Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalShe's Settling In
Josie is becoming acclimated to her new surroundings. She still spends most of her time in her little house, but she comes out now and then to survey her surroundings from the top of the roof. These pictures were taken from footage from the basement door cam (Ha! I'm spying on her!). The first one is just on the top of the roof. The second is a 4 am shot of her glaring at the local possum, who had come to investigate whether s/he might be able to reach the food dish. (Nope!) Of course they are black and white, but she is still camera shy.
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'Marshall Law!': Dozens of GOP Politicians Texted Meadows About Overturning 2020
Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows texted with at least 34 members of Congress about both legal and extralegal means that could be used by former President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election, according to a new report from Talking Points Memo.
South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman, for example, called for “invoking Marshall [sic] Law!” in a Jan. 17 text to Meadows, three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Texas Rep. Brian Babin, meanwhile, told Meadows on Nov. 6 that “when we lose Trump we lose our Republic.”
“We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship,” Babin wrote. “Fight like hell and we’ll find a way.”
Meadows received at least 364 text messages from GOP members of Congress about overturning the results and sent nearly 100 of his own, Talking Points Memo reported. Meadows’ texts were obtained by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the events leading up to it.
The text messages provide further evidence that the Trump administration’s effort to steal the 2020 election was backed by many rank and file House Republicans, most of whom are still in Congress. Come January, these Republican politicians will find themselves in the House majority.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy79jx/mark-meadows-text-messages-jan-6
These guys need to be arrested, charged with sedition, and court-marshalled! (sic) That Budd guy is right down there with RoJo and Tommy Tubs on the dumbass scale
FTX's implosion and SBF's arrest, explained
Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the crypto industry’s biggest stars, has had a rough end to 2022. His crypto exchange FTX — which was once valued at $32 billion — declared bankruptcy in November, leaving his customers unable to withdraw their money and his investors out of luck. Now he’s been arrested in the Bahamas following the filing of criminal charges in the US; the charges include wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance laws violations. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Bankman-Fried with defrauding equity investors, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed a complaint against him as well.
Before the scandal, Bankman-Fried captured the interest of those in finance, politics, philanthropy, and beyond. He said he might spend as much as $1 billion on the 2024 election. He said he had a lot of ideas for policing the crypto industry and using his crypto-fueled fortune for good. He said he’d be fine bailing out some crypto companies in trouble as crypto winter hit over the summer. All of these claims are now essentially meaningless, thanks to another thing he said on November 7: that his crypto exchange, FTX, was “fine.” It was not. Instead, the next day, the exchange imploded. By November 11, the company had filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO.
The company’s balance sheet has since been revealed to be a disaster, and it’s unclear where much of the company’s money has even gone. FTX’s new CEO — who helped manage Enron after its 2001 collapse — said that he has never in his career “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such complete absence of trustworthy financial information.” He believes FTX collapsed because a “very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals” running the company “failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls” needed to handle other people’s money. The situation, again, coming from the guy who dealt with the Enron fallout, is “unprecedented.”
“It’s incredible how quickly these things can spiral out of control,” Molly White, a software engineer and prominent crypto critic behind the website Web3 Is Going Just Great, told me in a November interview in the wake of FTX’s collapse.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23451761/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-arrest-bankrupt-bitcoin-alameda
If something sounds to good to be true, it probably is. I've always been leery of crypto, and apparently for a good reason!
Neuralink shows what happens when you bring "move fast and break things" to animal research
Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: alleged animal cruelty.
Neuralink, a startup co-founded by Musk in 2016, aims to develop a brain chip implant that it claims could one day help paralyzed people walk and blind people see. But to do that, the company has first been testing its technology on animals, killing some 1,500 since 2018 — and employee whistleblowers recently told Reuters the experiments are going horribly wrong.
Reuters reported this week that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General has opened a probe into potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act at Neuralink. It’s a rare corrective for an agency that is generally hands-off when it comes to animal research.
