Beet L. Jooz

‘If it makes sense I could support it’

When Democrats issue policy proposals like the “Green New Deal” that are full of errors and strange conjectures, the mainstream media treats them with respect, but when Republicans point out problems with the proposals, they are aggressive people looking to “pounce” for political gain. The Green New Deal endorsed by some Democratic lawmakers stated “we […]

The post Media Treats Policy Proposals from Democrats, Republicans Totally Differently appeared first on Accuracy in Media.

A comprehensive analysis of glyphosate - the most widely used weed-killing chemical in the world - reveals that those with the highest exposures to the popular herbicide have a 41% increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) cancer. 

The meta-analysis of six studies containing nearly 65,000 participants also looked at links between glyphosate-based herbicides and immunosuppression, endocrine disruption and genetic alterations. 

The study authors said their new meta-analysis evaluated all published human studies, including a 2018 updated government-funded study known as the Agricultural Health Study (AHS). Monsanto has cited the updated AHS study as proving that there is no tie between glyphosate and NHL. In conducting the new meta-analysis, the researchers said they focused on the highest exposed group in each study because those individuals would be most likely to have an elevated risk if in fact glyphosate herbicides cause NHL. -The Guardian

"Together, all of the meta-analyses conducted to date, including our own, consistently report the same key finding: exposure to GBHs are associated with an increased risk of NHL," concludes the report. 

The study, which looks at both human and animal studies also suggests that glyphosate "alters the gut microbiome," which could "impact the immune system, promote chronic inflammation, and contribute to the susceptibility of invading pathogens."

Furthermore, glyphosate "may act as an endocrine disrupting chemical because it has been found recently to alter sex hormone production" in both male and female rats. 

Lastly, the study looks at genetic alterations caused by glyphosates, noting that several studies show glyphosates inducing "single- and double-strand DNA breaks," oxidation, and other "genotoxicity" factors - though the researchers caution that this remains a controversial subject. 

The findings by five US scientists contradict the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assurances of safety over the weed killer and come as regulators in several countries consider limiting the use of glyphosate-based products in farming.

Monsanto and its German owner Bayer AG face more than 9,000 lawsuits in the US brought by people suffering from NHL who blame Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides for their diseases. The first plaintiff to go to trial won a unanimous jury verdict against Monsanto in August, a verdict the company is appealing. The next trial, involving a separate plaintiff, is set to begin on 25 February , and several more trials are set for this year and into 2020. -The Guardian

Monsanto claims that there is no legitimate scientific research conclusively linking glyphosate to NHL or any other type of cancer - pointing to fact that the EPA's finding that the herbicide is "not likely" to cause cancer is backed by hundreds of studies. They have knocked claims by scientists with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) who classified glyphosate as a "probable human carcinogen" in 2015, suggesting that researchers engaged in improper conduct that failed to adequately consider several important studies. 

As the Guardian notes, "the new analysis could potentially complicate Monsanto’s defense of its top-selling herbicide," as three of the study authors were tapped by the EPA as board members to sit on a 2016 scientific advisory panel on glyphosate. 

"This paper makes a stronger case than previous meta-analyses that there is evidence of an increased risk of NHL due to glyphosate exposure," says co-author Lianne Sheppard, a professor in the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences department at the University of Washington. "From a population health point of view there are some real concerns."

SHeppard was an EPA adviser on glyphosate, and was one of three advisers who told the agency that it failed to follow proper scientific protocols when it concluded that glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer.  

"It was wrong," said Sheppard. "It was pretty obvious they didn’t follow their own rules, she said. "Is there evidence that it is carcinogenic? The answer is yes."

The EPA says it is "reviewing the study." 

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein rejected allegations made by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to CBS.

'This was not perceived to be a joke...'

Barr has questioned legitimacy of Mueller probe.

Said he could prove no fatalities occurred in hospital footage

Amazon.com Inc abruptly scrapped plans for a new headquarters in New York that could have created 25,000 jobs, blaming opposition from local leaders upset by the nearly $3 billion in incentives promised by state and city politicians.

A new survey reveals that most American executives see their businesses gaining from a potential increase in tariffs with China than being hurt by it, according to Bloomberg. 

Around 59% of approximately 500 firms surveyed during Q4 of last year say they expect profits to benefit under new tariffs on imports - more than double the number who saw a negative impact, according to a UBS Group AG survey released this month. A domestic investment boost was listed as a key beneficiary tariffs negatively impact the cost of doing business abroad. 

The survey separated firms by four categories and found that larger companies were more optimistic than smaller firms. 

"Executives may be overly optimistic but this does support our view that tariffs create the potential for both winners and losers," said chief US equity strategist Keith Parker in a Monday note. 

The stock market has been dancing to the tune to trade talks as investors monitor efforts from the world’s two largest economies to prevent an escalation with the March 1 deadline approaching. If there’s no deal by then, President Donald Trump has threatened to more than double the rate of tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports.

Companies are getting ready for a lapse in negotiations. In the UBS survey, 75 percent of respondents said they have already taken at least one action in response, such as raising prices to offset higher costs, shifting supply chains and pulling orders forward to get ahead of potential tariffs. -Bloomberg

Bank of America has been tracking comments made by S&P 500 companies on the trade impact, and found that half of them have suggested their business would be hurt by tariffs. That said make of them have accounted for the potential hikes "for conservatism," accortding to strategists led by Savita Subramanian. 

