Very sorry to hear that. They are gonna be wanting to look up there very frequently now.
Yeah I have to go back in 6-12 months.
Pure example of alpha dog
This was so sad to read
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That’s so funny. That lab(?) just put him down.
Seismic news in Australian politics today in the wake of the Labor victory, as the 38-year Coalition between the conservative Liberal and National parties has broken up. I am 45, so the Coalition has been a de facto single party as long as I have been aware of politics. Broadly speaking, the Nationals represent rural seats and the interests of farmers, while the Liberals represent the right wing in cities - the interest of companies and capital.
Senior National Barnaby Joyce had this to say:
Joyce said the political divide over renewable energy is a “massive gulf” within the Coalition.
“We see the world completely differently,” he said.
The Coalition went to the election with a very weird and I think unpopular policy of bringing nuclear energy to Australia. I think this must have been a compromise position on decarbonization. The astute reader will notice that Australia has wind, sunshine and empty space in abundance and could therefore become a world leader in renewables. I know base load power is a challenge, but… maybe we could try to figure it out? It should be noted that no private company wanted to build nuclear power plants in Australia because it’s a shit idea, and thus the Coalition were proposing that the government do it (THAT’S SOCIALISM!).
This means that the chances of the Liberal Party (who, as I will now unfortunately have to keep explaining again, are the conservatives) forming majority government in the next couple cycles are probably pretty low. This could herald a general realignment in Australian politics, it’s hard to say. We’ll have to see.
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[wrong thread]
What was the divide on renewables between the two parties? Farmers know climate change is real and so do financial (insurance) companies. Who was on the MAGA BS green new scam side?
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For those who don’t know why the uk wants them
Judges in Romania previously ruled the two men could be sent to the UK after Bedfordshire Police obtained a warrant for their arrest over allegations of rape and human trafficking.
Both of the right ring parties were pretty all in on culture war, right wing bullshit, because they are both run by a bunch of objectionable old white men.
The city assholes have been absolutely ruined the last few elections because city women don’t want to vote for old white assholes anymore if they don’t deal with women’s issues and climate change.
City assholes took a while to realise this, but I guess have eventually realised that they have to stop being the party of old white asshole men and elected an asshole white woman to be their leader
Country assholes are quite fine with being the party of rich old asshole men and don’t want to act on climate change
- Analysis is my own.
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“Farmers” was a bit too specific, the Nationals represent the interests of rural seats, which means mining as well, including coal mining.
Pretty good summary.
Last election we saw the rise of the so called “Teal Independents”, a number of independent female candidates who combine status-quo, centrist-ish economics with a call to action on climate change and generally small-l liberal positions on social issues like LGBT rights. This is a combination pretty much cooked up in a lab to expose the fault lines in the Coalition voting base. Their response was this half-baked nuclear plan, which never made a lot of sense to me, and doubling down on culture-war shit like Rugby said. I think it must be abundantly clear to them though after the tariffs debacle (because of which the Trump brand took on extra toxicity here, just like in Canada) that tacking to the right is going to lose them elections.
Just doing culture-war shit and being straightforwardly right-wing on everything is working out great for the country assholes (Nationals), who held all their seats this election. This is why they’ve walked out of the Coalition, because they can see that the city assholes (Liberals) are going to have to tack back to the center to stop hemorrhaging votes to Labor and the Teals, and they are not interested in having their brand tarnished by these wedge issues. The new Liberal leader is a woman from the moderate faction of the party, so I think this demonstrates a recognition from the party that they need to present a more centrist image, at the very least.
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How Ken Paxton found the doctors still prescribing hormones to minors. He used the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, a program that tracks who prescribed what to who. Originally intended to combat opioids in a lot of states law enforcement can access it without a warrant, allowing dragnets.
Testosterone, classified as a Schedule III controlled substance, is automatically tracked in the PDMP database. Although the attorney general’s complaints do not spell out how these physicians were caught, the detailed counts of their hormone prescriptions and the fact that virtually all of the patients were transmasculine points to the usage of the PDMP to find providers still prescribing hormones to trans youth. The reason for this is that estrogen is not a controlled substance and is not subject to PDMP surveillance.
