Earlier this month, singer Tory Lanez went on trial for allegedly shooting Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion.

In July 2020, the two were leaving Kylie Jenner’s home when Megan says Lanez shot her in the foot, telling her to “Dance, bitch.” He pleaded not guilty to felony assault with a semiautomatic firearm, possessing a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle and using a firearm and inflicting great bodily injury.

Months later, the singer put out an album in which he lodged a barrage of insults in Megan’s direction — the day after news broke that the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor would not be charged. Lanez’s unapologetic misogyny threw salt on the wounds of Black women everywhere.

Amid the quick hits about the grotesquely timed and vitriolic album, streetwear blog Highsnobiety took an incredibly rare stance.

“This is the last time we will cover Tory Lanez,” the blog declared in September 2020 to rounds of cyber commendations.

“The rapper just added to his list of disgraceful behavior by dropping the most toxic album of the year,” Highsnobiety’s statement read. “He recently became a music industry pariah after Megan Thee Stallion revealed that he shot her during an incident that led to his arrest on July 12. However, rather than publicly apologizing to Megan or addressing the issue, he released an album instead, using the media attention from the shooting to promote his work.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gabby-petito-zac-stacy-domestic-violence_n_62051fa2e4b083bd1cbb0f37
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Article goes on to discuss media coverage of violence against Black and Indigenous women vs. white women. Disturbing and disgusting.

Since Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott deployed thousands of personnel to the US-Mexico border, the operation has been slammed as overtly political and a waste of resources by Democratic lawmakers and even some of the National Guard members participating in the mission.

Last March, Abbott, who's up for reelection, launched "Operation Lone Star," citing a crisis at the US southern border. The operation -- which leaned on resources from Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas National Guard -- has swelled to more than 10,000 service members.

The speed at which the operation launched and its scope has fueled frustrations internally and among veterans of the Guard. Multiple members of the Guard who are deployed as part of Operation Lone Star and spoke to CNN described long hours with little to do, poor planning, and a lack of mission -- all of which, they say, are contributing to low morale among soldiers.

"As military, people know the term hurry up and wait. This is just the biggest hurry up and wait I was a part of, and there's really no set, 'hey, we're doing this, or hey, go out and do this.' It's just, we're sitting around doing nothing," one soldier said.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/politics/texas-operation-lone-star-border-immigration-abbott/index.html

There’s a paradox in memory science: Empirical evidence and life experience both suggest older adults have more knowledge of the world. However, in laboratory settings, they generally perform worse on memory tests than younger adults. What can explain the disparity?

The answer might be “clutter,” according to a review of memory studies published Friday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.

Tarek Amer is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Harvard Universities and the review’s first author. While some scientists think that as adults grow older, they begin to form “impoverished memories” — memories that contain less information relative to the memories of younger people — Amer and his colleagues have a different view. Instead, “older adults might actually be forming too many associations between information,” Amer said.

Compared to young adults, healthy older adults (defined in the paper as 60 to 85 years old) process and store too much information, most likely because of greater difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, the analysis found. This difficulty is described as “reduced cognitive control” and can explain the cluttered nature of older adults’ memory representations.

“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/memory-issues-older-people-result-clutter-rcna15133
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I knew I was right when I joked with my kids that "the chips were getting full"!

Nursing is a second career and a calling for Sara Dean of Mt. Juliet, Tenn. Dean loved her work at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital. But then the pandemic hit and she saw how much nurses were getting paid to travel — as much as $10,000 a week.

"That's a life-changing number. That's a number that helps you pay off debt, move out of your grandma's basement or whatever," Dean, 38, says. "I'm not saying we were struggling. We were a two-income household. But we made ends meet."

So she took a leave from her hospital job and signed her first three-month contract to go to New Mexico. Her immediate family came with her; her boyfriend could work remotely and her daughter was in virtual school. And when not working, they enjoyed exploring the desert on dirt bikes.

Dean eventually quit her job at home as the money got better and better following COVID hotspots from New Mexico to Maryland to rural Alabama. At one point, Dean's overtime rate was more than $200 an hour, and she was working 60 hours a week saving the lives of COVID patients.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/11/1077687493/for-travel-nurses-jobs-at-home-cant-come-close-to-pay-they-get-on-the-road
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When I did travel nursing, the staff RNs at some hospitals used to complain that we made more than they did (not really true). Now travelers really do!

A Republican businessman seeking his party’s nomination to face Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in the fall has released a new Western-style TV ad in which the candidate, dressed as a sheriff, fires a gun at actors portraying Kelly, President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

The candidate, energy executive Jim Lamon, said in a tweet that the ad will air during the Super Bowl.

Kelly is the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in the head while greeting constituents outside a Tucson supermarket in 2011. Six people were killed in the shooting rampage and many others were injured.

Shannon Watts, the founder of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, called the ad “disgusting.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/campaign-ad-senate-candidate-shoots-gun-actors-playing-biden-pelosi-sen-mark-kelly-whose-wife-gabby-giffords-was-injured-arizona-rampage/
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Leave it to the GQPers to lower the bar.

