of the cluster’s age) can still give a good match, because the evolution of the cluster could not erase the traces of its previous black hole population.
The new results indicate that the Hyades-born black holes are still inside the cluster, or very close to the cluster. This makes them the closest black holes to the sun, much closer than the previous candidate (namely the black hole Gaia BH1, which is 480 parsecs from the sun).
Whilst much closer to and inded probly inside home(s) :
Daddy-long-leg spiders are in homes throughout the world – but there’s so much about them that is misunderstood.
For a start, they’re not all actual daddies, says Samantha Nixon, a research scientist from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr Nixon is originally from Queensland and credits the daddy-long-legs for helping her switch from an arachnophobe to a spider-loving venom scientist. She’s going to help us clear up a few myths and misnomers about the daddy-long-legs.
Canada is experiencing its worst wildfire season on record in terms of total carbon emissions and land area burned, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday.
This year’s fires have tripled the record high for carbon emissions from previous Canadian wildfire seasons and have burned the largest land area ever observed in the country, Copernicus said. They have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate, created dangerous air quality across Canada and large portions of the United States, and spread smoke plumes all the way to Europe.
The record-breaking fire season in Canada has coincided with severe wildfires in several regions around the world, including devastating blazes in Greece and Hawaii. While most wildfires are sparked by lightning or accidentally by humans, scientists say human-caused climate change is making larger fires more likely in more places.
Wildfires have raged across Canada this year from coast to coast. Last month, thousands of people in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories were urged to evacuate, including all 20,000 residents of Yellowknife and many in Kelowna, as flames threatened homes and strained firefighting services. Wildfires also disrupted oil and gas production in Canada over the summer.
Canadian fires have emitted almost 410 megatons of carbon this year, compared with a previous record of 138 megatons in 2014, accounting for more than a quarter of the year’s global wildfire emissions to date, Copernicus said. With more than 900 fires still burning, emissions “may keep increasing although the rate of increase seems to be leveling off,” Copernicus said.
Fires have burned 42.7 million acres (17.3 million hectares) this year, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center — more than double the previous record of 17.5 million acres (7.1 million hectares) in 1995. That number is likely to keep rising because wildfire season in Canada typically continues into October. […]
More at the Washington Post link, including details about fires in Greece, Hawaii, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Chile.
StevoRsays
A month out from a referendum and it might be the ugliest week Aboriginal people have been subjected to in what can feel like an interminable campaign.
The debate over the creation of a Indigenous advisory body has burst into a cacophony of noise, misinformation, confusion and abuse.
While the nation debates our right to a place in the constitution, as an Aboriginal person, it’s hard not to feel like it’s a fight over our rights. Yet another one. We don’t know how our people will feel on October 15, but surely there will be some collective sense of relief that it’s all over.
If Australia votes Yes — which polls suggest is increasingly unlikely — the Voice to Parliament would be a representative group to advise parliament and the government on matters affecting Indigenous communities.
If you drown out all the noise about its merits or otherwise, you might like to take a look at Victoria, where there is already an assembly of Aboriginal people quietly working as a Voice.
Barely 24 hours before the contract deadline, the United Auto Workers leader said Wednesday that his members were prepared for a strike against the three Detroit automakers — first at a limited number of factories, with the walkout expanding if talks remain bogged down.
The U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, also ruled out any extension of the existing four-year contracts with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis after they expire on Thursday night. “September 14 is a deadline, not a reference point,” he declared in an address to union members on Facebook Live.
He said the initial strike locations would be “limited and targeted,” and would be communicated to members on Thursday night ahead of a Friday walkout.
This tactic — a departure from the union’s usual strategy of staging an all-out strike against a single automaker chosen as a target — is intended to give the U.A.W. negotiators increased leverage in the talks, and to keep the manufacturers off balance.
[…] Striking at even a handful of plants would disrupt the automakers’ production while ensuring that a large portion of the 150,000 U.A.W. members at the three companies continued to work and receive paychecks.
The union plans to pay striking workers $500 per week and cover the cost of their health insurance premiums. The union has a strike fund of $825 million, which would cover payments to workers in a full strike against all three companies for about three months.
In its initial proposal to the companies, the union demanded a 40 percent increase in wages over four years, on the premise that pay packages of the companies’ chief executives have on average risen that much over the last four years. The union has also sought regular cost-of-living adjustments that would nudge wages higher in response to inflation.
The union is also seeking pensions for all workers, improved retiree benefits, shorter work hours and an end to a tiered wage system that starts new hires at about half the top U.A.W. wage of $32 an hour.
The companies — each negotiating separately with the union — have made counterproposals raising wages by roughly half what the union is asking, according to Mr. Fain, and have done even less to satisfy the other demands. […]
Mr. Fain also pointed out that auto industry executives had given themselves a 40% raise.
StevoRsays
t may be too late for supporters of the Yes cause at the referendum to retrieve their initially majority support among the population.
Perhaps people have made up their minds and are unlikely to go 180 degrees again. But if there is a strategy and a tactic which could win the case, it could be from an unsparing attack on the character and personality, and record in relation to indigenous affairs of the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton. That might be risky, in part for “going negative”. It would, on the other hand be focusing right on the core of the Yes case problem, and the fundamental wickedness and mischievousness with which the No campaign is lying to voters and preying on popular anxieties. Dutton cannot distance himself from the way the No argument has been made, including by a few prominent Indigenous advocates and some of the more egregious non-Indigenous leaders of the no campaign. To be fair to him, he hasn’t much tried. He simply cannot avoid the logical consequences and must take responsibility for the way that many of the No arguments are code and dog whistles for unambiguously racist positions.
Some months ago, Dutton seemed to want to make the Voice referendum a referendum on Anthony Albanese. Not on Albanese’s Indigenous affairs policies, or his ideas about the Voice, but about his general record in government. This way, perhaps, he could sop up all the dissatisfaction against Labor in office, assuming that surely the Albanese honeymoon would be over by then. The honeymoon may well be over, but it hasn’t led to an outpouring of affection for the alternative, let alone for the alternative prime minister. It could also be a campaign against “wokeness” – at which red blooded Australians could express their distaste for all the touchy-feely stuff that all right-thinking policemen hold in complete horror.
Another good article from Perals & Irritations well worth reading in full states this stark truth :
We are not living sustainably, requiring 1.7 Earths to meet our present environmental demands. If the whole world lived like Australians humanity would need four Earths to fulfill humanity’s demand. To Mr Albanese, Mr Dutton and all Australian politicians ‘How do you justify demanding an even larger share of Earth’s dwindling resources?’ ‘Do you really think Australians have some God-given right to an unfair and unsustainable share?’ ‘Does such a course lead to a safer, sustainable and more equitable world?
It is easy to be pessimistic about prospects for our children, in the face of the climatic events that are now confronting humans everywhere. But there is also some very good news around the idea of developing a Global “Earth System Treaty” (EST) that could radically alter the trajectory we humans are currently on.
Developing such a treaty will not be straightforward, but it could change our future prospects and set in train an exciting new set of possibilities for the human world. Australia is well placed to lead the way on an EST, preliminary ideas for which have been developed by Canberra science communicator, Julian Cribb, who has also been at the forefront of the argument that without radical change, our human days are seriously numbered.
An EST would be a global accord, negotiated, signed, and ratified by all the countries on Earth under the UN umbrella. Once declared, it could also be available for voluntary signature by individual citizens, corporations, non-government bodies and other groups and organisations and agencies worldwide, so that all would have a chance to affirm their commitment to a whole planet and the safer future it could provide for humans and other life.
The purpose of the Treaty would be to provide an international legal framework for protecting and restoring the Earth System. It would set the standards, objectives and boundaries that all can follow and abide by.
Russia covered up a fighter jet pilot’s attempt to shoot down a NATO aircraft near Ukraine last year, blaming it on a malfunction, the BBC reported on Thursday.
The pilot of a Russian SU-27 fighter jet fired two missiles at a British RAF RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft on September 29 last year.
At the time, Russia claimed it was a “technical malfunction” — an explanation accepted by British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.
But three senior Western defense sources with knowledge of the incident told the BBC that new intercepted communications reveal that the pilot believed that he had permission to fire at the RAF, but that he missed.
One missile did not hit the target, while another either malfunctioned or was aborted the moment after it left the wing of the aircraft, the sources said.
The RAF plane, which had a crew of up to 30 people, was flying a surveillance mission over the Black Sea in international airspace when it came into contact with two Russian SU-27 fighter jets…
Ukraine says it has destroyed a sophisticated Russian air defence system in occupied Crimea.
Kyiv’s security service (SBU) and navy carried out the attack on a Russian facility near Yevpatoriya using cruise missiles and drones, a Ukrainian intelligence source told the BBC.
Video footage on social media showed a fire and smoke near the city, in the west of the Russian-occupied peninsula…
Earlier on Thursday, a number of explosions were reported in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally occupied in 2014.
According to the BBC’s intelligence source, the Ukrainian operation used drones to take out radar equipment, then cruise missiles to hit air defence missile launchers.
“After disabling the radar stations, the navy units hit the S300 and S400 ‘Triumph’ systems, worth $1.2bn, by two Neptune cruise missiles,” the source said…
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Bulgaria decided on Thursday not to extend a ban on Ukrainian grain imports in five eastern EU nations that is set to expire this week, AFP reports.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has closed off Black Sea shipping routes used before the war, resulting in the EU becoming a major transit route and export destination for Ukrainian grain.
But in June, the EU agreed to restrict Ukrainian grain imports to five member states, seeking to protect their farmers who blamed the imports for a slump in prices on local markets.
The five member states are Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The Polish government decided on Tuesday to extend the ban, which expires on Friday.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Thursday he was grateful to Bulgaria for not extending restrictions on Ukrainian grain exports from Friday.
“I thank [prime minister] Nikolai Denkov and his team, as well as Bulgarian parliamentarians who supported this move. Bulgaria sets an example of true solidarity,” Zelenskiy said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that any decision by European states to extend import restrictions on Ukrainian food from 15 September would be illegal and harm common economic interests, Reuters reports.
Restrictions imposed by the European Union in May allowed Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia to ban domestic sales of Ukrainian wheat, maize, rapeseed and sunflower seeds, while permitting transit of such cargoes for export elsewhere.
The restrictions are due to expire on Friday. Several states, including Hungary, have indicated they will continue with the ban.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said the international criminal court (ICC) has opened a field office in Kyiv, as part of efforts to hold Russian forces accountable for potential war crimes, AFP reports.
Kyiv has called for a special tribunal to be created to hold Moscow responsible for violations committed during its invasion, launched last February.
“Today marks a pivotal stride in our journey towards restoring justice,” Prosecutor Gen Andriy Kostin wrote on social media.
“The field office of the international criminal court has opened in Ukraine, the largest ICC office outside The Hague. Now our cooperation will be even more effective and efficient.”
The move comes after an international office to probe Russia for the war crime of aggression opened in The Hague in March in what Kyiv called a “historic” first step towards a tribunal for Moscow’s leadership.
“Unlike Russia’s criminal regime, Ukraine has nothing to hide,” Kostin said.
“Together with the entire civilised [eyeroll] world, we are united by one goal – to ensure the aggressor is held accountable for all the crimes perpetrated,” he added.
Britain’s most senior military officer, Sir Tony Radakin, said that Ukraine “continues to hold the initiative, it is pushing Russia back” in a short assessment of the current state of the fighting given at the DSEI arms fair in London.
Rejecting claims that Ukraine’s counteroffensive was struggling, he said “in the north they are holding and fixing Russian forces there and in the south they are making progress between 10 and 20km depending on how you judge it”.
Radakin, who is closely involved with advising Ukraine’s most senior commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said that Ukraine’s slow counteroffensive progress could not be measured by a predictable timetable.
“The idea that war is neat and tidy, and you can plan and predict it to the nth degree is nonsense”.
Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade, fighting around Bakhmut, denied an earlier report by Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar that the village of Andriivka, Donetsk Oblast, had been liberated.
“The statement about the liberation of Andriivka is false and premature. Currently, serious and heavy fighting continues in Klishchiivka and Andriivka,” the brigade reported.
“Such statements are harmful, threaten the lives of personnel, and harm the performance of combat missions.”
At around 2 p.m. local time on Sept. 14, Maliar wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had liberated Andriivka, around 10 kilometers south of Bakhmut. However, after the Third Assault Brigade refuted the claim, the part of the text about the liberation was deleted from the post.
Instead, Maliar said that the situation in Andriivka was “very complex and changeable.”
Even later, Maliar claimed there had been “miscommunication between several sources reporting directly from the scene.”
“I do not release such information without coordination and agreement with the military,” she said. The official added that Ukrainian forces had achieved some success in Andriivka, but fighting over the settlement was still ongoing.
On the same day, Presidential Office head Andriy Yermak announced “good news from the front lines” but didn’t provide any further details….
Today’s story features another EV designed and built by students, this time from the Technical University of Munich, and they took a lot longer to set the record.
The car, called muc22, looks more conventional than the Swiss speedster, if only a little. The diminutive coupe in this case was built for efficiency, and in a six-day test at Munich airport, it set a new distance record on a single charge (for a non-solar EV): 1,599 miles (2,574 km), with less battery capacity than many plug-in hybrids—just 15.5 kWh…
For one thing, the streamlined EV has a top speed of just 26 mph (42 km/h) and weighs just 374 lbs (170 kg) without a driver….
Planned Parenthood announced Thursday that it will resume offering abortions in Wisconsin next week after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that seemingly banned the procedure actually didn’t apply to abortions…
Kaul argues that the ban is too old to enforce and that a 1985 law that permits abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb supersedes the ban. Three doctors later joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs, saying they fear being prosecuted for performing abortions.
Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled in June that Wisconsin’s 173-year-old abortion ban outlaws killing fetuses but doesn’t apply to consensual medical abortions. Her ruling, a victory for those fighting the ban, said that the legal language in the 1849 law doesn’t use the term “abortion” so it only prohibits attacking a woman in an attempt to kill her unborn child…
As summarized by Steve Benen from a Washington Post article:
As Sen. Mitt Romney prepares to exit the stage, the Utah Republican admitted that he’s spoken “many times” to Sen. Joe Manchin about the No Labels project. Romney apparently told the West Virginian that if Manchin ran for president on a third-party ticket, “it would only elect Trump.”
The CDC and FDA approved new Covid boosters. Florida’s Joseph Ladapo is rejecting their findings. It’s part of a potentially dangerous pattern.
Early last year, with Covid cases still frustratingly high, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encouraged everyone over the age of 5 to get vaccinated. A New York Times report noted at the time that “vaccinating children can also protect family members who are not eligible for vaccination — including children younger than 5 — or who are at increased risk for serious illness if infected. More children were hospitalized during the Omicron surge than at any other point in the pandemic.”
The CDC’s recommendations were accepted by 49 states. The exception was Florida.
There was an obvious explanation for this: Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo holds a series of fringe views, and as part of official duties, he’s urged the public not to trust scientists, physicians, and other public health officials.
A year and a half later, too little has changed. NBC News reported:
In a deviation from federal recommendations, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration is advising residents under age 65 not to get the new Covid boosters from Pfizer and Moderna. “What I have directed our department to do is to provide guidance that really recommends and advises against the use of these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines for anyone under 65,” the state surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, said at an online panel hosted by DeSantis on Wednesday.
In case this isn’t obvious, the FDA recommended these boosters, and CDC approval soon followed. Ladapo, true to form, rejected their findings, raising baseless concerns “about safety and about effectiveness.”
In the not-too-distant past, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was a proponent of Covid shots — the vaccines “are saving lives,” the Republican said two years ago — but criticized what he derided as vaccine “mandates” and “passports.” Those days are clearly over: DeSantis tapped Ladapo to oversee the Sunshine State’s public health system and shifted from balking at requirements to balking at vaccines themselves.
As NBC News’ report added, the White House was quick to issue a statement from the CDC’s director, Dr. Mandy Cohen.
“As we head into the fall and winter seasons, it is important that Americans get the updated COVID-19 vaccine. They are proven safe; they are effective, and they have been thoroughly and independently reviewed by the FDA and CDC,” Cohen said. “Since this Administration’s launch of the largest adult vaccination program in our nation’s history, COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives and kept countless people out of the hospital. Public health experts are in broad agreement about these facts, and efforts to undercut vaccine uptake are unfounded and dangerous.”
Among my principal concerns is that regular, everyday folks in Florida may not realize why it would be in their interests to ignore Ladapo’s deeply strange perspective.
[…] let’s not forget that Ladapo’s former supervisor at UCLA discouraged Florida officials from hiring the controversial doctor, explaining that he relies on his opinions more than scientific evidence. The UCLA supervisor added that Ladapo’s weird theories “created a stressful environment for his research and clinical colleagues and subordinates,” some of whom believed the doctor “violated the duty in the Hippocratic Oath to behave honestly and ethically.”
It was not the first time Ladapo’s work at UCLA generated scrutiny. It was during his tenure in California when the physician also claimed in a USA Today op-ed that his perspective on Covid treatments had been shaped by his experience “taking care of patients with COVID-19 at UCLA’s flagship hospital.” Two weeks later, Ladapo added in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had his experience “caring for patients with suspected or diagnosed Covid-19 infections at UCLA.”
Thanks to reporting from The Rachel Maddow Show, those claims have since been called into question. As my colleague Kay Guerrero explained in a report in November, “Several former colleagues of Dr. Joseph Ladapo … say he misled the public about his experience treating Covid-19 patients.”
One UCLA source also said, in reference to Ladapo, “A lot of people here at UCLA are glad that he is gone because we were embarrassed by his opinions and behavior. At the same time, we don’t wish this on the people of Florida. They don’t deserve to have someone like him making their health decisions.”
[…] A few months prior, Ladapo questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines, denounced vaccine requirements, referenced unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to argue against the vaccines, and encouraged Floridians to “stick with their intuition,” as opposed to following the guidance of public health officials who actually know what they’re talking about.
As regular readers may recall, it was around the same time when Ladapo started pushing “innovative” Covid treatments with little track record of success, to the frustration of state physicians and medical experts.
Before taking office, the doctor also spent much of the pandemic questioning the value of vaccines and the efficacy of masks, while simultaneously touting ineffective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine.
It led the editorial board of The Orlando Sentinel to describe Ladapo as a “COVID crank” who’s been “associated with a right-wing group of physicians whose members include a physician who believes infertility and miscarriages are the result of having sex with demons and witches during dreams.”
DeSantis and Republican state senators wanted him to be state surgeon general anyway.
Many Florida families will see Ladapo’s title and assume the state’s official surgeon general must know what he’s talking about, or he wouldn’t be the state’s official surgeon general.
Traditionally, that might’ve been a safe assumption. In Florida in 2023, skepticism of Ladapo’s advice is probably the safer course.
Strike that “probably.” Skepticism of Ladapo is definitely the safer course.
House Republicans are engaging in a completely partisan, evidence-free impeachment inquiry—but Peter Baker of The New York Times wants to talk about how the White House is treating this as a political issue. And just to get this out of the way right off the bat, the paragraph count before Baker acknowledges that Republicans have no evidence against Biden is seven.
In paragraph eight, he gets around to, “The Republican investigation so far has not produced concrete evidence of a crime by the president, as even some Republicans have conceded.” Even there, the implication is that the Republican investigation has produced some evidence, and they just need to make it concrete. In reality, the Republican investigation has produced no evidence that the president has engaged in any misconduct, let alone a crime.
Before the reader gets to that halfhearted admission, though, they’ve had to plow through a great deal of fretting about how the White House is treating this as political:
Forget the weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process. Mr. Biden’s defense team has chosen to take on the Republican threat by convincing Americans that it is nothing more than base partisanship driven by a radical opposition.
How exactly would Baker propose the White House make weighty legal arguments when there is no legal case against Biden? When after months of fruitless investigations into Biden, Republicans have simply decided to go ahead with claiming to have found the things they looked for and didn’t find? What would he have the White House or any other Democrats do in response?
[…] If Democrats were to cede the political fight and allow Republicans to beat the crap out of Biden while the Democratic Party was busy making “weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process,” it might satisfy Baker for a minute, but it would be a disastrous course of action. As it is, through sheer repetition and relying on lousy media coverage that doesn’t call a lie a lie, Republicans have convinced a substantial fraction of the public that there must be a there there when it comes to Biden and corruption. Imagine if Democrats voluntarily disarmed.
[…] As tired and predictable as it is, though, it’s still harmful to have the Times pretending there’s equivalence between a fraudulent impeachment inquiry and attempts to push back on such an inquiry by pointing out that it is fraudulent.
If it feels more like a political campaign than a serious legal proceeding, that is because at this point it is, at least as the White House sees it and would like others to. In the first 24 hours of their inquiry, the House Republicans made no new requests for documents, issued no new subpoenas, demanded no new testimony and laid out no potential articles of impeachment. Instead, they went to the cameras to call Mr. Biden a liar and a crook, so Mr. Biden’s defenders went to the cameras to return fire.
Note the structure here: The White House wants people to see it as political. There’s strong evidence that it is, yet it is always the White House’s pushback efforts that lead Baker’s coverage, as if they came first. Reality is the reverse.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an irate letter to the White House, Kevin McCarthy and other congressional Republicans have demanded that President Biden reveal why they are impeaching him.
The letter claims that, after Republicans announced their impeachment inquiry, “the White House has stubbornly refused to provide us with any reasons for our doing so.”
The Republicans go on to demand that Biden reveal the rationale for his ouster “immediately, or face the consequences.”
“The American people are waiting, Mr. President, for you to explain to us why we are impeaching you,” the letter concludes. “Your silence will not be forgiven.”
Liz Cheney, former Representative of Wyoming and vice share of the Jan. 6 select committee, speaks out:
[…] Instead of littering the Republican primary as another doomed Trump detractor, Cheney is dropping incisive anti-Trump messages into the political ether.
Cheney’s latest addition to the political landscape came Tuesday, when she sought to separate old-guard Republican defense hawks from newfangled MAGA isolationists.
“Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” Cheney tweeted over an AP News article about Russian President Vladimir Putin blasting the criminal indictments of Trump as “rotten” politically motivated prosecutions.
“Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history,” continued Cheney. “Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”
[…] Cheney’s rallying cry against “Putin Republicans” seeks to make common cause among a politically divergent group of establishment Republicans and Democrats who are united in their support for Ukraine, rejection of Trump, and disdain for Putin.
Rhetorically speaking, “Putin Republicans” and “Putin wing” of the Republican Party are also sticky phrases that could potentially catch on, helping to create a definitive us (democracy stalwarts) versus them (Trump/Putin backers) dynamic.
MAGA Republicans hate Cheney with a white-hot rage and reveled along with Trump in throwing her out on her ear last year. But her name still holds political sway with a very narrow slice of the Republican Party—perhaps some 5% or so—and that’s still a meaningful chunk of voters in a general election, even if it’s a pittance in the primary.
Democrats would be smart to take note of Cheney’s messaging and even take it up, reinforcing it. It skillfully creates a permission structure for old-guard Republicans to help reelect Joe Biden next year, even if they don’t particularly like him.
That’s a device Biden loves, as he has routinely shied away from painting Republican voters with such a broad brush that he alienates all of them.
Some of those conventional Republican voters could very well be the difference between a one-term presidency and Biden’s successful reelection next year.
Prosecutors in Davis County, Utah, declined to press charges in the traffic stop death of Chase Allan, who espoused sovereign citizen rhetoric before being shot by police earlier this year.
Allan was pulled over in a parking lot in Farmington, Utah, on March 1 for having a fake license plate fixed to his unregistered vehicle. The fake plate on Allan’s vehicle had all the hallmarks of a sovereign citizen…
The officer who pulled Allan over called for backup, and four more officers arrived. Allan refused to get out of his car when police told him to, stating he is “not required to,” and adding, “If you try and force me, then we’re going to have an issue.”
An officer tells him if he doesn’t get out of the vehicle on his own, they will “break the window and pull you out.”
As the officers pulled open a door to Allan’s car, one began shouting that he had a gun. The officers stepped back and began firing. Allan was struck multiple times. When officers pulled him out of the car and began attempting life-saving procedures, an empty holster could be seen on Allan’s right hip, and a handgun could be seen on the driver’s-side floorboard, according to the police body camera footage...
The prospect of modern medical technology and science wielded by religious fanatics to enforce their dogma sounds like something out of dystopian fiction. However, thanks to some Polish researchers, elected Republicans now have a new tool to identify women and others who become pregnant but try to evade or circumvent draconian forced-birth laws […]
It’s a simple blood test to detect the presence of mifepristone, the drug typically used to induce medical abortion, colloquially known as the “abortion pill.” The test can be administered by any competent lab technician or medical practitioner who may suspect that their patient has taken the drug to terminate (or try to terminate) an unwanted pregnancy. Likewise, a tissue test has been developed to detect the presence of misoprostol, the drug used in tandem with mifepristone in such circumstances. Both tests were developed by researchers in Poland, which has effectively outlawed abortion and has imposed surveillance and threats of prosecution towards women and others suspected of violating the prohibition.
As reported by Patrick Adams […], it’s only a matter of time — weeks, perhaps — that these tools will be utilized by law enforcement in Republican-dominated states to enforce their forced-birth agenda against their own citizens and others.
As Adams observes:
Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer, Poland’s draconian crackdown, which was spearheaded by the governing right-wing Law and Justice party, should have been alarming to American supporters of abortion rights. It was always possible that some aspects of what has happened there could happen here.
Now there are reports that laboratory tests to detect abortion drugs have not only been created in Poland but are, in rare cases, also being used there to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies. These tests are not yet known to be in use anywhere else in the world. But Americans would be wise to plan for the possibility that the technology could one day be adopted on this side of the Atlantic and used by law enforcement to suss out whether women have taken abortion pills — which are now banned or restricted in more than two dozen states.
[…] Republican legislatures and attorneys-general can confirm their use and take whatever action— criminal or otherwise — they deem appropriate against their users and those who may supply or facilitate the use of such drugs.
[…] The utility of these tests to forced-birth proponents in their continuing assault on reproductive freedoms in this country is obvious. […] Adams quotes Glen P. Jackson, a forensics professor at the University of West Virginia, who confirms that most testing laboratories that operate as adjuncts to emergency rooms, coroner’s and medical examiners’ officers now have access to the technology to easily develop such tests using the methodology outlined in this Polish, state-sponsored research. Of course, these laboratories also work in tandem with law enforcement.
As Adams explains:
[…] this year alone, more than half a dozen states have introduced legislation that would classify abortion as homicide […] One such existing effort: a serious legal challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s nearly 25-year-old approval of mifepristone that threatens access to the drug across the country. (In mid-August, a federal appeals court panel upheld mifepristone’s approval but with significant restrictions on patients’ access to the drug. The ruling cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court weighs in.)
Adams also quotes Georgetown law professor Mary Goodwin, who notes that broad discretionary power afforded to medical practitioners under some state abortion laws allows them to report their clinical observations to the police. […]
It is theoretically possible that at least some of those American citizens who voted Republican over the years didn’t realize they were voting for this kind of malignant police-state intrusion into their own and their children’s’ reproductive lives. But in Republican-dominated states, thanks to the intersection of modern medical technology, law enforcement and the unrelenting demands of the religious right, that’s exactly what they’re going to get.
