Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

“But what about the lurkers?”

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

This fight is for everything.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Republicans in disarray!

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Saturday Morning Open Thread: Busy, Busy, Busy All the Time

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Busy, Busy, Busy All the Time

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Holding our Houston area jackals in the light… y’all check in when you get the chance:

“Debates over the debate” convo in full spate:


Per the Associated Press, “Trump accepts a VP debate but wants it on Fox News. Harris has already said yes to CBS”:

… President Joe Biden’s campaign signaled it would reject Trump’s offer, an official pointing to the acceptable debate parameters it detailed earlier this week. Under those conditions, a Fox News-hosted debate would not qualify.

Republican Trump’s post on his social media network came after Democrat Harris accepted a different invitation from CBS News…

Fox News said in a statement it offered to host a VP debate on July 23, August 13 or a day after both party conventions. Harris’ team previously told CBS she would debate in-studio on the July or August dates Fox mentioned…

Trump for months has pressed Biden to debate, even placing an empty second lectern onstage at some of his rallies as a symbolic offer to the president. In a separate post Friday, he said he had accepted an invitation for still an additional debate, hosted by NBC and Telemundo, after previously committing to yet another invitation from Fox News for an October debate.

Biden’s campaign on Friday referred back to a previous statement in which chair Jen O’Malley Dillon accused Trump of having “a long history of playing games with debates: complaining about the rules, breaking those rules, pulling out at the last minute, or not showing up at all.”

At least it will, if our Very Serious Horserace-Tout Media has anything to do with it…

… CNN said Friday that it will make its debate, scheduled for June 27 with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as moderators, available for simulcast on any U.S. network with a news division that wants it, and allow free entry to CNN.com to stream it. ABC had said on Wednesday that it would allow networks and streaming services to simulcast its debate, set for Sept. 10 with David Muir and Linsey Davis as moderators.

A debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and whomever former President Trump chooses as his running mate is expected to air this summer on CBS. Fox News said it was seeking a second undercard debate but the Biden campaign signaled it would reject that

Each of the two debates between Biden and Trump in 2020 were carried on at least 16 networks, according to the Nielsen company. The first was seen by 73.1 million viewers, the second by 63 million…

For CNN leaders, there was a great temptation to keep it for themselves. It would have likely been the most-watched event ever on a network that is struggling in ratings. CNN’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, made a point in tying the debate to the brand on Wednesday when he announced the agreement to hold it during a sales presentation to advertisers in New York…

[Which is why CNN is not doing that!]

Despite worries about how many people will watch, Jamieson said there’s some irony in that there’s a lot to like about the proposed ground rules for the event. So far, the plans are to hold them in television studios without an audience.

That’s something the Annenberg group had proposed a decade ago, saying an audience that reacts to what the candidates are saying is often a distraction, and that audience is usually packed with partisans on both sides.

If the two campaigns agree to rules where one candidate’s microphone would be shut off while his opponent answers a question, it would go a long way to solving what has been a more frequent problem recently with politicians interrupting and talking over an opponent, she said…


 
Elsewhere: Violent criminals & their defenders —

At least David duPape has the excuse of untreated mental illness:

Reader Interactions

115Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    With regards to Bozell IV, clearly conservative white pundits are failing to provide good role models to their children. Perhaps they should be required to enroll in parenting classes and submit to monitoring? Or maybe the kids should be removed from their parents and fostered out instead?

  2. 2.

    Baud

    One fugitive caught (reddit link)

    Rudy Giuliani’s tweet bragging about evading service of his Arizona indictment. He was served 30 minutes later, during his birthday party.

  7. 7.

    Baud

    Also, I read the Pelosi attacker will be up on state charges, so no Trump pardon if the unthinkable happens.

  10. 10.

    Ohio Mom

    Sitting in my driveway with my cast-offs — it’s the annual subdivision yard sale.

    Business is very slow. Not a lot of customers and very few of them are impressed with my tasteful knickknacks.

    Oh well. There’s always Goodwill, they will take almost all of this off my hands.

  12. 12.

    sab

    @Ohio Mom: We have a Humane Society Thrift Store. Almost everything I donated was sold within 24 hours.

    My sister in law lives in a suburb that has the annual couch swap. Only time you can put your couch on the curb for trash pickup. So everyone goes out looking for a better couch. It’s hilarious.

    ETA My rule for Humane Society is I have to donate more items that day than I buy. They have really good stuff. I bought a porpoise night light there.

  13. 13.

