So weird!
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/14/world/moonquakes-apollo-17-scn/index.html

They speculate that the rapid heating of the moon lander (Lunar Module) when the sun hits it, is the cause of some moonquakes. I'm not clear why this would happen, does anyone else get it?

These quakes were detected for a while after Apollo 17 left the moon in the late 1970s. Not clear if this is still happening. If the expansion of the LM can cause a detectable ground quake, what is it doing to the LM structure after so many years?

Paul Krugman--

I’ve been writing about economics and politics for many years, and have learned to keep my temper. Politicians and policymakers often make decisions that are simply cruel; they also often make decisions that are stupid, damaging the national interest for no good reason. And all too often they make decisions that are both cruel and stupid. Flying into a rage every time that happens would be exhausting.

But the latest census report on income and poverty made me angry. It showed that child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022. That’s 5.1 million children pushed into misery, for it really is miserable to be poor in America.

And the thing is, this didn’t have to happen. Soaring child poverty wasn’t caused by inflation or other macroeconomic problems. It was instead a political choice. The story is in fact quite simple: Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years, and as a result just about all of the gains were lost.

The cruelty of this choice should be obvious. Maybe you believe (wrongly) that poor American adults are responsible for their own poverty; even if you believe that, poor children aren’t to blame. Maybe you worry that helping low-income families will reduce their incentive to work and improve their lives. Such concerns are greatly exaggerated, but even if you worry about incentive effects, are they big enough to justify keeping children poor?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/14/opinion/child-poverty-america.html

what exactly are they doing about it???

Did I miss the news that Biden vetoed some big border security plan that they've passed?

How is this tolerable in this day and age???

This Dickson guy pushing these laws makes me sick.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-highways/

Great thread by Josh Marshall on a sickening problem:

Let’s admit that every reporter in DC knows but most won’t say for fear of falling out of favor with the bothsides rules of official DC: there is a two-tiered Justice System. One for Democrats, in which the most exacting focus on conflicts of interest are followed, often going …
2/ well beyond not only what the law or established norms require but sometimes even basic logic. Meanwhile for Republicans most of these rules simply don’t apply. Ever. Does anyone think that a newly installed President Trump in 2025 would leave in place US Attorneys …
3/ investigating matters tied to Trump or the Trump family for years into his administration? The very idea is absurd. In fact the Trump campaign is openly running on plans to thoroughly politicize federal law enforcement and target his enemies. Openly. When actual GOP …
4/ crimes are uncovered or in some cases not even uncovered but simply done in public and widely known we’re treated to lengthy debates about whether open and shut criminal cases should even be charged, then whether Republicans should immediately be pardoned.

5/ The entire highprofile political system operates in an open & essentially bottomless world of Republican grievance in which allowing the law to function in its normal manner with respect to high profile Republicans is treated as inherently questionable and sensible people …
6/ agree to pretend that GOP claims of “weaponziation” and a “two tiered Justice system” stacked against them isn’t comical and preposterous on its face. None of this is new. Everybody knows this. Every byline in essentially any publication knows this. I was tempted to say …

7/ unless it’s the daily caller or the free beacon or whatever other publication. But the truth is that they know it too. It’s simply worth saying this in the open because the basically endless lying about it starts to seep in after a while, even for sensible people.

8/ A brief addendum: It basically goes without saying that Hunter Biden wouldn't have gotten in any legal hot water at all had it not been for the scrutiny brought on him by his father's prominence and presidential campaign. But "hey, most people get away with it" has ...
9/ never been a legitimate defense. It seems clear that he broke at least some laws or at least that there was enough evidence to bring charges against him. How serious the violations were and whether they can be proven is what we're going to find other. Is that fair?

10/ Well, the law is pretty clear that it is. And again, most people get away with it is simply not a defense or an excuse that our system recognizes. But note that this is precisely the situation with fmr President Trump and his fraud case in NYC. Clearly Trump got away ...
11/ this kind of stuff forever and I'm sure other people have to. It was the scrutiny brought about by his presidential campaign, the Stormy Daniels story and all the stuff we remember that put this in front of first federal and then state prosecutors. And it's pretty ...
12/ clearly a crime just on its face. Note that the guy who helped Trump do it has already done serious jail time. And yet otherwise sensible people routinely treat this is sort of the criminal justice runt of the Trump indictment litter, as though it's somehow ...
13/ ungentlemanly to charge Trump with a crime guys like him usually get away with. For both of them, that's just how life works. Leona Helmsley didn't get charged with anything before she became tabloid fodder either. But again, it's only part of the story for Trump.

14/ And that's because just the normal law functioning is controversial when it's Republicans.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1690091969412845568


https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1690091969412845568.html

"Obviously, it’s of utmost importance for the public to understand that there’s literally zero evidence to suggest Biden ordered federal prosecutors to indict one of his GOP rivals 15 months before Election Day 2024. That said, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest Trump, while in office, did exactly what he’s so concerned about.

As we discussed a couple of months ago, the former Republican president, while in office, spent much of his White House tenure trying to turn Justice Department prosecutors into his own personal attack dogs. The New York Times reported last year that Trump and his team “tried to turn the nation’s law enforcement apparatus into an instrument of political power” to carry out the Republican’s wishes. A Washington Post analysis published soon after highlighted the many instances in which Trump not only leaned on the Justice Department to follow his whims, but also Trump’s efforts to push federal law enforcement to validate the Big Lie in the wake of his election defeat.