Such moves are “suggesting some upside risk if more amicable resolution is reached,” the strategists wrote in a note Monday. -Bloomberg

While some have voiced their concern that tech and industrial stocks are likely to be hit the hardest by growing trade tensions, executives seem to have a less dramatic view of things - reporting that they expect better profit margins helped by higher prices and demand due to a likely boost to investments. 

Energy industry execs were the most negative.  

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Thursday he would like to bring Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein back to Capitol Hill to testify about claims that the Justice Department official discussed a plan to potentially re...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Thursday that President Donald Trump will sign legislation to prevent a second partial government shutdown and declare a national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Lawyer Michael Avenatti says he's representing a 'whistleblower' who first showed him the purported R. Kelly sex tape.

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If you are puzzled by the nationwide rape kit testing backlog, Oklahoma provides maddening insight on the bureaucratic forces that create intolerable inertia – and injustice.

An estimated 225,000 rape kits have gone unprocessed across the country; more than 7,200 have been neglected in Oklahoma. Last month, a woman who reported an Oklahoma City sexual assault to police back in 2011 discovered that her rape kit had gathered dust on a shelf in Tulsa’s police department for seven years – after the Oklahoma County district attorney had informed her he was dropping the case because no rape kit existed.

Police, prosecutors and politicians do not have a sense of urgency about the issue. Why? My ongoing investigation shows that status quo obstructionists don’t want to clear the backlog because they don’t want the public poking around government-run crime labs – especially ones with a shameful history of forensic misconduct and a culture of destruction.

Solving the rape kit testing problem requires accountability and transparency. That means shedding light on long-buried secrets that go well beyond the usual incompetence and inattention that have led to backlogs. It’s not just rape victims who suffer when criminal justice agencies shut out the public. It’s criminal defendants trying to prove their innocence against charges of sexual crimes.

Consider Rayshun Mullins, who petitioned the state of Oklahoma three times for post-conviction testing of DNA evidence used against him in 2009. (The Sooner State was last in the nation to adopt a post-conviction DNA testing statute in 2013.) Three times he was denied. Why? Shockingly, dozens and dozens of crucial forensic items in Mullins’ case have been destroyed or “lost.”

Gone. Poof. Disappeared.

Oklahoma requires that criminal justice agencies “retain and preserve” biological evidence for as long as a person convicted of a violent felony offense is incarcerated. Mullins certainly meets that criteria: He is serving a whopping 1,015 years plus six consecutive life terms behind bars for multiple rapes and robberies.

There is an exception allowing destruction of biological evidence if a criminal defendant is notified in advance and given 90 days to object. But as Mullins revealed to me last week:

“They never told me that they would destroy them. I found out when I got them papers.”

The papers are part of an inventory compiled by the Oklahoma County district attorney’s office, which I obtained exclusively. Among the destroyed or lost pieces of evidence in Mullins’ case:

– 34 items collected in one victim’s case, including SANE/Rape kit, clothes, buccal swabs (taken from the cheek for DNA), sheets, cuttings and sexual assault trace evidence from the victim and Mullins, which were all “destroyed in 2013.”

– A second victim’s purse, photographs, check card, calendar book, checks and papers, which were released to Oklahoma City Det. Kim Davis. According to the documents, “their current location is unknown.” Davis claimed D.A. David Prater’s office had them. The D.A.’s office denies having them after a “thorough investigation.”

– A third victim’s swabs and trace lifters, which “were destroyed in 2013.”

– A fourth victim’s SANE/rape kit, swabs, buccal swabs, clothes, bedding, swabs of persons of interest, Mullins’ swabs and buccal swabs, which were all “destroyed in 2013.”

– A fifth victim’s SANE/Rape kit, clothing, toilet paper, bedding, disc containing photographs and fingerprint cards, which were all destroyed on an unknown date.

The Oklahoma City forensic analyst responsible for analyzing evidence in Mullins’ case is former crime lab employee Elaine Taylor. She is the same analyst who confessed to her OCPD supervisor Byron Boshell back in 2000 that she destroyed untold numbers of rape kits after two years at the behest of her colleague and infamous OCPD rogue chemist Joyce Gilchrist (who said she was authorized to destroy evidence by former D.A. Bob Macy) because “the only thing I could do was follow her orders or else pay the consequences.”

Taylor was conducting tests on rape kit evidence in Mullins’ case less than three years after this shocking admission. It is unknown for how long and in how many other cases this routine evidence destruction continued. What is known: Gilchrist facilitated several wrongful convictions (including two exonerated death row inmates) over more than a decade by falsifying blood evidence, destroying human hair evidence, concocting junk science testimony on dog hair, and lying about and destroyed semen evidence while Taylor worked under her.

Taylor is also the analyst at the center of former OCPD officer Daniel Holtzclaw’s wrongful conviction, which he is appealing. Six internationally renowned scientists called for a retrial after examining Taylor’s faulty work on the case. Like Mullins, Holtzclaw was charged with serial rape. Like Mullins, Holtzclaw was investigated by sex crimes Det. Kim Davis, who worked closely with Taylor for nearly 20 years.

At a recent deposition in federal lawsuits against Holtzclaw, who is represented in the civil litigation by famed exoneration attorney Kathleen Zellner, Taylor admitted she personally witnessed boxes of evidence from sex crimes, homicide and other cases being burned and shoved “in a big ole hole” down by the Oklahoma City river.

