Here’s to all the shockingly single bachelor uncles or the two very close friends who just happened to be girls and are only living together until one of them finds a man (they lived together for forty two years).
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
Does this hold true for others, too? This could be a game-changer.
Please, there is already so much noise in my ears, I do not want Sam and Brennan in there, too.
A juror was dismissed Monday after reporting that a woman dropped a bag of $120,000 in cash at her home and offered her more money if she would vote to acquit seven people charged with stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children during the pandemic.
“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”
These seven are the first of 70 defendants expected to go to trial in a conspiracy that cost taxpayers $250 million. Eighteen others have pleaded guilty, and authorities said they recovered about $50 million in one of the nation’s largest pandemic-related fraud cases. Prosecutors say just a fraction of the money went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property.
I am so grateful for comics like these because if people hadn’t started joking about it I would never have known why i was Like This
In Japan we call ourselves “fluorescent light” (keiko-to-) because, you know, it takes a few seconds to turn on.
[Image Description: a two panel comic of two figures drawn in black lineart with wide heads and simplified torsos.
Person 1: hey man do u wanna get French toast?
Person 2: sorry what did u say? I couldn’t hear u I’m sorry.
The first person repeats their question but it is covered up by the second person’s speech bubble with larger red text saying “Oh shit yeah I heard u actually let’s get French toast!”
Almost $100k per smooch in 2024 dollars (she made over $7M that day)
June 12, 1942 — “Glamour Selling War Bonds! Out in Portland, Oregon, movie delectable Lana Turner spurs drive by promising a kiss to any man who buys $5,000 worth. The score: $380,000 in one day!”
I’ve officially forgiven Dublin Bus for all the times they were late or never showed up costhepride Bus they done with proud dads was the most wholesome thing i’ve ever seen in my life & i still can’t watch it without tearing up omfg
i thought i could keep it together but i lost it at “let’s go to pride, son”
Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Travis County District Attorney José Garza announced Tuesday that his office would ask the state’s highest criminal court to overturn Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardon of a man who was convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter demonstrator in 2020.
One day after a Travis County jury convicted Daniel Perry of murder in April 2023 for shooting Garrett Foster, Abbott asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to consider Perry’s case.
Last month, the board unanimously recommended Abbott pardon Perry’s 25-year prison sentence, which he did the same day.
In July 2020, Perry had turned into a crowd of marching protesters while driving for a ride-share company in downtown Austin. Foster, who was participating in a protest against police brutality, was legally carrying an AK-47 at the time. Perry claims Foster had raised his rifle toward him, though witnesses said he didn’t. Perry fired a handgun repeatedly at Foster before he sped away and called police.
On Tuesday, Garza said his office filed a petition with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Abbott’s pardon, arguing the governor’s intervention interfered with lower court rulings and halted the appellate process. The Travis County prosecutor also said Perry’s case did not meet the requirements to receive a pardon.
“When Governor Abbott issued the pardon, not only did he circumnavigate the process for pardons, he exceeded his authority and violated the separation of powers doctrine,” Holly Taylor, the director of the Division of Public Integrity and Complex Crimes for the district attorney's office, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.
Garza said he also requested an opportunity to argue the case in front of the court to “make our case on behalf of our democracy, our legal system and the family.”
In his declaration announcing the pardon last month, Abbott claimed Garza, who ran for district attorney on a progressive platform, had prioritized “reducing access to guns” instead of protecting Perry’s right to self defense. The governor’s office did not return a request for comment as of Tuesday evening.
Sheila Foster, the mother of Foster, who was a U.S. Air Force veteran, was present at Tuesday’s press conference. She said Abbot’s pardon could encourage similar violence against others who have different political views.
“My own child was killed on American soil for doing nothing but practicing his First and Second Amendment rights and our governor just said, ‘That’s OK, that’s acceptable,’” Foster said.
Doug O'Connell, Perry's lawyer, called Tuesday’s filing “political theater” by Garza.
“The pardon power of the executive branch is a well settled Constitutional authority,” O'Connell said on social media.
Abbott rarely issues pardons, in which the seven-person board — appointed by the governor — must recommend before Abbott can act. Abbott granted three pardons in 2023, two pardons in 2022 and eight in 2021 — most for lower-level offenses.
Abbott’s pardon of Perry came after influential conservative voices, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Texas GOP Chair Matt Rinaldi, urged Abbott to pardon Perry saying he acted in self-defense in the face of dangerous protests.
Shortly after Perry’s conviction, unsealed court documents revealed that he had made a slew of racist, threatening comments about protesters in text messages and social media posts. Days after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted nationwide protests, Perry sent a text message saying, “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” Both Perry and Foster are white.
