Guess Who Voters Think Will Defend Democracy Better... Hint: It Isn't Joe Biden.

Matt Yglesias on 'Elite Misinformation'

Scientists have come together to identify the most important hotspots for biodiversity, whose survival is essential if the era of human domination is to avoid ranking with Earth’s worst periods. Combined, the locations involved are smaller than Iran, but time is running out.Five times in the planet’s history the Earth is known to have lost the majority of living species during a short period of time. It’s likely this occurred on earlier occasions as well, but the record is obscured. Fears that this is happening again, not from an asteroid or super-volcano but human activity, may be premature but will be fulfilled eventually without deliberate action. It might seem simple to choose the areas most in need of protection to avoid this. It’s well known that locations like tropical rainforests are bursting with life and contain an astonishing proportion of the Earth’s land-based species. However, saving the whole of these regions is ambitious given current trends, perhaps too ambitious. The most efficient path to species protection turns out to be somewhat different.“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr Eric Dinerstein in a statement. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2 percent of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”This 1.2 percent is made up of almost 17,000 sites, and represents a 46 percent reduction on previous estimates though improved targeting. Co-author Professor Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia claims this preservation “is a financially viable proposition, but I'm afraid this viability will rapidly decline over time." For this reason, the study’s authors are calling for protection by 2030.Currently, areas chosen for protection often have more to do with politics and cost than the number of species that can be saved. It’s easy for a government to legislate a National Park in an area with few competing interests, or around a beloved tourist attraction. Much harder to do the same for the only home to many species with the misfortune of sitting above an oil field. The authors quantify this truism, noting that 1.2 million square kilometers of land (0.47 million miles) gained protection between 2018 and 2023, but that less than 10 percent of this would be prioritized for species protection.Whether it is within our capacity to protect some of these areas from the consequences of climate change and invasive species is uncertain, however, even if we assume illegal poaching and deforestation can be prevented.Still, the authors want us to focus on what can be achieved, not what can’t. They note that 38 percent of the areas they identify lie close to locations that are already protected, and could often be incorporated with ease.“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world's most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said Andy Lee, who like Dinerstein is from the NGO Resolve. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”By looking at the costs incurred for similar areas that have already been protected, the authors make an estimate of the price. They acknowledge there are often differences between locations even in economically similar regions, but across enough sites, these should cancel out. All up, the team produces a figure of $169 billion a year for the next five years to acquire the land and preserve it. Limiting the project to the tropics, where the majority of species lie, reduces the cost to $34 billion a year. Intimidating as this may be to anyone other than a handful of the planet’s richest people, Lee noted: “This represents less than 0.2 percent of the United States' GDP, less than 9 percent of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”Cost may not be the only obstacle, however. Maps of the priority areas reveal clusters in war zones like Somalia and Yemen.The authors also note the areas are vital for stopping global heating, given their vast carbon storage will be lost if the biodiversity is destroyed.“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” said Dinerstein. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”The study is open access in Frontiers in Science. 

Under the shadow of night, criminals have put an end to an important field test in Italy. Scientists had planted a new experimental variety of rice that could be the answer to one of the most destructive diseases this crop faces – but the field was recently broken into and destroyed.If you have ever had a good risotto, you most likely had it with arborio rice. This variety is ideal for that kind of dish based on the consistency of its grains when cooked. But the popular Italian variety is also susceptible to a deadly fungus, Pyricularia oryzae. Every year, the fungus destroys an amount of rice that could have fed 60 million people.There is little to be done to stop the fungus. Fungicide treatments have been effective for a while, but it has pushed the fungus to adapt to them and left us to ingest the fungicide. A potential solution came in 2017 with the development of RIS8imo, a variety of rice resistant to the dangerous fungus that has many nicknames such as rice blast, rotten neck, and rice seedling blight.The variety was created with the revolutionary genetic technique CRISPR-Cas9. The pioneers of it, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. In Italy, it is illegal to plant genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but this variety of rice is not a GMO.There are three genes in the arborio rice that make it more susceptible to the fungus. Using the technique, the team made sure that those genes were inactivated variants. There's nothing added to the rice – some species of rice naturally do that.The destroyed field. The name of the rice, RIS8imo, is a pun in Italian. It means Best Rice.Image Credit: Vittoria Brambilla/Università Statale di Milano The only difference is that this natural development was made in the lab when it comes to RIS8imo. For this reason, in Italy this falls under the TEA category: assisted evolution techniques in agriculture. A law was passed last year to put specific requirements into testing potential crops developed like this.The rice field in this case was 28 square meters (302 square feet), planted on May 13. It was fenced and surrounded by another fenced field of 400 square meters (4,306 square feet) field to make sure that no rice could be spread beyond either through the weather or animals. Just over a month later, on June 21, the field was destroyed.In a press release, the creators of the rice, Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, Università Statale di Milano explain how the goal of their research is to create sustainable agriculture that is not dependent on chemical fungicides. The work on the site came after a broad agreement from the local community and other stakeholders.“As publicly-funded scientists we express shock and sadness at having suffered this unjustified violence, the result of obscurantism and anti-scientific impulses,” Brambilla and Fornara stated. The team is expected to continue the work, given it could provide food for so many people, expressing hope that the Italian government would step up by protecting such experiments.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and captures the cutest ‘conversation’ appeared first on Animal Channel.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and what happens next is melting hearts appeared first on Animal Channel.

