News bits: Today's reddit feed

 As usual, five mixed-bag items were in the reddit feed this morning. This one is juicier than most so I’ll just show all of ’em.

The New Republic reported that on of the judges in a Trump case finally grew a pair and ordered the case to proceed without Trump's usual delays. As one would expect, Trump was really pissed:

Finally, a Judge Steps Up and Denies a Trump Trial Delay Bid

On Thursday, Trump headed to New York for a court hearing on his hush-money case. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ignored his requests for a delay and determined the trial would start on March 25, when jury selection will begin, and last approximately six weeks.

He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Trump’s legal team tried to protest the decision to go to trial, citing the legal load attached to so many disparate criminal trials for one individual.

“We have been faced with compressed and expedited schedules in every one of those trials,” Todd Blanche, an attorney also representing Trump in his classified documents case, told the judge. “We—meaning myself, the firm and President Trump—have been put into an impossible position.”

But Judge Merchan wasn’t having any of it, quickly sidestepping Team Trump’s further attempts to delay the trial.

“You don’t have a trial date in Georgia. You don’t have a trial date in Florida,” he retorted. [That is because DJT has been doing more than everything possible to slow the lawsuits down 😊]

Trump has already started his habitual mudslinging against the court and the trial itself, claiming over the last year that Merchan, who has acknowledged a $15 donation to President Joe Biden, is a Trump-hating judge appointed by a Democrat—even though all the judges in his trials have been randomly selected. Meanwhile, Trump has whined on TruthSocial [LiesAntisocial, actually] that going to court for his alleged misdeeds counts as “election interference.”  

The dates for Trump’s three other indictments are not yet on the books. His January 6 election interference trial, which was originally slated for March 4, was postponed while the Supreme Court reviews appeals on Trump’s presidential immunity claim.

Hm, 34 felonies. Speaking as an attorney, 🤨 , that’s a lot of felonies! 

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Joe.My.God. reports about how the morally rotted, Christofascist hate group One Million Moms sees the Jesus Gets Me ads that aired on the superbowl. Trigger alert: It is what you would expect:

Via email from hate group leader Monica Cole:

As Christians, One Million Moms’ biggest concern during Super Bowl LVIII was the incomplete and misguided “Foot Washing” ad from the He Gets Us movement. The commercial was partially true, as it showed the love of Jesus and how we can serve and love one another even with our differences.

Unfortunately, the movement’s “Foot Washing” ad missed the mark, because it never shared the Gospel so a person might put their faith in Jesus Christ in order to receive salvation. The ad missed the most important part of the Gospel – the truth that Jesus loved us so much that He died for us to save us from our sins.

Sharing only part of the truth can be extremely misleading, especially to those who are unsaved. It is also disturbing that the He Gets Us website describes Jesus as a mere storyteller instead of a Savior.

Cole makes a great point. Fabulous, actually. Sharing only part of the truth can be extremely misleading. By golly, that hits the nail on the head.

If only Christian hate groups out there would adhere to that undeniably true point, the world would be a noticeably better place. For example, cruel Christian zealots could apply it to their own Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Those faux medical service places are there to knowingly mislead, manipulate and lie to young pregnant women. The point is to get them to have babies they do not want. 

Obviously, if politically active Christian nationalists had to stop lying and partial truth telling, the whole morally rotted, authoritarian (theocratic) wealth and power movement would collapse and go away. 

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Gizmodo reports about a huge breakthrough by a team of German physicists in producing a stable time crystal:

A team of physicists in Germany managed to create a time crystal that demonstrably lasts 40 minutes—10 million times longer than other known crystals—and could persist for even longer.

Time crystals are structures whose lowest-energy states have highly ordered patterns (periodicity) in space and time. Time crystals were predicted to also have their properties suddenly change at a given time, even without some external factors inducing such a change.

In this way, time crystals break time-translation symmetry—the idea that a chunk of stable matter will not change (without external factors) if you drag it to a different point in time. Time crystals change on a metaphysical whim, regardless of when they are. You can read all about time crystals here, for a better understanding of what they are and why they’re useful.

The recent team of physicists managed to make a time crystal that lasted superlatively long: 40 minutes. The crystal is made of indium gallium arsenide, or a combination of indium atoms and gallium arsenide, a semiconductor. Their research was published last week in Nature Physics. 

The new time crystal is in an electron-nuclear spin system. The team excited the material with polarized laser light, polarizing the spins of the nuclei in the system. This caused the indium gallium arsenide to produce oscilations, rendering it “equivalent to a time crystal,” according to a TU Dortmund University release.

Yup, that is what it looks like (I think)

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CNN reports that special Counsel David Weiss has had former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov arrested and charged with lying about Biden’s business dealings. Smirnov was a key witness for the morally rotted authoritarian House Republicans in their cynical, baseless witch hunt to smear and attack Joe Biden. CNN writes:

Special counsel David Weiss charged a former FBI informant with lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s involvement in business dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, undercutting a major aspect of Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president.

Alexander Smirnov, 43, is facing charges in connection with lying to the FBI and creating false records. He was arrested Thursday at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, after his arrival in the US from overseas, and will make his initial appearance in federal court Thursday afternoon.

The indictment alleges that Smirnov’s story to the FBI “was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”

Congressional Republicans have championed Smirnov’s now-discredited allegations for roughly a year, though not by name. They fought with the FBI to obtain memos about what Smirnov told investigators and publicly released the materials over the FBI’s objections. The congressional Republicans repeatedly praised Smirnov as “credible” and put his uncorroborated claims front-and-center in their impeachment inquiry into the president.

While announcing the impeachment inquiry, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said “a trusted FBI informant has alleged a bribe to the Biden family.” The FBI is now using some of the same memos that congressional Republicans released as part of their indictment against Smirnov. 

“For months we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” said Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, in a statement to CNN.

“We were right and the air is out of their balloon. This is just another instance of Chairmen Comer and Jordan peddling falsehoods based on dishonest, uncredible allegations and witnesses,” he added.

Those darned sneaky liar Russkis and those darned sneaky liar Repubs. When those two morally rotted garbage heaps hook up, one can be sure that nasty business is afoot.

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Finally, a Bloomberg opinion opines, and this bit is very, very important (the most important of today’s five bits):

As six Republicans on the US Supreme Court increasingly arrogate to their bloc the power to make national law, frustration in blue states is mounting.

Just one day before a sympathetic Supreme Court heard the case of an insurrectionist who wants to be president, the highest state court in Hawaii declared that it really, truly, is sick and tired of the Supreme Court’s nonsense. In a unanimous decision handed down Feb. 7, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that it has no obligation to treat the high court in the nation’s capital with deference; it couldn’t even summon basic respect. The state court reached that end point, fittingly, in a case concerning what it derisively called “the Second Amendment’s brand-new right to bear arms in public for self-defense.”

That brand-new right was created by the US Supreme Court in 2022, courtesy of Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen . Thomas’ opinion was based, in turn, on the brand-new individual right to gun possession created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s 2008 decision in Heller v District of Columbia, a mere 219 years after the constitution came into effect.

“Conventional interpretive modalities and Hawaiʻi’s historical tradition of firearm regulation rule out an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Hawaiʻi Constitution,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins.“In Hawaiʻi, there is no state constitutional right to carry a firearm in public.”

Let that sink in for a minute. State courts breaking away from the USSC was a major development on the road to the April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865 American civil war. This is evidence of the Union dissolving in a deadly serious way. I did not expect it to come from a blue state, but here it is folks. And if Hawaii can do this, just think what catastrophic hell and corruption (yes, I really do mean huge corruption) red states like Texas, Florida and Georgia are going to unleash.