(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Cheers and Jeers: Thursday [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2023-04-20 To send a donation via snail mail: Bill Harnsberger, 16 Pitt Street, Portland, ME, 04103. If you're already a C&J monthly subscriber through PayPal: You don’t have to do anything but make sure your card is still active and then feel good about your excellent investment. A few brief points as we near the end of our 2023 plea for cash and jewels and/or fine artwork: 1) I assure you I am not artificial intelligence. Or any other kind, for that matter. 2) An anonymous donor has agreed to 4,000X IMPACT for the NEXT FIVE MINUTES and you could win LUNCH WITH ME AND THE POPE! 3) If you print this page out and send it to me, I’ll autograph it and certify it as a 100% non-fungible token suitable for framing and/or confusing the hell out of your heirs when they stumble on it in your attic between your leg lamp and VHS Buns of Steel collection. Thanks again for supporting America’s longest-running kiddie pool-based blog post. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled stuff you were doing before reading this. - Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, April 20, 2023 Note: None of this madness would be happening if Crockett and Tubbs were still on the beat. Not one bit of it. - By the Numbers: 8 days!!! Days 'til the full "flower moon": 15 Days 'til the Pennsylvania Herb and Garden Festival in York: 8 Percent of U.S. adults polled by CBS News who support raising the debt ceiling if it means the U.S. would otherwise default: 70% Current number of single family units under construction, the highest since 1973: 716,000 Number of people dismissed by the judge in the 1-day Fox-Dominion trial because they got caught taking photos: 1 Percent chance that the removed attendee was a Fox News PR representative: 100% Number of clips from The Simpsons that were included in Fox's list of trial exhibits: 4 - Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment: Seeing yet another story in the newspaper about global warming doesn’t make much of an impression unless, of course, some storm has just knocked out your electricity for three days and your acquaintance with the greenhouse effect is now measured in buckets of sweat. […] This summer, five hundred people died from a heat wave in Chicago, and Russian scientists report venomous snakes appearing for the first time in the far north. A team of British scientists predicts that 1995 will be the warmest year in human history. Bill McKibben, author of Hope, Human and Wild (out next month), wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the most curious part of this phenomenon is not that it’s taking place—global warming is right where it’s supposed to be, according to all the predictions by all the scientists who have studied it—but that no one is paying attention. As they say at Alcoholics Anonymous, denial is not just a river in Egypt. —September 1995 - Puppy Pic of the Day: Live from the Worldwide Woozle Wrestling ring… - CHEERS to replacing tiki torches with handcuffs. If you were told to be patient for justice to be done after the August 2017 "Jews will not replace us" riot by Trump's "very fine people" in Charlottesville, good news! Your patience has officially paid off because… …a grand jury in Virginia has indicted multiple people on felony charges for carrying flaming torches with the intent to intimidate. […] The indictments, which were issued in February but only recently unsealed, come almost six years after violence broke out during two days of demonstrations by the largest gathering of white nationalists in a decade. If convicted and given the maximum penalty, the next five years these Nazi nitwits planned spend enjoying the good life of TV sports and beer will be replaced with five years of prison bars and thin gruel. I believe I speak for all of us here when I say: karma, don’t fail us now. JEERS to the Supreme Pussyfooters. The good news: a majority of justices on the most hated court in the world agreed to extend the hold on that Texas MAGA judge's ban on the FDA-approved abortion pill mifepristone. The bad news: it's an extension that only lasts until midnight tomorrow. The six conservatives on the court still need to weigh important considerations, such as: what Baby Jesus whispers in their ear tonight, what Clarence Thomas's Nazi collector thinks and, most important, how big a pounding their side will take in the 2024 elections if they go the Full Handmaid's Tale. Y'know…judge stuff. JEERS to gun nuts going gun-nutty. The Columbine High School massacre took place on April 20, 1999, as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—who, yes, went bowling that morning—killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others. (If you feel so inclined, you can donate to the upkeep of the Columbine Memorial here.) The Columbine Memorial. 24 years later, there’s no doubt who’s #1 in preventable civilian gun massacres: USA! USA! USA! Normally I’d express my usual pessimism about anything getting done to stop American human bodies from being used so frequently as convenient ammo receptacles. But those darn Parkland kids and their allies grabbed the NRA and said, “No more.” Legislation has been passed in several states, President Biden is doing what he can without the help of a calcified Congress (their recent band-aid doesn’t seem to be doing much good), and even the once-invincible NRA is watching its influence circle the drain (their latest convention was a low-attendance geezerfest), beset by infighting, lawsuits, laying off staff and shuttering NRA TV. Family members and gun-control advocates will mark today’s anniversary with low-key commemorations of the tragedy. Wayne LaPierre will probably mark today’s anniversary by cowering on his friend’s yacht. Message: he cares. - BRIEF SANITY BREAK - x Vincent Bal is "shadowologist" and filmmaker: he uses the shadows of ordinary objects to complete his artwork [Instagram account: https://t.co/dP059pspYm]pic.twitter.com/jLSMEV9MCc — Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 18, 2023 - END BRIEF SANITY BREAK - JEERS to God's currency. 