    MagdaInBlack

    Last evening I saw something I had not seen here before. A woman walking her cat. Cat happily exploring, obviously not it’s first rodeo. I was charmed.

    ( yes I know its done, I just not seen it in the real world, just videos)

  14. 14.

    Ohio Mom

    @Baud: Pelosi’s attacker should certainly be removed from society, but this is another example of the penal system functioning as our de facto mental health system.

    We emptied out the psychiatric hospitals (excuse me, behavioral health facilities, gotta keep up with the new terminology) and filled up the jails and prisons.

  15. 15.

    sab

    @MagdaInBlack: The neighbors’ cat that moved in with us has a brother cat. He goes for walks with his owners and their big dog. Dog on a leash, cat just trotting along beside them. Adorable. Our cat wanted to be inside.

  16. 16.

    Ohio Mom

    @sab: The couch trade sounds like my neighborhood’s Buy Nothing group on Facebook. People trade furnishings and I can’t figure out what they see in the stuff they are grabbing up.

    I’m imagining the person with the couch nobody else wants. Ouch.

  17. 17.

    HinTN

    @Ohio Mom: In addition to prisons, you can blame much of the homeless population of the 90s and naughts on St Ronnie doing that.

  18. 18.

    p.a.

    @MagdaInBlack: Last week in my local state park a guy was walking with a toddler-sized remote controlled electric car with a birdcage in its seat, 2 parakeets sitting outside the cage.  Pretty healthy population of hawks around the park.🤔

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Baud:

    My drug test was very positive, bigly positive. There’s never been a drug test like mine in probably a very long time. Maybe forever. Who knows? We’ll have to see. But the day I took the drud tess a doctoc came up to me, he said “Sir, excuse me Sir, but the other doctoosh and I were talking about your perfect drub text and it was the most positive drum tent in medical history. I swear on my hypocritic oaf.” I don’t think crooked Joe could say that.

  22. 22.

    MagdaInBlack

    @sab: My cat is happy to lay by the patio door, no desire to even step out on the balcony. I know neither of us has the desire or the patience for learning to walk on a leash.

  23. 23.

    Percysowner

     

    @MagdaInBlack:

     That’s what Michael Steel said this morning.

    I think by now anyone in Texas who has the financial means and the physical ability should be installing solar with battery backup. Admittedly this storm was so destructive that rooftop solar might not have survived, and no power grid could survive having multiple towers being knocked over. Still by this time, Texans should recognize that their power grid is not secure and they need some sort of backup for when it goes down. This is what? The third time since 2021. That’s close to one huge outage a year.

    I just hope we hear from our jackels in Houston. Keep safe guys and let us know you are safe when things settle enough.

  24. 24.

    Almost Retired

    OT but I have been up since 4:30 because some sort of very restless varmint has taken residence in the crawl space under our bedroom.  I am fairly sure it’s a bear, but Mrs. AR thinks I can be a bit dramatic. I’ll give it the Noriega treatment and blast some Barry Manilow at it all day so it can’t sleep.  I can do that because we don’t have an HOA in our neighborhood.

  26. 26.

    stinger

    I take it the photo in that third tweet is proof of TIFG actually attending Barron’s graduation ceremony.

  27. 27.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @MagdaInBlack:

    I saw a guy once in KC (we were going to see Martin Sexton) who had a cat, unleashed, that followed him around like a dog, would ride on his shoulder.

    An old friend had a cat he took camping with him.  They’d setup in the woods, he’d let the cat roam, cat always came back.  He told us he had the cat since about it was 8 weeks old.  He lived in WY and would go out into a big-assed field with nothing around, let the cat loose, set out a chair and read until the cat came back.  Thus trained, he did that for the next 17 years.

    We’ve saw a couple of people here in the ‘hood try training their cats to walk on leashes during the real down times during the Plague.  Not sure how successful they were although it was hysterical to watch them try.

  29. 29.

    Percysowner

     

    @Almost Retired:

     HOAs have a bad rep, and most of them deserve it. The only one I ever lived in had an HOA because 1) It was a private street so someone needed to pay for plowing in the winter and 2) there was considerable green space that no one owned so the HOA paid for mowing every year. The only thing they ever got pissy about was making sure you couldn’t see the garbage cans from the street. The fee was only $180 a year, so it really just covered the necessaries.

  30. 30.

    Scout211

    @Almost Retired: I am fairly sure it’s a bear, but Mrs. AR thinks I can be a bit dramatic.

    Some people say that raccoons can be as large as bears.  Just saying.

  34. 34.

    Ohio Mom

    @HinTN: Yup, one of the first things Reagan did as president was repeal Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, which was to provide funding for mental health centers.