Welcome to Woke of the Weak, where I’ll update you about the most woke, progressive, insane, and crazy clips and stories that the left thinks is tolerable and well, point out why exactly they’re nuts. It’s the final week of pride month 2024 (PRAISE GOD), and the left made many attempts to finish out the month strong.  This week, we saw both Spirit Airlines and Alaska Air share just how pro-pride their companies are. Similarly, a pride parade took place at none other than DisneyLand in California - yeah, because kids really need MORE pride propaganda shoved down their throats! One school thought similarly to Disney when it made kindergarteners watch a drag show during school. Speaking of drag queens, it seems that they LOVE children. In one video, a drag queen was dancing around in his thong, saw a child and welcomed her in for a hug.  That's child abuse that will lead to kids having no idea what is reality and what is delusion and could lead them down a path of that same sort of confusion. That same sort of confusion that tells kids that mutilating their perfectly good, God-given bodies is a great idea - or that tells them that men can get periods. Towards the end of the episode we saw a group of queers let out a little cultish-chant. Are trans witches a thing? Finally, we saw a grandpa strut his stuff in a black dress, stockings and high heels. Somebody come get him!

As the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera Reports waited for and then reacted to the day’s Supreme Court opinions, the assorted legal minds assembled to promote multiple conspiracy theories about the Court. One was the idea that the Court is slow-walking former President Donald Trump’s immunity case to help him win the election, while another tried to claim there are no liberals on the Court. Regarding the immunity case, Cabrera asked Law Prof. Leah Litman, “When it comes to cases, though, that could impact the election, like abortion or immunity specifically, should they consider whether they're leaving voters hanging? Do they have the ability to really prioritize or fast track certain things?”     Litman claimed it could and cited two examples: So we know that they absolutely do have that ability and that they've exercised it before. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the decision out of Colorado, that the Colorado Supreme Court initially ordered Donald Trump off the ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment disqualified him, the Supreme Court acted quite quickly and opted to release a decision within 50-some days of when they agreed to hear the case and they also released the decision before Super Tuesday so that voters could go to the voting booth and know whether one of the candidates was actually disqualified from office.  The second one was, “In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court acted extremely quickly and issued a decision basically one day after oral argument in this case. So, the Court has acted quickly when an electoral timeline has suggested that acting quickly would be in the nation's best interest.” Those two cases involved actual legal electoral deadlines involving primary election days and Electoral College certification. The immunity case is not connected to the election except for the fact that liberals want it to be because they think additional Trump convictions will benefit them. Nevertheless, Litman declared, “So I do think it's telling that they have apparently declined to do so in the Trump immunity case.” Later, legal analyst, former Obama solicitor general, and self-described “extremist centrist” Neal Katyal was alluding to the Court’s Wednesday ruling that held that states and certain individuals did not have standing to sue the feds over censorship claims when he assessed the Court’s various factions, “Well, in a lot of the politically-charged cases, you know, when I'm there, I tend to think about it as three blocks of the Court. There's the three so-called liberals: Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.” Denying that liberals are liberals disqualifies you from calling yourself a centrist, but Katyal’s faux centrism was only just beginning to reveal itself, “There's the three much more die hard conservatives, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, as Melissa points out, and then there are the three justices in the middle of the Court, not in the middle of American public opinion, these three are far to the right, I think of mainstream public American opinion, but on the Court, the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett do play that role.” Apparently Katyal views himself as the definition of the political center, but he was not done pretending the liberal wing of the Court does not exist, “in this case, you see that same lineup happening with the three more moderate conservative justices joining the three so-called liberal justices for that alignment there.” Katyal’s analysis is just an exaggerated form of a typical media problem. The liberal position is defined as moderate, and so anyone who isn’t a liberal must be a wingnut. Throw in some bad analogies courtesy of Litman and you get typical MSNBC legal analysis. Here is a transcript for the June 26 show: MSNBC Ana Cabrera Reports 6/26/2024 10:07 AM ET ANA CABRERA: When it comes to cases, though, that could impact the election, like abortion or immunity specifically, should they consider whether they're leaving voters hanging? Do they have the ability to really prioritize or fast track certain things? LEAH LITMAN: So we know that they absolutely do have that ability and that they've exercised it before. