Thursday, April 15, 2021

And another day of police murder, sanctions, sharing information, overlooking the true driver of police violence, permitless carry, the GOP and their anti-transgender crusade, and embryos that are part human and part monkey comes to a close:

"You need to respect the chair, and shut your mouth!" -- Maxine Waters to Jim Jordan

Deaths

US: 578,993 (+901)

World: 2,999,246 (+13,779)

Cases

US: 32,224,139 (+74,916)

World: 139,670,814 (+842,580)

U.S. preparing for 1-year COVID-19 booster shots; Pfizer chief sees need.

CDC: About 5,800 'breakthrough infections' reported in fully vaccinated people. -- That’s pretty damn good.

Oregon COVID-19 cases up 94% from a month ago.

The United States on Thursday announced a sweeping series of sanctions against Russia over election interference, cyber hacking, and other “harmful foreign activities,” it said, including reports of Russia offering "bounties" for Taliban attacks against U.S. troops, and Russia’s occupation and alleged human rights abuses in Crimea.

No Hoax: New Report Says Trump’s 2016 Campaign Shared Info With Russian Intelligence. So here’s the bottom-line: Manafort passed inside info from the Trump campaign to Kilimnik, and Kilimnik gave it to Russian intelligence, which at the time was mounting a covert attack on the 2016 election to thwart Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. No collusion? Manafort was scheming with a Russian operative, as the Kremlin was trying to sabotage American politics to assist Trump.

Pelosi has "no plans" to bring bill expanding Supreme Court to House floor.

Video Shows A 13-Year-Old Boy Had His Hands Up When A Police Officer Fatally Shot Him. Ahead of the release, Mayor Lori Lightfoot described viewing the footage as "excruciating." She also urged Chicagoans to respond peacefully and cautioned that the videos should not be viewed by children.

“Everyone who ever says ‘you should just comply’ needs to understand that Adam Toledo was shot in the chest within two seconds of complying.” -- Emily L. Hauser

“People are watching the Adam Toledo video and asking ‘why is this happening so much now?’ It's not happening any more now than previously. There are just more cameras now.” -- John Fugelsang

The question of how veteran Minnesota police Officer Kim Potter could mistake her gun for a Taser has dominated discourse about the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright so much that, experts say, the true driver of police violence has gone overlooked. “The conversation about training and the use of Tasers misses the larger culture of policing that sees lethal force as the ultimate tool to suppress crime,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of history, race and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “As long as we keep talking about individual police officers, we’ll keep making for a broken and sick society. Clearly, policing has reached the level of a public health crisis. It’s not just in the shooting of unarmed people. It’s also in the everyday assaults, brutalities and indignities that people face.”

Daunte Wright and the grim financial incentive behind traffic stops. Daunte Wright was stopped on a “pretext traffic stop” — officers believe these stops are “valuable" to promote safe driving or find drugs and illegal activities. But recent studies question how much these stops encourage safe driving or prevent accidents.

Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature approved stiffer penalties against violent protesters on Thursday, handing a major legislative victory to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who began campaigning for the measure last year following a summer of turmoil across the country over the killings of Black people by police.

Texas House gives initial approval to “constitutional carry,” which would allow people to carry a gun without a license.

Police associations and chiefs from all over Texas Tuesday spoke about their opposition to bills gaining steam in the legislature that would allow people to carry a gun without a license.

Twitter Permanently Bans Project Veritas Founder James O’Keefe.

Florida House passes anti-transgender bill that would allow for genital examinations of high school athletes.

Oklahoma lawmaker faces backlash for saying transgender people are mentally ill. "There is male and there is female. And transgender would be a mental health issue," Humphrey told the news outlet. "So those people that say I'm bigoted, I will say you're insane and you're doing the people wrong by doing that." — What a self pompous bigoted dick. 

Jeff Bezos seems to be reckoning with his legacy in the wake of the Amazon union drive.

CEO who gave employees $70K minimum wage says revenue tripled 6 years later. "6 years ago today I raised my company's min wage to $70k. Fox News called me a socialist whose employees would be on bread lines," Dan Price, the CEO of Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments, tweeted Tuesday. "Since then our revenue tripled, we're a Harvard Business School case study & our employees had a 10x boom in homes bought." "Always invest in people," he added. 

Scientists Create Early Embryos That Are Part Human, Part Monkey. The embryos, described Thursday in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, said the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns. "My first question is: Why?"

Study: 2.5 billion T. rex roamed Earth, but not all at once. Using calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures’ energy needs, a team at the University of California, Berkeley figured out just how many T. rex lived over 127,000 generations, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. It’s a first-of-its-kind number, but just an estimate with a margin of error that is the size of a T. rex.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.