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Alabama becomes seventh state to approve castration for some sex offenses

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Monday signed into law a measure requiring anyone convicted of sex crimes with children younger than 13 to be chemically castrated as a condition of parole.

Under the new law, offenders required to undergo the reversible procedure must begin the treatment at least a month before their release dates and continue treatments until a judge finds that it's no longer necessary.

Ivey, a Republican, made no public statement about the measure. She had given little indication whether she supported the measure until Monday, the last day she could sign the bill.

The bill was introduced by Rep. Steve Hurst, a Republican representing Calhoun County, who said that if he had his way, offenders would be permanently castrated through surgery.

Chemical castration in the United States

Chemical castration is generally considered reversible when treatment is discontinued, although permanent effects in body chemistry can sometimes be seen, as in the case of bone density loss increasing with length of use of DMPA.

[...] When used on men, these drugs can reduce sex drive, compulsive sexual fantasies, and capacity for sexual arousal. Life-threatening side effects are rare, but some users show increases in body fat and reduced bone density, which increase long-term risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. They may also experience gynecomastia (development of larger-than-normal mammary glands in males).

When used on women, the effects are similar, though there is little research about chemically lowering women's sex drive or female-specific anaphrodisiacs, since most research focuses on the opposite, but anti-androgenic hormone regimens would lower testosterone in women which can impact sex drive or sexual response. These drugs also deflate the breast glands and expand the size of the nipple. Also seen is a sudden shrinking in bone mass and discoloration of the lips, reduced body hair, and muscle mass.

[...] Despite its long history and established use, the drug has never been approved by the FDA for use as a treatment for sexual offenders.

[...] The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida opposes the administration of any drug that is dangerous or has significant irreversible effect as an alternative to incarceration; however, they do not oppose the use of antiandrogen drugs for sex offenders under carefully controlled circumstances as an alternative to incarceration. Law professor John Stinneford has argued that chemical castration is a cruel and unusual punishment because it exerts control over the mind of sex offenders to render them incapable of sexual desire and subjects them to the physical changes caused by the female hormones used.

Some people have argued that, based on the 14th Amendment, the procedure fails to guarantee equal protection: although the laws mandating the treatment do so without respect to gender, the actual effect of the procedure disproportionately falls upon men. In the case of voluntary statutes, the ability to give informed consent is also an issue; in 1984, the U.S. state of Michigan's court of appeals held that mandating chemical castration as a condition of probation was unlawful on the grounds that the drug medroxyprogesterone acetate had not yet gained acceptance as being safe and reliable and also due to the difficulty of obtaining informed consent under these circumstances.

Sounds like it negatively impacts the health of the individual, and they are coerced into doing it (would you rather be stabbed to death in prison?). #StateTransgender

Florida charter boat captain accused of drinking, doing drugs, firing gun, threatening passengers

A Florida charter boat captain is accused of drinking heavily, doing drugs and threatening to shoot his passengers and throw them overboard before firing his gun several times from the top deck of the boat.

[...] All of the passengers and Kissell reported that Bailey drank several beers in the beginning of the trip, according to an arrest report. When Lopeparo asked his nephew, Rialmo Jr., to grab him a beer from the top deck where Bailey was, the captain told him he couldn't have it, but the teen thought he was kidding and grabbed the beer anyway.

At that point, "the captain bumped shoulders with the young man and grabbed him around the neck and clasped on to the young man’s chain and ripped it off," Giuffre told police. An argument ensued, but the captain retreated back to the upper deck to keep drinking. At this point, he was drinking Captain Morgan rum, smoking a joint and using cocaine, the passengers reported.

Later, the inebriated captain told Giuffre Jr., "It would be nothing to pop a bullet in each one of us and dump our bodies overboard," Giuffre Jr. wrote in his statement to police. "He also stated he has his buddies at the dock for us when we get back. He then proceeded to say he wanted to help to kill n------," Giuffre Jr. wrote. The police report said Giuffre Jr. and his fellow passengers were white.

All of the passengers reported that shortly after threatening them, Bailey fired between four and eight gunshots from the upper deck. At that point, the elder Giuffre said, Bailey was "drinking rum from the bottle" and "scaring the crap out of all of us."

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 4.7 GHz CPU Leaked, World’s First 16 Core Gaming Chip

It has the full 72 MB of cache.

I'll guess $700 for the price.

AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT ‘7nm Navi’ Graphics Card Final Specifications Leak Out – Features 2560 Cores, 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM and Up To 1905 MHz Clock Speeds

Apparently people want more than 8 GB of VRAM for 4K gaming.

Skip as many gens as you can!

Spotted at Computex: Triple Monitor Mobile Systems are Back

More innovation than a MacBook.

AMD says “we need to start to talk about our ray tracing strategy”

AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, told the press at Computex that the company will discuss ray tracing in mainstream graphics in 10 days (via PCWorld). So we can expect to hear more from AMD’s Next Horizon gaming event on June 10.

Supposedly the Sony PS5 custom chip will do ray tracing, but this year's Navi desktop GPUs (a hybrid of GCN and RDNA) won't. Maybe we'll get a surprise though.

See also: AMD and Samsung's GPU Licensing Deal: A New Era of Collaboration?

Who’s in — and out — of the first Democratic debates

Presidential hopefuls have until June 12 to cross one of two thresholds to qualify for the primary debates, and 13 of the 20 slots available are set. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is currently out, one of the foremost candidates in danger of missing the stage. His camp blasted what it called the DNC's eleventh-hour "unmasking" of "arbitrary" polling rules, but the DNC said the Bullock campaign has been aware of the criteria for months.