Moreover, Taylor contradicted her trial testimony, admitted the Holtzclaw forensic evidence could have been contaminated (by her son-in-law and co-lead Det. Rocky Gregory), and admitted to being involved in at least six other contamination cases (which Oklahoma officials, who held illegal secret hearings on Taylor’s work, refuse to disclose to the public).

Lost, burned, buried, tainted: This is an alarming crisis, whether you are a rape survivor, criminal justice reformer, forensic scientist or taxpayer. And I’m certain it’s not just an Oklahoma problem. Peel the layers of government intransigence enveloping a rape kit backlog and underneath you’ll find much more than criminal neglect.

The post Lost, buried, burned: Oklahoma's rape kit scandal appeared first on WND.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Scientists are telling us that we have entered “the sixth major extinction” in the history of our planet.  A brand new survey of 73 scientific reports that was just released has come to the conclusion that the total number of insects on the globe is falling by 2.5 percent per year.  If we stay on this current pace, the survey warns that there might not be “any insects at all” by the year 2119.  And since insects are absolutely critical to the worldwide food chain, that has extremely ominous implications for all of us.

I write a lot about the inevitable collapse of our economic systems, but it could definitely be argued that our environment is already in a very advanced stage of “collapse”.  According to this new research, insects are going extinct at a rate that is “eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles”…

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

Perhaps the entire world will come together and will stop destroying the planet and we can reverse this trend before it is too late.

Unfortunately, you and I both know that this is extremely unlikely to happen.

And if it doesn’t happen, the researchers that conducted this scientific review insist that the consequences will be “catastrophic to say the least”…

The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: “The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” they write. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”

The clock is ticking, and time is running out for our planet.

Assuming that we could somehow keep the global insect decline from accelerating even more, we probably only have about 100 years before they are all gone…

Chillingly, the total mass of insects is falling by 2.5 percent annually, the review’s authors said. If the decline continues at this rate, insects could be wiped off the face of the Earth within a century.

“It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none,”study co-author Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, an environmental biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian.

So what would a planet without insects look like?

Well, according to Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney, millions upon millions of birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish would “starve to death”…

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.

And without bees and other pollinators, humans would be in a world of hurt.  You may have heard that Albert Einstein once said the following…

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.”

With that statement in mind, I would like for you to consider what this new study discovered about the decline of bee colonies in the United States…

The study suggested that bee species in the UK, Denmark, and North America have taken major hits — bumblebees, honey bees, and wild bee species are all declining. In the US, the number of honey-bee colonies dropped from 6 million in 1947 to 2.5 million just six decades later.

We aren’t there yet, but a food chain cataclysm is literally right around the corner.

So why is all of this happening?

Modern methods of agriculture, urbanization and pesticides are some of the factors being blamed, but the truth is that scientists don’t actually know exactly why insects are dying off so quickly.

And none of those factors directly impact our oceans, and yet scientists have discovered that phytoplankton is declining at an exponential rate.  As a result of that decline, seabird populations have been plummeting at a pace that is extremely alarming.  The following comes from Chris Martenson…

Fewer phytoplankton means less thiamine being produced. That means less thiamine is available to pass up the food chain. Next thing you know, there’s a 70% decline in seabird populations.

This is something I’ve noticed directly and commented on during my annual pilgrimages to the northern Maine coast over the past 30 years, where seagulls used to be extremely common and are now practically gone. Seagulls!

Next thing you know, some other major food chain will be wiped out and we’ll get oceans full of jellyfish instead of actual fish.

A global collapse is not something that is coming in the distant future.

A global collapse is here, and it is happening right in front of our eyes.

Our environment is literally dying all around us, and without our environment we cannot survive.

If humanity cannot solve this crisis, and we all know that they cannot, then an extremely apocalyptic future awaits for all of us.

Illegal immigrant Javier da Silva allegedly confessed to the murder of 24-year-old Valerie Reyes of Westchester County, New York, whose body was found in a suitcase.

China and Russia are building military capabilities to rival those in America, Defense Intelligence Agency report warns

Less than three months after the new owners of the Belle of Baton Rouge said it was “highly unlikely” the downtown riverboat would move onto land, the casino’s general manager said a “real serious look” will be taken at making…

The NYPD is going to great lengths to collect, and permanently store DNA from everyone they can - guilty or innocent, according to the NY Daily News.  

Whether it be going door to door, bribing people with cigarettes, or simply demanding cheek swabs from random passers by, the NYPD has been aggressively compiling an Orwellian crime-fighting DNA database which had over 64,000 profiles as of 2017. 

Take as an extreme example the police investigation of the Howard Beach jogger case. Before they identified a suspect, the NYPD collected well over 500 DNA profiles from men in the East New York area. Imagine police knocking on doors, in uniform, with a cheek swab in hand, asking residents to prove they didn’t kill the jogger in the nearby park.

They were willing to do it in East New York. Do you think this would happen on Park Ave.? In Park Slope? Not likely.

But things get worse from there. For those people excluded from the jogger case, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the city’s crime lab, permanently keeps those profiles in their databank and routinely compares profiles to all city crimes. -NY Daily News

The Chief Medical Examiner's office, meanwhile, has justified the supercharged data collection on ambiguous city and state laws - instead preferring to invent their own rules governing how they use someone's DNA. 

