30 thoughts on “Those Hazy Crazy Dazed Days Called Summer 2024”

  2. “the country grieves with you”

     

    US President Joe Biden is embraced by Hawaii Governor Josh Green (C) after delivering remarks as he visits an area devastated by wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii on August 21, 2023. The Bidens are expected to meet with first responders, survivors, and local officials following deadly wildfires in Maui. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

  3. Time

    Biden stepped up to a podium not far from the charred-but-still-living limbs of the 150-year-old banyan tree that had shaded the central square of the town before the fires. “The tree survived for a reason,” Biden said. “I believe it is a powerful—a very powerful symbol of what we can and will do to get through this crisis.

    “Today it’s burned,” he added, “but it’s still standing.”

  4. The growing threat of urban wildfires (yahoo.com)

    Maui’s wildfire is one of the deadliest urban fires in U.S. history, with a death toll of at least 114 people and many more missing. And these fires are going to become increasingly common.
    What are urban wildfires?
    Urban wildfires happen in residential and developed areas like the historic town of Lahaina on Maui. They develop when a fire occurs at the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of a region, which is the “zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development,” per the U.S. Fire Administration. “It is the line, area or zone where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.” More building has occurred in these areas as people want to gain proximity to nature.
    Fires in these areas have been on the rise, largely due to the combination of climate change and human development. “The expansion of the built environment and the growth of settlements and their long-term resource requirements have been dramatic across the globe,” according to a study published in the journal Nature. “The most immediate human-environmental conflicts arise where buildings are built in or near wildland vegetation.” Climate change has also caused more fires as the heat sucks moisture from the vegetation, making them more likely to catch fire.
    Essentially, the hotter fires from climate change are “burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel,” with the wind spreading the flames “from home to home as earlier fires would jump from tree crown to tree crown,” wrote David Wallace-Wells in a piece for The New York Times.
    […]
    Will there be more?
    Yes, for two main reasons: climate and development. The changing climate will create more fire-hazard areas because of the increase in dry vegetation. And wildland-urban interfaces will continue to grow by approximately 2 million acres per year, with 60,000 communities already at risk for WUI fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. “Of all people living near 2003-2020 wildfires (0.4 billion), two-thirds have their home in the WUI, most of them in Africa (150 million),” the study in Nature reported.
    “We’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage,” remarked Wallace-Wells. In any developed area “where you have a wildland-urban interface and then you have any kind of complicated transportation, where you don’t have free egress, that’s problematic,” Ann Bostrom, a risk communication researcher at the University of Washington, told Wired.
    Many areas, especially those like Maui, that are not prone to fires, lack the resources to withstand fires and are grossly underprepared to execute large-scale evacuations when necessary. As Wallace-Wells reported, “When the fire broke out, almost no one seemed adequately prepared.”

  5. DOJ pushes back against Dumbass’ requested 2026 trial date.

    The Justice Department pushed back Monday on former president Donald Trump’s claims that he cannot be ready to go to trial in January on charges that he illegally sought to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

    A trial in D.C. federal court in April 2026, which Trump’s attorneys requested, “would deny the public its right to a speedy trial,” attorneys working for special counsel Jack Smith wrote in Monday’s filing. In arguing for its preferred Jan. 2, 2024, date, the office said they do not intend to use classified information against Trump in this case.
    U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan is expected to set a trial date at a hearing Aug. 28. If prosecutors get their way, Trump will face two federal criminal trials before the 2024 presidential race, in which he is the leading Republican contender.
    In arguing for more time, Trump also made misleading comparisons to trials that were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, superseding indictments adding defendants, and disputes over incarceration, the government said.
    Trump’s legal team argued in a court filing last week that it needs years to prepare for the “unprecedented case” and that the January date proposed by the government would create conflicts with the five other criminal and civil trials Trump faces in the next nine months. They told the court that the 11.5 million pages of material already handed over by the special counsel took over two days to download and if printed out would be eight times taller than the Washington Monument. To read it all before the government’s proposed jury selection date of Dec. 11 would be like reading “Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day,” they said.
    Smith’s office called those comparisons “neither helpful nor insightful,” because attorneys don’t read evidence cover to cover — they review it online using electronic keyword searches. Much of what was shared with Trump is already in the public domain, the special counsel said, including social media posts, transcripts of interviews with the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6attack, and court records from legal challenges to the election results. Other documents came from the National Archives, meaning they were already known to Trump. There are also duplicates of documents within the production, the Justice Department said, and likely irrelevant papers handed over “in an abundance of caution and transparency.”
    […]

    What an utter load of horse-crap.  His attorney’s act like they don’t have Adobe Acrobat.  Place your bets – mine is June, 2024.

