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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 9:33:30 GMT -8
I have a chicken proof lawn. It's impeccable Another Brittney is FreeThe U.S. has swapped WNBA star Brittney Griner for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, according to a senior U.S. official. The basketball star was taken into custody at a Moscow area airport in February in possession of vaping cartridges containing hashish oil, an illegal substance in Russia. Griner pleaded guilty in July and was sentenced to nine years in prison on Aug. 7. She appealed the sentence, but was quickly rejected in October. Das Bout The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called Viktor Bout (pronounced “Boot”) “one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers.” Mr. Bout become notorious among American intelligence officials, earning the nickname “Merchant of Death” as he evaded capture for years. His exploits helped inspire a 2005 film, “Lord of War,” that starred Nicolas Cage as a character fashioned after Mr. Bout. He was probably the highest-profile Russian in U.S. custody and the prisoner Russia had campaigned the most vociferously to have returned. His return to Russia is likely to reignite the debate over the wisdom of engaging in prisoner exchanges for Americans the United States considers “wrongfully detained” — as was the case with Ms. Griner and is with another American still imprisoned in Russia, Paul Whelan, a former Marine. In interviews with journalists, Mr. Bout has repeatedly denied accusations that he has worked for Russian intelligence agencies. But Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s security services, said there were strong signs — Mr. Bout’s education, his social and professional networks, and his logistical skills — that he is a member, or at least was in close collaboration with, Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U. “That is also the opinion of U.S. and other authorities — and it explains the reasons Russia has been so assiduously campaigning to get him back,” Mr. Galeotti, a lecturer on Russia and transnational crime at University College London, said in an interview in July. “All countries try to get their citizens out of rough jurisdictions, but it is clear that it has been a particular priority for the Russians in getting Viktor Bout back.” Who Is Viktor Bout, Arms Dealer in Swap for Brittney Griner?While I am Thrilled That She is Free, Putin Got the Better of This Deal. They Took a Young Woman as a Hostage, and We Let a Really Bad Man Go Free.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 9:46:43 GMT -8
Spike This, COVID!The coronavirus has been a shifty foe, with new variants and subvariants rapidly evolving to evade vaccines and treatments. Researchers at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are working on an experimental drug that takes one of the virus’ most dangerous traits — its talent for mutation — and turns it back on itself. When the coronavirus binds to a specific type of receptor on the surface of a cell, it drives its spike protein in like a switchblade and initiates an infection. The drug is designed to mimic that receptor, working like an assassin in an attractive disguise. When the coronavirus attempts to bind to it instead of to the real thing, it destroys the structure of the spike protein, permanently disabling the mechanism that would make that switchblade, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. This approach backs the coronavirus into a corner: If it adopts a mutation that makes it bind less effectively with the decoy drug, it will also bind less effectively to the human cell. The virus has found ways around antibody treatments by evolving new versions of its spike protein. But to get around this decoy, it would have to seek out and bind with a completely different receptor — a highly unlikely possibility “that would involve super-drastic changes" to the virus, said Gordon Freeman, an immunologist at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School and the study's senior author. ... The team is currently working on the preclinical studies that are necessary to begin human trials in 2023, Torchia said. Experimental decoy drug tricks coronavirus, then destroys it
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 9:50:18 GMT -8
This is a BS Story
Police in western Germany are appealing for help in cracking a potentially very cold case.
Authorities say about 60 containers of bull sperm were stolen from a farm in the town of Olfen, 90 kilometers (56 miles) northeast of Cologne, late Monday or early Tuesday.
Police said in a statement Wednesday that while it’s unclear how the rustle happened, the precious cargo needs to be supercooled with liquid nitrogen at –196 Celsius degrees (–320 Fahrenheit) so it isn’t spoiled.
They are seeking tips from the public that might lead to the recovery of the sperm, which was intended for artificial insemination.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:00:31 GMT -8
Lie-Walker's Campaign Should Hove Told the Candidate, "You're Fired!"The former Heisman Trophy-winning University of Georgia football star was hard to manage and coach, according to campaign staff who didn’t want to publicly speak about his foibles; they noted his poor public speaking skills and penchant for veering off message. The candidate limited his television time almost exclusively to the comfortable environs of Fox News and other conservative media outlets as the messy details of his troubled past unfolded daily in the mainstream media and in Democratic attack ads on TV, radio and social media. And donors both big and small weren’t as generous as the opposition was for Warnock. While those issues were apparent to even casual news consumers, behind the scenes, campaign insiders and their political allies describe a first-time celebrity candidate who was difficult to manage and utterly unprepared for a brutal campaign that would tarnish a once-sterling brand. Walker did not set up a traditional campaign structure, according to people who worked for him. They say that decisions normally left to professional staff — from media buys to the campaign’s daily messaging to vendors who sold campaign swag online to picking event locations — were instead controlled, and often micromanaged, by Walker and his wife, Julie Blanchard. Neither had any experience in politics. It led to delayed decisions and redundancies, namely the hiring of two media vendors to make TV ads, whereas most campaigns have only one. nside the turbulent, doomed campaign of Herschel Walker
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:02:22 GMT -8
Dumb Headline and Story of the Day
"Just a couple minutes of vigorous activity several times a day might lower one's risk of death"
"Might"?? So It Might Not? It Might Increase One's Risk of Death?