In short - anyone who has given their DNA to the NYPD will be routinely compared to DNA samples from every rape, murder and any other violent crime run through the system. 

But wait, you might say - why worry if you've done nothing wrong? 

Because, as the Daily News notes, "DNA has unparalleled power to wrongly accuse. Genetic testing can now reveal a profile based on a few cells, and we shed hundreds of thousands of cells a day. Your DNA can show up in places you’ve never been."

For example, the DNA of Lukis Anderson was discovered under the fingernails of a murdered billionaire - which was transferred to the dead man by paramedics that night who had treated both men. Anderson was facing the death penalty before his 2013 exoneration. 

You might also take a cue from the police themselves. Under their labor contract with the city, rank-and-file officers don’t give the lab their DNA, which means the lab can’t easily rule out possible crime-scene contamination. This means that the officers knocking on doors ask people to volunteer to do what they won’t.

Basic privacy is another genuine worry. We see every day how our personal information, once set loose upon the internet, can never be recaptured. The past few years have heralded incredible expansions of the uses of DNA. Now imagine what will be possible in 30 years.

And just when you thought private DNA testing companies were safe (granted, ZH readers generally know better) - FamilyTreeDNA, one of the pioneers of the growing market for "at home", consumer genetic testing, confirmed a report from BuzzFeed that it has quietly granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to its vast trove of nearly 2 million genetic profiles.

Having been caught abusing client privacy, the company decided to make the best of it and despite the (coming) outrage over privacy abuse, Family Tree officials touted their work with the FBI to BuzzFeed.

“Without realizing it [Family Tree DNA founder and CEO Bennett Greenspan] had inadvertently created a platform that, nearly two decades later, would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever,” the company said in a statement.

What a brave new world!

Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,

From Jeff Bezos to Anthony Weiner to Brett Favre, a look back at below-the-belt selfies that shook culture...

The AMI-Jeff Bezos scandal is set up to dominate headlines for a while. Who knows where it will lead? In the third world, an oligarch-president proxy war playing out in public like this usually presages a coup.

If this were Thailand or Uruguay, bookies would already have odds on a Bezos-Mark-Zuckerberg-Sundar-Pichai junta being in power by May.

This scandal will at least drag us through unprecedented legal and ethical conundrums. Can the president use the surveillance powers of the state to go after political enemies? Can a billionaire intelligence contractor and administrator of one of earth’s largest private data collections - including the so-called “Secret Region” cloud - fight back using his own surveillance trove through a newspaper he owns?

This story could blur the lines between public and private power to the point of meaninglessness. America could very well find its fate decided by a series of pre-dawn phone calls, after which we’d wake up to find Trump flying to Switzerland, Amazon lieutenants in the Joint Chiefs office and the presidency replaced by an executive board.

At the center of all of this: a dick pic.

Nothing could be more American than the fate of our democracy now hanging (!) on what Enquirer editor Dylan Howard euphemistically describes as a “below-the-belt selfie.”

Seemingly since the birth of the Internet, celebrity jackasses have felt the urge to take pics of their naughty bits and send them, often unsolicited, on the electronic superhighway. One study suggests as many as four in 10 young women have received an unsolicited nude photo from a man.

The dick-pic scandal really became a thing between 2010 and 2011, with the (listed below) Brett Favre and Anthony Weiner stories. Since then, it’s become so common for men to put their junk online that it really only makes headlines if it’s accidental, political or a slow news day. From Greg Oden to Tyrann Mathieu to Jude Law to countless others, there are so many famous penii online that the headlines have become more interesting than the stories (i.e. “Canada’s Dick Pic Scandal Gets Bigger All the Time”).

A few recent incidents, however, have become relevant major news stories. In declining order of cultural importance, here they are:

10. Brett Favre

What should a wealthy, married professional athlete do when he’s feeling the urge? Obviously send an unsolicited photo of what looks like half a stale donut to a married masseuse who works for your company. Poor Jenn Sterger probably thought she was the first person in history to receive a dong shot from a med school cadaver, but it got worse when she realized the infamous picture belonged to the Jets’ franchise quarterback. The masseuse was subjected to horrific media treatment after that — she actually had to go on TV to say she was not flattered by pictures of Brett Favre’s dick. The Favre incident ended up being a template in many ways for future scandals of this type. The Bezos story already fits on the “selfie-taking male must immediately act like he’s the victim” front, while the “gross-out picture always ends up getting released in NSFW form no matter how hard lawyers try” part of the story is yet to come.

9. Joe Barton

The Republican chair of the House Energy Committee has long had a reputation as one of the meanest people in Washington, like LBJ without national ambition. The Texan has also long been one of the most pious peddlers of aw-shucks, hand-over-heart “family values” claptrap in recent history — among other things he was one of the fiercest critics of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So there was a powerful cosmic justice angle when Barton was caught sending retch-inducing selfies showing him tugging sausage below his giant pink under-cauldron. He added a text message: “I want you so bad, deep and hard.” The selfie-taker-as-victim narrative kicked in quickly, as it’s been suggested Barton should be protected by a new Texas law against “revenge porn.” Of note: despite being a Republican and just as graphically compromised as his Democratic counterpart, Barton has not been dumped on as much either in Washington or in the national press as Anthony Weiner. This might be because Weiner’s preening and bottomless self-regard was extremely funny, while Barton is just a gross wanking old dude. It might also be a telling indicator of how loathed Weiner was during his time on the Hill.

