January 20, 2021

OMNIPOLLO️ GONE 2021

https://omnipollo.com/products/gone-2021

January 19, 2021

Well, fuck, Lawrence O'Donnell is now saying Trump can do secret pardons that we will never know

about until and if that person is charged with a federal crime that was secretly pardoned (included in this shitbaggery could be a self-pardon).

WTFuckery!

January 19, 2021

A 3.5 billion-year-old living organism

In Western Australia, 3.5bn-year-old stromatolites built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210117-stromatolites-the-earths-oldest-living-lifeforms



The sunroof was open and the tinted windows were wound down. It was the closest I could get to soaking in the surrounds of desert and sea under the cloud-sailing sky. I was on Indian Ocean Drive heading a couple of hours north of Perth to Lake Thetis, on Western Australia’s wildcard Coral Coast. Like an M C Escher drawing, the landscape morphs from market gardens to limestone-spotted scrub, soundtracked with clattering windmills drawing water from the Yarragadee Aquifer formed during the Jurassic era. There were white-trunked eucalypts and punk-haired grass trees sprouting in their thousands, flocks of black cockatoos in raucous flight and, sadly, dozens of kangaroos that had ended their days as roadkill.

Going on a road trip along the coast of the oldest continent on Earth was bound to be steeped in mysteries. As I passed green and yellow road signs warning to keep a look out for kangaroos, emus and echidnas, there was another rare life form I was seeking an audience with – one that traces its ancestry to the beginning of time. Stromatolites are living fossils and the oldest living lifeforms on our planet. The name derives from the Greek, stroma, meaning “mattress”, and lithos, meaning “rock”. Stromatolite literally means “layered rock”. The existence of these ancient rocks extends three-quarters of the way back to the origins of the Solar System.

With a citizen scientist’s understanding, stromatolites are stony structures built by colonies of microscopic photosynthesising organisms called cyanobacteria. As sediment layered in shallow water, bacteria grew over it, binding the sedimentary particles and building layer upon millimetre layer until the layers became mounds. Their empire-building brought with it their most important role in Earth’s history. They breathed. Using the sun to harness energy, they produced and built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve.



Living stromatolites are found in only a few salty lagoons or bays on Earth. Western Australia is internationally significant for its variety of stromatolite sites, both living and fossilised. Fossils of the earliest known stromatolites, about 3.5 billion years old, are found about 1,000km north, near Marble Bar in the Pilbara region. With Earth an estimated 4.5 billion years old, it’s staggering to realise we can witness how the world looked at the dawn of time when the continents were forming. Before plants. Before dinosaurs. Before humans.

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January 16, 2021

Flew on a private jet to DC to "stop the steal." FBI arrested her today. She says: I feel persecuted

“I would like a pardon from the President of the United States.”
Dallas area realtor Jenna Ryan is the 2nd D.C. riot participant to ask for one. She flew on a private jet to D.C. to “stop the steal.” FBI arrested her today. She says: I feel persecuted.
https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1350253097818329089

January 16, 2021

The Boogaloo Bois Prepare for Civil War

As the FBI warns of violence, anti-government extremists are ready to get in on the chaos.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/boogaloo-prepare-civil-war/617683/



In the menagerie of right-wing populist groups, the boogaloo bois stand out for their fashion, for their great love of memes, and, to put it plainly, for the incoherence of their ideology. Which is saying a lot, considering that the riot at the Capitol last Wednesday featured partisans of the long-gone country of South Vietnam, Falun Gong adherents, end-times Christians, neo-Nazis, QAnon believers, a handful of Orthodox Jews, and Daniel Boone impersonators. The boogaloos weren’t a huge presence in that mob. But according to federal officials, the attack on the Capitol has galvanized them and could inspire boogaloo violence in D.C. and around the country between now and Inauguration Day. The FBI warned earlier that boogaloos could launch attacks in state capitols this Sunday, January 17. The boogaloos don’t appear interested in fighting for Donald Trump—they tend to despise him, mostly because they think he panders to the police. But for the past year, boogaloo bois all over the United States have been cheering on the country’s breakdown, waiting for the moment when their nihilistic memes would come to life and the country would devolve into bloody chaos.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take the boogaloo threat. Some are likely just joking when they “shit-post” about shooting cops or “yeeting alphabet boys”—killing government law-enforcement agents. But others seem serious. They’ve already shown up heavily armed (and in their signature Hawaiian shirts) at protests and at state capitols. They’ve allegedly killed law-enforcement officers, talked about throwing Molotov cocktails at cops during the racial-justice protests this summer, and plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. They say they want a total reset of society, even if they haven’t thought very hard about what, exactly, should come next. Who are the boogaloo bois? And why do they want to start a civil war? I’ve spent the past few months trying to figure that out. Let’s start with what boogaloo isn’t. It isn’t, mainly, a white-supremacist organization, though there are some white-supremacist boogaloo bois. It isn’t a collection of Trump supporters ready to fight for the president, like, say, the Proud Boys. And despite the various attacks—planned or carried out—against police officers and government officials, boogaloo also isn’t a militia in any traditional sense of the word. It isn’t even really a movement.