Those court documents also revealed that Perry sent inappropriate messages to someone who claimed to be 16 years old through a messaging platform that has been used to share child pornography.
Following Abbott’s pardon, a group of 14 attorneys general from across the country wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking the federal agency to investigate whether Perry violated Foster’s civil rights.
“When states fail to protect their residents from such violations of our civil rights, it’s imperative that DOJ steps in and ensures that justice is served,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “We urge DOJ to investigate this incident and demonstrate that this will not be tolerated in America.”
We’ve added new speakers to the stellar lineup of leaders, lawmakers and newsmakers hitting the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Get an up-close look at today’s biggest issues at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event!
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
this is one of TWO great new tooth therapies i’ve been very interested in!
in one, they pack your cavities or cracked tooth or whatever with stem cells and then trigger those stem cells to become tooth cells and your tooth basically heals itself :D
in this one, they basically tell your genes, “hey, remember that bit of genetic code that caused your body to grow a whole new set of teeth when you were like 8 years old? Yeah, run that code again right here” or, more accurately, what they really do is tell your body to temporarily stop running the extra bit of code that prevents you continuously growing new teeth like a shark.
anyway, can you imagine? Right now if you lose an adult tooth, in order to replace it they have to drill into your skull bones and screw in a fake one. In ten years you might be able to just… grow a new one! the future of dentistry is about to be so cool!
I’ve complained about my inability to constantly regrow teeth for ages now. crossing my fingers I can get this at some point
if this works this is gonna benefit a whole lot of people
Gonna use all our extra teeth to make terrifying weapons
Finally, I can have all my teeth comically fall out when I bite something hard on accident and then regrow them for the next time that needs to happen
I’m gonna have so much teeth for crafts and activities 🥰
So I decided to look further into this story. I’ve been lamenting my rent recently– in 2019, it was a hefty 1,900. Now, in 2024, it’s 2,850.
This complex prided itself on safety. My car was broken into, and my neighbor’s car was stolen. In the garage– which has no security cameras– several other, more severe crimes have occurred.
My apartment had roaches for eight months because another tenant left their home in disarray. Nests upon nests of roaches.
Our air-conditioner, which is not optional where I live, has broken down 15 times in the past two years. The emergency maintenance number has never worked, and I recently learned– after going to visit the managers myself– that it simply hasn’t been working for a year.
Oh, and they told us they can’t replace the fridge filters anymore. It’s just… oh, perish the thought, too expensive.
And last time we went to re-sign our lease, when I spotted a listing from our building managers– our exact unit plan, our exact floor– for 2,315, I took screenshot. Why, I thought, would us long-time tenants be asked to pay 2,850 when new renters were looking at 2,315?
Eleven days later when I went to ask them about it, the listing had mysteriously disappeared. “Oh, when was it that price? It wasn’t listed at that price. Oh, that screenshot’s from… a few days ago. The market’s volatile.” They told me. Really? $600 in 11 days volatile?
If we adjust what I was originally paying for cumulative inflation, I should be paying 2,415 a month. It just didn’t make sense! But moving was expensive, and the other options in our area were expensive too.
So you can imagine that when I looked into this story and learned the fucking company that the FBI is investigating is the same company that manages my building, I SCREAMED.
So, check this shit out. This is absolutely fucked beyond imagining, and almost certainly worse than you even thought, and they wrote this shit down:
Last month, the FBI reportedly conducted an unannounced raid of Cortland Management, a major corporate landlord based in Atlanta. The surprise search appears to be part of a Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported by Politico in March, into an alleged scheme among many corporate landlords to artificially increase rents through collusion.
…
According to the lawsuit filed by the State of Arizona in February, landlords that are supposed to be in competition with each other “outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight” to RealPage. The company allegedly facilitates and encourages landlords to work cooperatively to increase rents. [In other words, to illegally collude.] An e-book produced by RealPage says that the company allows corporate landlords who are “technically competitors” to “work together … to make us all more successful in our pricing.” RealPage bragged that landlords that use its software “continually outpace the market in good times and bad.” In other words, RealPage helps landlords charge higher rates than they would in a truly competitive market.