8. Kimberly Guilfoyle

The former Fox anchor — and reputed willing Donald Trump, Jr. paramour — left work last summer amid rumors of bizarre in-office behavior. The Huffington Post, which did a major investigation interviewing 21 unnamed sources, noted: “Six sources said Guilfoyle’s behavior included showing personal photographs of male genitalia to colleagues (and identifying whose genitals they were).” The story also said Guilfoyle frequently complained Jeanine Pirro is too old. So it’s possible people at Fox were shown pictures of a Trump penis against their will. The alleged female dick-pic flasher was a new twist on the usual scandal format.

7. Tony Clement

The Canadian version of the Anthony Weiner scandal was, predictably, basically the same story as the American prototype, only less interesting. The Conservative MP exchanged explicit pictures with someone he thought “was a consenting female” but was, he claimed, in fact “an individual or party who targeted me for the purpose of financial extortion.” Vice reported that Clement was a serial Instagram lurker who went on “deep timeline liking sprees” late at night. Though nothing will ever top Weiner’s decision to try “equine therapy” for his sexting addiction, Clement also went into “treatment” for his behavior, holding to what’s become a pattern (my money is on yoga, dolphins, and Alexa lullabies when Bezos inevitably chooses a sexting cure).

6. Lars Ohly

In proof that junk-shot scandals are survivable, Sweden’s former Left Party leader Ohly emerged unscathed after he accidentally posted his packaging. Apparently he was trying to show off a tattoo.

“Ha, ha, I accidentally posted a picture on Instagram that showed more than intended. Now corrected,” he wrote, and that was it.

No scandal, no horse therapy, no freakout, no major-release documentary. Is everything in Europe easier?

5. Kanye West

It’s now officially more embarrassing to be photographed arm in arm with Donald Trump than it is to have your junk on the Internet. Obviously, it depends a little on the picture.

4. Hulk Hogan

It wasn’t really a dick pic, but the verbal penis-boasting of the famed wrestler — named Terry Bollea in real life — became a central issue in a landmark case that sank a media empire. Hogan’s attorney Shane Vogt scored crucial points in the lawsuit against Gawker for publishing a sex tape of Hogan sleeping with his best friend’s wife. Former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio answered “no” to the question posed by Vogt, “Mr. Bollea’s penis had no real news value, right?” This case not only resulted in the devastation of Gawker Media (now a shell of itself under the name Gizmodo Media), but it forced Bollea, who had bragged to various radio personalities that Hulk Hogan was carrying a monster in his speedo, to say “I do not have a ten-inch penis,” on camera. It’s on YouTube forever. Note: Hogan’s son Nick is said to have been the first male victim of the hack-and-leak scandal called “the Fappening.”

3. Robert Mueller’s extremely rumored, extremely alleged possession of Individual 1’s selfie

In February 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller to great fanfare indicted 13 individuals and three companies connected to the Russian “Internet Research Agency.” It was widely assumed none of the defendants would appear to contest the charges, but one, Concord Management and Catering, did, showing up announcing a willingness to go to trial. Mueller asked permission to delay his own prosecution and was refused, a fact few outlets noticed. Mueller then commenced a long battle over discovery he seems to be winning, successfully arguing to a judge that the Russians are not entitled to what their lawyers call “millions of pages of non-classified discovery.”

As part of the motions in this case, Concord argued, “Could the manner in which [Mueller] collected a nude selfie really threaten the national security of the United States?”

This one sentence for the first time attracted real press attention to the case, as reporters ignored the anomaly of Mueller’s seeming reluctance to present evidence in his own case in favor of the remote possibility that he might have a Trump selfie in his possession. Although clearly, the public would have mixed feelings about the existence of such a picture.

As (again) The Root put it, “Please, for the love of god let this not be a photo of President Mushroom Cap. No one needs to see that. No. One.”

2. Anthony Weiner

It was bad enough that a sitting congressman named Weiner was sending unsolicited “nether region” pics to women around the country; it was worse when he did it again after leaving office, this time to a 15-year-old girl. What’s even worse is Donald Trump might now be president because of it. In late 2016, why is the FBI up on Weiner’s laptop if he’s not sexting with a teenager? Do new Hillary Clinton emails come out just before Election Day that year if Weiner wasn’t so proud of his photography? As an excuse for why the Democrats lost, emailgate has always seemed pathetic, but viewed purely through the lens of individual consequences, the butterfly effect of Weiner’s eroto-narcissistic addiction has been amazing. Not only did he help launch Breitbart into national-power status through his humiliating public prostration before the gloating form of Andrew Breitbart himself, but he threw a massive wrench in the 2016 presidential election by exposing his wife’s boss to political tormentors at just the wrong time. There’s not much to say beyond, what an asshole.

1. Jeff Bezos

The Bezos story is proof that there is no disincentive that could be invented to prevent men from taking pictures of their penises. Under Washington state law, Bezos’ wife MacKenzie in a divorce could collect half of his 79 million shares of Amazon stock, worth north of $130 billion. She could also massively dilute the worth of Amazon stock by forcing Bezos to sell off his shares to pay her in cash. This means Bezos at some point aimed a camera at his unit, snapped, and thought: I’m gonna risk $65 billion to hit send.

