turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalA Breakthrough Way to See Distant Planets
Astronomers have created a one-of-a-kind image of a distant exoplanet by zeroing in on the molecules in its atmosphere.
MARINA KOREN
12:29 PM ET
On a cloudless night, stars provide a breathtaking view: hundreds, thousands, of milky-white specks, draped over the Earth like a sparkling quilt. But stars can be annoying for astronomers trying to observe distant planets. Because stars are so luminous, it’s extremely difficult for even the most powerful telescopes to make out the tiny planets around them, says Henriette Schwarz, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands who studies planets outside of our solar system.
“Stars are millions to billions of times brighter than the planets that orbit them, and their bright glare completely outshines the faint light of these planets,” Schwarz says. Even the youngest planets, still glowing brightly from the heat of their formations, are millions of times fainter than their stars.
Since the discovery of the first planet outside of our solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have found thousands more “exoplanets” in the Milky Way, from gas giants the size of Jupiter to rocky planets 10 times the mass of Earth. They have been found through indirect means; telescopes detect an exoplanet by the effects the planet has on its parent star, like a faint dimming as it passes in front of the star, or the star’s slight wobble as the planet tugs on it. Only a handful of exoplanets have ever been observed directly. Stars are just too bright.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/exoplanet-atmosphere-imaging/564908/
That is so cool..................
This 'Fox & Friends' segment about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is beyond parody
"They talk about education for your kids, health care... it was really uncomfortable."
AARON RUPAR
JUL 24, 2018, 9:55 AM
Fox & Friends on Tuesday featured an interview with Daily Caller associate editor Virginia Kruta about her experience attending an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rally in St. Louis that could have been mistaken for satire.
Kruta told hosts that both Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic candidate for whom she was stumping, Cori Bush, “talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent — they talk about education for your kids, health care for your kids. Things that you want.”
But for Kruta, that sort of discussion is an “uncomfortable” thing.
“If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it, or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, ‘my kids deserve this, and maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that,'” she added.
https://thinkprogress.org/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-virginia-kruta-fox-and-friends-daily-caller-rally-c7e6bd164cd1/
-snip-
Host Ainsley Earhardt interjected to earnestly ask Kruta, “As a conservative, when you’re sitting in that audience or standing in that audience, and you’re listening to that message, how did it make you feel? Were you angry? Were you more drawn to that?”
Kruta replied by saying she “was mostly uncomfortable, because I was surrounded by a group of people who were talking about how they had gotten involved because they were tired of being angry all the time. It seems like so much effort to be angry about everything, instead of to focus on what you could do to change it.”
Hey, Kruta.....................did you by some quirk of right wing bull shit go to the republican convention, or did you go to a debate between your president the sexual predator and Clinton, when he was following here around, or better yet did you go a rally when people who were protesting against the narcissistic psychopath were getting beat up................
Quite a double standard there Kruta....................don't you think , or did you just want to forget that part .........of what the traitor was doing
ICE-contracted private prison company made potentially illegal donation to GOP governor's PAC
The state he is running to represent in the U.S. Senate has one of the largest ICE detention centers in the nation.
REBEKAH ENTRALGO
JUL 24, 2018, 10:35 AM
The largest private prison company in the nation may have made an illegal donation to New Republican PAC, a super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) campaign for Senate, according to an investigative report by MapLight in collaboration with the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
In April, the Boca Raton-based GEO group donated $125,000 to New Republican PAC through a company subsidiary. Campaign finance experts claim the donation violates a longstanding ban on political contributions by federal contractors.
“In my book, this is a violation of the pay-to-play law,” said Craig Holman, an ethics advocate at Public Citizen told MapLight. “You can’t let subsidiaries get around what is illegal for the parent corporation to do. Otherwise you just essentially throw the law out.”
GEO group operates 141 prisons in the country and is the biggest contractor of U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE), with $471 million — nearly half of $1 billion — in federal ICE contracts. Some of the largest and most dangerous ICE detention centers are operated by GEO. The GEO facility outside of Los Angeles, Adelanto Detention Center, was named the “deadliest ICE detention center of 2017,” after a third immigrant died in the facility’s custody in 2017.
https://thinkprogress.org/ice-private-prison-company-illegal-donation-republican-governor-adc4c06195c8/
Just like Medicaid bilking right, .................. Rick Scott you were right in the middle of that scam.......................you just break the laws..............
solution:
https://www.nelsonforsenate.com/
This California district has been red for over 20 years. Katie Hill could change that.
Hill's campaign is running a highly effective ground game ahead of the midterms. And Rep. Stephen Knight is feeling the heat.