Of the nearly 5,000 women and girls murdered in the United States in 2021, 34 percent were killed by an intimate partner. Sixteen percent were killed by a non-intimate family member. But gun rights advocates think that can we can do better — and by better, I mean, giving more domestic abusers the ability and opportunity to gun down their lovers and family members.
In what has to be one of the least surprising developments of all time, the man at the center of the “gun rights for domestic abusers” case soon to be before the Supreme Court shot at a woman in a public parking lot, according to police records obtained by the Huffington Post.
In 2019, Zackey Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend and promised to shoot her if she ever told anyone. Not only did she not listen to him about that, she got a restraining order that barred Rahimi from owning guns. This did not deter Rahimi from having any gun, or from opening fire in public at least six times after that, which is why he is currently in jail.
One of those times has been referred to in court documents as merely “threatening” a woman with a gun, despite the fact that it led to him being charged with “assault with a deadly weapon.”
Via Huffington Post:
On Nov. 12, 2020, a 25-year-old woman told police that she agreed to meet Rahimi in a parking lot after receiving a Snapchat message from him saying that he “had something for her.”
When she arrived, she told police she saw him kneeling by the driver’s side of a vehicle, wearing all black clothes, including a black ski mask covering his face. Rahimi had his hands around his waistband, she said, where he appeared to hold a pistol with a magazine larger than the gun itself.
As the woman got back into her car and drove off, she heard five or six gunshots, some of which appeared to strike her car. “Vehicle was shot multiple times with the driver inside,” the police report reads.
Again, Rahimi went on to open fire in public five more times after that, and will soon argue in front of the Supreme Court that no one should ever be allowed to take his guns away.
Rahimi’s case was initially rejected by the Fifth Circuit, but they ended up overturning his conviction based on the Supreme Court’s new ridiculous Second Amendment test. The rule now, more or less, is that you can’t have any restrictions on guns if those restrictions wouldn’t have existed at some point between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War. […]
The “Founding Fathers,” as you might have guessed, were not especially concerned about domestic violence — which was not widely discussed or treated seriously until the 1970s. Therefore, Rahimi’s lawyers argue, there should be no restrictions on his ability to own a gun no matter how many girlfriends he assaults and then threatens with a gun and then shoots at.
Indeed, the lawyers argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that the Founders were aware of the existence of domestic violence — because some states allowed people to divorce because of it, and because “In colonial New England, domestic violence offenders might be brought before a magistrate, bound over, and sentenced to a variety of punishments that often included public shaming. Whipping, a fine, the stocks, or some combination of these penalties appear to have been the most common sentences for wife beaters.” The Founders, they argue, could have made it illegal for those convicted of domestic violence to own a gun, but they didn’t. Therefore, they must have wanted “wife beaters” to own guns.
“The Founders could have adopted a complete ban on firearms to combat intimate-partner violence,” the brief read. “They didn’t.”
Again, they also did not allow women to vote.
One of the judges in the Fifth Circuit court decision literally argued that the “better” way of protecting domestic violence victims is just to incarcerate perpetrators — not, godforbid, take away their guns.
“Those who commit violence, including domestic violence,” wrote Trump appointee Judge James C. Ho, “shouldn’t just be disarmed — they should be detained, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated. And that’s exactly why we have a criminal justice system — to punish criminals and disable them from engaging in further crimes.”
[…] One “positive” thing this case is doing, is tearing the mask off the “gun rights” movement. Their great love of guns has nothing to do with personal safety and it never did. If “personal safety” were remotely an issue, domestic abusers having guns would not even be an option on the table. It is, and always has been, about the power to make and keep people afraid.
In a number of instances, particularly when one is suspected or convicted of a crime, a number of your constitutional rights can be curtailed. Despite your First Amendment rights, attempting to talk over a judge or calling them names will quickly land you in a cell for contempt. And despite your Second Amendment rights, I don’t recall anyone being allowed in the SCOTUS chambers while armed. It’s almost like none of our rights are absolute and at times are subordinate to things like public safety and the proper functioning of society.
The sheer number of logical, legal, and historical issues with the Court’s recent interpretations of the Second Amendment are kind of mind-boggling.
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Meanwhile . . .. HUNTER BIDEN just got indicted for lying on an application to buy a gun.
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So what if he had shot at a random person? Are the founding fathers ok with that too?
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Texas Tribune: “In the span of a month during the winter of 2020, Zackey Rahimi was involved in five shootings around Arlington, according to court documents. He shot at someone’s house after selling them prescription narcotics. After getting into a car accident, he shot at a car, returned in another vehicle and shot at the car again. Three days before Christmas, he shot at a constable’s car. And after New Year’s, he fired shots into the air outside a Whataburger after his friend’s credit card was declined.”
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[Not] like that Black woman who ended up in prison for firing a warning shot at her abuser.
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If SCOTUS is so obsessed with the period between the founding and the civil war, then they should live the entirety of their lives in accordance with that obsession. No more medicine for you old fucks – just chew some cocaine gum and rub a little dirt in that heart failure. Electricity? The hell you say – lanterns for all!
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The founders knew about abortion and didn’t ban it. Therefore abortion should be legal.
Poor Kevin McCarthy! Who […] could possibly have predicted that he would find himself in so many uncomfortable situations after he promised the extreme right wing of his party anything it wanted in exchange for letting him play House Speaker? Just this week, after he finally announced an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s many very bad but indefinable crimes, House Republicans repaid him by threatening to remove him as speaker because they still doubt his commitment to Sparkle Fascism.
On top of that, NPR reports that McCarthy “calculated” his impeachment inquiry concession “could help fund the government and avoid a shutdown at the end of the month.” But nah, the House Chaos Caucus wasted no time Tuesday making clear that they still want to shut down the government if they don’t get massive budget cuts that reverse almost everything Joe Biden and Democrats passed in the last couple years.
As we noted yesterday, Florida Man Matt Gaetz insisted that if McCarthy tries to keep the government funded temporarily with a continuing resolution, Gaetz and allied crazies would consider that an “automatic motion to vacate.” […]
“Those are two separate conversations and two separate actions by Congress,” said Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member. “There is no leverage with an impeachment process. And if anyone tries to use that to leverage votes for a CR, there will be hell to pay.”
NPR reports that McCarthy on Wednesday tried to rally the people who control him by presenting a plan to “continue passing individual spending bills to present a united GOP front to respond to the bipartisan bills coming out of the Senate.” Unfortunately, for that plan to work, the House would need to pass 12 appropriations bills for various parts of the government, and so far it’s passed only one. With just 11 working days scheduled for the House this month, there’s no way in hell the House will get the other 11 bills passed by the end of September, when the current fiscal year ends and the government no longer has authority to operate. […]
As of Wednesday afternoon, progress on passing anything had pretty much fallen apart already. McCarthy had to give up on bringing the annual Defense Department funding bill to the floor because far-right Republicans wouldn’t even agree to vote for the procedural motion to consider it. That had nothing to do with what’s in the bill, which is already loaded up with all sorts of terrible culture wars measures that’ll never pass in the Senate. Instead, the Free Dumb Caucus refused to move it forward without guarantees from McCarthy that they’d get deep cuts in non-defense spending.
Never missing an opportunity to take hostages, the loony wing has already won promises from McCarthy to hold votes on slashing aid to Ukraine, and to reduce various Pentagon officials’ salaries to $1 to punish them for wokeness, not that they’ll have the votes to pass. [OMFG]
Looking at the whole sorry mess, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told reporters yesterday to be ready for further cray-cray:
“Fasten your seatbelts, because it’s going to be a shitshow. […] If you can’t pass defense, you can’t pass any of them.” [“shitshow” un-asterisked from NPR’s reporting — Dok]
And as always seems to happen with government-shutdown shitshows (say that five times fast), at least one delusional Freedom cocker, Bob Good (R-Virginia), insisted a shutdown of the federal government wouldn’t be a big deal. Good explained that in the fantasy world he inhabits, the government shutdown is all pretend anyway: “There’s not going to be much impact from that if we do that.” He said the House can just stay in session well into October to finish the funding bills, apparently unaware that “no funding” means no, the House can’t do that.
House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), who apparently isn’t a drinker of poisoned Flavor-Aid, pointed out that there’s this place called reality, where
“Shutting down the government is the political equivalent of putting a gun to your head and saying ‘do what I say or I’ll shoot’ — you hurt yourself, you’re not going to advance your objective.”
[…] Sadly, it increasingly looks like they do not want a nap or a juice box; they want to tear up all the plushies and poop in the play kitchen, then have a long sobbing/screaming fit until America comes to its senses and lets them run everything.
Rudy Giuliani has a couple things going on, what with the RICO indictment and the other investigations and disbarment recommendations against him and whatnot. There’s the lawsuit from his former assistant, who alleges he’s exactly the disgusting piece of pig trash we always thought he was. We guess he’s broke, so Newsmax is running a legal defense telethon for him, so that’s approximately the most pathetic sentence in the history of the English language.
But he’s at the top of his game, as he’s been babbling the past couple days to whoever will listen. And because he’s such a giving guy, he’s willing to be the leader of the TOTALLY REAL House impeachment of Joe Biden.
It’s not that he doesn’t think the leaders of the committees doing the TOTALLY REAL House impeachment aren’t talented — how could you say that about James Comer and Jim Jordan? […]
Stop laughing, he’s serious! […]
ROODLES: They’re wonderful guys, but this is my profession, not theirs. I know how to question a lot better than they do. […] This is what I do best. I practiced a long time for it, but I do it best. [extreme pregnant pause] Let me question them!
Raise your hand if you think national laughingstock Rudy Giuliani is currently “the best” at anything that doesn’t involve getting snowed by Russian spies.
ROODLES: This case could be proved without witnesses. Just with the hard drive and electronics.
No witnesses, yeah? Because of the hard drive? Would that be Hunter Biden’s laptop, the one Rudy carries around […] and it’s definitely for certain untainted by Russian intelligence?
ROODLES: You could do it with videos, you could do it with texts, you could do it with emails. Texts, emails. It’s a multimedia case that could be won by a moderately talented prosecutor. The evidence is overwhelming!
Oh yes, Rudy, the evidence!
Of course, he means the “evidence” Russian spies funneled up his asshole during his quest to get Donald Trump impeached the first time for trying to make Ukraine steal the 2020 election for him. Evidence which has been hilarious and thoroughly debunked one million times, but fucking hell, if House Democrats have to do it one million more times during the impeachment spectacle Republicans were stupid enough to ask for, we imagine House Democrats will just do it one million more times.
[…] But sure. Rudy is definitely in fighting shape, even though he’s not allowed to practice law in DC, and if he shows up drunk, well then that’s just more primetime ratings for C-SPAN.
Please let dementia-free non-alcoholic Rudy Giuliani do it. Please.
In a frantic last-minute attempt to derail a trial that threatens to destroy Donald Trump’s corporate empire, the former president’s lawyers have turned the heat on the judge overseeing this case—by suing him directly.
In an emergency court filing Thursday morning, attorneys for the former president and his associates cited an “urgency” that required New York’s higher courts to step in. They want an appellate judge to commence an “Article 78 special proceeding” against Justice Arthur F. Engoron, one that would force him to decimate a case brought by Attorney General Letitia James.
“Although he has yet to perform his lawful duty, Justice Engoron plans to proceed with the trial of the Attorney General’s claims on October 2, 2023—just nineteen days from the date of this petition,” attorneys Clifford S. Robert and Michael Madaio wrote…
Trump’s lawyers filed a case before New York’s First Department appellate court, which has repeatedly weighed in on this Trump case and many others originating from Manhattan.
Thursday’s court filing claims Engoron and James are both acting to defy appellate orders that could narrow the AG’s behemoth bank fraud lawsuit, putting the judge in the awkward position of having to use lawyers to defend himself alongside the AG. He is expected to be represented by the local court administration’s own lawyers.
Trump’s legal team says Engoron is overstepping his authority, and they want an appellate judge to put him in his place. It’s the latest escalation against the trial court judge, who has increasingly grown tired of their delay antics…
In theory, given the GOP’s fixation on Hunter Biden, this development would be celebrated in party circles. In practice, it’s not working out that way.
After Hunter Biden’s plea agreement with federal prosecutors collapsed last month, it seemed quite likely that he’d face a new indictment. As NBC News reported, that’s precisely what has now happened: Newly available court documents show that President Joe Biden’s son is now facing gun-related charges.
Biden was indicted in Delaware federal court on three counts tied to the possession of a gun while using narcotics. Two counts are tied to Biden allegedly filing a form claiming that he was not using illegal drugs at the time he purchased a Colt Cobra revolver in October 2018. The third count alleges that he possessed a firearm while using a narcotic.
I remain mindful of the fact that it’s generally best not to focus too much attention on the family members of politicians. If elected officials’ kids enter the political arena — serving in positions of public power or influence, for example — the standards change, but as a rule, I still believe the fact that someone is related to a politician does not mean he or she necessarily deserves extra scrutiny.
But as regular readers know, when it comes to Hunter Biden, this rule has largely been thrown out the window. The president’s son has never worked in the White House, does not appear to have any influence in any area of public policy, and has never sought public office. He’s nevertheless been the subject of intense Republican interest for several years.
Whether one sees this news as worthy of national attention or not, it’s certainly historic: No child of a sitting president has ever before been prosecuted by the Justice Department.
And ultimately, these are the circumstances that strike me as remarkable: In the United States, we take the rule of law so seriously that Justice Department officials felt comfortable prosecuting a sitting president’s kid without fear of retribution and without interference from the White House.
What’s more, the prosecutor in this case was appointed, not by the Democratic incumbent, but by Donald Trump. Joe Biden kept David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney in Delaware, in his position so that he could continue the investigation into his son.
It’s a reminder as to how the system should work.
In theory, given the Republicans’ fixation on Hunter Biden, these developments would be celebrated in GOP circles. In practice, we know such merriment is unlikely to occur. In fact, The Hill reported last week:
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-K.Y.) criticized special counsel David Weiss after the prosecutor said he would seek to indict Hunter Biden on a gun charge by the end of September, saying the charge is the “least of all the crimes” that Biden has committed.
In other words, Republicans are likely to complain that the charges simply aren’t good enough for them.
Jeansays
Re #216
Why is it that the SCOTUS interpretation of the 2nd amendment completely ignores the “well regulated militia” and the “security of a free state” parts of the second amendment? (rhetorical question; the owners of the elected and non-elected officials want it that way for money and power) If they were true originalists, they would have to keep all of it (and there are already plenty of infringements on which types of arms are allowed)
Moreover, the creation of the US army would have made obsolete the need for a well regulated militia and therefore the 2nd amendment itself. I wonder what would happen if someone were to create a “well regulated militia” and claim their second amendment right on this.
[…] Tax charges are presumably coming in another jurisdiction. But the gun charges are frankly weird. As David notes, it is very uncommon, perhaps as much as unheard of, for someone to be charged with lying about substance abuse when buying a gun unless it’s part of prosecution for some other felony. So maybe you buy a gun, use it to commit a felony and then prosecutors charge you for that felony and also hit you for lying about your drug use when you bought the gun. I haven’t spoken to anyone who can think of another example. Former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich said simply today, “It doesn’t happen. DOJ will need to produce data in discovery, which will show this is the most selective of prosecutions.”
I wanted to share some thoughts on two parts of this. One question is what amounts to selective prosecution – what counts as selective prosecution but before we get to that just what happened here in a global sense, with the plea deal falling apart, Weiss becoming special prosecutor and now these charges.
Earlier this week the Times and the Post got access to a transcript of lawmakers interview with the lead FBI agent on the Hunter Biden investigation. He disputed most of the key allegations made by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley and others. You can see the details about that here and here. That’s gotten much less attention than the original whistleblower claims. If you go back to the original reports about how the plea deal fell apart it sounds like then-US Attorney and now Special Counsel David Weiss had empowered his deputy to negotiate a plea deal and then, while that was happening, seemed to lose confidence in the deal he had authorized her to negotiate. This all happened while House Republicans were moving into overdrive about Shapley’s and others’ allegations. The Times at least reported that Weiss told others he didn’t want to settle for a few misdemeanor charges as special prosecutors often do since it would either amount to or appear like selective prosecution. Then the plea deal blew apart in front of the judge. Now we have charges that at the least are extremely uncommon under these circumstances.
What happened? There’s really no plausible explanation other than that House Republicans simply rolled Weiss. They dramatically upped the scrutiny of his decision making; they undoubtedly got the MAGA crazies making threats and I would imagine got Weiss worried his reputation would be besmirched by attacks claiming he’d given the younger Biden a sweetheart deal. This is the result.
Next let’s discuss what amounts to selective prosecution.
A few weeks ago we discussed the fact that it’s quite likely that Hunter Biden wouldn’t have been prosecuted or even investigated for any alleged crimes were it not for the fact that he was the President’s son who had his life exposed to the light of day when his computer hard drive found its way to Steven Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. […]
Even if prosecutors were much more aggressive with white collar crime this would likely always be the case. It’s no defense to say that only 20% of people who commit this crime get charged. Indeed, it’s always been the case that best way to get charged with tax fraud or other white collar crimes is to get notorious and get prosecutors to start looking into your business dealings. Paul Manafort can certainly claim that was the case with him, even if his crimes were much more serious.
I don’t know enough about tax law and the specific evidence pertaining to Hunter Biden to know whether he should be charged or whether the government would be likely to get a conviction. But the fact that Biden already paid a lot of back taxes and had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges at least suggests he wasn’t operating by the books.
Whatever happens on the tax front, though that’s altogether different from these gun charges.
We’ve managed to arrive at the point where Hunter Biden may end up being the only target of a genuinely selective prosecution. Indeed, one so clear cut and transparent that I really don’t quite know what Weiss was thinking.
Andrew Weissmann noted on Nicole Wallace’s show “Deadline White House” that they seem to be charging Hunter Biden for three felonies related to lying on the form he filled out to obtain a gun. All three felonies seem to be the same crime, more or less. And that is for a crime which the prosecution was earlier willing to let go with good behavior provisos in the plea deal. So it is now not a misdemeanor, and is not part of a plea deal which would result in no jail time. It is instead three felonies that might put Hunter Biden in jail for 25 years. That seems crazy to me. Also, this has never been charged before unless it was in connection with a crime committed with said gun. Hunter Biden never even fired that gun.
[…] This sets the stage for what I would expect to be a very contentious fight between Biden attorney Abbe Lowell and Weiss over whether Weiss is bound by the earlier agreement [the binding non-prosecution (or diversion) agreement, or plea deal]. You’ll recall that Lowell stepped in after the Biden lawyer who negotiated the plea agreement withdrew in anticipation of being a witness in any future fight over the gun charges.
Setting aside the fierce fight over whether the diversion agreement is binding, most legal types who have looked at the case agree that these gun charges are highly unusual. They’re typically brought in conjunction with another felony. As a standalone crime, you just don’t see it. That adds to the concern that the murky origins of the Biden criminal investigation in the Trump DOJ have culminated in disparate treatment of Hunter Biden because of who his father is.
That doesn’t mean Hunter Biden wasn’t a red-hot mess in the throes of addiction making horrendous decisions, self destructing, and leaving a trail of personal carnage in his wake. But that alone doesn’t necessarily rise to criminal conduct.
Sometimes very exciting announcements made in the immediate wake of a military action turn to slightly less glowing achievements once the smoke has begun to clear. No, I’m not talking about the destruction of the landing ship Minsk and significant damage to the Kilo-class submarine Rostov-on-Don. In spite of Russian propaganda that all is very hunky and most extremely dory, visual evidence supports reports of severe damage to both ship and boat. Your Russian Navy Bingo cards are safe.
But today, what seemed to be a $1.3 billion follow-up shot to the attack on the Crimea dry docks may be a little less successful than it first seemed. Or at least, a little more complicated. The same goes for what seems to be at least the thousandth report that Russian defenses at Bakhmut had collapsed and that Ukraine was advancing at will.
That’s not to say that both events involved in these reports don’t represent some very good news (they do). It’s just that one or both may not be quite as good as early reports.
Why the Ukrainian Army is still moving forward south of Bakhmut is a bit of a puzzler to some observers (namely, me). Having taken the high ground west of Klishchiivka and pushed Russia back to where it represents little threat to traffic along either highway T0504 or the Chasiv Yar-Khromove road, it would seem that Ukraine has done what they need to secure this front while their forces concentrate on the movement into Zaporizhzhia. If anything, the remaining task in the area for Ukraine would seem to be dislodging Russian forces from hills west of Berkhivka on the west of the city. That little cluster of force near the village of Dubovo-Vasylivka still represents a significant tactical position that threatens Ukrainian positions on lower ground to both the south and east. [map at the link]
However, Ukraine is continuing to advance south of Bakhmut, and Russia seems to be helping them out with some extremely ill-considered maneuvers. In August, Russia made two runs at the town of Klishchiivka from the east, but with Ukraine’s well-positioned artillery on the hills to the west and drones providing clear images of Russian forces making a slow approach down a heavily cratered road, each of those attacks was converted into scrap with high efficiency. [Tweet and video at the link: The roads to #Klishchiivka are peppered with the Russian fallen soldiers, located in southwest of Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, Donbas region, eastern Ukraine. Russia’s attack collapsed with high losses, including 3 T90 tanks]
Until this week, Russia had been able to maintain a small infantry force, hiding among buildings and trees at the northeast edge of Klishchiivka, but that force has taken a prolonged battering. [Tweet and video at the link]
It’s unclear how or if Russia was able to provision that force. The bridge heading out of the town to the north has been destroyed, and everything around the small Russian-occupied area was clear ground under close coverage.
In just the past few days, Ukraine largely flushed out these Russian forces to capture the remainder of the town. Honestly, this might not have been so much “Ukraine advances” as “surrounded Russian forces try to make a break for it.” Russian infantry wasn’t really holding part of Klishchiivka: It was more like they were trapped there. And as they tried to exit the area to the east, Ukraine knocked them off. I’m not really sure that counts as “an advance.”
Russia is still apparently throwing forces at Klishchiivka where, again, Ukraine not only holds defensive positions in and around the buildings, but has artillery mounted on high ground with a commanding position over the fields east of the town. So Russian attacks are running into what appears to be properly described as a “meat grinder.” If the map above is correct, Ukraine is not really moving to position people on every street in Klishchiivka. They’re just keeping those streets clear of Russians.
However, there is a significant fight underway just south of Klishchiivka at the smaller town of Andriivka, where Ukrainian forces have pushed across the canals that had for some time defined the boundary between forces. And it’s here that we get to the “not as good as indicated” part of the story.
Earlier today, Ukrainian deputy defense minister and military spokesperson Hanna Mailar announced the news that Ukraine had completely cleared not just Klishchiivka, but Andriivka. This led others to proclaim that Russian defenses around Bakhmut had collapsed, and expectations were raised that a significant Ukrainian force movement was underway.
Russia has defensive lines in place a few kilometers to the east of the highway running south of Bakhmut, but as Ukraine has already demonstrated in the south, not every defensive line is the same—and empty trenches never stopped anyone. So maybe Ukraine has decided to make a big push east. Or to take its forces to the highway, then press north into Opytne. Or maybe it was going to deliver a big PR kick to Putin’s nethers and advance into Bakhmut.
However, soon after this information went out, members of the unit actually fighting in Andriivka sent out a different message: “The statement about the capture of Andriivka is false and premature. Currently, serious and heavy fighting continues in the districts of Klishchiivka and Andriivka. Such statements are harmful, pose a threat to the lives of personnel and harm the performance of combat missions.”
Soon after that, Mailar put out an apology, noting that Ukrainian and Russian forces are still fighting in Andriivka. This doesn’t mean that Ukraine hasn’t advanced, because it has. It also doesn’t mean that Ukraine isn’t winning this confrontation, because it is. What it means is that Russia’s defenses in the area have not “collapsed” in the sense that Russia is fleeing the area in a rout and Ukraine can advance at will with minimum losses. Russia is continuing to contest these areas.
If Ukraine wants to move on Opytne, or advance on defensive lines to the east, they will need to fight for it.
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The other partially walked-back story of the day is one that started off big, then got slightly smaller, but may turn out to be even bigger than originally thought. [map at the link, followed by a tweet that includes video and images]
Following the spectacular attack on the dry docks near Sevastopol the previous night, Wednesday night brought another Ukrainian attack on Russian military targets in occupied Crimea. And though a $350 million sub was a pretty good score, this time Ukraine looks to have gone hunting for even bigger game. [Tweet and image at the link]
Actually, a single S-400 air defense system carries a price tag of around $500 million. That price, about half that of the U.S. Patriot Pac-2 system, has been one of the S-400’s big selling points around the world. Even so, there have been reports that the S-400’s reputation for being among the best air defense systems available was not well deserved, and some countries who bought S-400 systems in just the last few years are reportedly looking for an upgrade.
In the case of the overnight strike, things may be a bit more complicated than originally thought. An S-400 is composed of multiple components, but as this post suggests, even taking them all out wouldn’t total the price tag that many sources were originally suggesting. [Tweet and illustrations of S-400 air defense complex components]
Of all the things on that infographic, it’s reportedly the 96L6 radar that is both the rarest and the most expensive. When the first clear satellite images of the area were available this morning, the truck bearing the 96L6 appeared to be missing. [Tweet and images]
This led to suggestions that this detector escaped the attack. However, other vehicles have since been removed from the site and it’s equally possible that Russia hustled the 96L6 away before the satellite images were taken. Even if that component did escape, this S-400 system is out of business.
In fact, there has since been something of a walk-back to the walk-back. Because it seems that Ukraine may have hit more components than would be found in a single S-400 system. That may include a launcher belonging to another S-400 or parts of an S-300 system, which Russia has been using for both air defense and for offensive missiles.
It might not all add up to $1.3 billion—but it was still a very bad day for Russia. And it was the second in a row. It’s also not a great ad for your supposed “best in the world” air defense system when it gets taken down by drones and missiles. That is definitely not going to help with future sales. [More dark humor.]
This time around, Ukraine didn’t use the British-sourced Storm Shadows. The S-400 was reportedly taken down with a mixture of drones and Neptune missiles, originally developed as anti-ship weapons (they’re what took down former Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva).
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Remember the post a few days ago detailing how Ukraine is improving its decoys? This thread provides a perfect case in point. Go get ‘em, Russia! Fire those big, big missiles. [Tweet and video at the link: Ukrainian decoys continue to get better and better, seen here, an incredibly realistic Spoon Rest D (P-18) radar decoy, sporting a fully rotating array. The unit was reportedly successful in fooling the Russians.]
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A good thread looking not at the ship and sub lost in the Sevastopol attack, but at the attack’s effect on Russia’s ability to maintain its fleet in the Black Sea. [Tweet and image at the link: The strike on Sevmorzavod September 13 would be the first time that Ukraine would strike a naval support facility in the ‘heart of the Black Sea Fleet’. Fleet maintenance played a vital role in the sustainment of the Black Sea Fleet, even with the increased threats]
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The Cybertruck looked better in prototype. [Tweet and image at the link]
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And speaking of Cybertruck … [Tweet and video at the link: ‘Has your ego cost Ukrainian lives? A senior war official says it has.’ Elon Musk was questioned by a Sky News reporter after the billionaire admitted thwarting a Ukrainian attack on Russia.]
Musk did not reply to the Sky News reporter’s questions, but I am glad to see that Musk is at least confronted with the questions.
