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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Is the statement at the bottom of the article new or did the earlier posters simply miss it?

    … One of Best Friends’ recommendations for due diligence within the adoption process was to focus on the shelter’s existing system, Chameleon, which pulls information related to animal welfare cases. This includes animal abuse and animal cruelty cases. Checking MyCase was discouraged, as its use was problematic and could lead to biased, inequitable vetting of potential adoptees.

    This story does not have enough detail, so I looked for more.

    First, I looked up Best Friends and they are firmly no-kill to the exclusion of all else. I am guessing the ‘Chameleon’ referenced is this CMS, but I could be wrong. If that is the software, it looks like there is a way for people to add notes about specific animals, but it isn’t clear if you can enter notes about specific people. It certainly doesn’t look like it has a way of automatically checking police records for criminal records. It does suggest you can enter these types of ‘field’ data:

    • Calls for service
    • Citations
    • Bite reporting
    • Field staff dispatching
    • Shift control and tracking
    • Laptop implementation
    • Case photos

    I’m guessing MyCase is this free Indiana-specific portal.

    Now: if they aren’t talking about the free MyCase link I found, then perhaps they are using software that charges the Animal Shelter for each search. I can see getting fired for incurring costs that aren’t in the budget. Alternately, perhaps ‘Best Friends’ is giving them funding based on the shelter NOT rejecting any adopter ever for any reason – or at least thinking that is a condition based on this statement from the Best Friends ‘who we are’ page:

    We’re making sure that everyone has the same access to loving pets and that every adoptable pet has access to the comfort of a foster home instead of a kennel in a shelter.

    – note that the above is meant to foster diversity and its links to their diversity page (which seems focused on income disparity), but that quoted bit COULD be read to mean ‘everyone gets a pet, no matter what’.

    I would think it incumbent on all employees to create notes/warnings about known abusers and have that be a flag if they come back to adopt, but I do see a case for allowing people to re-adopt an animal they voluntarily gave to the shelter because they had gone through a patch where they couldn’t afford to feed it, but now they can. Others might argue that this is abuse or that the owners don’t deserve a pet, but it is clear that Best Friends thinks that refusing such people is discriminatory.

    That doesn’t mean that the particular abuse getting uncovered with MyCase was simply surrendering a pet until people got on their feet. Mostly, it just feels like there’s a bunch of stuff going on that no one reported.


  • We already had the Expanded Access Program (thank you ACT UP) and we don’t want a repeat of thalidomide babies like we had before there were strong protections on how drugs get tested.

    So now we have Expanded Access (EAP) with FDA oversite and Right to Try (RTT) without that oversight. Having both is confusing for everyone and most people don’t know which covers what. From Journal of Law and the Biosciences (they only sampled 17 neuro-oncologists from 15 different academic medical centers):

    Many physicians described having difficulty in distinguishing between RTT and EAP or demonstrated misconceptions in their responses. A physician with knowledge of both pathways spoke about his colleagues generally: ‘I don’t think a lot of people understand the difference between expanded access and Right-To-Try’ [Participant 1]. The confusion resulted in conflation with the different features between EAP and RTT including structure, intent, and processes of these pathways. In response to our question ‘Have you provided a drug through Right-to-Try?’ one clinician erroneously replied, ‘I think most compassionate use is under that category’ [Participant 2]. Another drew a rough equivalence between the two despite the absence of FDA oversight for RTT: ‘I guess the way I try to think about Right-to-Try is like compassionate use.






  • He’s already been considering this for at least a week or more.

    He and his team have considered it, but I doubt Trump is capable of preparing for it. His team will try, but – like Biden – he is an old man past his prime. Voters do not want Project 2025, so Trump’s team CAN’T talk about it with anything but denial, and that is the only ‘plan’ they have. The rest is a few insults that Trump repeat over and over, to which Harris can say, “I’ll take the insults if it keeps necessary abortions legal. I’ll take it to keep schools open. To improve them. To make sure [insert message here] is expanded, not abolished.”


  • You don’t see them. You are on the ice and so are they. They hunker down and purposefully cover their nose with their paw when you look in their direction. When you look away, they creep closer until your head starts to turn again. They don’t want you don’t see the little black spot getting closer and closer. If you are lucky and looking around while you are out on the ice, you will see a little black spot disappear. If you do. GET OUT NOW. If the spot was big enough to notice, the bear is probably close enough to charge. I hope your snow machines are close and ready to go.




  • Sigh.

    Those weren’t MY points. It was just proof you do not choose to read. You said:

    Not just legislation that he signed, three things that we got because Biden has the big desk and not literally anyone else with a D by their name.

    The reply was the politico piece, and you claimed nothing on it counted. I checked. You were wrong. I posted 3 you missed and added two more (with links) which you ALSO ignored.

    I didn’t bother with obvious stuff like defending Ukraine, strengthening alliances that had faltered, or surging the economy (especially since I think most economic stuff is a lagging indicator if under any Presidential control at all). If you weren’t going to read the politico article, why waste my time? I only waste my time now so the trolling becomes obvious to all.




  • CTRL+F “executive order”

    • (farming) …executive order directing agencies across the government to promote competition and take on monopolies.
    • (pot) … executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a review of all available cannabis science
    • (AI) … executive order starts the clock for more than a dozen federal agencies to figure out what the gold standard for “safe, secure and trustworthy” AI handling should be for their own operations

    And that’s just the little stuff you didn’t notice – not the big stuff like the SAVE Plan for student debt (also an executive order) or caregiver support.

    I guess that is besides the point, which seems to be redefining everything Biden has done as ineligible. I’m guessing you’d say Regan gets no credit for ending the Berlin Wall since HE didn’t tear it down.



  • It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

    do we want flood-risk predictions sponsored by a flood-insurance company, or heat advisories from an air-conditioning conglomerate?

    The agency is home to one of the most significant repositories of climate data on Earth, which includes information on shifting atmospheric conditions and the health of coastal fisheries, plus hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of ice-core and tree-ring data.

    Eliminating or privatizing climate information won’t eliminate the effects of climate change. It will only make them more deadly.

    Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We’d pay more for fish because fishermen can’t get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

    Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers – such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing “The Superbowl” unless you pay for a license. How’s any of that going to make things better?

    P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I’m reiterating this post repeatedly.



  • Alright, I admit that from a tactical point of view, if the local cop got shot it would have alerted other security and maybe no one would have died … though at such short range, it would be likely that the cop died instead of the firefighter in the stands.

    That said, I still don’t blame the cop – who I presume never had Secret Service training – for taking cover when someone aims a gun at them. That seems like an instinctive reaction that you’d need serious training to overcome. I expect it to take a few seconds at least to figure out how to approach the situation before you stick your head back up for easy targeting.

    Better solutions might have been to either: a) have at least one person on that group of rooftops and every/any other roof-group in advance, or short of that b) when rally-goers said there was someone on the roof with a gun, radio that info FIRST and THEN look. It is possible that the latter happened, but no one passed the information forward and the cops haven’t owned up to the failure yet, but IF that happened, that sort of detail would tend to come out later rather than immediately.