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:03:10 GMT -8
Today's Story That No One Is Reporting
Gasoline is cheaper now than a year ago — and could fall below $3
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:10:49 GMT -8
My, My, My, My Kreminna
Russia is claiming that it has counterattacked Ukrainian forces in the Serebryanskyy forest south of Kreminna with propagandists insisting that Ukraine has been dislodged from positions that were only 2km outside of Kreminna.
At the same time, Ukrainian forces are reporting that they are still advancing on all sides of Kreminna, following an earlier report that “good news” is expected in the area today.
We should know who is right very soon.
Putin Wants to Make Russia Great Again. About That ...
Historian Kamil Galeev has produced some of the most incisive and thoughtful examinations of Russia’s motivations and behaviors during this invasion. Just three days into the conflict, he produced a genuinely deep and insightful review of “Why Russia will lose this war,” and his writing about the criminal culture within Russia and the level of corruption in the Russian military has been revelatory.
Galeev is back this week with more analysis of what happens when Russia loses the Ukraine invasion. What he expects going forward is that Russia is about to see a fracturing of its remaining empire. And have no doubt about it, Russia remains an empire. For Galeev, the glue that holds that Russian empire together is a “mythos,” one that says that the Russian military is so superior to that of any potential breakaway component that there is no point in fighting, and one that warns any resistance to Moscow will result in horrific punishment—see Grozny for a reference example.
Moscow doesn’t see Ukraine as an independent nation they have invaded. They see it as another “rebel province” that has to be taught a lesson in standing up to the Czar. The problem for Moscow is that, in framing it that way, they are turning Ukraine into exactly the object lesson they don’t want the rest of a long-repressed empire to learn.
If Russia is unable to “crush” Ukraine, or at least keep its populace convinced that it can do so in the near future, the mythos that binds the empire together unravels. So does the empire.
An interesting series of Tweets
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:13:11 GMT -8
It's a Good Day for Equality
The U.S. House of Representatives has joined with the U.S. Senate in declaring that every marriage between two people of whatever religion or race or sexual orientation is equal under law in every state of the union. They passed the Respect for Marriage Act, 258-169-1, with outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi presiding. The bill will now go to President Joe Biden for his signature.
The legislation repeals the huge 1996 embarrassment for Congress and former President Bill Clinton that was the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a bigoted bill declaring that federal law only recognized marriage between one man and one woman. The U.S. Supreme Court essentially voided that law in the 2013 decision U.S. v. Windsor, finding DOMA unconstitutional. The court followed up in 2015 with Obergefell v. Hodges, ruling that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional.
But what the Supreme Court gives, the Supreme Court can take away, as they did just this year with half a century of protected abortion rights. Writing in that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly threatened to throw out marriage equality. This law preempts him—and his radical colleagues—from ending marriage protections.
One of the key things that this legislation will put into law is the many federal protections that only exist by executive order. Former President Barack Obama extended those protections across a range of federal programs, including health care, immigration, labor, military service, and Social Security. Those protections could easily have been rescinded by a Republican president. That can’t happen now. It will also protect children in these marriages, requiring that states have to honor couples’ parentage of children born or adopted into the marriage.
It’s a good day for equality.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:21:47 GMT -8
He's Biden His Time
With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. [...]
Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.
But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:24:43 GMT -8
A Little Good News on Defending Democracy From the so-called “independent state legislature theory”
After three hours of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, only one thing is certain: If the justices want to blow up federal elections, they will have nothing to hide behind—not history, not logic, and certainly not the Constitution. The three lawyers defending democracy methodically dismantled the “independent state legislature” theory from every conceivable angle, debunking each myth, misreading, and misrepresentation deployed to prop it up. They bested the conservative justices who tried to corner them, identifying faulty reasoning and bogus history with devastating precision. [...]
