Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
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China’s military has flown into Taiwan’s ADIZ almost every day since 2020.
Crossings of the median line have soared, effectively erasing it altogether.
The incursions, as well as large-scale military drills, wear down Taiwan’s military.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinas-warplanes-erased-dividing-line-165641392.html
This would discourage me from getting pregnant and having kids.
https://www.vox.com/life/377657/pregnancy-miscarriage-care-abortion-bans
“The 12-week abortion ban Nebraska lawmakers passed in May 2023 included exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
As in other states, these exceptions have proved ambiguous for doctors on the ground, and many patients who need abortion care have been unable to get it.
Kim Paseka, a 34-year-old woman based in Lincoln, Nebraska, was one of those patients. Paseka lives with her husband and their 3-year-old son, and though they wanted at least two children, they were unsure about pursuing that in Nebraska after Roe was overturned.
“We knew it was probably inevitable that our state government was going to work on banning reproductive health care in some capacity and it definitely gave us pause, like should we move, do we stay and fight? Those were our dinner table conversations,” she told Vox. In the summer of 2023, just after Nebraska lawmakers passed their 12-week ban, Paseka learned she was pregnant again.
Initial blood tests looked fine, but following a routine ultrasound, Paseka was informed that her baby’s heartbeat was slower than expected. In subsequent appointments, the doctors determined the heartbeat was diminishing and that Paseka was carrying a nonviable pregnancy.
Because of the new ban and the fact that Paseka’s life was not immediately threatened, her doctors weren’t comfortable ending the pregnancy. They sent her home with instructions for “expectant management” — meaning to wait until she’d bleed out eventually with a miscarriage.
“I had to go back to the hospital for three more scans, where I had to see the heartbeat weaken further week by week, and during this whole time I’m so nauseous, I’m tired, I’m experiencing all the regular pregnancy symptoms, but I was carrying a nonviable pregnancy,” she said. It took roughly a month for Paseka to finally bleed out the pregnancy at home.
“In Nebraska, we have these exceptions, but in my situation it wasn’t assault, it wasn’t incest, and my life wasn’t in immediate danger, so I automatically just lose health care,” she said. “They’re forgetting how detrimental that can be to mental health, that it’s not just about physical endangerment. … I felt like a walking coffin.”
Mann, the executive director of Nebraska’s statewide abortion fund, emphasized that the 12-week ban has had far-reaching consequences that most people underestimate.
“Not only are folks now restricted in how and when they can get the care they need, but it’s additionally problematic that these rules are designed to be confusing and were brought about during a time when confusion was at an all-time high,” she told Vox. “We talk to callers and members of the community all the time who have no idea when and if abortion is even legal here in Nebraska.”
There are two remaining abortion clinics in the state, though both only perform abortions part-time, meaning there sometimes are not enough appointments to go around, including for patients traveling in from states with near-total bans like Iowa and South Dakota.
“This means that not only are patients who are past the 12-week mark forced to flee the state for care, but even patients under that ban restriction are sometimes having to travel just to get an appointment in a timely manner,” Mann explained. “These patients are going to places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver … this travel is often expensive, inconvenient, and overall an enormous burden on pregnant people.””
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/377639/nebraska-abortion-ballot-measure-trimester-ban-election-reproductive-freedom
“Beginning in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as a particular method of punishment grew less common, the Court was increasingly likely to declare it cruel and unusual in violation of the Constitution.
At least some members of the Court’s Republican majority, however, have suggested that this “evolving standards of decency” framework should be abandoned. In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), the Court considered whether states could use execution methods that risked causing the dying inmate a great deal of pain. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which held that potentially painful methods of execution are allowed, seems to exist in a completely different universe than the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases that look to evolving standards.
While the Court’s earlier opinions ask whether a particular form of punishment has fallen out of favor today, Gorsuch asked whether a method of punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. Though his opinion does list some methods of execution, such as “disemboweling” and “burning alive” that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch wrote that these methods are unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’”
What makes Bucklew confusing, however, is that it didn’t explicitly overrule any of the previous decisions applying the evolving standards framework. So it’s unclear whether all five of the justices who joined that opinion share a desire to blow up more than a half-century of law, or if the justices who joined the Bucklew majority simply failed to rein in an overly ambitious opinion by Gorsuch, the Court’s most intellectually sloppy justice.
In any event, Hamm opens up at least two major potential divides within the Court. Smith says he is intellectually disabled; the state of Alabama wants to execute him anyway. So the case perfectly tees up a challenge to Atkins if a majority of the justices want to go there. Meanwhile, Bucklew looms like a vulture over any cruel and unusual punishment case heard by the Court, as it suggests that the Republican justices may hit the reset button on all of its Eighth Amendment precedents at any time.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/378058/supreme-court-hamm-smith-death-penalty-eighth-amendment
“Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.”
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“The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.”
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“scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.”
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“the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.
Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.
Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.
One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/378359/hurricane-climate-change-flood-helene-milton-warming
“There are two primary reasons for the recent uptick in announcements of tainted food. One, the US food system has become extremely complicated in recent decades: There are more imported foods now as well as more highly processed foods, which creates more opportunities for disease to enter the food system.
