peppergal

I've been thinking, there is a reason that ex post facto laws are expressly forbidden by the US Constitution. Obviously this site is a private entity not legally required to adhere to said prohibition. Morality is of course not the same as legality so while they are legally in the clear I leave it to the reader to decide on their morality. It says a lot to me personally about the ethics and maturity of the new leadership that they appear to have chosen the path and method they have. You can't foster personal growth by punishing someone for something they did that was permitted at the time it was done and not even telling them what specifically they did that got your undergarments twisted so they can make an attempt at changing. If instead of growth and learning, the goal is to drive off or even outright ban a large portion of the members and turn the carcass of the site into some sort of barren echo chamber where the remaining people copy and paste platitudes in pursuit of digital bling while paid advertisers flee to higher traffic sites until they can no longer afford to keep it open, they are certainly off to a grand start. Who knows, maybe that's exactly what they want. All I know for sure is I'm getting a doubleplus-ungood feeling.

In this case their point of appeal is "Does the exclusion of relevant evidence of an alternative perpetrator based on a trial court’s conclusion it is too speculative violate a criminal defendant’s constitutional right to present a complete defense?" Outside of the context of felon's specific case, it is an interesting question and it looks like there may be a possible circuit split on it. I just don't think their "evidence" was relevant or factual. Someone with an unrelated criminal background might have done something remotely isn't evidence, it is wild conjecture if not outright fiction. I did get quite a laugh that they included the nonsense from that "expert" about universal Plug and Play on the computer meaning that the router was not secured, meaning someone could remote into the computer. That's like saying that because we found an apple core in the trash, he must have had OJ with breakfast.

For those that wish to follow along, the docket is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/23-937.html the petition is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-937/301156/20240222141956501_Duggar Petition February 22 2024 EFile.pdf The government has until the end of March to respond.

That sweater reminds me of the Spencer jackets that used to be worn over empire waisted dresses. They didn't want a jacket that drew in the natural waist when wearing that cut of dress, so it stopped under the boobs. Having the fabric able to flow freely from the bust line to the floor hid the shape of the waist and hips. Think what the Bennet sisters wore as outerwear in the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice. Not sure what Jill was thinking wearing it the crazy way she did since it doesn't do the figure camouflaging/enhancing things that people often use it for, but that may be what the original designer was going for...

Though they would need to know how long the teeth were missing which they might not figure out if this is the first time the practice is seeing the patient. Especially since I figure Jill is too cheap to allow for diagnostic tools like xrays that might show what is happening below the gum line. If they were to ask when the baby teeth came out and were given just a month, they probably wouldn't even think to ask the year that goes with that month because a sane parent would actually be asking why the teeth haven't come in for so long without needing to be interrogated.

With the new (lack of) requirements in Ohio starting with the 2023-2024 school year, she may just have decided to wait to reduce her (tiny) workload. Number of academic hours and subjects were reduced, and no more assessments to cheat on. Also they now no longer need to file the excused letter from the district for the Sr year to issue a diploma, so if Jill had lost the paperwork in her Plexus fueled haze (or whichever daughter was in charge of it was courting/marrying/having a baby), well starting this year she doesn't have to keep her crap organized.

Yeah I had the same thought, a rolling stop at the light is running the light herself, which means cross traffic likely had the green. I suppose if you squint, she could have been hit by someone behind her that was also running the same light, only at a faster speed. Or Jill doesn't know the difference between "traffic light" and "red light" Someone should have gotten a citation for that, but without us knowing when it happened and where it might be hard to find.

They actually do have nutrition labels for most of their stuff on their sales website. Funny thing though, when I went to look at them the product selling pages where the labels are kept were blocked by my ad blocker. Even my browser knows that stuff is crap.

If anyone is interested, Ian Runkle, a defense attorney friend of Emily Baker, did a rundown of the appeal ruling on his youtube channel, Runkle of the Bailey, this week. As someone who has had his fair share of stupid and/or unappealing clients working as a public defender, he has a good take on the arguments and why they were doomed to fail due to Josh's own actions and the failures of his defense team.

