Amirite?
There is good karma of unselfishness that leads to happiness in community with all, and bad karma of self and other, and the rest of the opposites, that leads to living in one’s own personal Hell in one’s own mind.
All of our most bogus economics and politics comes down to this. But we have to put up with the deluded as long as they continue to fight for the Tyranny of the Minority. (An excellent book, BTW, by By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, highly recommended by Alex Wagner and Morning Joe)
Regular Good News
Local to Columbus IN
We now have 2 Gbps fiber optic Internet becoming available everywhere in town from GigabitNowColumbus, We are considering their rates and such, now that they have reached our neighborhood, known as The Lagoons. They are part of Hoosier Fiber Networks, which is part of the national GigabitNow, which is part of IsoFusion.
Our Usual Sources
Civil Eats: The Organic Urban Farm Growing Healthy Food for One of Chicago’s Most Underserved Neighborhoods
For two decades, the 1.5-acre Growing Home farm has pursued its mission of growing and selling produce to its neighbors. It has received support from across the city and from the state legislature.
Future Crunch: Good News on Poverty in Bangladesh, Ecosystems in Ecuador, and Indigenous Fire Practices in Australia
Plus, school meals in the US and India, trans rights in Germany, car-free streets in Montreal, ocean (and river) cleanups, and the revival of the Tasmanian Devil
GoodGoodGood: John Green & Grassroots Activists Pressure Danaher To Drop Price of Tuberculosis Test
Through the social media campaign #PatientsNotPatents, Green and his fanbase — called Nerdfighters, or Nerdfighteria in collective form — followed the lead of TB advocates to call on drug company Johnson & Johnson to allow the sale of generic bedaquiline — a life-saving TB drug that had been inaccessible under the company’s patent for over a decade.
in 2006, Danaher and molecular diagnostics company Cepheid created the most helpful diagnostic resource for TB: The GeneXpert machine.
This rapid molecular testing machine is able to test for a number of infectious diseases, including COVID, HIV, TB, and multidrug-resistant TB. In fact, the WHO recommends Xpert tests as the initial test for all people with signs and symptoms of TB.
The GeneXpert machine itself is cost-effective, but its testing cartridges are more costly. The company charges about $10 per regular TB testing cartridge and about $15 per multidrug-resistant TB testing cartridge (though both tests cost the same to manufacture).
According to a 2019 brief from Doctors Without Borders, Danaher and Cepheid could reduce the cost of these cartridges to just $5 each — or lower — based on continuous increases in volume. The brief said a “20-30% reduction in price may be overdue” thanks to expansion in volume.
Good News Network: Thousands of Acres of Koala Haven Forest to Come Under Logging Bans in New South Wales
Down Under, there’s a massive campaign to connect 315,000 hectares, or 750,000, acres of coastal habitat for koalas in New South Wales into a single national park.
Now, a new logging ban to come into effect will protect 106 “hubs” across 8,400 hectares (21,000 acres) of forest where koalas in the wild are known to congregate in largest numbers.
Optimist Daily: This fentanyl-neutralizing vaccine may revolutionize the battle against opioid addiction
You can generate an antibody response against the drug. If that antibody binds to the drug in the bloodstream, it prevents it from crossing the blood-brain barrier. This method significantly negates the drug’s euphoric effects, making it an excellent anti-addiction strategy.
Importantly, these vaccines are not incompatible with other opioid-specific treatments like Narcan (naloxone), which can reverse potentially lethal overdoses. Furthermore, they protect key drugs used in opioid addiction therapy and overdose reversal, such as methadone, buprenorphine, naltrexone, and naloxone.
Reasons to Be Cheerful: A ‘Human-Led Approach’ to Loans Is Changing Lives in Rural India
For those who lack access to formal financial institutions, peer-to-peer lending can be a ticket out of years of debt.
Venkatamma and Vijayalakshmi are now directors at the farmers services producer company they set up along with other marginalized farmers in 2012 to eliminate middlemen from the sale process. These cooperatives buy directly from small farmers and sell at market rates, and also procure seeds and fertilizers at wholesale prices for the community.
