What goes through my my mind when I read the news with my morning coffee. …Or for the Simon's Rockers in the group, this is my response journal.
A Google employee named Emma Haruka Iwao has used Google’s cloud-computing service to break the world record for calculating pi, an infinite number vital to engineering.
…Iwao — a cloud developer advocate who has been working at Google for over three years — successfully calculated pi to 31 trillion digits, beating the previous record by 9 trillion.
Google employee breaks record for calculating pi – Business Insider
cool
The researchers report that male Sam’s perceived status was enhanced by humor, while female Sam’s was diminished. Humorous male Sam was evaluated more positively than serious male Sam on several indicators, including leadership potential. The opposite was true for humorous female Sam.
What’s behind these disparate results? Evans and his colleagues note that men are generally seen as rational and achievement-oriented. “These aspects of the male stereotype reinforce a positive interpretation of humor,” they write.
In contrast, “working women are stereotyped as having lower dedication to work, because of their association with family responsibilities,” they add. This makes colleagues and supervisors more inclined to view their use of humor in a negative light, signaling that women aren’t taking work sufficiently seriously.
Witty Women Are Less Likely to Get Promoted Than Men – Pacific Standard
hmmmm
Why Bernie Sanders Says Hillary Clinton Isn’t ‘Qualified’ to Be President – The Atlantic
Let’s see if I have this straight….
She questioned his positions on a few issues. That’s taken to be the same as accusing him of being unqualified, which is totally out of line.
Then he calls her unqualified because she disagrees with him on a few issues. Which is not out of line to say because, well, not sure….
No double standards or unfair treatment of Hillary by her opponent’s camp here! Am I right, bros?
Some die-hard supporters of Bernie Sanders are echoing, and in some cases amplifying, unproven claims that Clinton may be covering up serious health problems.
Hillary Clinton, Pneumonia, and Health Conspiracies – The Atlantic
Well, at least she didn’t emerge from the shower with a head wound that needed 7 stitches. Am I right, ladies?
In 2017, the president called Zervos and other women accusing him of sexual harassment or sexual assault “liars.” It prompted Zervos to then file the suit.
Trump’s lawyers have said that because he is the president he’s immune from any prosecution, but the court didn’t agree.
…They cited the Supreme Court’s ruling of Clinton v. Jones, which decided the president could be sued in office relating to unofficial acts that have nothing to do with his role as president.
mmmhmmm
The detective said a grant from the Manhattan district attorney’s office had helped the Tucson authorities clear a backlog of untested rape kits, which preserve the DNA evidence left by an attacker. After five years, Ms. Sudbeck’s kit had finally been tested, the detective said.
…The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., committed $38 million in forfeiture money to help other jurisdictions test rape kits. Since the grants began being distributed in 2015, the evidence kits have led to 165 prosecutions in cases that were all but forgotten. So far, 64 of those have resulted in convictions.
…The initiative has paid to get about 55,000 rape kits tested in 32 law enforcement agencies in 20 states, among them the police departments in Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Miami, Memphis, Austin, Tex., and Kansas City, Mo.
…Using money seized from international banks in New York that were accused of violating sanctions, Mr. Vance dedicated $38 million in grants to other law enforcement agencies to clear those backlogs.
…Still, even with such successes, the problem of untested rape kits persists. Advocates for rape victims estimate that about 250,000 kits remain untested across the country.
…Victims whose cases had been solved with the help of grants from the Manhattan district attorney recalled how the local police had dismissed their claims or questioned whether their encounter was consensual.
…“I believe fundamentally there was a gender bias at issue,” Mr. Vance said Tuesday, when asked about the backlog. “A crime mostly involving women was simply not viewed as important to solve.”
Old Rape Kits Finally Got Tested. 64 Attackers Were Convicted. – The New York Times
It’s always a good thing when the American Injustice System actually deals out justice.
“Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys,” Carlson said in one clip from October 7, 2008.
…Carlson said of Iraqis in 2006. “A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks … they can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view.”
…Carlson questioned whether Barack Obama is really black, mused about a presidential candidate running on a platform of protecting the country from “Muslim lunatics,” and used a homophobic slur.
…NowThis News published a third tranche of Carlson clips — audio of him alternately mocking and joking about having sex with underaged beauty pageant contestants.