Gotta love the phrasing of the Arkansas Times reporting on the ruling. Opening sentence "Josh Duggar of “19 Kids and Counting” and child pornography scandal fame will not get a new trial."

See if your surgery center plans to send you home with one of those ice therapy machines. My mom was given one for her knee even though she had made arrangements to borrow one from a friend. You can also get them on Amazon and from medical supply stores. One trick for those is instead of using normal ice, get about a dozen of those small 4 or 6oz kiddie sized water bottles and freeze those. Then you can just swap out the ice bottles in the water instead of lifting the machine and emptying out melted ice to replace it a few times a day. Just put the melted bottles back in the freezer for next time.

Since they talk about other approved colleges for credit hours, I think the requirement is that of the 96 hours required, 36 of them must be done in person at MBC, and part of that must be during the senior year. I think it refers to butts in classroom seats as in residence, not that they have to live on the campus. Could be a revenue protection type thing where you can't get the degree unless you have paid enough tuition hours to the institution you want the degree from. Either way, their requirements are unclear, which is not unexpected from an institution of their "quality."

It's like these guys saw something about PJs and decided they would become one without putting in the really hard work to do so. PJs are on about the same level as SEALs in regards to the level of physical fitness, commitment, and training they are required to have. Most of these guys probably couldn't even pass the entry physical, and none of them seem to have the mental fortitude to make it through to the end of training. I doubt many of them would even make it through basic, and if they did, they run the risk that in between school assignments to become a PJ (or if they wash out of training) that they'd be in a unit where they may have to take orders from a woman. So instead they waste their grifted money on vanity "training" and photo ops.

Did anyone watch the American Gladiators episodes? The first part was OK, getting into a little bit of how low budget and unsafe the production was. The second part just seemed to devolve into some sort of naval gazing exercise about how everyone hates everyone else but is too afraid to admit it on the record. They could have tightened the whole thing up into a single 2 hour episode. If it were a channel other than ESPN I'd wonder if the bloat was due to needing to fill airtime cheaply due to the current every other decade writer's strike (ironic since that was the background for both renditions of AG)

Yeah once or twice a year someone on our beagle rescue alumni group posts about their older roomba having a run in with either poop or vomit during it's scheduled rounds when they aren't home. The outcome was so common that iRobot did release an updated roomba version about 2 years ago that attempts to detect and avoid the poop. Prior to that, this is what commonly happened: The worst part people reported was cleaning the innards of the roomba since it would get all in the brushes.

One thing about a roomba, if you have a pet that has indoor accidents, especially of the poop variety, things can get pretty gnarly if you don't catch the accident before the roomba does.

When I last visited London I stayed at the Hilton Kensington (yay free room on points!) It is about a block away from Shepherd's Bush which is a combo tube, overground, and rail station. Technically the rail is across the street from the tube station, but unless you are doing a transfer, you don't really notice. Getting from the airport to the hotel by transit also wasn't bad, even for a sleep deprived single traveler coming off a red eye dragging luggage for two people (long story). Took the Heathrow Express to Paddington and from there took two tube lines to get to the hotel.

Ace makes a decent night wrist brace that is affordable. Has no metal in it, and has an egg shaped foam pad that rests in the palm of your hand to keep you from clenching your fingers too much in your sleep.

The night and day difference between how Jill and her family are exploiting her mother's illness and how Rick Hoeg and his family have chronicled his own stroke recovery is amazing. Jill's is all about performative art. She oscillates between how wonderful Ma's recovery is and playing up the need for prayerful donations because of how bad it is. Rick on the other hand has started back at work. He's got an ongoing youtube series detailing his stroke and recovery. He focuses on what he was experiencing while it was happening, how his wife and daughters stepped up and saved his life and how all of his family rallied around to support him, his wife, and their kids. He highlights the many different kinds of therapies he went through and even has scheduled some of the therapists to come on future episodes to provide more (and accurate) information. No "broken brains" here. Jill will never understand that the reason this "godless heathen" lawyer with around 125k followers on youtube was showered with 100x the financial support she and her precious Ma got is because he and his family are genuine and kind people, and she and hers are decidedly not. Jill and her family are all about what they can take. Where Jill bellyaches about being asked to provide a ride to someone "beneath" her from her church, Rick (pre stroke) helps a fellow youtuber raise money for a children's hospital just because he can.

