[GEO.TV] The legislature of the western US state, Idaho, has passed a bill on Monday that authorises the use of a firing squad as a means of execution in the event that lethal injection is unavailable for death row inmates. If I take my poor old dog to the vet to have her put down and they're out of whatever it is they use are they gonna shoot her? Same idea. Why won't the same meds they used on my dogs work, by the way? It's not like it'd kill them... Well, I guess it would.
Idaho would become the fifth US state to approve execution by firing squad, after Utah, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and South Carolina, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
Since 1976 and the end of a brief moratorium on the death penalty in the United States, two men and a woman have been executed in this way -- all in Utah, also in the west. The last one was 2010.
The US states which have the death penalty have been experiencing great difficulty in obtaining the chemical components necessary for a lethal injection, due to opposition by pharmaceutical companies which do not want to be associated with executions.
Death by firing squad would occur in Idaho only if a lethal injection were not possible.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/21/2023 00:00 ||
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#1
So what exactly are the authorities doing with the vast amounts of hyper lethal fentanyl they keep confiscating?
#2
Wait for it...
Some activist Lawyer seek media attention, will bring a legal challenge, that the Ammo Caliber, type of rifle and/or brand of ammo is untested for human executions.
With that said. IF it produces a 1 shot, kill shot, I'd buy box of the same ammo and put up a sign of the gate marked.
" Homeowner uses _____ Ammo,
a proven solution to criminals"
[From NOAA] After a year and half of non-stop La Nina, the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere system has transitioned to neutral, allowing NOAA to issue its "Final La Niña Advisory"..
The forecaster consensus is indeed very confident that neutral conditions will remain through the spring...will El Niño develop? If we can anticipate an El Niño, we can anticipate an increased likelihood of its impacts on weather and climate. In contrast, a continuation of neutral conditions means the tropical Pacific Ocean will not be an actor on the world's climate stage. The lack of El Niño or La Niña means that there is no seasonal-scale influence from the Pacific to push around the global atmospheric circulation and influence seasonal climate patterns.
Many of our computer climate models are predicting a transition into El Niño sometime later this year. However, right now is a very tricky time of year for the models, due to the "spring predictability barrier." ENSO events peak in the winter and tend to decay and transition in the spring, so models often don't have a lot of strong signals to go on. (Why do ENSO events peak in the winter?? This is a really complicated topic that we don't have a simple, satisfactory answer to... (yet!) It could be warmer. Or colder. Dryer. Or wetter. Magic 8-Ball says: "It is not determined"
[FOXNEWS] North Korea ...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche... n leader Kim Pudge Jong-un ...the overweight, pouty-looking hereditary potentate of North Korea. Pudge appears to believe in his own divinity, but has yet to produce any loaves and fishes, so his subjects remain malnourished... has called on his country to be ready to launch a nuclear attack to deter war as he accused the U.S. and South Korea of carrying out military drills with American nuclear assets, according to state media.
Kim's remarks, carried on state media KCNA, came after the Hermit Kingdom launched a short-range ballistic missile toward the sea on Sunday. The missile flew across the country and landed in the sea off its east coast, according to South Korean and Japanese assessments — which reported that the missile traveled a distance of about 500 miles.
Kim, who oversaw the test, said the exercises improved the military's actual war capability and highlighted the need to ensure its readiness posture for any "immediate and overwhelming nuclear counterattack" through such drills.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/21/2023 00:00 ||
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#1
Finally, they got a traditional speech-writer back, with classic commie-speak vocabulary who wrote:
""Amidst soaring anger and hostility toward the US imperialists and the South Korean puppet traitors going mad over the reckless nuclear war provocation targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the ranks of hot-blooded youths bravely and vigorously set out to defend the homeland are growing day by day is growing," a Pyongyang statement said."
LONDON/DETROIT, March 20 (Reuters) - For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles - leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric.
And now those battery packs are piling up in scrapyards in some countries, a previously unreported and expensive gap in what was supposed to be a "circular economy."
"We're buying electric cars for sustainability reasons," said Matthew Avery, research director at automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research. "But an EV isn't very sustainable if you've got to throw the battery away after a minor collision."
[Epoch Times] "Total red meat and poultry production in 2023 is forecast to decrease for the first time in nearly a decade," the USDA said in its bi-annual livestock, dairy, and poultry outlook released in early March.
The report said dwindling cattle production would likely cause a "significant year-over-year decrease in beef production, the first decline since 2015."
"This is due to the 6 percent decline in beef production that more than offsets forecast increases in pork (2 percent), broiler meat (1 percent), and turkey (7 percent) production."
According to the USDA, drought conditions contributed to the yearly decline in the beef cow inventory last year.
"While 2019 was the second-wettest year on record for the continental United States, after 1973, dry conditions began to persist in 2020, mostly in the West and Plains farm production regions," the report noted.
"Overall, drought has contributed to reduced pasture and range conditions, and increased beef and cow slaughter. Any changes to the current drought conditions will likely impact inventory numbers in the coming year."
