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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 7:53:32 GMT -8
I ordered 2000 lbs. of chinese soup. It was Won Ton.
Oklahoma Schools Are Not OK, If This is the Top "Educator" in the State
Far-right Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters suggested at a public hearing in Norman that lessons about the infamous racial massacre that destroyed the most prosperous Black community in Oklahoma don't have to mention race, reported Fox 25 News.
"The Cleveland County Republican Party invited him to speak at the Norman Central Library. The room was packed with many unhappy Oklahomans, making for an hour of chaos," reported David Chasanov.
"It doesn't matter how much the radical left attacks me," Walters told the crowd. 'It doesn't matter how much the teachers union spends against me. I will never stop speaking truth."
However, things got tricky for Walters when someone asked him if teaching about the infamous "Black Wall Street" massacre in the city of Tulsa would be banned under his restrictions on teaching "Critical Race Theory."
"Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined that," Walters replied.
The Tulsa massacre was an act of racial mass terrorism in 1921 that destroyed the Greenwood District of Tulsa, a nationally-renowned prosperous community nicknamed "Black Wall Street." After a 19-year-old Black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland was arrested on trumped-up charges for allegedly assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page, white residents of Tulsa rioted, looting and burning down the Greenwood District. Roughly 300 people were killed, and when the National Guard was sent in, the Black residents were arrested by the thousands.
Walters, who was elected last year on a platform of ordering teachers to be given "patriotic education" and has pushed the urban legend about schools giving out litter boxes to children who identify as animals, has immediately become one of the most controversial state superintendents in the country.
Earlier this year, Walters was given the power by Gov. Kevin Stitt to downgrade accreditation of any school found to have "sexualized content," and to force schools to out children's gender identity to their parents. He has also come under fire after a state audit revealed massive amounts of waste and fraud in a homeschooling program he ran with taxpayer funding when he worked as a nonprofit director, with some of the money going to buy fancy televisions and Pokémon merchandise.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 7:57:34 GMT -8
So What Are They Going To Do With Young Criminals?
What was once the nation’s largest network of youth prisons is no more. California’s final remaining youth prisons shuttered on June 30, marking an end to a 132-year-old statewide correctional system plagued by violence and abuse. Youths previously in custody under the California Division of Juvenile Justice have all been spread across the state’s 58 counties. Coinciding with last week’s historic closures was an announcement that a controversial nonprofit formed to help facilitate the transition of youths from state-run facilities to their home counties would also be winding down. California’s youth prisons have shuttered — and prompted an end to this secretive group
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 7:58:43 GMT -8
Fresh Cash for Frisch
The Democrat who almost beat U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert has just set a multi-million dollar fundraising record after announcing he will again challenge the Colorado GOP congresswoman in 2024.
Businessman Adam Frisch, who lost to Boebert last year by a mere 546 votes, says he has raised over $2.6 million in the second quarter alone, "shattering the record for the largest quarterly fundraising for a U.S. House challenger in the year before an election, excluding special elections and self-funded campaigns."
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:01:18 GMT -8
This Sounds Like a Cluster Fuck for Someone
The US is planning to send Ukraine a cluster munitions package to help in its counteroffensive against Russia, US media reports.
Ukraine has been asking for the weapons for months amid an ammunition shortage.
Cluster munitions - which are banned by more than 100 countries - are a class of weapons that contain multiple explosive bomblets called submunitions.
The Biden administration is expected to announce the package on Friday, the BBC's US partner CBS News reports.
US officials had reportedly been hesitant to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions as they can kill indiscriminately over a wide area, threatening civilians. The US has a stockpile of these cluster bombs, which were first developed during World War II.
The munitions are controversial because of their high failure rates, meaning unexploded bomblets can linger on the ground for years and possibly detonate later on.
US law prohibits the transfer of cluster munitions with bomblet failure rates higher than 1% - meaning more than 1% of the bomblets in the weapon do not explode - but President Joe Biden is able to bypass this rule.
Defence Department officials told reporters on Thursday the Biden administration was considering sending cluster munitions with a failure rate lower than 2.35%.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:04:53 GMT -8
Joe Biden Continues Quietly to Do Good Things
President Joe Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks from the White House on Friday afternoon about the latest actions his administration is taking to lower health care costs and limit so-called insurance junk fees to consumers.
Among the administration's new efforts are proposed rules that would close loopholes that let companies offer "misleading insurance products that can discriminate based on pre-existing conditions and trick consumers into buying products that provide little or no coverage when they need it most," the White House said.
Actions taken by the Trump administration had allowed insurance companies to take advantage of those loopholes, it added.
The Biden administration also announced new rules to further curb surprise medical billing in which millions of people have received unexpected bills for health care they thought was in-network and covered by their insurance. The White House said these surprise bills can cost people an average of $750 to $2,600.
The administration said it will issue guidance to make clear that it's illegal under federal law for health plans that contract with hospitals to claim that they are not technically in-network.