It’s more like an absurdist internet culture propagated by libertarian-leaning gun enthusiasts on 4chan—the anonymous, Wild West version of Reddit—that has somehow moved into the real world. It’s jargon and memes and jokes and a sometimes-serious desire to bring about a violent revolution to overthrow the U.S. government. Like nearly everything about boogaloo, the ideas and terminology are simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying. The term boogaloo, for example, can refer to the purveyors of this culture or to an event: a violent revolution some of them hope to hasten, dubbed Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. The name itself is a take-off on a pervasive internet joke, an allusion to a 1980s dance movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. (Take a moment to pity historians, centuries from now, as they try to understand how the name of a dance-movie sequel turned into the name of a proposed nationwide insurrection.) JJ MacNab has studied anti-government extremist groups for more than 20 years. As a fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, she’s tracked the boogaloo bois online since last fall, when she saw an uptick in memes calling—in a jokey way—for a civil war. Some of the boogaloo bois, she told me, are “accelerationists,” meaning they’re looking for any provocation—be it proposed gun-control measures, Black Lives Matter protests, or the presidential inauguration—to spark a violent conflict.



Other boogalooers believe that the “boogaloo” will be brought to them by the opposing side, by measures like gun confiscation, or some other perceived overstepping of authority. Over the past two years, the terminology moved from 4chan to Facebook, where a few groups quickly grew to thousands of members. MacNab says she tries to identify what she calls the “social butterflies” of the online groups: young men who seem to intuitively understand what’s cool and funny to their peers, and what isn’t. Once she finds a few, she follows them from group to group, across the internet, as a way of accessing their world. The word boogaloo morphed into big igloo, which brought about a deluge of igloo imagery, and also into big luau, which is what prompted some boogaloo bois to wear Hawaiian shirts under their body armour. One boogaloo meme shows the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden snake set against a turquoise-and-pink floral pattern above the words ALOHA FUCKFACE. If none of this makes much sense, that’s the point. “They really want to create their own in-world so the rest of us won’t get their jokes,” MacNab told me. “It’s tribal,” she added. “These are tribal markings: the shirts they wear, the jargon they speak, even the types of guns they like.”

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January 16, 2021

The Coronavirus Is Evolving Before Our Eyes (The Atlantic)

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/coronavirus-mutations-variants/617694/



In the final, darkest days of the deadliest year in U.S. history, the world received ominous news of a mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Scientists in the U.K. had identified a form of the virus that was spreading rapidly throughout the nation. Then, on January 4, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a lockdown that began almost immediately and will last until at least the middle of February. “It’s been both frustrating and alarming to see the speed with which the new variant is spreading,” he said in an address, noting that “our scientists have confirmed this new variant is between 50 and 70 percent more transmissible” than previous strains. Those figures, based on an early estimate by British government scientists in late December, made for terrifying push alerts and headlines. Though this strain of the virus (officially called “B.1.1.7”) quickly became known as “the U.K. variant,” it has already been found in 45 countries, suggesting that the opportunity to contain it with travel restrictions has passed. On January 8, Australia locked down Brisbane, a city of 2.3 million people, after discovering a single case.