…Last December, Carlson — who took over Bill O’Reilly’s primetime time slot after O’Reilly was forced out amid a sexual harassment scandal in May 2017 — was widely denounced after he said during his Fox News that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
Carlson’s comments resulted in 14 companies pulling their advertising. AstraZeneca followed suit on Monday, on the heels of Media Matters publishing the first set of clips from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show.
The Tucker Carlson drama, explained – Vox
hmmm
The lawmakers say that unless people of color are guaranteed a share of the potentially $3 billion industry, there may be no legalization this year. They want to be assured that some of that money will go toward job training programs, and that minority entrepreneurs will receive licenses to cultivate or sell the marijuana.
…They say one misstep, in particular, stands out: None of the 10 states or Washington ensured that minority communities would share in any economic windfall of legalization — missing out on an opportunity to redress years of having a disproportionate number of African-Americans arrested on marijuana charges.
…Critics say marijuana legalization has fostered an inequitable system in which wealthy, white investors often reap the profits of the fledgling industry.
In Colorado, black entrepreneurs said they were banned from winning licenses because of marijuana-related convictions. Black people make up just a handful of the thousands of cultivation or dispensary license holders there, and continue to be arrested on marijuana-related charges at almost three times the rate of white people.
In California, several cities introduced equity programs retroactively. Oakland now requires at least half of licenses to go to people with a cannabis-related conviction and who fell below an income threshold.
…Ms. Peoples-Stokes, a Democrat who represents a district that includes Buffalo. She has introduced her own bill, which directs half of all marijuana revenue to a community fund supporting job training, and prioritizes licenses for people from communities most affected by criminalization.
…That concern has made itself so clear that the New York Medical Cannabis Industry Association, worried that legislators might seek to shut them out of the new industry, sent a letter to Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders on Monday promising to set up a $25 million “Cannabis Economic Opportunity Fund” to provide zero-interest loans to companies led by women and people of color.
…The City Council’s Progressive Caucus and the Black Latino and Asian Caucus recently introduced laws and resolutions calling for the city to have local control over home delivery and cultivation of marijuana, potentially allowing smaller businesses to share in the sales.
“Not arresting people is not good enough,” Donovan Richards, a city councilman from Queens, said. “Economic justice must be served.”
hmmmm
Julie Bishop, who was Australia’s first female foreign minister and deputy leader of the Liberal Party, said the first lady made the mistake after President Donald Trump struck up a conversation with her partner David Panton.
…Melania, standing by, assumed David was the foreign minister and she said to me: “Julie, will you be coming to my ladies’ lunch tomorrow?”,’ Bishop said of the encounter at the UN General Assembly Leaders’ week in 2017.
Melania Trump ‘mistook former female Australia foreign minister for partner’ | Daily Mail Online
Damn the Trumps’ staff sucks. Sure, she should have known. She also should have had someone with her to help avoid gaffes like that. If she did have anyone there, they clearly weren’t of much use.
“This is a struggle. Is this a societal issue? Is this a military issue?” said Van Winkle “It doesn’t matter to us, we pull from society and we are responsible for changing them to align with our core values.”
hmmm
McSally, the nation’s first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that she was “preyed upon and raped by a superior officer.”
…McSally served in the Air Force for 26 years and mostly flew the A-10.
…”Like so many women and men, I didn’t trust the system at the time. …I thought I was strong but felt powerless.”
…”I was horrified at how my attempt to share generally my experiences was handled. I almost separated from the Air Force at 18 years of service over my despair. Like many victims, I felt like the system was raping me all over again.”
Sen. Martha McSally says she was raped by a senior officer while in Air Force – ABC News
hmmm
The top-grossing movies from 2014 to 2017 with women leads out-earned movies starring men across all budget levels.
,,,The research also found that films that passed the Bechdel test — a gender bias test that measures whether at least two female characters converse about something other than a man — earned more than films that failed it.
…“There’s a lot of conventional wisdom that woman led films make less money. But our data doesn’t support that,” Smith tells CNBC.
…The financial success of women-led films is significant, considering that women accounted for only a quarter of the solo protagonist roles in the top films of 2017 and only played around a third of the major characters.
Movies starring women make more money than movies starring men
hmmmm
In the years before Carlson became a Fox host, he called into the “Bubba the Love Sponge” radio show and delighted the shock jock by saying all sorts of crude things.
…A Media Matters spokesperson told CNN that more material will be published within the next day, hinting that the new audio would “give some additional insight into Tucker’s worldview vis-a-vis race and ethnicity.”