[…] Republicans’ anti-abortion zealotry appears to have cast a pall over the entire nation, decreasing the number of Americans who both want and are willing to risk getting pregnant and carrying to term in an environment where the phrase “the life of the mother” has become a political football. […]
the Republican Party proceeded to make the U.S. among the most inhospitable of developed nations for birthing children, particularly if one is interested in surviving—as if U.S. maternal mortality rates weren’t already abysmal, not to mention disproportionately shouldered by people of color.
It’s just one more Republican policy coming back to bite the country in the butt, all while ruining one of life’s most precious experiences: parenthood.
The Supreme Court on Thursday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would place restrictions on the Biden administration’s contact with social media companies. … It gives the court more time to consider what next steps to take before deciding whether to grant the administration’s request. In the meantime, the lower court ruling will remain on hold until midnight on Sept. 22.
It’s been a hot summer in more ways than one. From strikes in Hollywood to United Auto Workers voting in favor of strikes, the push for better working conditions isn’t showing signs of cooling down. It’s been years since we’ve seen this kind of burst of workplace organizing, and it recalls some of the most famous moments of labor history. We couldn’t think of a better voice than our guest this week to help us unpack everything that’s been going on. Alex Press is a staff writer for Jacobin Magazine where she covers labor. Her work has appeared in outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post, just to name a few. She was a union organizer before becoming a reporter. Press joins WITHpod to discuss what has contributed to this current wave, pandemic induced changes to how people think about labor, shifts in power during this moment and the outlook ahead.
I recommend the whole thing, but the last section concerns the new leadership of the Teamsters and the UAW and is very informative.
The UAW taffed that there will be a Facebook Live with Shawn Fain tonight at 10 ET.
Justice Scalia’s majority opinion [in Heller] said that the first half of the Second Amendment is “prefatory” language, while the second half is “operative.” But that is pure sophistry; why isn’t all of the language of the Second Amendment to be deemed operative language?
(I know it was rhetorical, but I couldn’t resist agreeing with you. :))
In trials, brexpiprazole failed to provide a clinically meaningful benefit and it increased mortality, but the FDA fast tracked its approval and the sponsor predicts $1bn in annual sales. Robert Whitaker investigates the first licensed antipsychotic for treating agitation in elderly patients with dementia…
As the article suggests, this undermines the work of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
…Most museumgoers accepted leaflets from the protestors. Besides one “Shut up!” call at the beginning of the protest, visitors snapped photos of the demonstration, and some asked for more information. XR directed onlookers to its upcoming September 17 March to End Fossil Fuels, scheduled to precede the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit in New York City on September 20. Security gathered but did not interfere. The activists later protested at the steps of the newly unveiled Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation….
Jeansays
SC @430
Glad to see others agreeing. These people interpret the constitution like they do for their religious texts: start with the wanted conclusion and parse the text to get there regardless of what’s actually meant or what is desirable in a just (for all) society. And if you have to invent text or meaning, no biggy.
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.
The story of how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person….
Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he’d been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. Especially when he wrote a story that was critical of tech, he’d be accused of being a “Luddite.”
Like most people, Brian knew at least vaguely what the term “Luddite” meant. But as time went on, and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more curious about the actual Luddites. Who were they? And what did they really believe?
Brian has a new book out about the Luddites called Blood in the Machine. And it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods.
The history feels a little too relevant today, and so we wanted to have Brian on the show to tell us what we can learn from the original Luddites. Take a listen, then be sure to grab his book (in print form, of course!), Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech….
Paris Marx is joined by Dean Preston to discuss the havoc robotaxis are wreaking in San Francisco and the wider impacts the tech industry has had on the city.
Dean Preston is the District 5 Supervisor in San Francisco and the first democratic socialist elected in the city in 40 years. He’s also a tenant attorney and founder of Tenants Together.
The head of a Michigan software company filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón of targeting him in a bungled prosecution last year that was almost entirely based on the word of election deniers and conspiracy theorists.
Eugene Yu, the chief executive of a 21-employee business known as Konnech, accused Gascón and the district attorney’s office of multiple civil rights violations, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, according to the 86-page complaint.
Yu was arrested in Michigan in October and indicted on charges that he compromised the personal information of L.A. County poll workers by storing data on Chinese servers. In the months before Yu’s arrest, Konnech had become the subject of unfounded allegations that it was working with the Chinese government to influence U.S. elections.
Many of those claims were pushed by True the Vote, a Texas-based group that traffics in conspiracy theories denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The organization funded and appeared in the film “2000 Mules” by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to prove that then-President Trump lost his bid for a second term because of coordinated ballot box stuffing by Democrats.
A little over a month after Gascón announced the arrest, which drew praise from former President Trump and other right-wing election deniers, the case against Yu collapsed.
After initially denying True the Vote had any involvement in the investigation, the district attorney’s office acknowledged that a tip from the group’s co-founder, Gregg Phillips, sparked the inquiry into Yu. Phillips has also said he testified before the grand jury. Even though the group’s election-related claims had been reviewed by several state attorney generals and the FBI with no charges filed, L.A. County prosecutors decided to pursue the case…
wzrd1says
Story that made me want to puke.
Cold cocking a 3 year old in the back of the head is only an option when that child’s head is on fucking fire. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/us/ohio-autistic-child-school-video/index.html
My preferred method of stopping running at that age is catch up, which is massive exercise, then put my hand in front of the child’s eyes, obscuring vision.
Inexperience halts forward progress, interaction then can ensue.
I’ve advocated for rare occasions for striking a child, typically over life threatening events.
The rest of the time, it’s either didactic instruction or my far preferred Socratic instruction. One has to have a base, then learn from there.
With modern distilled methods, not a one requires or suggests punching a minor child in the motherfucking head.
And a selection process where, when one is flat out of ideas, that is never considered a solution if the child’s head is not on actual fire.
For fuck’s sake, I’ve slowed down a fair bit with age, I could’ve tripped him with my cane.
Trivially. I use my cane as a tool on a daily basis and it’s a weapon. Pull top shelf goods down, done, trip an idiot, trivial, it’s also a staff weapon that I’d never use on a child.
Obscuring vision works for a simple reason, fresh still in the 3 year old’s memory is toddler memory of running and falling, painfully.
So, use your knowledge and experience as a weapon of choice, when needed badly. That should be vanishingly rare in punching a child.
Which reminds me, gotta order some new cloth diapers. Most got lost in the move and they’re one of the best household cleaning cloths ever made…
I’ll probably have nightmares over that fucking story.
To compete with other nightmares.
My worst remains, starting to say something to my wife and awakening to find her long gone.
Then, considering talking to a new close friend, who’s currently hospitalized with a stroke.
Then, considering my stock of pasta sauce is down to 50% reserve, but fortunately I have all ingredients needed to make more, if not freezer space.
Always look for some upside, lest one look toward suicide.
And I never did learn how to quit.
Other, more entertaining, if unfortunately disastrous without cost news, Portugal suffered a 3 million bottle loss of wine to a dual tank failure, flooding the gutters of the town with wine.
A significant hazmat incident, with no Boston flood of syrup killing anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Hey, it could’ve been worse, instead of wine, it could’ve been a sewage failure and urine stunk up the town instead.
At least, according to friends. I have no realistic sense of smell, only some trigeminal derived residue and supertasting. That nerve carries, oddly, due to its additional length, the more noxious scents. Delaying transmission and well, suggesting some really poor design ideas for a perfect being designing a penultimate being or something.
Upside, I still do replicate, accurately recipes on pure taste alone.
StevoRsays
A wonderful Aussie water critter the critically endangered Bellinger River Snapping Turtle also called the Bellinger River Sawshelled Turtle or simply the Bellinger River Turtle (Myuchelys georgesi) which lost 90% of its population in just months is this week’s Endangered Species of the Week. An ancient omnivore that once swam alongside the non-avian dinosaurs, this moderately sized turtle’s favourite habitat is cool, deep pools in the riverbed. It gets the second part of its species name from Arthur Georges an Australian herpetologist with, sadly, no info I can find on its Indigenous name.
Never common and always restricted to only the eponymous 70 km long river system in New South Wales once numbered almost five thousand individuals before the deadly Bellinger river virus struck in 2015 nearly driving it into extinction. Today only 150 of these reptilian cuties remain with on-going efforts to save this species including a successful captive breeding program. A thin thread for this turtle’s future against the mysterious threat of that virus which so nearly caused them to vanish forever plus the loss of habitat and especially native vegetation and possibly from Global Overheating and its effect on its river both potentially drying up and heating up the pools they prefer.
Introducing the new (?) word biotechnosphere plus stigma vs science on Unidentified objects and a serious method of determining whether aliens might be out there scientifically.
StevoRsays
The Indigenous Australians minister says she feels betrayed by senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comment that First Nations people are not being affected by colonialism because “we now have running water”. Senator Nampijinpa Price was asked during her National Press Club address if she felt there were any ongoing, negative impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australians. “No, there’s no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you, I do not think so. A positive impact, absolutely.” The Northern Territory senator added: “I mean, now we have running water, readily available food.”
Minister Linda Burney said she felt betrayed and shocked by Senator Nampijinpa Price’s comments. “The idea that colonisation in any country where there’s been a colonisation process doesn’t have long and far-reaching effects is simply wrong,” she said. Ms Burney took the opportunity to highlight issues that First Nations Australians face today that she hoped a Yes referendum outcome would assist with. “Life expectancy, education outcomes, overcrowding and incarceration rates,” she said. “It is so important to recognise the full story of Australia.”
Ms Burney said First Nations people she had spoken to after Senator Nampijinpa Price’s comments said the remarks had made them feel distressed and disgusted.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces has reported that it has seized the village of Andriivka in the partially-occupied Donetsk region, and that it shot down 17 drones launched at Ukraine by Russia.
In a statement on Facebook, the general staff said of the battle around Bakhmut:
In the Bakhmut direction, the enemy does not abandon the attempt to break through the defence of the armed forces of Ukraine in the Bohdanivka area.
In their turn, the defence forces of Ukraine during the offensive actions had partial success in the area of Klishchiivka.
During the assault operations they had success and mastered Andriivka, causing the enemy significant losses in manpower and equipment.
Andriivka lies to the south of Bakhmut.
The report also claims:
There were 25 combat clashes in the last 24 hours. The enemy fired 2 missiles and 59 air strikes, carried out 56 shellings both on the positions of our troops and on civilian objects of our country. Also, yesterday the invaders attacked Ukraine and used 22 Shahed-136/131 kamikaze drones, 17 of which were destroyed by Ukrainian anti-air defence.
There has not been any major change on the Robotyne frontline the last 10 days. It would seem RU have succeeded in slowing down UA progress by moving and engaging the 76th VDv division to Zaporizhzhia. It’s not unlikely we are will see a period with more focus on attrition.
StevoRsays
See also :
I wonder who Senator Jacinta Price is referring to when she talks of “my people”.
She can’t mean the people I work for – 90 democratically elected Aboriginal men and women from the towns, remote communities and hundreds of tiny homelands of the southern half of the Northern Territory. People aged between 20 and 80, who are elected for three-year terms, meet three times a year out bush and who, for the past five years, have consistently expressed their strong support for the constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament the senator opposes.
A voice that allows local representatives to be heard about laws and policies that affect them and offer solutions informed by their unique knowledge and lived experience. What could be more practical? What could be fairer, more modest and unifying?
… (snip)…
Price is entitled to ignore the clear will of the democratically elected members of the land councils. However, her stance also demonstrates perfectly why electing Aboriginal politicians is not enough and why the voices of Aboriginal Territorians need to be heard by the parliament.
The ignorance expressed this week about the voice – genuine, feigned or self-inflicted – is only surpassed by the lack of knowledge about the rigorous and inclusive process that has led us here and about how long-standing our desire to be heard is.
Boeing has provided visuals of its first pre-production example of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, which the company is currently developing for the U.S. Navy…
Once the drones do end up in service, they will perform critical refueling support for the Navy’s carrier air wings. Having a dedicated tanker capability will allow tanker-tasked F/A-18E/F jets to focus on their primary mission sets. As we’ve noted previously, this will both expand the combat capabilities of strike fighter squadrons, as well as freeing up Super Hornet fleets…
Finland on Friday joined the three Baltic countries in banning vehicles with Russian license plates from entering their territory, a joint move in line with a recent interpretation of the European Union’s sanctions against Moscow over its war on Ukraine.
The Nordic EU member’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said the ban would stop private cars from entering Finland as of Friday midnight, Finnish broadcaster YLE said.
Earlier this week, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania imposed the measure. Estonia said the decision followed “the additional interpretation of the sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation published by the European Commission” on Sept. 8.
As for the exclave of Kaliningrad, which is surrounded by Lithuania, Russian citizens will be able to continue transiting through the southernmost Baltic state by train.
Under the EU’s decision, motor vehicles registered in the Russian Federation are no longer allowed to enter the territory of the 27-member bloc, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Baltic states are among the most vocal European critics of Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
YLE said that Russian-registered cars with fewer than 10 passengers will no longer be permitted to enter Finland from Russia, although some exceptions are likely…
…Ultimately, the British public, the museum’s true beneficiaries, should demand a museum that represents UK society as it is today. Stop upholding, celebrating, and defending institutions built on racist ideologies, colonial looting, and immoral and illicit practices. Instead, let us actively work toward confronting and dismantling ongoing colonial narratives, advance toward restorative justice, and reckon with imperial crimes. Proactively ensuring that communities of origin have ownership of, access to, and agency with regard to their cultural heritage is an essential first step toward these goals, and the only way the British Museum should be able to survive.
Otto Bruno and Rahne Alexander join Mike to discuss the 1937 Archie Mayo film, Black Legion. Based loosely on the actual racist terrorist organization from Detroit, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as Frank Taylor, a man who gets passed over for a promotion by one of those darned immigrants. He does the only thing that makes sense by joining a hate group and trying to bolster his manhood with violence.
Special guest Tom Stanton talks about his book, Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-era Detroit, which looks at the highs and lows of 1930s Detroit.
A new book of Miller’s photographs, featuring a foreword by Kate Winslet and an essay from her son, also tells a unique story of the second world war…Kate Winslet plays Lee Miller in the forthcoming film Lee…
The judges of the 2023 Bird Photographer of the Year competition…sifted through more than 20,000 images submitted from photographers around the globe. With lenses trained on a variety of avians and their habitats, the makers of this year’s winning images highlight diverse behavior, sizes, colors, and environments, from enigmatic and elusive species to familiar backyard friends.
As much of the political world now knows, Sen. Mitt Romney spoke at great length with The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins for a book that will be out next month, and a lengthy excerpt was published online this week that generated a lot of attention. It’s well worth your time, though there was one element that stuck with me after reading it.
The retiring Utah senator told Coppins about routine reluctance among GOP members to hold Donald Trump accountable for wrongdoing, largely because they feared a political backlash. “But,” Coppins wrote, “after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged.”
One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
Romney was dismayed by the perspective, though he understood it at a personal level: In the wake of the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, the book excerpt added, the senator shelled out $5,000 a day “to cover private security for his family.”
It’s not clear exactly how long that level of security continued — it might still be in place now — but for context, it’s worth noting that $5,000 a day is roughly $1.8 million a year.
If Romney’s version of behind-closed-door events is accurate, it’s an extraordinary peek into a deep pathology. In a healthy society with a stable political system, elected officials don’t cast votes out of fear that their families might be killed.
For all the recent Republican hysterics about “banana republics“ and “third-world“ countries, it was in the United States where GOP members of Congress were assessing threats of violence when making calculations about how best to vote.
[…] it happened just two years ago.
What’s more, according to the retiring GOP senator, members of his party wanted to cast principled votes, but they were ultimately against it — because they feared violence.
Worse, these fears were not necessarily paranoid or irrational given recent events.
In a functioning democracy, this simply is not supposed to happen. Coppins added, “How long can a democracy last when its elected leaders live in fear of physical violence from their constituents?”
That need not be a rhetorical question.
Their fears are understandable. But if they cannot vote for what they know is right, they should retire from public office.
As House Republicans move forward with their evidence-free impeachment inquiry targeting President Joe Biden, a small handful of members will be taking the lead — both in the investigation and as the public faces of the partisan endeavor.
Among them is Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer. For the GOP, that isn’t good news.
The principal problem with the Kentucky Republican’s recent work is that Comer has failed spectacularly to uncover any evidence of wrongdoing against Biden, despite months of effort. He’s periodically made bold promises and issued hyped findings to great fanfare, but in each instance, Comer’s revelations have been embarrassing flops.
But there’s a related problem: Comer hasn’t just been failing, he’s also been lying.
Axios reported overnight, for example, that the Oversight Committee chairman “has repeatedly exaggerated and distorted the findings of his investigation into the Biden family.” The report added that the Republican congressman has “at times undermined his credibility” by “overstating his committee’s findings.”
A Washington Post analysis came to the same conclusion.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee chairman appeared on Newsmax for an interview about his committee’s efforts to evaluate the business activity of President Biden’s son, Hunter, and any possible connection to the president himself. Over the course of the interview, Comer made a number of claims that were unsupported by publicly available evidence, contradicted by other parties or obviously false.
Both the Post and Axios reports are worth your time, and they go into more detail than I will here. The bottom line is unavoidable: Comer, in his zeal to smear the president, has simply pushed claims that are at odds with reality, and which crumble under scrutiny.
[…] we’re not just talking about sporadic and incidental Comer misstatements.
Rather, at issue is the Republican’s willingness to repeatedly tell tales he ought to know aren’t true — about everything from banking records to the National Archives, Burisma to imagined code words, Devon Archer’s testimony to the circumstances surrounding Comer’s participation in the Archer interview. This week, the chairman’s detractors were able to discredit one of his claims by pointing to his own earlier rhetoric.
Comer started overhyping his findings a while ago, and his willingness to play fast and loose with the facts seems to be getting worse.
But nearly as important as the Republican’s dishonesty is his motivation. Comer seems painfully aware of the fact that he hasn’t been able to deliver a coherent case against the president, not because of a lack of effort, but because the evidence simply doesn’t support his partisan crusade.
And so, it appears the Oversight Committee chairman has embraced “alternative facts” — in part to justify his work, in part to besmirch a Democrat who doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong, and in part to satisfy his party’s demands.
As the impeachment inquiry process advances, and Comer takes center stage, it will be important to keep this rhetoric record in mind.
[…] There is simply no defense for such brazen dishonesty. Perhaps a brief timeline of events might help clarify matters.
1. Comer spends months assuring the public that he’d present devastating evidence of Biden corruption. He fails spectacularly at every step.
2. Comer schedules a special closed-door interview with Archer, promising important results. The Oversight Committee chairman fails to attend the Q&A.
3. Comer peddles a variety of highly provocative claims about Archer’s testimony, including during appearances on national television, leading the public to believe the witness advanced the case against the president.
4. Comer’s committee releases the transcript of Archer’s testimony — at a time that appeared designed to bury the news — that shows the opposite of what Comer had claimed.
5. Comer’s political operation seeks financial rewards from his supporters anyway, pretending the information that was devastating for the GOP was actually “smoking gun evidence” that incriminated Joe Biden, despite reality.
These are not the actions of a powerful public official acting in good faith.
[…] the core details are obvious and no longer in doubt: Archer said under oath that Joe Biden wasn’t involved with Burisma, didn’t talk business with his son’s associates, and didn’t take bribes. The Post’s analysis added, “That’s the pattern here. Comer … and others hype claims of Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s work only to see those claims collapse as more information is made public.” […]
The far-right wing of the Republican Party has compelled House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to call for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. The biggest problem with this move? After nine months of Republican-led House committee investigations into the president and his son Hunter, the GOP has come up with bupkis.
Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo took time away from purposefully misinforming the public about Trump’s false election-fraud claims to discuss the impeachment inquiry into President Biden. Her guest was Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith. In a clip tweeted by journalist Aaron Rupar, Bartiromo asks Smith what he thinks is “the most damning evidence that you all have to suggest bribery.” She proceeds to reiterate some vague circumstantial evidence as well as some completely unsubstantiated claims made using big financial numbers.
And Smith responds, “Those are all great questions that we need answers to.”
The Justice Department is challenging efforts by former President Donald Trump to disqualify the Washington judge presiding over the case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith’s team wrote in a court filing late Thursday that there was “no valid basis” for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to recuse herself.
Trump’s lawyers filed a long-shot motion earlier this week urging Chutkan to step aside, citing comments she made in separate sentencing hearings related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that they say taint the Trump proceedings and call into question whether she has already prejudged the Republican former president’s guilt.
In one such hearing, Chutkan told a defendant who was sentenced to more than five years in prison that he had “made a very good point” that the “people who exhorted” and encouraged him “to go and take action and to fight” had not been charged. Chutkan added that she did not “make charging decisions” and had no “influence on that.”
“I have my opinions,” she said, “but they are not relevant.”
But the Justice Department said the Trump team had taken Chutkan’s comments out of context and failed to show that she harbored any bias against the former president, who lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.
The Justice Department said the statements the Trump lawyers had cited show the judge simply doing her job — responding to, and rejecting, efforts to minimize their own culpability by pointing the finger at Trump, who had told his supporters to “fight like hell” at a rally shortly before the deadly Capitol insurrection.
Chutkan did not say, prosecutors wrote, that Trump was legally or morally to blame for the events of Jan. 6 or that he deserved to be punished.
“Although the defendant tries to claim otherwise, the Court’s statements about which he complains are core intrajudicial statements — statements that the Court made while performing its official duties, in direct response to the arguments before it, and which were derived from knowledge and experience the Court gained on the bench,” the prosecutors wrote.
They added: “As such, to mount a successful recusal claim based on the cited statements, the defendant must show that they display a deep-seated animosity toward him. The defendant cannot meet this heavy burden.”
Trump’s motion is unlikely to succeed given the high standard for recusal. A similar effort to seek the recusal of a judge in a separate New York prosecution he faces was unsuccessful.
For once, the Senate was working well. The Appropriations Committee passed all 12 of the required spending bills with bipartisan support back in July. The full Senate was set to approve a “minibus” spending package of three of those bills this week, which would fund the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development. In fact, senators agreed to bring the bill to the floor in a 91-7 vote early Thursday. They had an agreed-upon set of amendments, equally divided between the two parties, ready to be approved as a block.
Enter Sen. Ron Johnson, who just had to show the world that the obstructionist House Freedom Caucus has nothing on him. When Appropriations Chair Patty Murray asked for unanimous consent to adopt the amendments package, Johnson objected and effectively shut the Senate down for the day, since it can’t move the base bill until amendments are approved. The Wisconsin senator’s rationale is, well, not really rational.
“This place is completely out of control, completely dysfunctional,” Johnson explained incoherently after totally disrupting the functions of the Senate. He added that he was objecting to moving forward on amendments because all of this should have been done before August recess, “through an orderly process one appropriation bill at a time.” That means no combined bills at all, and no big “omnibus” appropriations package that has to be pushed through at the last minute because Congress is running out of time.
[…] Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plan for the Senate was essentially to get these three minibus spending bills approved and ready to go to the House, while also working with Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a stopgap spending bill that would keep the government operating after Oct. 1, when current funding runs out. So much for that plan.
It turns out that Johnson isn’t the only nihilist intending to aid and abet the House extremists who are hellbent on shutting the government down. Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana told Axios that there are “seven or eight” Republican senators prepared to gum up the works with objections, and each of them has some separate demand. The list includes usual suspects like Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Florida’s Rick Scott.
“MAGA Republicanism seems to be taking over the Republican Party,” an angry Schumer said after Johnson’s antics. “And now all of a sudden you have a group, a small group in the Senate, trying to mimic the Freedom Caucus in the House and holding up the defense bill, which had huge bipartisan support,” he said. “Republican leaders have to reject this MAGA Republicanism for the good of the country and for the good of their party.”
He’s not wrong. But if he’s counting on Republican leaders—whoever that might be at this point—to fix it, it looks like he’s going to be in for a disappointment.
A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that President Barack Obama lacked the authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program back in 2012, striking down a revised version of the DACA rules that the Biden administration put in place last year. The government is likely to appeal the case, eventually putting the question before the US Supreme Court.
US District Judge Andrew Hanen at least didn’t order the deportation of roughly 600,000 immigrants still protected by DACA, leaving that for the Supremes to decide later on. Current DACA recipients will continue to be allowed to work in the US, and to renew their DACA protections through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but as with earlier decisions in the long-running case, the ruling blocks the addition of any new applicants to the program. (Biden’s DHS has nonetheless been taking new applications, in hope of processing them should it get a favorable court ruling.)
The decision means DACA will be an issue in the 2024 elections. The status of people brought to the US when they were children could finally be resolved once and for all if Congress passes the DREAM Act to protect them and to finally give them a pathway to apply for citizenship. Whoever wins the Republican nomination for 2024 will no doubt argue that Dreamers — most now adults in their 20s and 30s — should be deported, if not shot on sight, even though the US is the only country they can remember living in. They should have known better than to be born to their criminal parents.
Hanen first threw out DACA in 2021, agreeing with Republican-run states that, among other things, the Obama administration had failed to follow proper rule-making procedure by not including the required public comment period when it created DACA. The Biden administration tried to fix that with its 2022 rules, which included the public comments (only three percent of the comments opposed the rule).
Hanen said that wasn’t good enough, and that even with the comment period the Biden policy exceeded the authority of the executive branch, as the AP notes:
“While sympathetic to the predicament of DACA recipients and their families, this Court has expressed its concerns about the legality of the program for some time,” Hanen wrote in his 40-page ruling. “The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation … The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void.”
The Trump administration tried several times to end DACA, but fortunately its efforts were such complete administrative fuckbungles that not even the rightwing Roberts Court could accept them, at least not with a straight face, although those rulings did come before the last minute addition to the Court of Cousin Oliver Justice Amy Coney Barrett a week before the 2020 election.
In a statement Wednesday evening, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration was “deeply disappointed” in the ruling, and that
As we have long maintained, we disagree with the District Court’s conclusion that DACA is unlawful, and will continue to defend this critical policy from legal challenges. While we do so, consistent with the court’s order, DHS will continue to process renewals for current DACA recipients and DHS may continue to accept DACA applications.
Despite the constant efforts of Republicans to demonize DACA and immigration generally, the program still has strong public support, with polls consistently showing large majorities of Americans in favor of providing a pathway to citizenship for people whose parents brought them to the US when they were children.
So hey, looks like we all have yet another reason to vote for Democrats, who want to actually pass immigration legislation instead of using fear of immigrants as an eternal electoral issue.
The United Auto Workers union launched a historic strike Friday against all three of Detroit’s biggest automakers after its contracts expired, with the first picket lines beginning at a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich., a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Mo., and a Stellantis plant in Toledo. […]
The strike comes as the union and the Big Three remain far apart on wages, benefits and worker schedules after weeks of acrimonious talks. The union is demanding a wage increase of 36 percent over four years, while the carmakers have boosted their offers to between 17.5 percent and 20 percent over 4 1/2 years.
The union’s president, Shawn Fain, has called those offers inadequate after years of sharp inflation and fat corporate profits and executive pay.
“This is our generation’s defining moment,” Fain said in a Facebook Live address to union members Thursday night, less than two hours before the deadline. “The money is there. The cause is righteous. The world is watching. And the UAW is ready to stand up.”
Fain said the union would initially stop work at targeted locations at each company, in what he called a “stand-up strike,” and broaden the action to additional factories if contract talks remain unsuccessful.
It’s the first time the union has launched a strike of any size on all three companies at the same time. The last national auto strike was against General Motors in 2019.
