REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments - The Commentariat -- July 7, 2013

The Ledes

Monday, October 7, 2024

Weather Channel: “Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a Category 3 and hurricane and storm surge watches are now posted along Florida's western Gulf Coast, where the storm poses threats of life-threatening storm surge, destructive winds and flooding rainfall by midweek. 'Milton will be a historic storm for the west coast of Florida,' the National Weather Service in Tampa Bay said in a briefing Monday morning.”

CNN: “This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on the discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated. Their research revealed how genes give rise to different cells within the human body, a process known as gene regulation. Gene regulation by microRNA – a family of molecules that helps cells control the sort of proteins they make – ... was first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun. The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor ... in Sweden on Monday.... Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, conducted the research that earned him the prize at Harvard University. Ruvkun conducted his research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.”

The Wires

The Ledes

Sunday, October 6, 2024

New York Times: “Two boys have been arrested and charged in a street attack on David A. Paterson, a former governor of New York, and his stepson, the police said. One boy, who is 12, was charged with second-degree gang assault, and the other, a 13-year-old, was charged with third-degree gang assault, the police said on Saturday night. Both boys, accompanied by their parents, turned themselves in to the police, according to Sean Darcy, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson. A third person, also a minor, went to the police but was not charged in the Friday night attack in Manhattan, according to an internal police report.... Two other people, both adults, were involved in the attack, according to the police. They fled on foot and have not been caught, the police said. The former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault....”

Weather Channel: “Tropical Storm Milton, which formed in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, is expected to become a hurricane late Sunday or early Monday. The storm is expected to pose a major hurricane threat to Florida by midweek, just over a week after Helene pushed through the region. The National Hurricane Center says that 'there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning late Tuesday or Wednesday.'”

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Public Service Announcement

Washington Post: "Americans can again order free rapid coronavirus tests by mail, the Biden administration announced Thursday. People can request four free at-home tests per household through covidtests.gov. They will begin shipping Monday. The move comes ahead of an expected winter wave of coronavirus cases. The September revival of the free testing program is in line with the Biden administration’s strategy to respond to the coronavirus as part of a broader public health campaign to protect Americans from respiratory viruses, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), that surge every fall and winter. But free tests were not mailed during the summer wave, which wastewater surveillance data shows is now receding."

