I haven't watched WWE in a long time. Was he even on any TV shows for them?

This network has been 🗑️ for close to an hour.

Historic day!

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Has been suspended for 2 weeks and banned from covering Indiana Fever games live this entire season. You may remember him as the reporter who asked Clark the question about the heart she makes with her hands, responding "Start doing it to me and we'll get along just fine."

Do you agree with this suspension?



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"I also believe two truths can be held at the same time." @RagnarLothbrok 👈He's talking to you, brother!​

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‘Reacher’ Star Alan Ritchson Fires Back at Cops Who Trolled Him Online​

Eboni Boykin-Patterson
Tue, April 16, 2024 at 2:09 PM CDT·3 min read



Alan Ritchson, the titular star of Prime Video’s Reacher series, has been known to share his political opinions despite how they may conflict with those of the show’s conservative fan base. And even though some viewers have threatened to stop watching the popular streamer series in protest of Ritchson’s “woke” comments, he’s doubling down on his message of police accountability in a post to Instagram this week.

The digs aimed at Ritchson were related to an interview he did with The Hollywood Reporter this month, in which he addressed the online stir among Reacher fans after an old photo of him wearing an “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” tee shirt resurfaced: “Cops get away with murder all the time, and the fact that we can’t really hold them accountable for their improprieties is disturbing to me,” he said in the interview. “We should completely reform the way that we do it. I mean, you shouldn’t have to spend more time getting an education as a hairstylist than as a cop who’s armed with a deadly weapon.”

The National Fraternal Order of Police caught wind of Ritchson’s comments and posted a photo of the actor to its Instagram page, calling him a “useless Hollywood actor” who is “virtue signaling for attention at the expense of brave police officers.” Ritchson responded to the post on Tuesday, calling it a “concerning” display of “emotional immaturity” in his lengthy reply.

“This kind of emotionally immature response is the epitome of what concerns me about law enforcement today,” he wrote in the post. “If this is how leadership handles a peaceful disagreement, what does life look like for those unseen interactions in the street? How does this shape the character of those police officers looking to management?”

“Do you really want individuals so easily angered and bully[sic] like school children to have a gun and the protection of an untouchable union?” he also said.

Ritchson went on to say that he knows there are “many good and brave cops” but pretending that there aren’t some bad apples indicates “blind allegiance” he called “dangerous” and “fertile ground for fascism.”

“There are rogue or ill-equipped officers who remind us that we need higher barriers to entry and stricter regulations so abuses are relegated to the past,” he continued, “To only seek praise and ignore this need is extremely unwise and endangers those at risk of being ostracized and marginalized.”

Ritchson also took the opportunity to call out Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “To make matters worse, in Florida, voters perpetuate these issues by continuing to support people like Gov. Desantis who just passed a law making it illegal for anyone other than the police to police themselves,” he wrote, referring to the governor’s recent bill that limits police oversight panels in the state.

“This lack of transparency would be laughable if not so deadly,” he added. “Efforts like these take us further from the world I hope to leave for my children, which is one with extreme prudence when deciding who we arm and a glass house for public institutions. Especially ones with the ability to end lives.”

In the same Hollywood Reporter interview, Ritchson opened up about his own Christian faith and expressed frustration over how conservatives have seemingly co-opted his religion. “Trump is a rapist and a con man, and yet the entire Christian church seems to treat him like he’s their poster child and it’s unreal,” he remarked. “I don’t understand it.”

Not sure if this is a forest-flavored Pepsi, but this has been all over lately. I figured HORTGIA might enjoy the spirited debate around it.

Barring another transaction, which I'm told by a WNBA source is unlikely, Kate Martin will have made the defending champion Las Vegas Aces regular season roster as a second-round pick. Defied the long odds most later picks face on ANY roster, much less a powerhouse like LV.

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How dumb can people be to fall for these scams?:

Gregory Lamar Scorza, 24. (Johnson County Jail
A Georgia man was arrested Monday in Iowa City on charges that he and two other men scammed someone out of $15,600 by pretending to be law enforcement officers.



Gregory Lamar Scorza, 24, of Douglasville, Ga., is charged with identity theft, impersonating a public official and ongoing criminal conduct.


