Hope everyone is having a great weekend. I had yesterday off, which was nice, but my dumbass scheduled a doctor’s appointment for 8AM. So I had to go do that, but then I treated myself to a latte, breakfast sandwich, and a nap.
Thanks I hate it
US abortion pill access in doubt after Texas judge suspends approval
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/07/abortion-pill-ruling-mifepristone-trump-judge-matthew-kacsmaryk
Women in this country are so screwed
Idaho AG rescinds legal opinion that said health care providers can’t make out-of-state abortion referrals
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/politics/idaho-abortion-referrals-guidance-rescinded/index.html
Ukraine Updates:
Pentagon investigates reported leak of top-secret Ukraine documents
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/07/pentagon-investigates-reported-leak-of-top-secret-ukraine-documents
Sprots!
Happy Easter!
Have a great day!
i can has meat without murder?
https://nltimes.nl/2023/04/07/lab-grown-meat-fish-delft-campus-will-hit-store-shelves-next-year
i am looking forward to that
course….dunno if im rich enough to pay for it
veggi fakes are cheaper than meat over here nowadays…..and its not coz they got cheaper
good thing a lot of them are tasty now
When the long term dietary studies come out in 10 years and find no problems, then I’ll try it. Until then it’s all grass fed and pasture raised for me.
i figure anything bought from a store is already suspect and fucked with…
straight from the butcher you probably get whats advertised…fuckery free…at a price tho
anyways…im poor i eat what i can afford and could give less than two fucks about where it came from
soylent green anyone?
sad thing is tho…you know…if lab grown meats become viable
its not gonna save any animals..
we’re just going to kill all the ones we keep once they start hurting the bottom line
and we are going to stop breeding them
…I can see how there’d be an argument it could save a lot of critters…but in a roundabout way where those wouldn’t be the sort of critters we include under the livestock heading?
…if we more-or-less-literally cut out the livestock & either give over the acreage that goes to producing their feed for “better” crops…or habitats…it could help out on the climate change front & thus keep some wildlife knocking about that might not otherwise
…but that rather assumes that we’d employ some joined-up thinking about the whole equation…& I seem to recall there being a famous saying about that whole “assume” thing?
it makes an ass out of you and me…. you know…thats only been used against me once
but the lesson stuck forever
dont assume
…I’d say it sounds like a point in your favor…according to another saying…once bitten, twice shy
…but I’ve seen no shortage of people who don’t shy away from doubling down…not to mention assuming they’ll be third time lucky
…so there’s a distinct possibility you might be ahead of the evolutionary curve learning a thing the first time?
Dr Lecter: What was it?
Agent Starling: It was… screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice.
Dr Lecter: What did you do?
Agent Starling: I went downstairs, outside. I crept up into the kitchen. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.
Dr Lecter And what did you see, Clarice? What did you see?
Agent Starling: It was supposed to be a lamb cake. The lamb cake was screaming.
LOL
See, I went to MASH SPAM lamb episode:
But yours is excellent, @ManchuCandidate.
American Beauty was ridiculously over the top, but not in a good self-aware way, just in an eye-rolling Cmon, Man! way.
One of the ways Mendes couldn’t help himself was the way he made the closeted dad not just a military guy and gun owner, he was a collector of Nazi memorabilia. I mean, how cartoonish can you get?
Let’s introduce Clarence Thomas’s bribe guy:
https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/04/07/clarence-thomass-billionaire-benefactor-collects-hitler-artifacts/
Oh. Oh, my.
I’m at a loss for words here. He’s got a garden full of statues of despots and dictators because he “hates fascism.” That’s … literally not what you do when you hate something.
It’s like me saying, oh, I hate Trump so let me collect statues of him to show the depths of my hatred.
Although it would have been funny to see Little Marco’s reaction at the fundraiser when he walked into the Nazi room.
In Modeler world, we have a bunch of varying categories and they attract a certain type of person. I always give serious side eye to the guy who builds only Nazi stuff especially armor because it seems they really really really like it and attract people of a certain political disposition (usually right/reich wing nut).
It’s part of the problem I have with Nazis models… they had well designed, over engineered military equipment that was state of the art and could be aesthetically pleasing to the eye (fuck, the SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss) but… I know the horrible things they did with it so… it tempers any enthusiasm I have to build WW2 German models. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve built my share of Messerschmidts and the odd Tiger tank, but they aren’t the focus of what I build.
I knew folks who have colllect Nazi stuff (mostly historian collector types.) I try not to make judgements (hard not to), but their fetish(?)/fascination for it certainly stands out when you see how they treat people and their politics… well, in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s not because Crow hates Nazis.