Washington Post: “Comedy news outlet the Onion — reinvigorated by new ownership over this year — is bringing back its once-popular video parodies of cable news. But this time, there’s someone with real news anchor experience in the chair. When the first episodes appear online Monday, former WAMU and MSNBC host Joshua Johnson will be the face of the resurrected 'Onion News Network.' Playing an ONN anchor character named Dwight Richmond, Johnson says he’s bringing a real anchor’s sense of clarity — and self-importance — to the job. 'If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer,' says Johnson, 44.” ~~~

~~~ Marie: I'll be darned if I can figured out how to watch ONN. If anybody knows, do tell. Thanks.

Washington Post: “First came the surprising discovery that Earth’s atmosphere is leaking. But for roughly 60 years, the reason remained a mystery. Since the late 1960s, satellites over the poles detected an extremely fast flow of particles escaping into space — at speeds of 20 kilometers per second. Scientists suspected that gravity and the magnetic field alone could not fully explain the stream. There had to be another source creating this leaky faucet. It turns out the mysterious force is a previously undiscovered global electric field, a recent study found. The field is only about the strength of a watch battery — but it’s enough to thrust lighter ions from our atmosphere into space. It’s also generated unlike other electric fields on Earth. This newly discovered aspect of our planet provides clues about the evolution of our atmosphere, perhaps explaining why Earth is habitable. The electric field is 'an agent of chaos,' said Glyn Collinson, a NASA rocket scientist and lead author of the study. 'It undoes gravity.... Without it, Earth would be very different.'”

The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI."

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

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Jul062013

The Commentariat -- July 7, 2013

David Kirkpatrick & Mayy El Sheikh of the New York Times: "The abrupt end of Egypt's first Islamist government was the culmination of months of escalating tensions and ultimately futile American efforts to broker a solution that would keep Mr. Morsi in his elected office, at least in name, if not in power."

** Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.... The court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny.... The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come.... Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case -- the government -- and its findings are almost never made public." ...

... CW: guess who chooses the judges who sit on the FISA court? Without anybody else having any say-so whatsofuckingever? Chief Justice John Roberts, that's who. And before him, of course, Chief Justice William Rehnquist. I'll bet those two fellows just loaded the FISA court with flaming civil libertarians. As Michael McGough writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of judges for the FISA court would allow senators to question nominees about their view of the 4th Amendment and constitutional privacy rights." ...

I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email. -- Ed Snowden, to the Guardian, June 2013

... CW: if Snowden really could wiretap & read the personal e-mail of "a federal judge," then it would have been a damned good idea if he had proved it by revealing some of the personal love notes or other embarrassing hoohah written by a few FISA court judges. What better way to cause them to rethink their cavalier rulings? ...

... Jeff Rosen of the National Constitution Center, in a Washington Post op-ed: "Repeatedly, our government has chosen technologies, policies and laws that reveal innocent information without making us demonstrably safer. The massive telephone and Internet surveillance programs disclosed last month are the most recent examples. But the tendency goes back at least as far as the USA Patriot Act, passed in the anxious weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, with only one dissenting vote in the Senate [Russ Feingold].... A better Patriot Act might have avoided national scandals over not only airport scanners and phone metadata but also wiretapping and library records. A better law could have dispensed with the 'trust us' mentality and mitigated the erosion of trust in government. It could have put us in a better position to detect terrorism and other serious crimes without threatening privacy." Rosen, a lawyer, goes on to suggest some improvements in the law. ...

David Mindich, in a New York Times op-ed -- citing President Lincoln & his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's establishment of a draconian surveillance state -- argues that the problem isn't the surveillance as much as it is the duration of the amorphous war on terror....

... CW: Mindich has a point. Perhaps it's not coincidental that Snowden's leaks came precisely at the time President Obama announced it was time to wind down the war on terror. Would the Post & the Guardian have been willing to publish the same type of information in November 2001? Nonetheless, Mindich is not considering two important factors: (1) inertia, and (2) special interests, both of which encourage, at the very least, continuance of the surveillance state. The federal government has never been good at cutting back military-related programs (do you think Sen. Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] wants to shut down the NSA facility in Utah?), & private contractors' interest in maintaining & extending their multi-billion-dollar contracts (easily effected by greasing Congress) only exacerbates administration officials' desires to enhance their fiefdoms. ...

... Deadline. Daniel Arkin & Brinley Bruton of NBC News: "Venezuelan officials say they have not heard from Edward Snowden since the country offered the professed NSA leaker asylum, but would wait until Monday to hear if he would take up the offer." ...

... Add Bolivia to the list of countries that have offered asylum to Ed Snowden. So that's three: Nicaraqua, Venezuela & Bolivia. Hope the duty-free shop at the Sheremetyevo Airport sells Spanish-language Berlitz tapes. ...

