Damn




https://www.kcrg.com/2024/03/20/wom...F69C0r4oevlo5FEdrz-2MfUV2Zh3xCeZ_AiDDohYXm8iU

Over Houston (and one dude). I think it's a positive reflection of the office culture.

I see a Pulitzer Prize in her future!

Can someone please post a link to updated brackets and team scores.

Age 88

What a great actor!

Sniper in The Jerk
Dive coach in Back to School
Machinist is Raising Arizona
Dr. Jellyfinger in Fletch

And on and on …

Great line from him in the article telling Warren Beatty that he was there on set because Jack Warden isn’t always gonna be available!

Noooo!

Figured I add to the woke thread titles

Wouldja?

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-implant company, said Thursday evening that it has regulatory approval to conduct the first clinical trial of its experimental device in humans.
Approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would mark a milestone for the company, which has been developing a device surgically inserted into the brain by a robot and capable of decoding brain activity and linking it to computers. Up until now, the company has conducted research only in animals.


“We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!” Neuralink announced on Twitter, calling it “an important first step that one day will allow our technology to help many people.” Musk retweeted the post, congratulating his team.

Neuralink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.


The FDA doesn’t typically confirm approvals for human clinical trials but offered a statement Friday. “The FDA acknowledges and understands that Neuralink has announced that its investigational device exemption … for its implant/R1 robot was approved by the FDA and that it may now begin conducting human clinical trials for its device,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement Friday.
Musk has prematurely touted regulatory approval in the past. In 2017, he wrote on Twitter that his tunneling firm, the Boring Company, had received “verbal govt approval” for an underground Hyperloop from New York to Washington, D.C. Officials at the time offered no direct confirmation of Musk’s claim — and it was clear there were no formal measures to approve such a project.
The race against Elon Musk to put chips in people’s brains

What is Neuralink?​

Founded in 2016, Neuralink is a privately held firm with operations in Fremont, Calif., and a sprawling campus under construction outside of Austin. The company has more than 400 employees and has raised at least $363 million, according to data-provider PitchBook.



With Musk’s backing, Neuralink has brought extraordinary resources — and investor attention — to a field known as brain-computer interface, where scientists and engineers are developing electronic implants that would decode brain activity and communicate it to computers. Such technology, which has been in the works for decades, has the potential to restore function to people with paralysis and debilitating conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Already, companies like Blackrock Neurotech and Synchron have implanted devices in people for clinical trials, and at least 42 people globally have had brain-computer implants. Such devices have enabled feats that once belonged to the realm of science fiction: a paralyzed man fist-bumping President Barack Obama with a robotic hand; a patient with ALS typing by thinking about keystrokes; a tetraplegic patient managing to walk with a slow but natural stride.
While most companies seeking to commercialize brain implants are focused on those with medical needs, Neuralink has even bigger ambitions: creating a device that not only restores human function but enhances it.


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“We want to surpass able-bodied human performance with our technology,” Neuralink tweeted in April.
Elon Musk says Neuralink is about six months away from human trials

What is Neuralink’s brain chip technology?​

The company has designed an electrode-laden computer chip to be sewn into the surface of the brain, and a robotic device to perform the surgery. Neuralink is pursuing a more invasive, high-bandwidth approach than some of its rivals, betting that its configuration will transfer data from brain to computer more rapidly than devices with fewer electrodes or that sit outside the brain’s surface. Musk envisions that the devices could be regularly upgraded.
“I’m pretty sure you would not want the iPhone 1 stuck in your head if the iPhone 14 is available,” Musk said at an event in late November, where he predicted Neuralink would begin human trials in six months.



Neuralink has highlighted Musk’s penchant for showmanship, implanting a computer chip in a monkey and teaching him to play the computer game Pong with his mind. But the company has also given lengthy, highly technical presentations on its technology, discussing such topics as how it will mitigate the risk of brain tissue scarring and a diminishing electronic signal from the implant.
The company has also drawn criticism for its research on animals from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which has called for an investigation into “serious safety concerns” arising from its practices.
“Musk needs to drop his obsession with sticking a device in our heads,” Ryan Merkley, director of research advocacy with the Physicians Committee, said in a statement Friday. “If he cared about the health of patients, he would invest in a noninvasive brain-computer interface.”



