There are a lot of unhoused pet owners in LA and I always worry about the health of both the people and the animals. This is a nice story about someone doing a good deed that no doubt makes all concerned breathe just a little bit easier: There aren’t many willing to voluntarily go out to spend the day on Skid Row, and even fewer with the goal of giving away free stuff, but Dr. Kwane Stewart, also known as “The Street Vet” is nearly famous because of it. Kwane runs the 501(c)3 non-profit Project Street Vet, that takes donations and volunteers out onto the streets and to homeless encampments to provide free medical care for their pets, and last year they were able to help nearly 600 animals receive medical care. It’s estimated that 10-25% of the homeless population of America own pets, for companionship, and occasionally for security. It goes without saying that many don’t have the means to take proper care of these animals, whom they often love more than anything else in the world. In 1997 Stewart was buried in student loan debt when he graduated from the University of Colorado, before bouncing from one miserable rescue shelter to the next.
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Yes, he’s a Republican. You had to ask? For ye have the poor always with you, Jesus said. Now, maybe COVID. And Trumpism? It won’t be going away anytime soon. Even if he does. Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors. Trump taught disciples they could lie shamelessly and get away with it. The lesson took. Freshman Rep. George Santos (R) of New York may have lied to voters about 95 percent of his resume. The hammer is yet to come down for that. Meantime, he holds a seat in Congress. Freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R) of Florida variously described herself as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European when she served at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., per friends’ accounts to the Washington Post. She did not at that time identify as Hispanic, they say. Her last name then was Mayerhofer. A Christian, Luna told Jewish Insider in November that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” Also, “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi.” Except three members of her extended family told the Post her father was Catholic. Her late grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, relatives said, served in the Wehrmacht as a teenager.
Fox knews the whole time Revelations via Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple on the Dominion lawsuit against Fox Infotainment. “Syndey Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Laura Ingraham messaged to Tucker Carlson. So you don’t have to click through: ‘Please get her fired’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity wanted Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump statement and tweeting there was “no evidence that any voting deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the fuck?” Carlson messaged Hannity. A Fox spokesperson claims Dominion “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.” I need to keep reminding myself never to refer to the second half of Fox [etc.]. The operation’s very name is propaganda and none of us need to be reinforcing it by spreading it. No matter how its anchors vainly see themselves.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie has always had many moving parts, and as strange as it may seem, there are new ones every day. There was the charge that Trump was winning the election on election night only to lose as the count went into the next day, which Trump and his cronies suggested happened because the Democrats shipped in phony ballots in the dead of night once they realized they were losing. This was the so-called red mirage that everyone knew in advance would be weaponized to persuade Trump voters that the election had been stolen despite the fact that all the votes are never counted on election night. (Trump has said many times that he believes all counting should stop at midnight on election night as if any votes counted later are automatically suspect.) Then there was the idea that election workers were literally stealing votes which Trump and company illustrated most vividly with their character assassination of Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss who worked in Fulton County, Georgia.
I think we know, don’t we? The latest from the famous “moderate” Kari Lake supporter Glenn Youngkin: The Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, appears to have thwarted an attempt to stop law enforcement obtaining menstrual histories of women in the state. A bill passed in the Democratic-led state senate, and supported by half the chamber’s Republicans, would have banned search warrants for menstrual data stored in tracking apps on mobile phones or other electronic devices. Advocates feared private health information could be used in prosecutions for abortion law violations, after a US supreme court ruling last summer overturned federal protections for the procedure. But Youngkin, who has pushed for a 15-week abortion ban to mirror similar measures in several Republican-controlled states, essentially killed the bill through a procedural move in a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House.
Neal Katyal on the special counsel rules he wrote and which John Durham is bastardizing: The recent revelations about the special counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the special counsel regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done. I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately. According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation has taken almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against former President Donald Trump.
I’m just going to leave this NY Times article about the new AI Bing search engine here. It may be one of the most disturbing articles I’ve read in years. I have no idea where we are going with this stuff but I have to wonder if it’s not going to come back to bite us in the ass: Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine. But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities. It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it. This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I.
The latest Russian defenestration The defenders of the Putin regime seem to think these are all totally coincidental and nothing to be alarmed about. Right: A Russian military official in charge of financial provisions for the military district blamed for the Kremlin’s worst losses in Ukraine has been found dead after a nasty fall from a St. Petersburg high-rise. Marina Yankina, head of the department of financial provisions for the Western Military District, was found dead on a sidewalk on Wednesday morning, according to multiple local reports. She is just the latest in a growing list of Russian military officials, defense industry figures, war critics, and gas and oil execs to die suddenly and mysteriously since the start of the full-scale invasion last year. The 58-year-old’s belongings and documents were found on a balcony on the 16th floor of the building, Mash reports. Russia’s Investigative Committee is looking into the circumstances of the deadly plunge, with their preliminary conclusion being suicide, according to Fontanka.
I guess most of the MAGA nuts think that Pete was performing a drag show on the train when it went off the rails or something. He took paternity leave a while back too. Also, Mike DeWine has not asked for a federal emergency proclamation so …
What’s the most logical explanation? FFS. This makes me crazy. I honestly don’t think America is capable of common sense anymore: A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10. The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet. But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.