In the end, Moore v. Harper probably comes down to Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all endorsed the ISLT in the past. Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, clearly have no desire to revive it. So Moore is in Barrett’s hands, and it serves as the ultimate test of her self-proclaimed originalism.
So it was noteworthy that Barrett sounded audibly skeptical throughout Wednesday’s arguments. She was pretty tough on David Thompson, who represented North Carolina’s GOP legislative leaders, suggesting that his “formalistic test” was an unworkable stab at “trying to deal with our precedent,” which cut against him. Thompson tried to draw a line between “substantive and procedural,” but Barrett wasn’t buying it: “As a former civil procedure teacher, I can tell you that is a hard line to draw and a hard line to teach students in that context as well.” She also pointedly noted that Thompson’s standards for implementing the ISLT were not “more manageable” than the North Carolina Supreme Court’s standards for measuring gerrymanders. It was a polite way of calling Thompson a hypocrite.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:27:56 GMT -8
Reichsbürger is Not Ye's Latest Fast Food Restaurant.
Lisa Hänel of Deutsche Welle takes a look at the far-right group Reichsbürger, the group that had dozens of its members arrested by German police on suspicions of plotting to overthrow the German government. Reichsbürger reject the German legal system and the country's parliamentarism, and most of them propagate the re-establishment of the German empire founded in 1871. They also believe that the victorious Western Allies of World War II, who defeated Nazi Germany, still secretly rule the country.
In recent years, the growing number of Reichsbürger has alarmed German security authorities. In its June 2022 report, the domestic intelligence service estimated that around 21,000 people belong to this scene — and their number is rising.
The high potential for violence among the self-proclaimed Reichsbürger was described as particularly worrying: "Around 500 of these people still have at least one weapons permit," the intelligence report read.
The Reichsbürger are not a homogeneous group, according to a 2018 study by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation. Instead, the term refers to a "large, very diverse milieu of ideologists" who vary in their propensity for violence and militancy, but all are united by the belief that the Federal Republic of Germany is not a sovereign state. They reject the constitution and all state institutions.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:32:48 GMT -8
Stupid Dog Tricks (Or Is It a Stupid Owner Trick?)
Holiday travel is stressful, and there’s always a lot to keep track of, so here’s a friendly reminder: Make sure you know where your pets are.
A passenger at Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, Wisconsin, accidentally sent her dog through the X-ray machine on Sunday, according to Transportation Security Administration officials.
“The passenger was unaware of screening protocol and did not alert the Transportation Security Officers that there was a small dog in a backpack-style carrier,” Jessica Mayle, a TSA spokesperson for the Great Lakes region, told Nexstar, per People magazine.
In a tweet Tuesday, TSA at Great Lakes shared an X-ray photo of the dog, reportedly a dachshund-Chihuahua mix, and confirmed the owner had sent her pooch through the machine by accident. The agency reminded travelers of the TSA’s animal guidelines.
“When traveling with any animal, notify your airline & know their rules,” the post read in part. “At the checkpoint, remove your pet from the bag and send all items, including the empty carrier, to be screened in the machine.”
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:35:43 GMT -8
This Sounds a Bit Like WWI
BAKHMUT, Ukraine—Oleksander Matviyenko, a junior officer in the Ukrainian army here on one of the most hotly contested front lines of the war, fights off Russian attacks with other defenders nearly every day. But they keep on coming.
“We shoot at them, they send more. It doesn’t end,” said Lt. Matviyenko, 26, a yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag patched onto his olive-green uniform. “There’s so many of them.”
The battle for Bakhmut has become a bloodbath for both sides as Russia steps up its attempts to take what used to be a quaint, tree-lined city. Ukrainian defense officials said Moscow is losing around 50 soldiers a day to maintain a slow, bruising advance to reach the city’s easternmost gates.
If the Russians break through to take control of Bakhmut, it would open a path to the political and economic centers of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in the Ukrainian-held portions of the Donbas area, once one of the country’s main industrial regions. Moscow tried to seize the area in a pincer movement in the early days of the war and into the summer. After a lightning offensive, Ukraine regained much of the lost ground. Now, as Russia slowly burns through its artillery stockpiles, defense analysts said, its troops are advancing once again but on tank and foot. This time it is so President Vladimir Putin can tout a rare victory to the Russian people after a succession of withdrawals, most recently in Kherson, giving it outsize importance to the Kremlin, analysts said.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. defense think tank based in Washington, D.C.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 8, 2022 10:44:11 GMT -8
It's Just That Old Sweet Song, Keeps Georgia on My Mind
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Post by gr8lurburt on Dec 8, 2022 13:41:57 GMT -8
You have to go with whatever cards you're dealt. We'll get him next time.
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