Linkee-poo, that's when she told me a story about free milk and a cow

Charles Fuller, and Judy Tenuta, it could happen.

"President Biden on Thursday announced that he is taking executive action to pardon people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law and D.C. statute… The pardons will be done through an administration process to be developed by the Justice Department, senior administration officials told reporters on a briefing call, and will cover citizens and lawful permanent residents." Brilliant. Not everything we could have wanted, but this is 1) a Good Thing™ and 2) brilliant politics.

"A charmed pair of guests will have the chance to stay in the cottage of the Sanderson sisters from Hocus Pocus. The building – complete with a cauldron, spell book and black-flame candle – has been recreated in the woods of Danvers, Mass. It's just a few miles from Salem, where the movie takes place, and where townsfolk accused more than 200 people of practicing witchcraft in 1692 and 1693."

"The asteroid that got smacked by a NASA spacecraft is now being trailed by thousands of miles of debris from the impact."

"As the U.S. heads into a third pandemic winter, the first hints are emerging that another possible surge of COVID-19 infections could be on its way… So far, no national surge has started yet. The number of people getting infected, hospitalized and dying from COVID in the U.S. has been gently declining from a fairly high plateau." Ta-da!

"Drugs like magic mushrooms and LSD can act as powerful and long-lasting antidepressants. But they also tend to produce mind-bending side-effects that limit their use… Now, scientists report in the journal Nature that they have created drugs based on LSD that seem to relieve anxiety and depression – in mice – without inducing the usual hallucinations." Bummer, Dude. Oh wait, no, that's good.

"Elon Musk now wants to go through with his original offer to buy Twitter for the previously agreed upon price… The legal team for the billionaire Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter Monday, which could put an end to the knock-down, drag-out legal fight over the merger that he tried to abandon in July." Twitter is not dismissing their suit.

"It seems Meta is having problems persuading even its own employees to don one of its virtual reality headsets and use its primary metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. So much so that an internal memo says the company would 'hold managers accountable' for their teams using it." (Grokked from John)

"America’s employers slowed their hiring in September but still added 263,000 jobs, a solid figure that will likely keep the Federal Reserve on pace to keep raising interest rates aggressively to fight persistently high inflation."

"Data now shows that the U.S. workforce is not as productive as just a year ago — it seems people are not producing as much in the hours between clocking in and clocking out each day. In the end, this could have a profound effect on the country's well-being, according to economists." Slackers. It's almost as if the success of the US economy, and capitalism, is based on unpaid labor. I'm sure it has nothing to do with how we're all doing three people's jobs and expected to kill ourselves for the jobs we have. Dear CEOs, you want your employees to embrace the fiction of "hard work will be rewarded", then you actually have to start rewarding hard work, not punishing it.

"Two Russians who said they fled the country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the U.S. after landing in a small boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Sea, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski's office said Thursday." Not exactly landing a MiG in Seoul, but okay.

"Relatives wailed and collapsed in grief before the small coffins of children Friday after a fired police officer stormed a rural Thai day care center at naptime and massacred dozens of people… At least 24 of the 36 people killed in Thursday’s grisly gun and knife attack were children, mostly preschoolers."

"Some Democrats in Congress are furious about OPEC+'s decision to cut production by 2 million barrels of oil per day starting next month, and are calling to reexamine ties with key oil producers, and even withdraw U.S. military support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates." I say we develop some logistics issues with their current orders.

"As Conley began digging further (into the rash of calls about active shooters in schools), more questions emerged. Elements of these calls were notably different than what she has typically seen in school-based threats. Nobody has taken credit for these calls, even as they stretched over several weeks, and the technological planning and research behind the calls betrayed a level of sophistication not typically seen." Finding signal in the noise.

"The city of Philadelphia issued an apology Thursday for the unethical medical experiments performed on mostly Black inmates at its Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s through the 1970s."

"The satirical site that manages to persuade people to believe the absurd has filed a Supreme Court brief in support of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for making fun of police on social media… The court filing doesn’t entirely keep a straight face, calling the federal judiciary 'total Latin dorks.'" Oh Onion, don't ever change.

"Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill Tuesday targeting medical treatments for transgender youth and called on the GOP-controlled Legislature to impose a statewide ban when it returns in February." Hey, remember when Republicans didn't want the government to come between you and your doctor?

"A Michigan judge threw out felony charges Tuesday against seven people in the Flint water scandal, including two former state health officials blamed for deaths from Legionnaires’ disease." Well fuck.

"A former Tennessee state trooper has gone missing after he was sentenced for a misdemeanor assault conviction on a charge that he pulled the face mask off a protester during the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2020."

"And Republicans are now using the loss to attack what they see as the 'big lie' that underlies Abrams’ career. They label her claims that Georgia’s election system has been discriminatory as a fraud she used to enrich herself and aggrandize her political career after her 2018 loss." You know, conservatives, you could have just walked away and nor drawn attention to how the 2018 election was handled by the person who is now governor.

"The ACLU’s Nevada chapter filed a lawsuit Tuesday against a rural Nevada county and its interim clerk to stop the implementation of the county’s new hand-counting process, which was spurred by false claims of election fraud. The process entails hand-counting all paper ballots alongside a machine tabulator."

"Hand-counting ballots is a voting 'solution' that, to those without familiarity with elections, may sound nice. The problem is that counting tactic has actually been found to be significantly less accurate, more expensive and more time-consuming than using tabulation equipment."