    I’ve long thought there is need for a coffee table book full of photos and graphs illustrating the last harms of the Reagan administration. One page could be Reagan signing away that funding, another page could be a graph showing the decline in union membership and corresponding rise in income inequality, still another the increase in the federal debt, the list goes on and on.

  35. 35.

    Scout211

    AOC had a very interesting point about the chaotic House hearing yesterday.  New Republic has a good explainer.  The crazy, wild outburst may not have been planned but she states that it was part of a more cynical move by the Republicans. 

     

    The following day, Ocasio-Cortez took to X (formerly Twitter) to break down how Greene’s outburst overshadowed—and aided—what Ocasio-Cortez describes as a “microcosm of what authoritarians do on a larger scale.”

    “AFTER the Republican Chair and GOP members broke official House protocol to allow MTG’s horrific opening silo of rhetoric, they THEN made another change to dispense with the legislative process,” Ocasio-Cortez said on X (formerly Twitter). “THAT part is not getting enough attention.”

    In a move Ocasio-Cortez described as “highly unusual and still unclear to me how legitimate it was,” the GOP-led committee vacated both the typical amendment process and legislative debate that follows, moving directly to vote on their own text without allowing for amendments or objections to be heard.

    ”That’s why this stuff isn’t just all-sides chaos, or mere distraction, or a pox on everyone’s house,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “They WANT you to think this was some random devolution of conduct instead of a structured GOP outcome. We must understand who and what actions created the situation. It matters.”

    Thanks to MTG’s meltdown, the vote to initiate contempt proceedings against Garland was successful.

  36. 36.

    Villago Delenda Est

    “Trump accepts a VP debate but wants it on Fox News. Harris has already said yes to CBS”
    Soon to be convicted felon TIFG/PAB can fuck the living fuck off. Or, more succinctly in the words of the late great EFGoldman, fuck’em.

  38. 38.

    Steeplejack

    @Almost Retired:

    I’ll give it the Noriega treatment and blast some Barry Manilow at it all day so it can’t sleep.  I can do that because we don’t have an HOA in our neighborhood.

    But you’re still subject to the Geneva Conventions, aren’t you?

  39. 39.

    Captain C

    @MagdaInBlack:

    So, Trump wants Biden to drug test? Ok, pal, you too.

    Every accusation is a confession.  Though at this point, coming into the debates gacked on Adderall would probably be counterproductive for TIFG.

  40. 40.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Scout211: Well..MTG is or was a frequent flyer on Bannon’s ” Warroom.” She appears to be his little acolyte, his chaos monkey whom he winds up and sets loose. So, ya, its no accident this happened

    Eta: Plus she’s an idiot, so easy to wind up.

  43. 43.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @MagdaInBlack: If there is going to be a drug test, I want the sample of both candidates monitored on live TV for authenticity, and a very strict chain of custody enforced on the sample.  When I had to submit a urine sample in the Army, some NCO was required to watch me piss.  I once had to watch my rater take a leak in a cup when his number came up for a drug test.

  45. 45.

    matt

    Biden should agree to the drug test if Trump does it too, but it’s a blood draw right before the debate, administered by a third party.

  47. 47.

    Shalimar

    @MagdaInBlack: Who ever heard of a debate where only one side has to take a drug test?  If it’s a debate rule, then it applies to both of them.  Let each party submit a list of drugs they suspect the other is taking and test for all of them.

  48. 48.

    Trivia Man

    @Almost Retired: When my housemates partied into the wee hours on a work night – i did my payback. When i got up for work at 6 it was the album Ennea by Chase. 40 years ago and they still talk about the “demon trumpets from hell.” I still enjoy the album – driving rock beat with a blaring trumpet section. I bet the bear would hate  it.

  50. 50.

    smith

    @Captain C: Absent a drug test, I think his handlers will be faced with a dilemma when it comes to prepping him for a debate. The sedatives they’ve used have kept him mostly quiet and in his seat during his trial, with the minor downside of his sleeping through most of it. But he can’t sleep through a debate, so they’ll have to throw some Adderall into the mix.

    Whatever combo they’ve been using for his rallies has kept him on his feet, but not tearing the curtains or throwing the lectern into the audience, but the verbal diarrhea that results could be a problem if anyone in the audience were listening. Can’t guarantee no one’s listening to a debate! What to do? What to do?

  53. 53.

    Trivia Man

    @Ohio Mom: And day 1 removing white house solar panels. Common wisdom says it was an early DRILL, BABY, DRILL statement but I contend it was just old school snobbishness. An elegant manor house fit for a king should never spoil the elegant lines with something practical and useful.