It Is Done Quietly, Because the Media Basically Ignores It.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:08:18 GMT -8
A Visit to the Crazy Side of Crazy TownThe leader of a QAnon cult who convinced thousands of people that former president John F. Kennedy and his son JFK, Jr. are still alive has died, VICE News can exclusively report. Michael Protzman, 60, died last Friday in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota a week after an accident at the Meadow Valley Motocross track in Millville, Minnesota. Protzman’s death was confirmed to VICE News in a phone call with the Minnesota Department of Health. Protzman died as a result of “multiple blunt force injuries” after he “lost control of his dirt bike” according to a report from the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office, which was obtained by VICE News. Protzman, who was known to his followers as Negative 48, was from Federal Way in Washington State and owned a demolition company prior to his emergence as a QAnon guru in early 2021. Protzman rose to notoriety in 2021, when the Telegram channel he ran garnered tens of thousands of followers. In that channel, Protzman mixed QAnon conspiracies with a bastardized version of Gematria, a Jewish numerology system, which he claimed to be able to use to predict the future. Protzman gained national attention in November 2021 when he convinced hundreds of his followers to travel from all across the U.S. to Dallas, where he claimed that JFK and JFK Jr. would reappear at Dealey Plaza, on the spot where JFK was assassinated in 1963. When that didn’t happen, Protzman’s conspiracies simply changed, and over the next 18 months he would alter and change his predictions to suit his needs and keep his followers on board. Ultimately he claimed that he was in direct contact with former President Donald Trump and that Trump was in fact JFK Jr. in disguise. He's a Dead Man Who Convinced Live People That Another Dead Man Was Alive. Now the Live People Believe Both Dead Men Are Still Alive.The Leader of the JFK-QAnon Cult Is Dead. His Followers Think It’s All Part of the Plan.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:11:24 GMT -8
Get Ready For the Real Grudge Match Between Zuck and Muck. The Race to See Who Can Hire the Most Lawyers.
Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms (META.O) over its new Threads platform in a letter sent to the Facebook parent's CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Twitter's lawyer Alex Spiro.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:13:09 GMT -8
The QOP People Want the Trial Because They Are Sure He Will Be Found Innocent.
A New Poll on the Trump Indictments Has a Surprising Result
A new POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll finds one thing that unites people on the Trump indictments.
According to a new poll commissioned by POLITICO Magazine and conducted by Ipsos, most Americans — including a large number of Republicans, who the former president is currently courting for his 2024 campaign — believe that the trial in the pending federal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents should occur before the GOP primaries and well before the general election.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:14:14 GMT -8
Meanwhile Madam DeGreene Keeps Knitting Fund-Raising
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:20:23 GMT -8
Realizing Tesla's Dream? Nikola's Tesla, Not the Car CompanyIn the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small. In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did. “To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.” The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless. Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. “So it’s really like a battery,” says Yao. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.” ‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:23:47 GMT -8
All They Have Left Are Pictures and a Blanket
All Heather and Nick Maberry wanted to do was hold their dead baby, but strict Kentucky abortion laws meant they couldn’t.
They were “furious” that the laws meant they never got to kiss or cuddle their daughter, Willow Rose, or tell her goodbye, Heather said.
“We’ll never know what her face looked like. We’ll never know what it was like to hold her in her arms,” she said. “We’re grieving someone that we’ve never seen.”
The family’s ordeal started in April, when Heather was nearly five months pregnant and they found out their daughter was missing a major part of the brain, a condition called anencephaly. They say their doctors told them she would either be stillborn or die very quickly after birth.
The Maberrys wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but a near-complete abortion ban in their state doesn’t have exceptions for birth defects – even severe ones like anencephaly.
The Maberrys went out of state to end the pregnancy, but their insurance, Kentucky Medicaid, wouldn’t pay for it. They wanted to induce birth so they could hold Willow, but that would’ve cost them tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, they had to settle for a much less expensive surgical procedure – but that procedure does not leave the fetus intact.
“We’re grieving pictures,” Heather said. “We’re grieving a blanket.”
Still distraught after his daughter’s death, Nick sleeps with Willow’s blanket and has not been able to return to his job as a factory worker.
“I was devastated,” he said.
The Maberrys said they’re speaking publicly about their experience in the hopes that their state legislators will listen and revise abortion laws.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:25:49 GMT -8
Fear the Fugitive Foot Fondler
People in Lake Tahoe are being cautioned to secure their residences as a foot fondling intruder has been making their way around the area.
Two women staying at a resort in Stateline, Nevada, reported intrusions to their rooms on Sunday and Monday morning, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office said in a release Tuesday.
The women woke up to the intruder "fondling their feet," the sheriff's office said.
In both incidents, the women were staying on ground floor rooms where the intruder is believed to have gained entry through unsecured exterior screen doors.