According to a criminal complaint, Scorza and two other men — Demonte Tequis Brazil, 31, and Anthony Cortez Jones, 23, both of Atlanta — traveled to Iowa and impersonated Johnson County sheriff’s deputies.




On Sept. 27, 2023, the three men told an Iowa City victim that without a large payment, the victim would be arrested. The victim gave them $15,600 over two transactions. The men used some of the money to buy jewelry at the Coral Ridge Mall, the complaint states.


The men already had scammed three others in Iowa when the Iowa City scheme took place, according to the complaint.


Brazil and Jones are both facing charges in Pottawattamie County for a similar scam. According to complaints in that case, Brazil and Jones scammed a woman out of $5,000 on Sept. 25, 2023. The woman reported that three men called her to tell her she was wanted on a federal warrant for failure to appear and contempt of court. Two men claimed to be deputies from the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office and the third said he was a bail bonds agent.


They told the woman she had to turn herself in to prove the courts had not served her, and that she had to pay $5,000 immediately. She was told she could not pay at the bail bonds office because it was federal property and she wasn’t allowed on federal property because of her warrant. She met one of the men behind the bail bonds office, and gave him $5,000. She was then told to go to the Pottawattamie County Jail to show she had paid her bond. When no one was waiting for her there, she realized she had been scammed.





Two other people reported that they had received calls on Sept. 25 and Sept. 26 from men claiming to be Council Bluffs police officers and who said they needed to pay money to clear a warrant. The other two people who were called recognized the calls were scams and did not pay, the complaint states.


Police used traffic camera footage to track the car that the man who had taken the money had exited. They ran the license plate and found it was a rental car, and they determined Brazil was the man who had rented it. Since Brazil’s address was in Georgia, police checked flight records and found that Brazil had purchased two flights to Iowa — and one was for Jones.


Brazil and Jones were arrested Sept. 28 in Pottawattamie County on charges of identity theft, impersonating a public official and first-degree theft. Both cases are pending.


A warrant was issued Oct. 9 in Johnson County for Scorza, and he was arrested Monday. He had an initial appearance in court Tuesday and was being held on a $40,000 bail.

Not sure why the administration chose to include this....

Last month, the Biden administration finally released the Department of Education’s long-anticipated rewrite of Title IX’s implementing regulations. Weighing in at just over 1,500 pages, the notice of final rulemaking and the published draft rules leading up to it have generated controversy at every step.

Most of the debate has centered around the revised regulations’ definition of sexual assault and protections for transgender people. But largely flying under the radar is the regulations’ effort to entice campus administrators to take the easy path toward ejecting or disciplining students and staff accused of sexual misconduct.
Colleges and universities should be particularly wary of accepting the invitation to trade due process — a cornerstone of our legal system — and the fairness and robust fact-finding that due process ensures, for administrative efficiency. History teaches us that this trade-off is usually a bad deal for all involved.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 plays a crucial role in our education system, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in all federally funded education programs and activities. Institutions that accept federal funds — which includes nearly all American colleges and universities — are obligated to promptly and effectively address claims of sex discrimination or risk losing their federal funding. While these institutions have the option to implement more rigorous due process standards, the revised Title IX regulations now allow institutions to provide only the most minimal procedural protections to students accused of sexual misconduct.

College disciplinary proceedings, often referred to as “grievance procedures” under Title IX, are far from trivial administrative matters. They carry significant weight, with students or staff found guilty of violating an institution’s code of conduct facing potential expulsion, diploma revocation and other life-altering consequences. This underscores the gravity of these proceedings and the need for careful consideration.


Three particular changes stand out as most threatening to unbiased fact-finding and fair decision-making: (1) Adopting the single investigator mode, in which a single official can be both investigator and final decisionmaker; (2) eliminating live, adversarial hearings; and (3) lowering the default standard of proof.

Of most significant concern to procedural fairness and accuracy in fact-finding is that the campus Title IX coordinator can now serve as the investigator, campus prosecutor and ultimate fact-finder and decision-maker in the same matter. This is somewhat deceptively called the “single-investigator model.”

