Sun: We Almost Had Death By Selfie

Putin is Out For Blood

A Russian "guided bomb" has hit a blood transfusion centre in north-eastern Ukraine, killing two people and injuring four, Ukrainian officials say.

Volodymyr Zelensky posted an image of the building on fire as a result of Saturday night's attack around Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region.

"This war crime alone says everything about Russian aggression," he said.

The Declaration of Independence is Not the Law of the US.  It was Propaganda.  It is PR.

John Eastman Comes Clean: Hell Yes We Were Trying to Overthrow the Government

I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.

January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.

“Our Founders lay this case out,” says Eastman. “There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable. At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

“So that’s the question,” he tells Klingenstein. “Have the abuses or the threat of abuses become so intolerable that we have to be willing to push back?”

The answer for Eastman is clearly yes, and that’s his justification for his and his associates extraordinary actions.

NIMBY in Action

As Feds Look To Cut Red Tape, More Local Governments Are Curbing Wind And Solar

In Washington, D.C., federal lawmakers from both parties are debating ways to make it easier to build wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines at a fast enough clip to meet growing demand, reverse the nationwide trend toward worse blackouts and offer a serious enough alternative to fossil fuels to bend the curve on planet-heating emissions.

Yet in town halls and county legislatures across the country, local governments have worked to counter those efforts, with rapidly multiplying zoning restrictions on wind and solar that threaten to shrink how much land is actually available for generating zero-carbon electricity.

In 2018, when researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory first surveyed nearly all the roughly 3,100 counties in the contiguous 48 states using search engines and legal databases, they identified 105 municipalities with siting ordinances on wind turbines. Because counties tended to have more than one ordinance on the books, the total number of regulations was 286, with as many as three separate regulations per jurisdiction.

By 2022, when the federal laboratory in Colorado updated its database, the number of counties with zoning rules on wind turbines had more than quadrupled to 461, with roughly four ordinances per jurisdiction. Municipalities with curbs on solar panels — which wasn’t measured in the 2018 survey — numbered about 315, with about more than 2 regulations per county.

“We redid the study and we were pretty surprised at how much they grew,” said Anthony Lopez, a senior researcher at NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center and the paper’s lead author. “This is almost a daily occurrence that some level of government is issuing some kind of ordinance or guidance for renewable energy development.”

If anything, Lopez said the study, which wasn’t designed to be “exhaustive,” may lowball the total number of ordinances. But the peer-reviewed findings, published Thursday in the journal Nature Energy, show how much power local governments wield over the future of the nation’s two fastest-growing sources of electricity — a variable that has, until now, not factored into most forecasts of the growth of renewables.

The results illustrate the limits of how much renewable energy the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax credits in President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act can really buy.

In some cases, new regulations may simply be codifying an official process and make clear to energy developers that a county is open for business.

But “they’re mostly intended to be restrictive,”said Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and the founder and faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The strictest ordinances for wind, in fact, slash the areas open to turbine developers by 87%.

Beloved? By Whom?

A beloved but troublesome black bear linked to a spate of home invasions in and around Lake Tahoe has been captured and will be moved to a sanctuary in Colorado, pending a successful veterinary check, wildlife officials confirmed last week.

Nicknamed "Hank the Tank," the animal was one of several large bears that gained notoriety in recent years for wreaking havoc on the South Lake Tahoe community. This particular bear, a female formally registered as 64F by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, is responsible for at least 21 home break-ins and "extensive property damage" in the South Lake Tahoe area since 2022, the department said in a news release issued on Friday.

Her involvement in those incidents was verified through DNA testing, which the agency used early last year to identify at least four "Hanks" causing problems across a wide stretch of land between Northern California and Nevada. At the time, authorities had already connected the bears to about 150 incident reports, including break-ins and damage to more than 30 properties in various parts of the region.

Wildlife biologists captured and "safely immobilized" Hank, along with her three cubs, on Friday morning, according to the state wildlife department. She will be transported to Colorado and placed in The Wild Animal Sanctuary, a sprawling refuge with facilities spanning more than 33,000 acres, according to its website, after clearing a veterinary exam.

The bear's young cubs, which have accompanied their mother on recent home invasions, will potentially be moved to Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, a rehabilitation facility in Pentaluma, "in hopes they can discontinue the negative behaviors they learned from the sow and can be returned to the wild," officials said. They believe one of the three cubs was seriously injured in a vehicle strike earlier this month. Although hurt, the cub is still mobile and will undergo a more thorough veterinary exam after all three had initial health assessments in the field.

California wildlife officials have been monitoring Hank the Tank since last year. This past March, they found her and her three cubs denning under a home in South Lake Tahoe, and worked with the Nevada Department of Wildlife to temporarily immobilize the bear and attach an ear tag, tracking collar and microchip for identification. Although she shed the tracking collar in May, authorities were ultimately able to find Hank and link her to the nearly two dozen home invasions by comparing DNA samples taken from those properties.

Hank will be separated from her cubs because the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department can only approve one placement and is using the authorization for this bear, the California wildlife department said.