[...] In order to be eligible for the debates, candidates must cross one of two thresholds: earning 1 percent in three polls approved by the DNC, or receiving donations from 65,000 people, with 200 in 20 different states. Thirteen have met both thresholds and clinched their spots. But there are at least 10 credible candidates bidding for the final seven spots — a list that includes two sitting senators, three congressmen, a governor, a former governor and the mayor of New York.

Next week’s deadline is a make-or-break moment for these second-tier candidates, who risk fading into irrelevance if they aren’t among the 20 candidates onstage in Miami.

The 13 candidates who can book their tickets include the race’s top figures. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro are the top-polling candidates; following a random drawing, they will be split across the two nights, with five on one night and four on the other.

But also meeting both the polling and fundraising thresholds are Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee and two lesser-known figures: Marianne Williamson, best known for authoring spiritual, self-help books, and Andrew Yang, a first-time candidate who wears a baseball cap that says “MATH” on the front as he touts his proposal for a universal basic income.

After those 13 candidates, the rest of the field gets murky. According to a POLITICO analysis, an additional seven candidates have hit the polling threshold: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell.

#YangGang #Yang2020

2020 Democratic Party presidential debates and forums

1A - Jun 26, 2019
1B - Jun 27, 2019
2A - Jul 30, 2019
2B - Jul 31, 2019
3A - Sep 12, 2019
3B - Sep 13, 2019 (may be cancelled)

See also: DNC Denies 2020 Democrats a Climate Change Debate

Want to defeat Trump? Attack Biden

Anyone angling to be the Democratic nominee should espouse a real progressive agenda – just being “anti-Trump” isn’t enough

Biden campaign's self-inflicted error is one it can't really afford

It’s political malpractice for any modern campaign to lift words, intentionally or not, for its policy plans or website.

That’s especially true if you’re the early Democratic frontrunner. And even more true if your 1988 presidential campaign ended in a plagiarism scandal.

But that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday, when Joe Biden’s campaign rolled out its climate plan — and admitted it forgot to give proper attribution.

“Several citations, some from sources cited in other parts of the plan, were inadvertently left out of the final version of the 22-page document,” the Biden campaign told NBC’s Garrett Haake.

Biden campaign confirms he supports controversial abortion rule (Hyde Amendment)

Planned Parenthood slammed Biden’s continued support for the Hyde Amendment in a statement to NBC. “The unfair Hyde Amendment makes it so that those who have the least end up having to pay the most to access abortion, and those who are service members or live on reservations are often left with no coverage for abortion care,” Kelly Robinson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund's executive director, said. “We encourage any candidate who doesn't recognize Hyde's impact to speak to the women it hurts most — particularly on women of color and women with low incomes — to learn more about the harmful impacts of this discriminatory policy," Robinson said.

[...] Biden voted against a 1977 compromise that allowed Medicaid to fund abortions with exceptions for rape, incest or medical safety of the mother. He then voted again in 1981 to remove rape and incest exceptions when they passed.

The ex-lawmaker also voted several times to prohibit federal workers from using health insurance on abortion services, with the only exception being to save the life of the mother.

I doubt that any of the current mudslinging at Biden is going to have an effect. Instead, it will take a few heated exchanges at one of the primary debates to cause a reversal. The first ones are scheduled for June 26th and 27th.

Previously: Joe Biden's #MeToo Adventure Continues
Joe Biden Parody Website Outranks Campaign Site

http://the-colossus.com/sciencegoals.html
http://the-colossus.com/technology.html

I was trying to recall this telescope concept but it was very difficult to find as it gets drowned out by other ELTs. It is linked from the very bottom of this page. Go ahead and bookmark it.

This is another overlooked project: the Magdalena Ridge Optical Interferometer (MROI). Except it is actually being built:

Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces, and black holes

When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.

MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope full operations begin in 2022. Extremely Large Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope will have first light in 2024. JWST scheduled for launch in 2021 or later. So astronomers will be shook in 7 years' time. It's the dark ages until then.

Earth's Minimoons: Opportunities for Science and Technology

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Don't expect any LSST results before 2022.

Lyme disease a bioweapon gone awry? Rep. Chris Smith pushes Trump to investigate

Now Lyme advocates have a new weapon — an explosive book that alleges the epidemic spawned from an American biological warfare experiment gone awry — and Smith, a Republican whose districts stretches across parts of Monmouth, Ocean and Mercer counties, is appealing to President Donald Trump for action.

The book is “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by Stanford University-based science writer Kris Newby. A chronic Lyme sufferer herself, Newby documents how the U.S. military infected ticks with complex, hard-to-detect pathogens in the 1960s. The book’s linchpin is an interview with late scientist Willy Burgdorfer, who did the infecting and references an accidental release of weaponized ticks that might have ignited all of this.

The relationship between the experiments and the continued denial of chronic Lyme is something Smith would like to see explored further.

“If this (book) this is true — and the documentation is very persuasive — we were doing bio-weapons work that was grossly immoral,” Smith said in an interview with the Asbury Park Press prior to Wednesday’s town meeting. “It’s a shocking read, and I hope it adds to our push. Looking at what happened might help us come up with how we deal with it now.”

He wrote a letter to that extent to President Trump and three inspectors general — of the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Agriculture — requesting a “serious and comprehensive investigation” into the book’s assertions.

“We owe it to the overwhelming number of patients currently suffering from Lyme disease,” Smith wrote in the letter, dated May 14. “These individuals — and the American public — deserve to know the truth.”

Although he has not received a formal response, Smith said his appeal got the attention of members of Trump’s inner circle. If Congress won’t act on his bipartisan bill (H.R. 220) to bump up funding for research — currently a measly $11 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and $28 million for the National Institutes of Health — he’d like to nudge Trump to enact changes via executive order.