The DOE contends that “requiring separate staff members to handle investigation and adjudication is burdensome.” Maybe. But any such burden pales in comparison to the risk that such a model presents to accused students. Getting it right and ensuring that final decisions are fully informed and correct should matter more. Among other things, this will reduce lawsuits and uncertainty in outcomes in the long run.

Relatedly, campus administrators can now choose to eliminate the accused’s right to a trial-like live hearing with cross-examination and the right to introduce expert testimony. Aside from producing potentially questionable outcomes untested by either an adversarial process or a neutral factfinder, the single-investigator model paired with the end of meaningful hearings as a matter of right will be a magnet for constitutional challenges, particularly for state-run schools.

In Doe v. Baum, et al., for example, the Sixth Circuit ruled that “if a public university has to choose between competing narratives to resolve a case, the university must give the accused student or his agent [1] an opportunity to cross-examine the accuser and adverse witnesses [2] in the presence of a neutral fact-finder.”

The DOE is undoubtedly correct that permitting cross-examination could threaten to retraumatize complainants, provide an unfair advantage to those able to hire attorneys or even scare individuals away from reporting misconduct. But these concerns only reflect one side of the balance. The adversarial process also carries with it very distinct, well-established benefits.

In the words of eminent 20th-century legal scholar John Henry Wigmore, cross-examination is “beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” After all, as the Baum decision highlighted, resolving dueling narratives through reliance on cross-examination is fundamental to our justice system. The DOE points out that schools retain the option of voluntarily electing to use independent fact finders — but due process should not be optional.

Lastly, under the DOE’s revised regulations, there is now also a presumption that adjudications of responsibility will be based on a lower standard of proof, namely, “preponderance of the evidence” (sometimes called “50 percent plus a feather”), rather than the more demanding “clear and convincing” (i.e. highly probable) standard.

Once again, we urge administrators to think twice about reducing the standard on which evidence is weighed and final decisions are rendered. The higher the standard of proof, the more defensible and integrity-filled the outcome.

The revised regulations allow colleges and universities to lighten their administrative load and opt for the easier way out. Schools have until August 1 to comply. But before succumbing to the lure of procedural minimalism, schools should carefully consider the significant litigation risk to which they expose themselves. They should also focus on how internal and external stakeholders will view their decision to abandon the traditional mechanism for ensuring fairness and integrity in fact-finding and decision-making for a flimsy process with essentially predetermined results.

The accused deserve accurate and trustworthy fact-finding. Those victimized deserve fair, just and defensible guilt determinations for those who have harmed them. Society deserves institutions that acknowledge the gravity of their truth-seeking mission and recognize the immense consequences of getting it wrong. The revised Title IX regulations’ false promise of efficiency threatens to ensure that all are left wanting.

T. Markus Funk, a former federal prosecutor and law professor, is the founding co-chair of Perkins Coie’s Higher Education Practice. Follow him @tmarkusfunk1. Jean-Jacques Cabou is the firmwide co-chair of Perkins Coie’s White Collar and Investigations Practice, a law professor and a member of the American Law Institute.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4642207-changes-to-title-ix-sacrifice-due-process-at-colleges-for-administrative-convenience/

Than Soros funding these protest?

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.
Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.
And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?
Not if the likes of Ron DeSantis have their way. Recently DeSantis, back to work as governor of Florida after the spectacular failure of his presidential campaign, signed a bill banning the production or sale of lab-grown meat in his state. Similar legislation is under consideration in several states.
On one level, this could be seen as a trivial story — a crackdown on an industry that doesn’t even exist yet. But the new Florida law is a perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.
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First, it puts the lie to any claim that the right is the side standing firm for limited government; government doesn’t get much more intrusive than having politicians tell you what you can and can’t eat.
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Who’s behind the ban? Remember when a group of Texas ranchers sued Oprah Winfrey over a show warning about the risks of mad cow disease that they said cost them millions? It’s hard to imagine that today, meat industry fears about losing market share to lab meat aren’t playing a role. And such concerns about market share aren’t necessarily silly. Look at the rise of plant-based milk, which in 2020 accounted for 15 percent of the milk market.

