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

Saturday, July 13, 2024

Linkee-poo July 13

"Last year was the hottest year on record for the world. The U.S. is warming up at a faster rate than the global average, which means the effects of global warming will be more pronounced... Arizona, California, Oregon and Nevada have all seen record-breaking heat in recent weeks. And while the heat wave is mostly in the West, states across the country like North Carolina and Maryland have also seen temperature records fall this summer." Considering the US was kept cool by unusually weather patterns for more than a decade (which played into the climate denial camp with, "warming, what warming") we're just catching up to the rest of the world.

"People in India and other countries across the Global South have long figured out ways to deal with horrible heat. I'd like to share a few tips I've learned from my elders back home in India. Some of the advice is just what you'd think —- drinking lots of liquids and staying out of the sun. Other strategies might surprise you."

"Researchers have found toxic metals — including arsenic and lead — in over a dozen popular brands of tampons, raising questions about a menstrual hygiene product used by millions of Americans."

"'We’ve been doing this now for well over three years here,' reCOVer Clinic (a part of Cleveland Clinic) Medical Director Dr. William Lago said. 'And we have people that have literally been sick, really, since the pandemic started.'... Lago said patients like Wickert have been searching for answers since the branch facility opened in 2021." I said at the beginning of this that since this was a novel virus to humans, it would change us. This is part of what I was talking about.

"Rudy Giuliani is no longer entitled to bankruptcy protection, a judge decided Friday, making it possible for creditors to immediately pursue his assets within days... The former mayor of New York sought bankruptcy protection after a jury awarded two Georgia election workers $148 million because Giuliani defamed them after the 2020 election. The judge’s decision Friday, to end his bankruptcy, paves the way for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, as well as other creditors, who are trying to collect on the more than $150 million Giuliani owes." Good.

"In a stunning turn of events, a New Mexico judge dismissed Alec Baldwin's 'Rust' case Friday, on day three of his manslaughter trial... The judge granted the defense's motion to dismiss the case, in which they claimed live ammunition that came into the hands of local law enforcement related to the investigation into the deadly on-set shooting was 'concealed' from them."

"One of the top stories was about the space junk strike, and even included a photo of the farmer, Barry Sawchuk, standing next to what looked like the charred, battered hood of a semitruck covered with woven carbon fiber and a few slightly melted aluminum protrusions. My jaw dropped in shock: The object looked exactly like debris that fell in an Australian sheep field in 2022, which the U.S. aerospace company SpaceX later admitted was part of a cargo trunk for its Crew Dragon spacecraft. This “trunk” is actually the size of a small grain silo, and is ejected in orbit well before the spacecraft’s atmospheric reentry, to naturally and chaotically reenter on its own and, supposedly, burn up completely."v "It was hard to foresee that parts of South Texas would become a sacrifice zone for SpaceX's ambitions to send people to Mars, but the company set up an impression of maintaining a 'small, eco-friendly' footprint to get what it wanted. But that hasn't been the reality, according to a new report."

"After the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report accusing the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) of colluding with companies to censor conservative voices online, Elon Musk chimed in. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote that X "has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators" behind an advertiser boycott on his platform… 'Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution,' Musk wrote, leading several X users to suggest that Musk wants it to be illegal for brands to refuse to advertise on X." And here comes the compelled speech defense.

"A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than a hundred victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s Black community, the mayor said Friday."

"When Anna Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for her dogged reporting on Mississippi’s welfare fraud scandal, she had no inkling she was soon going to have to contend with the possibility of going to jail… But just over a year after she secured journalism’s top award for exposing how $77 million in federal welfare funds went to athletes, cronies and pet projects, she and her editor, Adam Ganucheau, are contemplating what to pack for an extended stay behind bars. Sued for defamation by the state’s former governor — a top subject of their reporting — they have been hit with a court order requiring them to turn over internal files including the names of confidential sources. They say the order is a threat to journalism that they will resist."

"The (SCOTUS) decisions, taken together, offer a perfect representation of the current Supreme Court: Our country is being led by an all-powerful, undemocratic institution that is, in many ways, a complete joke — in addition to being simply corrupt. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent on Friday, 'The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power' — and the justices are 'making a laughing-stock' of long-standing judicial principles." And this article was from before the SCOTUS gave the president unparalleled immunity.

"A conservative think tank that is planning for a complete overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win is suggesting that President Joe Biden might try to hold the White House 'by force' if he loses the November election… The Heritage Foundation’s warning — which goes against Biden’s own public statements — appeared in a report released Thursday that the group said resulted from a role-playing exercise gaming out potential scenarios before and after the 2024 election." This is what's known as "seeding the ground" so that when they lose, they can claim, "it was all rigged from the start."

"A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump… These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation… Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups."

"(The Press) have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: 'As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.' They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one."v "President Joe Biden didn’t entirely stumble at his high-stakes NATO press conference on Thursday — but his performance and continuing defiance to stepping aside has frozen Democrats in place once again over the president’s embattled candidacy against Donald Trump." This whole campaign of "Biden must step down" stinks of an information warfare campaign aided by willful fools who think they have something to gain.

"During a news conference Thursday, when asked why he no longer considered himself a 'bridge' to the next generation of leaders, Biden responded that 'what changed was the gravity of the situation I inherited in terms of the economy, foreign policy, and domestic division... We’ve never been here before,' Biden continued. 'And that’s the other reason why I didn’t, you say, hand off to another generation. I gotta finish the job.'"

"Donald Trump is expected to launch a new legal battle to suppress any damaging evidence from his 2020 election-subversion case from becoming public before the 2024 election, preparing to shut down the potency of any 'mini-trials' where high-profile officials could testify against him."

"The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials whom Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has 'no idea' who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline… One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform… Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides…Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video."

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