  56. 56.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Ohio Mom:

    While it is right and just to put a lot on Reagan, he was really part of, the became the leader of, a nationwide right-wing revanche against Civil Rights, women’s liberation, and the military defeat in Vietnam. It was also fueled by the end of America’s post-WWII worldwide economic hegemony which was happening at the same time. The era really began with the OPEC boycott in 1973.

    The optimistic part of my torn and frayed political soul tells me that we are right now in the last years of that era. What we need is a kind of manifesto – not by that name, please – that describes what America wants to be.

  57. 57.

    mountain granny

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: I have been walking my cat on a leash for the past three years. But we don’t go down the street, we go around our house and into the vacant lots next door. Because our “path” is very circuitous, and, I admit, chosen primarily by my cat. He has to carefully inspect “his” territory, and sample various strains of grass and other edibles.  I am a mobile fence, as it were. He has learned where the boundaries are (asphalt roadway, neighbor’s yards, steep canyon) and a tightening of the leash is all it takes now to signal a no-go area. No climbing trees, but he is allowed to jump into my arms and see things from an elevated perspective. He demands to be taken out every morning at the crack of dawn, even when the weather is less than pleasant. We do about 20-30 minutes and then he is satisfied for the remainder of the day. The rest of the day he is confined to the house and the “catio” that our back deck has been turned into.  I’ve been more involved with this cat than any of the many I’ve had over the years. And it has been a challenging and eye-opening experience. As a horse and dog trainer, it has given me a very different perspective on animal behavior.

  59. 59.

    snoey

    @Villago Delenda Est: None of that matters. They believe that there is something that they give Biden that magically temporarily transforms him from a dementia victim into a function adult. You can’t test for a drug, especially a non-existant one, without knowing what it is.

  62. 62.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Captain C: It seems like everyone has already memory holed the fact that the White House medical staff during TIFG’s time there was handing out controlled substances like candy. The press should be like wait wut, weren’t you the drugged up POTUS running a drug ring from the White House?

    It’s not that anyone takes the idea that Biden is on drugs seriously it’s that everyone ignores the evidence that Trump IS on drugs. Because that’s not bad news for Biden.

  63. 63.

    Captain C

    @What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:

    The press should be like wait wut, weren’t you the drugged up POTUS running a drug ring from the White House?

    A competent press that wasn’t in the tank for TIFG and his hateful and freeloading backers would be doing this nonstop.

  64. 64.

    Ohio Mom

    @Melancholy Jaques: I could see an argument that the era of neoliberal economic policy/shrinking of the safety net was predetermined in ways, Reagan just happened to be there.

    He didn’t do it all by himself and you could say it was Carter after all who got the ball rolling by deregulating the airlines. Not to mention Clinton’s End of Welfare as We Know It.

    But my imagined coffee table book would hammer home that these were conscious decisions, that this country did go off in a different direction, and by implication, we could change course again. Like you, I am hoping we are seeing the first steps toward more humane era.

  65. 65.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @sab: I’ve had cats that did that. They’d sneak from bush to bush and somehow always happen to be in the yard we were walking past as I walked the dog.

    But that cat on a leash thing… only seen that a couple of times in my life. I don’t know how you’d get a cat to tolerate being leashed, let along cooperate and walk the direction you want to go.

  66. 66.

    TBone

    @MagdaInBlack: I trained my cats on harness/leash when they were little.  Now they don’t leave my property – they somehow know exactly where their boundaries are AND they come when I call them (trained by calling them every time I put food down so they’d know the call).

  68. 68.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Percysowner: Never had to live with an HOA, but one of my favorite humorous X-files episodes had an HOA that would summon demons to kill homeowners who were insufficiently obedient. The scene where Mulder is trying to commit as many violations as possible to get their attention was hilarious (all I remember is a yard full of pink flamingos and playing basketball at midnight).

    Methinks some writer was having some issues with their HOA.

  74. 74.

    3Sice

    The blue blazer & khaki combo is the Zhongshan suit of the 80s California GOP.

    Dated now, but it serves as a useful red flag at social functions.

  75. 75.

    karen marie

    @MagdaInBlack: So many things that can go wrong. You may think that harness will hold them until it doesn’t. Almost lost my Alice Springs when walking down Beacon Hill to the vet, her in my arms in a harness and leash. A rattling box truck went past and scared her. She lept straight out of the harness. I just caught her tail as she was flying away.

  76. 76.