From what I could find, she is on "deferred" immigration status and has to apply yearly for a work visa and driving license. She came in on her dad's visa when she was 10 and never left. In fact she pretty much can't leave right now or she'd have a very hard time getting back in. She's supposedly working on her green card and travel visa. I figure an anchor baby is probably in the near future too...

Someone who actually likes her should remind Jill that you aren't supposed to photoshop your waistline in the "before" photo, reserve that for the "after" photo when you want to fool people into thinking your MLM actually works. Also that if you photoshop above the hand, you also need to do so below the hand, else you look like you had a cheap sideways BBL. Someone who actually likes her should remind Jill that you aren't supposed to photoshop your waistline in the "before" photo, reserve that for the "after" photo when you want to fool people into thinking your MLM actually works. Also that if you photoshop above the hand, you also need to do so below the hand, else you look like you had a cheap sideways BBL.

I agree that it is unusual for someone to choose a method of death where there is such a long period to be able to back out. Not completely unheard of, just odd for there to be such a lag between initiating the action and the action being non-reversible. It's possible though that after doing whatever was done to keep the passengers/other crew from interfering, the pilot also took himself out, either through hypoxia, pharmaceuticals, over consumption of alcohol, or other self harm. Doesn't even have to have killed him in flight, just render him unconscious so he couldn't/wouldn't change his mind. For some suicidal people, it is easier to choose to go to sleep and never wake up than it is to deliberately take a violent action like flying into the water. There aren't really fail safes to keep a pilot from intentionally flying into the ocean, or a mountain, or a building. There's a lot of warning gear to warn you that you are about to do it, but the Boeing philosophy in airplane design is that the pilot is in a superior position to the automation. Even in the disaster with the badly designed MCAS, the pilot was supposed to be able to override the automation, but having the issue occur so close to the ground, there was insufficient time for the pilots to diagnose, correct, and recover. Though thinking about it, whatever caused some of the electronics like the Inmarsat to reboot might have caused the autopilot to go into a "straight and level" mode awaiting pilot input. If the pilot were already unaware by then it would have just run until out of fuel, even if the original intent had been for it to crash earlier. If we want to throw out wildly speculative nearly insane theories, maybe this was some sort of Heaven's Gate type thing where he felt he needed to escape his mortal body, but he thought he needed to be out in the middle of nowhere for the aliens to beam him up. I'm glad that in the years since the incident, both short term and long term policies, software, and hardware requirements have been updated so that if another plane ends up in a similar flight path, there is a much higher chance of being able to figure out what happened. I hope we never have to use them though.