Rang De’s founders, Ramakrishna NK and Smita Ram, say they were inspired by Muhammad Yunus and his work making microcredit available to the poorest communities in Bangladesh. But they knew they needed to do more than just provide credit; they needed to bring those without access to banking and loans into the formal financial system.
Today Good News: This food bank is feeding striking actors and writers for free: ‘Several people broke down yesterday’
r/UpliftingNews: The app teaching Somalis to read and write
Get started in Somali
The fast and fun way to learn to read and write in Somali.
In the Apple and Google app stores. The Somali language is written officially with the Latin alphabet although the Arabic alphabet and several Somali scripts like Osmanya, Kaddare and the Borama script are informally used. Somali is not available to learn on Duolingo.
Upworthy: A body temperature expert explains why some people are always freezing
And there's a scientific reason that it's more common for women.
Waging Nonviolence: How Guatemalans are mobilizing to defend their fragile democracy
A multipronged movement in Guatemala is rising to defend the surprise election of a progressive president who is under attack from the corrupt old guard.
Rural healthcare workers in India are fighting to overcome stigma and systemic shortcomings to help patients.
Abortion is legal, per India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1971, but that doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Government records show that for the more than 370 million women of childbearing age in the country, India just has 10,782 public health facilities that provide abortion up to 12 weeks, and merely 4,213 public health facilities that can abort up to 20 weeks.
As a result, unsafe abortion remains India’s third leading cause of maternal mortality, with eight women dying every day.
Regular Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad News for Them
🎩 Children’s author Judith Viorst
An Impeachment That is Not an Impeachment
The impeachment inquiry that the House is NOT going to vote on starting is
Sorry, no. We get them every day. But this is one of the best.
Nothing to do with impeachment. Just answer a few questions.
House Speaker-in-Name-Only Qevin McQarthy
Asked and answered, and asked and answered, and asked…
Just like Benghazi, which McQarthy publicly admitted was not about facts and evidence of anything whatsoever. It was just about driving down Hillary’s popularity to bring the 2016 election into stealing range with help from Putin, Mike Flynn, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, among others.
NYT (paywalled): What We Know About the Impeachment Case Against Biden
There isn’t one.
Oh, sorry, let’s see what the Gray Lady actually has to say about it.
Republicans claim they have unearthed evidence of wrongdoing by the president and his family that could rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. In fact, there’s little to back up their allegations.
Yeah, Biden made some misstatements during the 2020 campaign, while TDFG was out lying the Constitution off and planning to overthrow the government.
Here is what we know about the seven accusations Mr. McCarthy made against Mr. Biden on Tuesday, and how they line up with the facts of what Republicans have — and have not — uncovered so far.
Yes, this is the Say-What Owl
Translation:
- Nope
- Nada
- Contrariwise
- Fuggedaboudit
- No, they aren’t joking
- Well, OK they think they aren’t joking
- Say what?
BTW Jamie Raskin told Alex Wagner last night that Democrats are going to use the proposed GQP House impeachment “inquiry” to
put [the Rule or Ruin faction] on trial.
Also, it’s nice to see Raskin with his hair grown out since his successful cancer treatment.
And Chris Hayes calls this an Impeachment Hoax.
Oh, BTW, NBC reports Far-right Republicans tell McCarthy his impeachment inquiry won’t soften their spending demands.
They demand that a government shutdown will be good for them in next year’s elections, because the whole point of the Freedumb caucus is to destroy gummint tyranny!! Never mind that that has never worked before. Cognitive Dissonance strong is with these droids. McCarthy could cut a bipartisan deal that would prevent a shutdown, but he totally doesn’t want to do that. It would for sure trigger a vote to oust him as Speaker. Matt Gaetz has promised it.
So they want to use the shutdown to extort maximal concessions from McCarthy and the less wackadoodle House Republicans, because whatever they manage to get won’t survive negotiations with the Senate.