The Republican’s weaponization efforts reached a truly amazing pinnacle less than a month before Election Day 2020, when Trump publicly called on federal prosecutors to go after Biden — at the time, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee who was leading the Republican incumbent in the polls — accusing him of undefined crimes. The then-president added that his future successor shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him.



The next day, the Republican incumbent spoke to Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo and called on the Justice Department to "indict" his perceived Democratic foes — including Biden. In other words, we’re left with a head-spinning dynamic: The politician who’s now asking, “Can a president order his Department of Justice to indict an opponent just prior to an election?” is the same politician who, as president, pressured his Justice Department to indict his opponent just prior to an election."

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-complaints-future-us-elections-turn-ironic-rcna98753?cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_ma&taid=64d2587d2669aa000106ec39&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/ptsd-treatment-veterans-medicine-mental-health/

All around the conference room in Atlanta last fall, jaws were dropping. Michael Roy, a physician from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, had just revealed to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies the preliminary results of a study comparing two treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder: Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy, long regarded as the “gold standard,” and a novel approach called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories or RTM.

In such a study, effectiveness is indicated by a complete remission of symptoms, a loss of diagnosis. Roy’s trial was ongoing and still double-blinded, so he could report only the outcomes of the two treatments combined. But the success rate was a stunning 60 percent. Every expert present knew that PE’s known remission rate hovers at 30 to 40 percent, so the 60 percent combined figure could only mean only one thing: The new RTM treatment was tracking dramatically higher.


From the back of the room, PE researchers glowered at Roy: Way too good to be true, dude.

Except it wasn’t. Afterward, the praise from colleagues was effusive, with one top researcher telling RTM’s creator, Frank Bourke, that the presentation was a “home run.” At the same time, a PTSD researcher from the Department of Veterans Affairs approached one of Bourke’s teammates and said coldly, “I don’t think it’s useful to pick fights” — as though RTM’s success had been a provocation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/09/opinion/supreme-court-conservative-agenda.html

To appreciate that transformation’s full dimension, consider the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago: Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies.

These goals were hardly new, but to conservatives’ bewilderment and frustration, the court under the previous chief justice, the undeniably conservative William Rehnquist, failed to accomplish a single one of them. In fact, to any conservative longing for change, the situation in 2005 must have appeared grim indeed. Not only had the Rehnquist court reaffirmed the right to abortion in the 1992 Casey decision; in 2000 it overturned a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, a law aimed at enlisting the court in a graphic anti-abortion narrative.


[snip]

That was how the world looked on Sept. 29, 2005, when Chief Justice Roberts took the oath of office, less than a month after the death of his mentor, Chief Justice Rehnquist. And this year? By the time the sun set on June 30, the term’s final day, every goal on the conservative wish list had been achieved. All of it. To miss that remarkable fact is to miss the story of the Roberts court.



It’s worth reviewing how the court accomplished each of the goals. It deployed a variety of tools and strategies. Precedents that stood in the way were either repudiated outright, as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision did last year to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or were simply rendered irrelevant — abandoned, in the odd euphemism the court has taken to using. In its affirmative action decision declaring race-conscious university admissions to be unconstitutional, Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion did not overturn the 2003 Grutter decision explicitly. But Justice Thomas was certainly correct in his concurring opinion when he wrote that it was “clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”

It's really hard to overstate how destructive and awful this court has been to America, unless you're a rightwing extremist.

A global crook and shill for the CCP

Hal Sparks breaks it down in all the gory detail, It's all so laughable!

https://twitter.com/HalSparks/status/1677437637794349057?s=20

Gosse was appalled. The memo’s ostensible purpose was to provide clarity to staff so they wouldn’t run afoul of state law, but to Gosse, it had the opposite effect. It came off “not as a friendly warning from your university legal team, but actually a kind of slap in the face,” she says. It felt like a threat—don’t say the a-word, or else—wrapped up in a package of legalese. At the time, Gosse was conducting research on the artist Edward Kienholz, whose portfolio includes two prominent sculptural installations about abortion. She worried continuing to discuss abortion and contraception—even in art history class—would make her vulnerable to prosecution.


It was hard not to be confused by the university’s memo. Did mentioning the location of the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic—about 15 minutes across the state border in Pullman, Washington—constitute “promotion”? Would resident advisors be jailed for telling a student that Plan B was available at Walmart? Were condoms and birth control pills now contraband? Those questions seemed dystopian and absurd, and yet, this is our new post-Roe v. Wade reality.

Would resident advisors be jailed for telling a student that Plan B was available at Walmart? Were condoms and birth control pills now contraband?” The memo was sent three months after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which a year ago on June 24, 2022, overturned Roe v. Wade. At the time, 26 states, including Idaho, had trigger bans or other legislation proposed or in place to restrict abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Now, after accomplishing its long-held dream of ending Roe, the antiabortion movement has turned its focus to a new target: birth control, with several states introducing legislation that could restrict or outlaw certain forms. If left unopposed, it is clear there are some politicians, judges, and activists who would not only deny people the ability to end unwanted pregnancies, but also the ability to prevent pregnancies in the first place.

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a44290204/birth-control-laws-abortion-2023/