Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalTiny survivor
Tonight while working the foster pet clinic (and doing a little double duty for the regular clinic manager in the kitten nursery) I heard an unholy high-pitched screeching in the Cat Intake room. I had just been in there and no one was there except a young cream and white cat who squeaked rather than meowing and a gray cat who hadn't opened its mouth at all.
What it was, was the tiniest blue-cream kitten imaginable--old enough to have its eyes wide open and scramble around--letting everyone know that she was here and she was HUNGRY and in need of attention NOW! I took her out of the kennel and she was momentarily quiet when I held her over my heart, but when she realized I didn't have anything for her to eat she resumed scrambling and screeching. I finally made her a little more comfortable in a carrier rather than a kennel, with a warmer and a blanket, but she never stopped hollering. What she lacked in size, she made up for in volume!
She had been found by someone on a Clayton mobile home lot, in the insulation of one of the homes, with her siblings. She was the only survivor. No sign of the mother. The person didn't know what to do with her, so they brought her to us. Thank goodness. The foster coordinator and I did her intake check; she's healthy and weighed half a pound, so she'd eaten recently anyway. She got a tiny dose of worm medicine. About that time the foster showed up. I suggested that this tiny one needed a warrior's name, perhaps Brunnhilde or something, since she was such a survivor. I'm just sorry I didn't get a picture before she left!
NBC's 'Meet the Press' Shakeup Puts Chuck Todd in Jeopardy
The executive producer of Meet the Press, who NBC announced last week is ”shifting” over to the streaming side, was pushed out amid the Sunday politics show’s ratings woes, two people familiar with the matter told Confider.
John Reiss, who had been EP for the last eight years, was officially punted over to the NBC News Now streaming service, and David P. Gelles, a long-time CNN producer who helped develop the now-defunct CNN+ streamer, was parachuted in to help fix the sinking show, which is down 21 percent in total viewership and 24 percent in the key advertising demographic compared to last year—more than any of the other Sunday politics shows.
Gelles’ first order of business, multiple sources said, is deciding what to do about Chuck Todd, who despite recently signing a two-year extension, as Confider has learned, has baffled many at NBC with how long he’s remained atop the struggling show.
NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker is being groomed to replace Todd, multiple insiders with knowledge of the matter said, and is expected to take on more hosting duties as the midterm elections approach.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nbcs-meet-the-press-shakeup-puts-chuck-todd-in-jeopardy?ref=home
Right up there with Andrea Mitchell retiring!
Prosecute Trump -- it will lower the heated political temperature
Amanda Marcotte, SalonAs shown by his efforts to steal the 2020 election, once he's all out of lies and deflections, Donald Trump turns to blatant threats of violence.
The January 6 committee carefully laid it out. Trump called on his insurrectionist mob to attack the Capitol after every effort to steal the election through the courts and state legislatures fell apart. The use of terroristic violence didn't work on that day, but, over a year and a half later, we can see Trump hasn't abandoned the hope that it might work with the criminal investigation into why he stole state secrets and refused to give them back when caught. This time, Trump is deploying his typical strategies of nuisance lawsuits and favor-trading to evade justice.
Appealing to a judge he appointed, Trump is trying to gum up the works by demanding a "special master" to adjudicate the question of whether he gets to hang on to classified documents he illegally took from the government and refused to give back, triggering a raid by the FBI to retrieve them. It's a tactic that relies less on any plain reading of the law and more on Trump's usual tactics of delaying justice until he figures out a way to escape its grasp entirely.
Trump is leveraging the fears of another January 6 — or worse — in hopes that it will intimidate law enforcement into backing down.
But, in a sign that he — and his ragtag team made up of the only lawyers left who will represent him — isn't feeling super hot about his legal case, Trump has already turned towards prepping his army of well-armed burnouts to threaten violence if the feds don't back down.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump's most thoroughly owned Republican senator, went on TV to make the threat, declaring, "there'll be riots in the streets" if Trump is prosecuted. In this, he was just imitating Trump's usual mob-style method of making threats by pretending they're "predictions" instead of the obvious call to arms they actually are. Trump, of course, immediately endorsed the threat by posting the video on his likely soon-to-be-bankrupt Truth Social network. He even embedded the threat in a court motion by reiterating a threat made earlier this month to Attorney General Merrick Garland: "The heat is building up. The pressure is building up."
https://www.rawstory.com/prosecute-trump-it-will-lower-the-heated-political-temperature/
The first private mission to Venus will have just five minutes to hunt for life
As the covid pandemic raged in late 2020, all eyes turned briefly from our troubled planet to our planetary neighbor Venus. Astronomers had made a startling detection in its cloud tops: a gas called phosphine that on Earth is created through biological processes. Speculation ran wild as scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing.
Now, a mission due to be launched next year could finally begin to answer the question that has excited astronomers ever since: Could microbial life be belching out the gas?