MacKenzie, a novelist, informed Bezos of her plans to divorce two days after being told an upcoming Enquirer story about his affair with Lauren Sanchez that included “raunchy messages and erotic selfies.”

Mercifully, we haven’t seen the actual photo yet, but we do seem to be mere minutes from a constitutional crisis.

So that’s awesome. What’s the over/under on dick-pic scandals in the 2020 race? I put it at two and I’m taking the over. You heard it here first.

During his town hall on CNN Tuesday night, possible 2020 presidential candidate Howard Schultz dodged the question of whether he would sell his Starbucks shares if he decides to run and ends up winning the upcoming election.

“If you run for president, if you become president, Mr. Schultz, will you sell all of your shares in Starbucks?” CNN’s Poppy Harlow asked Schultz tonight, who responded by joking that “we’re getting way premature” with the question.

“This is my third week since 60 Minutes,” he said.

Harlow continued by pressing him on the question, leading Schultz to give typical politician non-answer regarding the sale of his shares:

“Uh, I think the best way to say that is that I will do nothing whatsoever to have any conflict of interest between my investments overall or my interests in the company that I love, because I will put the role and responsibility and the accountability for results first if I run for president and I’m fortunate enough to win. And that is a promise I make to the American people.”

“Have you not decided if you would sell all of your shares?” the host asked again.

“I don’t think that’s the question. I think there are multiple ways to do this,” he responded. “No, no, I’m not evading the question. There are multiple ways to do this, set up a blind trust, to do lots of things to remove any conflict of interest.”

Watch above, via CNN.

[Image via screengrab]

A New York City Police detective was killed by friendly fire during a robbery Tuesday night in Queens.

NASA sets likely funeral for silent Mars Opportunity rover  CNET

The solar-powered rover hasn't called home since being swamped by a massive dust storm months ago.

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1. Radar reveals a second potential impact crater under Greenland's ice  Science Magazine
2. Huge Meteor Left Crater Hidden Beneath Greenland Ice  Live Science
3. NASA Spots a Second Massive Possible Impact Crater Buried Under Greenland Ice  Space.com
4. There's a second impact crater under Greenland  Astronomy Magazine
5. NASA Spots Another Possible Impact Crater Buried Under Greenland Ice  Scientific American
6. View full coverage on Google News

Nearly 75% of American households believe the nation is experiencing a housing affordability crisis, according to a recent survey published on behalf of the National Association of Home Builders.

Affordability appears to be a significant issue for renters and prospecting homeowners.

So realtor.com wanted to find the locations where housing is the most unaffordable.

What they discovered was not necessarily the most expensive real estate markets. The focus of the report is on regions where residents are spending above 28% of their household income on a place to live.

As realtor.com warns: "that can be a perilous financial line to walk."

“The more you spend on housing the less you have to spend on other things you value and to fund your financial goals," says Roger Ma, a financial planner at Lifelaidout and New York City–based real estate agent.

The real estate listings website said some cities made the list because "foreign, out-of-state, and second- and third-home buyers" had inflated prices out of reach of the locals, many of whom are considered to be the poor working class. Other areas are popular with retirees, who have lower incomes or are living on savings. And less expensive places on the list are due to low, local wages and a lack of high-paying jobs.

To compute the findings, realtor.com examined median monthly housing costs in 500 metros to pinpoint the markets where residents are spending way too much on their homes. They did this by dividing the median monthly expenses for renters and homeowners by the median monthly household income.

realtor.com presents: America's Most Unaffordable Cities For Housing 

 

1. Santa Cruz, CA

Median list price: $895,800
Median monthly housing cost: $1,840
Median household income: $73,663
Share of income going toward housing*: 30%

2. Miami, FL 

Median list price: $385,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,280
Median household income: $51,758
Share of income going toward housing: 29.7% 

3. Grants Pass, OR

Median list price: $334,600
Median monthly housing cost: $918
Median household income: $40,705
Share of income going toward housing: 27.1%

4. Atlantic City, NJ

Median list price: $240,000
Median monthly housing cost: $1,290
Median household income: $57,514
Share of income going toward housing: 26.9%

5. New York, NY

Median list price: $515,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,588
Median household income: $72,205
Share of income going toward housing: 26.4%

6. Kahului, HI

Median list price: $928,800
Median monthly housing cost: $1,594
Median household income: $72,743
Share of income going toward housing: 26.3%

7. Jacksonville, NC 

Median list price: $203,300
Median monthly housing cost: $1,028
Median household income: $48,162
Share of income going toward housing: 25.6%

8. Bellingham, WA

Median list price: $415,000
Median monthly housing cost: $1,203
Median household income: $56,419
Share of income going toward housing: 25.6%

9. Barnstable Town, MA

Median list price: $525,00
Median monthly housing cost: $1,411
Median household income: $68,048
Share of income going toward housing: 24.9%

10. Carson City, NV

Median list price: $347,100
Median monthly housing cost: $1,012
Median household income: $49,341
Share of income going toward housing: 24.6%

Housing is vital to the economic health of the country. This new report should serve as a wake-up call to lawmakers at all levels of government to ease regulatory burdens that drive up the cost of housing and enact sensible policies that will promote affordable living.

Authored by James Carroll via TomDispatch.com,

With the creation of a new “mini-nuke” warhead, the US is making nuclear war all the more probable...

Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched Trident missile, a weapon with a range of more than 7,500 miles. By September, an undisclosed number of warheads will be delivered to the Navy for deployment.

What makes this particular nuke new is the fact that it carries a far smaller destructive payload than the thermonuclear monsters the Trident has been hosting for decades - not the equivalent of about 100 kilotons of TNT as previously, but of five kilotons. According to Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the W76-2 will yield “only” about one-third of the devastating power of the weapon that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yet that very shrinkage of the power to devastate is precisely what makes this nuclear weapon potentially the most dangerous ever manufactured. Fulfilling the Trump administration’s quest for nuclear-war-fighting “flexibility,” it isn’t designed as a deterrent against another country launching its nukes; it’s designed to be used.  This is the weapon that could make the previously “unthinkable” thinkable.

There have long been “low-yield” nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear powers, including ones on cruise missiles, “air-drop bombs” (carried by planes), and even nuclear artillery shells — weapons designated as “tactical” and intended to be used in the confines of a specific battlefield or in a regional theater of war. The vast majority of them were, however, eliminated in the nuclear arms reductions that followed the end of the Cold War, a scaling-down by both the United States and Russia that would be quietly greeted with relief by battlefield commanders, those actually responsible for the potential use of such ordnance who understood its self-destructive absurdity.

Ranking some weapons as “low-yield” based on their destructive energy always depended on a distinction that reality made meaningless (once damage from radioactivity and atmospheric fallout was taken into account along with the unlikelihood that only one such weapon would be used). In fact, the elimination of tactical nukes represented a hard-boiled confrontation with the iron law of escalation, another commander’s insight — that any use of such a weapon against a similarly armed adversary would likely ignite an inevitable chain of nuclear escalation whose end point was barely imaginable. One side was never going to take a hit without responding in kind, launching a process that could rapidly spiral toward an apocalyptic exchange. “Limited nuclear war,” in other words, was a fool’s fantasy and gradually came to be universally acknowledged as such. No longer, unfortunately.

Unlike tactical weapons, intercontinental strategic nukes were designed to directly target the far-off homeland of an enemy. Until now, their extreme destructive power (so many times greater than that inflicted on Hiroshima) made it impossible to imagine genuine scenarios for their use that would be practically, not to mention morally, acceptable. It was exactly to remove that practical inhibition — the moral one seemed not to count — that the Trump administration recently began the process of withdrawing from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, while rolling a new “limited” weapon off the assembly line and so altering the Trident system. With these acts, there can be little question that humanity is entering a perilous second nuclear age.

That peril lies in the way a 70-year-old inhibition that undoubtedly saved the planet is potentially being shelved in a new world of supposedly “usable” nukes. Of course, a weapon with one-third the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, where as many as 150,000 died, might kill 50,000 people in a similar attack before escalation even began. Of such nukes, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was at President Ronald Reagan’s elbow when Cold War-ending arms control negotiations climaxed, said, “A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. You use a small one, then you go to a bigger one. I think nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons and we need to draw the line there.”

HOW CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT?

Until now, it’s been an anomaly of the nuclear age that some of the fiercest critics of such weaponry were drawn from among the very people who created it. The emblem of that is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a bimonthly journal founded after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by veteran scientists from the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear weapons. (Today, that magazine’s sponsors include 14 Nobel Laureates.) Beginning in 1947, the Bulletin’s cover has functioned annually as a kind of nuclear alarm, featuring a so-called Doomsday Clock, its minute hand always approaching “midnight” (defined as the moment of nuclear catastrophe).

In that first year, the hand was positioned at seven minutes to midnight. In 1949, after the Soviet Union acquired its first atomic bomb, it inched up to three minutes before midnight. Over the years, it has been reset every January to register waxing and waning levels of nuclear jeopardy. In 1991, after the end of the Cold War, it was set back to 17 minutes and then, for a few hope-filled years, the clock disappeared altogether.

It came back in 2005 at seven minutes to midnight. In 2007, the scientists began factoring climate degradation into the assessment and the hands moved inexorably forward. By 2018, after a year of Donald Trump, it clocked in at two minutes to midnight, a shrill alarm meant to signal a return to the greatest peril ever: the two-minute level reached only once before, 65 years earlier. Last month, within days of the announced manufacture of the first W76-2, theBulletin’scover for 2019 was unveiled, still at that desperate two-minute mark, aka the edge of doom.

To fully appreciate how precarious our situation is today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientistsimplicitly invites us to return to that other two-minutes-before-midnight moment. If the manufacture of a new low-yield nuclear weapon marks a decisive pivot back toward jeopardy, consider it an irony that the last such moment involved the manufacture of the extreme opposite sort of nuke: a “super” weapon, as it was then called, or a hydrogen bomb. That was in 1953 and what may have been the most fateful turn in the nuclear story until now had just occurred.

After the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the United States embarked on a crash program to build a far more powerful nuclear weapon. Having been decommissioned after World War II, the Pantex plant was reactivated and has been the main source of American nukes ever since.

