I am just heartsick over the plight of the animals lost in the LA fires. People have lost their pets and many others have nowhere to live so are having to house them at shelters. And then there is the wildlife that live in the neighborhoods and foothills that were ravaged by the firestorm. There are many groups rushing in to help, some even having to evacuate shelters in the path of the fire. 🔗 Lost and found pets: Cleo&Hooman’s lost/found spreadsheet and @eatonfirefoundlostpets are helping reunite pets with their owners. BFAS has set up a volunteer interest survey for those interested in helping. Pasadena Humane / @pasadenahumane Due to overwhelming support, Pasadena Humane has no more capacity for material donations or fosters, and has put a pause on volunteer applications, but is in need of monetary donations. L.A. Animal Services / @laanimalservices You can sign up to foster or adopt for from one of 13 city and county shelters. This will open up space for new animals.
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Fossil fuel operatives are pushing Trump and state governments to buy billions of a volatile cryptocurrency, jeopardizing taxpayer dollars and the environment alike.
The worst of the worst rising to the top: Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time. He holds the positions of deputy chief of staff, with oversight of domestic policy, and homeland security adviser, which gives him range to coordinate among cabinet agencies. He will be a key legislative strategist and is expected to play an important role in crafting Mr. Trump’s speeches, as he has done since he joined the first Trump campaign in 2016. Most significantly, Mr. Miller will be in charge of Mr. Trump’s signature issue and the one that Mr. Miller has been fixated on since childhood: immigration. And he has been working, in secrecy, to oversee the team drafting the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump will sign after he takes office on Jan. 20. “I call Stephen ‘Trump’s brain,’” said Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who credited Mr. Miller — a private citizen at the time — with helping to rally Republican lawmakers to insert a sweeping border crackdown into a spending bill in 2023. In the four years since Mr. Trump has been out of office, Mr.
Cling to reality, folks. It’s all we’ve got. And the reality is that Trump is no popular, he’s an idiot and so are most of the people around him. Not that he can’t do damage, of course. But he is no colossus.
What rove beetles can tell us about the predictability of life
The post The Evolution of a Mimic appeared first on Nautilus.
“MUST FIND THE LEAKER!” Trump posted, decrying the damage to Israel when its Iran attack plans were made public.
The post CIA Leaker of Israel Intel Pleads Guilty Days Before Trump Takes Office appeared first on The Intercept.
Here we are again, at the beginning of yet another year. Let’s hope it is an improvement on the last. The highlights of this past year have been two events …
The post The Gower Intitiative for Modern Money Studies newsletter – January 2025 appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.
American Primeval, Netflix’s flashy (and quite gory) new series depicts the clash between zealous Mormons,...
Refute your friends and family, never be satisfied. Philosopher Agnes Callard on life lessons from Socrates.
The post Argue Your Way to a Fuller Life appeared first on Nautilus.
They’ve moved the inauguration ceremony inside die to the cold weather. I’m sure he doesn’t want his pet oligarchs to be uncomfortable. I guess he doesn’t want to be the William Henry Harrison of our time? I’d guess both. He’s old and he’s terrified of a small crowd size.
1. “If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”
2. “Why would Kim Jong Un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat’? Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!”
3. “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
4. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
5. “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.”
6. “The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware, and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.”
Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game. It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and Continue reading »
Australia needs to try and persuade the Trump Administration that no country can expect to dominate our region and the benefits of cooperation. But if, as is likely, Trump refuses to accept a multipolar region then Australia must be prepared to act on its own and seek its security within Asia. Australia’s strategic dilemma For Continue reading »
Palestinians and Israelis are breathing sighs of relief that after fifteen months of killing, famine, torture and destruction across Gaza, the Israeli Netanyahu government and representatives of Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire. US negotiators from the Biden and prospective Trump administrations are claiming credit for this pause in fighting, an achievement fuelled partly by Continue reading »
For all the media folderol about Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, new polling shows that most Americans are actually feeling pretty meh about the prospects for any of his grandiose plans. The AP Norc poll shows that Trump’s 41% approval rating is only a few points higher than it was when he was ignominiously rejected four years ago and most people don’t have any confidence that he’ll be able to accomplish most of what he’s promised. For a man who erroneously insists that he won a landslide and claims that he’s been given a mandate for massive change, it doesn’t appear that most Americans actually support his agenda (other than eliminating taxes on tips) either: Members of both parties say they want compromise but considering recent history it’s pretty clear that the Republican party simply is no longer organized to do that. They are in the grip of an extremist faction, led by Trump himself, that is immune to any kind of concession. From all the reports coming out of the new Congress nothing has changed on that count.
In an age of constitutional hardball In my post below, Michael Steele hammers Democrats for trying to play nice with his former political party. An exasperated Steele says Republicans are “gonna shove those [bipartisan] plowshares up your behind!” The MAGA GOP is playing “constitutional hardball,” clinically defined by Mark Tushnet of Harvard Law School in 2004 as: … political claims and practices – legislative and executive initiatives – that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings. It is hardball because its practitioners see themselves as playing for keeps in a special kind of way; they believe the stakes of the political controversy their actions provoke are quite high, and that their defeat and their opponents’ victory would be a serious, perhaps permanent setback to the political positions they hold.
The point of the discussion, of course, has to do with where Koopmans thinks we should look for “autonomous behaviour relations”. He appeals to experience but in a somewhat oblique manner. He refers to the Harvard barometer “to show that relationships between economic variables … not traced to underlying behaviour equations are unreliable as instruments […]
Michael Salib and Mesha Ghazaleh The Bank’s monetary policy objectives are some of the most significant objectives bestowed by Parliament on any UK public authority. They are to maintain price stability and, subject to that, support the Government’s economic policy, including its objectives for growth and employment. In our paper we offer a historical and … Continue reading The Bank of England’s statutory monetary policy objectives: a historical and legal account