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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:19:51 GMT -8
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.
How Will the Country Survive If Men Can See Women's Hair?
Iran's morality police, which is tasked with enforcing the country's Islamic dress code, is being disbanded, the country's attorney general says.
Mohammad Jafar Montazeri's comments, yet to be confirmed by other agencies, were made at an event on Sunday.
Iran has seen months of protests over the death of a young woman in custody.
Mahsa Amini had been detained by the morality police for allegedly breaking strict rules on head coverings.
Mr Montazeri was at a religious conference when he was asked if the morality police was being disbanded.
"The morality police had nothing to do with the judiciary and have been shut down from where they were set up," he said.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
Let’s not forget that the morality police were just one very visible tool of implementing mandatory hijab.
Complying with dress standards became mandatory by law four years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It birthed the current theocratic establishment and overthrew a monarchy backed by the United States.
No senior official has seriously signalled in public that a major change in hijab laws could be implemented soon. Top authorities have emphasised over the years that they consider the issue to be a “red line”.
Montazeri had said last week that both parliament and the judiciary “are working and studying the issue of hijab” while pointing out that the judiciary does not favour indefinitely shutting down the “moral security police”.
President Ebrahim Raisi has said several times since September that “flexibility” could potentially be shown in implementing the law, but he has not elaborated. Other officials have hinted at less confrontational but still controversial methods like using artificial intelligence and cameras to fine perceived offenders.
Iran is Still Iran
Iran has executed four men accused of working with Israel's intelligence service, Iranian state media reported.
The sentences for "intelligence cooperation" with Israel and "kidnapping" were carried out on Sunday, the Mizan news agency said.
Iran's Supreme Court had upheld death penalties against them on Wednesday following their arrest in May.
The executions come at a time of heightened tensions in Iran after more than two months of protests.
Three other people were sentenced to between five and 10 years in prison for crimes against the country's security, complicity in kidnapping and possession of weapons, the judiciary's website said.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:27:07 GMT -8
The School of Hard Warnocks
When Lauren Nicks, a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta, cast her vote in last month's midterms, she did so in her home state of New York.
Nicks, a 21-year-old international studies major at the historically black college, had been told months earlier by fellow students about a law that does not allow students from private colleges and universities in the state to use their school ID as identification to vote — a rule she believed would prevent her from casting a ballot in Georgia.
As a result, she wasn’t able to vote for her preferred candidate, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, in November, or in next week’s runoff election either.
“You can’t use that [Spelman] ID,” she said in a recent interview. “I just thought I wasn’t eligible.”
Her confusion emanated from a 16-year-old provision in Georgia voting law in which only IDs from state schools, not private schools, are considered an acceptable form of voter ID.
It’s a provision that voting rights experts say continues to confuse voters — especially college students or others who already face barriers — and results in many of them voting elsewhere or not at all. Furthermore, they argue it has a disproportionate impact on student voters of color, because seven out of 10 of Georgia’s historically Black colleges and universities are private institutions.
Nicks could have brought in another form of identification to vote; under Georgia law, her passport or her New York state identification card would have sufficed, for example. But she didn’t know that. Nicks said she didn’t want to risk not being able to vote, so she simply remained registered in New York and voted with an absentee ballot.
“Students in general often have a more difficult time accessing the ballot box because of all sorts of things. For example, their addresses often change. Voters of color face barriers to the ballot box as well. So when you take that overlap, you’re making it even harder for a subset of voters for whom it’s already quite difficult to cast a ballot,” Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the Georgia American Civil Liberties Union, said.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:28:59 GMT -8
Kind of a Drag
The hosts of a "Drag Queen Story Hour"-style event for children in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday pulled the plug because of what they described as the intimidating presence of right-wing demonstrators.
The scheduled holiday themed "Holi-Drag Storytime" at the First Unitarian Church of Columbus, which runs the K-5 institution behind the event, Red Oak Community School, was canceled at the last-minute Saturday morning following internal discussions, organizers said.
Members of Ohio's Proud Boys organization and other right-wing groups made good on promises to make waves outside the venue Saturday. More than 50 demonstrators, including members of the Proud Boys, gathered near the church Saturday morning and shouted, chanted and held up signs. Some were armed with long guns.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:31:19 GMT -8
Previous Guy Tells the Truth. He Wants to Dump the Constitution
Trump’s message on the Truth Social platform reiterated the baseless claims he has made since 2020 that the election was stolen. But he went further by suggesting that the country abandon one of its founding documents.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote.
The post came a day after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed he would expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the run-up to the 2020 election. But his “Twitter Files” did not show that the tech giant bent to the will of Democrats.
“UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!” Trump followed up in another post on Saturday afternoon on Truth Social.