[…] Striking workers will stop receiving wages from the companies and get paid $500 a week out of the UAW’s strike fund instead. Ford officials on Thursday cautioned that workers in nonstriking plants will also be hurt if a location that lacks parts from striking plants is forced to halt production. In that case, many of those workers will be sent on temporary unemployment, in line with Ford’s usual policy when plants are idled over a lack of parts, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations.
The Stellantis plant in Toledo makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators, and it employs 5,260 hourly workers, according to the company’s website. GM’s Wentzville plant makes Chevrolet Colorado trucks and Express vans as well as GMC Canyon trucks and Savana vans, employing about 4,100 people. Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne makes Ranger trucks and Bronco SUVs and employs about 4,600 hourly workers, but Fain said only the workers in final assembly and the paint shop were walking out initially.
[…] Alarmed by the prospect of a broad work stoppage in an industry that makes up about 3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the White House has been urging all sides to come to a deal.
President Biden spoke with Fain and the executives of the auto companies Thursday, a White House spokesperson said. The White House is preparing economic measures to protect suppliers to the auto industry from long-term damage, concerned that they will be particularly vulnerable in any strike […]
Fain has argued that workers deserve the same generous pay increases that executives got over the life of the current contract, which was signed in 2019.
GM CEO Barra’s compensation grew by 34 percent between 2019 and 2022, to $29 million last year. Ford’s CEO pay grew by 21 percent over that period, to $21 million last year. Stellantis, headquartered in the Netherlands and formed through a 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s Peugeot SA, didn’t exist when the contract began. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares earned about $25 million last year, including long-term incentives.
[…] Beyond the wage increases they are offering, the companies have made other concessions. All three companies are offering to allow workers to progress to the highest wage level at a faster rate than in the past. They’ve also made concessions on temporary workers, who make far less than full-time workers do and often get stuck in temp status for years. Ford is proposing converting all of its current temporary workers to full-time status after 90 days of work, while GM and Stellantis are offering an immediate 20 percent raise over temps’ starting wage, to $20 an hour. […]
One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
I’m sure I said it at the time (I think after the incident with Lindsey Graham at the airport) and probably on a few occasions prior to that, but this isn’t just cowardly; it’s deeply stupid. Every time people who have the power to do something to stop an authoritarian refuse to do it or remain silent or attempt to justify the authoritarian’s actions or whatever, they further endanger everyone, including themselves. Refusing to impeach him both times handed him and his thuggish followers more power over them. Every successive cowardly action (or lack of action) limits their capacity to stop him in the future and further emboldens the people threatening them. It always escalates like this, and they’re too stupid to recognize that each time they’re putting themselves in more danger. Now they didn’t stop him from running again when they had the opportunity so they have to fear his regaining power and using the power of the state to have them arrested or killed if they displease him. Because they’re craven fools.
SC in comment 456: “Every successive cowardly action (or lack of action) limits their capacity to stop him in the future and further emboldens the people threatening them. It always escalates like this, and they’re too stupid to recognize that each time they’re putting themselves in more danger.”
[…] [The Republican push to impeach Joe Biden is] obviously about payback. Oddly enough, Trump’s explanation is the accurate one. Republicans haven’t made much of an effort to hide the fact that they’re seeking revenge, and their transparency helps make plain what is obviously true.
What Trump said:
“They did it to me,” Trump told Megyn Kelly. “And had they not done it to me, I think, and nobody officially said this, but I think had they not done it to me … perhaps you wouldn’t have it being done to them.”
In 15 days, funding for all federal government operations will expire, barring a miracle (or House Speaker Kevin McCarthy having a personality transplant that turns him into a competent leader, which puts us back in miracle territory). A guy who lets people like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz pressure him into trying to impeach President Joe Biden based on the hallucinations of Rudy Giuliani isn’t likely to transform into a competent strategist.
The House returned from its six-week August recess Tuesday afternoon ready to do one of the easiest things Congress ever has to accomplish: spending a lot of money on the Pentagon. They failed—massively—as the extremist zealots refused to let the bill come to the floor. They didn’t do it because they’re opposed to the bill. They did it because they can, as a power flex.
No one in the House seems capable of coming up with a plan to stop them. “It’s stupid,” Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson complained to Politico. “We’ve been seeing this coming for the last three or four months. I just didn’t think we were dumb enough to get there,” he said. Simpson should know better, coming from Idaho of all places, the sinkhole of GOP stupidity.
Another senior GOP member told Semafor that what happened with the “Five Families” in the “Godfather” movies is coming. “The whole family kills each other,” they said. “I think we’re close to that right now. We are in maybe the Godfather II stage.” The member is probably referring to the fact that GOP leadership in the House decided to emulate “The Godfather” by calling the various factions in the House the “Five Families.” For real. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.
Two of those five are working on a supposed solution. A few members of both the Main Street Caucus, made up of supposed moderates, and the Freedom Caucus started meeting Wednesday to hatch some sort of stopgap funding plan, including spending cuts and border security funding.
Since Freedom Caucus guy Chip Roy of Texas is one of the negotiators, don’t expect it to work. What he’s in it for is a shutdown that they can blame on the Senate. He admitted it.
SHUTDOWN: @chiproytx says at Family Research Council he views a shutdown as inevitable because of Senate intransigence. He says GOP uniting around push for border policy changes as reason for fight
The Senate will not accept a stopgap bill or a continuing resolution that slashes funding. For one thing, it’s called a continuing resolution because what it does is continue current funding. Roy knows that. His whole group knows that. A shutdown is exactly what the Freedom Caucus wants, for whatever reason.
[…] Seventy-one percent of Republicans “believe a government shutdown this fall would hurt the economy,” according to the latest polling from Navigator Research. Other Republicans understand that. “Have we ever not got blamed for a shutdown? … I’m worried about the basic functions of government,” said Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong of South Dakota.
Making matters even worse for McCarthy, he lost another vote Friday when Rep. Chris Stewart’s planned resignation was supposed to take effect. That leaves just a four-vote margin for McCarthy.
The glaring solution—and the inevitable one—is reaching out and compromising for Democratic votes. It’s the only way this gets solved. But at this point, it’s going to take Republicans reaping the disaster of a shutdown to force them to do it.
On Thursday, Hunter Biden was formally charged with three felony violations related to his purchase of a firearm in 2018. Should he be found guilty on all three charges, President Joe Biden’s son faces up to $750,000 in fines and a potential 25 years in prison.
There is absolutely no doubt that Hunter Biden was using cocaine when he filled out an ATF firearms transaction record. There’s no doubt that he lied about this both when he filled out the form and when he affirmed to the dealer that the form was accurate. There’s no doubt that while owning the gun over a period of just 11 days, Hunter Biden was in violation of regulations against owning a firearm while addicted to illegal drugs. Biden admits to his 2018 addition in his memoir. The law extends back to any time in the last year. So … case closed.
Except that part of what makes a justice system a justice system is equal application of the laws to everyone. And what’s happening in this case is the opposite. Hunter Biden isn’t really being prosecuted for lying when he filled out a form five years ago. He’s being prosecuted for being Joe Biden’s son.
Just one year before Hunter Biden scribbled his name on that Form 4473, the General Accounting Office carried out a review of how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was dealing with those who lied when applying for a firearm.
In that year, 112,090 were denied a gun during the application process for submitting “falsified information.” Of those, 12,710 were referred to the ATF for further investigation. And of those, the total number actually prosecuted was … 12.
That’s just 0.01% of those whose forms were rejected for providing false information. What’s more, the cases were referred for prosecution “when aggravating circumstances exist, such as violent felonies or multiple serious offenses over a short period of time.” None of those circumstances apply to Hunter Biden.
But it’s worse than those numbers might indicate. Hunter Biden was not caught lying on his form during his application. He wasn’t really caught at all. The only reason that prosecutors know about his addiction to cocaine during this period is that Hunter Biden wrote about his struggles with addiction in a 2021 memoir. So he’s being retroactively prosecuted for being honest about the difficulties he experienced and being forthright about his failures.
Biden wasn’t one of 112,090 who were singled out as lying on his form. He was one of 27 million who filled out that form and went on. Now the Department of Justice is backing up five years to charge Hunter Biden with something—for the purposes of charging Hunter Biden with something.
The recommendation of that GAO review in 2017 was that the ATF was spending too much time investigating falsified forms since follow-up prosecutions were so rare. Instead, the GAO recommended that the agency concentrate on keeping track of false information and making information about rejected forms available to local law enforcement. The DOJ concurred with GAO’s recommendation.
Following the recommendations of the GAO, the number of cases referred for investigation in the year Hunter Biden made his purchase was greatly reduced, from 12,710 to just 478 referrals. That’s 0.002% of those who applied for a gun that year. But wait. It gets worse.
When The Washington Post took a look at this issue last year, they did so because the ATF and DOJ were being bombarded with tweets insisting that Hunter Biden be charged.
The controversy prompted us to request statistics from the Justice Department to determine whether someone falsely filling out the form faced much of a risk of prosecution.
It took months to obtain the data. The answer, it turns out, is no.
According to the Post, most of the cases prosecuted for lying on the form “concerned obvious instances of ‘straw buyers’” where someone was sent into a store to buy a gun for someone else who couldn’t legally purchase a gun, because they had already been convicted of a violent crime. Which seems like exactly the sort of thing the law was designed to catch in the first place.
But of all the statistics that show just how selective “justice” is being in the case of Hunter Biden, the results of a Freedom of Information request sent to Delaware for the year in which the purchase was made may be the most damning.
The provided information shows that in fiscal year 2019, only three Form 4473 cases were referred for prosecution in Delaware. The U.S. attorney for Delaware—that would be David Weiss, the same U.S. attorney in charge of the investigation into Hunter Biden—opted to prosecute none of these cases. None.
Confronted with three other cases involving the exact same charge in the same state, in the same year, Weiss decided to file no charges. But Hunter Biden is getting three charges and the possibility of 25 years.
Two journalists with long experience in Russia were interviewed by the German publisher t-online. I translated a few of their statements for DKos readers. They are very pessimistic about Russian society and any prospect of changes from the grassroots.
Russian society has been deformed by dictatorship and brainwashing for more than a hundred years. Victim myths are systematically instilled and hatred of the West is fueled; any critical questioning of this version of history is punished.
If you hinder the interests of the authorities, you will face severe consequences. That’s why most people prefer to stay out of it. The Russians are afraid.
There is no individual sense of responsibility for collective action in Russia.
Veterans (in the Russian army) have always tortured younger people to a degree that is unimaginable here, and this is never punished. This horrible experience shapes the entire Russian society.
Nobody in the free West can expect people in Russia to take their protest to the streets. The penalties are horrendous and arbitrary. You can be arrested just for holding up a blank piece of paper.
People in Russia have no idea how WW-II really happened. They know that Germany committed terrible crimes after the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. But they don’t know that the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939 to divide the country according to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. People have a selective view of history instilled in them from an early age. That’s why many now believe the lie that there are “Nazis” in Kiev who are being controlled remotely by the West.
There will be no reforms as long as Russia does not experience a clear defeat in Ukraine, and even this chance is low.
The Russian people make no connection between their criminal and brutal government and their own passive and slavish mentality. [this is my summary of several sentences – not a translation]
The risk (of nuclear escalation) seems very low. It would also be the end of Russia. It is clear that this regime is cowardly. It only attacks weaker states. People in the Kremlin know that they are hopelessly inferior to NATO.
The United Auto Workers union has only been on strike for a little over a half a day, but there have been enough developments so far that we’re just gonna go ahead and drop a round-up.
Who Would Have Thought A Billionaire Would Be Anti-Union?
Following the announcement of the strike, Elon Musk, owner of What Used To Be Twitter and non-union auto manufacturer Tesla, went ahead and deleted the checkmark that the UAW paid for.
The site no longer does actual verification and the checkmark is really just an emoji, but by paying Musk $8 a month, users can get their “posts” boosted, write longer “posts,” and do some other stuff that definitely isn’t worth it. Still, it’s actually a little funny in light of the fact that one of the reasons he and his supporters wanted to get rid of actual verification for actual celebrities and journalists was because the site previously took checkmarks away from professional bigots and disinformation purveyors as punishment for being professional bigots and disinformation purveyors.
This move is obviously meant to limit the amount of reach the UAW is getting — and he probably hoped nobody would notice, but Ryan Grim and Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept did notice and wrote it up. Not long afterwards, the checkmark mysteriously reappeared.
As noted in The Intercept, Musk has a long history of union-busting nonsense — including actually firing workers for talking about unionizing, which is very illegal, and barring employees from talking about their wages, which is also very illegal. He also pays his workers a lot less than workers at the Big Three make […]
Even though his workforce is nonunion, the fact is that when unions win, wages and benefits go up for all workers — and Musk is pretty happy paying people peanuts.
Trump Also Hates Auto Workers, Natch
In an interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker for next Sunday’s “Meet The Press” (in case you thought it was gonna get less both-sidesey without Chuck Todd), Trump attacked UAW leadership for not supporting him. He also claimed that the strike would push the manufacturers to move to China, which they actually will not because Chinese car factories are not very good or very well developed and won’t be for years. There’s a reason they are not making cars in China right now. You can’t SHEIN a car, it would cost too much to insure.
Via CNBC:
“The auto workers will not have any jobs, Kristen, because all of these cars are going to be made in China. The electric cars, automatically, are going to be made in China,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview set to air Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
“The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump,” the Republican presidential frontrunner added.
So basically what he’s saying is that he thinks the best thing to do would be to just let these car companies pull in massive profits off the backs of their workers without sharing any of that with said workers, and the union should support him in this. Nice!
The fact is, these auto manufacturers are not staying in America out of the pure goodness of their hearts. They’re just not. And if it does become feasible to move their operations overseas, they will do so regardless of what they are paying American workers now, because what they pay American workers will always be significantly more than it costs to build something in a sweatshop. The average automotive worker in China makes, on average, about $3000 a year. So unless we want people in America making $3000 a year (we don’t!), sacrificing good wages now is not going to keep these companies from moving to China in the future if that is what they want. So get the damn bag while it’s available.
General Motors CEO Making $30 Million Unclear On Why Workers Should Get More Money
Effortlessly clueless General Motors CEO Mary Barra made an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning, where she repeatedly avoided answering questions about why she thinks it is okay to screw her workers.
Barra claims in the interview that she put an “historic offer on the table,” and yet repeatedly fails to explain why that offer includes only a 20 percent increase over four years, while her own salary is increasing by 34 percent.
Barra kept trying to explain that her salary is simply based on how well the company does, while CNBC’s Vanessa Yurkevich kept trying to press her on whether or not she thought that the people actually making the cars should also benefit when the company is doing well, which she avoided by talking about profit sharing. Which, again, is not the same thing as one’s salary being raised 34 percent.
The UAW was not impressed, tweeting, “During the eight and a half minutes @GM CEO Mary Barra appeared on CNN this morning, she “earned” more money than any autoworker makes in a full work day. And that’s how the Big Three wants to keep it.”
Much of conservative eastern Oregon wants to be part of Idaho, and a push to shift an old border is underway
The Snake River has formed the border of Oregon and Idaho for more than a century and a half, slicing through fields of onions, sugar beets and wheat that roll out for miles through Treasure Valley.
Here on the Oregon side, where Bob Wheatley has lived his entire life, are a collection of high-end cannabis shops, a new Planned Parenthood clinic, and gas prices a dollar higher than those just over the river.
Across the river in the town of Fruitland, in western Idaho, new housing subdivisions stretch out for miles from the main streets. Agriculture, bottling and construction businesses that just months ago were based in Oregon are thriving. One of Fruitland’s new problems is building enough schools to accommodate the out-of-state arrivals, many of them from Oregon.
“Things have changed,” said Wheatley, who retired recently after five decades as a local pharmacist. “And it’s the politics that have changed fastest.”
These twin towns across an old border straddle a seam in the nation’s deepening political polarization, neighboring opposites living under starkly different laws. The river separates states that, perhaps more than in any other part of the nation, embrace the two parties’ most extreme positions on gun control, abortion rights, environmental regulation, drug legalization and other issues at the center of the American political debate.
The result in eastern Oregon, from the volcanic Cascade Range to this border town, is a sense of profound political alienation. The disaffection among conservatives has spawned a movement to change the state’s political dynamic in a novel if quixotic way — rather than relocate or change the politics, which seems impossible to many here, why not move the border and become residents who live under the rules of Idaho?
This is no small task.
Both the Oregon and Idaho state legislatures, which are controlled by Democrats and Republicans respectively, would have to approve a border shift, which in this case would be the most significant geographically since western states began forming in the mid-19th century. The issue would then go to the U.S. Congress.
But, as more than two dozen interviews across the state made clear, there is momentum behind the cause among a lightly populated region of ranch land, swift rivers, and vast pine forests. It is known formally as the Greater Idaho movement. [map at the link]
So far 12 counties in central and eastern Oregon have voted in favor of local ballot measures that compel county leaders to study the idea of moving the border about 270 miles west. The movement envisions 14 full counties joining Idaho, along with parts of others.
[…] White residents account for more than 80 percent of the population.
The political contrast between the states is stark.
Oregon Democrats have a more than 30 percent edge in voter registration over Republicans, and Joe Biden won the state by 16 percentage points in 2020. Idaho offers a mirror image: Republican voters outnumber Democrats more than 5 to 1, and Donald Trump defeated Biden by 30 percentage points. Both states have sent two senators from the same party to Washington — Democrats in Oregon, Republicans in Idaho.
[…] In many parts of the country, the divide between red and blue has prompted a re-sorting in which moving states has seemed simpler to tens of thousands of people than changing the party in charge.
The Greater Idaho movement may be among the most extreme versions of this trend. But deep-blue California is also experiencing pockets of red resistance to dominant Democratic rule.
El Dorado County, which bumps up against the southern tip of Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border, has been the venue recently for boisterous town hall meetings over whether to secede. Last year, San Bernardino County supervisors voted to study creating its own state. A movement to carve out a new “state of Jefferson” from parts of northeastern California has been simmering for more than a half century.
[…] Abortion remains legal in Oregon. In Idaho, the Republican legislature passed a law last year that bans abortion after six weeks except in cases of rape and incest. In addition, the legislature passed a first-of-its-kind “abortion trafficking” bill that punishes health-care providers with prison time for helping a minor secure the procedure out of state.
Oregon voters passed among the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in November, while Idaho gun laws are among the most permissive in the nation. Much of the Oregon agenda, including a law requiring that by 2035 all new vehicles sold in the state are electric, has been adopted despite the objection of the eastern counties.
“What we’re looking for is local control, not foreign control,” said Oregon state Sen. Dennis Linthicum, a Republican former software engineer and cattle rancher. “And by foreign I mean Portland, Salem and the rest of those in the west who have decided they know better than we do how to run our lives.” […]
I’ve been writing about economics and politics for many years, and have learned to keep my temper. Politicians and policymakers often make decisions that are simply cruel; they also often make decisions that are stupid, damaging the national interest for no good reason. And all too often they make decisions that are both cruel and stupid. Flying into a rage every time that happens would be exhausting.
But the latest census report on income and poverty made me angry. It showed that child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022. That’s 5.1 million children pushed into misery, for it really is miserable to be poor in America.
And the thing is, this didn’t have to happen. Soaring child poverty wasn’t caused by inflation or other macroeconomic problems. It was instead a political choice. The story is in fact quite simple: Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years, and as a result just about all of the gains were lost.
The cruelty of this choice should be obvious. Maybe you believe (wrongly) that poor American adults are responsible for their own poverty; even if you believe that, poor children aren’t to blame. Maybe you worry that helping low-income families will reduce their incentive to work and improve their lives. Such concerns are greatly exaggerated, but even if you worry about incentive effects, are they big enough to justify keeping children poor?
Why do I say that this policy choice was stupid as well as cruel? Two reasons. First, avoiding much of this human catastrophe would have cost remarkably little money. Second, child poverty is, in the long run, very expensive for the nation as a whole: Americans who live in poverty as children grow up to become less healthy and productive adults than they should be. Even in purely fiscal terms, refusing to help poor children may, over time, actually increase budget deficits.
About the immediate budgetary costs: The thing about helping low-income Americans is that precisely because their initial incomes are so low, fairly modest amounts of aid can make a huge difference to their well-being.
More than half of the rise in child poverty could have been avoided by extending the 2021 enhancement of the child tax credit. Such an extension would probably have had a direct budget cost of about $105 billion a year.
That may sound like a lot to people who aren’t familiar with the sizes of both the U.S. economy and other major social programs. But it’s actually a modest sum. It’s less than half a percent of the country’s gross domestic product. It’s a small fraction of what we spend on Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and Medicare ($800 billion). It’s only a bit more than half the annual revenue loss from the 2017 Trump tax cut.
Furthermore, we could have significantly blunted the rise in child poverty by retaining just one piece of the child tax credit enhancement, the part that made the credit fully refundable — that is, allowed the lowest-income households to get the entire $2,000 credit. The estimated cost of doing this would be around only $12 billion a year — pocket change in the context of the federal budget.
But we didn’t do any of these things, again, because of conservative opposition. And the nation as a whole will pay a steep price.
[…] Realistically, the political will to undo our terrible mistake doesn’t exist at the moment. But there’s always hope that we’ll eventually do the right thing.
Yeah, that’s a bad thing, but I have to point out that rabies can’t “return” because it never went away. It is endemic in the wild in some areas, and can be encountered in a variety of species from raccoons to foxes to bats.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday urged Americans not to shy away from uncomfortable facts about the history of violence against Black Americans.
The first Black woman on the nation’s highest court offered her frank assessment of the tendency to avoid acknowledging racism in a speech in Birmingham, Alabama. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have recently led the charge in public school curriculum changes that critics say whitewash the country’s past.
Her remarks were part of a ceremony at the 16th Street Baptist Church marking the 60th anniversary of the racist 1963 bombing of the building, in which four young Black girls were killed.
“If we are going to continue to move forward as a nation, we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history. It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about,” Jackson said.
“We cannot forget because the uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves. … We cannot learn from past mistakes we do not know exist,” she added.
Jackson’s blunt words are notable not only because they come from a sitting member of the highest court, but also because they land on the heels of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority restricting race-conscious admissions practices in colleges and universities in June. Jackson, appointed by President Joe Biden, is one of three liberals on the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
In a scathing 29-page dissent to the court’s affirmative action ruling, Jackson wrote that her conservative colleagues were suffering from “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.” She warned that deeming “race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
Her comments in Alabama also came at a time when the state’s Republican leaders have an emergency application pending at the Supreme Court seeking to revive a congressional district map that a lower court said discriminates against Black voters.
The state was forced to redraw the map after a Supreme Court ruling in June struck down its previous attempt in a ruling that surprisingly reaffirmed the landmark Voting Rights Act, enacted to protect the rights of minority voters. Jackson was in the majority in that 5-4 ruling.
After a lengthy summer break, the Supreme Court’s new nine-month term begins next month.
In Friday’s remarks, Jackson did not address any pending issues before the court or the debate swirling about whether justices should adopt a new ethics code after recent controversies.
Speaking more broadly, she defended the importance of facts and history in education at a time when some school districts continue to grapple with efforts to police how racism is discussed in the classroom.
“I know that atrocities like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive,” Jackson said. “But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.”
She juxtaposed her own life with that of the four girls killed in the bombing in illustrating progress made in the intervening years.
“I have come to Alabama with a heart filled with gratitude, for unlike those four little girls, I have lived and have now been entrusted with the solemn responsibility of serving our great nation,” Jackson said.
The victims — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — could have achieved great things themselves, she said.
“They could have broken barriers. They could have shattered ceilings. They could have grown up to be doctors or lawyers or judges, appointed to serve on the highest court in our land,” Jackson added.
Jackson said she was moved by how much her appointment to the court meant to people. “Some have even said that they never thought they would see this happen in their lifetimes,” she added.
A jury in the US state of Michigan has acquitted three men of involvement in a plot to kidnap the state’s governor.
William Null, Michael Null and Eric Molitor were found not guilty of providing support for a terrorist act and a weapons charge…
But the jury acquitted the Nulls and Mr Molitor, who were the last to stand trial in connection with the case, after a three-week trial in Antrim County in northern Michigan, site of Ms Whitmer’s holiday home.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, prosecutor William Rollstin said the men “hated their government” and “were willing to go to war”.
Prosecutors said the Nulls – who are twin brothers – and Mr Molitor participated in military-style drills and travelled to Ms Whitmer’s holiday home, where they shot a reconnaissance video.
In testimony, Mr Molitor and William Null admitted they had attended drills and travelled to the holiday home. But the defence argued that the trio were scared off when talk turned to violence and did not support the plot. Mr Molitor said Fox, one of the organisers, was “incredibly dumb” and would not pull off a kidnapping…
According to multiple sources, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Russian Republic of Chechnya, loyal toady to Vladimir Putin, and producer of hilarious TikTok videos, has been hospitalized. Some of those reports say the man who betrayed Chechen forces to Russia is in a coma. There are also reports that the Chechen health minister has been disappeared for failing to keep Kadyrov in tiptop condition.
In recent photos, Kadyrov has appeared severely swollen. Make that more severely swollen than usual. His odd appearance and reduced visibility lends a certain amount of credence to reports that he is seriously ill. On the other hand … Kadyrov claimed to have been poisoned by a letter earlier this year and was said to be at death’s door before he popped up in Moscow and the whole brink-of-death-take-one was forgotten.
So this could easily be part of a stunt to explain how Kadyrov was too strong to be felled by a heart attack. Or how he wrestled single-handed with Death and whipped the Grim Reaper’s bony butt. Honestly, even reports that Kadyrov had died could be just the prequel to glorious reports of his resurrection. Because, after everything else he has pulled, why not?
[…] But of all the ridiculous Kadyrov videos, my favorite has to be one that he didn’t produce. This video from The World is One News is so funny simply because it seemingly takes everything about “Lyulya” seriously. That the announcer keeps a straight face throughout this is either an admirable act of farce, or extremely distressing. [video at the link]
In any case, don’t be surprised to learn either that Kadyrov is dead and there’s a mad scramble for power in Chechnya, or that he’s descending through the clouds after ripping a sword away from the nearest archangel while preparing to take out his vengeance … on whatever nearby Russian town can pass for Ukraine.
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EVERYTHING WE LEARN ABOUT ELON MUSK MAKES IT WORSE
Biographer Walter Isaacson has been making the rounds in conjunction with the release of his ode to Elon. While the author is clearly anxious to talk about anything else, his interviews invariably turn back to Musk’s actions in Ukraine, because those actions, and what they reveal about the greater threat Musk represents, are not good.
In the latest conversation with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Isaacson is doing his best to defend the man he just spent three years following around. According to his biographer, Musk has not talked to Putin, which contradicts Musk’s own statements. Also, says Isaacson, everyone should remember that “when the Russians invaded Ukraine, [Musk] immediately came to the aid of Ukraine, and Viasat, the satellite company, its satellites were all disabled. Even the U.S. and other military couldn’t do satellite communication. So Ukraine, as Vice Minister Fedorov has said often, would have been crushed had Starlink, had SpaceX, and Musk not rushed in Starlink satellites. So I think that he still is quite in favor of protecting Ukraine.”