A clinical trial for the device in humans is no guarantee of regulatory or commercial success. Neuralink and others are bound to face intense scrutiny by the FDA that their devices are safe and reliable, in addition to facing ethical and security questions raised by a technology that could confer a cognitive advantage to those with an implant.

When will clinical trials in humans begin?​

It is unclear when clinical trials might begin. A patient registry on Neuralink’s website indicates that only patients with certain conditions — including paralysis, blindness, deafness or the inability to speak — are eligible to participate.
The brain-computer interface is one of Musk’s most ambitious bets in a business empire that spans electric cars to rockets propelling humans to space and that has grown most recently to encompass generative artificial intelligence and social media.



Musk earlier this year incorporated a company, X.AI, that aims to compete with Microsoft and Google after the tech giants launched large language-model chatbots that can answer a vast range of queries.
Meanwhile, he has been devoting much of his time in recent months to Twitter, the social media company he bought last year for $44 billion while pledging to restore “free speech.”
Musk’s frenetic schedule has him juggling commitments to each of the companies at once. He travels the country by private jet, visiting his Tesla factories and SpaceX launch sites and giving speeches for Twitter and visiting its Bay Area headquarters — sometimes all in the same week. Musk announced earlier this month that he was appointing advertising executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s chief executive, relieving him of some of the responsibility for overseeing the social media platform that has been plunged into chaos since his takeover last year.

Last Friday, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) told a lie about U.S. spies.

He was asked by reporter Liam Cosgrove if he was worried about U.S. intelligence agencies spreading propaganda within the United States, thereby manipulating our minds about domestic or foreign affairs.

Cosgrove was asking in the context of the growing debate about the social media app TikTok. Crenshaw offered his reasonable fears about the Chinese government using the platform to twist our “hearts and minds” to suit its communist goals.

But Crenshaw dismissed that the U.S. government and our intelligence agencies would ever do such a thing. “I know that they’re not,” Crenshaw said firmly. He added sarcastically, “Do you have some evidence otherwise that you’d like to share?”

When Cosgrove offered none, Crenshaw snarked at the gaggle of reporters around him, “Are there any serious questions?”

But the good representative from Texas lied. He knows, or should know, that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies are spreading propaganda inside the U.S. to change our hearts and minds.

And former CIA officers such as myself are outraged by it.

Let me give you but one example.

On Dec. 29, 2022, British spymaster Jeremy Fleming guest hosted BBC Radio 4’s Today Program. Joining him was U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

They discussed their countries’ respective propaganda operations regarding the war in Ukraine. The mission, they said, was to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speeches and public arguments that justified his invasion of Kyiv. The way to do it, they argued, was to declassify top-secret intelligence of Putin’s war plans and share them with media outlets around the world.

“[There’s] no point collecting [intelligence] unless you use it,” Fleming said. “… Get the intelligence out there and use it to ‘pre-bunk.’”

Haines agreed, explaining what he meant: “We saw that [the Russians] were looking to create a pretext for the invasion and we wanted to sort of debunk that and help people understand that this was a false narrative.”

In other words, fight fire with fire.

Very well. We should ask: How did the debunking operations go?

Here’s the assessment provided by Haines: “[In Russia] we had basically no impact … and we were not that impactful in other countries [either] that already had sort of taken on the narrative of what the Russians were pushing.”

In other words, mission failure — if the goal was to manipulate minds abroad.

Her British counterpart agreed. But then, Haines added this bombshell: “Our impact was far greater in the West than it was in other places in the world.”


As a former CIA officer, let me offer two reasons this is utterly horrifying. First, American taxpayers should not be funding propaganda operations to influence American audiences. Nor should the British, I’d imagine.

Second, we also have troubling reports that the intel they were releasing for propaganda purposes wasn’t top secret or even accurate — and sometimes not real.

In other words, their propaganda operations spread half-truths or utter lies to their own countrymen. Haines and Fleming then measured the impact of the operations and found them to be “great.”

It’s the stuff of George Orwell’s 1984.

The question is whether they’re still doing it — and which of their political bosses in the White House and 10 Downing Street ordered it be done.

I don’t know what the answers to those questions might be. But it’s time that at least Haines and her colleague at the CIA, Director William Burns, testify under oath and in public about the matter at the U.S. House and Senate Select Intelligence Oversight Committees. And soon.


The reason? Both of them are working with President Joe Biden to convince, cajole, or otherwise shame U.S. lawmakers and taxpayers into forking over another $60+ billion in war aid for Ukraine.

