Tues: Trying to Stop Fani Willis From Charging Trump in GA?

Nothing Honors Jesus More Than an Assault Rifle.  Unless It's Four Assualt Rifles.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a first-term Republican who represents the Nashville district where a shooter killed six people at a school on Monday, faced criticism from gun control advocates and Democrats on Tuesday after a 2021 photo resurfaced showing Ogles and his family posing with firearms in front of the family's Christmas tree.

How Not to Protest

Dozens of people have been killed and injured after a fire broke out in an immigration detention facility in northern Mexico near the United States border.

The blaze – one of the deadliest incidents at an immigration lockup in the country’s history – occurred late Monday at a facility in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

At least 39 people died in the fire and 29 injured people were taken to hospitals, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said in a statement. The facility was holding 68 adult men from Central and South America, it said.

Mexico’s attorney general’s office launched an inquiry and has investigators at the scene, according to media reports.

“I was here since one in the afternoon waiting for the father of my children, and when 10pm rolled around smoke started coming out from everywhere,” 31-year-old Viangly Infante, a Venezuelan national, told the Reuters news agency.

Her husband was in a holding cell inside the facility when the fire started and survived by dousing himself in water and pressing against a door, said Infante, adding that she saw many dead bodies lying on the ground.

Guatemala said on Tuesday that 28 of its nationals are believed to have died in the incident.

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the fire began during a protest by the migrants inside the facility.

“They put mats at the door of the shelter and set them on fire as a protest, and did not imagine that it would cause this terrible tragedy,” Lopez Obrador told reporters.

You Don't Want to Challenge a Challenger.

The Challenger 2 is an amazing tank. It may have the record for the longest-distance tank kill in history. It also notched a 200+ to 0 record against Iraq tanks in the Gulf War. Those Iraqi tanks were a mixture of T-54, T-62, and T-72 (including a version made locally in Iraq), with a scattering of other vehicles, including U.S. tanks from the 1950s. Iraq also had a weirdly high number of old Soviet PT-76 amphibious light tanks, a relic of a period in which Saddam Hussein waged war on the “marsh Arabs” within his own country and drained the vast Mesopotamian Marshes that had supported civilization in the region for better than 6,000 years.

Anyway … the Challenger 2 plowed through these Iraqi tanks without taking a single loss, and that is impressive. But it did so on the basis of three things: First, the Iraqi tank operators were almost all poorly trained and undersupplied; second, their tanks were poorly maintained and often poorly positioned to meet the British assault; third, the number of British tanks involved in the attack often meant they outnumbered the Iraqi force in the area.

There are pretty good arguments to be made that the first two of those factors also apply in Ukraine. Right now, some of the Russians sitting in those just arrived T-54 tanks are going to be sitting there staring at unfamiliar controls, or watching a half-assed instructional video on YouTube. But that third fact, the sheer numbers factor, is still not with Ukraine, in spite of all the Russian losses.

More Dead Kids.  More QOP BS.

“But, but, but … the Second Amendment,” some will scream, like a myopic, zombified Greek chorus.

Hang your Second Amendment. It’s Monday in America, there has been yet another school shooting. Children are dead. The students who weren’t shot are forever changed by the trauma, and plenty more people across the country will be killed by gunfire in the days to come because, as I wrote a few words earlier, it’s Monday in America, and we have a whole damn week to go.

“Thoughts and prayers! Don’t politicize this!” the people will crow.

Nuts to that. The thoughts-and-prayers, it’s-too-soon-to-talk-about-it ship sailed several hundred mass shootings ago. I’m mad now.

And I’m not waiting for permission to tweet or write or holler about how reckless, how ridiculous, how bloody twisted it is that we inhabit a country where people treat the tool used to murder other people in schools, in churches, in malls, at concerts, in movie theaters, on street corners and in their homes as a sacred possession that must not be regulated, that should be protected as an icon of America, like a bald eagle that spits lead.