For what it’s worth, Musk didn’t rush any satellites to Ukraine—or even slow-walk them in. He merely offered receivers for satellites that were already in place. While SpaceX did provide some of those initial receivers free and cover some of the service, most of the receivers in Ukraine were bought by Ukraine and their service is paid for by Ukraine. When SpaceX complained about the cost of providing free service—which wasn’t so much “cost” as failing to generate revenue—the U.S. government signed a contract to cover what SpaceX had been providing. For every Starlink receiver now in Ukraine, Musk’s company is drawing revenue.
In fact, earlier this month SpaceX reported that they had turned a profit of $55 million on “surging revenue” of $1.5 billion.
Musk did move in to provide a service early in the invasion. And it was useful. That action acted as fantastic advertising for his new service and has since become a source of revenue for his company. Which makes it hard to think of this as a wholly humanitarian gesture … especially in light of what else Isaacson had to say.
Isaacson: I made a mistake, which I mentioned a couple of days ago, and I’ve said–which as I put in the book–he cut off Starlink. In fact, what he did was reaffirm the decision that it would not be enabled on the Crimean coast, and I have all the text messages back and forth because the Ukrainians didn’t know that.
So that night–I mean, the essential point is that night, Musk did make the decision not to enable Starlink to be used for this sneak attack. Now, I should have just expressed it that way, which is he decided not to enable Starlink to be used for this sneak attack, but that leads to the broader question of what gives him the power to decide whether or not a sneak attack on Crimea is something that should be allowed and whether or not it would lead to a wider war.
Let’s walk through these two paragraphs. First, Isaacson seems to think it’s somehow better that Musk didn’t turn off service around Crimea; he just geofenced that area of occupied Ukraine off and didn’t tell Ukraine.
Second, it was not a “sneak attack.” It was a fucking attack. That’s how attacks work. You don’t announce them in advance.
Labeling this a “sneak attack” or comparing it, as Musk did, to Pearl Harbor, suggests that Ukraine was doing something heinous here, something outside the normal bounds of war. The truth is, they were defending themselves by striking at an enemy that was occupying Ukrainian territory and using that territory to launch missiles into civilian homes, leading to thousands of civilian deaths. Ukraine was using weapons specifically designed to take out military targets, while Russia was using those military targets to strike civilian buildings.
“Sneak attack.” Damn.
But wait, we’re not done.
Ignatius: Why were the Ukrainians so surprised to learn that they wouldn’t get Starlink coverage in Crimea?
Isaacson: Because Musk had not enabled it at Crimea and kept that a secret.
And by the way, as you’ve probably seen in the book, there’s all these encrypted text messages that I was given because it happens in Donbas as well. They can’t figure out, because Musk also decides not to enable it in parts of eastern Ukraine, because he doesn’t want it to be used for offensive purposes.
The Senate probe into this asshole cannot get moving soon enough. What Isaacson is casually acknowledging here is that Musk has ceded both Crimea and the Donbas to Russia, and deemed any attempt by Ukraine to liberate these territories, or even to fight back against weapons systems deployed in these territories, as an offensive act.
Musk is willing to help Ukraine … so long as they stay outside the bounds of a Greater Russia that he’s already handily defined without telling them.
Let’s go one more step before we let this go for the day.
Ignatius: Walter, why did Musk keep the fact that Starlink was not enabled for Crimea secret from the Ukrainians? In effect, they were walking into a trap. They thought they had coverage that they didn’t. Why did he keep it secret?
Isaacson: It was geofenced, as I said. He felt that the terms of service was–it wasn’t supposed to be used for offensive purposes. You and I can discuss all you want whether or not Crimea, you know, is part of Ukraine and it should have been included, but it wasn’t. And, you know, why didn’t he tell the Ukrainians exactly where the geofence was? Frankly, I don’t know.
Yeah, why wouldn’t he do that, Walter? Seems pretty fucking sneaky.
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ZAPORIZHZHIA FRONT IS EITHER COLLAPSING, OR STAGNANT, OR…
According to Igor Kossov at the Kyiv Independent, every day in Zaporizhzhia is bringing Russian forces closer to collapse. Breaches in Russian defenses are being widened. Russian equipment is being attrited. And Russian forces have a fundamental issue: They’re fighting with defensive positions created by one general, but operating under the command of another general who has a very different style.
Kossov notes what everyone has noted: Gen. Sergei Surovikin built elaborate multitier lines of defense including massive mine fields, rows of dragon’s teeth, tank trenches, personnel trenches, pillboxes, and hardened firing positions. But Surovikin was seen as being too close to Wagner Group’s former leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. That connection got Surovikin benched for several months before he turned up in Africa.
In Surovikin’s absence, command fell to Gen. Valery Gerasimov. Rather than huddle behind the defenses his predecessor had constructed, Gerasimov sent his troops forward, often massing them in attempts to hold or retake ground. This generated extremely high losses and has diminished Russian forces to the point where defending Surovikin’s lines could be difficult, even if they decided to climb into those trenches and keep their heads down.
On the other hand, analysts who have been following the invasion from the beginning can’t help but notice that there’s been a prolonged period in which the lines in the south don’t seem to have changed. [Tweet and map at the link]
Ukraine may be, as Kossov indicates, in the midst of solidifying its hold on trenches and towns it has already liberated. It may be positioning itself for the next move. But that long period of relative inactivity is a little distressing.
It would be considerably more distressing if kos had not gone over these concerns and exactly why this was likely to happen, shortly after Ukraine liberated Robotyne.
What was once a slow, plodding advance picked up a great deal of steam, shocking observers with its sudden rapid gains. But if all goes well, things should slow down for a bit. And that’s not a typo—if things go well.
It may be frustrating for those who, like me, take great pleasure from flipping the color of dots on towns and redrawing the border between Ukrainian and Russian forces, but this period of relative stability fits right into the Gerasimov-ness of Russian actions on the southern front. Ukraine moved until it held the high ground on the east of Robotyne, and had broken through both the first and second defensive lines. Then it … stopped. It’s an action that allows Ukrainian forces to regroup and bring fresh forces to the front, while any effort to retake ground by Russia runs into reinforced, well-positioned troops.
It’s also an opportunity for Ukraine to move up the tanks and other heavy weaponry that is often lagging the infantry in this peculiar new style of drone- and foot-soldier-dominated war.
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A CLOSER LOOK SHOWS THAT THE SUB ROSTOV-ON-DON TOOK A DIRECT HIT
The U.K. government seems pretty excited about the way the Ukrainian military put those Sky Shadow missiles to use. [Tweet and image at the link]
There have been numerous close-up looks at the Ropucha Class landing ship Minsk, and all of them appear to show a vessel that is out of the game, likely forever. Both the initial impact and the subsequent fire did such extensive damage that the ship is little more than a burned out hulk.
The Kilo-class submarine Rostov-on-Don also took a direct hit, and also saw fire across much of its outer hull, but it’s harder to predict just how bad the damage really is. Close-up images of the sub’s nose show that the missile apparently impacted well ahead of the conning tower, on the steeper curve of the sub’s bow. It’s unclear if this missile actually penetrated the sub’s double hull. If it did, there is likely a great deal of internal damage. Even if it didn’t, the obvious damage to the pressure hull shows that the Rostov-on-Don will need to get towed to some other dry dock before it can be beaten into a configuration able to reach any significant depth.
Neither ship nor boat is going to return in this war—unless it’s as featured players on new Ukrainian stamps.
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MOVEMENT SOUTH OF BAKHMUT
For the past few days, it seems that there’s been some … disagreement … between Ukrainian leadership and the forces on the ground south of Bakhmut. First, Ukrainian deputy defense minister and military spokesperson Hanna Mailar announced the liberation of Andriivka, only to have members of the forces fighting in that village contradict her. Then the Ukrainian General Staff made the liberation announcement formal just a few hours later.
That was followed up on Friday with announcements that Klishchiivka had been liberated, only to have the primary force fighting in that town pull back their own statement an hour later. But in any case, Ukrainian forces have been walking around the town today with no obvious pushback. That includes Ukrainian troops moving in the area of the northern part of the town, where Russia had been holding out.
So it’s hard to imagine just how much more liberated Klishchiivka can get.
While we wait for it to be official (again), enjoy these fine images of Russian soldier’s hightailing it out of both Klishchiivka and Andriivka. [Tweets and videos at the link]
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Joe Biden to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House next week
US President Joe Biden will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, September 21.
“This comes at a critical time as Russia desperately seeks help from countries like North Korea in its brutal war in Ukraine and Ukrainian forces continue to make progress in their counteroffensive,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said. [Tweet and image at the link]
A woman known as a QAnon-inspired conspiracy theorist who purports to be the “Queen of Canada” was forced out of Kamsack, Sask., on Wednesday.
Romana Didulo and some of her followers had convoyed into Kamsack, according to local residents and town officials who spoke with CBC News.
Within a six-hour period Wednesday, a couple hundred townspeople peacefully protested their presence and the RCMP eventually escorted the group out of town, they say…
Didulo started as a far-right QAnon conspiracy theorist a couple years ago but has turned into something else, said Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an independent, non-profit organization that says it monitors, exposes and counters hate groups.
Didulo has declared herself the “Queen of Canada,” among other titles including the national Indigenous leader. She has amassed thousands of followers by pushing conspiracy theories and what she calls decrees through social media, particularly Telegram — a messaging app popular with the far-right.
Some of her followers are in personal trouble for following her directives, such as one saying they no longer need to pay tax on utility bills, Balgord said, but others decrees include tones of violence.
“This is not necessarily a group of harmless people,” he said. “We are talking about a cult…
Sounds like there is some sovereign citizen mixed in with that Q.
Federal prosecutors in the case charging Donald Trump with scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential election are seeking an order that would restrict the former president from “inflammatory” and “intimidating” comments about witnesses, lawyers and the judge.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team said in a motion filed Friday that such a “narrow, well-defined” order was necessary to preserve the integrity of the case and to avoid prejudicing potential jurors.
Federal prosecutors in the case charging Donald Trump with scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential election are alleging that the former president has targeted individuals with threats, harassment and inflammatory statements, a judge said Friday.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan made the revelation in an order permitting special counsel Jack Smith’s team to file a redacted motion on the topic that will black out the names and identifying information of the individuals who say they have been targeted. An unredacted version will be filed under seal.
The Justice Department has also conducted interviews with unnamed individuals describing the threats and harassments they have received, though the transcripts of those interviews will remain sealed.
“The history of harassment and threats towards the individuals whose information has been redacted demonstrates the real likelihood that they could suffer further intimidation upon disclosure of their identities,” Chutkan wrote. “And the government’s proposed redactions are tailored to mitigate that risk, covering only those individuals’ identifying information in a handful of instances and the witness interview transcripts.”
The issue surfaced last week with the disclosure by the Justice Department that it sought to file a motion related to “daily” public statements by Trump that it said it feared would taint the jury pool.
Also Friday, Smith’s team pushed back against the Trump team request to have Chutkan recuse herself from the case. Defense lawyers had cited prior comments from Chutkan that they say cast doubt on her ability to be fair, but prosecutors responded that there was no valid basis for her to step aside.
And when he continues to intimidate the court and witnesses, LOCK HIM UP! [Yes, that is what would normally be done.]
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He’s violated the terms of his bail, big-time.
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it’s not just trump. there are 1500 radio stations attacking them nonstop. judges, juries, prosecutor. all day long every day they’re blasting the stochastic terrorism
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As with all restrictions on the dotard, this will be meaningless until and unless, there are tangible consequences. Jail time, restriction of movement or media interviews or fines >$1M are necessary, or it is just so much noise.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — One of the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justices tapped to investigate impeaching newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz for taking Democratic Party money accepted donations from the state Republican Party when he was on the court.
The former justice, Republican David Prosser, gave $500 to the conservative candidate who lost to Protasiewicz, did not recuse from cases involving a law he helped pass as a lawmaker and was investigated after a physical altercation with a liberal justice….
Vos won’t say who he’s chosen for the secret, three-judge impeachment review panel, but Prosser confirmed to The Associated Press that Vos asked him to participate. None of the other eight living former justices, six of whom are conservatives, have told the AP they have been picked. Justices are officially nonpartisan in Wisconsin, but in recent years the political parties have backed certain candidates.
The impeachment threat comes after Protasiewicz’s win this spring handed liberals a majority on the court for the first time in 15 years, which bolstered Democratic hopes it would throw out the Republican maps, legalize abortion and chip away at Republican laws enacted over the past decade-plus.
Prosser also refused a request to recuse in 2015 from considering three cases related to an investigation into then-Gov. Scott Walker and conservative groups that supported him. The groups in question had spent $3.3 million to help elect Prosser in 2011. He defended hearing the cases, saying that because the money was spent four years earlier, enough time had passed to make them irrelevant.
Prosser then voted with the majority to shut down the investigation.
No matter who is on the impeachment review panel, Democrats say the process is a joke.
“The entire concept of having a secret panel deliberating in secret to advise an Assembly speaker on an unconstitutional impeachment on a justice who has yet to rule on a case is a farce,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler. “This is a charade.”
Vos said impeachment may be warranted if Protasiewicz doesn’t step down from hearing two Democratic-backed redistricting lawsuits seeking to undo Republican-drawn legislative maps.
Vos argues that Protasiewicz has prejudged the cases. She never said how she would rule on any lawsuit.
It is up to each justice to decide whether recusal in a case is warranted, and the conservative majority of the court adopted a rule saying that justices don’t have to recuse if they accepted money from parties arguing a case. Other current justices have also been outspoken on hot-button issues before they joined the court and all but one have taken money from political parties.
Under the Wisconsin Constitution, impeachment is reserved for “corrupt conduct in office or for the commission of a crime or misdemeanor.”
StevoRsays
Of all the objects in the Solar System, perhaps the most spectacular are the great comets that occasionally grace our skies. If you’ve been on social media in the past few days, you’ve probably seen articles proclaiming we have such a comet in our skies right now: C/2023 P1 (Nishimura). …(snip)… Unfortunately, Nishimura’s path will keep it close to the Sun in the sky as observed from Earth. While it’s definitely bright enough to be visible to the naked eye in dark skies, at best it will hug the horizon just after sunset — almost lost in the Sun’s glow.
Still, astronomers across the globe are excited. Even a hard-to-spot naked-eye comet is worth observing. And as science writer and astronomer David H. Levy once said:
“Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.”
There’s a chance Nishimura might brighten unexpectedly. If it does, we might see something special in the next couple of weeks. If not, there’s always next year — but more on that later.
Last September, a New Jersey toddler got ahold of a bottle of weight loss supplements. The product, purchased by the toddler’s mothers, was labeled as the dried root of tejocote, aka Mexican hawthorn, a large shrub-like plant found in Mexico and Latin America that produces crabapple-like fruits. Although there’s little data on the effects of the dried root—including any supporting its use for weight loss—tejocote is generally considered safe to consume.
But the toddler soon experienced nausea and vomiting. At an emergency department, doctors noted low heart rate, falling blood pressure, irregular heartbeats, and a telltale anomaly on an electrocardiogram.
The weight loss supplement was, in fact, not harmless tejocote root—it was entirely pieces of yellow oleander, a poisonous plant containing cardiac glycosides, including a toxic cardenolide, that can cause dysrhythmia and cardiac arrest, among other things.
The emergency department physicians didn’t know this. But, unsure of what was going on, they contacted the New Jersey Poison Information and Education System (NJPIES), who helped figure it out. The NJPIES recommended a blood test for digoxin, a type of cardenolide. The test returned positive, indicating cardenolide toxicity, and the toddler was then given a digoxin overdose antidote—digoxin-specific antibody fragments.
Fortunately, the toddler recovered, but the NJPIES wasn’t done. In a case report published Thursday, the New Jersey doctors and toxicology experts reported buying 10 tejocote products sold online as weight loss supplements and testing them. The products were tested by Flora Research Laboratories, which specializes in analyzing the chemical constituents of supplements. In this case, the company used ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography–accurate mass-time of flight mass spectrometry analysis, and consulted with an ethnobotanist…
Televangelist and former Donald Trump spiritual adviser Paula White claimed that she helped Nelson Mandela end apartheid in South Africa.
White made the outrageous claim during the Universal Peace Federation 2023 Peace Summit in Seoul, South Korea, on May 4.
White — who claims to speak in tongues and once prayed for the angels of “Africa and South America” to reverse the 2020 election — claims in a resurfaced clip that she worked with Nelson Mandela to end apartheid in Pretoria, South Africa, while doing advocacy work, according to The Christian Post…
The Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Razia Saleh told the Post the foundation had no record of White ever working with Mandela.
“We have searched our holdings and do not find anything on Paula White,” said Saleh…
A Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessel (USV) hit a Samum-class missile carrier hovercraft on Thursday, 14 September.
Source: Ukrainska Pravda’s sources in the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU)
Details: The sources said the SSU’s SeaBaby USV hit the Samum near the entry to Sevastopol Bay.
The USV hit the rear right side of the vessel, causing significant damage, which resulted in the ship losing power.
The sources stated that the Russians had to tow the Samum away for repairs “with a significant tilt at the stern and listing to starboard”.
The SSU used an experimental model of USV capable of operating in a storm, using high waves for cover. The waves were 1.5-2 metres high at the time of the special operation…
The day before Hunter Biden was indicted, a conservative-led appeals panel ruled that the federal gun law used to charge Biden was unconstitutional when it was applied in a previous case.
The three-judge panel on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided against the law in a case involving Patrick Daniels, a Mississippi man who was convicted and sentenced to prison for possessing a firearm while being a marijuana user.
The law in question prohibits anyone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from owning a firearm.
But the appeals court panel ruled that it was too broad when it was used in Daniels’ case and tossed out his conviction…
Paula White-Cain, a former advisor to Donald Trump, claims that she worked with Nelson Mandela to bring an end to Apartheid in South Africa but no evidence has been discovered, the Christian Post reports.
White-Cain made the statement during a presentation she gave at the Universal Peace Federation’s Peace Summit in May where she spoke about her conversion to Christianity and her advocacy work around the world.
“That advocacy started, and I would go to South Africa soon after that and build the first AIDS home in Pretoria, South Africa, and begin to work with Nelson Mandela to abolish apartheid,” White-Cain said.
“Little did I know that God would take me [to] over 100 nations, multitudes all over the place to bring forth true transformation, ultimately bringing my path with Mother Moon (co-founder of the controversial Unification Church with Sun Myung Moon her late husband) and being a part of this great organization.”
The Nelson Mandela Foundation which is located in Johannesburg, South Africa, released a statement noting they could not find any evidence of Mandela working with White-Cain.
“We have searched our holdings and do not find anything on Paula White,” said Razia Saleh, head of archive and research…
This is not a hard story to tell. A first-year law student could win this case [impeaching Joe Biden] before a fair jury. Now, the United States Senate isn’t a fair jury. It’s full of great fashion icons like John Fetterman. But I think that the Senate will be the platform, and the American people will be the jury when we put that case on before them.
Senator John Fetterman’s reply:
Government shutdown in t-minus 16 days. Instead of crying about how I dress, how about you get your shit together and do your job, bud?
Commentary:
[…] Now, if you need the lowdown on why Republicans’ entire impeachment case is naught but frothy horseshit, Daily Kos’ own Mark Sumner dropped his latest wonderful primer on the manufactured allegations on Thursday. Gaetz’s—and the GOP’s—strategy is clear: Muddy the waters among low-information (i.e., Republican) voters enough to make President Joe Biden look corrupt—all so they can shove the most corrupt human on the planet down our throats for another four years.
After all, if everyone’s dishonest, you might as well vote for the one with the most felony convictions.
So instead of getting down into the wonky weeds on this “issue” here, let’s take a cue from Sen. Fetterman, who’s treated the GOP’s disingenuous efforts with the dismissiveness they deserve. […]
[video of Fetterman mocking the impeachment threats is available at the link]
[….] even before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally announced the launch of a formal impeachment inquiry this week, Fetterman was being unusually blunt about the GOP’s upcoming, and no doubt soon-to-be-disastrous, Fyre Liar Festival.
On Sept. 6, as Republicans were telegraphing plans for their latest waste of time, Fetterman literally dared them to go ahead with their half-baked schemes.
“Go ahead, do it. I dare you,” Fetterman said. “Your man has what, three or four indictments now? Trump has a mug shot, and he’s been impeached twice.”
Fetterman also correctly noted that the impeachment push “would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right” and “would diminish what impeachment really means.”
Well, yeah, that’s at least part of the reason they’re doing this. If impeachment no longer means anything, Trump’s long-demonstrated penchant for double-fisting big, frosty mugs o’ crime might not seem like such a deal-breaker. Nor will his (likely) upcoming felony convictions.
In fact, Democrats should think about letting Fetterman lead on this issue, if only because he’s a genuine human being who abhors political double-talk and can connect with ordinary voters on a host of real issues. When he says, “Sometimes you just gotta call their bullshit,” people will be more likely to listen than if, say, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says it. […]
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tried to quell his raucous caucus by telling them they can’t force a government shutdown while continuing their “Biden crime family” investigations and impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. He previewed that argument a few weeks ago during a Fox News interview. “If we shut down, all of government shuts it down—investigations and everything else—it hurts the American public,” he said.
Maybe that’s why he decided to let his rabid weasels loose in an impeachment inquiry, thinking they would be so caught up in the bloodthirst that they wouldn’t want it to be derailed by a shutdown. The problem is that McCarthy’s argument is not entirely true, and plenty of the Republican “investigators” intend to keep on chasing their tails, no matter what.
Some of them didn’t even connect the two things until reporters asked them about it. “I have no idea, I’m hopeful that we don’t have that scenario,” Rep. James Comer told The Messenger. He’s the Oversight Committee chair who has to keep publicly admitting that he’s got nuthin’ on the president, despite devoting months and months to the quest. So, yes, it’s totally believable that Comer didn’t even bother to think about whether his pet investigations might be affected.
His counterpart in wild-goose chasing, Rep. Jim Jordan, has thought about it. “We’re gonna do our job no matter what happens,” the Judiciary Committee chair said. He threw in, “We’re not looking to shut down the government.” Seems Jim has some catching up to do with his Freedom Caucus colleagues.
What Jordan isn’t saying is that he would be happy to force his committee staff to continue working during a shutdown, even though they wouldn’t be getting paid. Because that’s how it works. Members of Congress get paid during shutdowns because that’s what the Constitution mandates. Their salaries are not included in the annual appropriations for the legislative branch. Unless that appropriations bill passes before Oct. 1 and a shutdown is averted, the people who work in Congress but aren’t elected members won’t get paid.
Members can deem some of their staff to be “essential” and force them to work without pay during shutdowns. In the case of Comer and Jordan, they could very well decide that their committee staffers have to keep working, which they would have to do without pay until the shutdown gets resolved.
“I’ve never seen a situation where there’s a potential shutdown and this thing running along simultaneously,” Rep. Tom Cole told The Messenger. He’s chair of the Rules Committee. “They certainly couldn’t pay the staffers. At some point, people aren’t coming into work for free, as patriotic as they all are.”
Staffers might not keep coming in, but the impeachment inquiry could keep going, according to one analysis from the last time this threat came up, at the end of 2019. The inquiry likely would continue, because it’s not like the staff would be that essential in “investigating” anyway—there’s no evidence to collect, and no actual crime to probe. Comer and Jordan and their buddies are just making it up as they go along anyway. Paid professionals might just get in their way. [LOL, too true.]
Whether they decide to run with the impeachment inquiry anyway depends on just how self-destructive they’re feeling. Because neither of the two things—impeachment or a government shutdown—are popular with voters. Most Americans don’t think impeachment is warranted, and a large majority are opposed to a shutdown.
If a shutdown happens, Republicans will be blamed. If the only thing Congress is doing while many government services are closed is going after Biden on the basis of unproven and ridiculous conspiracy theories, well, McCarthy might as well just hand the keys to the place over to Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Democrats will have run of the place after 2024.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was fully acquitted Saturday of corruption charges following a historic impeachment trial, a resounding verdict that reaffirms the power of the GOP’s hard right and puts an indicted incumbent who remains under FBI investigation back into office…
Once again. Republican fail to clean up their own mess.
Reginald @483, I guess we have to believe it because it actually happened, but my first thought was “unbelievable!”
Paxton is such a brazen criminal that I thought his fellow Republicans might impeach him. No such luck. However:
[…] The outcome far from ends Paxton’s troubles. He still faces trial on felony securities fraud charges, remains under a separate FBI investigation and is in jeopardy of losing his ability to practice law in Texas because of his baseless attempts to overturn the 2020 election. […]
I saw the photos of Paxton and his lawyers having a good laugh together during the impeachment hearing earlier. Slimeballs.
A new type of vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has shown in the lab setting that it can completely reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes— all without shutting down the rest of the immune system.
A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.
The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with “do not attack” flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system— with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease…
Bezdorizhzhya means “roadlessness” in Ukrainian (it’s rasputitsa in Russian), and it refers to to the biannual mud season that hits Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia in the spring and fall. During this season, off-road or unpaved movement becomes dramatically more difficult.
Historically, bezdorizhzhya has made offensive actions in this corner of the world significantly more difficult, as both Adolf Hitler and Napoleon discovered to their chagrin. Famously, Russia chose to start its full-scale invasion of Ukraine shortly before the spring bezdorizhzhya of 2022, resulting in many of its units being slowed or stopped by mud.
[…] some analysts and experts, like American Army General (and outgoing Joint Chiefs Chair) Mark Milley, are concerned that Ukraine only has 4-6 weeks before mud season gets in the way of its counteroffensive. But as Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas recently predicted, that might not necessarily be the case—and not just because Ukraine’s infantry tactics are better suited to navigating the mud.
Fact is, bezdorizhzhya doesn’t impact all of Ukraine the same.
Much of Ukraine has a clay-rich black soil called cheronzem (“black soil” in Russian), with a high moisture retention ability. Chernozem largely explains how Ukraine’s northern and central farmlands require little to no irrigation. However, this moisture retention ability is precisely what turns the Ukrainian countryside into an unnavigable morass of sticky mud able to swallow entire tanks. [Tweet and video at the link, shows a tank pretty much buried in the mud.]
In those conditions, armored vehicles struggle anywhere outside paved surfaces (where they can more easily be targeted by artillery). Trucks have trouble delivering supplies. Yet despite the conventional wisdom, mud season may prove a boon to Ukraine’s counteroffensive—not a hindrance.
MUD SEASON IS MILDER IN THE SOUTH
Bezdorizhzhya comes twice a year, but its effects tend to be far more significant in the spring than in the fall.
In much of Ukraine, winters tend to be quite cold and harsh, resulting in the accumulation of snow. The snowmelt combines with the spring rains to create an extremely high moisture content in the topsoil.
This is exacerbated by a layer of underground frozen earth that persists deep into spring. This frozen earth traps moisture from spring rains and melting snow from draining into groundwater. High levels of moisture are thus retained in the topsoil for weeks, while the frozen earth slowly melts below.
None of that is a factor in the fall.
Bezdorizhzhya also isn’t just about rain. Surprisingly, Ukraine experiences the most rain during the late spring to early summer—around May to July. This is true in southern Ukraine, northern Ukraine, and eastern Ukraine alike. So why is mud season in the fall instead of the summer? Because of temperature and evaporation. Fall bezdorizhzhya generally begins when average daily temperatures drop below 5° C (41° F); the lower temperatures reduce moisture evaporation.
Cities like Luhansk and Kyiv reach that average daily temperature sometime in October. The summer rains have raised the water tables, the high moisture retention of Chernozem soil locks much of this moisture in place and maintains a high water table, and so Ukraine’s fertile farmland is happy!