BLAIR BESS
JUL 24, 2018, 8:00 AM
SANTA CLARITA, CALIFORNIA — On a blisteringly hot Saturday morning in June, 10 days after 30-year-old Katie Hill emerged as the Democratic party’s candidate to unseat Republican Steve Knight for California’s 25th Congressional district, dozens of her supporters gathered at the campaign’s cramped headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita to prepare for a massive voter registration drive. This last remaining GOP bastion in Los Angeles County (the district also includes parts of Ventura County) is high up on the list of priorities for Democrats hoping to turn the district from red-to-blue in November.
Hill’s campaign had run an aggressive, highly effective ground game, bolstered by social media, in the weeks leading up to California’s “jungle primary,” with hundreds of volunteers canvassing the district and eventually knocking on 80,000 doors. As the campaign looks to the midterms, capitalizing on that momentum is crucial to unseat an incumbent who, Hill believes, is out of step with his constituents.
“I don’t believe Steve Knight is representing our values … He’s dependent entirely on the [Republican] party because he hasn’t been able to raise money on his own,” Hill told ThinkProgress.
Knight was first elected to Congress in 2014 and is the latest GOP representative in more than two decades of Republican leadership in the 25th district. The area was one of seven historically red districts in California that voted for Clinton in 2016, a reality that could tilt the scales in Hill’s favor. Though Knight was re-elected by a slim 6 percent margin in 2016, Hill and her team think the district’s growing Democratic population (Democrats now comprise 38 percent of the 25th’s registered voters) gives them a good chance of flipping the seat.
https://thinkprogress.org/california-25-district-katie-hill-stephen-knight/
-snip-
“I’m far more left-leaning than Katie but I would much rather have someone who is progressive and doesn’t agree with me on all the issues, but will be honest with me when we disagree,” Ryan Skolnick, a college student from Simi Valley and a delegate to the California Democratic party, told ThinkProgress.
“Not someone who will pander to me and betray me in Congress later.”
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough.............vote
If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, the Constitution is going to change so fast your head will spin
Donald Trump's judges are poised to seize control of the Supreme Court's docket.
IAN MILLHISER
JUL 24, 2018, 9:22 AM
Late last week, a federal appeals court divided 8-7 on whether to blow up a widespread consensus on how to read the Second Amendment and turn some of the NRA’s wildest fantasies into reality in the process. Mance v. Holder is a stark reminder of the Trump administration’s success in filling the bench with judges who, just a couple years ago, would have occupied the more extreme reaches of the judiciary. It’s also a warning about how quickly the law is likely to change if Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed.
Nihilist conservatives in the mold of Neil Gorsuch are about to capture an entire United States Court of Appeals, and that court will form a pipeline that will channel ambitious right-wing lawsuits to the Supreme Court.
Arms and the Mance
Mance attempts to create a controversy out of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision which held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Admittedly, Heller is not a model of clarity. It acknowledges that there are limits on the Second Amendment, but describes them in vague terms — permitting bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons,” for example, or allowing “laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
Yet, despite Heller‘s vagueness, all ten federal appeals courts to consider the question have applied what Judge Stephen Higginson describes as a “two-step analytic framework” to determine whether or not a law violates the Second Amendment. Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to a test known as “strict scrutiny,” the most demanding test courts typically apply in constitutional cases. Meanwhile, “less onerous laws, or laws that government conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,'” are more likely to survive judicial review.
https://thinkprogress.org/if-brett-kavanaugh-is-confirmed-the-constitution-is-going-to-change-so-fast-your-head-will-spin-730ba67ddc87/
The Federalists Society that group that hates the Constitution.......................this amendment was not intended to kill its own citizen.........................
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough.........................vote
Inside Incels' Looksmaxing Obsession: Penis Stretching, Skull Implants And Rage
Thousands of “involuntarily celibate” men in online forums are consumed by misogynist entitlement and a skin-deep quest for self-improvement.
By Jesselyn Cook 07/24/2018 05:46 am ET
It’s late on a Friday, and hundreds of men are browsing the forum Lookism.net. A new member logs on and posts two photos showing the lower half of his face.
“What surgeries/implants are needed to fix this?” he asks. “As you can see I have a recessed jaw/chin.”
The replies come swiftly: “It’s not just your chin. Your upper lip is retruded as well. Orthognathic surgery if you can afford it. Chin implant or [genioplasty] if you can’t. You should also look at jaw angle implants,” someone responds. “Start saving.”
It’s a typical exchange on the message board, where new posts continue to pop up throughout the night with men asking other men for physical evaluation and advice.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/incels-looksmaxing-obsession_us_5b50e56ee4b0de86f48b0a4f
The QAnon Conspiracy Has Stumbled Into Real Life, And It's Not Going To End Well
POLITICS 07/24/2018 08:01 am ET
Armed men showing up and demanding answers to conspiracies. That can’t be good.