Congressional Democrats are weighing in too. As reported by Reuters, US House Representatives Earl Blumenauer and Adam Schiff wrote in a draft letter to the USDA that they are “very concerned that this may be another example of high-profile cases of animal cruelty involving USDA-inspected facilities.”
Questions around Neuralink’s treatment of animals date back to 2017, when Neuralink conducted experiments on monkeys at the University of California Davis. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that campaigns for alternatives to animal testing, obtained public records detailing the experiments. The findings were gruesome: One rhesus macaque monkey’s nausea was “so severe that the animal vomited and had open sores in her esophagus before she was finally killed,” according to Ryan Merkley, PCRM’s director of research advocacy.
Surgeons used an unapproved adhesive to fill open spaces in an animal’s skull, created from implanting the Neuralink device, “which then caused the animal to suffer greatly due to brain hemorrhaging,” Merkley said.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/12/11/23500157/neuralink-animal-testing-elon-musk-usda-probe
Dr. Oz, Envigo, now Eloon....
I brought my new barn kitty home Saturday
Her name is Josephine (Josie) and she is a beautiful patched tabby and white with distinctive raccoon like markings on her tail, which we all remarked on when she was in the shelter. She is currently residing in a large (think German Shepherd-sized) wire crate out by the woodpile. The crate contains a very nice feral house from Tractor Supply, her litter box and dishes, and room to move. Not quite the luxurious accommodations she had at the shelter, where she lived in a former dog kennel with two other cats. She can see out into the back 40 but nothing can get to her. She and Winnie have inspected each other (she withdrew into the carrier she came in) and she was also inspected by that damn tuxie boy who comes down from somewhere. Winnie ran him off. The first evening she wouldn't come out of the carrier, but by morning she'd moved into the house. She didn't eat anything or use the litterbox for the first 24 hours, but has done both now. This morning she was in the house and watched everything I did. Cheyenne, who's the "cat boss" at the shelter, says she doesn't think Josie is terribly feral as she was always out and watching everything while in the barn cat room. I seem to remember she was that way in the stray jail too, where we all remarked on how beautiful she was. She's a relatively big girl, too, 8.5 lbs on admission and probably a little bigger now. She sat quietly in the carrier on my lap while we processed her paperwork and got her stuff ready to take her home Saturday.
English Mountain residents near 2 weeks without water
Residents on English Mountain heard what they have been wanting to hear for a long time; a review board with the state Comptroller’s Office has asked for all current board members of ESCUD to step down. There are still problems that need to be addressed and people still without water.
“Since November of this year we have been out of water three times already,” English Mountain resident Jerry Hayes said. “We’re in December and there are people who have not had water this month on the mountain. We’ve got a major problem, we were at the state Comptroller’s office yesterday and for the first time in 10 years we have hope.”
Residents are always in limbo when it comes to knowing whether or not they will have water that day.
“You get up at 5:30 in the morning and never know if you’re going to be able to bathe,” English Mountain resident John Kirkbride said when talking about getting up for work. “We work with people so if we can’t bathe we aren’t going into work so we are missing out on quiet a bit of money anytime the water system is out. When you get home from work and make dinner, but you don’t know if you can.”
Because they cannot rely on their water supply, they are unable to flush their toilets, wash their clothes and dishes. When the water goes out on the mountain, it impedes their day to day lives, and some need clean, reliable water due to medical conditions.
https://www.wate.com/news/sevier-county-news/residents-on-english-mountain-nearing-two-weeks-with-no-water/
This is not an impoverished area. These are nice homes, for the most part, some extra nice. This happened at least once before, when I lived near there in the 1970s, but at that time the water was "only" contaminated for several months, requiring the residents to haul water for drinking, cooking, and bathing their kids.
TN suspends ex-senator's law license over guilty plea
The Tennessee Supreme Court has suspended the law license of a former Tennessee state senator who pleaded guilty last month to violating federal campaign finance laws.
The court suspended former Republican Sen. Brian Kelsey’s law license Thursday at the request of the Board of Professional Responsibility, pending further orders by the court. The state Supreme Court cited its own rules requiring the suspension because of Kelsey’s guilty plea.