But politicians who claim to worship free markets should be vehemently opposed to any attempt to suppress innovation when it might hurt established interests, which is what this amounts to. Why aren’t they?
Part of the answer, of course, is that many never truly believed in freedom — only freedom for some. Beyond that, however, meat consumption, like almost everything else, has been caught up in the culture wars.
You saw this coming years ago if you were following the most trenchant source of social observation in our times: episodes of “The Simpsons.” Way back in 1995, Lisa Simpson, having decided to become a vegetarian, was forced to sit through a classroom video titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/...catskills-bolt-together-jeffrey-milstein.html

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Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.
But even if you’re someone who insists that “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?
And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.
And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?
By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.
And aside from demonstrating that many right-wingers are actually enemies, not defenders, of freedom, the lab-meat story is yet another indicator of the decline of American conservatism as a principled movement.
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Look, I’m not an admirer of Ronald Reagan, who I believe did a lot of harm as president, but at least Reaganism was about real policy issues like tax rates and regulation. The people who cast themselves as Reagan’s successors, however, seem uninterested in serious policymaking. For a lot of them, politics is a form of live-action role play. It’s not even about “owning” those they term the elites; it’s about perpetually jousting with a fantasy version of what elites supposedly want.
But while they may not care about reality, reality cares about them. Their deep unseriousness can do — and is already doing — a great deal of damage to America and the world.

Some 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object smashed into the nascent Earth, spinning off our moon. Now a team of scientists proposes this giant impact did even more: The collision left behind mysterious blobs within Earth’s interior that may have helped kick off plate tectonics — the geologic process that fuels earthquakes, volcanoes and generally allows life to exist on our planet.


The idea, fleshed out with computer modeling in a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is an attempt to answer one of the most fundamental questions about our home world.
We live on the only planet known to have a surface made up of rocky plates that slide around and crash into each other at boundary zones as the superhot interior churns. This subterranean drama usually goes unnoticed on human time scales, except when an earthquake strikes or a volcano erupts. But most experts agree this process is absolutely essential to life as we know it because it helps the planet cycle carbon, which is important to keeping the climate habitable.



What experts don’t agree on is how plate tectonics started.
The new paper builds on a previous idea that attempts to explain a geologic conundrum. For decades, geologists have speculated about mysterious blobs inside Earth’s mantle detected using seismic imaging. These dense, massive blobs appear to be made of different material than the surrounding mantle, raising questions about what they are and how they formed.
One theory — published in the journal Nature last year — offers an explanation, but also raises a few eyebrows. It suggests that after the moon-forming object slammed into our planet, bits of it ended up intact in Earth’s interior.
The new paper takes this idea a step further: Around 200 million years after the impact, these submerged blobs could have helped create hot plumes inside Earth that disrupted the nascent surface, breaching the crust and allowing circular slabs to sink — a process called subduction.



This process, the authors say, could explain why the oldest minerals on Earth are zircon crystals that appear to have undergone subduction more than 4 billion years ago. What’s more, they suggest it might have contributed to the rise of modern plate tectonics.
“The giant impact is not only the reason for our moon, if that’s the case, it also set the initial conditions of our Earth,” said Qian Yuan, a geoscientist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the authors of the paper.

An ‘unknowable’ event?​

Outside geologists said the model was intriguing but raised a host of questions.
Taras Gerya, a geoscientist at ETH Zurich, said in an email that the idea of an initial subduction event triggered by vigorous mantle plumes shortly after the moon-forming impact is credible and supported by models and some geochemical data. But he added that he is unsure whether this would have led to modern plate tectonics or would have resulted in rapid global recycling of the entire crust, similar to what may have happened on inhospitable Venus.




Michael Brown, a geoscientist at the University of Maryland, said that it’s unclear how a circular subduction zone would lead to the global plate boundaries and the mosaic of rocky slabs that exist in modern plate tectonics.

