Tartu Airport, in Estonia, is having problems with GPS. Finnair is suspending flights there for a month.

The jamming extends over much of Estonia and other areas. Here’s a map of today’s jamming in the area, by John Wiseman. The site covers the world, as does another GPS site from FlightRadar24. At the moment, it looks like the area around Tartu is okay, although much of the rest of Estonia and a chunk of Latvia have GPS interference.

Who could be doing this? Attention seems to be centered on Kaliningrad, that separated particle of Russia to the south of this map. Folks who do that sort of thing are trying to track it down.There’s a lot of GPS interference around Ukraine too.

More about GPS interference from Politico.

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dilfdyke:

hellsw0rth:

Anyone missing a heavy stone/concrete Dalek?

ALT

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the complete saga

As much as I may believe that it is entirely unseemly to call a grown man who is not a cartoon “Tommy* Tuberville,” Tommy Tuberville is a 69-year-old man who has been speaking English all of his life and should probably know most of our more common terms.

For instance, abortion, as a medical procedure, is the termination of a pregnancy while one is still pregnant with a fetus that, in cases where there is nothing life-threatening happening, could not survive outside the womb.

Once the baby exits the womb, however, that is homicide. Or infanticide, if you want to get real specific about it.

This comes up because, once again, Tommy Tuberville is echoing Trump by claiming that post-birth abortions are a thing.

“You have to give it to the Democrats, progressive Left; they’re all in on abortion, anytime, anyplace, on the public dime,” Tuberville said on a podcast on Tuesday. “They’re for abortion anytime, sometimes past the birth of the baby.”

So, first of all — we are not in favor of abortion “anyplace.” I am vehemently opposed to anyone having an abortion or any other medical procedure at the table where I am eating, as it is both rude and unsanitary. Neither I nor anyone else I know would recommend one have an abortion on a rollercoaster, or on a flight to the Maldives, or in the dressing room at Nordstrom Rack. We would all prefer that abortions occur in clean, sterile environments.

That being said, it is deeply concerning that both Tuberville and Trump are going around telling people that it is entirely legal to execute newborn babies, because you never know who is going to hear that and decide “Hey, if it’s legal, I think I’ll go kill me a newborn baby.”

It could happen.

But the real sick thing here is that, you know, we all know that’s not what either of them is talking about. They’re talking about palliative care, the standard procedure that happens when a child is born who will not survive more than a few minutes or hours after birth.

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It was repulsive before, but it’s extra grotesque and extra cruel now that Republican politicians are forcing people to give birth to babies with no chance of survival. What is it, exactly, that they want doctors to do when babies are born with their brains on the outside of their heads or other fatal fetal anomalies? They don’t want the women to have abortions, they don’t want the doctors to do all they can to make the babies comfortable before they pass on, what is it that they want?

I sent a message to Tuberville asking him some of these questions I have. I doubt he will write back. But it would be really nice if people in the more “legitimate” media could be just a little harsher with this nonsense as well so that we don’t have people going around making this claim — or anyone thinking that homicide is legal.

PREVIOUSLY:

Nine years ago I said Donald Trump had a good chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, and eventually the presidency, at a time when this opinion was considered self-evidently ridiculous by the Wise. Now not even the Wise can see all ends, and I’m no prophet, and I don’t know nature’s way, but with those characteristically academic caveats out of the way:

I think that Donald Trump is on the verge of collapsing as a political force in America.

I’m NOT saying that his political collapse is inevitable. I’m arguing for the OPPOSITE of complacency. At this most perilous moment, the opportunity to drive a stake into the avatar of revenant fascism in America is just that.