Although later studies questioned the detection of phosphine, the initial study reignited interest in Venus. In its wake, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) selected three new missions to travel to the planet and investigate, among other questions, whether its conditions could have supported life in the past. China and India, too, have plans to send missions to Venus. “Phosphine reminded everybody how poorly characterized [this planet] was,” says Colin Wilson at the University of Oxford, one of the deputy lead scientists on Europe’s Venus mission, EnVision.
But the bulk of those missions would not return results until later in the 2020s or into the 2030s. Astronomers wanted answers now. As luck would have it, so did Peter Beck, the CEO of the New Zealand–based launch company Rocket Lab. Long fascinated by Venus, Beck was contacted by a group of MIT scientists about a bold mission that could use one of the company’s rockets to hunt for life on Venus much sooner—with a launch in 2023. (A backup launch window is available in January 2025.)
Phosphine or no, scientists think that if life does exist on Venus, it might be in the form of microbes inside tiny droplets of sulfuric acid that float high above the planet. While the surface appears largely inhospitable, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead and pressures similar to those at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, conditions about 45 to 60 kilometers above the ground in the clouds of Venus are significantly more temperate.
“I’ve always felt that Venus has got a hard rap,” says Beck. “The discovery of phosphine was the catalyst. We need to go to Venus to look for life.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/29/1058724/the-first-private-mission-to-venus-will-have-just-five-minutes-to-hunt-for-life/
My inner 10-year-old is just geeking out all over the place lately!
Henrico non-profit repairs cars for those in need
One unique Central Virginia non-profit is helping people get their cars repaired and back on the road, for not even a dime out of their pockets.
The organization’s employees and volunteers work out of the backyard of New Life Baptist Church in Henrico.
Mechanics of Faith has helped a little over 70 people this year so far, either by donating a car to them or making hundreds of dollars of repairs on their car, for free. One of those people, Erik Bennett, said his car wasn’t running as well as it is now a few months back, until now.
“I’m a single dad and I’m on a fixed income and I had some car repairs that need to be done and I reached out all over and I couldn’t get anybody to help me,” he explained.
That’s where Mechanics of Faith stepped in, performing what could’ve been hundreds of dollars of repairs, and charging not even one penny.
“Now I can, you know, get my daughter to softball practice, get to doctors’ appointments,” Bennett smiled.
https://www.wric.com/community/positively-richmond/its-been-a-joy-henrico-non-profit-repairs-donates-cars-to-those-in-need/
I don't know about you, but I needed some good news to start my day.
'Clinically awful': why the pain of a broken heart is real
In the winter of 2004, women started arriving at Japanese hospitals complaining of chest pains and a shortness of breath. It was a month since a major earthquake had shaken the country, causing mudslides in the mountains, injuring 4,805 people and killing 68. In emergency rooms, doctors hooked the women up to ECG monitors, and saw the same extreme changes they’d expect with heart attacks. But subsequent tests showed their coronary arteries weren’t blocked, as they would be by a heart attack. Instead, their hearts had changed shape. It didn’t take long for these cases to be diagnosed as takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome”.
Heartbreak is not simply a metaphor. Today, up to 7% of all sudden cardiac hospital admissions in Japan are diagnosed as takotsubo, when stress hormones after a traumatic event have caused a weakening of the left ventricle, meaning it can no longer pump effectively – for a while, it gives up. It hurts. And it clearly shows the link between the stresses happening in a person’s life, whether an earthquake or the end of a relationship, and their heart.
This understanding is one of the things that’s leading to heartbreak being taken seriously in a way it never has been before. There have been pop songs about heartbreak, of course. There have been novels and films and many thousands of poems, but now, after years of concentrating simplyon the process of falling in love, scientists are starting to look at the end of love, too. Today there are books that unpick the science of heartbreak and memoirs detailing the messy, sticky truth of it, and an “intensive care” retreat for heartbroken women to heal in a very nice hotel in the Peak District. All newly seeking to understand this slow torture. “Romance’s estranged cousin,” wrote Rachel Cusk in her 2012 divorce memoir, “a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenaline unsweetened by hope.”
Annie Lord’s heartbreak arrived one evening on Euston Road, London, when her boyfriend said he needed “to be alone”. Her memoir Notes on Heartbreak evolved from a long love letter she wrote to him afterwards, but never sent. To explore her pain, she returns to memories of the relationship, finding a kind of solace in the realisation that in order to get over her boyfriend she doesn’t have to forget him altogether. She remembers, she tells me, looking out of the window and finding it impossible to accept that most people she saw had gone through this agony. How was the world still functioning? In A Grief Observed, about the loss of his wife, CS Lewis says grief feels like suspense, “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual.” Reading that, Lord recognised the sensation: she was waiting for something that would never come. “For him to come around the corner asking where the towels were or to feel his leg hit me in bed . Knowing others had gone through something similar I felt less alone with my experiences.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/aug/28/clinically-awful-why-the-pain-of-a-broken-heart-is-real
One of my friends suffered from this for months following the death of her husband. A new doctor finally diagnosed her symptoms and told her that yes, her pain WAS real.