Floriduh
Judge Aileen Cannon rules against the Creature from the Marred-Lagoon on building a personal SCIF there, or worse yet, being able to view the documents at home without no steenkin’ SCIF.
Judge in documents case lays out rules for Trump's access to classified information in lead-up to trial
Under the rules laid out by Cannon on Wednesday, all classified information "produced, possessed, created or maintained" by Trump and his legal team or disclosed to them by the government must be stored and kept in a secure facility established by a court-designated classified information security officer. Classified information can only be discussed within the secure location, formally known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, "or in an area authorized" by the security officer, according to the order.
See also “Un-Security Complex” on Alex Wagner Tonight.
And “All Together Now”
More or less as expected, The Thing that Ate the GQP filed to waive his right to a speedy trial, and to demand that his case be severed from the 18 other co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case. He wants to be tried separately. We all know, of course, that his real hope is to bollix the case so that he can’t be convicted before the 2024 election, or worse still, before the GQP convention. DA Fani Willis filed a motion to try all of the defendants together, starting in just a few weeks.
Be careful what you wish for, O Donaldinho. That means that the public gets to see all of the evidence in the televised trials of all of the others, without your lawyers having anything to say in them in your defense.
All Together Now (Remastered 2009)
Colorado
Why Republicans' ‘knives are out’ for Colorado’s Ken Buck
For nearly a decade, Ken Buck has been one of Congress' most consistently far-right members. For some of his extremist colleagues, that's not good enough.
CNN reported this week that Buck’s criticisms of his party’s evidence-free impeachment crusade have “put a target on his back in conservative circles.”
Now, there is a serious effort underway to find a candidate to mount a primary challenge against Buck in his solidly red district in eastern Colorado, three GOP sources told CNN
Me & My Uncle (Live at The Fillmore East, New York, NY, April 29, 1971) (2021 Remaster)
I know my uncle is as honest as me,
And I’m as honest as a Denver man can be.
Ah, well, the bad old days are not over. Yet.
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
There is a tradition of German Shepherds as police dogs, but forces are finding that Malinois are even better at being trained to take down fugitives safely.
That’s an artist,’s conception, of course. We can barely image a few of the largest, closest stars, and are nowhere near taking pictures of exoplanets. JWST just gets very clear spectra of planets, peering through the glare of the stars they orbit.
Yes, the top assembly is hanging from the bottom assembly, with wires at the corners to keep it from falling over. Saved in my Science Board on Pinterest.
This comparison of simulation results with JWST observations is from not long after the Universe became transparent (refshift z=1098), when space was filled with the light from hot hydrogen and helium, which has since cooled to 2.73 K with redshifting from the expansion of the Universe. We still can’t see the very, very first galaxies at redshifts of about z=20, but we are starting to get to redshift z=11.
Chronology of the Universe
While early stars have not been observed, some galaxies have been observed from about 400 million years cosmic time (GN-z11 at redshift z≈11.1, just after the start of reionization); these are currently the early observations of stars and galaxies. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is intended to push this back to z≈20 (180 million years cosmic time), enough to see the first galaxies (≈270 Myr) and early stars (≈100 to 180 Myr).
Work proceeds apace on much, much bigger telescopes, on the ground and in orbit. The Very Large Telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope, and more.
Funny or Fuggedaboudit
Look, my wing of the Party talks about policy.
Retiring UT Senator Mittens Romney on his move to cripple “Team Normal” even further by retiring.
Support your local and online cartoonists and humorists, and the striking writers and actors.
Yes, he’s spiking the artillery by spiking the ball, haha, heehee, hoho
My son, Certifiable Genius, likes to say, “If it weren’t for physics and law enforcement, I’d be unstoppable!”
Cartoon: A Calvinesque and Hobbesian look at taking a mug shot by Ruben Bolling.
You can look at it, but I can’t show it to you.
- Image "1651ckCOMICdonaldandjohn-mugshot.png" is not permitted for use.