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/21/2023 00:00 ||
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[2 views]
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#1
Of course inflation and the high costs not mentioned. Must be the weather.
What makes you sure you know what you are buying? At least in the 'old' days the local butcher actually had carcasses visibly hanging in the back of the shop.
situation in Mississippi valley has much improved since March but further west in the plains from TX to ND, significant drought has persisted
Posted by: lord garth ||
03/21/2023 10:52 Comments ||
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#6
^ Western Nevada and much of California;s critical central valley are back to NORMAL, in a stuuning reversal of three months:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA
[France24] In March 2020, Paris emptied as the first Covid-19 lockdown was announced. City dwellers fled and sought refuge in the countryside. Three years later, what has become of those Parisians who embarked on a new way of life? And how has the arrival of these "neo-rurals" affected the local landscape? Our team went looking for the answers in the Perche regional park in north-western France, an area where many Parisians have settled.
#2
The French countryside is beautiful but I thought it was just populated by oldsters who would succumb to demographic extinction. This is an odd effect that I had not considered.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/21/2023 10:12 Comments ||
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[Dawn] President Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly on Monday, after bypassing the lower house to push through a deeply unpopular change to the pension system.
The outcome will be a relief to Macron: a successful no-confidence vote would have sunk his government and killed the legislation, which is set to raise the retirement age by two years to 64. But the relief could be short-lived.
For one thing, the vote was closer than expected. Some 278 MPs voted in favour of the tripartisan, no-confidence motion, just nine short of the 287 needed for it to succeed.
In addition, unions and protesters have vowed to carry on with strikes and protests against the pension reform. Observers say Macron’s failure to find enough support in parliament to put his pension proposals to a vote has already undermined his reformist agenda and weakened his leadership.
As soon as the narrow failure of the vote was announced, politicians from the hard left La La Belle France Insoumise (LFI, La Belle France Unbowed) shouted "Resign!" at Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and brandished placards that read: "We’ll meet in the streets." "Nothing is solved, we’ll continue to do all we can so this reform is pulled back," LFI parliamentary group chief Mathilde Panot told news hounds.
Violent unrest has erupted across the country in recent days and trade unions have promised to intensify their strike action, leaving Macron to face the most dangerous challenge to his authority since the "Yellow Vest" uprising over four years ago.
A ninth nationwide day of strikes and protests is scheduled on Thursday. "We’ll meet again on Thursday," Helene Mayans, of the hard-left CGT union, said at a rally in central Gay Paree. There were boos at the rally after the vote result and chants of "strikes" and "blockade." A police fired tear gas at protesters who sought to march beyond the square where the rally was taking place.
[WashingtonExaminer] Now that Republicans have narrow control of the House of Representatives, the GOP is investigating the Biden administration with gusto.
Still, Republicans seem not to have noticed one major foreign policy scandal that's hiding in plain sight.
As I recently reported , the rising scandal surrounding retired FBI senior official Charles McGonigal is perhaps the worst in the bureau’s history. Multiple sources have told me that McGonigal, while still serving with the FBI as head of counterintelligence in New York, shook down Balkan business people, most of them Albanian, in an audacious political corruption scheme worth many millions of dollars.
McGonigal apparently pulled off this unprecedented scam in collaboration with Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama, whose Socialist Party has ruled that small country for a decade. Contrary to Rama’s carefully cultivated image as a pro-American NATO stalwart and even corruption fighter, during his rule, Albania has in fact become the leading narco-state in Europe. As the Washington Examiner has reported , Rama’s Albania has grown into an analog to Manuel Noriega’s Panama in the 1980s. For whatever reason, the Biden administration doesn't appear to care.
Now others are starting to notice.
This week, the Financial Times reported on Rama’s misguided governance, dropping subtle hints of troubling events behind the scenes, noting that "Rama’s reputation overseas has also been tainted by his contacts with a disgraced U.S. law enforcement official," i.e., McGonigal, "accused of having helped the Albanian leader persecute political rivals." The outlet gently noted that many average Albanians "believe the government co-operates with drug traffickers.
Yes, they do. And people should start asking why Washington goes out of its way to defend Rama’s narco-friendly government against its critics.
The drug running isn’t the worst of it. Albania is a U.S. ally and valued NATO member, yet the Biden administration has repeatedly interfered in the internal politics of a friend and ally for reasons that are difficult to decipher. The heart of the scandal involves Sali Berisha, the country’s former president and prime minister. Although Berisha is a stalwart of the center-right Democratic Party, he was sanctioned by the United States in 2021 for alleged corruption. While trying to find a corruption-free politician in Albania is as challenging as finding a squeaky-clean Chicago alderman, nobody who’s informed about Albania — as the former technical director of the National Security Agency's Balkans Division, I’ll include myself on that list — thinks Berisha and his Democrats are more corrupt than Rama and his Socialists. (Most would say less.)