A lot of the anger comes from some missteps when the plane was probably still in the air as well as the laundry list of incorrect information the Malaysian government and airline gave out in the hours, days, and weeks following the loss. For instance, the plane disappeared from secondary radar at around 0120, but was seen on primary radar in multiple locations until around 0220. But when the airline was asked to provide information about the location of the aircraft based on the call home info from the onboard electronics, they provided the expected flight plan and claimed it was real time data. They did not correct the record until about 0330. So the Kuala Lumpur ACC (what we would call ATC) was calling the wrong control centers. The actual emergency action plan that designated a central point of contact and sent out alerts so that entities like those primary radar locations that had data they didn't know was important were informed was not activated until 0530. No one expects a plane to just fly off into the black, so it is understandable that they may have failed to imagine such a scenario and have an emergency procedure for it that didn't include a 4 hour delay. But I can see why such a failure would anger grieving people. At the initial briefing with the acknowledgement that the aircraft was lost the airline representative gave the wrong time (0220) for when the aircraft disappeared from the controller's secondary radar (properly 0120). No reason to think this was anything other than tired people reading the data a bit wrong, but the optics of getting that initial statement wrong aren't great. Then the Malaysian government and airline authorities continued giving out incorrect information in briefings later. How many stolen passports were used on the flight, why they changed the search location further west, when they first searched the pilot's home, were hazardous materials in cargo, the contents of the final radio transmission, and on and on. The only part that might have made a difference in outcome was the initial response by the airline and the ACC in the 0130-0300 time frame, and that would only have been a difference in solving the mystery and not saving lives. But I can certainly see the anger about all the misstatements and backside covering that went on later. It feels like a coverup even though it was probably just incompetence.

Yes and no. The electronics that identified the flight as well as giving advanced data on things like altitude (transponder) were not transmitting for whatever reason. This is known as secondary radar. But plain old radar (primary) just needs to see a thing in the sky. It knows it is there, and it knows the approximate trajectory after a few pings, it just doesn't know who/what it is. That's why stealth planes have to have special geometry and coatings to keep the plain old radar pings from returning to the enemy's radar stations. A passenger jet no matter the state of their advanced electronics is gonna light up primary radar as long as someone is looking and it is not too close to the ground. But over the open ocean, they aren't using plain old radar. There's a lot of space over the water that can't be seen by terrestrial radar at all. They can only be seen by the advanced satellite telemetry that was turned off or by systems like Australia's JORN which sadly was not in use the night of the incident. They did mention at some point (1st episode I think) that a military installation (Vietnam?) did see something on radar in the general area that they expected MH370 to have been at the time it should have been there and that it turned west. What they didn't mention was that multiple primary radars both military and civilian tracked the plane for a while after the transponder stopped functioning. One of the issues was that for the first part of the search, the military installations did not release everything they knew because they didn't want others to know their tracking capabilities. It is unfortunate that there was not more real time cooperation between the civilian ATC that knew it had lost a plane and the primary radar stations that saw an unidentified aircraft. The emergency response measures for a missing/downed aircraft were not activated until almost 4 hours after the plane was last seen by ATC's secondary radar. Had the folks tracking the aircraft as it recrossed the Malaysian peninsula known that there was a missing aircraft and been able to tell the folks looking for it closer to the time of the event, there is the possibility that a military chase flight could have been launched while it was still close enough to land be intercepted. It probably wouldn't have changed the outcome for the people on board since an intercept couldn't do anything for either catastrophic equipment failure or crew malfeasance/incapacitation, but it would have told the families more about what likely happened and possibly allowed recovery ships to search in the correct area before the CVR and FDR pingers died.

A few years ago I was working with the USO on care packages for deployed service members. One of the things they were looking for was cards with hand written notes for their "unattached" service members, those that did not have a partner, children, or other family that regularly kept in touch with them while deployed. They had to specify that you couldn't use cursive writing because most of the intended recipients were young enough that they would be unable to read it if you did. When I was in HS way back in the dark ages, I had a teacher with a teaching method where she would slowly reveal each point on an overhead projector and we were expected to copy it down. She didn't really expand on the points, they were the instruction. She wasn't even writing them in real time, she just had a paper covering the parts she didn't want you reading yet. It was so boring and slow that despite having horrid handwriting, I started writing it in very neat, flowery cursive to slow myself down. In doing so, I realized that writing in cursive that way I was using the artistic/drawing part of my brain instead of my language part (it was a horrible boring class, so there was plenty of time for reflection). I was essentially drawing the letters instead of writing the words. The only knowledge I have about how the brain integrates different skills and functions is a single college course on the psychology of human memory (in other words none), but I do wonder if there is a subset of students that are missing out on brain development by not linking art and language, either through decorative writing like cursive and calligraphy or art like painting letters.