In other words, it’s time we know if Biden and company are using domestic propaganda operations to achieve their partisan goals. And if so, there should be hell to pay.

And among the many to pay should be Rep. Crenshaw. Cosgrove asked him a fair and important question last Friday about U.S. intelligence agencies spreading propaganda to manipulate American minds. As it turns out, the answer is yes — they are.

That means that the least Crenshaw could do is offer Cosgrove an apology — and a promise to stop them.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...S&cvid=5200106f768546ed83f192956e1c3fba&ei=41

She hiding? Dang autocorrect

Dan Monson and Little Richard. I have found this humorous.

for the NCAAs tore her ACL. Feel bad for the kid.

MLB games shouldn’t be played anywhere else except in America. Playing baseball in Asia is embarrassing and ruining the integrity of the game.

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Very cool.

You can preorder it here: https://slamgoods.com/collections/slam-249-caitlin-clark/products/slam-249-caitlin-clark

Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys have failed.
So far, the signs are promising.
Kidneys remove waste products and excess fluid from the blood. The new kidney began producing urine shortly after the surgery last weekend and the patient’s condition continues to improve, according to physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, known as Mass General. He is already walking the halls of the hospital and may be discharged soon.
The patient is a Black man, and the procedure may have special significance for Black patients, who suffer high rates of end-stage kidney disease.
A new source of kidneys “could solve an intractable problem in the field — the inadequate access of minority patients to kidney transplants,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, associate chief of the nephrology division at Mass General and the patient’s primary kidney doctor.
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If kidneys from genetically modified animals can be transplanted on a large scale, dialysis “will become obsolete,” said Dr. Leonardo V. Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General. The hospital’s parent organization, Mass General Brigham, developed the transplant program.
Over 800,000 Americans have kidney failure and require dialysis, a procedure that filters toxins from the blood. Over 100,000 are on a waiting list to receive a transplanted kidney from a living or dead human donor.
In addition, tens of millions of Americans have chronic kidney disease, which can lead to organ failure.
While dialysis keeps people alive, the gold-standard treatment is an organ transplant. Thousands of patients die annually while waiting for a kidney, however, because there is an acute shortage of organs. Just 25,000 kidney transplants are performed each year.
Xenotransplantation — the implantation of an animal’s organ into a human — has for decades been proposed as a potential solution that could make kidneys much more widely available. But the human immune system rejects foreign tissue, causing life-threatening complications, and experts note that long-term rejection can occur even when donors are well matched.

​

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/dining/stock-market-bars-london.html

​

In recent years, scientific advances including gene editing and cloning have edged xenotransplants closer to reality, making it possible to modify animal genes to make the organs more compatible and less likely to be rejected by the immune system.

The kidney came from a pig engineered by the biotech company eGenesis, which removed three genes involved in potential rejection of the organ. In addition, seven human genes were inserted to enhance human compatibility. Pigs carry retroviruses that may infect humans, and the company also inactivated the pathogens.
In September 2021, surgeons at NYU Langone Health in New York attached a kidney from a genetically modified pig to a brain-dead man and watched as it began to function and make urine. Shortly afterward, scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced they had performed a similar procedure with similar results.
Surgeons at the University of Maryland have twice transplanted hearts from genetically modified pigs into patients with heart disease. While the organs functioned and the first did not appear to be rejected, both of the patients, who had advanced disease, died shortly afterward.
(Patients who agree to these cutting-edge experimental treatments are usually extremely ill and have few options available; often they are too sick to qualify for the waiting list for a precious human organ or are not eligible for other reasons.)
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The transplant patient in Boston, Richard “Rick” Slayman, a state transportation department supervisor, had suffered from diabetes and hypertension for many years, and had been under treatment at Mass General for over a decade.
After his kidneys failed, Mr. Slayman was on dialysis for seven years, eventually receiving a human kidney in 2018. But the donated organ failed within five years, and he developed other complications, including congestive heart failure, Dr. Williams said.
When Mr. Slayman resumed dialysis in 2023, he experienced severe vascular complications — his blood vessels were clotting and failing — and he needed recurrent hospitalization, Dr. Williams said.
Mr. Slayman, who kept working despite his health problems, faced a long wait for another human kidney, and “he was growing despondent,” Dr. Williams said. “He said, ‘I just can’t go on like this. I can’t keep doing this.’ I started to think about extraordinary measures we could take.”
“He would have had to wait five to six years for a human kidney. He would not have been able to survive it,” Dr. Williams added.
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When Dr. Williams asked Mr. Slayman about receiving a pig’s kidney, Mr. Slayman had many questions but eventually decided to proceed.
“I saw it not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” he said in a statement provided by Mass General.
Mr. Slayman’s new kidney seems to be functional, so far, and he has been able to stop dialysis. The new pig kidney is making urine as well as creatinine, a waste product.
Other measures are also improving daily, his doctors said. Doctors will continue to monitor Mr. Slayman for signs of organ rejection.
“He looks like his own self. It’s remarkable,” Dr. Williams said.
The surgery was not without critics. Xenotransplantation raises the prospect of still greater exploitation of animals and may introduce new pathogens into human populations, said Kathy Guillermo, senior vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Former president Donald Trump’s legal team, in a Supreme Court filing this week, decided it would be a good idea to cite the past words of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
In doing so, though, they reinforced just how drastic what they seek is: absolute immunity for broadly defined presidential acts. Kavanaugh’s actual words cast that as unthinkable.