159 years ago this week, in 1864, Congress took a bold stand for the separation of church and state by passing an act that required "In God We Trust" to be stamped on all our coins. Since then, our trust in God has gotten us into a Civil War, two world wars, a bunch of other wars, a Great Depression, two Great Recessions, and two catastrophic pandemics. I don’t want to seem pushy or anything, but I think maybe it’s time to change it to something more useful. Like, say, anything. CHEERS to turning a deluge into a delupportunity. It's feast or famine in California, where a historic drought has become a historic opposite-of-drought. Being from the other side of the country as I am, and having visited California once years ago for 48 hours, I've deemed myself an expert on the situation there and have been screaming that anytime it rains there every drop needs to be caught, catalogued, and stored for use against future droughts. Thankfully some farmers listened to me and are deliberately flooding their fields to restore "the precious" to aquifers there: “It’s kind of a deep irrigation,” said [Michael] Naito, who has continued this practice over the past few months, flooding 250 acres of his 600-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. As the water sinks in, it travels deeper underground to slowly percolate into the underlying aquifer. The practice, called managed agricultural groundwater recharge, probably looks strange to the uninitiated, but it’s seen as an increasingly important task during years with a water surplus in the state. […] Be careful what you pray for? This practice requires the same tools as flood irrigation, an approach that was once practiced by most farmers in California. It’s still the most common form of irrigation globally. “You put the water out and what the plant didn’t use, the majority of it went back into our aquifer,” said [Michael] Naito. But over the past couple decades, many farmers converted to drip irrigation, giving their crops only the water they need. As a result, very little water returns to the aquifer. While practiced by a handful of farmers in his irrigation district, he’s confident that active groundwater recharge will soon become mainstream. Farmers across the state will join together, he hopes, flooding their orchards every time there’s water to spare. It's a good start, and a reminder that climate change nullifies all future guarantees of reliable H20. I'm happy to have telepathically spearheaded this irrigation initiative, and now leave it in the capable callused hands of the farmers and appropriate state and federal agencies to carry the sustainability ball across the goal line. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Martian invasion to repel. (A blogger's work is never done.) - Ten years ago in C&J: April 20, 2013 CHEERS to seeing in Lavavision. In Hawaii, the green light has been given to build one of the world's biggest telescopes on top of a volcano. This sucker's gonna mess with your mind, man… Once built, the Thirty Meter Telescope will instantly shoot near the top of the list of the most advanced telescopes on Earth. According to astronomers, the telescope will have the ability to observe light and objects from 13 billion years ago. The observatory will also have the ability to observe the early formation of exoplanets and galaxies, providing astronomers with rare insight into the formation of the universe. The project is the culmination of vision, hard work, perseverance, and a burning desire to find out what naked aliens looked like 13 billion years ago. - And just one more… Ben doing that Ben thing Ben did so well. CHEERS to the mellowest national holiday ever. Today is 4/20 Day, and that means it’s also Ben Masel Day! Ben was a cantankerous, beloved Kossack (User ID 3982, joining one day before the debut of C&J in December, 2003), perennial attendee at our Netroots Nation conventions, and a good-trouble causer on behalf of legal pot, free speech and privacy rights whom the folks in Madison, Wisconsin will never forget. Read John Nichols’ 2012 tribute to him here. He was the template for the dogged activist, and he’d be loving the rise of the resistance, from the Freeway Bloggers to the pre-pandemic sit-ins in Congress and state houses, to the historic marches, and especially the recent warp-speed acceptance and legalization of the demon weed. In his honor, tonight we plan to twist up a fattie as we watch The Wizard of Oz with the sound turned down and replaced with Dark Side of the Moon. And miss old Ben—the Kenobi of doobies. Have a nice Thursday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today? - Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial Don’t Buy Bill in Portland Maine's Whitewash of His Early, Selfish Decision to Jump in the Cheers and Jeers Kiddie Pool —Isaac Shore - [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/20/2164646/-Cheers-and-Jeers-Thursday Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/