“We certainly want to make sure [the new audio tapes] are released when they can be most helpful to the media buying decision makers,” the Media Matters spokesperson said in an email.
Tucker Carlson refuses to apologize for his misogynistic remarks – CNN
hmmm
She was, in all but name, part of the military’s top-tier Special Operations forces. Officially a chief petty officer in the Navy, she actually worked closely with the nation’s most secretive intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, to target leaders of the Islamic State.
…Chief Kent spoke a half-dozen Arabic dialects and four other languages. She was one of the first women to complete the rigorous course required for other troops to accompany Navy SEALs on raids. She could run a 3:30 marathon, do a dozen full-arm-hang pull-ups and march for miles with a 50-pound rucksack.
…Chief Kent developed skills that have become critical over the last two decades, including the immediate exploitation of documents, hard drives and other intelligence found during raids, and sophisticated methods of targeting that combined eavesdropping, human intelligence and relationship mapping.
…Chief Kent illustrates an unspoken truth: that for many years women have been doing military jobs as dangerous, secretive and specialized as anything men do.
She would sometimes muse that conversation — even with people who had top security clearances — would be simpler if she could just join a Special Operations unit.
…“Women have been on the front lines with special operators for 16 years,” said Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of a book about female troops working with elite forces in the combat zones of Afghanistan. “But because that community is unseen and so rarely talks about their work, it’s been hard to know how much women have done.”
…This week, the Navy modified its rules to make it easier for enlisted service members who wish to become officers to petition for medical waivers.
“The Navy fixed everything that kind of screwed Shannon,” Mr. Kent said.
Her Title: Cryptologic Technician. Her Occupation: Warrior. – The New York Times
hmmmm
Congressional Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday that would classify reproductive rights as human rights and require the U.S. State Department to include access to reproductive health care in its annual human rights report, a practice that ended when President Trump took office.
…the State Department’s annual human rights report has critical government uses. “It’s important for immigration judges and for immigration lawyers trying to determine whether asylum claims are founded.”
The report’s use by immigration judges is critical for Stephanie Schmid, U.S. foreign policy council at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who used an example from Central America to demonstrate the harm of excluding reproductive rights from the report. “Any woman that would be coming to the U.S. border right now … fleeing some condition like in El Salvador where you can be jailed for having a miscarriage, and trying to make a refugee or asylum claim at the border, wouldn’t be safe,” she told Rewire.News. “Potentially an immigration judge [could say] ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, the 2017 human rights reports don’t say anything about women being jailed in El Salvador for miscarriages.’ They don’t say anything about the high rate of sexual and gender based violence by gangs and in other situations. So what we do is invalidate and erase the experience and stories of women all over the world.”
…Clark’s bill mandates that foreign service officers must consult with reproductive health and rights organizations in local communities to gather accurate information for the human rights report.
Here’s How Democrats Want to Classify Reproductive Rights as Human Rights – Rewire.News
hmmm
For years, hospitals have blamed rising maternal deaths and injuries on problems beyond their control. Almost universally they’ve pointed to poverty and pre-existing medical conditions as the driving factors in making America the most dangerous place in the developed world to give birth.
…The data, medical records and lawsuits suggest a complicated mix of misdiagnoses, delayed care and a failure to follow safety measures [are contributing factors.]
…These kinds of life-threatening childbirth complications are happening at Touro more often than at most hospitals. It is one of 120 hospitals where mothers suffer severe complications at far higher rates, USA TODAY found by examining billing records from 7 million births in 13 states.
Women at these outlier hospitals were more than twice as likely to have had blood transfusions, hysterectomies, seizures, heart attacks, strokes or other indicators that their deliveries turned deadly.
…Studies have found half of mothers’ deaths and severe injuries could be prevented or reduced with better medical care.
…Of the 120 high-complication hospitals identified by USA TODAY’s analysis, at least 56 are training sites for OB/GYN residency programs, and 22 of them have accreditation histories that include warnings, probation or both.
…While many hospitals with the highest rates pointed to patients’ poverty, the USA TODAY analysis identified plenty of hospitals serving high concentrations of poor women or black women with far lower complication rates.
…Hospitals, Main said, too often respond defensively instead of using the data to evaluate their care practices.