Let me point to three signs and portents:

(1) Trump’s affect and behavior during the first of what will be multiple trials has been a disaster. He can’t stay awake; he can’t control his bodily functions in a socially acceptable way; he is increasingly coming across to all but the most unreachable zealots (admittedly these make up something like a third of the voting public, but that is still a vastly lower percentage than necessary to win or even seriously compete for the presidency) as a viscerally disgusting old man, despite the fancy suits and the drag queen-level cosmetic interventions. And disgust is an extremely powerful political emotion. Yes I realize his base is not disgusted with him, or at least very little of it is. But again, his base only makes up around half of Republican voters, let alone anyone else. For those outside the cult, what is happening in that New York courtroom is a ritual humiliation that for many of them is destroying the idea of Donald Trump as anything other than a pathetic buffoon. Contemporary American elections are won at the margin, and at the margin Trump is getting killed right now. Indeed I believe there’s a serious question of whether he’s even capable of enduring the rest of this trial without having a frank total emotional and physical breakdown. We shall see (If the trial were televised I would be even more confident about all this, but unfortunately it’s not).

(2) Trump and his minions have spent the last couple of weeks begging his supporters (I’m on his email distribution list) not just for money, but to show up in person at his current trial, as a symbolic act of solidarity and resistance. These pleas have been an almost indescribably comprehensive flop. No one — almost literally no one among the 74 million people who voted for him four years ago — has shown up. Yesterday afternoon you could count Trump’s supporters outside the courthouse on the fingers of one hand. This is not a small thing. Trump is so humiliated by this development that he’s making farcical claims about how the police are physically barring thousands of his supporters from the site of the completely non-existent protests in support of him. This massive public absence of support is obviously driving him up the wall, and may well play a key role in the potential breakdown over the course of the trial I mentioned above.

(3) Last night, Pennsylvania held a closed Republican presidential primary, seven weeks after Nikki Haley formally withdrew from the race, and the media noted accurately at the time that there was no longer even the formal semblance of a race for the Republican presidential nomination. This again is at a moment when Trump is begging his supporters for any gesture of loyalty and solidarity. Haley got nearly 17% of the vote — 157,000 out of 946,000 votes cast. These are all registered Republicans, who bothered to go to the trouble of casting an explicitly anti-Trump vote under the most purely symbolic of conditions. Yes I realize most of them will vote for Trump in the general. But a lot won’t vote at all, or will vote for RFK Jr., and a few will even vote for Biden. And again, contemporary elections are won at the margin. Trump can’t afford to lose any of these voters and be competitive in Pennsylvania, or any other swing state. All in all, it’s a terrible sign for him.

Six months is a long time. A lot can happen in the interim. The Electoral College is wildly favorable to any Republican presidential candidate at the moment. A lot of the mainstream media are prostitutes who want a close race more than they want to avoid fascism. All this is true. All this means that anti-Trump efforts should be redoubled. Far too much is on the line to take anything for granted.

Still: I think he’s done.

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Background here.

Note that this means that the majority of USC’s graduating undergraduates will have missed both their high school commencement (because of Covid) and their college commencement (because upper university administrators have evolved into an invertebrate species.)

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The olive tree was domesticated in the Near East about the fourth millennium B.C. and there is evidence of olives being cultivated in pharaonic Egypt, though the Greek geographer Strabo observed they only grew in Alexandria.

Olives were a staple for the average Greek and Roman, and they were usually stored in the dark by layering them with fennel in jars filled with brine. Olive oil must be stored in the dark and with little or no contact with air. They were also used in a popular dip, which, according to the Roman author Cato, was made by pitting the olives, choping them up and then marinating them in oil, vinegar, coriander, cumin, fennel, rue and mint.

In Arabic, olives are known as zaytūn (زيتون) and in the medieval culinary tradition its fruit was mostly used for its oil, and less as an ingredient. They were often consumed as a side or snack, seasoned (mutabbal) and preserved in water and salt. Olives were used far more in the Muslim West (al-Andalus and North Africa) than in the East, often also to decorate dishes, or in the stuffing of meat dishes. Olive oil, too, was used far more in the Maghrib, in contrast with the sheep’s tail fat used in the Near East.

Green olives were considered to have a large number of benefits, including as an aphrodisiac. The best are the unripe ones; when salted, they strengthen the stomach, but cut the appetite, and are harmful to the lungs, which can be remedied wth honey.

Black olives are quickly digested. The best types are those that are reddish, rather than entirely black. As they arouse the appetite, they should be eaten before the meal. Mountain olives came highly recommended because they were appetizing and useful against sciatica. They should be eaten in the middle of the meal, with vinegar.