Each day, B.1.1.7 is being found in more people in more places, including all around the United States. Experts have raised dire warnings that a 70 percent more transmissible form of the virus would overwhelm already severely stretched medical systems. Daily deaths have already tripled in recent months, and the virus is killing more than 3,000 Americans every day. From a purely mathematical perspective, considering exponential growth, a significantly more transmissible strain could theoretically lead to tens of thousands of daily deaths, with hospital beds lining sidewalks and filling parking lots. To make matters worse, the warnings from Britain were followed by headlines about yet another variant, B.1.351, in South Africa. Then another concerning variant was identified in Brazil. News reports speculated that these strains may resist vaccines. Some experts cautioned that the mutations could render current treatments less effective. Scott Gottlieb, the former director of the FDA, said last week: “The South Africa variant is very concerning right now because it does appear that it may obviate some of our medical countermeasures, particularly the antibody drugs.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci echoed that concern, calling the variant “disturbing.”

These new variants demand to be taken seriously. Skyrocketing case counts in the U.K. suggest a potential to do enormous damage, and the identification of B.1.1.7 in so many countries is noteworthy. Still, we don’t yet know whether either variant will become as dominant worldwide as they have in their respective countries. They might spread widely and cause tremendous harm. They might also do neither. The sheer scale and capacity of this virus are challenging many things we thought we knew, but the basic laws governing its evolution are not among them. All viruses are constantly evolving and changing, just as human populations are. When a virus is spreading as widely and rapidly as SARS-CoV-2, spinning through trillions of generations each minute, adaptation is inevitable. The transmissibility of the virus will change. The severity of the disease it causes will change. Its ability to evade our immune system will change. It very well may evolve to circumvent our current vaccines. Thanks to genetic-sequencing technology, we can watch this evolution in real time. We can see the changes in a virus’s genes before we even know what they mean for the spread of disease. Charting the course of this evolution, and assessing its significance, has quickly become a foremost challenge of the pandemic. The peril is not that the virus will suddenly change in an extraordinary way that transforms the pandemic, but that it is changing in small, ordinary ways that are playing out on a vast scale, and whose significance we may not appreciate until it’s too late.

Almost exactly a year ago, in January of 2020, a flight attendant warned the renowned Chinese virologist Zhang Yongzhen: It was time to turn off all portable electronic devices. He was sitting with his phone to his ear. On the other end of the line, his Australian collaborator Eddie Holmes was pleading with him to publish the genetic code of the novel coronavirus. The Chinese government had forbidden this. Yongzhen was torn. The world did not yet know the cause of the rapidly spreading respiratory infection, and he seemed to have uncovered it in a sample of sputum from a severely ill person in Wuhan. Using genomic sequencing to unravel the code of the virus, he had found what appeared to be the blueprint of a new coronavirus. He told Holmes to publish the code. When Holmes did so on Twitter, the international scientific community pounced. Within days, researchers in Thailand were able to verify that the same virus had infected patients there. Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health began to work on a vaccine. The code became the backbone of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which owe their development to the speedy identification and sharing of the genome.

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January 16, 2021

AOC on Rachel now (or very soon) nt

January 16, 2021

Scientists May Have Detected a Signal That Could Change Astronomy Forever

Scientists think they may have spied the universe's "gravitational wave background" after more than a decade of searching.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpep5/scientists-may-have-detected-a-signal-that-could-change-astronomy-forever



In 2015, scientists snagged the first detection of a gravitational wave, a ripple in the fabric of spacetime. The achievement marked the beginning of an entirely new field of astronomy and earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Now, emerging research suggests that we may be on the cusp of yet another major milestone for gravitational wave astronomy: the detection of the so-called “gravitational wave background.” The discovery of gravitational waves continues to be one of the most consequential breakthroughs in science because it allows researchers to examine cataclysmic events, such as the mergers of black holes, that could never be spotted with traditional light-based astronomy.

Detectors like Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which captured the first gravitational wave over five years ago, are built to sense relatively loud, high-frequency waves. But scientists predict that there is also an ambient murmur of subtle, low-frequency ripples constantly flowing through everything in the universe, including Earth. Now, researchers think they’ve found a candidate signal after more than a decade of watching fast-spinning collapsed stars for the faintest sign of a discrepancy that might indicate a wave.

This background wave source, if discovered, would be an absolute goldmine of information about some of the most persistent mysteries of the universe. For instance, the stochastic waves could shed light on the enigmatic behaviour of supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times more massive than the Sun and may produce wave events that last months or years. (By comparison, LIGO and similar detectors are focused on waves emitted by seconds-long interactions between star-scale objects.)

