Articles of Distraction

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^Makes sense. I know when my own faith needs rejuvenation, Russia is at the top of my list.

Boru

[Angrboda]

https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/ai-reli...s-chatbots

[Angrboda]

Last year, America’s crop farmers lost $34.6 billion, and farm bankruptcies surged to numbers not seen since 2020, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. This year, 70 percent of farmers surveyed claim they cannot afford all the fertilizers they need. Fuel costs continue to rise as the Iran conflict remains unresolved and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

Ninety-four percent of farmers reported that their financial situation has “worsened or remained the same” since last year. Fifteen thousand farms closed in 2025 alone. The New York Times chronicles the closing of American family farms: Bankruptcies were up 55 percent in 2024, 46 percent in 2025 and 70 percent by May of this year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...rade-iran/

[Paraselene]

Rupert Everett has said he’s “almost crippled” after he “ruined” his body in the gym lifting weights in the 1980s and 1990s.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/06/02/r...980s-body/

[Angrboda]

Four years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important part of Justice Samuel Alito’s legacy may not be the end of Roe v. Wade, but the transformation of doubt into a constitutional weapon.

Historians have long documented how tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry strategically manufactured uncertainty to weaken support for consumer and environmental protections. Today, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority increasingly deploys a similar tactic in constitutional law, using doubt to erode protections for reproductive rights, voting rights and racial equality.

In Dobbs, a decision authored by Alito, the court did more than overturn Roe. It normalized a jurisprudence in which uncertainty itself becomes grounds for rescinding constitutional protections. Historical ambiguity, contested social science, and speculative state interests are no longer obstacles to judicial intervention. They are its justification.

Long-settled rights are reframed as major questions. Meanwhile, speculative state interests — where states claim, without evidence, to be motivated by vague concerns related to election fraud or general moral panic — are accepted with near-total judicial deference.

The Supreme Court’s decision this spring in Louisiana v. Callais, again authored by Alito, demonstrates how quickly this logic has migrated to other issue areas.

In Callais, at issue was whether Louisiana’s congressional map diluted Black voting strength unlawfully under the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court approached the problem through a framework increasingly characteristic of Alito’s decisions: raise doubt about evidence that structural racial discrimination exists and then show substantial deference toward state assertions about possible harm to states.

In short, Alito’s invocation of doubt is not a neutral part of normal jurisprudence. It is invoked to serve the conservative legal movement and the Republican Party.

The same asymmetry is now trickling down to lower courts....

How doubt became a weapon against constitutional rights

[Fake Messiah]

Another restoration

Jesus & Virgin Mary statues left looking like goth rock band after amateur artist bungles restoration

Depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, the statues at the Calvary monument on the Praça do Cruzeiro public square in Carmo do Cajuru, Brazil, had decayed due to time and weather exposure.

The Brazilian parish commissioned the restoration work that later sent shock waves through the deeply religious community.

Before the chosen painter’s heavy-handed paint work could be hidden, residents shared before and after images of the statues, which have since had the new paint stripped away and covered up.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/39423165/j...ed-brazil/

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^Yeah, the lowest bid is not always the best choice. 

Boru