…Childbirth safety advocates called the hospital’s response troubling, particularly because a majority of women who deliver at Touro are black. Nationally, black mothers are dying from childbirth at three to four times the rate of white mothers; they suffer severe complications twice as often.
…Looking more deeply at New Orleans shows the kinds of differences among hospitals the analysis exposed. Seven hospitals deliver all the city’s babies. Of them, Touro’s maternity patients were far more likely to face serious complications.
…No matter how USA TODAY sliced the data, moms delivering at Touro experienced worse outcomes than women in similar situations who went to other hospitals.
Compare the births of poor mothers at Touro with poor mothers at other area hospitals – Touro’s moms had more complications. Compare black mothers. White mothers. Mothers with private insurance. Touro’s patients fared worse.
The pattern held true with patients coming from individual ZIP codes.
…Over the years, the OB/GYN training program at Touro has drawn concern from a national accreditation group that oversees medical education. Four recent lawsuits accused trainee doctors at Touro of failing to order the right tests, being slow to recognize emerging complications and making surgical or medication mistakes.
Maternal death is rising. This data could help moms but it’s secret.
Dayum, Touro…
Nearly 23 years ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a landmark decision invalidating the Virginia Military Institute’s exclusion of women as a violation of equal protection. The ruling in United States v. Virginia compelled the United States’ last all-male public university to accept women, who quickly proved themselves to be worthy cadets. But as every adult man in the U.S. knows, sex discrimination in military service remains: Upon their 18th birthday, American men must register for the selective service, while women are exempt. How, almost 23 years after the VMI decision, can this flagrant inequality persist?
On Friday, a federal judge in Texas provided an answer: It can’t. In a brief but emphatic decision, U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller ruled that the Selective Service System may not constitutionally direct men to register as part of its draft requirements while excluding women. Miller’s decision closely tracks Ginsburg’s gradual development of the law toward ever-greater gender equality. While the outcome might seem startling, the logic is carefully anchored in precedent. It would be difficult if not impossible for the Supreme Court to reverse Miller’s ruling without simultaneously eroding decades of sex discrimination jurisprudence. Under any plausible interpretation of today’s equal protection principles, the men-only selective service has got to go.
Judge cites Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rules against men-only draft.
hmmmmm
Bernie Sanders Defends Campaigning With Nebraska Anti-Abortion Rights Democrat Heath Mello : NPR
This is rich, old, white guy really, really, really does not get it.
“Diversity isn’t just ‘Let’s have people of color supporting this white person’s story,’” Wu says, adding it’s a distinction she finds herself explaining repeatedly in Hollywood.
…“What he was saying was such bullshit. If you want to talk about whether or not an Asian person, or a person of color, or a trans person can open a studio movie, you can’t argue, ‘That’s not going to sell!’ because you’ve never done it before!” [Wu] takes a breath, then continues. “I think he thought because I’m a female actor and he’s super high-powered that I would try to make nice. But I don’t give a fuck.”
…“People say women are inherently bitchy and competitive. But anybody will be competitive if there’s only one seat at the table.”
…“I didn’t have any dreams or designs that a studio would want to make my work, that any awards body or critical community would embrace my work.” DuVernay chose to use this bias as an asset: “In many ways, that lack of attention put me in a really good place. No one’s going to watch it anyway, so I may as well make what I want.”
…“I’ve had people tell me, ‘You need to be a little more quiet with all this woman talk,’” Chastain admits, laughing, adding she has no interest in perpetuating damaging sexist tropes about what women should be and do, on- or off-screen. Her dedication to leveling the field extends to crew and head-of-department hires, adjustments that have real-world implications and puncture the oft-repeated lie that filling those jobs with women is “too hard.”
“I agree there are not as many women as men that have the same experience, but that’s because, in the past, women have been actively discriminated against. Male directors who had their first film in Sundance, their next offer is a huge action movie. Women haven’t been given those opportunities, and we need to ask why.”
…When asked how she freed herself from the approval matrix, Chastain pauses a beat.
“That’s a hard question because I don’t know that it was even something that I was aware of until I stopped doing it. All of a sudden, I realized, I feel really happy. Why is that? And it was because I was caring less about what others think of me.”
…“I learned it’s impossible to make everybody happy. At the end of the day, just do stuff that you’re proud of and don’t be an asshole.”
Constance Wu, Ava DuVernay and Jessica Chastain Talk Time’s Up Entertainment and Equal Pay
hmmmm
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 