    Pink Tie

    In our part of Houston (West U for those who know the city), it’s mostly lots of debris in yards and streets. We didn’t lose power ourselves, but the sky turned a scary color and it got very dark and loud. I do have friends in the Heights/Washington area who are still without power, and we heard that downtown had a ton of buildings with windows blown out — glass everywhere, apparently. Lots of people around here have generators, but it’s controversial because whole-house generators take a lot of space and make a great deal of noise. Our local facebook group has a couple of threads where neighbors are bitching about loud generators and the generator owners bitch back. But this is nowhere near as awful as a hurricane, and as far as I know there wasn’t much flooding. As for installing solar panels, they would have been blown right off the house and probably increased damage. So that’s not in our plans.

  77. 77.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … Science.org:

    Müller quit his job in a pain clinic and received various diagnoses from different physicians, including delusional disorder and schizophrenia. He spent weeks at a stretch in psychiatric hospitals, sometimes against his will. In 2017, he developed an unquenchable thirst that compelled him to guzzle up to 15 liters of fluids a day. He moved into his parents’ house, where he’d lie in bed all day, sobbing and “afraid of dying,” he says. “I knew there was something terribly wrong with me.”

    Then, in 2019, Müller’s aunt shared a magazine article about Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a neuropsychiatrist at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg who is exploring a new frontier of medicine: autoimmune conditions that trigger psychosis. Müller went to visit, and that August, Tebartz van Elst’s team isolated telltale antibodies from Müller’s blood serum. They signaled an autoimmune brain disease with a jawbreaker of a name: anti-leucine-rich glioma-inactivated 1 (anti-LGI1) encephalitis. The team administered high doses of intravenous cortisone, a first-line treatment for brain inflammation. “My expectations were tempered,” Tebartz van Elst says. “Were we too late to help him?”

    Müller showed scant improvement at first, ending up back in a psychiatric ward in early 2020. But after a second stint under Tebartz van Elst’s care, his symptoms started to relent. By the fall of 2021, he was on the road to recovery.

    Over the past 15 years, researchers have identified 18 different diseases, all triggered by an immune attack on the brain, that can lead to diverse neurological symptoms, and in some cases, psychosis. Like other autoimmune diseases, which include rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, and lupus, these autoimmune brain inflammations, or encephalitides, arise when antibodies turn against the body. These antibodies may originate in the brain or slip in from the bloodstream. They then bind to targets on the surface of neurons or in the synapses between them, altering brain function and triggering a cascade of inflammatory processes.

    “These aren’t new disorders,” says Belinda Lennox, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford. But before the aberrant antibodies behind autoimmune encephalitis were unmasked, many affected individuals died in intensive care units. Some languished in psychiatric wards—and a handful were even subjected to exorcisms. “You can be fine one day, and absolutely psychotic the next. And that’s horrifying,” says Stacey Clardy, a neuroimmunologist at the University of Utah.

    When the first form of autoimmune encephalitis was discovered in 2007, psychiatrists largely ignored the revelation—or didn’t think it was relevant to their patients, Lennox says. There was a “barrier to change” in the field, she acknowledges.

    Many have now come around. Psychiatrists and neurologists are increasingly joining forces to find and treat patients with autoimmune psychoses. “We’ve been waiting for this moment, when everybody finally listened,” Clardy says. Hubs for treatment and research have sprouted across Europe and in the United States. Scientists at Columbia University’s newly launched Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Precision Psychiatry & Mental Health are planning this fall to screen for autoantibodies in patients in the New York state mental health system—14 psychiatric centers totaling 3000 beds—who may have undiagnosed autoimmune conditions.

    Brains are biological organs. They can have biological issues just like skin or sinuses or livers. There’s still a mountain of stuff that we don’t know about human biology.

    I’ve said many times in the past that I long for the day when there’s a vaccine to prevent people from becoming conspiracy theorists, science and reason deniers, and members of cults. That day cannot arrive too soon…

    (Of course, figuring out whether that vaccine is actually beneficial and does what it claims on the tin is left as an exercise for future readers…)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  84. 84.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, in France … France24.com:

    Cannes (France) (AFP) – When Russian President Vladimir Putin was unavailable to star in his biopic, Polish director Patryk Vega turned to artificial intelligence.

    Issued on: 18/05/2024 – 18:35

    2 min

    [ Image: Putin — here the real one — is to star in a damning AI-enhanced biopic © Mikhail METZEL / POOL/AFP ]

    The groundbreaking film, whose trailer starts with the leader cowering on a floor in diapers, uses a deepfake of the ruler’s face transplanted onto the body of a real actor.

