Fri: Is the QOP Intentionally Passing Unpopular Laws?

the Urkanians are Coming! The Ukranians are Coming!

As spring get under way in Ukraine, an ominous lull in hostilities has fallen over the battlefields in the war Russia began last year.

Moscow’s winter offensive never quite materialised despite the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of mostly untrained men. Many were shipped straight to the front line only to be killed in what survivors called “cannon fodder storms”.

At the same time, Ukraine has not regained any ground in the southern region of Kherson or the eastern region of Kharkiv in the months after Russia retreated from key areas there.

As spring rains turn soil into mud impassable for troops and heavy weaponry, Ukraine is amassing fresh forces trained to use new Western arms, and its long promised counteroffensive seems imminent.

“We are confident the counteroffensive is taking place in the nearest future,” Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said last week. “The US absolutely supports us.”

But where and how will it begin?

A Western military analyst said he thinks Ukraine has enough manpower and gear to call the shots.

“Whenever they choose to begin their counteroffensive, they’re going to have sufficient trained and equipped manpower,” retired US army Major General Gordon Skip Davis told Al Jazeera

Kyiv’s only major drawback, a dire shortage of air forces, can be compensated by improved air defence capability, he said, and US-made Patriot air defence systems arrived in Ukraine on Wednesday.

By the End of May?

The United States will begin training Ukrainian forces on how to use and maintain Abrams tanks in the coming weeks, as the it continues to speed up its effort to get them onto the battlefield against Russia as quickly as possible, U.S. officials said Friday.

The decision comes as defense leaders from around Europe and the world are meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany in the ongoing effort to coordinate the delivery of weapons and other equipment to Ukraine. An announcement is expected later Friday.

According to the officials, 31 tanks will arrive at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany at the end of May, and the troops will begin training a couple of weeks later. Officials said the troop training will last about 10 weeks. The training tanks will not be the ones given to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. Instead, 31 M1A1 battle tanks are being refurbished in the United States, and those will go to the frontlines when they are ready.

It's Not THE Answer, But We the Answer Will Consist of Thousands of Little Things.

Atop a 100-foot barge tied up at the Port of Los Angeles, engineers have built a kind of floating laboratory to answer a simple question: Is there a way to cleanse seawater of carbon dioxide and then return it to the ocean so it can suck more of the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere to slow global warming?

Called the lungs of the planet, the ocean, whose plants and currents take in carbon dioxide, has already helped the Earth tremendously by absorbing 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution and capturing 90 percent of the excess heat from those emissions. Acting as a giant carbon sink, it has been a crucial buffer in protecting people from even worse effects of early climate change.

Seawater can store 150 times more carbon dioxide per unit volume than air, roughly. But absorbing the greenhouse gas has come at a cost, causing oceans to become more acidic, destroying coral reefs and harming marine species, including impeding shellfish from building their skeletons.

The technology, dubbed SeaChange, developed by the University of California Los Angeles engineering faculty, is meant to seize on the ocean’s natural abilities, said Gaurav Sant, director of UCLA’s Institute of Carbon Management.

The process sends an electrical charge through seawater flowing through tanks on the barge. That then sets off a series of chemical reactions that trap the greenhouse gas into a solid mineral that includes calcium carbonate — the same thing seashells are made of. The seawater is then returned to the ocean and can pull more carbon dioxide out of the air. The calcium carbonate settles to the sea floor.

Plans are now underway to scale up the idea with another demonstration site starting this month in Singapore. Data collected there and at the Port of Los Angeles will help in the design of larger test plants. Those facilities are expected to be running by 2025 and be able to remove thousands of tons of CO2 per year. If they are successful, the plan is to build commercial facilities to remove millions of tons of carbon annually, Sant said.

But even if the project is able to remove millions of tons, that is still thousands of times less than what will be needed to meaningfully address climate change.

“I’m not saying this won’t work, but the ultimate thing is how much CO2 will it actually draw down on a scale of decades?” said Margaret Leinen, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Sant doesn’t disagree. Scientists estimate at least 10 billion metric tons of carbon will need to be removed from the air annually beginning in 2050, and the pace will need to continue over the next century.

Is the QOP Intentionally Looking for Unpopular Laws to Pass?


Is This an Accidentally Discharged Self-Destrucive Law?


What Century Are they Living In?

Nine Michigan Republicans voted Wednesday to keep a nearly century-old state law that bars an unmarried woman and man from living with one another.

The bill to repeal the unenforced 1931 law ultimately passed 29-9 in the state’s Democrat-controlled Senate. But the fact that half of the state Senate’s GOP lawmakers voted to maintain the cohabitation ban made a number of Democrats scratch their heads.

“What year are they living in?” asked Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), according to MLive.

Michigan is one of two states in the country with a law that bars unwed couples from living together, according to a 2016 analysis for the state Senate.