  8. As tRUMPsky’s clown car full of jokers go to Georgia to turn themselves in and bond out, do you think the gravity of the situation is going to sink in?   Are the going to start going flipity-flop to save themselves?  

    pogo – Fani asked for March, so June is a good guess.

    What will the “October surprise” be for 2024? Orange Adolf fleeing?

  9. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-warnings-ai-danger-risk-before-chatgpt-1234804367/

    “As AI has exploded into the public consciousness, the men who created them have cried crisis. On May 2, Gebru’s former Google colleague Geoffrey Hinton appeared on the front page of The New York Times under the headline: “He Warns of Risks of AI He Helped Create.” That Hinton article accelerated the trend of powerful men in the industry speaking out against the technology they’d just released into the world; the group has been dubbed the AI Doomers. Later that month, there was an open letter signed by more than 350 of them — executives, researchers, and engineers working in AI. Hinton signed it along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his rival Dario Amodei of Anthropic. The letter consisted of a single gut-dropping sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

    “What if we had heard the voices of the women like her who’ve been waving the flag about AI and machine learning?
    Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous: that they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities.”

  10. Parody of “Don’t Rain On My Parade” from FUNNY GIRL, music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and Jule Styne

  11. LP’s latest which also could be titled “putin’s puppets will perform as predicted”/p>

    The Lincoln Project presents The RNC First Presidential Debate Pre-Enactment

  12. Trump attorneys guided false electors in Georgia, GOP chair says – POLITICO

    Former Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer said attorneys for former President Donald Trump, his campaign and the local GOP were responsible for urging him to assemble a slate of false presidential electors that are now at the heart of a sprawling racketeering case.

    Shafer is among the 18 defendants indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, alongside Trump as part of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.“Mr. Shafer and the other Republican Electors in the 2020 election acted at the direction of the incumbent President and other federal officials,” Shafer’s attorney wrote in a petition seeking to move the Fulton County case to federal court.

    [continues]

  14. renee, yeah, a real woke woke woke woke-up call.

    oh how the mighty fall and have fallen. if you liked his 1st book on djt you’ll love this one:

     ‘This power is reaching a natural end’: Michael Wolff’s new book predicts the fall of Fox News | Books | The Guardian

    Michael Wolff, whose bestselling books have chronicled the rise and fall of Donald Trump, promised on Tuesday to tell readers how Fox News will end.
    “I have been telling the story of the great power of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News for many years,” Wolff said, announcing his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. “This power is now reaching a natural end and The Fall brings the story to its closing act.”
    Previous books by the former Guardian columnist include The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.
    A spokesperson for the publisher Henry Holt told the Associated Press that for his new book, Wolff interviewed “people throughout the Murdoch organisation, including many with direct knowledge of [Rupert] Murdoch and his family”.
    […]
    The Fall will be published on 26 September.
    On social media on Tuesday, Wolff referred to Moby-Dick by Herman Melville when he said: “My long, white whale, Murdoch obsession finally comes to an end.”
    […]
    Wolff’s most recent book was Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned, a collection of profiles of what his publisher called “the major monsters, media whores and vainglorious figures of our time”.
    On Monday, Wolff announced an October live event in support of his new book, to be hosted by the actor Alec Baldwin.

  15. at least he’s thinking about going on the lam so it’s not out of the question it’s probably plan B

    Trump jokes about flying to Russia after bond set in Georgia case | The Hill

    “I assume, therefore, that she thought I was a ‘flight’ risk – I’d fly far away, maybe to Russia, Russia, Russia, share a gold domed suite with Vladimir, never to be seen or heard from again,” he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Would I be able to take my very ‘understated’ airplane with the gold TRUMP affixed for all to see. Probably not, I’d be much better off flying commercial – I’m sure nobody would recognize me!” 

  16. Interesting story about FOX, pat. I have followed that channel closely ever since it started and have never seen them in such obvious disarray, and their ratings are down. These days they waste gobs of time obsessing about Hunter. Seldom anything new, just repeating the same stuff over and over again, cannot believe that is very compelling for viewers

  17. So, he’s thought about fleeing.  That comment was him JKNK.

    Maybe they should take his passport?  

    Is anyone investigating JarJar and his Saudi billions?

  19. bId – His passport and his plane.  In most cases a judge, especially some I know, would take that statement at face value, the orange maroon usually states something he is planning.  Ground his fat aft, if not at home, in a nice padded cell.  Again, I think this is one of those ‘look I am stepping over your line and I don’t care’ statements. Edging over and over because no one want to jail him.