    “To come extremely close to the dictator, we needed Putin, not an actor with make-up,” Vega told AFP at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has been shopping the film to buyers.

    “I called Putin and asked him if he wanted to play in my movie… No, that was a joke.”

    Vega — a 47-year-old director, who has made several hit Polish films — used AI to generate just the face, since he lacked enough high-resolution images for a full-body deepfake.

    The results are uncanny.

    The producers of the film, called simply “Putin”, say it has already been sold in 50 countries ahead of its premiere in September.

    The film follows the ruler’s life over six decades from the age of 10 when he is seen being beaten by his stepfather.

    “In the end I show his death. A happy end,” said Vega.

    The initial idea came to Vega during the first days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

    “First I wanted to do a movie about the Russian mafia. Then I decided to do it about the biggest gangster,” he said.

    He shrugged off any concerns about reprisals.

    “Putin should be afraid of me,” he said.

    […]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  85. 85.

    John S.

    @TBone: Holy shit that is bonkers. But not totally unexpected. The morality police are always the most fucking depraved people.

  86. 86.

    Kayla Rudbek

    I can’t figure out why I’m smelling stale cigarettes in my house, as neither Mr. Rudbek nor I smoke or have ever smoked. Maybe it’s the occupants of the townhouse next door?

  87. 87.

    Splitting Image

    @John S.:

    Holy shit that is bonkers. But not totally unexpected. The morality police are always the most fucking depraved people.

    The most worrisome thing about the conservative movement is how extensively they use ‘pedophile’ and ‘groomer’ as insults.

  88. 88.

    jonas

    Wow! Even Newsmax can’t ignore the great things President Biden has done “Biden has funneled a record $16 billion to Black universities, passed criminal justice reforms, and worked to roll back marijuana restrictions, among other legislative efforts.”

    Of course Newsmax means this to be a criticism. Free $$ for n*CLANG!*s! That’s Democrats for ya!

  89. 89.

    Kelly

    Today is the anniversary of the huge Mount Saint Helens eruption. A friend and I were between jobs at the time. We packed a week’s worth of food, beer and paperbacks drove up the Toutle river to a campsite with a view of the mountain. We stayed one night. Got bored and went home. The mountain blew 4 days later. We’d of been safe from the blast but on the wrong side of a couple wrecked bridges.

  90. 90.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, how did they get the giant blocks to the pyramids, and why did they pick that location anyway??

    Nature.com:

    Abstract

    The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.

    There’s still a lot we’re learning about this big old round rock of ours, and how humans made the choices they did based on its configuration at the time.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  91. 91.

    Baud

    @Another Scott:

    Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids

     
    Just what the aliens that built the pyramids did.

  94. 94.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Captain C: The frustrating thing is he’s tee-ing it up for the media and they still can’t revisit the the drugsRus White House story. He could have found a half dozen other complaints (I want some guarantee he doesn’t get leaked the questions in advance for example) but he goes right for the thing he’s guilty of and the press can’t be bothered to mention the hypocrisy.

  95. 95.

    Melancholy Jaques

    Excerpt from Cohen’s testimony that needs follow-up on cable news show right after he is done testifying in this trial:

    Q. So the example I just went through with Ms. Haberman, you had several reporters where you had the same relationship?

    A. Yes, sir.

    Who are those other reporters?

    And while we’re at it, ask all our favorite Trump promoters reporters if they, too, had that same relationship with Cohen.

  100. 100.

    Another Scott

    @Melancholy Jaques:

    chris evans
    @notcapnamerica
    May 16

    Michael Cohen just testified that his main press contacts in order to get positive stories published about Donald Trump were Katy Tur, Maggie Haberman, and Chris Cuomo

    [ images ]

    May 16, 2024 · 7:27 PM UTC

    FWIW.

    (via 7veritas4)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  102. 102.

    frosty

    @Another Scott: ​I wonder if the therapy for autoimmune psychosis could help with Long COVID. Brain inflammation seems more and more to be a key for brain fog.​

  103. 103.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Another Scott:

    Thanks. I’m not following that trial too closely, but Cohen confirmed what we all knew, didn’t we? Sometime prior to 2015, a connection existed between Trump and the Habermans. Maybe the mother, maybe through some other channels. But Haberman exploited it and made a career out of washing and dispensing insider stuff from Trump to the public. I thought it was Ivanka and Hope Hicks via the NYC rich people party circuit. But however it was formed, it was and remains, so far as I know, the only reason anyone would hire Haberman to do anything.