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the decision out of Colorado, that the Colorado Supreme Court initially ordered Donald Trump off the ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment disqualified him, the Supreme Court acted quite quickly and opted to release a decision within 50-some days of when they agreed to hear the case and they also released the decision before Super Tuesday so that voters could go to the voting booth and know whether one of the candidates was actually disqualified from office.  We know years ago in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court acted extremely quickly and issued a decision basically one day after oral argument in this case. So, the Court has acted quickly when an electoral timeline has suggested that acting quickly would be in the nation's best interest. So I do think it's telling that they have apparently declined to do so in the Trump immunity case. … NEAL KATYAL: Well, in a lot of the politically-charged cases, you know, when I'm there, I tend to think about it as three blocks of the Court. There's the three so-called liberals: Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, there's the three much more die hard conservatives, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, as Melissa points out, and then there are the three justices in the middle of the Court, not in the middle of American public opinion, these three are far to the right, I think of mainstream public American opinion, but on the Court, the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett do play that role and I think Melissa’s absolutely right, as usual, she is, to point out that, you know, in this case, you see that same lineup happening with the three more moderate conservative justices joining the three so-called liberal justices for that alignment there. I don't know that it necessarily tells us much about where the immunity case is going or any other case. These are pretty stable blocks across one case to another. It wouldn't surprise me if we saw something like that in the immunity case, but, you know, I think as Melissa says, it's just a tiny tea leaf of what might be to come.

It’s a bad day for free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the government may continue to pressure Big Tech companies to censor speech it disapproves of, and dissenting Justice Samuel Alito tore the outrageous decision apart. The Court ruled 6-3 — with Justice Amy Coney Barrett authoring the Opinion — that the complainants lacked standing to file an “injunction against any defendant” because they failed to demonstrate “particularized” harm. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined in the majority’s ridiculous position. The Court’s explicit gaslighting as to the Big Tech companies’ independent reasons for censoring content was particularly galling. “And while the record reflects the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment,” Barrett wrote on behalf of the majority. The absurd implication here is that yes, the government was strong-arming the platforms, but it was ultimately the tech companies’ decision.  Alito went straight to the point in his dissent, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas: “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”  Alito, writing for the minority, further rebuked that what the government did in colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans “was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.” In shirking its duty to properly tackle the un-American onslaught against free speech brought before the Court, Alito said the majority “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”  Alito blasted the Court for treating the government’s incessant communications as simply “benign.” Effectively, Alito said the Court spun that the government “merely ‘asked the platforms for information’ and then ‘publicly and privately criticized the platforms for what the officials perceived as a … failure to live up to the platforms’ commitments.” But, as Alito correctly pointed out, “This characterization is not true to what happened.”  As recounted by Alito, government officials “browbeat” Facebook “for months and made it clear that if it did not do more to combat what they saw as misinformation, it might be called to account for its shortcomings.” The totality of the evidence “— constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences— evince ‘a scheme of state censorship,’” Alito asserted.  But that wasn’t all.  Alito took the Court to task for defending the government’s position that Biden and his officials were just using the bully pulpit “‘to speak out on such matters of pressing public concern.’” Alito called out this blatantly false, bastardization of the facts, writing: On the contrary, they were engaged in a covert scheme of censorship that came to light only after the plaintiffs demanded their emails in discovery and a congressional Committee obtained them by subpoena. If these communications represented the exercise of the bully pulpit, then everything that top federal officials say behind closed doors to any private citizen must also represent the exercise of the President’s bully pulpit. That stretches the concept beyond the breaking point. Alito concluded, “In any event, the Government is hard-pressed to find any prior example of the use of the bully pulpit to threaten censorship of private speech.” It’s clear the Court in its atrocious ruling completely upended the historical understanding of the First Amendment by permitting the Biden administration’s dystopian censorship enterprise to continue with impunity. Americans should be outraged. The complainants in the case relied on original MRC Free Speech America research documenting evidence of Big Tech censoring to protect Biden to bolster their initial lawsuit.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

