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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • What is happening in North America is not a regional aberration; it’s part of a global departure — what climate scientists call a phase shift. The past year has seen virtually every metric of planetary distress lurch into uncharted territory: sea surface temperature, air temperature, polar ice loss, fire intensity — you name it, it is off the charts. It was 72 degrees Fahrenheit in Wisconsin on Tuesday, and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Paraguay; large portions of the North Pacific and the South Atlantic are running more than five degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

    Thomas Smith, an environmental geographer at the London School of Economics, summed it up this way for the BBC in July, “I’m not aware of a similar period when all parts of the climate system were in record-breaking or abnormal territory.” And with these extremes comes lethality: More than 130 souls perished last month in wildfires outside Valparaiso, Chile — more than the number of dead in the Maui fire last August or the Paradise, Calif., fire in 2018 — making them the world’s deadliest since Australia’s Black Saturday fires in 2009.

    Damn. That’s depressing.




  • One girl drank two cups, and another girl drank one cup and a third said she did not like the smoothies and barely drank any at all. It was unclear how many smoothies Meyden’s daughter drank, but one girl told police it appeared to be a significant amount, the affidavit said.

    One girl drank at least twice as much as the others, and the guy drugged his own daughter, too. What a piece of shit.

    A girl who told police she drank two smoothies said she began to feel woozy, hot and clumsy, shortly after finishing the second smoothie. She said she “blacked out” and slipped into a “thick, deep sleep” she never experienced before, the affidavit said.

    I know they’re only 12, but how much did he put in there I wonder?

    And did the girl who didn’t drink much of the smoothie just not like the flavor or whatever, or did she think it tasted weird because she could taste whatever he spiked it with?




  • Focusing the Friday morning address on the “anthropological crisis and the necessary promotion of human and Christian vocations,” Pope Francis said this task is challenged by myriad social challenges arising from the cultural zeitgeist, including gender ideology.

    Highlighting the anthropological angle of the conference, the pope pointed to “an elementary and fundamental truth, which today we need to rediscover in all its beauty: The life of the human being is a vocation.”

    The pope emphasized that this is a foundational element “which underlies every call within the community” and “has to do with an essential characteristic of the human being as such.”

    What the fuck does this even mean?








  • The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has tallied 106 deaths in Border Patrol vehicle pursuits from January 2010 to June of this year. Deaths averaged 3.5 a year through 2019 but spiked in 2020, leading officials to develop a new policy for vehicle pursuits with an eye toward increasing safety.

    The policy announced in January stops short of prohibiting chases but, according to CBP, “provides a clear framework for weighing the risks of conducting pursuits, such as the dangers they present to the public, against the law enforcement benefit or need.”

    Either the framework isn’t as clear as you think it is, or they just don’t give a shit.


  • The Women’s Bureau has been in operation since 1920, when it was founded to create policies and standards to improve conditions for women at work, helping conduct research that formed the basis of early gender-based labor laws and key legislation on fair pay and paid leave.

    Today, the agency collects and analyzes data on women at work and runs several grant programs, including the Women in Apprenticeship & Nontraditional Occupations program, which last year awarded $5 million to seven organizations developing apprenticeships for women in industries where they are underrepresented. The 2023 award was the largest in the program’s history, with funds going to programs in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.

    The bureau also supports initiatives that work to close the gender pay gap, advance paid leave policies, alleviate the child care crisis and eliminate workplace harassment. This year, it awarded $1.3 million in grants to organizations working to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and harassment against women workers, and launched the only federal database comparing child care prices at the county level.

    Republicans: but does it do anything good?!?!