Even a pacifist like the Dali Lama had a fasciation for war machines… but he doesn’t like war or want people to die for his ambitions/bloodlust.
The Texas judge is a Trump hack. His judgement has already been contradicted by another federal judge.
Abortion is on a fast track back to the Supreme Court
So now it will end up in front of the Supreme Taliban, who will doubtlessly do what the Taliban does.
However, this really isn’t cause for despair. The abortion issue is killing Republicans in elections, as last week’s landslide victory of Janet Protasiewicz for the Wisconsin Supreme Court has demonstrated. National GQP officials, like Ronna McDaniel, are basically begging Republicans to stop instituting abortion bans because it’s destroying any chance of seeing Republicans elected. But of course, because they’re crazed zealots, they won’t stop.
No Wisconsin wake-up call: Republicans go full steam ahead on abortion restrictions
Party operatives are growing openly worried.
Even that miserable sack of shit Trump has stated that Republicans are taking this too far.
It’s galvanizing anti-Republican sentiment like never before, and Democrats are finally starting to show that they can capitalize on a social issue. Finally.
A lot of women are going to get hurt before this gets sorted out, though.
What happened with Judge Kacsmaryk is a part of an even bigger right wing activist judge strategy.
Another one in Florida issued an injunction banning DOD from reassigning a ship captain who refused to follow Covid regulations, arguing that national security took a back seat to politics, which meant that a Navy ship was unable to deploy even as the Ukraine war was ramping up until a higher court eventually reversed.
A judge violated clear precedent by following Project Veritas’s demand and issued a gag order on the NY Times, which again eventually was reversed. They’ve blocked voting rights measures with overly broad orders, and what’s clearly going is they’re pushing the limits of both the appeals system and other branches of government to rule by fiat.
They’re out to break the system, not stretch it.
…in many ways they’ve been pulling this stuff for about as long as I can remember…whether it was the hanging chads or the innumerable trial balloons they sent up before they finally got their rhymes-with-ducks’-wits lined up to overturn roe v wade…it seems to be a brute force & ignorance kind of a buy-one-get-one-free deal where they just hurl endless shit at the wall not so much to see what sticks as to allow for the residue that’s left over to eventually build up to the point where they can try claiming the wall itself is a health hazard & turn the whole thing into a pile of rubble?
…or…if you’re inclined to give them slightly more credit…if only for thinly-veiled guile…a version of blind man’s bluff where they & their supreme court majority pretend they can’t see each other but eventually the two manage to triangulate their way to a meeting of like minds
…like @butcherbakertoiletrymaker said the other day…there’s apparently precious little anybody seems to be in a position to do to stop them…& even less chance they might out of the obvious shame it ought to cripple all concerned with, though?
I think the method before was to erode and stretch. I think this is actually something new.
It’s about destroying regular order, not taking advantage of it. I think there’s a difference between incrementalism, even aggressive incrementalism, and outright attacks, and we’re in the latter category.
The Kacsmaryk order and the others I referred to aren’t bad because the judges were stupid or trying to stretch an ambiguity or apply a precedent in a new way. Even more than defiance of the law, they are an attack on the entire notion of laws.
What’s more, in the past bad orders might have been done for the goal of making a point. These are being done to provoke a reaction by established authorities in order to create chaos. They are trying to box in higher court conservatives into joining them in flouting the entire notion of law, and they are trying to provoke liberal authorities such as state governments, judges, and Biden to be lawless as well in order to stop them.
It’s an authoritarian power play by the extreme right.
I’m not sure there’s a consensus on the right that this is the way to go, by the way. I think there are a lot that recognize if the current legal structure goes underwater, they’re ultimately handing the power to people like Trump and DeSantis, and judges lose their influence. I think that is reflected in the hesitancy of most conservative courts to rubberstamp Trump’s antidemocracy lawsuits in 2020, and the way even Trump judges have been at best lukewarm to the claims of January 6 defendants.
But I’m not sure where the balance of power really lies. The extremists are coming from the same place as the Clarence Thomas bribe guy, and there’s a lot of careful pressure coming from people like him on the more establishment-friendly right wingers.
…it’s pretty much the explicit plan the federalist society have been pushing for a while…but I don’t know as I see a difference in kind rather than degree compared to the florida count/brookes brothers riot kind of thing & the way they killed row & the tennessee/texas/wherever state legislature thing…they’re all end runs…but the incremental thing has shifted fulcrums into their chosen territory?
I much prefer the lambs of @luigi-vuoto. Not to eat – to totally squee over.