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The filing is merely the latest head-scratching move from Trump’s lawyers. And it’s not even the first time they have filed something to the nation’s highest court that fits that description.
The current example involves the lawyers’ citation of a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article from Kavanaugh — almost a decade before his ascent to the Supreme Court.

To hear Trump’s lawyers tell it, Kavanaugh’s article reinforced the dangers of presidents being subject to criminal and civil actions.


“In short, ‘a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President,’ ” the Trump team’s brief says, quoting Kavanaugh. It then adds, in its own words: “The same conclusion holds if that criminal investigation is waiting in the wings until he leaves office.”

Left unstated — but soon noted by law professor Ryan Goodman of Just Security — was that Kavanaugh in the same article actually took a different position from the one Trump’s lawyers advanced.

While Kavanaugh posited that presidents shouldn’t have to face criminal investigations or prosecution while in office, he took no such position on post-presidential indictments. Indeed, he seemed to take the constitutionality of post-presidential indictments for granted.
“The point is not to put the President above the law or to eliminate checks on the President,” Kavanaugh said in the very next paragraph, “but simply to defer litigation and investigations until the President is out of office.”


The title of that section of Kavanaugh’s article is: “PROVIDE SITTING PRESIDENTS WITH A TEMPORARY DEFERRAL OF CIVIL SUITS AND OF CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS AND INVESTIGATIONS” — emphasis on “temporary.”

Kavanaugh wasn’t even arguing that a president was constitutionally immune from criminal investigation or prosecution while in office; he was merely saying that a president should be, and specifically that Congress should pass a law exempting the president from that.
The Trump team’s using Kavanaugh to make this argument — in a case that now sits before him — is particularly notable. Not only is Kavanaugh one of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court, but one of the potential stumbling blocks in Kavanaugh’s confirmation was his expansive view of presidential power. With Trump facing plenty of scrutiny midway through his tenure, Democrats argued that Kavanaugh was too deferential to the chief executive. His previous thoughts on immunity were a major topic of debate and a strike against him with Democrats.


But even then Kavanaugh didn’t go nearly as far as Trump now wants him and the rest of the Supreme Court to go. If it wasn’t already clear that Trump’s claim to full presidential immunity is extraordinary, spotlighting these words from Kavanaugh — of all people — would seem to drive it home.

Of course, few legal experts expect Trump’s immunity claim, which was roundly rejected by an appeals court last month, to succeed. For Trump, the main value of the Supreme Court’s taking up the case appears to be delay. But cuing this up for the nation’s highest court at the very least risks another embarrassing defeat at the hands of Trump-nominated justices such as Kavanaugh.
The Kavanaugh citation follows other dubious inclusions in Trump’s legal filings, both in the Supreme Court and in lower courts:

• In late 2020, Trump lawyer John Eastman claimed near the start of a Supreme Court filing that Trump’s 2020 election loss was inexplicable, in part, because no other candidate had ever won Florida and Ohio while losing the presidency. In fact, Richard M. Nixon did in 1960.
• In a legal brief earlier this year to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Trump’s lawyers cited a vaguely sourced document full of specious and long-debunked voter fraud claims — even as members of his campaign distanced themselves from the document. Trump’s lawyers argued that the document showed there remained “vigorous disputes and questions about the actual outcome of the 2020 Presidential election,” despite the document showing no such thing and actually demonstrating the opposite.
• Trump lawyer Alina Habba weeks later suggested in a filing that the judge in Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation case might have a conflict of interest, citing a thinly sourced New York Post story alleging a decades-old professional relationship between him and Carroll’s lawyer. Habba quickly withdrew the suggestion just a day later as the claim fell apart. And even in her initial filing, she bolded and italicized text from the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges that undermined her claim to a conflict even if the story had been true.
• Trump’s lawyers in an August brief to the D.C. district court cited a pair of highly dubious claims popularized by far-right social media influencers. One of them involved Biden’s November 2022 comment that he was “making sure [Trump], under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.” Trump’s lawyers claimed Biden was saying his “administration” would thwart Trump and that his comments added “an unprecedented political dimension to this prosecution.” This claim had been debunked repeatedly months earlier. Biden never cited his administration, and there’s no reason to believe he was referring to prosecutions.

These examples don’t even include the sloppy, error-riddled legal filings that characterized other Trump-aligned lawyers’ hasty efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has pitched his many legal setbacks as a result of a biased and weaponized legal system. But when you have to reach for these kinds of arguments — including citing your own Supreme Court nominee who clearly took a position at odds with your own — it would seem to reinforce that you’re not working with much.

Nice.

Importing poverty for their political gain.

The plan detailed:

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Search for birth control on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.
Instead, many social media influencers recommend “natural” alternatives, such as timing sex to menstrual cycles — a less effective birth-control method that doctors warn could result in unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is now banned or restricted in nearly half the states.

Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence. While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) — is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.



The backlash to birth control comes at a time of rampant misinformation about basic health tenets amid poor digital literacy and a wider political debate over reproductive rights, in which far-right conservatives argue that broad acceptance of birth control has altered traditional gender roles and weakened the family.
Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators.


“People are putting themselves out there as experts on birth control and speaking to things that the science does not bear out,” said Michael Belmonte, an OB/GYN in D.C. and a family planning expert with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). “I am seeing those direct failures of this misinformation.”
He says women frequently come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control and the effectiveness of tracking periods to prevent pregnancy. Many of these patients have traveled from states that have completely or partly banned abortions, he said, including Texas, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Doctors stand a better chance of dispelling misinformation when they listen to patients’ concerns, said Belmonte, noting that some are more worried about the side effects of birth control than the effectiveness doctors have long been trained to emphasize. He has adopted ACOG’s recommendation that physicians candidly discuss common side effects such as nausea, headaches, breast tenderness and bleeding between periods; many of these resolve on their own or can be mitigated by switching forms of birth control.
Women of color whose communities have historically been exploited by the medical establishment may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation, given the long history of mistrust around birth control in this country, said Kimberly Baker, an assistant professor at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. Forced sterilizations of tens of thousands of primarily Black, Latina and Indigenous women happened under U.S. government programs in the 20th century.
“That’s another huge reason why these negative videos around birth control get a lot of fanfare, because there’s already the stigma attached to it, and that’s steeped in our history,” she said.For influencers of all political stripes seeking fame and fortune on the internet, negative content draws more clicks, allowing them to reach a wider audience to sell their products and services.


Nicole Bendayan, who has amassed more than 1 million combined followers on Instagram and TikTok for her holistic-health coaching business, shared on social media that she stopped using hormonal birth control because she was concerned about weight gain, low libido and intermittent bleeding, which she had assumed were side effects.
Bendayan’s TikTok about getting off birth control and becoming a “cycle-syncing nutritionist” who teaches women how to live “in tune” with their menstrual cycles has drawn 10.5 million views.
The 29-year-old is not a licensed medical specialist.



“I had a lot of really bad symptoms [and] went to see a bunch of different doctors. Every one of them dismissed me. Even when I asked if it had anything to do with birth control, they all said no,” Bendayan said in an interview with The Washington Post. She had used a vaginal ring for eight years and an IUD for two; she said that when she went off birth control, her symptoms went away.
“I believe that the access to birth control is important,” she said. “I don’t think that we’re given informed consent.”
Bendayan has told her followers that birth control may deplete magnesium, vitamins B, C and E, and zinc levels. She charges hundreds of dollars for a three-month virtual program that includes analyses of blood panels for what she calls hormonal imbalances.
When asked about the science behind why her symptoms resolved after getting off birth control, Bendayan said she did her own research and found studies that backed up what she was feeling. She doesn’t claim to be a doctor, but says she wants to help others.
“I always make it clear in a disclaimer that I’m not a medical professional and that I would happily work with their health-care team,” said Bendayan, who lives in Valencia, Spain. “I’m an educator.”