    I’ve read all the defenses and praises of her supposedly great journalistic achievements, but it’s all bullshit. She never added anything good to the discourse, never gave us anything that mattered. And she’s a generic newspeak writer.

  104. 104.

    Another Scott

    @frosty: Maybe!

    I’m no expert on this stuff.  I’m impressed by how much progress has been made in understanding this novel virus and its effects on the body.  But the body is really, really complicated.

    A recent “perspectives” article at Science.org (probably paywalled):

    More than 4 years into the global COVID-19 pandemic, widespread infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) has left millions of people around the world with Long Covid, which describes the constellation of post-acute and long-term adverse health effects caused by the infection. Evidence generated by the scientific community—with formidable contributions from patient-led research teams—has provided a thorough understanding of the epidemiology and clinical manifestations of Long Covid. Understanding the biologic underpinnings of this disease is also improving, along with evidence that vaccination and antivirals can help prevent it. Yet despite this progress, prevention efforts have stalled, there is uncertainty about governments’ long-term commitment to address research needs in this area, and there has yet to be a treatment option validated with randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

    Long Covid can manifest in people across the life span (from children to older adults) and across race and ethnicity, sex, and baseline health status. It is a complex nonmonolithic multisystemic disease with sequelae across almost all organ systems. Long Covid is likely a disease with many subtypes that may have different risk factors (genetic, environmental, etc.) and distinct biologic mechanisms that may respond differently to treatments. For example, the prototypical (classic) form of Long Covid (with brain fog, fatigue, dysautonomia, and postexertional malaise) is more common in younger adults and in females. Other forms of Long Covid, including those with cardiovascular and metabolic sequelae, are manifest more often in older adults and those with comorbidities. A common risk across all types of Long Covid is severity of acute infection; the risk—on the relative scale—increases according to the severity of the acute infection. However, despite the lower relative risk, more than 90% of cases occur in people who had mild SARS-CoV-2 infection, owing to the much higher prevalence of mild cases (1).

    From an extensive body of mechanistic research in people affected by Long Covid, there appear to be multiple potential pathogenic pathways, including persistence of the virus or its components in tissue reservoirs; autoimmune or an unchecked, dysregulated immune response; mitochondrial dysfunction; vascular (endothelial) and/or neuronal inflammation; and microbiome dysbiosis (2). In people with severe COVID-19, systemic acute infection can arise in which SARS-CoV-2 replicates in pulmonary and extrapulmonary tissue, and its genomic RNA may persist for months in multiple sites, including the brain and coronary arteries (3). To what extent this happens in milder cases and whether this contributes mechanistically to Long Covid is not yet clear. SARS-CoV-2 may also reactivate dormant viruses, including Epstein-Barr virus and varicella zoster virus, as well as lead to gut-brain and neuroendocrine dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, and impaired coagulation (4, 5) (see the figure).

    Because nonpharmaceutical interventions to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission have largely been abandoned, vaccines are now the primary line of defense against both severe disease in the acute phase of the infection and Long Covid. Studies have consistently shown that vaccines reduce the risk of Long Covid by 15 to 75%, with a mean of ~40% reduction in risk. Yet vaccine policies in much of the world restrict boosters to older adults or those with risk factors for severe COVID-19, and with pandemic fatigue, the public’s appetite for boosters seems to be waning.

    Evidence from observational analyses also suggests that use of the antiviral ritonavir-boosted nirmatrelvir within 5 days of symptom onset of SARS-CoV-2 infection may reduce the risk of Long Covid by 26% (6). Molnupiravir—with known mutagenic effects on SARS-CoV-2 and putative mutagenic potential in human cells—has also been shown to reduce the risk of Long Covid. However, the studies on ritonavir-nirmatrelvir and molnupiravir were limited to those who presently qualify for antivirals, including older adults or those with risk factors for the progression to severe COVID-19, and the mutagenic potential of molnupiravir is concerning because mutations of SARS-CoV-2 may spawn new variants and mutations in humans may lead to cancer or other diseases. Another SARSCoV-2 antiviral, ensitrelvir, has been shown to reduce the risk of Long Covid in preliminary analyses. Additionally, the diabetes drug metformin initiated within 7 days of SARSCoV-2 infection reduced the risk of Long Covid by 41% in a RCT (7). More evidence is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of reducing Long Covid risk and the safety of various antivirals, especially in younger and healthier adults (where evidence is lacking), and to reproduce the findings on metformin. Whether a combination of metformin and an antiviral, a combination of antivirals, or a higher dose or longer duration of treatment with an antiviral would yield greater effectiveness in reducing the risk of Long Covid should also be investigated.