The Deets
Here’s a synopsis for the blessedly uninitiated:
On Friday, Elon Musk promised to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.” It turns out that he had provided a trove of internal corporate documents to the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack, Matt Taibbi, who said they amounted to a “unique and explosive story”—revealing the juicy details inside Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which had previously been rejected by such liberal outlets as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal due to its suspicious provenance. Taibbi agreed to divulge these private emails on Twitter itself rather than via his Substack as part of a “few conditions,” which he does not detail, that were imposed on him, presumably by Musk or a Musk factotum.
The documents Taibbi tweeted on Friday were titillating in the way that reading private correspondence revealing what people were really saying around a controversial subject always is, but nothing new was learned about the contours of the story. The leak mostly relitigates two facts that have already received much ink across the media: 1) How Twitter throttled the New York Post’s initial story about Hunter’s laptop based on what we now know was an incorrect assessment of its source; and 2) How political campaigns and government agencies have worked with social media companies—in this case Twitter—to flag troubling content.
On the first point, the emails confirm the essential consensus that has come into focus in reporting on the matter: Twitter got out over its skis on the ban and a typical corporate bureaucratic goat rope ensued as the company tried to “unfuck” the situation, as one employee put it. To say that this is not a new revelation would be an understatement given that Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that this was a mistake over a year ago.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:36:59 GMT -8
Does Mineral Mapping Sound Boring?
An International Space Station instrument looks for dust, finds methane vent in the Permian Basin.
A news release from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about its new mineral mapping instrument on the International Space Station sent Oil Conservation Division (OCD) employees scrambling the last week in October. The notification, posted to science aficionados around the world, featured the agency’s new ground-scanning camera and led with an image of a massive methane leak from what appears to be a gas well along the Pecos River, 10 miles southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico.
In the image, the leaking plume stretches just over two miles due north, a roil of angry reds and blues reflecting different concentrations of the incredibly potent greenhouse gas. Those high concentrations are why the new instrument detected the event, which it wasn’t exactly looking for. NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation—known as EMIT—originally went to space to map minerals in this planet’s deserts, part of an effort to understand how dust from these places affects the global climate. Methane detection is a bonus.
“It’s not formally part of the mission as stated and as funded,” says Andrew K. Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL who works on the project and has studied methane emissions for the past decade. “I’m just leveraging a small portion of the data that’s already being collected as part of this other NASA mission, and mining it for the methane work.”
The new plume near Carlsbad was venting more than 40,300 pounds of methane an hour.
In addition to the picture, NASA documented a one-hour release rate at that site that was far greater than the amount reported at the nearest well site for all of 2022.
As far as I can tell, nothing has been done about the leak.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:41:01 GMT -8
Russians Have Had Enough. Putin Hasn't. Guess Who Decides.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:48:19 GMT -8
Humpty Putin Had a Great Fall
Truly dramatic events for Putin took place in the evening at his residence," the report says, once translated from Russian. "Going down the stairs, Putin stumbled and fell to the fifth point, after which he fell on his side and slid down a couple of steps. The incident took place in front of the president's bodyguards, who quickly reacted and rushed to Putin's aid."
Putin suffers from oncology of the gastrointestinal tract, as a result of which he already experiences serious problems with digestion, and as a result of the fall, as it turned out, the main blow fell on the coccyx, which probably caused sharp pain, provoking involuntary defecation," the report adds.
All Putin's Horses and All Putin's Men
In the afternoon, Putin was upset by the news from the front," the report claims. "Promises by the leadership of the military bloc to capture several settlements before the start of winter, including Bakhmut (called Artemovsk in reports to Putin) in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, were not realized. Moreover, yesterday the leadership of the military bloc was not ready to guarantee the president a significant advance on any sector of the front before the New Year."
Couldn't Put Putin Back Together Again
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:49:35 GMT -8
Who Won the Week?
Same-sex and interracial couples, as DOMA is finally repealed and the Respect for Marriage Act tells Clarence Thomas to go f*ck himself
Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, for stomping on Trump's BS claim of "absolute immunity" in a civil rights lawsuit against him
The diverse new members of the Democratic House leadership: Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, Peter Aguilar, and Ted Lieu
The House Ways and Means Committee, which finally got hold of the federal tax returns, likely riddled with fraud, belonging to career criminal Donald Trump
President Biden: 3rd quarter GDP 2.9%; 263k new jobs; gas prices down; creates 450k-acre Avi Kwa Ame national monument in Nevada; welcomes France's Macron to WH for 1st state dinner
The Justice Department, for scoring big with the conviction of Oath Keepers ringleaders who'll now spend up to 20 years in prison for sedition and other Jan. 6 related crimes
The courageous citizens in China and Iran who continue defying their mullahs and dictators to protest ridiculously oppressive conditions in their countries
The 11th Circuit Court, for deeming Trump Judge Aileen Cannon an incompetent fool, dismissing the special master, and letting DOJ go through the classified documents Trump stole
The record-shattering number of voters who are turning out to cast ballots early in the Georgia runoff election between Raphael Warnock and a chronically-confused Texan
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:52:26 GMT -8
Lie-Walker and Mitch McDonalds
The Omicron Variant of Kanye
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:55:11 GMT -8
The Turd Doesn't Fall Far From the Asshole
A niece of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was kicked off a plane in New Orleans last month after she asked passengers she believed were Latino if they were drug smugglers, according to law enforcement authorities.