You will need an ESPN+ subscription. I will be getting it. I won't see any of it live as I am quite booked up on work.

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This weight has been the most uncertain and unpredictable all year. Any of about 15 in the tournament could end up champ or not place. Really hard to look at and predict even with my black and gold sunglasses but going to take a stab at it.
Top half of bracket: Barring a ref bailout, I dont see Davis getting through to the finals. McKee may take him out or Volk will surely be a tough out. I think Ramos will finally get on a roll and find his way to the finals for the second year in a row.

Bottom half of bracket: Ayala will look for bonus in first round and should (should being the key word) easily win the second round. Ugly Spratley should make the quarters. They had a tight match at Okie St but the ref at NCAA should be a little tougher on the run to the edge thing till 30 seconds left and I doubt the ref will limit the boxing match stuff. At any rate, Sprat was doing a lot of barking after his loss and am thinking he was telling Ayala how he would beat him when they meet again so Ayala gets the benefit of a chip on his shoulder in this one. I got Ayala winnin over ugly Sprat 7-3. Any one of Deaug, Bartlett or Cammacho could surprise and come out of the bottom of the bottom bracket. Stanich only has 3 losses but I think one of them was ugly Spratley. He is 2nd seed for winning whatever conference tournament he was in but probably just good enough to take out Deaug in the quarters.

Ayala wins a close one against Stanich but loses a close one to Ramos in the finals.

A jury convicted a former Milwaukee election official of absentee ballot fraud and misconduct in office Wednesday in an unusual case that pitted a self-proclaimed whistleblower against election conspiracy theorists.

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Kimberly Zapata, 47, served as Milwaukee’s deputy elections director in 2022, when baseless claims about elections circulated among Republicans, including in the state legislature. Zapata has said the focus by some lawmakers in this critical swing state on meritless issues frustrated her and she wanted to alert them to what she viewed as a true vulnerability in Wisconsin’s voting system. To do that, she has said, she generated three ballots under the names of fictitious military members and sent them to one of the legislature’s leading election deniers.

No illegal votes were cast, and the lawmaker promptly reported the ballots to authorities. Zapata soon afterward was fired and charged with a felony count of misconduct in office and three misdemeanor counts of absentee ballot fraud.



A jury in Milwaukee County on Wednesday convicted Zapata after hearing two days of testimony. She faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $13,000 fine.

Shortly after she was charged in November 2022, Zapata told The Washington Post she came to a “breaking point” because of false election claims and threats. She said lawmakers should look into actual problems with the state’s voting system and said she wanted to make that point in “the loudest and most attention-grabbing way.”
“I understand what I did was wrong, and I understand that I need consequences for it,” she said in that interview. “But at the same time, I did this for the greater good. I did this for the American voters to believe in the election system again.”

She described herself as a swing voter and said she did not consider herself a Republican or Democrat.


Falsehoods about elections flourished in Wisconsin after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020. Republican lawmakers hired investigators who consulted with conspiracy theorists and flirted with trying to revoke the state’s 10 electoral votes more than a year after the election. The lead investigator for the Republican lawmakers later acknowledged that trying to pull back the electoral votes was “a practical impossibility.”
Unlike most states, Wisconsin allows military members to cast absentee ballots without registering to vote or providing proof of residency. Zapata said she saw that policy as a problem and used a state website to have three ballots sent under invented names to state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), who has promoted discredited theories about the 2020 election and at the time led the Wisconsin State Assembly’s elections committee.

Brandtjen in a written statement this week said she had never spoken to Zapata but believed she had identified a “critical flaw” in the state’s online system for requesting absentee ballots. She said she was concerned that lawmakers and the state elections commission had not done more to address the issue.


Election officials have downplayed the incident, saying they would quickly discover any instances in which large numbers of fictitious ballots were created. They have said the charges against Zapata show that such schemes don’t work.
Zapata created the ballots under fake names four months after Wisconsin conservative activist Harry Wait made online requests to have ballots meant for other people sent to his home. Wait, who has been charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors, has said he was trying to expose what he considers flaws in how the state allows voters to apply for absentee ballots.