Two, the government has better and faster tracing capabilities, thanks to legislation around food safety modernization. That makes it easier for the Food and Drug Administration, one of the bodies that investigates such outbreaks, to track problems to their source. It also makes it easier for companies to recall tainted products before they spread further into the food system and sicken large numbers of people. (The US Department of Agriculture oversees recalls of meat, poultry, and eggs as well, but it’s not subject to this legislation.)”
https://www.vox.com/food/379474/mcdonalds-e-coli-boars-head-listeria-salmonella-outbreak
“Some of the most valuable farmed species, like salmon and trout, are carnivorous and must be fed wild-caught fish when farmed. Farmed shrimp, along with a number of omnivorous fish species, are also fed wild-caught fish. All told, some 17 million of the 91 million metric tons of wild-caught fish are diverted to the aquaculture industry annually.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379564/fish-farming-sustainable-wild-caught
“Despite the decline in attention, Zika is still spreading in many countries. In the first half of 2023, health officials recorded about 27,000 Zika infections in the Americas, with Brazil the most affected country with more than 2,700 cases. Thousands of babies are still being born with preventable disabilities.
“With a safe and effective Zika vaccine, we could eliminate the possibility of congenital Zika syndrome, and I think that would have a huge impact,” said Anna Durbin, a professor of international health and global disease epidemiology and control at Johns Hopkins University. “Even if there are few cases of congenital Zika syndrome, just the emotional, financial effect of that is huge.”
Scientists and global health experts warn that Zika, alongside other mosquito-borne infectious diseases, could make a broader resurgence. The first step to defeating pandemics is, of course, prevention, and a Zika vaccine is vital to that goal.
But major hurdles stand in the way. Private pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to invest in vaccine development because so few people are getting infected now — and those who are getting infected largely live in relatively poor countries. Researchers say governments aren’t investing sufficient public funds in vaccine development. And it is almost impossible to run a traditional clinical trial for the few vaccines hastily developed during the 2015 outbreak.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379740/zika-virus-vaccine-mosquitoes-climate-change
“These experiences have given Patel a worldview that I think is best defined as paranoid.
Patel believes that foreign enemies — ranging from China to Iran to drug cartels — are doing their best to infiltrate the United States and wreak havoc on its homeland. Only Trump has the strength and the fortitude to stand up against these enemies and defend American allies like Israel.
The Democrats, he believes, do not just disagree with Trump on how to handle these threats: They are actively aligned with America’s enemies.
In one War Room segment, for example, Patel hosted a discredited China “expert” named Gordon Chang to warn that China was “planning an attack on our facilities on our soil.” But it’s worse than that, Chang argued: China had installed Joe Biden as the president of the United States.
“They were actually able to cast the decisive vote in 2020,” Chang told Patel, claiming without evidence that China “poured money into Joe Biden’s campaign” through the Democratic crowdfunding platform ActBlue. Patel’s response was not skepticism but credulity: “I hope people are paying attention.”
But Democrats are not merely unwitting cat’s paws of foreign powers, per Patel: They are nefarious actors aiming to tear down American democracy.
One of Patel’s favorite phrases, one that he uses again and again on Bannon’s show, is “two-tiered system of justice.” In his mind, federal law enforcement employs two distinct standards — one for “the deep state’s” friends and another for its enemies. Its allies, like the Bidens, receive only limited and superficial scrutiny, while its enemies are constantly harassed and persecuted. The four prosecutions of Trump, for Patel, are not legitimate inquiries into wrongdoing and abuses of power, but rather agents of a corrupt system lashing out at the one man who threatens their grip on America.
For this reason, Patel has an enemies list — literally. His book Government Gangsters, which he is constantly hawking on War Room, contains an appendix listing dozens of names that comprise the “executive branch deep state.””
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“he is constantly proposing schemes — like Congress arresting Garland — that amount to efforts to criminalize political disagreements. This includes proposals to investigate prominent Democrats and even prosecute journalists.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said in a guest appearance on War Room last year.
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.””
https://www.vox.com/politics/389481/kash-patel-trump-fbi-steve-bannon-podcast
“South Korea is in the grip of a political crisis after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday — a shocking move that sparked mass protests and drew sharp rebuke from the country’s parliament.
Though Yoon has said he will reverse his declaration, that’s unlikely to end South Korea’s political problems, which go beyond Tuesday’s emergency.
Yoon first made the declaration during a televised announcement on Tuesday night local time, claiming that the opposition party to his government was in the midst of an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy,” likely in reference to the political deadlock between himself and the parliament that has prevented him from enacting his agenda. Despite that ongoing gridlock, the move to declare martial law took Yoon’s political opponents, allies, the South Korean public — and the world — by surprise.
Shortly after Yoon’s declaration, South Korea’s parliament, known as the National Assembly, met to unanimously vote down the martial law decree.
“There is no reason to declare martial law. We cannot let the military rule this country,” opposition leader Lee Jae-myung said Tuesday. “President Yoon Suk Yeol has betrayed the people. President Yoon’s illegal declaration of emergency martial law is null and void.” Martial law typically involves the suspension of civilian government and rule by military decree in a major emergency, such as intense armed conflict.
Despite Yoon’s pledge to lift his declaration, the country is still in limbo; on Wednesday, opposition parties in the National Assembly submitted a motion for Yoon’s impeachment, and a vote could come as soon as Friday. What comes next is unclear.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/389580/south-korea-president-yoon-martial-law-north-korea