There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Sunday, May 14, 2023

Linkee-poo Sunday May 14

"The numbers speak for themselves: More than 100 movies in over 45 years of acting. Now Tom Hanks is drawing on all that experience to craft a story in a very different medium. He used some of the pandemic slowdown to write a novel. Titled The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, it tells the story of a comic strip that becomes a multimillion-dollar superhero movie."

"Beware the Nibblerids, for they shall nibble you to shreds. Their name might make them sound like the antagonists in a children's book, but if you're a microbe, nibblerids can be quite scary. These tiny, single-celled organisms are voracious predators that use a tooth-like structure to rip apart their prey bit by bit. They are also, it turns out, occupants of a completely new branch on the tree of life — a novel lifeform quite different, and distant, from any other known living creatures." Something new has been added. (Grokked from John)

"Hydrologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said deep snowpack across much of the West will bring short-term relief, but the equally deep “bathtub rings” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are a reminder of the long road to bringing supply and demand in balance."

"Daily tides stoked with increasingly warmer water ate a hole taller than the Washington Monument at the bottom of one of Greenland’s major glaciers in the last couple years, accelerating the retreat of a crucial part of the glacier, a new study found… And scientists worry that the phenomenon isn’t limited to this one glacier, raising questions about previous projections of melting rates on the world’s vulnerable ice sheets." We're boned.

"Roads in Florida could soon include phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — under a bill lawmakers have sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis." Getting rid of our dangerous byproducts in plain site. I'm not worried about radium, with it being in the open that should quickly dissipate. But I do believe that this is not the solution to the toxic waste in Florida.

"A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate perchlorate, reversing a Trump-era rollback on a drinking water contaminant linked to brain damage in infants."

"Breast cancer is very treatable when caught early, and mammograms, which are X-ray images of breasts, are a reliable screening test to detect it. Now, new draft recommendations released Tuesday from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force urges all women to get screened every other year, starting at age 40." Remember when they said you could start later…

"As the Biden administration ends the COVID-19 public health emergency, millions of Americans who contracted the disease continue to suffer from symptoms associated with long COVID… Neuropsychologist James C. Jackson says people with long COVID can suffer from symptoms like exhaustion, shortness of breath and disturbed sleep. Some of the most troubling symptoms are neurological: struggling to remember things, to focus, even to perform basic daily tasks and solve problems." You might remember when COVID-19 started I said because this was a novel virus it will change us by the end of it. This is part of what I was talking about.

"We are witnessing a technological revolution unfolding in real time. The rise of smart machines opens up some scary possibilities; for our economy, for our democracy, even, in the most catastrophic scenarios, for our continued existence as a species. But, if we get our act together, the age of Artificial Intelligence could be one in which we rebuild the middle class, says MIT's David Autor, one of the top labor economists in the world." Yeah. I think he's full of shit.

"The Justice Department said Tuesday that it had disrupted a long-running Russian cyberespionage campaign that infected computer networks in dozens of countries, including in the United States, and resulted in the theft of sensitive information from governments."

"President Vladimir Putin declared Tuesday that the West has unleashed “a real war” against Russia, reprising a familiar refrain at scaled-down Victory Day celebrations that may reflect the toll the Ukraine conflict is taking on his forces."

"Tucker Carlson, who was Fox News' biggest star until his abrupt firing last month, says he's taking his show to Twitter." Haven't we suffered enough on Twitter?

"The man who killed eight people and injured seven more in a shooting at Allen Premium Outlets Saturday was armed with eight weapons and had 'neo-Nazi ideation,' Texas Department of Public Safety officials said Tuesday." But they're still not sure what his motive was. Strong side-eye.

Ma href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tommy-tuberville-defends-white-nationalists-military-1234733007/">"WBHM Birmingham asked Tuberville if white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military. 'They call them that,' the senator responded. 'I call them Americans.'… Tuberville had explicitly defended 'white extremists' and 'white nationalists' earlier in the interview, alleging that President Biden is 'destroying' the military by opposing their inclusion." In case you were still wondering what side the GOP was on. After their attempt at a coup failed, they're now trying to subvert from the inside.

"(George) Santos, whose astonishing pattern of lies and fabrications stunned even hardened politicos, has been charged on a 13-count indictment, including seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives."

"Republican Rep. George Santos surrendered to federal authorities at a courthouse in suburban Long Island on Wednesday facing 13 counts of criminal wrongdoing."

"A jury found Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5 million in a judgment that could haunt the former president as he campaigns to regain the White House."

Jim Wright on the CNN spectacle of having That Fucking Guy on.

"Facing growing pressure to show progress in their investigations, House Republicans on Wednesday plan to detail what they say are concerning new findings about President Joe Biden ’s family and their finances… The smoking gun, according to the GOP, is 'thousands of pages' of recently obtained financial records that include more than 150 suspicious activity reports connected to the president’s son Hunter Biden and brother James Biden, as well as a growing number of associates." Again, the fetish with the page numbering. And a heavy dollop of "something must be in there" and not a lot of "what is in those pages."

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