This and That

A new four winged feathered dinosaur has been discovered in China. Well, its bones have been found. What they’ve figured so far is that Jian changmaensis (nice name but a bit long – we’ll call them Jian for short), a microraptor, was about the size of a barn owl with a four foot wing span. It’s thought that Jian was a glider, like a flying squirrel, rather than an actual real birdy-like flier.

Jian was hanging around Earth during the Early Cretaceous period. You know, 145 to 100.5 million years ago, back when Sauroposeidons and Iguanodons were frequenting the local watering hole and I was just getting my drivers license or something.
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Annnd another one bites the dust 

A Pennsylvania man was convicted of sexually abusing a teen over a period of years. He was found dead in his prison cell. Kevin Esterly hung himself with a bedsheet. GOOD! Save taxpayers some damn money on his damn trial, inevitable appeals, and incarceration.

This 53-year-old predatory turnip began raping his step-daughter’s friend when she was 14 in 2016. This went on through March of 2018. He groomed her and tanked her up with booze. He'd give her coke and speed so she could stay awake in school the next day because she "would be up with him all night" during the abuses. 

Somehow this bullshit excuse for a human being, this man, a father, was only caught when he took his victim to Mexico. 

NB: The NBC site says the girl was 13 when the rapes began. The Lehigh Valley Live site says 14. The man met the child when she was 8-years-old – how much you wanna bet the grooming started shortly after that?
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In Ukraine war news:

On June 22, signal repeaters on the territory of Belarus that Russia used to coordinate Shahed drone strikes on Ukraine ceased operations.

The operational halt follows a public warning issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on June 19, 2026, which demanded the removal of the specialized guidance equipment within seven days, according to RBC. (source) 

Lukashenko, the Prez of Belarus, is a dictator, a weasel, and an incredible bastard (everything that Trump aspires to) but he can smell a loser. Putin is going down. I see defenestration, a nice polonium tea or a sudden unfortunate fatal heart attack in Puti’s future, followed by an end to the war on Ukraine.
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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has now been on the Red Planet and working for five years. Neat, huh? 

Last September the robotic science lab found that Jezero crater, at some point, was filled with water, leaving lake sediments at its base. Water and sediments might mean there could have been life on Mars at some point. 

More recent data, from an article posted just yesterday: 

Measurements of two mudstones show hundreds of organic detections, making this the most robust organic detection in Jezero crater.
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"There are multiple potential pathways to form abiotic organics on Mars," the authors state in this paper, clarifying that this, even compounded with other existing data, cannot conclusively say whether or not life created what Perseverance has observed.  (source) 

Desperately fascinating, don’cha know. Go read the column (it's short).