…
RealPage’s former CEO revealed that participating landlords share “occupancy rates, rents charged for each unit and each floorplan, lease terms, amenities, move-in dates, and move-out dates." After feeding in this highly-detailed information that would normally be kept proprietary, "landlords agree to outsource their pricing authority to RealPage—rather than competing with one another on price.” RealPage even has a feature called “auto-pilot” that lets the software set rent prices without any human approval or intervention. …
…RealPage employs “pricing advisors” who “meet with landlords to ensure that properties are implementing RealPage’s set rates.” This is described by Arizona as “policing the conspiracy to make sure no one cheats by lowering prices and trying to gain market share.” RealPage training materials, cited in the DC lawsuit, advise that landlords “should be compliant” with the software’s pricing recommendations. The Arizona lawsuit claims that landlords “agree that if they fail to consistently implement RealPage’s set rates, their contract with RealPage will be terminated.” Jeffrey Roper, who created the RealPage algorithm, explained that if “you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system."
… According to the plaintiffs, landlords using RealPage "account for over 53% of the multifamily rental market in the Atlanta Submarket.”
Did you catch all of that? These landlords, who control over fifty percent of the multifamily rental market in the Atlanta Metro area, turned over a bunch of privileged information to a company which promises them greater profits. How does it do that? Well, RealPage literally requires them to collude with each other to fix prices. @artsekey saw the effects of that in real time: rents jumping $600 in a couple of days, and why? Well, in the words of Amber Ruffin, which I will take totally out of context:
So yeah, it’s a fucking cartel. Literally, this is “an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.” That is the literal definition of a fucking cartel, and this absolutely meets that definition.
They wrote it down! They fucking WROTE IT DOWN! They’re so confident that they put it in their fucking training materials.
(LegalEagle used that clip in a video about Trump so that line has been stuck in my head all fucking day, but SERIOUSLY Y'ALL.)
Okay okay we all know Johnny cash did his cover of Hurt and we were all like “ok he owns that now” but I watched the music video he made and I’m like “oh he OWNS it owns it”
It’s totally wild to me because most people agree that Trent Reznor is a master of his craft and Hurt is considered one of NIN’s best songs. Imagine having this great hit and 8 years later a musical legend who hasn’t done anything great in a long time and is ostensibly dying takes your song and fucking. Just fucking obliterates you
Taken from the Wikipedia page. Even Trent Reznor said it’s not his song anymore.
I guess friendly reminder that you can’t actually judge someone’s socioeconomic status based on what they own and the classic republican “they can’t be poor they own a smart phone/computer” argument doesn’t suddenly stop being complete out of touch nonsense when a poor person makes it.
Anyway insert “y'all can’t be trusted to eat the rich bcs you’ll target taco bell shift leaders and people with playstations instead of actual billionaires” post here.
One time, in the local queer exchange, an older person was trying to sell a small painting by a long-dead, moderately well known artist for a couple grand and all these babies started screaming at them in the comments about how high the asking price was and how they should be donating the painting to a museum or the money to charity. And OP was like, “the artist gave me this as a gift bc we were friends and I’m only selling it to pay for chemo.”
There’s a story that goes around in conservative circles about “people on welfare who drive Cadillacs” (which, at least in the mid-20th Century, was a more expensive make of car than, say, a Ford). The implication is that people on welfare don’t really deserve it, because if they had enough money for a Caddy, they have enough money to pay for food.
And, you know, there are a lot of reasons that someone who is poor might have something that started out expensive: maybe they lost their job or got divorced or had a medical crisis recently, and the car is from before that. Maybe it’s really old and thus cheap. Maybe it was a gift from a family member with more money than they have (I drove a Mercedes Benz to school in high school … but it was a thirty-year-old beater that could barely maintain road speed on a flat road, and which I got for free because it had been passed through several family members before it got to me). Maybe a lot of things.
But the interesting thing is where the story about welfare recipients in Cadillacs comes from. You see, it comes from an experiment they did in a city where they wanted to see who was getting welfare checks and how they lived to give proof that they didn’t “deserve” the money. So they declared that one month, instead of checks being mailed out to people, they had to come to City Hall to pick them up.
Now, the thing is, a lot of poor people don’t have cars, either because they’re too poor to afford them, or because they are old and can’t drive any longer. So this was a major problem for a lot of people. So the local boyscout troop (which had a lot of kids from upper-class families) organized rides for all of them. So yeah, a lot of people showed up in Caddys and Lincoln Towncars and other nice cars … not because they owned nice cars but because the people who gave them the ride owned nice cars. But the story that goes around is about the “lazy scammers who are on welfare but drive luxury cars so they can’t really be poor.” That’s the story they tell! It’s not true, but it’s the story.
If your assumptions of wealth and poverty is the same as conservatives, if the way you talk about poor people is indistinguishable from conservatives, you are not a progressive.
The stinkers that visit us are really hard to startle -- I regularly chase them... they did get the MiL one night when she surprised them (dog in a bay carriage).
ALT
ALT
ALT