The state’s cohabitation ban could find an unmarried man or woman “who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together” guilty of a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year prison sentence and maximum fine of $1,000.

The ban has implications for taxpayers. As Michigan state Sen. Stephanie Chang (D), who introduced the bill, noted, certain tax benefits are off-limits to people whose relationships violate local laws under the IRS tax code.

“This bill is not about a moral issue, it’s not about changing people’s behavior, it’s not about marriage rates ― it’s really just about bringing us into the 21st century,” Chang said, according to Bridge Michigan.

Under the new bill, there would be no penalties to an unwed couple over their cohabitation. It would not repeal the law’s penalties for “open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior,” which apply to both married and unmarried people.

Does the QOP Shot at Bigots R Us?

Uncle Rupert Wants You!  To Pay for the Dominion Settlement

With their viewership intact and the Dominion case in the rearview, Fox is going to cable and satellite providers not so much hat in hand as hammer at the ready, demanding a stiff increase in subscription fees—one that exceeds past industry levels. In an ongoing round of negotiations, Fox is demanding that they get more than $3 per subscriber from providers. That’s $3 not just for every person who tunes in to watch Carlson rant, but everyone on the service, whether they watch a minute of Fox News or not.

These subscription fees are exactly why Fox has been able to keep raking in cash even as name-brand advertisers have fled shows like Carlson’s nightly conspiracy fest. In fact, as reported at MSNB, Fox doesn’t really need advertisers as long as it can tap the bank accounts of everyone who watches television on cable or satellite.

The dirty secret about Fox News is that it is one of the only commercial TV channels that doesn’t need a single advertisement to be profitable, if not the only one. In fact, Fox could have zero dollars in ad revenue and still have at least a 35% profit margin. This is the result of carriage fees and the guaranteed revenue they provide Fox.

In the next year, 70% of Fox News’ contracts with providers are up for renegotiation, and they’re taking this opportunity to press for increases that will dwarf the Dominion settlement.

I'll Bet She Didn't Look Like Elizabeth Taylor

A new Netflix series has ignited backlash after portraying Queen Cleopatra as a Black woman.

An Egyptian lawyer filed a legal complaint against the streamer, accusing the company of trying to “erase the Egyptian identity,” the BBC reported.

Mahmoud al-Semary made his complaint Sunday, shortly after Netflix released a trailer for the upcoming documentary “Queen Cleopatra,” which depicts the ruler as a Black woman.

Al-Semary launched the legal complaint with the country’s public prosecutor, calling for Netflix to be shut down in Egypt and for the show’s creators to be penalized.

“Most of what Netflix platform displays do not conform to Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian ones,” Al-Semary said in his complaint, according to Egypt Independent.

The series stars British actor Adele James as the iconic monarch.

Last week, the 37-year-old thwarted criticism on Twitter, telling naysayers if they “don’t like the casting don’t watch the show.”

Jada Pinkett Smith, an executive producer on the show, recently explained the controversial depiction on Netflix’s promotional website Tudum.

“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them!” the actor and talk show host said.

However, some historians argue that Cleopatra was likely not Black — though others have said it would be hard to know for sure, given that the queen’s race was “unlikely to be documented.”

“Given that Cleopatra represents herself as an Egyptian, it seems strange to insist on depicting her as wholly European,” said Sally Ann Ashton, an Egyptology expert who Netflix said was interviewed in the series.

She added: “Cleopatra ruled in Egypt long before the Arab settlement in North Africa. If the maternal side of her family were indigenous women, they would’ve been African, and this should be reflected in contemporary representations of Cleopatra.”

Does That Mean They Will Support Biden?

Anti-abortion group threatens to reject Trump in 2024 unless he supports national abortion ban

Former President Donald Trump, who is embroiled in a series of legal and political fights, is getting his latest challenge from a core Republican constituency: life anti-abortion activists.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an influential conservative group with more than 1 million members, threatened Trump – and any 2024 candidate – that they will lose the organization's support unless they back a national ban on abortion.

"We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections," SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement.

Do They Shop at Empty Threats R Us?

Beware the Ides of June

Experts in Washington and on Wall Street are making their best guesses for how close the government will come to defaulting in the months ahead if Congress remains gridlocked.

A key date that keeps coming up is June 15.

That is the deadline for taxpayers to pay their second installment of estimated taxes for 2023. It's also likely the next time the government’s books will improve appreciably now that the main tax season is winding down.

Those funds — combined with financial flexibility offered by accounting maneuvers the Treasury Department can deploy — are what stands between the US and a default.

What's likely to happen between now and then is that Treasury “will gradually burn through its remaining cash on hand and extraordinary measures” to pay for government operations, Shai Akabas of the Bipartisan Policy Center told Yahoo Finance by email.