All the news that was too inconsequential for MSM to care……

I have said many times that certain politicos want to see the country go back a hundred years or more….and there is a story that can illustrates why I say such……

Arizona can enforce a near-total ban on abortions that has been blocked for nearly 50 years, a judge ruled Friday, meaning clinics statewide will have to stop providing the procedures to avoid the filing of criminal charges against doctors and other medical workers. The judge lifted a decades-old injunction that blocked enforcement of the law on the books since before Arizona became a state. The only exemption to the ban is if the woman’s life is in jeopardy. The ruling means the state’s abortions clinics will have to shut down and anyone seeking an abortion will have to go out of state, the AP reports. The ruling takes effect immediately, although an appeal is possible. Planned Parenthood and two other large providers said they were halting abortions.

Planned Parenthood had urged the judge not to allow enforcement, and its president declared that the ruling “takes Arizonans back to living under an archaic, 150-year-old law.” “This decision is out of step with the will of Arizonans and will cruelly force pregnant people to leave their communities to access abortion,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s president and CEO, said in a statement. Mark Brnovich, the state’s Republican attorney general who’d urged the judge to lift the injunction so the ban could be enforced, cheered the ruling. “We applaud the court for upholding the will of the Legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue,” Brnovich said in a statement. “I have and will continue to protect the most vulnerable Arizonans.”

The old law was first enacted among a set of laws known as the “Howell Code” adopted by the First Arizona Territorial Legislature in 1864, almost 50 years before Arizona secured statehood. Prosecutions were halted after the injunction was handed down following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which the Supreme Court overturned in June. Even so, the Legislature reenacted the law in 1977. Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson said that because the injunction was issued in 1973 only because of the Roe decision, it must be lifted in its entirety. Before Friday’s ruling, bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy were in place in 12 Republican-led states. In another state, Wisconsin, clinics have stopped providing abortions amid litigation over whether an 1849 ban is in effect.

Ever wanted to have your own submarine?

If so then this report is for you….

Submarines have been around for roughly 400 years, but it’s only in the last few that the rich have thought about owning one, as they might a plane or yacht. In fact, “everyone with a yacht over 150 feet is at least considering one” these days, Erik Hasselman of U-Boat Worx tells Kevin Koenig for the New York Times. That company is one of a few that manufacture submersibles that can be purchased by the well-heeled and curious. In addition to models in the $2.5 million to $3.5 million range that come with two weeks of training, it now has a cheaper model that clocks in at around $600,000, as well as a program that divides ownership of one sub into shares that start at about $80,000. As Koenig quips, “submarine ownership can now be enjoyed by a particularly successful orthodontist.”

As for the appeal, Carl Allen, who owns a sub made by the rival Triton Submarines and is an experienced diver, says, “You don’t need tanks anymore to see all the stuff that’s down there. You have a cocktail and put on your music and go down … and have a blast.” Or champagne. The Red Bulletin reports U-Boat Worx is developing a high-end Nexus submarine whose buyers can opt for built-in wine coolers and luxury seating for up to nine people, who can spend as many as 18 hours underwater (prices start at $5.5 million). As for safety, Hasselman says the company has logged 3,700 dives “without incident.” Koenig, for his part, took solace in the fact that the hefty waiver he had to sign before boarding was devoted in large part to “slipping and falling when walking along the dock toward the sub.”

Everyone has a plan for Mars….NASA, SpaceX, Blue Horizons, et al…..basically billionaires playing god…….but is the red planet really the best idea?

Maybe not so fast, Buck-O……

While Venus is never going to be a vacation destination for space tourists, largely because anybody stepping foot on its surface would die in a split-second from intense heat and crushing air pressure, a group of experts is arguing that it would be a better target than Mars for the first crewed mission to another planet, the Guardian reports. They say that since Venus is a lot closer to Earth than Mars is, a flyby mission to inspect the planet from the safety of a spacecraft could be completed in under a year, including 72 days close to the planet, compared to the three-year timeline NASA is looking at for a potential mission to Mars in the 2030s.

Experts say a Venus flyby could also happen as part of a Mars mission, with the spacecraft using Venus as a “gravity assist” that would reduce the overall flying time to Mars. In a report making the case for a Venus mission, experts described Venus as “a vast, almost completely unexplored world of great variety, mystery, and beauty, with an area of unknown lands several times the land area of Earth.” The planet, they said, is “the most Earth-like and Earth-relevant world we will ever get to explore up close”—and a mission involving humans instead of only robots would benefit from humans’ ability to carry out “exploratory studies focused on serendipitous observations and real-time decision-making.”

One of the researchers calling for a Venus mission, Noam Izenberg of the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory, says it would provide valuable experience of a long deep-space mission “without committing yourself to a full Mars mission.” “Venus gets a bad rap because it’s got such a difficult surface environment,” Izenberg says, per the Guardian. “The current NASA paradigm is moon-to-Mars. We’re trying to make the case for Venus as an additional target on that pathway.”

Now for the WTF story…..

A Houston couple with a side hustle of buying and reselling goods from surplus auctions recently purchased more than 100 heavy-duty storage containers from a website that deals in government surplus. When the cases arrived, a friend helped them load the containers into their storage unit. As a thank you, the couple gave the friend one of the containers. Turned out, the container wasn’t empty like they had thought. From ABC13:

Inside were 12 fully-automatic M-16s, all of them still with various tags designating the military branch and name of service members who handled the weapons.

“We just purchased these cases. We never expected anything in there,” said the husband, who did not want to be identified. “Supposedly, the sender should check every single box to make sure there’s nothing dangerous or anything.”[…]

Unsure of what to do, the couple reported the M-16s to authorities. Within hours, ATF and FBI agents seized the one open box with the 12 weapons. Shortly thereafter, the ATF obtained a search warrant for the couple’s storage unit. They spent most of Monday on location, going through the boxes.

The ATF and FBI are currently investigating. Meanwhile, the online surplus reseller from whom they purchased the containers have removed all similar cases from their website.

Finally for a little fun to start your weekend….WTF is this ?

I know and with the help of Google so will you.

You may now tell everyone you know that you have been schooled…..

Have a great weekend…..

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”