[ZERO] On Saturday, President Biden's social media galaxy brains tweeted out a twice-corrected lie, quoting the president telling said lie, that billionaires are getting away paying just 3% of their average earnings in taxes.
BIDEN - "You know the average tax billionaires pay?
THREE PERCENT.
No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or firefighter," reads the erroneous tweet.
MUSK - "I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average!"
"I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022."
[An Nahar] A major new United Nations ...the Oyster Bay money pit... report being released Monday is expected to provide a sobering reminder that time is running out if humanity wants to avoid passing a dangerous global warming threshold. That's some kinda coincidence, coming on the five year anniversary of the announcement that it would only be five years until climate change kills us all.
The report by hundreds of the world's top scientists is the capstone on a series that summarizes the research on global warming compiled since the Gay Paree climate accord was agreed in 2015.
It was approved by countries at the end of a week-long meeting of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in the Swiss town of Interlaken, meaning governments have accepted its findings as authoritative advice on which to base their actions.
At the start of the meeting U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres ...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years... warned delegates that the planet is " nearing the point of no return " and they risk missing the internationally agreed limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of global warming since pre-industrial times.
That's because global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases keep increasing — mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and intensive agriculture — when in fact they need to decline quickly.
Governments agreed in Gay Paree almost eight years ago to try to limit temperature rise to 1.5 C or at least keep it well below 2 C (3.6 F). Since then scientists have increasingly argued that any warming beyond the lower threshold would put humanity at dire risk.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/21/2023 00:00 ||
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[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
A major new United Nations report being released Monday is expected to provide a sobering reminder that time is running out if humanity wants to avoid passing a dangerous global warming threshold.
They release one every year, don't they? Maybe they can delete the one from five years ago like that little shit Greta Thunberg did with a recent tweet.
[GreyDynamics] United States Air Force Special Reconnaissance (SR) is a specialized military unit that deploys advanced technology and covert operations deep behind enemy lines to provide critical battlefield intelligence, develop targets, and achieve global access, air, space, and cyberspace superiority.
The various branches of the United States (US) military have extensive and diverse capabilities. Some are unique to a specific branch, while others are present throughout all branches. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are essential to all US military branches – even branches that a casual observer would not anticipate having SOF units, such as the Marine Corps and Air Force. This article focuses on the youngest Air Force SOF unit, Special Reconnaissance.
#1
"The USAF rebranded SWOT as Air Force Special Reconnaissance (SR) in 2019. Weather forecasting technology relegated SWOT as obsolete. However, the Air Force was unwilling to disband the unit totally." So it poaches on other services turf.
#4
There was a union shop steward at one plant that I worked that was nicknamed Special Ed. He did not have the physic that would lead me to consider him as a special forces vet. It must have been deep cover.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/21/2023 10:08 Comments ||
Top||
#5
I thought JSOC and the big push for Joint-you-name-it Task Forces was to obviate the "we gotta have one of those" mindset of the services? Duplication, however well done, splits resources and the available talent pool.
#6
Yep, the best of the best. I was aware of such units. Small like a cell. Some devote many years to these efforts. On call. High level of security and special skills. Two spooks who have visited here have said our government is capable of anything. When the Ukraine business started we had a unit(6) lodged in a Kiev motel for a night but were ordered to leave next morning immediately. Not reported of course. Shroud of secrecy and such. So the story remains buried as planed. After all its special operations.
#7
I served 4 years in 2/75 Rangers. Initially went to the USAF recruiter and told him I wanted to join the Combat Control Teams. Said he’d never heard of them. Walked across the hall and signed up in the Army. Arrived at the unit and of course got to work with the CCT guys. When they deployed with us they’d always say “these quarters are not to Air Force standards” and would literally check into the nearest Hilton. That being said, they performed well in the field. FYI CCT is a combination of forward air control for air strikes crossed with air traffic control. Nice work if you can get it.
#9
One of my late dad's late friends, I am convinced, was some sort of air force special forces, but when pressed he said he wound up on those missions because he ran out of radios to repair back at base and got bored. I don't know if this unit was it but it's something to read about.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[From NOAA] After a year and half of non-stop 
...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche...
The report said dwindling cattle production would likely cause a "significant year-over-year decrease in beef production, the first decline since 2015."
Of course inflation and the high costs not mentioned. Must be the weather. 
[Dawn] President Emmanuel Macron’s government narrowly survived a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly on Monday, after bypassing the lower house to push through a deeply unpopular change to the pension system.
[ZERO] On Saturday, President Biden's social media galaxy brains tweeted out a twice-corrected lie, quoting the president telling said lie, that billionaires are getting away paying just 3% of their average earnings in taxes.
[An Nahar] A major new 
...Portuguese politician and diplomat, ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations. Previously, he was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees between 2005 and 2015. He was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and was the Secretary-General of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. In both a 2012 and 2014 poll, the Portuguese public ranked him as the best Prime Minister of the previous 30 years...