A Norfolk Southern freight train with 141 loaded cars, nine empty cars, and three locomotives was making its way through Ohio the evening of Feb. 3, 2023, when disaster struck. Thirty-eight cars, 11 of which contained hazardous materials — including vinyl chloride, benzene residue, hydrogen chloride, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene — went off the tracks in the town of East Palestine. The worst, however, had yet to come. The flames that apparently first showed beneath the train soon transformed part of the pile of derailed cars into an inferno. 'We basically nuked a town with chemicals.' Days into the fires, Norfolk Southern emergency crews, under the supervision of purported experts and first responders, started their own blaze. Citing the need to avoid a "catastrophic tanker failure," the railway conducted a vent and burn of five tanks of vinyl chloride, darkening the sky above East Palestine with what the National Transportation Safety Board called a toxic "mushroom cloud." Silverio Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, told WKBN, "We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open." Local creatures died off in the thousands. Nearby water was poisoned. Residents had to flee their homes. Apparently it was all for nothing. The NTSB announced Tuesday that the decision by the local incident commander on Feb. 6 to execute the controlled burn "was based on incomplete and misleading information provided by Norfolk Southern officials and contractors. The vent and burn was not necessary to prevent a tank car failure." While the Federal Railroad Administration maintains that a vent and burn procedure should be the last resort, the NTSB indicated the railway "rejected three other removal methods and began planning for a vent and burn shortly after the derailment." According to an abstract for the NTSB's final report, the "observed downward temperature trend in tank car OCPX80370 indicates that polymerization was not occurring within the tank car, contrary to the representation by Norfolk Southern Railway and its contractors." Polymerization similarly did not occur in the tank cars containing vinyl chloride monomer — which "remained in a stabilized environment until the vent and burn" — meaning their alarmist defense of blowing up the trains was unfounded. The safety board claimed the railway withheld information from Oxy Vinyls, the company that made the vinyl chloride, as well as information indicating the tank cars were cooling after the derailment, reported the Associated Press. Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, indicated that investigators were told by a Norfolk Southern contractor that it did not keep records of temperature changes on the tank cars containing vinyl chloride. 'We found through text messages through one of their employees, who provided that information in later interviews, that they did keep those records," said the NTSB chair. "It took about two months before the team received those texts and the emails." Temperature readings were highly relevant when making the decision to execute a controlled burn. In a statement Tuesday, Norfolk Southern once again defended its decision, claiming it carefully considered all alternatives. It also alleged that it and its contractors "received conflicting information from Oxy Vinyls' personnel as to whether polymerization was or could be occurring. And Oxy Vinyls' safety data sheet was clear that polymerization was possible in the circumstances observed at the derailment." Contrary to the railroad's suggestion, Oxy Vinyls experts reportedly testified at previous NTSB hearings that they were certain at the time that polymerization wasn't happening. At the NTSB's hearing Tuesday, Homendy also accused Norfolk Southern — which has spent nearly $100 million greasing the hands of politicians in Washington, D.C., since 1990 — of tripping up the investigation and abusing its status as a party to the investigation, "Norfolk Southern’s abuse of the party process was unprecedented and reprehensible," said Homendy. The railroad apparently dragged its feet when providing investigators with critical information. At other times, Homendy suggested that Norfolk Southern did not even bother providing requested information. The NTSB also stressed in its report that Norfolk Southern's delayed provision of consistent information to emergency responders "needlessly increased the time emergency responders spent near the derailment pileup and delayed the evacuation order, resulting in unnecessary and increased exposure of emergency responders and the public to postderailment hazards." The release of the board's findings comes one month after a federal judge approved Norfolk Southern's $600 million class action settlement addressing class-action claims within a 20-mile radius of the derailment and personal injury claims within 10 miles of the derailment. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!