The atomic bomb is a fission weapon, meaning the nuclei of atoms are split into parts whose sum total weighs less than the original atoms, the difference having been transformed into energy. A hydrogen bomb uses the intense heat generated by that “fission” (hence thermonuclear) as a trigger for a vastly more powerful “fusion,” or combining, of elements, which results in an even larger loss of mass being transformed into explosive energy of a previously unimagined sort. One H-bomb generates explosive force 100 to 1,000 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

Given a kind of power that humans once only imagined in the hands of the gods, key former Manhattan Project scientists, including Enrico Fermi, James Conant, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, firmly opposed the development of such a new weapon as a potential threat to the human species. The Super Bomb would be, in Conant’s word, “genocidal.” Following the lead of those scientists, members of the Atomic Energy Commission recommended — by a vote of three to two — against developing such a fusion weapon, but President Truman ordered it done anyway.

In 1952, as the first H-bomb test approached, still-concerned atomic scientists proposed that the test be indefinitely postponed to avert a catastrophic “super” competition with the Soviets. They suggested that an approach be made to Moscow to mutually limit thermonuclear development only to research on, not actual testing of, such weaponry, especially since none of this could truly be done in secret. A fusion bomb’s test explosion would be readily detectable by the other side, which could then proceed with its own testing program. The scientists urged Moscow and Washington to draw just the sort of arms control line that the two nations would indeed agree to many years later.

At the time, the United States had the initiative. An out-of-control arms race with the potential accumulation of thousands of such weapons on both sides had not yet really begun. In 1952, the United States numbered its atomic arsenal in the low hundreds; the Soviet Union in the dozens. (Even those numbers, of course, already offered a vision of an Armageddon-like global war.) President Truman considered the proposal to indefinitely postpone the test. It was then backed by figures like Vannevar Bush, who headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had overseen the wartime Manhattan Protect. Scientists like him already grasped the lesson that would only slowly dawn on policymakers — that every advance in the atomic capability of one of the superpowers would inexorably lead the other to match it, ad infinitum. The title of the bestselling James Jones novel of that moment caught the feeling perfectly: From Here to Eternity.

In the last days of his presidency, however, Truman decided against such an indefinite postponement of the test — against, that is, a break in the nuke-accumulation momentum that might well have changed history. On November 1, 1952, the first H-bomb — “Mike” — was detonated on an island in the Pacific. It had 500 times more lethal force than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. With a fireball more than three miles wide, not only did it destroy the three-story structure built to house it but also the entire island of Elugelab, as well as parts of several nearby islands.

In this way, the thermonuclear age began and the assembly line at that same Pantex plant really started to purr.  Less than 10 years later, the United States had 20,000 nukes, mostly H-bombs; Moscow, fewer than 2,000. And three months after that first test, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved that hand on its still new clock to two minutes before midnight.

A MADMAN-THEORY VERSION OF THE WORLD

It may seem counterintuitive to compare the manufacture of what’s called a “mini-nuke” to the creation of the “super” almost six decades ago, but honestly, what meaning can “mini” really have when we’re talking about nuclear war? The point is that, as in 1952, so in 2019 another era-shaping threshold is being crossed at the very same weapons plant in the high plains country of the Texas Panhandle, where so many instruments of mayhem have been created. Ironically, because the H-bomb was eventually understood to be precisely what the dissenting scientists had claimed it was — a genocidal weapon — pressures against its use proved insurmountable during almost four decades of savage East-West hostility. Today, the Trident-mounted W76-2 could well have quite a different effect — its first act of destruction potentially being the obliteration of the long-standing, post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki taboo against nuclear use. In other words, so many years after the island of Elugelab was wiped from the face of the Earth, the “absolute weapon” is finally being normalized.

With President Trump expunging the theoretical from Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” — that former president’s conviction that an opponent should fear an American leader was so unstable he might actually push the nuclear button — what is to be done? Once again, nuke-skeptical scientists, who have grasped the essential problems in the nuclear conundrum with crystal clarity for three quarters of a century, are pointing the way. In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with Physicians for Social Responsibility, launched Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War, “a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on.”

Engaging a broad coalition of civic organizations, municipalities, religious groups, educators, and scientists, it aims to lobby government bodies at every level, to raise the nuclear issue in every forum, and to engage an ever-wider group of citizens in pressing for change in American nuclear policy. Back From the Brink makes five demands, much needed in a world in which the U.S. and Russia are withdrawing from a key Cold-War-era nuclear treaty with more potentially to come, including the New START pact that expires two years from now. The five demands are:

1. No to first use of nukes. (Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Adam Smith only recently introduced a No First Use Act in both houses of Congress to stop Trump and future presidents from launching a nuclear war.)

2. End the unchecked launch-authority of the president. (Last month, Senator Edward Markey and Representative Ted Lieu reintroduced a bill that would do just that.)

3. No to nuclear hair-triggers.

4. No to endlessly renewing and replacing the arsenal (as the U.S. is now doing to the tune of perhaps $1.6 trillion over three decades).

5. Yes to an abolition agreement among nuclear-armed states.

These demands range from the near-term achievable to the long-term hoped for, but as a group they define what clear-eyed realism should be in Donald Trump’s new version of our never-ending nuclear age.

In the upcoming season of presidential politics, the nuclear question belongs at the top of every candidate’s agenda. It belongs at the center of every forum and at the heart of every voter’s decision. Action is needed before the W76-2 and its successors teach a post-Hiroshima planet what nuclear war is truly all about.

Transgender activists are lobbying the courts to achieve their goal of removing children from the homes of parents who refuse to affirm their child's new, self-proclaimed gender identity.