  21. They’re gonna weigh tRUMPsky when he turns himself in on Thursday, and we get to see a mugshot, and someone from the Mar-A-Ego documents case is cooperating with Jack Smith!

  22. They are going to weigh him????? That ought to send him over the edge.   Will they release that info?
    I say 320 We need a pool
     
     
     

  24. KGC – i am going with 5’10.4, and 324.8.  His mug shot should be wild, they will “comb” back his top hat for the shot, no disguises allowed.  And drug screening too.  I don’t know why that has not been talked about in the chattering class. If he is handled as a regular criminal he will have drug tests done too.

  25. Are the going to put the white towel around his neck?   Ooooh, is he even allowed to wear his clown make-up? 

  26. BB, yeah even though wiki says he’s 6’3″ an inch or two of that is probably lifts. will they measure his ht with or without shoes?  no way tho’ is it as low as 5’10” unless they discover his spike heels (which he borrows from melania/ivanka). weight may be 293 stripped or more.

    Trump’s Weight At Georgia Arraignment Has Inspired Gambling (uproxx.com)

    Next week the world’s most famous McDonald’s customer will be arraigned for a fourth time. This one, though, will be a bit different. The sheriff’s office in Fulton County, Georgia has vowed to not give Donald Trump celebrity treatment, promising the world the first mugshot of a former American president. That might not happen, but we might still get one thing: his official weight. And that’s inspired some gamblers to place bets.

    As per The Daily Mail, bookie sites have been taking bets on how much the guy weighs. During his first arraignment in Manhattan this spring, Trump claimed he weighed 244 — more or less consistent with what White House physician Sean P. Conley had been saying before he was voted out of office.

    Bookie sites aren’t buying that line. For instance, BetOnline is offering an over/under on 273.5 pounds — far over what Trump has alleged. According to one of the service’s employees, a whopping 77 percent of gamblers have bet on this one.

    Even the anti-Trump Republicans at The Lincoln Project have gotten in on the act, offering a free coffee mug to those who correctly guess Trump’s weight.

    @ProjectLincoln

    Follow

    Trump’s gotta be feeling weighed down with all the legal troubles. When he surrenders to the Fulton County jail he’ll have his mugshot taken & be fingerprinted, like a regular old inmate. Guess Trump’s actual weight for a chance to win an LP coffee mug☕️: bit.ly/45enaIv

    Image

  27. https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-gun-control-lawmakers-ead058f4a024cdc4318c1e5a47efbf3d
     

    Check this out.  Moms with signs are prohibited from using their First Amendment rights.   Fascism is alive and well in Tennessee. 

    “Families close to a Nashville fatal school shooting broke down in tears Tuesday after a Tennessee Republican leader ordered state troopers to remove them and others from a legislative hearing room while they waited to testify in favor of gun control measures.”

    “On the first day of the special session on Monday, House Republicans advanced a new set of procedural rules that carried harsh penalties for lawmakers deemed too disruptive or distracting, and banned visitors from carrying signs inside the Capitol and in legislative hearing rooms. The Senate and House also signed off on severely limiting the public from accessing the galleries where people have traditionally been allowed to watch their government in action.”

    “Yet protestors on Tuesday found ways to defy the new sign ban, showing up to the House chamber with pro-gun control messages written on their bodies and clothes. Others wrote out messages on their phones and held them up for lawmakers to see.”

    “That defiance faced a harsher response as lawmakers broke out into committee rooms to begin debating legislation.”

    “Allison Polidor, a gun control advocate from Nashville, was escorted out of a hearing room because she was holding a sign that said, “1 KID ALL THE GUNS.”

    “I wasn’t saying anything. I wasn’t doing anything. I was holding up a sign,” Polidor told reporters outside the room.

    They want to force motherhood, but they want to protect guns. Republicans are not pro-life, they are lying fascists.

  28. He’s taller with his bone spurs? What? IDK, but everyone shrinks with age, so if he was ever 6’3” it’s doubtful he’s still there, but I’d put him at 6’ even.  And this is the only fat shaming I feel good about, because I know it’ll bother him hugely.  My guess is that hugely weighs 267. He might skip a few meals and spend Wednesday in a sauna trying to sweat it off before weigh-in like a prize fighter.

  29. My guess is 6’ 1.5” and 311#.  I want that coffee mug.

    We could ask LSOS Rear Adm. Ronny Lynn Jackson (ret.)(R. TX), but he’d probably say he’s 6’8”, 240#.

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