A description of the suspect was not released.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:27:45 GMT -8
The Gov DeathSentence War With Disney Went So Well That Gov NoBrains Declares War on Ice Cream
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem slammed Ben & Jerry's over the ice cream company's July 4th advocacy campaign calling for the return of Mount Rushmore to Indigenous populations.
Vermont-based Ben & Jerry's launched the campaign Tuesday saying "stolen Indigenous land" should be returned. The ice cream company singled out Mount Rushmore, writing it "was desecrated and dynamited to honor their colonizers, four white men — two of whom enslaved people and all of whom were hostile to Indigenous people and values."
Noem dismissed the campaign on Fox News Thursday and said she will not "listen to a bunch of liberal Vermont businessmen who think they know everything about this country and haven't studied our history."
Ben & Jerry's, however, specifically highlighted the history behind Mount Rushmore in a post on its website. The company wrote that Mount Rushmore was created on a holy mountain known to the Lakota Sioux as the Tunkasila Sakpe. The land surrounding the mountain is known as the Black Hills and is also considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux.
On its website, the ice cream company also detailed how Indigenous tribes signed treaties with the US government in the 19th century that allowed them to live on land that included the Black Hills as a "permanent home." But the government reneged on its agreement after gold was discovered on the land years later and displaced the the Great Sioux Nation once again.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:30:02 GMT -8
It's Such a Low BarRobots told reporters Friday they could be more efficient leaders than humans, but wouldn't take anyone's job away and had no intention of rebelling against their creators. Nine AI-enabled humanoid robots sat or stood with their creators at a podium in a Geneva conference center for what the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union billed as the world's first news conference featuring humanoid social robots. Remember: Robots Can Lie When Given the Choice Between a Sensible Solution and a Stupid One, Which Do You Think Human Leaders Chose?Study says buyout of threatened Outer Banks homes would be cheaper than beach nourishmentThe inlet was coming. For more than 15 years, Mason Inlet had been marauding south, approaching the structures at the north end of North Carolina's Wrightsville Beach. It had already carved away hundreds of acres of sandy spit, a public parking lot, and the land that was home to the temporary beach house used in Julia Robert's 1991 film "Sleeping with the Enemy." By the early 2000s, it was just yards from the nine-story Shell Island Resort, only stopped by a line of large sandbags. Faced with letting one of Wrightsville Beach's signature structures wash away or cobbling together a funding package to move the inlet, the New Hanover County Commissioners chose the latter. The county would relocate the inlet 3,000 feet to the north with property owners at the north end of Wrightsville Beach and those on Figure Eight Island, a wealthy private enclave on the other side of the inlet, assessed a special assessment to repay the $6.5-million relocation cost and future maintenance costs. More than two decades after the 2002 relocation project, the inlet remains stably and safely away from threatening the expensive beachfront properties on either side of the waterway. Along coastal North Carolina, engineering answers to threats from Mother Nature is a time-honored tradition to dealing with eroding beaches and threats from wandering inlets. But pumping sand isn't cheap. It also us becoming a scarce commodity along some parts of the North Carolina coast. Moving waterways or building hardened structures, like terminal groins, also can break the budgets of many local beach communities that don't have the deep pockets of a Wrightsville Beach or financial support from Washington or Raleigh.
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Post by mhbruin on Jul 7, 2023 8:37:08 GMT -8
Rent to Buy Isn't Exactly a Scam, But ...Home Partners, which launched in 2012, now owns more than 28,000 homes nationwide. It is the largest of a handful of new companies promising "a clear path to homeownership" for families not yet ready or able to buy. The company's success has inspired startup competitors such as the New York-based company Landis, which boasts of investments from entertainers Will Smith and Jay-Z. Once dominated by fly-by-night operators, rent-to-own is now attracting some of the biggest players from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz led a Series A funding round for a rent-to-own competitor, Divvy Homes, in 2018. BlackRock and KKR purchased a majority stake in Home Partners by 2014, before private-equity giant Blackstone Group bought the company in 2021 for $6 billion. In its marketing, Home Partners emphasizes that it offers "flexibility, choice and transparency," providing the opportunity to "rent your dream home" without making a long-term commitment. "Home Partners has created a path to home ownership for tens of thousands of people who may not otherwise have had one," a company spokesperson told Insider. "We are tremendously proud of our business." Yet Home Partners tenants, in interviews and court documents, say they got stuck in barely livable dwellings, with leaking sewage, broken air conditioners, filthy carpets, or nonworking electrical outlets. They describe being blocked from seeing home-inspection reports and facing swift eviction filings for a single late payment. One tenant filed a lawsuit claiming she suffered injuries when the ceiling of her home collapsed. More than 4,000 Home Partners tenants have purchased their homes over the past decade, according to a July 2022 paper from Moody's Analytics, coauthored by an advisor to the company. But over the same time, nearly four times as many tenants — roughly 15,000 — moved out without buying. Private equity sold them a dream of home ownership. They got evicted instead.As You Might ExpectBlack and Hispanic households are more likely than white ones to rely on alternative home financing.
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