Two Parents Object, So No One Can See a Disney Film

Disney’s anti-racism film Ruby Bridges is the subject of a complaint brought by a Florida parent who claims the movie is not appropriate for second-graders, because it might teach them that “white people hate Black people”.

The film, which tells the story of a six-year-old girl who integrated New Orleans schools in the 1960s, has been a staple of school curriculums during Black History Month in the state’s Tampa-area county of Pinellas.

The complaint over the film about Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate into a white school, comes as parents across Florida have been granted greater powers over what their children are shown and taught in classrooms, including being given advance warning over “controversial” topics.

Emily Conklin, the North Shore elementary school parent who filed the instructional and media material objection to Ruby Bridges, cited several racial slurs in the film, including a scene where adults scream, “I’m going to hang you!”

The issue has been rumbling since early March, when Conklin said she would not allow her child to watch the film after the North Shore school sent out permission slips to parents. Two families opted to take their children out before a teacher showed the film to about 60 second-graders on 2 March.

You May Be Tired of Reading About Thwaites, But It's Serious

A widening of an eighty mile wide ice stream is the latest concern by glaciologists in West Antarctica to show signs of extreme stress. The river of ice is the Thwaites glacier which holds 2 feet of sea level rise. Thwaites, Pine Island and Crossen ice shelves all of which are weakening together in the Amundsen Sea Embayment would raise levels by four feet if they were to collapse together.

A recent Stanford University study published in the AGU has found the widening to be an accelerator of ice flow within the main trunk of the ice stream Thwaites is nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier for it’s potential to raise sea levels quickly as it is the cork which holds back a total of eleven feet of sea level rise in the entirety of West Antarctica.

The findings are yet another warning of the deglaciation of the planet's air conditioners. We are in unknown and dangerous waters.

The report occurred before the massive iceberg b22A broke away in December of 2022 from the undersea mountain where it had been lodged for twenty years. The loss of the iceberg exposed the tongue of the weakened glacier to the power of the Pine Island Gyre and the open ocean itself. Several pinning points failed, but the tongue survived. March and April are when ice shelves across the continent are at the most risk of shattering and collapse.

From Stanford University's presser:

In West Antarctica, the 80-mile-wide stream of sliding ice at the heart of Thwaites Glacier is likely to creep outward over the next 20 years, a change that could speed up ice loss, new research finds.

"It's like a torrential river eating away at the riverbanks and widening in the process," said senior study author Jenny Suckale, an assistant professor of geophysics at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Led by geophysics Ph.D. student Paul Summers, the researchers found that the observed thinning of Thwaites Glacier, together with changes in the slope of its surface and the conditions at its base, makes both sides prone to move a few miles outward over the next 20 years.

"We are considering relatively small changes in driving stress as would realistically occur in the coming two decades," Summers and colleagues write. Yet even this subtle widening—only about 2% of the glacier's overall width—could speed up ongoing ice loss.

"If the widening trend were to continue and were to accelerate, then we'd better know. It would mean that we would have to prepare for higher sea levels," said Suckale, who is one of dozens of scientists working to understand the glacier and its response to climate change as part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration.

Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica, is losing ice rapidly, making it a major contributor to the uncertainty in current projections of global sea level rise. Many models have looked at how ice speed and thickness are likely to evolve over hundreds of years. Less scientific attention has been devoted to understanding the possibility that the main trunk of Thwaites Glacier might change in width. Here, we use a numerical model to show how ice thinning and could affect the width of the main trunk of Thwaites Glacier. We find that both lateral sides of Thwaites Glacier are prone to move, resulting in an overall widening of the main trunk when we apply thinning where it is currently observed. This widening of the glacier could speed up ongoing ice loss. To evaluate the sensitivity of our findings on conditions at the base of the ice sheet, which tend to affect ice speed sensitively, we look at four different cases of basal friction and use these to discuss what different bed friction means for where widening might occur and how pronounced it might be. We also discuss how our results could be tested against field data currently being acquired through the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration.

I'm So Tired, Tired of Twaiting. Tired of Twiating For You.