But when the fall rains arrive, the ground is already saturated from the summer rains, and cooler temperatures reduce evaporation. Most of the Ukrainian countryside turns into a giant mud pit.
But there is an exception to both of these points: southern Ukraine. The area hosting the fiercest, most consequential fighting of the war differs from northern Ukraine in both soil type and climate, mitigating the extent of mud season. [Ukrainian soil map at the link]
While much of Ukraine’s soil is composed of various types of Chernozems with high moisture retention, the exception is in southern Ukraine, around Tokmak, Melitopol, and Kherson. [map at the link]
It may be no coincidence that while they were bogged down everywhere else, Russia’s biggest successes in the spring of 2022 were exactly those cities—Kherson, Melitopol, Tokmak, and Mariupol to their south. Their armored forces were able to maneuver across the fields and plains of this region without dealing with mud challenges. Currently, Ukraine is just 8-9 miles north of this drier soil, just north of Tokmak.
Still, there is more to mud season than soil type. Temperature plays a huge role. Remember—warmer air allows more evaporation, and southern Ukraine remains warmer than the north. [Average temperature comparison at the link]
Mud season is triggered at 5° C (41° F); even just a few degrees is enough to push that tipping point number later into the calendar, giving additional time for southern Ukraine to dry out from the summer rainy season. The more of the summer rains are dried out, the less chance bezdorizhzhya happens at all. (And don’t forget, Kyiv’s soil retains more moisture than Tokmak’s, which is happier to dry out.)
The final factor is precipitation.
Much of southern Ukraine, from Melitopol to northern Crimea, experienced an exceptional mud season this spring, as heavy winter snow and spring rain pushed moisture levels high. Those uncharacteristically muddy conditions likely played a role in Ukraine’s decision to delay the start of the counteroffensive. We don’t know what next spring will bring, but none of this is currently a factor in the months ahead.
Remember, for the south to experience bezdorizhzhya, southern Ukraine would need to see heavy rains in the late summer, which would elevate the water table, and face a cold winter that arrives early, with daily temperatures dropping below 5° C.
While we can’t predict when the weather will turn cold, Ukraine hasn’t had abnormally high summer rains. In fact, it’s been the opposite—below average precipitation.
Paired with record-high summer temperatures, southern Ukraine actually has experienced a drier-than-average summer,</b? and that doesn’t appear to be likely to change through the end of the season. Indeed, the Ukrainian agricultural ministry has been expressing concerns about crop impacts from that drier weather.
So with forecasts for a mild winter throughout Europe, we may end up with exactly none of the factors necessary to trigger a severe fall mud season. And so Ukraine’s southern offensive is very unlikely to be directly adversely affected by the fall berdorizhzhya.
(Incidentally, rainfall was higher than average in northern Ukraine, which may trigger a particularly nasty berdorizhzhya there—the only area where Russia is still trying to advance.)
THE MUD SEASON IS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO CONCENTRATE FORCES IN THE SOUTH
As of late August 2023, Ukraine was conducting the below offensives in blue, while Russia was conducting its own offensives in red. However, two things have altered the strategic calculus of these ongoing offensives. [map at the link]
In late July, Ukraine breached the first Russian defensive line east of Robotyne. Then, on August 28, Ukrainian forces liberated Robotyne, cracking Russia’s first major line.
It took Ukraine only a week to breach the second line of trenches west of Verbove and gain a foothold beyond Russia’s 2nd line of defenses on Sept. 4. Ukraine also made gains directly south of Robotyne, capturing a series of trenchworks to the northeast of Russia’s main trench defenses of Novoprokopivka.
Russian forces appeared to be on their heels, and all the momentum with Ukraine.
So Russia made a major move, transferring its 76th Guards Air Assault Division (known as GAAD) from the eastern front to Tokmak.
Ukraine had two possible responses:
– Mirror Russia’s movement, and transfer troops to the southern theater (or elsewhere); or
– Take advantage of the reduced Russian presence on the eastern front and intensify its attacks.
Ukraine chose option two.
As a result of the reduced Russian presence on the eastern front, Ukraine has made fresh gains south of Bakhmut, as well as south of Avdiivka (northwest of Donetsk). On the other hand, the fresh reinforcements stabilized the Russian line on the approach to Tokmak. Ukraine hasn’t made any significant gains since the arrival of the 76th GAAD, but it has held its progress in the face of repeated Russian counterattacks (because that’s what they do).
So why has Ukraine chosen to preference gains around Bakhmut and Donetsk, instead of pressing its advantage toward Tokmak? One hint may be in where Ukraine has chosen to launch and intensify its attacks.
Near Donetsk, Avdiivka has became a dangerous salient in the Ukrainian line as Russian forces attempted to encircle the Ukrainian position. In April, Ukrainian counterattacks to the city’s south alleviated the pressure somewhat, but the city remains a precarious but heavily fortified salient in the Ukrainian defensive line.
It is clear that Ukraine is now attempting to flatten that line, attacking Russian positions south of Avdiivka, and ultimately removing the threat of Avdiivka’s encirclement. [map at the link]
By pushing the Russian line back in this area, Avdiivka’s precarious position will be largely resolved, its flanks and rear supply lines secured. As a result, fewer, and lower quality troops should be able to hold their ground.
Something similar can be said of Bakhmut. What was, at the start of June, an isolated salient around Khromove as Russia threatened to swallow Ivanivske and Chasiv War, has been flattened, particularly in the south. [map at the link]
Ukrainian offensive actions south of Bakhmut appear to serve two purposes: positional and attritional.
A 2-month counterattack south of Bakhmut led by Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade has secured the heights west of Klishchiivka and may have destroyed Russia’a 72nd Brigade defending newly liberated Adriivka.
On the positional side, Ukraine has been straightening the line south of Bakhmut, controlling the dominant heights to the south of its main defensive position at Khromove, protecting the highway leading towards Bakhmut from Russian fire control, and establishing a secure defensive position on the hill west of Klischiivka. [map at the link]
But why not stop there? This is better understood in an attritional context.
Controlling the dominant heights to the west, Ukraine can observe Russian positions below the hill for its artillery and rocket batteries to strike exposed Russian positions. [video at the link]
From those heights, Ukraine can deal deal crippling losses to its enemy while suffering substantially fewer losses. In fact, the Third Assault Brigade claims that a significant element of the Russian 72nd Motor Brigade were encircled inside Adviika, their entire command staff killed, and significant additional troops killed or surrendered. [Tweet and video at the link: In the final moments of the battle in Andriivka, Ukrainians send an UAV, which had an attached loudspeaker, into the surrounded village, ordering the remnants of the Russian unit to surrender.]
But what happens next?
In four to six weeks, temperatures will begin to quickly drop across northern and eastern Ukraine. By mid to late October, both Avdiivka and Bakhmut will hit the 5° C mark that heralds the arrival of mud season.
The plan may be for Ukraine to try to establish a dominant and efficient defensive position in Bakhmut and Avdiivk,a while attritting enemy forces in as favorable conditions as possible. Then, when mud season arrives, and offensive operations grow difficult for both sides, Ukraine could settle in defensively, and have a surplus of forces available to reposition southward.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a lot to brag about — or at least she thinks she does. After signing a law yesterday that would prohibit journalists from requesting access to her travel and security records through FOIA (specifically the cost of any European vacations to taxpayers), Sanders posted a series of videos detailing the things she is most proud of doing in Arkansas.
For one, she’s super jazzed about cutting $250 million in taxes for rich people and banning “government Covid vaccine mandates.” [video at the link]
n fact, she says her plan is to phase out income tax in the state entirely, which is certainly a bold choice given the fact that it is the 5th poorest state in the nation. Call me crazy, but if I ran a state in which 22 percent of children were living at or below the poverty line, I might tax some rich motherfuckers in order to correct that situation.
Worth noting here that, thanks to pandemic-era social programs, the child poverty rate in the United States dropped down to an historic low of 5 percent, and has since, with the loss of the Child Tax Credit and other programs, gone back up to 12.4 percent — so we could all stand to do a little better in this area. It feels very reasonable to say that “child poverty” should, under no circumstances, even be a thing in this country.
Huckabee Sanders also claimed that “people all over the country are looking to Arkansas as a bastion of of normal in an ever crazier world.” [video at the link]
“No more men playing women’s sports, no more indoctrination in our schools,” she continued. “No more gender science experiments on our kids. This is what this administration and legislature have been able to do in just eight months. And we’re not stopping here. We are breaking the status quo, we are bucking special interest, and we are making Arkansas the absolute best state in the union to live, to work and to raise a family.”
Unless your family includes a trans kid, that is. Or a kid who might like to take a Black History class.
Of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders cannot take all of the credit for making schools more ignorant. Arkansas has, in fact, been failing to teach students about the Civil War for actual decades.
To say that their commitment to rearing ignorant bigot children makes the state a bastion of normalcy flies in the face of the many abnormal things about Arkansas. […] You know, like her initiative to bring child labor back to the state.
Arkansas also has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation, which isn’t going to improve much now that they’ve completely outlawed abortion except in cases where doctors are 100 percent certain that the mother is going to die without one. It’s a very bad place to be pregnant or to, frankly, require health care of any kind. 73 of the state’s 75 counties are “designated medically-underserved areas.” So sure, Sarah Huckabee Sanders likes to boast that trans kids won’t be getting any health care in her state … but what she fails to mention is no one else is gonna get very much either.
Also not very normal? The state’s teen pregnancy rates, which are the highest or second highest in the nation depending on which source you’re looking at. Why? Lack of access to contraceptives and comprehensive sex education. Teenagers in Arkansas aren’t actually more sexually active than teens in any other state, they’re just more poorly prepared and informed, perhaps because former Governor Asa Hutchinson barred Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of sex education programs in the country, from Arkansas schools — because “abortion.”
This is something that Sarah Huckabee Sanders could easily do something about […] and chooses not to.
It’s also maybe not a great place to live if you want your kids to go to college. Arkansas has the second lowest educational attainment rate in the country, with only 33 percent of those over 24 having an associate’s degree or higher.
As for being a great place to work? Not so much! According to statistics compiled by the Junior League of Little Rock, 60 percent of Arkansas workers have hourly jobs, with 51 percent of the jobs in the state paying less than $15 an hour; 41 percent of families cannot make ends meet and 1/3 of families with children are living below the poverty line.
The JLLR also reports that a quarter of families in the state qualify as ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — meaning that they earn enough to put them over the Federal poverty line, but not enough to reach the basic cost-of-living threshold.
That seems bad! And also like it’s maybe not the greatest place to work. Or live. Or raise children.
I’m not trying to drag Arkansas as a place. There are lovely people in and from Arkansas, and it looks very pretty in the Google image searches I have seen. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, while she is surely very proud of how aggressively terrible and inhospitable her state is to transgender children, should perhaps keep the bragging to a minimum.
Nevada is the latest state where advocates are pushing to enshrine abortion access and other reproductive rights in the state constitution, taking a cue from other states that have successfully codified those rights after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year.
Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom ― a coalition made up of Planned Parenthood Votes Nevada, NARAL Pro-Choice Nevada and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada ― submitted a petition with Nevada’s secretary of state’s office on Thursday seeking to ask voters to preserve those protections with a constitutional amendment.
If the group collects at least 103,000 valid signatures from registered voters by next June 26, the question will appear on the ballot in November 2024. If a simple majority supports an amendment, voters will be asked in 2026 to give it a second approval, per Nevada’s rules for changes to its state constitution…
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 489
Yes, “Normal:” Men and women locked into boring, monogamous, heterosexual marriages, crapping out kids they really don’t want or need, and forever groveling before the copspigs, the militarythe warmongers, capital, and, of course, their nonexistent Abrahamic god.
Yeah, Arkansas sounds like utopia… if you’re fucking rural dullard.
Reginald Selkirksays
@491
I used to be a fucking rural dullard, but I got better
The judge presiding over John Eastman’s disbarment trial in California stopped a hearing on Thursday to call out Steve Bannon’s podcast for livestreaming from the courtroom.
“I’m going to take just a minute to inform everyone about something that I just learned about,” Judge Yvette Roland interjected during witness testimony, Raw Story reported. “I’ve been informed that the Bannon War Room is live-streaming this proceeding.”
The former White House strategist under Donald Trump began his far-right podcast shortly after leaving the administration. It has since been flagged by researchers as the top purveyor of misinformation among podcasts.
“But live streaming is not allowed,” Judge Roland made clear. “And that goes for any and everyone.”
Eastman, the conservative lawyer who devised a strategy to help maintain former President Donald Trump’s hold on power, is also facing criminal charges in Georgia for his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #493…
The article doesn’t drop the other shoe. What happened after the judge made her remarks? Inquiring minds, and all that…
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
@Reginald #483, @Lynna #486:
Speaking of unbelievable, this is from Jul 25, during the trial, over bribery.
Video: Maddow – Unbelievable: Texas A.G.’s PAC makes [$3 million] donation to Lt. Gov. presiding over his impeachment trial
And who isn’t even up for reelection until 2026.
From Lynna’s #494:
Some of those images are amazingly detailed!
Here’s the unrolled thread from the Threadreader app for #1. (From Lynna’s link to Daily Kos: “Ukraine Update: Ukraine may be about to flank Hill 166.”)
Kastehelmi notes at the end: “Thanks for reading, this thread took forever to make. The images are from 1.-2.8.2023. They do not endanger Ukrainian OPSEC in any way.”
Fani Willis, an update, and additional details.
Link
For the convenience of readers, here are some links back to the previous group of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-5/#comment-2193250
White House asks Congress to pass short-term spending deal, boost food aid.
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-5/#comment-2193242
Georgia Gov. Kemp Rejects Commission to Remove Fani Willis
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-5/#comment-2193272
Brain fog after Covid linked to blood clots – study
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-5/#comment-2193279
Meduza – “Culture Ministry official says Barbie and Oppenheimer movies do not promote Russia’s ‘traditional spiritual and moral values’”:
https://twitter.com/AnthonyMKreis/status/1696880355267973622
The senator is Colton Moore. Video is available at the link. He is a rightwing doofus.
Cartoon: Ramaswamy on Climate Change
Link for comment #8:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/brian-kilmeade-terrified-a-bong-full
Kevin McCarthy Warns House Ninnyhammer Caucus That Gubmint Shutdown Would Delay Biden Impeachment.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/kevin-mccarthy-warns-house-ninnyhammer
Lololol.
The Hill – “Raskin asks Comer to subpoena Kushner for information on firm’s Saudi ties”:
Jack Sonni from Dire Straits has died.
😢
Plant Based News – “Irish EPA Deletes Tweet Encouraging People To Cut Down Meat”:
Hope this helps :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-01/misinformation-voice-referendum-we-need-your-help/102798438
Happy Wattle Day everyone!
https://wattleday.asn.au/
Good news for early diagnosis (and soon, hopefully a treatment)
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-09-blood-biomarker-great-alzheimer-disease.html
Brain circuit study finds control of behavioral decisions is the same in insects and mammals.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-brain-circuit-behavioral-decisions-similar.html
A NASA orbiter has found the crater probably created by the crash of Luna 25.
Spent around an hour this morning trying to release a terrified blue tit (small bird, I don’t know how far their range extends) which had managed to trap itself between the two panes of a sash window Ms. KG likes to leave slightly open at the bottom. It must have flown or hopped into the room, flown upward, tried to get through the glass of the top, closed pane, and fallen down between the two. We tried various strategies to get hold of it, which only resulted in the bird losing its tail-feathers. Eventually we managed to swing the lower pane inwards the wrong way (swinging it the way it’s supposed to swing would have squashed the poor thing) far enough for it to drop out of the trap and fly away. Hope it can manage without tail-feathers until they regrow!
Moscow missile plant ablaze in apparent drone attack
Alabama lawmaker resigns and agrees to plead guilty to voter fraud
Finland’s Marin, once the world’s youngest premier, steps down as party leader
KG @ 20
Good work!
.
NB
Real receipts: What my giving birth in Germany costs in the USA
Universal vs. Private healthcare.
https://youtu.be/NpE2bZ7UHFs
American reacts to Middle East wars explained by Germans
https://youtu.be/UjNty9_wDo
Oops. The video cannot be played. Try googlung the title åt Youtube, it is both fun and infuriating.
NB 1: “Japanese astrophysicists suggest possibility of hidden planet in the Kuiper Belt ”
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-japanese-astrophysicists-possibility-hidden-planet.html
NB 2: “Reserchers discover quantum switch for regulating photosynthesis”
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-quantum-photosynthesis.html
Paris says au revoir to rental e-scooters
911 lines are working again after many Nebraska emergency centers lost service
Re; Reginald Selkirk @ #29…
Probably a farmer with a backhoe.
Link
Pentagon releases new website on UFOs
Texas Supreme Court Allows Ban on Transgender Care for Minors to Go into Effect
September 01, 2023
Religion Clause
https://www.wonkette.com/p/that-time-vivek-ramaswamy-fleeced
Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting.
Washington Post link
A new ordinance, passed in several jurisdictions and under consideration elsewhere, aims to stop people from using local roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion. [What?!]
More at the link, including details like the fact that anti-abortion activists meet in gun stores in Texas, and in pizza joints with giant confederate flags on the wall.
Rugged, nasty bacterium infects hundreds in rugged, nasty Tough Mudder race
Re: Lynna 35
“the unborn child is always taken against their will.”
There’s the fetus puppetry. Spectral evidence and I’d say it to his face. Getting themselves all worked up with pretend people.
No one gets to use force on another with make believe.
@19.birgerjohansson : “A NASA orbiter has found the crater probably created by the crash of Luna 25.”
Yup. See :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-01/russian-spacecraft-luna-25-leaves-crater-on-moon/102806284
Australia’s had its warmest Winter ever :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-01/bom-confirms-australia-s-warmest-winter-on-record/102804760
I am so dreading what Summer is likely to bring here..
Josh Marshall:
Link
Josh Marshall did not present a really clear picture of what may be going on here, but it is interesting that, “An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign,” according to the Mother Jones article.
That news formalizes a complaint about Giuliani’s activities.
Followup to this previous conversation:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/07/11/infinite-thread-xxviii/comment-page-5/#comment-2193242
Georgia Gov. Kemp Rejects Commission to Remove Fani Willis
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is making Kevin McCarthy look really, really pathetic
Link
Link
Ron DeSantis Sics Goons On 15-Year-Old Child Who Terrified Him With With Substantive Question
https://www.wonkette.com/p/ron-desantis-sics-goons-on-15-year
Tennessee woman sets record for world’s longest mullet
Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean gets 18 years in prison, tying for longest sentence in Jan. 6 attack
Federal judge dismisses Florida lawsuit seeking to have Trump declared ineligible for presidency
“Standing” is a bullshit excuse that gets applied arbitrarily.
Exclusive-U.S. to send its first depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine -sources
No one hurt in Talkeetna taco truck explosion
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-02/how-space-junk-could-trigger-war-among-the-stars/102681410
Ukraine Update: Ukraine chafes at outside criticism […]
Good analysis here on West Africa’s recent spate of Coups and
the Colonial powers vs Wagner mercenaries and more just over 15 mins long.
Followup to comment 51.
Posted by readers of the article:
Fox News’ efforts to deny climate change are getting comical
Link
https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1697511463286423927
video at the link
This is some next-level trolling.
During the attack on the Russian airfield in Pskov, Ukraine called the Russians in Pskov and asked them what was hit. And Russia told them.
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1697546296922378305
Sound file with subtitles at the link.
coughTalibancough
And before that Taliban (again) vs. USSR, Eritrean independence movement vs. Ethiopia, Vietnam vs. France, then USA, then China, Algerian independence movement vs. France, South Yemen vs. the UK, Kenya vs. the UK, East Timor vs Indonesia… Timothy Snyder has said somewhere that since WW2 it has usually been the smaller power that won. Presumably because it was fighting for its independent existence, and the larger power was not. Admittedly these are a highly disparate set of examples, and only Vietnam vs. China (which some claim was a draw rather than a victory for the smaller power) was a “conventional” war, with frontlines – but then, Ukraine hasn’t won yet, and if it does, it will be due to a lot of outside support.
Jimmy Buffett, ‘Margaritaville’ Singer, Dies at 76
India’s Aditya-L1 solar probe successfully lifts off toward the sun
LifeWise Academy founder explains how legal Bible instruction can come to schools near you
Followup to Reginald @59.
Link for the text quoted in comment 63:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/lets-remember-the-time-jimmy-buffett
Hunter discusses the future of the No Labels political party.
Link
Followup to comment 65.
Posted by readers of the article:
Elon Musk again undermines X CEO Linda Yaccarino, reinforcing why advertisers can’t trust her promises about addressing hate speech
Tucker Carlson launches attack on Fox News: “It’s run by fearful women”
Canada is at the forefront of the woke assault on our essential human liberties
Jordan Peterson
Apparently the Telegraph is giving him a platform.
Australia launches mission to rescue Antarctic researcher
Bill Richardson, former governor and UN ambassador who worked to free detained Americans, dies at 75
Ukraine Update: Ukraine is getting stronger
Followup to comment 72.
Posted by readers of the article:
Laser burrows into the Earth to destroy land mines (2004)
U.S. Military Wants To Blow Up Landmines With Lasers (2015)
To the best of my knowledge, this is not actually in service yet.
Bertha the sunflower towers over the garden
Arizona to host presidential primaries for Dems, Republicans after GOP plan falters
Ukraine tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky named suspect in fraud probe
@Reginald Selkirk #32: Related…
Video: Mick West – Alex Dietrich interview (1:35:33)
A pilot who reported a UFO and became a professor teaching critical thinking.
Italian ex-premier says French missile downed an airliner in 1980 by accident in bid to kill Gadhafi
DeSantis’ redistricting map in Florida is unconstitutional and must be redrawn, judge says
Meg Ryan Says Her Kids Are Embarrassed By Orgasm Scene in ‘When Harry Met Sally’
That was one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema.
CPAC Got an Actual Priest to Perform an Exorcism After Low-Level Employees Quit Over Pay
So conservatives don’t understand capitalism?
Study: Elon Musk’s X takeover helped Russian disinfo thrive
Ukraine to receive 110 Australian-made Slinger anti-drone systems to take out Iranian Shahed drones
Cops rough up climate protestors blocking Burning Man, and then climate crisis intervenes.
Followup to comment 85.
EcoWatch writes on the trash left behind
@86
Those ought to be worth something as scrap metal.
NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week
“X” Didn’t Pay Severance. Now It’s Facing 2,200 Cases—and Big Fees
Facing boycott, Nobel Foundation withdraws award ceremony invitation to Russia, Belarus, and Iran
Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow.
Washington Post link
Some of the largest U.S. insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums.
Environmentally, economically and in terms of pure human suffering, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam unleashed untold damage. Months later, many communities are still reeling.
New York Times link
Russian ammunition warehouse blown up by Himars missiles
You’re not agnostic, you’re an atheist (repost)
Ukraine Update: Russia wants to freeze the conflict because it can’t hold its gains
More Ukraine updates coming soon.
Link
Followup to comment 95.
More Ukraine updates:
Link. Scroll down to view updates.
Link
Burning Man memes are swamping social media
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-04/why-ukraine-counteroffensive-could-be-close-to-major-prize/102801456
German TV satire about Trump 2017
https://youtu.be/Bopx04tLEWo
How “Redneck pride” shaped the South.
(NB – this is a mostly historical description)
https://youtu.be/ 7e3W704jYE4
https://youtu.be/7e3W704jYE4
“Pro-brith” (aka “subjugate women”), racism and eugenics is alive and well in the US. They’re staging a “Natal” conference in Austen, Texas: Revealed: US pro-birth conference’s links to far-right eugenicists. In case you don’t know, the say the world’s population is shrinking and that’s a bad thing.
FBI searches for growing number of Jan. 6 fugitives
Ukraine Update: The tables have turned on the artillery war, and the Bayraktars are back!
Followup to comment 107.
Posted by readers of the article:
UKRAINE: Reznikov sacked. First Jewish President appoints first Muslim Defence Minister.
Followup to comment 109.
Posted by readers of the article:
Link
Kim Jong Un to meet with Putin in Russia
Washington Post link
Hello all, I’m losing track here.
The newly elected Finnish government is still rightwing and racist. Today was the start of parliamentary function after summer break.
Yesterday was a big demonstration against racism here in Helsinki. I was there, with a friend, though not for the whole duration (only a couple hours, including a march). The organizers estimate that 20,000 people attended for some part of the event, and 14,000 marched.
On abortion, for Trump’s judges it’s still all about misogyny, surveillance, and control
Wired – The Dark History Oppenheimer Didn’t Show
* See also: Navajo miners in xxviii p2 #368
Roger Peet – “The wound at the heart of the world” lecture (56:01)
* Rest is mostly logistics of processing and irresponsible waste disposal in the US.
Elon Musk threatens to sue the Anti-Defamation League, claiming it is ‘trying to kill’ X, formerly known as Twitter
Why does he hate freedom of speech?
St. Jude’s arm is going on tour: Catholic church announces relic’s first-ever tour of US
I just love it when people try to tell me how modern and science-friendly the Catholic church is because they didn’t oppose evolution to the extent the bottom-feeding Protestant churches did. Relics, miracles, exorcists – it is a very medieval organization.
@116
Insert meme of Ken Watanabe from Godzilla movie saying “Let them fight.”
WHOOPS! Please ignore that last one. When I read “ADL”, my buggy brain mistook it for the “Catholic League.” I thought that old Bill Donahue said something that pissed Elon off and it resulted in a flame war.
LOTR lore.
Why was Eriador so depopulated?
https://youtu.be/FDuzIHp43vs
or maybe
https://youtu.be/FDuzlHp43vs
Good Universe Today Space News clip here on an exoplanet denser than steel, the plight of New Horizons, Supermassive Black Hole mergers, the new space telescope imaging an iconic spiral galaxy and SN 1978A plus more – 21 minutes long.
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-08-climate-changing-human-billion-deaths-century.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly-nwletter
StevoR quoting Joshua Pearce @ # 122: … no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom.
Dr. Doom hardly talks about anything but his plans for vengeance and/or world conquest. You don’t pass Climatology 101 if you don’t learn to keep that quiet (except possibly while dumping secret agents into vats of boiling piranhas).
Thousands queue for hours to leave Burning Man festival
Republicans seek constitutional amendment requiring two-thirds vote to raise taxes
Court strikes down Alabama congressional map in scathing opinion
Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson announces US Senate run
@123. Pierce R. Butler : LOL! Yup.
.*
On a much more serious and grim note, there’s a photo here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-05/selwyn-resort-closes-early-after-poor-snow-season/102816702
The second one down in that article that neatly sums up what Global Overheating is doing to Oz. A Snowy Mountains (See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains ) ski lift located about now in time. The last vanishing patch of melting snow amidst a burnt out bushcape from the Unprecedented Bushfires. (Remember them? Just a few Summers ago now :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season
Reshaped Death Valley park could take months to reopen after damage from Hilary
@70
Australian who fell ill at remote Antarctic base is rescued after daunting mission, authorities say
Regarding Burning Man.
I am told it is 8 km (5 miles) from the area ro the nearest major road.
That is a long way to walk when you are up to your knees in mud.
Not so far if you are an entrepreneur in the business of making paved roads.
You would need more than two lanes and have decent ditches to carry away any rainwater, but it would not be a goddamn Apollo program.
Maybe make an extra, smaller paved road in a different direction, in case a serious accident blocks the first during a rain.
