Large image of Pluto (Grokked from John)
"Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface. They were trying to find the perfect landing site for the Apollo missions. They would be good enough to blow up to 40 x 54ft images that the astronauts would walk across looking for the great spot. After their use, the images were locked away from the public until after the bulk of the moon landings, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from." (Grokked from Dan)
"Native to the Caucasus region, (giant hogweed) looks like a huge mutant version of the benign common hogweed - but it can cause severe skin burns if you so much as brush against the bristles on its stalks."
"'What people deserve is well thought-out information,' (James Evans, a professor of genetics and medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) says. 'The only people who will really benefit are the investors in these companies that market these incomplete and misleading (medical DNA) tests.'" You know what would really help? Universal, single-payor, comprehensive medical insurance.
"Attom Data looked at the annual change in home prices and sales across 3,397 cities around the country, then divided those cities into five groups based on their exposure to various types of natural disasters. What they found suggests the threats of climate change are beginning to register." Beach front property should be getting real cheap, but not, you know, where it's really pretty.
"Politicians often sell charters as a solution for low-income black and brown students stuck in poor-performing public schools. Yet, by 2015, racially identifiable white charter schools had emerged in 18 states — at a time when charters existed in 42 states. The federal government has played a role in the growth of these charters by granting charter startup grants to schools without considering whether they will lead to increased segregation. Some have been approved even while their communities were still under active school desegregation court orders, and in one case even after residents implored the federal court to step in and bar the school from opening." Gee, charter schools were designed to reverse desegregation? Shocked, shocked I am…
"The World Health Organization announced "gaming disorder" as a new mental health condition included in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases, released Monday." Here we go again.
"One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper." We are creating the next generations of people who will fight us because of our inhumanity towards them. (Grokked from Laura J. Mixon)
"A group of House Democrats converged on an immigration detention facility in New Jersey on Sunday, days before a planned vote by House Republicans next week. Meanwhile, Trump administration officials alternately took credit and sought to distance the administration from the family separation policy."
"With chants of 'families united' and 'free our children now,' hundreds of people marched to the tent city in Tornillo, Texas, where children have been detained for immigration violations."
"Former first lady Laura Bush spoke out Sunday night about the separation of families on the US border, writing a harsh criticism of the current zero-tolerance immigration policy being enforced under the Trump administration… Bush, whose opinion piece ran in The Washington Post, decries the separation of children from parents entering the United States illegally as 'cruel' and 'immoral.'"
So what could be the harm by making "illegals" feel vulnerable and that they can't trust the police for fear of separation and deportation? "A Texas sheriff's deputy was being held Monday on a charge of 'super aggravated sexual assault' of a 4-year-old girl after authorities say her mother, an undocumented immigrant, was being blackmailed to stay silent about the abuse — or face deportation." And I'll just note that to fill hiring quotas ICE and CBP have stopped a lot of the vetting of their applicants (because so many failed they couldn't keep [positions filled). (Grokked from Chuck Wendig)
So, everybody happy we're not talking about Stormy Daniels "taking down the president" anymore?
"In November 2017, (Commerce Secretary Wilbur) Ross confirmed in writing to the federal Office of Government Ethics that he had divested everything he promised… But that was not true." Ah, the "amended paperwork" gambit again. (grokked from Laura J. Mixon)
"The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped two major cases concerning partisan gerrymandering, allowing controversial district maps to stand and be used in this fall's midterm elections." They're not going to be able to avoid it much longer.
"There are, after all, valid security questions for election officials across the country: from the fact that 13 states still use electronic voting machines that don't provide an auditable paper trail, to the security of local election websites that have often never seen a major test… Even if every state did prioritize its own issues, bureaucracy has slowed the process. With midterms nearing, and the intelligence community warning about impending interference from Russia, that could be a problem." The problem of our current "last minute possible" or reactionary form of governing (it's a conservative mindset/problem)
Sherman, set the Spin-cycle Machine to high. "Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray will head to Capitol Hill Monday, to be grilled by senators about last week's inspector general's report that concluded that the FBI violated long-standing department guidelines and mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2016."
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