    Reinfection, which is now the dominant type of SARS-CoV-2 infection, is not inconsequential; it can trigger de novo Long Covid or exacerbate its severity. Each reinfection contributes additional risk of Long Covid: Cumulatively, two infections yield a higher risk of Long Covid than one infection, and three infections yield a higher risk than two infections (8). Whether different SARS-CoV-2 variants alter the risk of developing Long Covid should be investigated. Regardless, efforts to prevent reinfection are important and may reduce the risk of long-term population health loss (8).

    […]

    We’ve learned a lot, but there’s still a lot unknown. Here’s hoping that people working on these problems continue to get funding and support to continue to make progress (and have a strong foundation for prevention and treatment for the next pandemic). Fighting efforts to, yet again, gut public heath are important, also too.

    Yet another reason to vote the monsters out!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  105. 105.

    piratedan

    @Another Scott: Katy fucking Turd, man, that’s a shocker ain’t it?

    While we’ve all wondered wtf she’s coming from, now we know, she’s in the fucking camp.

  106. 106.

    The Return of Mo Salad

    @Another Scott:

     
    Saw them last night. Seeing them again tonight.

    I had to discuss with my girlfriend when leaving the show that Dr. Worm is a bigger jam than Birdhouse. They played Birdhouse in the encore, but saved Dr. Worm for the last song of the night in the second encore.

    I conducted an unscientific poll of one other fan walking down Woodward back to the car and she agreed. Dr. Worm > Birdhouse.

  107. 107.

    Dan B

    @Percysowner: There were solar panels on the brick building in Houston where the car was squashed by bricks.  The PV panels were dangling over the void by their cables.  In the Southeast  US Solar PV panels should have tempered glass that can resist hail.

  108. 108.

    Ironcity

    @Jackie: Would the independent lab that had to watch pay their tech time and a half overtime or hazard pay for the service?  If not they should.  Videos?  Tickets?

  109. 109.

    Dan B

    @Kelly: I was boarding the Lady of the Lake on Lake Chelan, 100 plus miles of mountain ridges away from Mount Saint Helens.  We heard the sound of a huge gun fired from a mile above us on the ridge.  Later, farther up the fjord like laje. there were wild dark clouds racing over even higher ridges – 8,000 + feet, and a mile deep fog bank at  the bottom of the lake – the ash cloud that filled the eastern Washington, Columbia basin.  We were clueless in the wilderness of the Eastern Cascades.

  110. 110.

    Jackie

    @Dan B: In the Tri-Cities, I had just hung a load of laundry on the clothes line and started planting marigolds, when something made me look up to the west. Black clouds were boiling from the west and rolling towards us FAST! I assumed it was a massive thunderstorm and raced to unload the clothesline. My husband dashed out of the house yelling Mt Saint Helens erupted. Within an hour, morning turned to night while grayish white ash fell like snow. It was spooky crazy. All before 10 a.m.

  111. 111.

    wjca

    @HinTN: In addition to prisons, you can blame much of the homeless population of the 90s and naughts on St Ronnie doing that.

    At the risk of being fair to Ronnie, closing the state mental hospitals (in favor of “community care”) was a liberal campaign here in California.  And the failure to then actually fund community care falls squarely on the (Democratic majority) state legislature.

  112. 112.

    wjca

    @Ohio Mom: Yup, one of the first things Reagan did as president was repeal Jimmy Carter’s 1980 Mental Health Systems Act,

    Let’s be clear.  Reagan could argue all day to repeal something.  But unless the Congress passed a law, there was no way it got repealed.  And Democrats controlled Congress the whole time.

  113. 113.

    Baud

    @wjca:

    @wjca:

    On of the nostalgia lies contemporary liberals like to tell themselves is that Dems were a better party at some distant point in the past.

  114. 114.

    Miss Bianca

    @Shalimar: who ever heard of a fucking debate where ANY participant took a fucking drug test? That is Crazytown talking there.

    Of course, we’re living in Crazytown whenever Trump is involved with anything.

  115. 115.

    Another Scott

    @Miss Bianca:

    Mrs. Betty Bowers
    @BettyBowers
    29 Sep 2020

    Donald pulled the same “they need a drug test” stunt on Hillary Clinton in 2016 before a debate, proving that this silly ole drama queen needs a new bag of tricks.

    [ short video ]

    Sep 29, 2020 · 10:18 PM UTC

    Donnie only has one playbook.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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