The board, which oversees regulates the practice of law in Tennessee, said it will hold formal proceedings to determine the final discipline against Kelsey.
Kelsey had previously pleaded not guilty to the campaign finance charges in the case related to his failed 2016 congressional campaign, calling them a “political witch hunt” and claiming he was “totally innocent.” He then changed his plea in front of a federal judge late last month.
The move came after his co-defendant, Nashville social club owner Joshua Smith, pleaded guilty in October to one count under a deal that requires him to “cooperate fully and truthfully” with federal authorities.
https://www.wate.com/news/politics/tennessee-suspends-ex-senators-law-license-over-guilty-plea/
GOPer. of course. What else?
Do you live in an 'ingredient household'?
The term “ingredient household” is making rounds on TikTok, but the term has been part of Google searches for years. Which means people want to know: what is it?
The term refers to a household where there is no ready-to-eat food, but rather ingredients that need to be prepared in order to eat. That means no frozen lasagna, breakfast pastries and so forth.
In December, terms “ingredient house” and “ingredient only household” have become more popularly searched but the term is not new. Google Trends records show that the term was searched for as early as 2004.
One blog explains that the choice to buy ingredients may help people save money, be more environmentally conscious, eat healthier food and have more control over what they consume. To run an ingredient household, however, there has to be enough time in the day to plan, shop for and cook from scratch.
A household where pre-made food is available could just be an indicator of a busy family life, not necessarily any disagreement with the motivations mentioned above.
https://www.wate.com/news/nexstar-media-wire/do-you-live-in-an-ingredient-household-2/
I do not. I admit to sometimes buying Costco MREs, All-Ready piecrusts, etc. because I'm getting up there. I was an "Earth Mother" when my kids were young though.
What We Know--and Don't Know--About Recent Power Grid Attacks
The lights are coming back on in Moore County, North Carolina, where tens of thousands of people were plunged into darkness after two power substations were shot up over the weekend.
But days later, there are still no answers about who might have been responsible for the attack or what their motivation was.
The attack on the Duke Energy substations coincided with a planned drag show in Southern Pines that had been the target of an escalating harassment campaign by far-right extremists in the area. The timing fueled speculation that the attack could have been ideologically motivated, part of an increasingly violent assault on LGBTQ rights and events nationwide.
So far, law enforcement have not found evidence that the drag show and substation attack were linked, but anti-LGBTQ terrorism has not been ruled out as a potential motive, sources told CNN. Investigators are also exploring other possibilities—including whether the attack in Moore County is part of a broader campaign from extremists to attack critical infrastructure in the U.S.
Law enforcement, however, appears certain that whoever was responsible for the attack “knew exactly what they were doing,” Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said Sunday. Investigators found nearly two dozen shell casings at the crime scenes. The office also applied for search warrants earlier this week.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5v9jj/north-carolina-power-grid-attack-what-we-know
Northern Plains tribes bring back their wild 'relatives'
Native species such as swift foxes and black-footed ferrets disappeared from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation generations ago, wiped out by poisoning campaigns, disease and farm plows that turned open prairie where nomadic tribes once roamed into cropland and cattle pastures.
Now with guidance from elders and outside wildlife groups, students and interns from the tribal college are helping reintroduce the small predators to the northern Montana reservation sprawling across more than 1,000 square miles (2,600 square kilometers) near the U.S.-Canada border.
Sakura Main, a 24-year-old Aaniiih woman who is entering Fort Belknap’s Aaniiih Nakoda College in January, is helping to locate, trap and vaccinate the severely endangered ferrets against deadly plague in a program overseen by the tribal fish and game department.
The nocturnal animals live among the mounded burrows of prairie dog colonies, where ferrets stalk the rodents almost as big as they are, wrapping themselves around their prey to strangle and kill it.
https://apnews.com/article/canada-montana-climate-and-environment-96dbd037644d8c35066ca84721d0afdc
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
Number of posts: 9,962