... Catch 22? Nataliya Vasilyeva of the AP: "Because Snowden's U.S. passport has been revoked, the logistics of him departing are complicated. Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia have made asylum offers over the past two days, but the three countries haven't indicated they would help Snowden by issuing a travel document, which he would need to leave Russia."

Frank Bruni: "Protecting assets and massaging facts, Cardinal Dolan and other Catholic leaders have responded to the abuse crisis the way the cunning chieftains of a corporation might.... Over the last few decades we've watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies -- shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth -- that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line."

The American Jihad. Historian James Byrd, in the Washington Post: "When colonists declared their independence on July 4, 1776, religious conviction inspired them. Because they believed that their cause had divine support, many patriots' ardor was both political and religious. They saw the conflict as a just, secular war, but they fought it with religious resolve, believing that God endorsed the cause.... Whatever century it is, our leaders often include some suggestion of the same biblical themes that filled revolutionary-era sermons, including sacrifice, courage for the fight and appeals for God's providential blessings on America."

Mackenzie Weinger of Politico profiles liberal talk-radio host Thom Hartmann.

Brian McFadden of the New York Times goes to journalism summer camp.

Congressional Race

It's All About Liz. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: Liz Cheney "has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican [Wy.] and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father. But Ms. Cheney's move threatens to start a civil war within the state's Republican establishment, despite the reverence many hold for her family. Mr. Enzi, 69, says he is not ready to retire, and many Republicans say he has done nothing to deserve being turned out."

News Ledes

AP: "Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, is in critical but stable condition in a hospital in Nantucket, Mass." It's worth noting that a few days ago, wingers were berating John Kerry for "vacationing" during the Egyptian crisis. ...

... Boston Globe Update: "Teresa Heinz Kerry, leading philanthropist and wife of US Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was at Massachusetts General Hospital tonight after being rushed this afternoon to Nantucket Cottage Hospital, where a hospital spokesman had said she was in critical but stable condition."

Al Jazeera: "The continuing chaos in Egypt in the aftermath of last Wednesday's military coup has been compounded further after the choice of liberal politician Mohamed ElBaradei as interim prime minister was thrown into doubt by objections from conservative groups." Al Jazeera's profile of ElBaradei is here. ...

... Update: "A polarised Egypt entered a second week of political crisis, as opponents and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi held rival demonstrations in Cairo and cities across the country. The rallies on Sunday came as a coalition that backed Morsi's removal wavered over the choice of Mohamed ElBaradei as interim prime minister."

Al Jazeera: "Turkish riot police have fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse about 3,000 demonstrators who tried to enter a park adjacent to Istanbul's Taksim Square, the heart of recent protests against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan."

AP: "Fires continued burning more than 24 hours after a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed in eastern Quebec, igniting explosions and fires that destroyed a town's center and killed at least one person. Police said they expected the death toll to increase."

NBC News: "Investigators recovered both black boxes from Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on Sunday, NTSB officials told NBC News, as the airline's president said that engine failure was likely not the cause of the crash that killed two and injured scores more on the runway at San Francisco International Airport." ...

... San Francisco Chronicle Update: "The doomed Asiana Airlines jetliner came perilously close to stalling before the pilot made a last-second attempt to abort landing and crashed into a seawall bordering a San Francisco International Airport runway, injuring dozens on board and killing two teenagers, transportation safety investigators said Sunday. Preliminary analysis of flight data and cockpit recordings shows that the plane's speed was 'below target,' said U.S. Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman at a media briefing on Sunday afternoon." ...

... Washington Post Update: "On Monday, Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said that Lee Gang-guk, the pilot in control of the Boeing 777, had little experience flying that kind of plane. She told the Associated Press that it was the pilot's first time landing in San Francisco and that he had nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes but only 43 hours on the 777."

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http://margaretandhelen.com/
Helen's on a humorous tear-
Her title is " If my vagina shot bullets, coud I conceal it from rick Perry and John Kasich?".

(the one below it is good too.)
mae finch

July 7, 2013 |

mae finch

[The Patriot Act] delenda est. My opinion, of course.

A wise sergeant once said: "Once a job is fucked up, any attemt to fix it only makes it worse." AIn't no way we can fix the Patriot Act. Tear it down and start over. First question after it's gone, "Do we need a replacement?" If so, Rosen has some good ideas. Replacement, not Revision.

That secret FISA court gives me the creeps. Roberts chooses the judges? Somehow, Torquemada comes to mind. Tear a leaf from Torquemada's book--he had multiple Inquisition--why not have multiple FISA courts?

July 7, 2013 |

Barbarossa

A Republican appointed chief justice appointing a FISA court consisting of 100% Republican appointees cannot be a good thing. Unless of course you believe judges render judgements divorced from personal history and bias.

July 7, 2013 |

cowichan's opinion

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