The PDMP itself is administered by the Texas State Board of Pharmacy. Within the system run by regulators, authorized personnel can query exactly which providers are prescribing a given drug, and even filter by patient age or other criteria. Paxton’s investigators appear to have combed through Texas’s pharmacy records for evidence that certain doctors continued providing testosterone to minors after the ban took effect, evidence they are now using to sue the providers and strip their licenses.
I submitted a Texas Public Information Act request in November 2024 to query whether the Board was participating in an investigation or otherwise was used to access records for trans youth. The responses seemingly confirmed that the State Board of Pharmacy was complying with Paxton’s requests for access to the PDMP.
Not only are PDMPs accessible without judicial oversight in much of the country, they also function as a nationwide surveillance network. According to Oliva, at least 42 states allow PDMP data-sharing across state lines. Through interstate agreements and centralized data hubs, an authorized official in one state can often query the prescription records held by another. For example, a law enforcement officer in Texas investigating a doctor or patient can retrieve PDMP entries from Oklahoma or Louisiana if those states participate in sharing with no court order needed.
This interoperability was originally intended to catch opioid users crossing state lines to fill multiple prescriptions. But in an era of red state/blue state divisions over healthcare, it means a prosecutor in a ban state can potentially hunt for evidence of prohibited care beyond their borders. In fact, Paxton’s office has taken exactly that approach in its pursuit of transgender care: last year the Texas attorney general issued sweeping civil investigative demands to clinics in other states, fishing for any Texas families they had served. Paxton’s subpoenas to Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington and QueerMed, a telehealth clinic in Georgia, demanded the names of Texas minors treated, the medications prescribed to them, their diagnoses, and even which laboratories were used for testing. Seattle Children’s refused and sued Paxton to block the disclosure, citing Washington’s new abortion/trans health “shield law” that forbids cooperation with out-of-state investigations. The parties ultimately settled and Seattle Children’s agreed to no longer conduct any business in the state of Texas.
A training presentation I obtained from the public information request confirms this broad access and shows how Texas can access the PDMP data from 37 other states via the “PMP Interconnect,” including many blue states that are supportive of access to gender affirming care.
Ultimately, the PDMP effectively becomes a shortcut to gleaning some of the most sensitive details of a patient’s health status. While Abortion medications like Mifepristone are not federally scheduled controlled substances, and thus not routinely logged in PDMPs yet, Louisiana recently classified the abortion medication Mifepristone as a controlled substance, which could now be tracked by Louisiana’s PDMP and might be flagged with a code indicating miscarriage or abortion. But many states vest their pharmacy boards with power to add any drug to the PDMP’s watch-list as a “drug of concern,” without legislative approval. Conceivably, an anti-abortion regulator could designate abortion-inducing medications or other reproductive treatments for tracking, instantly pulling them into the surveillance dragnet.
The targeting of gender-affirming care is thus part of a much larger pattern. It exemplifies how data collected for one purpose – public health and patient safety – can be repurposed for surveillance and social control. Paxton’s unprecedented fishing expeditions into pharmacy and hospital files have made Texas a bellwether. Other states are watching closely: Republican officials in at least nine states have requested information on gender clinic patients or treatments in the past two years, either through PDMP queries or direct subpoenas, according to the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s new “Anti-Care Cops” report. While current efforts focus on trans youth and abortion, the precedent could extend to many other areas such as fertility treatments, to PREP, to mental health medications. Essentially, wherever moral panic and culture wars seep into healthcare, surveillance is sure to follow.
kid i taught for several years just got transferred to ADX Florence bc he killed a(nother) guy in prison and was caught with a knife after that.
definitely a first. i’ve taught every kind of criminal over the years, never someone that got transferred to the highest security prison in the country 
like he could be next to fucking el chapo…
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https://www.wkbn.com/news/judges-sentence-man-for-bristolville-murder-shank-in-jail-cell/
“This court sees you without any redeeming social values in any way, shape or form,” Judge Rice said.
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You can’t share this without some info on what the kid was like.
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I am here asking my trolliest friends (that’s you, UP) to suggest a proper response to this scam text I just received. It should be noted that this is the first of these I’ve ever felt compelled to answer to fuck with them. I usually just block and report, since any answer given lets them know you’re a real number.
But this one presents an opportunity even I cannot resist.