“We need to bear in mind there is insufficient evidence for us to ever really know what the tectonic mode was in the Archaean,” the eon that lasted between 4 and 2.5 billion years ago, Brown said. “So from a philosophical standpoint, it’s almost certainly unknown and unknowable. I think that point sometimes gets lost.”
T. Mark Harrison, a distinguished research professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, recently wrote a paper called, “We Don’t Know When Plate Tectonics Began.” He questioned assumptions built into the model, pointing to geochemical inconsistencies that cast doubt on the giant impact theory itself.




“If we didn’t have plate tectonics, you and I would not be having this conversation, because our species would not have arisen,” Harrison said. “The best thing I can tell people is that my generation … couldn’t solve arguably the most interesting question left in science, which is how and under what conditions did life emerge.”
To future scientists, he has a message: “We’ve left you a little gift-wrapped present.”

Mind made up? Still undecided?

MacPherson just picked up an offer from Iowa -- his first Power 4 offer. Spoke with him last night, article coming this morning.

Listening back to our conversation, I've decided to fire in a FutureCast. I believe he will be a Hawkeye.

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Dayum!!!!
Clever Girls!

One of my ex-Press-Citizen reporters was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning news team in Santa Cruz, winning for breaking news of the massive California storms last year.

The best thing about Hillary is that she's an even better person than a reporter and she's a hell of a reporter!

And she also has had an outstanding mentor at her first newspaper job

Good people on both sides. Not a cult.


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He'll start for the Aggies after beating out incumbent, Cooper Legas.

The news media used to monitor Twitter (now known as X) 24/7 to catch the latest utterance from four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump. These days, the press obsessively keeps tabs on Trump’s nap schedule in a Manhattan courtroom.

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On the very first day of Trump’s falsifying business records trial, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reported, “Even as a judge was hearing arguments on last-minute issues in a criminal case that centers on salacious allegations and threatens to upend his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.” (That earned her a glare from Trump.)

Pundits inside the courtroom chime in to inform Americans when he nods off. You can believe Trump’s sleepiness has become noticeable when Fox News propagandists try to cover for him by praising his naps.



Outside of MAGA-friendly media, observers are less sanguine about his dozing off. The Atlantic’s David A. Graham called Trump’s slumbers “worrisome.” He asked, “If Trump can’t manage to stay awake during a trial when his very freedom is on the line, what are the chances that he will be able to focus on the intricacies of a spiraling regional war, a trade policy, or any new crisis that might face him if he returns to the White House?” (One might ask the same of his unhinged rants, juvenile musing about Gettysburg and slurred speech: Is this a man ready to resume the presidency?)
As president, Trump usually appeared in the Oval Office only after extensive “executive time” up in the residence, so perhaps sitting in the courtroom all day is too taxing for him. Others speculate that he does not get enough Diet Coke. Others who doubt his mental fitness claim vindication in his habitual napping. Since Trump produces hyped and comical attestations to his health rather than detailed medical reports, we cannot know for certain if there is some medical issue.
Whatever the cause for his frequent drifting off, Trump has drawn plenty of fire from social media and late-night comedians. The man who has an insulting nickname for so many political foes now gets ribbed as #DonSnorleone or “Sleepy Don” or #TheNodfather.


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The mocking has gotten under Trump’s skin. On Thursday, he insisted: “Contrary to the FAKE NEWS MEDIA, I don’t fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.’s Witch Hunt, especially not today. I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!” He sounds much like an errant schoolboy caught sleeping in class: “Just resting my eyes!”


Trump’s denial understandably sparked a new round of mockery. Rex Huppke humorously imitated Trump-speak and wayward capitalization. “Trump is far too STRONG and MANLY to nod off in court and all prior reports about such behavior are preposterous,” he wrote. “What those lamestream losers witnessed Tuesday was America’s greatest president closing his eyes and obeying the court’s UNCONSTITUTIONAL gag order really, really hard.”
All jokes aside, Trump’s denial is par for a narcissist’s course. He can admit no weakness. He expects his base to freakishly admire his physique(!). And, most important, he and his followers have grounded his 2024 campaign on the myth that President Biden (who bikes, dashes off to war zones and works out five times a week, according to his doctor) is the enfeebled one. One wonders whether Trump’s attacks on Biden’s aging are yet another example of habitual “projection.”