A QAnon influencer and convicted grifter who claims she can time travel, who led a campaign to replace elected officials with QAnon supporters, and who misrepresented her expertise in an election lawsuit before the Supreme Court, now wants to become Ohio’s next Secretary of State.

And Terpsehore Maras isn’t even trying to hide her affiliation to QAnon.

Launching her official YouTube and Facebook campaign pages this week, Maras, who is known to her followers simply as Tore and is also known by numerous other aliases, uploaded a logo, replacing the ‘o’ in ‘Secretary of State’ with a Q.

But then again, Maras, who did not respond to VICE News’ questions about her campaign, is not one for subtlety.

“As SOS of Ohio I will get rid of EVERY SINGLE ELECTION VOTING MACHINE,” Maras wrote on Telegram this week. “Humans will be paid to count the votes live on camera. Paper ballots and PEN ONLY. I will do that on day one.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdpwz/ohio-terpsehore-maras-qanon-time-traveler
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I would not attempt to pronounce her name, but it's obvious her parents could neither pronounce nor spell Terpsichore...

Since January 28, Canada’s capital city of Ottawa has been under siege by a convoy of angry truckers — a two-week running protest that has drawn support from right-wing extremists in Canada and abroad.

The so-called “freedom convoy” is nominally protesting a vaccine mandate for truckers, implemented in mid-January on both sides of the US-Canada border. But the demonstrations have swiftly ballooned into a broader far-right movement, with some demonstrators waving Confederate and Nazi flags. Protester demands include an end to all Covid-19 restrictions in Canada and the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The demonstrators, which have included as many as 8,000 people at their peak, have terrorized Ottawa: blockading streets, harassing citizens, forcing business closures, and honking their extremely loud horns all night. Ottawa police, who have proven some combination of unwilling and unable to restore order, have even set up a special hotline to deal with a deluge of alleged hate crimes stemming from the protests. In the first week of February, it received over 200 calls.

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has declared a state of emergency, and Trudeau’s government has deployed hundreds of Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the protests. As the situation in Ottawa continues, the freedom convoy movement has expanded across the country. Demonstrators have shut down at least two border crossings between Canada and the United States.

But while the protests are generating a lot of noise and attention, the eruption actually points up a counterintuitive fact: The Canadian far right is weak and ineffectual, especially when it comes to pandemic restrictions.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22926134/canada-trucker-freedom-convoy-protest-ottawa
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It appears, from this, that it may have more in common with Jan. 6 than July 4

In the early hours of New Year's Day 2020, Rebecca Hogue came home from a 12-hour shift at the Oklahoma casino where she worked as a cocktail waitress, crawled into bed next to her 2-year-old son Ryder, and her boyfriend, and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, she woke to find that Ryder wasn't breathing. Her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, was at work. She called the police and panicked.

Bodycam footage of that day from emergency responders shows her trying in vain to perform CPR on her son, who was pronounced dead when he arrived at hospital.

A coroner's report later concluded that his cause of death was blunt-force trauma, and evidence from the home Hogue shared with Trent showed strands of Ryder's hair were found in the drywall.

Hogue says she didn't know any of that then. She called Trent, begging him to meet her at the hospital.

But he wouldn't respond to her texts or voice messages.

Four days later, police found Trent's body in the Wichita Mountains. He had died by an apparent suicide. A prosecutor would later make clear it was known that Trent had killed Ryder.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60326621
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This is so wrong!!!

In the early hours of New Year's Day 2020, Rebecca Hogue came home from a 12-hour shift at the Oklahoma casino where she worked as a cocktail waitress, crawled into bed next to her 2-year-old son Ryder, and her boyfriend, and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, she woke to find that Ryder wasn't breathing. Her boyfriend, Christopher Trent, was at work. She called the police and panicked.

Bodycam footage of that day from emergency responders shows her trying in vain to perform CPR on her son, who was pronounced dead when he arrived at hospital.

A coroner's report later concluded that his cause of death was blunt-force trauma, and evidence from the home Hogue shared with Trent showed strands of Ryder's hair were found in the drywall.

Hogue says she didn't know any of that then. She called Trent, begging him to meet her at the hospital.

But he wouldn't respond to her texts or voice messages.

Four days later, police found Trent's body in the Wichita Mountains. He had died by an apparent suicide. A prosecutor would later make clear it was known that Trent had killed Ryder.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60326621
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This is so wrong!!!

Forty-five percent of Republicans believe the NFL provides too much support for its Black players, who make up nearly 70% of the league.

That’s according to a Los Angeles Times poll released Wednesday ahead of the Super Bowl that asked respondents to assess how much the NFL has done for Black players. Only 22% of all respondents said the league has done “too much.” And 57% of Democrats said the league hasn’t done enough.

GOP members also took a much dimmer view of the league’s revamped hiring practices for coaching vacancies: 48% approved of the “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates from the outside for head coaching positions and coordinator jobs.

Even with the rule in place, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers was the only Black head coach among the league’s 32 teams until this week, when the Houston Texans hired Lovie Smith and the Miami Dolphins hired Mike McDaniel, who is biracial.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-nfl-black-players-poll_n_620543a5e4b032302467a67f
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Gee, quelle surprise!