“These are the black holes that are at the centres of every massive galaxy that we know of,” said Joseph Simon, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a call. “If we were to be able to detect this signal, we would actually be able to open a completely different window into the universe than what LIGO is able to probe,” he continued, “and we will be able to learn more about the way that these supermassive black holes grow and evolve through throughout kind of cosmic time with their host galaxies.”

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January 15, 2021

The Perfect At-Home Cocktail Tour of Oregon's Distilleries

https://www.thrillist.com/drink/the-must-try-cocktails-from-oregons-distilleries



Oregon is no stranger to the craft beer boom. But in the midst of its small-batch revolution, another boozy change is brewing: the rise of craft distilleries -- and with it, a cocktail renaissance. In a selfless -- some may say heroic -- attempt to learn more about these distilleries, we put together a collection of cocktails to show off liquors from every corner of the state. So until you can go back to in-person distillery crawls, here are seven must-try concoctions you can mix up to get the taste of Oregon right at home.



https://pendletonwhisky.com/





https://www.freelandspirits.com/



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January 15, 2021

The Israeli right: authoritarianism and ethnic supremacy

https://progressivepost.eu/spotlights/the-israeli-right-authoritarianism-and-ethnic-supremacy

To understand Israel properly, one must get to know the political right, its characteristics, components, and the changes it has undergone in recent years. The right has been in power since 1977, save for the brief terms of Yitzhak Rabin (1974–77, 1992–95) and Ehud Barak (1999-2001) as prime ministers. It has been a partner in and leader of Israeli governments, shaping domestic and foreign policies. The structural and ideological shifts on the Israeli right express to a large extent a sea-change that has swept Israeli society in recent decades, and that is still under way.

Adopting radical neo-liberalism

Israel was founded by workers’ parties and labour organisations from the left. As such, it evolved into a welfare state inclined to socialism and embracing solidarity. The rise of the right in the late 1970s brought about economic change that reflected the trending neo-liberal capitalism around the globe. In Israel, as in other countries, this generated increasing privatisation, eroded the public sector, weakened labour unions, and resulted in growing inequality. Capital was increasingly concentrated in the hands of few wealthy individuals and families, which shape the economy, the media, politics, and, to a growing extent, Israeli society by and large. It is therefore hardly surprising that the criminal indictments against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stem from his ties with business and media tycoons.

Abandoning liberal ideas

While the Israeli right adopted neo-liberal economic principles, it abandoned the liberal underpinnings of these principles, especially over the past decade. The basic concepts of human and civil rights, a substantive component of the Likud party’s ideology in its early days, was subsumed by ideological and political considerations. The marginalisation of human and civil rights makes it easier to justify occupation, and allows the right to question the legitimacy of Israeli Arab voters and thus make it more difficult for them to join up with the political left to provide an alternative to right-wing rule. It also lays the groundwork for the formation of a right-wing coalition of non-liberal parties, leaving the concepts of human and civil rights as the purview of the political left. Liberal voices within the Likud party, such as former ministers Benny Begin and Dan Meridor or President Reuven Rivlin, have been cast aside. Right-wing governments labelled human rights organisations as ‘traitors’ and adopted legislation and a public discourse designed to undermine their legitimacy, funding, and freedom within the public arena.

The rule of law is yet another fundamental liberal principle targeted by the right. The new Israeli right finds Israeli and international law, based on a liberal world view, disruptive. The law gets in the way of the Israeli settlement enterprises and the occupation. While Israeli courts have used various tactics to successfully whitewash the settlement enterprise, for example differentiating between so-called legal and illegal settlements and thereby greenlighting the whole settlement enterprise, these rulings do not satisfy the nationalist proponents of a Greater Land of Israel, especially when the court rules in favour of Palestinians whose human rights are violated by the occupation. The law is also a thorn in the side of the Israeli plutocracy, and it seeks to protect individual rights against the power of the majority. It battles corruption and therefore personally threatens leaders on the right who have run afoul of the law: Netanyahu, two leading ultra-Orthodox politicians – Yaakov Litzman of the United Torah Judaism Party and Shas party chair Aryeh Deri, Likud Members of the Knesset David Bitan and David Amsalem, and others. For all these and other reasons, the Israeli right seeks to weaken and undermine the courts, the police, the state prosecution and the justice system, which serves as basic building blocks of the liberal order.

A non-liberal coalition on the right......

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