She then “bit, kicked and spit on” Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputies attempting to detain her after the incident on Thanksgiving Day at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jason Rivarde told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Shannon Epstein, 25, was on her way to New Jersey Nov. 24 when she asked a nearby family — whom she believed to be Latino — if they were “smuggling cocaine,” the newspaper reported.
Airline staff reportedly asked that Epstein be removed from the plane as she became increasingly “irate,” and the plane returned to the gate.
When deputies arrived, Epstein refused to exit into the terminal, and when they tried to arrest her she became “extremely combative,” Rivarde said.
During the ensuing scuffle, Epstein shouted that the deputies were going to lose their jobs or end up in jail, boasting that she was related to powerful people and that her uncle is a friend of Donald Trump, Rivarde said. (Maybe she can get him to suspend the Constitution for her.)
Six deputies were injured and were treated on the scene by paramedics, the Times-Picayune reported.
Epstein was charged with six counts of battery on a police officer, three of disturbing the peace, and one of resisting arrest by force, Rivarde said. She paid $10,750 bail and was reportedly released from the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center later that day.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 4, 2022 9:58:53 GMT -8
the Flu Hasn't Flown
Last week, it became clear that under new CEO Elon Musk, Twitter had stopped enforcing a policy against spreading disinformation related to COVID-19 and vaccinations. They didn’t make a big announcement about this. It wasn’t until people began wondering why so much outright anti-vax nonsense was suddenly floating around, that it was discovered that Twitter had stopped trying to block such propaganda back in mid-November.
The cost of that disinformation campaign is absolutely measurable. In the United States, not only did the total number of Americans vaccinated with the original vaccine stall out at under 70%, the percentage who have gotten the latest bivariant booster, which has been available for three months, is a mind-boggling 12.7%. That number explains why, over the last few months, the number of new deaths among those who got the original vaccine has come to exceed the number of deaths among the unvaccinated.
According to the CDC, even among those who got the original vaccine, 81% have failed to get the latest booster. For most of those, all their shots and boosters are so far in the past, that the residual effect is much smaller than it was in the weeks and months after the vaccine was first administered. As a result, it’s expected another 120,000 Americans are projected to die of COVID-19 over the next year.
But that’s not all. That disinformation is leading directly to the worst flu season in many years, at a time when the U.S. is seeing one of the nastiest flu variants in some time.
The disinformation campaign around COVID-19 has done exactly what anti-vax forces hoped; it has spilled over into a growing resistance to vaccines in general. Right now the U.S. is seeing a decline in flu vaccinations. It’s also being hit with a variant of the flu that expresses the H3N2 proteins — a variety that has not been seen in so long that few Americans have any resistance. However, the current vaccine is well-matched the the strains of flu that are circulating, meaning that it provides good protection both against infection and against severe effects.
As The Washington Post reports, there’s a direct link between the anti-vax propaganda spread concerning the COVID-19 vaccines, and lower uptake of flu vaccines. Officials have even anticipated this, similar resistance has been displayed in both schools and the military against vaccines that have previously been routine.
The disinformation campaign has tried to make it seem as if, in protecting ourselves from COVID-19, we somehow lowered our resistance to flu. This is 100% not true. In fact, the opposite is true. It was ending the steps being taken against COVID-19 that has created conditions for a bad flu season.
Officials had been bracing for a more robust flu season this fall and winter because so many people have dropped covid protection measures and are reluctant to get vaccinated.
When people try to dismiss COVID-19 as a “mild” disease, with symptoms no worse than the flu, they’re forgetting how bad the flu actually is. Not only does it lead to many serious illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths each year, the flu, like COVID-19, has “long” effects that may not always be identified with the disease.
What many people don’t realize is that even after someone recovers from the flu, the inflammatory response generated by the virus continues to wreak havoc for another four to six weeks in those who are middle-aged and older, increasing the rate of heart attacks and strokes, Schaffner said.
My Family Was Going to See a Musical at the Pantages in Hollywood Tonight. The Show has Been Cancelled Due to Illness in the Cast. There is a LOT of Virus Stuff Going Around.
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