Return of rare Ojibwe horse lifts spirits -- but still needs help
Em Loerzel grew up hearing stories about the Ojibwe horse from her uncle, about small ponies that would roam free near Ojibwe communities tucked among the forests and lakes along the Minnesota-Canada border, and help with tasks such as hauling wood and trap lines.
"I think when people think about Native people and their horses, they think of Lakota people or southwest people, but he would tell me, don't forget that we are horse people too,” said Loerzel, a descendant of the White Earth Nation.
Loerzel has taken that teaching to heart. Earlier this year, the 28-year-old graduate student in social welfare at the University of Washington raised money to rescue six of the horses from a Canada rancher who could no longer afford to keep them.
She brought them to a farm owned by a friend outside River Falls, where Loerzel moved last year with her husband. And she started a nonprofit called The Humble Horse, to raise awareness about the breed–which is also known as the Lac La Croix pony, and to help revive it. Only about 180 Ojibwe horses remain, mostly in Canada.
The horses are small, sturdy and friendly. Last month, Loerzel nuzzled a 2-year-old stud colt named Mino. “Short for Mino Bimaadiziwin. That's our word for ‘a good life.’ All of our Ojibwe horses have their Ojibwe names,” Loerzel explained.
“He’s just one of the sweetest guys. We Anishinaabe people bred them to be really smart, sweet, docile."
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/08/23/return-of-rare-ojibwe-horse-lifts-spirits-but-still-needs-help
Minnesota lawyer is accused of beating his ex-wife to death in front of their kids
A Minnesota lawyer accused of beating his ex-wife to death in front of their children has been charged with second-degree murder.
An 8-year-old who witnessed Tuesday's deadly assault told officials that his parents had been arguing about whether his mother, Carissa Odegaard, could take the children to church, according to a probable cause statement filed in Minnesota’s 9th Judicial District Court.
Anders Odegaard, 31, did not want her to, the child told authorities, according to the complaint. The child said his parents also fought about his 2-year-old brother, whom his mother was holding during the assault, according to the document.
The couple had five children together beginning in 2013 and divorced last year, according to a court filing. Carissa Odeegard was awarded sole physical custody of the children, and they were both given joint legal custody.
Anders Odegaard was identified in the filing as the state’s attorney for Mercer County, North Dakota. It wasn’t clear if he still worked for the office. A message seeking comment was not immediately returned.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minnesota-lawyer-accused-beating-ex-wife-death-front-kids-rcna45074
Pretty sure this wasn't the first time he hit her, either.
Short-staffed school districts are hiring students to serve lunch and answer phones
While her peers study civics or economics in class, Saniyya Boykin, a 17-year old senior at Camden High School in Camden, South Carolina, preps food for the next day’s school lunch, or cleans kitchen floors for $12.50 an hour.
“I’m looking to own my own restaurant,” said Boykin, who plans to attend a historically black college after graduation and then culinary school. “I feel like this will open opportunities, like [to learn] the inside of the business.”
Between noon and 3:30 p.m., Boykin works alongside several other students who are ahead in school credits and work part-time to help run the high school kitchen. Some Camden High students are unpaid interns working to meet the state’s career readiness requirement for graduation, and others are students with disabilities who work as part of their curriculum.
Boykin is among a growing handful of teenage students employed by their own high schools as districts across the country struggle to fill landscaping, clerical and cafeteria jobs traditionally held by adults in their communities.
While many schools have begun taking unusual measures to address an acute teacher shortage intensified by the pandemic, the hiring crunch is hitting education systems’ staffing needs in other areas, too. About a third of schools reported a vacancy in custodial staff for the incoming school year, according to June figures from the Institute of Educational Sciences, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. About 19% of schools reported vacancies in kitchen staff, and 29% said they hadn’t filled all their transportation positions.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/short-staffed-school-districts-are-hiring-students-serve-lunch-rcna44905
Some of this is good for the kids, some of it....I dunno.
Well, Look Who Just Got Dragged Into Trump's Criminal Nightmare
Mark Meadows just got pulled into former President Donald Trump’s legal drama in Georgia.
Meadows, Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is being summoned to testify next month in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ criminal investigation into Trump allies’ attempts to flip the 2020 election.
Willis also wants to hear from pro-Trump “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, Meadows contact Army Col. James “Phil” Waldron, and former Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, according to court filings released Thursday afternoon.
The attempt to compel testimony from some of Trump’s closest advisers is further evidence that Willis’ probe is looking in every corner of Trumpworld in a strikingly thorough investigation, legal experts said. Willis’ filing describes Meadows as a “material witness” to her investigation.
“The subpoena [for Meadows] tells us that the DA may be closing in on Trump and other big fish in this scandal,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, told VICE News.
Meadows participated in the infamous phone call that Trump held with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 in which Trump told Raffensperger he wanted to “find” enough votes to allow him to carry Georgia. President Joe Biden won Georgia by a wafer-thin margin of 11,779 votes.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axabn/mark-meadows-georgia-criminal-investigation
I keep saying it--Fani Willis don't play!
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