Re: birgerjohansson @ #131…
The Burning Man site is a dry lake bed. If it rains, that’s where the water is going to go.
I used to have a US Geological Survey map titled “Pleistocene Lakes of the Basin and Range”. When things were wetter, there were a lot lakes across Nevada and Utah, and a few in California (Death Valley, for instance, was a lake). The really fun one was Lake Bonneville. It covered about a third of Utah at its maximum extent and was, in that condition, about 1000 feet deep. The Great Salt Lake is the remaining remnant. I leave to your imagination what would happen to Salt Lake City should Lake Bonneville come back, even if only to half its maximum depth.
@ 125
I fear that even most rank-and-file Democrats have bought into Reaganomics and that progressive tax policy will somehow destroy the economy and impoverish them, so I think this one will pass.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Guardian – ! – “Cuba uncovers ‘human trafficking ring’ recruiting for Russia’s war in Ukraine”:
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian US liveblog. From their latest summary:
Followup to Reginald @116.
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musks-epic-antic-labor-day-weekend-against-the-jews
France 24 – “Another Russian mercenary group shows discontent with the Kremlin: ‘A sign of more to come’”:
Normal people find Hunter Biden obsession ‘incomprehensible’
Bellingcat – “Saunas and Swastikas: Finland’s Summertime neo-Nazi Meet-Up”:
This is crying out for satire.
France 24 – “Far-right militants in Greece illegally ‘arrest’ migrants they blame for fires”:
Followup to comment 10.
House Republican extremists look like they want a government shutdown
Followup to Reginald 2126.
Marc Elias has got the new US Congress map in Alabama struck down
The article is a good summary of all the amazing work that Marc Elias and the Elias Law Group have done. The group now has 60 lawyers working on cases like the recent one in Alabama. Elias’s work is essential to protecting voting rights in the USA.
As of September 4, Elias’s firm is litigating redistricting cases in:
Alabama
Florida
Louisiana
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New York
Ohio
Texas
And…Georgia!
Here’s a nice tweet from Elias: https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1699086159417127360
The man has a sense of humor.
One America News settles defamation lawsuit from a Dominion executive at the center of election conspiracy theories
Tatarigami on Tafcat:
Guardian – “US supreme court likely to determine Trump’s 2024 eligibility soon – ex-judge”:
France 24 – “Confronté à de nouvelles manifestations et acculé économiquement, le régime syrien ‘joue la montre'”:
North Korea Finds New Leverage in the Ukraine War
New York Times link
Kim Jong-un is likely to seek missile and warhead technology in an expected visit to Russia, and he is already getting a public embrace he has long sought.
NBC – “Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse files ethics complaint over Justice Samuel Alito interview”:
Some podcast episodes:
Drilled – “S10, Ep1: The Corporate Push to Criminalize Speech”:
Drilled – “S10, Ep3: In Australia, a State-by-State Approach to Criminalizing Protest”:
On the Media – “How Big Tech Went to Sh*t”:
Jacobin Radio – “Dig: AOC on US Hegemony and Latin American Sovereignty”:
From the Guardian liveblog, reporting on Enrique Tarrio’s sentencing: “Federal judge Tim Kelly has ruled that the terrorism enhancement will be applied to Enrique Tarrio’s sentence, Politico report, a sign that he could potentially face a long jail sentence…”
Ukraine Update: Ukraine breaches Russia’s 2nd Surovikin Line west of Verbove
Followup to comment 148.
Posted by a reader of the article:
Cartoon: Collect ’em all!
Latest numbers on job growth show a resilient U.S. economy
President Biden took a victory lap of sorts on Friday morning, boasting that the U.S. was in one of “the strongest job creating periods in our history.”
Truth Social investment partner extends deadline, avoiding liquidation
The extension will give Digital World Acquisition another year to merge with Donald Trump’s start-up
YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate’s videos, court says
Maker of rapid-fire triggers falsely told customers they are legal, judge says in preliminary ruling
New tropical depression forms, expected to strengthen. Early track points toward Florida
Babcock Ranch: Florida’s first hurricane-proof town
We’ll see how that goes when the entire peninsula goes underwater.
Some really good news for a change of pace.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/05/brazil-launches-biggest-operation-illegal-cattle-farms-amazon
At his sentencing hearing, “Tarrio says that on Nov. 3rd something happened he didn’t expect: ‘My candidate lost’.” Earlier, he winked at some of his supporters in the courtroom, which I’m sure will endear him to the judge.
Noel on Tafkat:
Video at the link.
What are the origins of Black Ghetto culture in America?
https://youtu.be/ybO-qPv_DBk
Re Reginald Selkirk’s #156: it’s already TS Lee.
Kyiv Independent – “Russian pilot who defected to Ukraine to receive $500,000 reward”:
Guardian liveblog:
If Trump had won the election, Tarrio, Rhodes, and others like them would have real power in the US right now.
More Than 60 ‘Stop Cop City’ Activists Hit With RICO Charges in Georgia
RICO Suave!
Metro rail service starts in Nigeria’s Lagos, set to ease traffic
Mango lovers told to prepare for an undersupply of the tropical fruit as warm winter reduces yield
Ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio jailed for 22 years for Capitol riot
Michael Kofman and Rob Lee at War On the Rocks – “Perseverance and Adaptation: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive at Three Months”:
Letitia James wants Trump, sons, and lawyers fined $10K each for repeatedly making losing arguments in her fraud case
Guardian – “Hundreds of academics call for 100% plant-based meals at UK universities”:
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-06/elon-musk-plans-to-sue-anti-defamation-group/102820786
LOL! FFS!
Professor Marcia Langton AO is addressing the National Press Club right now – in SA timezone 12.30 noon – on TV c2, ABC. She’s worth listening to and a great speaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcia_Langton
A very good thunderf00t video mostly about climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbxOvu069Y
This also brings up things that have been somewhat bugging me. Most climate models only go up to 2100 whereas we know the warming is going to continue beyond 2100. The other thing is people’s unjustified faith in future magic technologies. Anyways, it’s worth watching, probably one of his best videos.
Ha!
The management of tourist visits at Buckingham Palace is so bad, it turns royalists into (small-r) republicans.
😊
“I visited Buckingham Palace & regretted it”
https://youtu.be/ORQd_Tg7Bgw
Finally, a proper guide to everything.
“What to do”
https://xkcd.com/2813/
Arthropod
Daytime firefly
https://xkcd.com/2808/
Does anyone know if Nerd of Redhead is still around and how he’s doing? I recall the Redhead passed a few years ago, I do hope he’s well.
Florida man arrested by Coast Guard for trying to cross Atlantic in human-sized hamster wheel
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Scuba #178,
I’m still around. I’ve had some health issues aggravated by stress. One of the stresses was trying to type with my left hand not fully cooperating due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Auto-correct didn’t help, and I spent too much time editing a post. So I reverted to just lurking, with rare posts. I do some volunteer work for ElderCare here in Lake County, driving other seniors to their medical appointments.
Film review: “Past Lives”
https://theguardian.com/film/2023/sep/06/past-lives-review-a-must-see-story-of-lost-loves-childhood-crushes-and-changing-identities
Def Mon on Tafkat:
Translated screenshot at the link.
Nerd of Redhead @ #181, thank you for the update. I knew you did volunteer work and thought I had seen you comment on another thread in the not too distant past, but I couldn’t remember how long ago it was. Sorry to hear about your health issues, and hope they can resolve soon.
A look at the 20 articles of impeachment against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
I have not paid detailed attention to this case. I was initially put off by mention of Paxton having a mistress, but it seems that was all tied in with the bribery and corruption.
Guardian liveblog:
Tendar on Tafkat:
Video at the link.
Guardian – “California poised to become first US state to ban caste discrimination”:
I linked to this piece in Jewish Currents a couple of months ago – “The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook”:
“Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote”:
TPM:
New Lawsuit Seeks To Enforce Disqualification Clause Against Trump In Colorado
You can read the (very detailed) complaint here
@lotharloo #175:
Pharyngula – Summary of Thunderf00t/Phil Mason’s disgrace (2012)
RationalWiki – Freethought Blogs saga
Trump ignored warnings about the FBI showing up at Mar-a-Lago
NBC News ran a notable report last week on Dylan Quattrucci, the deputy state director of Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire: “The No. 2 official in New Hampshire on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign told police to kill themselves in an expletive-ridden Jan. 6 video shot close to the U.S. Capitol, according to a recording posted this month by an X account associated with the ‘Sedition Hunters,’ a group of online sleuths who have helped authorities identify hundreds of people present that day.”
Summary courtesy of Steve Benen.
Currently serving U.S. military leaders hardly ever condemn specific politicians. For Sen. Tommy Tuberville, they’re making a dramatic exception.
NBC News:
New York Times:
Link
Judge rules Trump in 2019 defamed writer who has already won a sex abuse and libel suit against him
See #166 above, for example.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/james-okeefe-spent-veritas-donor
Background:
I remember that part of James O’Keefe’s unethical activities. I typed “deceptively edited video” so many times! Republicans used ACORN to “prove” that Democrats were lying criminals … supposedly.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/wonket-sexclusive-totally-blameless-crime-stopper-james-okeefe-to-pay-100000-to-acorn-criminal
Kyiv Post – “Ukrainian Gains Reported Following Renewed Push Towards Berdyansk, New Axis in Play”:
Why Do We Keep Saying COVID Symptoms Are ‘Mild’?
https://www.wonkette.com/p/why-do-we-keep-saying-covid-symptoms
‘Mild’ compared to hospitalization or death, we guess.
FDA could green light new Covid boosters as early as Friday
NBC News exclusive link
The shots could become available next week, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also signs off.
I need the cost to be covered. This lack of funding is not good.
I have one of these not far from my residence. I think the idea is that if the ped is already in the middle of the street, they are more likely to be seen.
An elderly relative that was in poor health passed away last evening.
While it was expected, he was the last living sibling of my parents.
I just realised that – excepting cousins- I and my siblings are now the oldest living members of the family.
It feels strange. I feel sad for my uncle, but it also brings home the reality of my own mortality like a punch in the gut.
Re; birgerjohansson @ , as is one of my sisters.205…
My condolences for your loss…and for your realization. Mine is the current senior generation, and being the second youngest (by about 3 months), while I haven’t kept track, I’m sure several of my cousins are dead by now, as is one of my sisters. My late wife’s family now only exists in our children and grandchildren.
Josh Marshall: McConnell’s Health Issues
All Systems Go On At Least One Georgia RICO Trial As Soon As October
Followup to comment 208.
The Judge denied requsest by Chesebro and Powell to sever from each other.
QAnon conspiracies are rising from Maui’s ashes
Mike Huckabee: if Trump doesn’t win it is the last election “that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.”
Oh, spare me. Yet another Republican threatening to shoot everyone who is not a MAGA Republican. Video at the link.
Internet meme: “What could be a more noble cause for a second Civil War than a litany of imaginary grievances?”
Internet meme: “Make us your masters or we will kill you.”
Mike Huckabee likes to inspire others to commit violence, but I don’t se him fighting the war himself.
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
Willis seeks to shield jurors in Trump trial
Move comes after online harassment of grand jurors who indicted former president
By Chris Joyner and Tamar Hallerman / September 6, 2023
You can read the motion here.
As some of you may recall, last year I had my right kidney removed due to a growth that turned out to be cancer. Even though I got away with just surgery, not requiring chemo or radiation, for the next five years I’ve got to go in for a chest/abdomen/pelvis scan to make sure nothing new is growing. I had my first today and got the results about an hour later:
“No evidence of metastatic disease in the chest, abdomen or pelvis.”
One down, four to go.
Nerd of Redhead @181
Glad to hear you’re still here on the blog, dude! Was it all the lab work that gave you carpal tunnel? I have friends who that hapened to – years of repetitive motions.
Best wishes to you.
Best wishes to both Nerd of Redhead and Akira. Good news so far on the health front for Akira. And Nerd is managing carpal tunnel.
SBU catches FSB agent red-handed preparing missile attack on Ukrainian Railways
Fani Willis blasts fake Georgia elector’s removal motion: “Fiction is not entitled to recognition”
Ukraine Update: How Robotyne became the center of the counteroffensive, written by Mark Sumner.
Politico link
Yet Another Mysterious Trump/Jan 6 Weirdo
See also The Giuliani aide who vanished.
Glad to hear your good news Akira@214!
@Akira MacKenzie : Good to hear!
.***
Great and very nicely illustrated with moving (physically not emotionally..) diagrams and grapghics here news article on Oz and El Nino :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/el-nino-southern-oscillation-climate-change-effects-on-australia/102788002
Plus a good one on our Indigenous Voice to Parliament idea and the opponents of it here :
https://kangaroocourtofaustralia.com/2023/09/07/the-voice-no-campaign-is-driven-by-the-lies-of-spineless-news-corp-ceo-lachlan-murdoch/
Meanwhile whilst channel 7’s owner Kerry Stokes ain’t quite as horrendous as Murdoch’s malignant empire they’re alos pretty FN terrible to put mildly :
&
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/more-transgender-people-speak-out-against-channel-7-spotlight/102825886
Theer’s also a petition calling for Channel Seven to pull that disgustingly transphobic episode from its website and social media platforms.
Meanwhile in better news and spaaace neeeews :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/japan-moon-mission-jaxa-moon-sniper/102827658
Japan also launched an X-ray space observatpory on that rocket too so hopefully a lot of good science to come from that as well.
Oh & yes! Aussies are heading to the surface of Earth’s largest, most famous and longest orbiting natural satellite too :
Source : https://www.space.com/australia-moon-rover-2026-nasa-artemis
Link to more info and naming contest here : https://www.industry.gov.au/news/competition-to-name-australias-lunar-rover
As we debate the Vocie and maybe Treaty and Truth when it comes to our First Australians :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/kinchela-boys-home-archaeological-search-confirmed-nsw-minister/102828232
Think I’ve mentioned this before but within walking distance (35 mins – hour or so?) of my home is Colebrook House where Indigenous Stolen generations were being taken up until the 1970’s.
Russia’s infamous ‘dragon’s teeth’ defenses are a joke and were easily overcome, says Ukrainian ex-commander
^ This place :
https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/culture/indigenous/display/50688-colebrook-blackwood-reconciliation-park-fountain-of-tears-
Sen. Tommy Tuberville Says He’s Worried About Sailors Reciting Poetry On Ships
@birgerjohansson 205
My condolences for your loss.
@Akira MacKenzie 214
I hope it stays away.
@Nerd of Redhead 181
I hope your condition improves.
FAA clears UPS delivery drones for longer-range flights
For history buffs
“Byzantine military revolution”
https://youtu.be/25Xo2W3QYBI
or possibly
https://youtu.be/25Xo2W3QYBl
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1699374629817553128
“Russian troops retreat victoriously, Ukrainian army runs after them in panic.”
The G20 summit:
Link
Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg
Ironically, it could accomplish precisely the opposite. If this “model” is viable, then you might have the ‘every sperm is sacred’ crowd demanding that every stem cell be respected as a ‘person.’
Re: Lynna, OM @ #233…
To quote the head Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine, “They’re advancing in the wrong direction!”
https://www.wonkette.com/p/clarence-thomas-responds-to-ethics
Video shows massive HIMARS strike on an ammo dump used by Russia’s powerful Ka-52 attack helicopters, Ukraine says
Partial transcript from a recent Fox News segment, with Hugh Hewitt interviewing Donald Trump:
Commentary from Wonkette:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-cant-wait-to-testify-against
@156, 162
Hurricane Lee set to explode to Category-5 strength prior to Caribbean, US impacts
It’s too far ahead to know if it will hit the U.S. mainland.
SBA program upended in wake of Supreme Court affirmative action ruling.
Washington Post link
A judge struck down a provision of a federal program meant to help minority-owned businesses, a ruling that could imperil other programs that benefit underrepresented groups.
Prosecutor to Jim Jordan: ‘You lack a basic understanding of the law’
Fani Willis could’ve simply ignored Jim Jordan. Instead, the prosecutor told the Judiciary Committee chairman that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Competent evil (as distinct from the incompetent variety we know from Britain and USA.
“Inglorious Basterds”
“You won’t get Hitler”.
https://youtube.com/shorts/aJmIQoAWsfk?si=9LNs0C45wMwN2b1S
Elon Musk personally thwarted a Ukrainian attack and saved the Russian Navy
https://youtube.com/shorts/aJmlQoAWsfk?si=9LNs0C45wMwN2b1S
The link from Inglorious Basterds show a perfect opportunist…
Followup to comment 244.
Posted by readers of the article:
Sigh. Polls and surveys. Chicanery is more like it.
Link
Followup to comment 248.
Posted by readers of the article:
See also: Trump campaign paid pollster hired by Wall Street Journal $600,000 just in 2023: records
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro is convicted of contempt of Congress in Jan. 6 investigation
‘That ’70s Show’ actor Danny Masterson gets 30 years to life in prison for rapes of 2 women
Re: #242 Jim Jordan letter.
The whole letter makes an enjoyable read.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23941366/jim-jordan-letter.pdf
North Korea says it has launched a new nuclear attack submarine to counter US naval power
Ukraine Update
Climate change affects classrooms and education:
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/tucker-carlson-hears-about-obama
NBC News:
Reuters:
Washington Post:
Associated Press:
Politico:
And now there is a Democratic majority at the FCC.
Followup to comments 244 and 247.
Musk cut internet to Ukraine’s military as it was attacking Russian fleet.
Washington Post link
Clever, subtle and awesome work by some Indigenous Australians here :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-07/how-traditional-owners-used-marri-trees-to-gather-water-wa/102799998
Iexpect they’ll be demonised for this despite being right. Noportest should ever inconvenience anyone or make apoint ina way that can’t be simply ignored by everyone right? (Does that really need a sarc tag?)
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-08/us-open-semifinal-gauff-muchova/102831116
So much for the deterrent factor and “Do the crime = do the time” huh?
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-08/ex-nsw-police-officer-christopher-borg-sentence-cut-assault-teen/102831974
But hey, let’s not give Indigenous People a Voice even a non-binding advisory one because there’s no racism to see here already or anything and they already have too much money and power and say. yeah? For fucks sake!
ABC factcheck because as the Voice debate here continues to prompt racist denial and hatred and lies from the Gestapotatos no side, this might be worth a read and help :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-08/fact-check-65000-years-aboriginal-history/101237936
If I understand this right they found one of the cosmic microwave background bubbles in the present day and it’s about a billion light years across.
https://youtu.be/oz8hwFz7QfA?si=PRS4aiHNbigy8tjx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations
Ocean explorers found a golden orb on the Alaskan seafloor, and they have no idea what it is
Ron DeSantis Endorses Child Support Payments for Embryos
IF fetuses were considered ‘persons’, this would actually make sense.
But obviously that is not the case.
Reginald Selkirk@266,
And they’ve brought it to the surface! If we were living in an SF/horror fictional universe (and the evidence for that has been growing pretty steadily since the 1980s: Thatcher, Reagan, AIDS, 9-11, climate disruption, Brexit, TRUMP FFS) these fools would be the first victims of the thing from beyond the beyond…
Oh, and how could I forget SARS-CoV-2! My sincere apologies to the virus.
11,196 Years Jail Sentence for Faruk Özer, CEO of Collapsed Turkish Crypto Exchange Thodex
That’s ridiculous. They should give him an opportunity for early release, presuming good behavior, in 300 or 400 years.
Georgia special grand jury recommended charges in election case for Sen. Graham and 2 ex-senators
CO2 pipeline project denied key permit in South Dakota; another seeks second chance in North Dakota
Biden campaign launches ad focused on his surprise Ukraine trip in February
The new ad will air this weekend during Biden’s trip to the G-20 Summit in India.
Video available at the link.
Followup to comments 244, 247 and 262.
Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-shutdown-ukrainian-attack-after-chat-with-russian-official
Hurricane Lee intensifies rapidly into powerful Category 5 storm
Pelosi says she’ll run for reelection in 2024 as Democrats try to win back House majority
Link
@156, 162, 240, 275
Update: Lee downgraded to a Category 4 hurricane. Here’s when SC could see impacts
Updated September 08, 2023 11:24 AM
https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1699820072418656331
One of President Zelensky’s top advisors posted that tweet.
RFK Jr. Gives Speech To Crowd Containing German Neo-Nazis, Sues Blogger For Noticing.
Sounds like a lot of Goebbels-dygook to us.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rfk-jr-gives-speech-to-crowd-containing
China’s military seeks to exploit U.S. troops, veterans, general warns.
Washington Post link
A memo obtained by The Post says Beijing is working to enhance its armed forces by targeting Americans with specialized skills and training.
Followup to comments 244, 247, 262, 274 and 279.
New York Times:
New York Times link
OMG, this praise for Elon Musk is disgusting. The over-the-top praise comes from Russia.
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Saudi Arabia and Oil Prices
Gaming and milbloggers.
Military podcasters LazerPig and Falcon have fun with in-jokes about Pierre Sprey and the infamous commenter of military matters Mike Sparks, as they design the absolutely most effective military combat vehicle ever.
Like the car Homer Simpson designed but a hundred times more awesome.
If you are into World Of Tanks or similar games, this is a good way to spend fifty minutes while consuming lots of alcohol.
https://youtu.be/-7bbdt6ptDA
Appeals court allows Texas to leave anti-migrant buoys in Rio Grande for now
Why you may want to think twice before throwing out those old at-home COVID tests
Meh. When I got COVID at the end of June, the 6-month-expired tests I had failed to give a reading. Biochemicals decay.
A shadowy fight is playing out on three continents for control of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sprawling interests as head of the Wagner mercenary group. The biggest prize: his lucrative operations in Africa.
New York Times link
Fentanyl and heroin vaccine ready for human trials
FTC judge rules Intuit broke law, must stop advertising TurboTax as “free”
Good news: Judge rejects Meadows effort to move election case from Georgia to federal court in big win for Willis
Ukraine Update: Mud season won’t stop Ukraine’s advances
Marsha Blackburn tries out new ‘after-birth’ abortion myth on Fox News
Associated Press:
Alito Pontificates Further On The Righteousness Of His WSJ Interview
Followup to comment 295.
Posted by readers of the article:
Eric Munchel, Nashville’s ‘zip-tie guy,’ gets one of longest sentences for January 6 riot at Capitol
He had some very fancy gear. “Tactical cos-play”
Judge who signed off on raid of Kansas newspaper is facing a complaint about the decision
California lawmakers approve new tax for guns and ammunition to pay for school safety improvements
Boogaloo member Stephen Parshall sentenced for plot to blow up substation near BLM protest
‘Bear cam’ viewers save stranded hiker in Alaska
Anti-ANC manderla rival Mangosuthu Buthelezi has died :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-09/south-african-politician-mangosuthu-buthelezi-dies-aged-95/102836256
Mandela rival that is,
Excellent if disturbing segment of this weeks MediaWatch with transcript and 5 minute long video here :
https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/woodside/102811196
Powerful quake in Morocco kills more than 800 people and damages historic buildings in Marrakech
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/sib-archive/tpms-the-weekender-courts-and-cartography
Different morning memo section from the same link as above (followup to comments 295 and 296):
This is good and love this old song here. John Farnham’s You’re the Voice song becomes yes referendum campaign ad – watch in full
Then toofromanother Aussie icon Paul Kelly – If Not Now – 3.16 length mins & secs.
For those that don’t know :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kelly_(Australian_musician)
& those who’d like to know more too, wikibasics.
The Triffids – Wide Open Road (1986) -the song eferenced in # 208’s song
Then there’s this personal fave fusion of songs here –
Midnight Oil – Blackfella/Whitefella / The Dead Heart (Blackfella/Whitefella / 1986)
Well over thirty years ago yet here we’re still.. But progress is made, peope are thinking.
This song as fused from last one linked above Warumpi Band Blackfella whitefella
Plus this Kev Carmody – Thou Shalt Not Steal – under 5 mins long.
Then there’s this – Archie Roach – Took The Children Away (Official Music Video) we did up untilthe 1970′ FFS! something in my eye.. every time.
StevoR, thanks for that. Good collection of songs with meaningful messages. I was moved by the Archie Roach video.
Republicans losing patience with House’s halfhearted efforts to impeach Biden
Yet another of the Supreme Court’s ‘religious liberty’ cases proves fraudulent
Man fractures the skull of a 13-year old because he disrespected the national anthem.
Lousiana’s Notorious Angola Prison Will No Longer Hold Children
Prison officials were reportedly punishing children, most of whom were Black boys, with handcuffs, pepper spray, and extended time in solitary confinement.
More at the link.
What we know about Morocco’s deadly earthquake
A massive quake near Marrakesh on Friday night has killed more than 1,000.
COVID booster warning from Florida surgeon general, who advises people not to get new vaccine
Idjit
Schiff rips Graham’s response to grand jury report
Allies of Joe Manchin believe the West Virginia Democrat could retire from the Senate to lead his alma mater, West Virginia University
Foreign language courses would be replaced by coal mining for credit.
AP:
New Mexico governor issues order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque
BY MORGAN LEE / September 8, 2023
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #317…
Now there’s a decisive recommendation to get the updated vaccine if ever I read one. With Lapado against it, it looks to be a sure winner.
Reginald @317, and whheydt @321, Lapado’s advice and lies are going to put more Floridians in danger of being hospitalized (and other serious outcomes) if they catch COVID.
The buck stops with Governor DeSantis, who hired Lapado in the first place. More of DeSantis’ constituents will die.
Ukraine Update: Gerasimov’s irrational optimism may be a fatal problem
Re: Lynna, OM @ #322…
Yup. Absolutely agree with you. For myself, I’ve been expecting, and planning for, a booster this fall ever since last spring. The rather grim “upside” to deSantis and Lapado is that is their own people (i.e. those that believe them..and Trump) that are going to get sick–possibly very sick and possibly die–because they believe what they are told. The even grimmer downside is that they’re going to fill up hospital beds that could be put to better use caring for people who have a decent chance to recover if they can get decent treatment.
While it would probably be considered medical malpractice, one might almost support a policy–when space gets to be at a premium–to deny hospitalization for COVID if the patient hasn’t been vaccinated (except where other medical conditions preclude vaccination).
That’s an excerpt from a much longer presentation that is replete with photos, videos, and statistics.
The age of fire, water, and ever-shrinking ice
Link
Let’s All Enjoy This Video Of Mike Lindell Freaking Out Over Lumpy Pillows
https://www.wonkette.com/p/lets-all-enjoy-this-video-of-mike
I thought the MyPillow pillows looked quite lumpy in the ubiquitous advertising on TV. Yes, they look lumpy.
From Mike Lindell’s reaction, I would guess that his company gets many calls about lumpy pillows.
Alito: Recusing From Cases Involving Friends Would “Disrupt” Supreme Court’s Work
The key to understanding this is to realize that your notion of “the Supreme Court’s work” is not the same as Alito’s notion.
Woman thinks her pancake looks exactly like Donald Trump
Republicans Want New Term for “Pro-Life” After Losing So Many Elections
@70, 130
Ill worker rescued from research station in Antarctica now in a hospital in Australia
Colossal Cache of Lithium Found in US May Be World’s Largest
Now we can lead the world in safe, environmentally friendly extraction of lithium right? Right?
Hurricane Lee gains strength, approaches major hurricane status once again
Ukraine Update: This is why Musk owns us all, by Mark Sumner
Link
More at the link. I snipped quite a bit of text.
Followup to comment 336.
