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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:16:06 GMT -8
I used to know a long-haired girl in the 60's who like to work with clay. She was a hippy potteress.
If It Looks Like Jan 6th ...
The scenes in Brasilia looked eerily similar to events at the US Capitol on 6 January two years ago - and there are deeper connections as well.
"The whole thing smells," said a guest on Steve Bannon's podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October last year.
The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud.
Across several episodes of his podcast and in social media posts, he and his guests stoked up allegations of a "stolen election" and shadowy forces. He promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring, and continued to encourage opposition even after Mr Bolsonaro himself appeared to accept the results.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:19:34 GMT -8
Was This Done in a "Deere, John" Letter?
Tractor maker John Deere has agreed to give its US customers the right to fix their own equipment.
Previously, farmers were only allowed to use authorised parts and service facilities rather than cheaper independent repair options.
Deere and Co. is one of the world's largest makers farming equipment.
Consumer groups have for years been calling on companies to allow their customers to be able to fix everything from smartphones to tractors.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:22:40 GMT -8
How to Ruin a Life in One Tweet
When Dr. Natalia Solenkova woke up Monday morning, she was greeted with a flood of Twitter notifications on her phone. The Miami critical care physician had hundreds of new followers, and they, along with thousands of others on Twitter, were angry with her.
In tweets, comments and direct messages across Twitter and other social platforms, strangers demanded to know why she had deleted a tweet that read: “I will never regret the vaccine. Even if it turns out I injected actual poison and have only days to live. My heart and is was in the right place. I got vaccinated out of love, while antivaxxers did everything out of hate. If I have to die because of my love for the world, then so be it. But I will never regret or apologize for it.”
Solenkova hadn’t deleted the tweet. In fact, she hadn’t written it at all. It was what misinformation researchers call a “cheap fake,” a term for a piece of fake media such as an image or video that takes little effort to produce. Someone had clumsily altered one of Solenkova’s posts to portray a blind, even deadly, zealotry for Covid vaccines and a vilification of anti-vaccine activists.
Over the next few days, despite Solenkova’s protestations and pleas to Twitter to stop the spread of the image, the fake tweet would go viral across the right-wing internet and serve as fodder for a popular and increasingly rabid anti-vaccination movement. The tweet would even make it to the popular podcast of Joe Rogan, who would later apologize for discussing it.
Solenkova knew what was coming next — a wave of harassment. She didn’t pay much mind to the comments and messages saying she was a terrible doctor, that she shouldn’t be practicing, that she was murdering people. She ignored the hateful direct messages in her private, personal accounts.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:24:50 GMT -8
We All Know the Jim Jordan Committee is Coming
Now that they’ve taken nearly a week to even choose a speaker, House Republicans are preparing to show their priorities for governing: personal attacks and efforts to dismantle the government, with sidelines in anti-abortion extremism, ruining the economy, and demonizing migrants.
Up first, creating a special Judiciary subcommittee addressing the “weaponization of the federal government,” by which they mean any federal efforts to stop Republicans from breaking laws. This would of course be a Jim Jordan joint, with Jordan—who will also be the chair of the full Judiciary Committee—getting an extra venue for his sweaty yapping. According to Rep. Chip Roy, in his increasingly desperate bids to gain votes for speaker, Kevin McCarthy promised that such a committee would get at least as much funding as the special committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Appearing on Fox News on Friday evening, Roy made clear that the plan was simply to harass the Biden administration with everything House Republicans can muster. “So we got more resources, more specificity, more power to go after this recalcitrant Biden administration,” he said. “That’s really important.”
House Republicans are intending to try to empower their special subcommittee to look into “ongoing criminal investigations,” because having a partisan group putting its nose into criminal investigations just screams “fair and impartial administration of justice.” The Justice Department is likely to fight those efforts in court.
A Whole New Level of Grandstanding
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:27:08 GMT -8
All These Sick QOP Kids Will Raise Health Care Costs for All of Us
What is now becoming clear is that this resistance to vaccination is leaching out of the soil of the same partisan divides—and spreading beyond aversion to Covid-19 immunization. Party affiliation is now becoming more and more associated with hesitancy toward immunization against such common childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio and chickenpox. Recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that more than a third of parents—up from less than a quarter in 2019—now oppose school vaccination requirements. Once again, this resistance to vaccination is concentrated among Republicans or those that lean that way; 44 percent of such parents now say they want out of these routine vaccination requirements.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:30:11 GMT -8
I'm Still Trying to Understand the Old Kind Quantum Entanglement
Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have discovered a completely new type of quantum entanglement, the spooky phenomenon that binds particles across any distance. In particle collider experiments, the new entanglement allowed scientists to peer inside atomic nuclei in more detail than ever before.
Pairs of particles can become so entwined with each other that one can no longer be described without the other, no matter how far apart they may be. Weirder still, changing one will instantly trigger a change in its partner, even if it was on the other side of the universe. The idea, known as quantum entanglement, sounds impossible to us, grounded as we are in the realm of classical physics. Even Einstein was unnerved by it, referring to it as “spooky action at a distance.” However, decades of experiments have consistently backed it up, and it forms the basis of emerging technologies like quantum computers and networks.
Usually, observations of quantum entanglement are made between pairs of photons or electrons that are identical in nature. But now, for the first time, the BNL team has detected pairs of dissimilar particles undergoing quantum entanglement.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:33:04 GMT -8
Well, Wasn't That Special!
The Special Grand Jury that had been convened by Fulton County DA Fani Willis has completed its work. They have produced a report and have voted to make it public. This is the grand jury investigating Trump and his cronies about interference into the Georgia 2020 election.
A judge has set a trial date for January 24th to see if the report will be made public (yes, we have to wait a bit more).
Note that this special grand jury cannot issue indictments itself, but it can recommend them. It would be up to Fani Willis to convene a regular grand jury to go ahead to try to obtain indictments.
But let’s hope the report from the special grand jury is juicy!
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:35:24 GMT -8
Being a Fast Liver Can Harm Your Liver
There is a disturbing trend of 25-to-34-year-old men and women experiencing severe, and sometimes fatal, liver damage related to their drinking. A 2018 study reported that between 2009 and 2016, deaths attributed to alcohol-related cirrhosis — scarring of the organ that can lead to its failure over time — had been consistently rising, with the sharpest increase among those in that age group.
The pandemic made it worse. Between 2017 and 2020, deaths from alcohol-associated liver disease continued to rise, with an acceleration during the the first year of the coronavirus, according to a report published in March 2022 in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Again, there was a sharp rise among young adults, 25 to 34 years old, especially among women.
Death rates rose each year for both genders. While there were still more men dying than women, the annual mortality rate was rising faster in women (37%) than men (29%), according to the report, which pulled data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
“We’re definitely seeing younger and younger patients coming in with what we previously thought was advanced liver disease seen in patients only in their middle age, 50s and 60s,” said Mellinger.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 9, 2023 9:40:11 GMT -8
Some Good Environmental News for a Change
A new assessment of Earth’s depleted ozone layer released Monday shows that efforts to repair the vital atmospheric shield are working, according to a panel of U.N.-backed scientists, as global emissions of ozone-harming chemicals continue to decline.
As a result, the ozone layer — which blocks ultraviolet sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface — continues to slowly thicken.
Restoring it is key for human health, food security and the planet. UV-B radiation causes cancer and eye damage in humans. It also damages plants, inhibiting their growth and curbing their ability to store planet-warming carbon dioxide.
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