By Andy Campbell
On June 15, when he packed his AR-15 and drove an armored vehicle onto the bridge near Hoover Dam, Matthew Wright had a mission. He’d gleaned it from a berserk conspiracy theory that circulates mainly online, and now here he was, offline, near a very real dam, with a not-at-all-virtual rifle.
As he blocked traffic, he held up a sign. “Release the OIG report,” it read. He wanted the same thing that so many others that subscribe to the all-encompassing QAnon conspiracy theory want: some sort of proof of a “deep state” conspiracy, run by the liberal elite and Hollywood, to commit and then cover up an array of atrocities, from child sex trafficking to false-flag shootings. And they thought they would find at least some damning evidence in the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The report he was looking for had actually been released the day before, and it didn’t have any of the information he and the rest of the QAnon followers sought. Of course, the theory’s adherents believe there’s another inspector general’s report they haven’t seen, one with all the “true” information, and they’ll fight to get it.
On the day he was arrested in Arizona on a variety of federal charges, Wright was acting as a soldier for “Q.” That’s the handle of an anonymous poster on equally anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan and on Reddit since late last year. In letters Wright wrote from jail, intended for President Donald Trump and various government offices, he signed off with the QAnon motto: “For where we go one, we go all.” He also referred to a “Great Awakening,” another likely allusion to QAnon.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/qanon-conspiracy-real-life_us_5b54bbafe4b0b15aba8fe484
Trump Legal Team: POTUS Would Sit For Mueller's Collusion Questions, But No Obstruction
Source: Talking Points Memo
By Nicole Lafond | July 24, 2018 7:27 am
President Donald Trump’s legal team has offered to allow Trump to sit for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, under the condition that he only be asked questions about collusion and not obstruction of justice, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the WSJ that despite eight months of negotiations between the two parties, the chance of an interview is “still on the table.” It’s unclear whether Mueller’s team would accept the Trump team offer. Last year, The New York Times reported on a list of questions that Mueller would like to ask Trump and the majority were related to his decision to fire former FBI director James Comey.
Mueller’s team is probing whether the Trump campaign aided Russia in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and whether Trump sought to obstruct justice by firing Comey in May 2017. At the time, Trump indicated in an interview with NBC that he had ousted Comey over the “Russia thing.”
Giuliani told the WSJ that the “we think the obstruction of it is handled by Article 2 of the Constitution,” referencing a president’s jurisdiction to hire and fire members of an administration as he or she pleases.
Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-legal-team-sit-mueller-collusion
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough....................vote
My terrifying deep dive into one of Russia's largest hacking forums
Dylan Curran
I spent three weeks studying FreeHacks, one of the dark web’s biggest platform for hackers. From passports to credit cards, nothing is safe
The darknet (or dark web) is one of the most fascinating vestiges of humanity we’ve ever seen. It’s an aggregated swamp of all the darkest aspects of Internet activity - child porn, drug markets, gun shops, gore smut, stolen merchandise, anarchist guides, terrorist chats, identity theft, hacking services …
I’m going to focus on the most potent of these tiers – hacking services.
I spent three weeks studying and translating FreeHacks, one of the largest hacking forums on the internet. It’s a Russian community which aims to collectively gather its resources in order to maximize efficiency and knowledge dispersement.
It works the same as any typical forum, you open up TOR (a specialized browser for browsing the dark web), paste in the URL, and land on a home page with various sub-forums split into different categories. The categories are varied and well-divided:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/24/darknet-dark-web-hacking-forum-internet-safety
-snip-
A lot of the information on this forum is incredibly worrying, even if a lot of it is harmless 15-year-olds trying to be edgy and hack their friend’s phones. In any case, it’s important to know these communities exist. The dark underbelly of the internet isn’t going anywhere.
Trump lawyer uses administration actions to fundraise for his own group
Jay Sekulow, whose activist group has directed millions to his family, has telemarketers cite Planned Parenthood ‘investigation’
One of Donald Trump’s lawyers is using the Trump administration’s scrutiny of Planned Parenthood to raise money for his conservative activist group, which has directed millions of dollars to his law firm and his family.
Jay Sekulow, a personal attorney to the president, has contracted telemarketers to collect money from the public for his not-for-profit organisation using a script that highlights the justice department’s examination of foetal tissue transfers by groups including the women’s clinic network.
“Planned Parenthood is under full investigation by the Department of Justice for aborting babies and selling their body parts,” the script states, between references to anti-abortion litigation brought by the activist group, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ)
It was unclear from the ACLJ script whether Sekulow was merely repeating past media reports of preliminary inquiries made by the justice department, or if the president’s lawyer had learned of a previously undisclosed full investigation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/24/jay-sekulow-trump-lawyer-planned-parenthood-fundraising
So just gotta to ask this "attorney" is defending the sexual predator...................you know a "guy" that attacks woman, and not knowing the difference between No and Yes.
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough......................vote
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