Posted by a reader of the article:
Link}
Re #335
We don’t have to worry about the fictitious jewish space lasers but we should definitely worry about the real nazi space lord.
Jean @339, yes. Well said.
In other news: ‘A long time in coming’: The African Union is joining the G20
Maps, videos and many more details are available at the link.
Kilaeua is erupting…again. I haven’t seen any announcement, but you can see it on their live feed here https://www.youtube.com/usgs/live Must have started within the last 30 to 60 minutes.
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/09/11/kilauea-eruption-underway-lava-fountains-contained-halemaumau-crater/
Today is the 50th anniversary of a massacre and coup d’etat that Henry Kissinger and the Republicans would want ja to forget.
They would prefer we remember 2001 9/11… which became possible because a Republican president who lost the election ignored the intelligence warnings about a terrorist attack… twice.
Details of capture emerge as escaped murderer Danelo Cavalcante taken into custody after 2 weeks
TechDirt – The batshit crazy story of the day Elon Musk decided to personally rip servers out of a Sacramento data center
It really does.
So glad to see that PZ and team managed to talk their provider into fixing the FreeThoughtBlogs server problem. It was difficult to do without PZ’s thoughtful posts for a couple of days. Yes, I am addicted.
We can now get back to updating The Infinite Thread. Yay!
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on the Biden impeachment inquiry
Ukraine Update: The strategy Russia has used since the start of the invasion shouldn’t work at all, by Mark Sumner
Should Democrats help Kevin McCarthy? Nope
Posted by readers of the article:
BBC – Tantalising sign of possible life on faraway world
Followup to comment 349.
Matt Gaetz doesn’t just want Kevin McCarthy to launch an evidence-free impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden. Gaetz’s appeal also came with a threat.
Semafor article, summarized by Steve Benen:
I kept waiting for Kevin McCarthy to come up with an explanation for why he was initiating an impeachment inquiry without an authorization vote. He didn’t.
Ummm, Republicans don’t have a legitimate reason to proceed, but they’re going ahead anyway. While they proceed, they are stumbling all over themselves, fighting with each other, and demonstrating their ignorance at every turn.
Followup to comments 351 and 353.
Some GOP members pitch hilariously bad ‘evidence’ against Biden
NPR – A popular nasal decongestant doesn’t actually relieve congestion, FDA advisers say
Ukrainian cruise missile attack hits Russian submarine
NPR:
Rep. Lauren Boebert was escorted out of ‘Beetlejuice’ over reports of rude behavior
By Emily Olson / September 13, 2023
Followup to comment 356.
Posted by readers of the article:
@355 Phenylephrine
It is true, phenylephrine, the ingredient in Sudafed PE and similar products, is entirely ineffective.
So why don’t they switch to using pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed? It works great! The problem is that pseudoephedrine can be used to manufacture meth, which is why they moved it behind the counter a decade or more ago.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Not a class act:
tomh @357, sorry for duplicating the information in your post.
Reginald @359, thank you for that clarification.
Link
Link
Who is running the circus?
Link
WaPo Columnist: What If Joe Biden Didn’t Run Again, That’d Be Cool Right?
https://www.wonkette.com/p/wapo-columnist-here-to-praise-joe
Too many media outlets are making “Joe Biden is old” into the “Hillary’s emails” propaganda of the 2024 election.
Libya floods destroy quarter of Derna city; death toll rises to 5,300.
Washington Post link
Journalist presents Mexican Congress with alleged ‘non-human alien corpses’ at UFO hearing: ‘We are not alone’
There’s a couple photos. They look like they were sculpted out of sand or something.
If these things are truly extraterrestrial, it is amazing that they have DNA at all, let alone 70% similarity to humans.
As a Doctor, a Mother and the Head of the C.D.C., I Recommend That You Get the Latest Covid Booster
New York Times link
Federal complaint filed against Oklahoma Children’s Hospital after woman denied emergency abortion
From ‘Data Dumping’ to ‘Webbing’: How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sells Misleading Ideas.
The candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination uses logical leaps and rhetorical devices to create false or misleading messages.
New York Time link
Beware the smooth-talking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who sounds (superficially) more intelligent than Trump, but who is, nevertheless, a conman promoting conspiracy theories.
The catastrophic flooding of the town Derna in eastern Libya has killed at least 6000 and 10,000 are still missing.
Lynna, OM@368,
Good that all Americans will be able to get updated Covid vaccines. That really should be the case for everyone worldwide: 3 1/2 years into the pandemic, it would surely have been possible to build and staff the facilities needed for this if there had been a will to do so. The UK government is limiting the latest round of boosters (and I think they are not even the most recent update) to a few groups: over-65s, front-line health workers, and people under 65 but extremely vulnerable. So I’ll get one (I’m 69), but Ms. KG, who is 64 and has asthma (but not severely enough to qualify under the “extremely vulnerable” heading), won’t. And they are getting effectively no pushback from any opposition party on this.
I want to get the annual flu shot with the new RSV vaccine and the latest Covid booster in one pincushion sitting. If Medicare won’t pay, I’ll pay for it. Better safe than sick.
Re: #373
Medicare will pay for RSV vaccine for over 60, since that’s what’s recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Medicare also covers the updated COVID-19 vaccine.
KG, sorry to hear that such essential health care is limited in the UK. That is not good.
Nerd @373, right. Same here, except that if they decided to charge me for the vaccines, I would not be able to pay for them. Luckily, Medicare will cover the costs. Local clinics here still usually manage to slip in a “facility fee” or “clinic fee” that I will end up paying for in part or in whole. We’ll see.
Washington Post:
Bloomberg:
Followup to comments 244, 247, 262, 274, 277, 279, 282 and 283.
Brunt glacier rapidly accelerates into the Weddell Sea after pinning point lost to iceberg A81 [Photo at the link]
More details, photos, and video at the link.
Link
https://www.wonkette.com/p/hold-on-tight-ukraine-putin-is-tonguing
#374 Thanks for the info. I’m over 70 so I didn’t think it would be a problem. I’m a firm believer in vaccines. Back in the nineteen fifties when I was a pre-teen, polio was a real problem. After the Salk and Sabin vaccines came out, everybody got vaccinated and polio just seemed to disappear.
@ #381
Good to see you pop up again, Nerd. Stay well. I left the seventies behind on my last birthday so we both remember the vaccines of the fifties. Nobody was happier about them than all the parents at the time.
Re: #374, #381, #382…
Another over 70 here who remembers the advent of numerous vaccines. Not surprising that my late wife and I saw to it that our kids were vaccinated. What pleases me is that the lessons sank in and the grandchildren are all getting their vaccinations.
@352 Things Ramaswamy says he will get rid of if he gets elected
The list includes birthright citizenship, which will be awkward because
1) If elected, he will take an oath to the constitution
2) birthright citizenship is clearly spelled out in the constitution
Feds open up $100 million funding for EV charger reliability grants
On Wednesday the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation announced it is accepting applications for grants to improve electric vehicle charger reliability. The Joint Office has $100 million to spend in this area to fund grants to repair or replace malfunctioning or broken EV chargers. The money was set aside as part of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, which allocated $5 billion for a national network of EV chargers by 2027…
Princess Martha Louise: Norway’s princess sets date to wed shaman
Ex-Trump attorney admits statements about 2020 election were false and is censured by judge
$224? Wow, what a huge deterrent to similar crimes. I hope this opens her up to further damages from individuals or corporations who feel they were harmed by her statements, they can use this judgment as evidence.
Fox Corp. Sued Again For Spreading Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Lies
Listened to this :
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/george-megalogenis-statistics-the-voice-referendum/102768718
On the radio the other day and quite intresting with the Voice Referendum and Dutton the Gestapotatoes motive sand lose lose situation and more.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-13/antarctic-sea-ice-probes-dropped-from-helicopter-totten-glacier/102844512
Oh and of cours ethey’re not :
Mummified alien corpses presented in Mexican parliament are not alien at all
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-09-14/mexico-mummified-alien-corpses-debunked/102854310
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #387….
That stipulation might be rather handy for Fani Willis.
Ukraine update: Russia loses a Kilo-class sub in spectacular attack on Crimean naval port
On discovering aliens :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-09-youve-alien-life.html
There might – or might not – be a Black Hole or two or three in the Hyades cluster 150 ly away :
Source : https://phys.org/news/2023-09-hints-closest-black-holes-earth.html
Whilst much closer to and inded probly inside home(s) :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-09/daddy-long-legs-truth-myth-misnomer-spider/102784822
This is Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, researchers say. (That’s a Washington Post link.)
More at the Washington Post link, including details about fires in Greece, Hawaii, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Chile.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-13/voice-misinformation-stolen-generation-victoria-first-people/102850668
SA is getting its own Indigenous Voice to our State Parlt too.
U.A.W. Prepares for Partial Strike Against Detroit Automakers on Friday.
The union’s president, Shawn Fain, said negotiators were nowhere near an agreement and ruled out a contract extension while talks continued.
New York Times link
Mr. Fain also pointed out that auto industry executives had given themselves a 40% raise.
Source : https://johnmenadue.com/dutton-has-made-himself-the-voice-target/
Another good article from Perals & Irritations well worth reading in full states this stark truth :
Source : https://johnmenadue.com/wilful-ignorance-drives-civilisation-collapse/
Plus a good idea here I think :
Source : https://johnmenadue.com/earth-systems-treaty-towards-a-positive-human-future/
Although getting it arranged and enforced in time is an issue..
Russia covered up a pilot’s attempt to shoot down a NATO aircraft near Ukraine, blaming it on a malfunction, report says
Russian air defence system destroyed in Crimea, Ukraine says>
Noel on Tafkat:
Tendar on Tafkat:
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Also in today’s Guardian:
“Libyans call for inquiry as fury grows over death toll from catastrophic floods”:
“Austrian ex-foreign minister moves to Russia – with ponies flown in on military plane”:
“‘Joyous’: Cornish seed-scattering event marks fightback against habitat loss”:
Whoa – update/correction to #s 399 and 400 – Kyiv Independent – “UPDATED: Third Assault Brigade denies Andriivka near Bakhmut was liberated”:
This EV smashed the world record for distance on a single charge
Planned Parenthood to resume offering abortions next week in Wisconsin, citing court ruling
Brazil’s Supreme Court convicts first defendant in January 8th trial to 17 years in prison
As summarized by Steve Benen from a Washington Post article:
Washington Post link
Florida’s Ladapo rejects CDC, FDA guidance on vaccines (again)
The CDC and FDA approved new Covid boosters. Florida’s Joseph Ladapo is rejecting their findings. It’s part of a potentially dangerous pattern.
Strike that “probably.” Skepticism of Ladapo is definitely the safer course.
The New York Times gives impeachment the both-sides treatment
Followup to comment 409.
Satire written by Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Biden’s age
Lena Dunham Will Paint a Mural in Your Home to Help Support Crews During Hollywood Strikes
Liz Cheney, former Representative of Wyoming and vice share of the Jan. 6 select committee, speaks out:
Link
Police Shooting Of Sovereign Citizen Pulled Over For Fake License Plate Ruled Justified
Republican states can now run blood or tissue tests to prosecute anyone’s use of the ‘abortion pill’
Domestic Abuser Shot At Woman In Parking Garage, Wants Supreme Court To Give Him Back His Guns
Followup to comment 416.
Posted by readers of the article:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/did-kevin-mccarthy-think-impeach
Dementia-Free Non-Alcoholic Rudy Giuliani Generously Offers To Lead House Impeachment Of Joe Biden.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/dementia-free-non-alcoholic-rudy
Trump Turns New York AG Case Against Judge
Federal prosecutors indict Hunter Biden on gun charges
In theory, given the GOP’s fixation on Hunter Biden, this development would be celebrated in party circles. In practice, it’s not working out that way.
Re #216
Why is it that the SCOTUS interpretation of the 2nd amendment completely ignores the “well regulated militia” and the “security of a free state” parts of the second amendment? (rhetorical question; the owners of the elected and non-elected officials want it that way for money and power) If they were true originalists, they would have to keep all of it (and there are already plenty of infringements on which types of arms are allowed)
Moreover, the creation of the US army would have made obsolete the need for a well regulated militia and therefore the 2nd amendment itself. I wonder what would happen if someone were to create a “well regulated militia” and claim their second amendment right on this.
Meant #416 above
Followup to comment 421.
What’s the Deal With These Gun Charges and the Whole Hunter Biden Situation?
Andrew Weissmann noted on Nicole Wallace’s show “Deadline White House” that they seem to be charging Hunter Biden for three felonies related to lying on the form he filled out to obtain a gun. All three felonies seem to be the same crime, more or less. And that is for a crime which the prosecution was earlier willing to let go with good behavior provisos in the plea deal. So it is now not a misdemeanor, and is not part of a plea deal which would result in no jail time. It is instead three felonies that might put Hunter Biden in jail for 25 years. That seems crazy to me. Also, this has never been charged before unless it was in connection with a crime committed with said gun. Hunter Biden never even fired that gun.
Followup to comment 424.
Link
Ukraine Update: Another day, another critical blow to Russian infrastructure in occupied Crimea
Musk did not reply to the Sky News reporter’s questions, but I am glad to see that Musk is at least confronted with the questions.
Link
More at the link.
NBC News:
Related to Lynna”s #395 above:
New episode of WITHpod (MSNBC link) – “Unpacking the hot labor summer with Alex Press: podcast and transcript”:
I recommend the whole thing, but the last section concerns the new leadership of the Teamsters and the UAW and is very informative.
The UAW taffed that there will be a Facebook Live with Shawn Fain tonight at 10 ET.
Jean @ #422, from Erwin Chemerinsky’s (2018) We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century:
(I know it was rhetorical, but I couldn’t resist agreeing with you. :))
Two recent articles by Robert Whitaker:
The BMJ – “How the FDA approved an antipsychotic that failed to show a meaningful benefit but raised the risk of death”:
As the article suggests, this undermines the work of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Mad in America – “The STAR*D Scandal: Scientific Misconduct on a Grand Scale”:
Some related articles:
Guardian – “Earth ‘well outside safe operating space for humanity’, scientists find”:
Guardian – “World Bank spent billions of dollars backing fossil fuels in 2022, study finds”:
Hyperallergic – “Protesters at New York’s Natural History Museum Warn of ‘Mass Extinction'”:
SC @430
Glad to see others agreeing. These people interpret the constitution like they do for their religious texts: start with the wanted conclusion and parse the text to get there regardless of what’s actually meant or what is desirable in a just (for all) society. And if you have to invent text or meaning, no biggy.
Some podcast episodes:
99% Invisible – “Whomst Among Us Let The Dogs Out (Again)”:
99% Invisible – “Blood in the Machine”:
Tech Won’t Save Us – “How Tech Wields Its Power in San Francisco”:
If Books Could Kill – “God And Man At Yale”:
The Josh Marshall Podcast – “Ep. 290: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Impeach”:
(Also too, once again, we have a vice president.)
L.A. County D.A. sued over prosecution allegedly sparked by election conspiracy theories
Story that made me want to puke.
Cold cocking a 3 year old in the back of the head is only an option when that child’s head is on fucking fire.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/us/ohio-autistic-child-school-video/index.html
My preferred method of stopping running at that age is catch up, which is massive exercise, then put my hand in front of the child’s eyes, obscuring vision.
Inexperience halts forward progress, interaction then can ensue.
I’ve advocated for rare occasions for striking a child, typically over life threatening events.
The rest of the time, it’s either didactic instruction or my far preferred Socratic instruction. One has to have a base, then learn from there.
With modern distilled methods, not a one requires or suggests punching a minor child in the motherfucking head.
And a selection process where, when one is flat out of ideas, that is never considered a solution if the child’s head is not on actual fire.
For fuck’s sake, I’ve slowed down a fair bit with age, I could’ve tripped him with my cane.
Trivially. I use my cane as a tool on a daily basis and it’s a weapon. Pull top shelf goods down, done, trip an idiot, trivial, it’s also a staff weapon that I’d never use on a child.
Obscuring vision works for a simple reason, fresh still in the 3 year old’s memory is toddler memory of running and falling, painfully.
So, use your knowledge and experience as a weapon of choice, when needed badly. That should be vanishingly rare in punching a child.
Which reminds me, gotta order some new cloth diapers. Most got lost in the move and they’re one of the best household cleaning cloths ever made…
I’ll probably have nightmares over that fucking story.
To compete with other nightmares.
My worst remains, starting to say something to my wife and awakening to find her long gone.
Then, considering talking to a new close friend, who’s currently hospitalized with a stroke.
Then, considering my stock of pasta sauce is down to 50% reserve, but fortunately I have all ingredients needed to make more, if not freezer space.
Always look for some upside, lest one look toward suicide.
And I never did learn how to quit.
Other, more entertaining, if unfortunately disastrous without cost news, Portugal suffered a 3 million bottle loss of wine to a dual tank failure, flooding the gutters of the town with wine.
A significant hazmat incident, with no Boston flood of syrup killing anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Hey, it could’ve been worse, instead of wine, it could’ve been a sewage failure and urine stunk up the town instead.
At least, according to friends. I have no realistic sense of smell, only some trigeminal derived residue and supertasting. That nerve carries, oddly, due to its additional length, the more noxious scents. Delaying transmission and well, suggesting some really poor design ideas for a perfect being designing a penultimate being or something.
Upside, I still do replicate, accurately recipes on pure taste alone.
A wonderful Aussie water critter the critically endangered Bellinger River Snapping Turtle also called the Bellinger River Sawshelled Turtle or simply the Bellinger River Turtle (Myuchelys georgesi) which lost 90% of its population in just months is this week’s Endangered Species of the Week. An ancient omnivore that once swam alongside the non-avian dinosaurs, this moderately sized turtle’s favourite habitat is cool, deep pools in the riverbed. It gets the second part of its species name from Arthur Georges an Australian herpetologist with, sadly, no info I can find on its Indigenous name.
Never common and always restricted to only the eponymous 70 km long river system in New South Wales once numbered almost five thousand individuals before the deadly Bellinger river virus struck in 2015 nearly driving it into extinction. Today only 150 of these reptilian cuties remain with on-going efforts to save this species including a successful captive breeding program. A thin thread for this turtle’s future against the mysterious threat of that virus which so nearly caused them to vanish forever plus the loss of habitat and especially native vegetation and possibly from Global Overheating and its effect on its river both potentially drying up and heating up the pools they prefer.
See : https://therevelator.org/bellinger-river-turtle-virus/
Plus : https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2016/09/festival-to-make-noise-to-save-the-snapping-turtle/
In adition to : https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/news/keeping-up-with-the-bellinger-river-snapping-turtle
Cross post from the Mexican pollies see alien people thread with three kinda aliens related stories here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2023/09/14/these-aliens-wouldnt-be-out-of-place-in-a-roadside-museum/#comment-2194515
Introducing the new (?) word biotechnosphere plus stigma vs science on Unidentified objects and a serious method of determining whether aliens might be out there scientifically.
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-15/linda-burney-feels-betrayed-by-price-colonisation-comments/102859658
Yup for real. Price (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacinta_Nampijinpa_Price ) said that.
Of course, its not the first time Price has said utterly appalling and totally wrong things :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-14/welcome-to-country-jacinta-nampijinpa-price-marcus-stewart/102727886
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Def Mon on Tafkat:
See also :
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/01/jacinta-price-doesnt-speak-for-my-people-and-her-stance-shows-why-australia-needs-the-indigenous-voice
Also in the Guardian:
“Auto workers strike after contract talks with US car giants fail”:
“When a fetal scan showed problems, she fled Idaho for an abortion – now she’s suing”:
Another of the women suing Idaho was on Deadline: White House the other day. Heartwrenching interview. I couldn’t find the video online.
“What are medicanes? The ‘supercharged’ Mediterranean storms that could become more frequent”:
“Li Shangfu: speculation grows over fate of China’s missing defence minister”:
(Apologies to Japan for Rahm Emanuel.)
Our First Look At Boeing’s Pre-Production MQ-25 Stingray
Finland joins Baltic neighbors in banning Russian-registered cars from entering their territory
Some art-related links:
Emiline Smith at Hyperallergic – “The Sun Is Setting on the British Museum”:
The Projection Booth Podcast – “Episode 640: Black Legion (1937)”:
Guardian – “Surrealism and war: the life of Lee Miller – in pictures”:
Colossal – “Bird Photographer of the Year 2023 Highlights Avian Attitudes and Winged Wonders Around the World”:
Guardian – “Astronomy photographer of the year 2023: winners and finalists”:
@355, 359
The spectacular downfall of a common, useless cold medicine
This article on phenylephrine has considerably more technical detail than what you will find in the mass media.
According to Mitt Romney, some Republicans wanted to hold Donald Trump accountable, but they feared violence. That raises some uncomfortable questions.
Their fears are understandable. But if they cannot vote for what they know is right, they should retire from public office.
It’s a problem that James Comer keeps making untrue claims about Joe Biden. The motivation behind the Republican’s deceptions makes that problem worse.
See also: https://twitter.com/OversightDems/status/1702668596562767935
See also: Link
Cartoon: Mike Luckovich on Fox News’ spin
Followup to comment 448.
[video at the link]
Link
The Justice Department says there’s no valid basis for the judge to step aside from Trump’s DC case
Stupidity and arrogance: Ron Johnson derails months of bipartisan Senate work on spending bills
Federal Judge Throws Out DACA Again
https://www.wonkette.com/p/federal-judge-throws-out-daca-again
UAW strikes begin against Big Three automakers
Washington Post link
Followup to comment 454.
New York Times link
Quoted in Lynna’s #447:
I’m sure I said it at the time (I think after the incident with Lindsey Graham at the airport) and probably on a few occasions prior to that, but this isn’t just cowardly; it’s deeply stupid. Every time people who have the power to do something to stop an authoritarian refuse to do it or remain silent or attempt to justify the authoritarian’s actions or whatever, they further endanger everyone, including themselves. Refusing to impeach him both times handed him and his thuggish followers more power over them. Every successive cowardly action (or lack of action) limits their capacity to stop him in the future and further emboldens the people threatening them. It always escalates like this, and they’re too stupid to recognize that each time they’re putting themselves in more danger. Now they didn’t stop him from running again when they had the opportunity so they have to fear his regaining power and using the power of the state to have them arrested or killed if they displease him. Because they’re craven fools.
SC in comment 456: “Every successive cowardly action (or lack of action) limits their capacity to stop him in the future and further emboldens the people threatening them. It always escalates like this, and they’re too stupid to recognize that each time they’re putting themselves in more danger.”
Very good points. Well said.
Followup to comments 448 and 450
What Trump said:
Link
House Freedom Caucus plans to shut down the government, blame it on the Senate
The charges filed against Hunter Biden are a travesty
Cartoon: Medical advice from DeSantis
Russian Society is Very Sick
There’s So Much More UAW News, We Needed Another Post
Outflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of Idaho.
Washington Post link
Much of conservative eastern Oregon wants to be part of Idaho, and a push to shift an old border is underway
More at the link.
Paul Krugman:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/opinion/child-poverty-america.html
Anti-Vaccine Dog Owners Could Mean the Return of Rabies
Yeah, that’s a bad thing, but I have to point out that rabies can’t “return” because it never went away. It is endemic in the wild in some areas, and can be encountered in a variety of species from raccoons to foxes to bats.
NBC News:
Link
Gretchen Whitmer: Three men cleared of plotting to kidnap governor
Ukraine Update: Everything we learn about Elon Musk’s actions makes thing worse, by Mark Sumner.
Canada’s QAnon ‘Queen’ forced out of Kamsack, Sask.
Sounds like there is some sovereign citizen mixed in with that Q.
Prosecutors in DC election case seek order barring Trump’s ‘inflammatory,’ ‘intimidating’ comments
Followup to comment 471.
Posted by readers of the article:
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are ‘coming to the end’ but together and ‘in love,’ their grandson shares
House Republicans Threaten to Subpoena VA for Data on Veterans Who Got Abortions
AP:
A member of the secret panel studying Wisconsin Supreme Court justice’s impeachment backed her rival
BY SCOTT BAUER / September 15, 2023
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/can-you-see-rare-green-comet-nishimura/102861648
Class action against racism in the AFL – Aussie Footy :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/phil-krakouer-racism-class-action-against-afl/102864588
Russell Brand is apparently gunna be in some trouble here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/russell-brand-denies-serious-allegations-against-him/102864768
Whilst in cool science news there’s a new species of burrowing spider that’s being discovered here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/new-burrowing-spider-wishbone-unearthed-bush-blitz-wa-goldfields/102847474
Well, in WA anyhow.
Toddler poisoned after eating deadly plant mislabeled as diet supplement
‘Who’s Allowing the Grifting?’: Donald Trump’s Former Spiritual Adviser Paula White, Who Once Prayed for Angels of Africa to Secure Election Win, Claims She Helped Nelson Mandela End Apartheid
Ukrainian SeaBaby drone hits Russian Samum missile warship in Black Sea
@421, 460, etc
A conservative appeals court just ruled against the federal gun law used to charge Hunter Biden
Former Trump Spiritual Advisor Paula White Claims She Helped Mandela End Apartheid – But There’s No Record Of It
What Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said:
Senator John Fetterman’s reply:
Commentary:
Link for text quoted in comment 481.
Related news: Would impeachment inquiry shut down with the government? Maybe
Republican Texas AG Ken Paxton is acquitted of corruption charges at historic impeachment trial
Once again. Republican fail to clean up their own mess.
A high school band director was tased by cops at a football game after he refused orders to stop his musicians from playing
Trump Warns That ‘Cognitively Impaired’ Biden Will ‘Lead Us Into World War 2’ in Confused Speech
Reginald @483, I guess we have to believe it because it actually happened, but my first thought was “unbelievable!”
Paxton is such a brazen criminal that I thought his fellow Republicans might impeach him. No such luck. However:
I saw the photos of Paxton and his lawyers having a good laugh together during the impeachment hearing earlier. Slimeballs.
“Inverse vaccine” shows potential to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases
Ukraine Update: Plot twist! The mud may actually help Ukraine
Sarah Huckabee Thinks Everyone Is Way Jealous Of How ‘Normal’ Arkansas Is
https://www.wonkette.com/p/sarah-huckabee-thinks-everyone-is
Effort To Codify Abortion Rights Underway In Another State
@ 489
Yes, “Normal:” Men and women locked into boring, monogamous, heterosexual marriages, crapping out kids they really don’t want or need, and forever groveling before the
copspigs,the militarythe warmongers, capital, and, of course, their nonexistent Abrahamic god.Yeah, Arkansas sounds like utopia… if you’re fucking rural dullard.
@491
I used to be a fucking rural dullard, but I got better
“I made it very clear at the outset”: Judge stops Eastman trial to slam Steve Bannon for live stream
Tim Scott, A.K.A. Mr. ‘Racism Isn’t Real,’ Says Talk About His Marriage Status Is Racist
Re: Reginald Selkirk @ #493…
The article doesn’t drop the other shoe. What happened after the judge made her remarks? Inquiring minds, and all that…
@Reginald #483, @Lynna #486:
Speaking of unbelievable, this is from Jul 25, during the trial, over bribery.
Video: Maddow – Unbelievable: Texas A.G.’s PAC makes [$3 million] donation to Lt. Gov. presiding over his impeachment trial
And who isn’t even up for reelection until 2026.
* In advance of Paxton’s trial.
Ramaswamy wants to end the H-1B visa program he used 29 times