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.
Texas Won’t Accept New Refugees, Gov. Greg Abbott Says : NPR
No governor is empowered to refuse the Federal government in this way. It is outside their purview. It is also bigoted and unAmerican as F*ck. There is no excuse for spitting on the soul of this country and pretending Lady Liberty does not exist, None. Period.
tuexaudiducis
On the one hand, Williamson, 67, was the only candidate to strongly advocate for reparations for African Americans. She advocated for stronger environmental protections, in discussing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In part due to Donald Trump’s rollback of environmental protections, “we have communities, particularly communities of color and disadvantaged communities all over this country, who are suffering from environmental injustice”, she said during the first Democratic primary debate in July.
Her contributions were unexpectedly lucid at times.
…Williamson’s own views were scrutinized as not just wonky, but sometimes dangerous. Critics worried that her vacillating over vaccines …could mislead families.
hmmm
The probe comes as senior U.S. officials are warning that Russia’s election interference in 2020 could be more brazen than in the 2016 presidential race or the 2018 midterm election.
…A signature trait of Russian President Vladimir Putin “is his ability to convince people of outright falsehoods,” said William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.
…Russia’s campaign interference in 2016 resulted in a multiagency investigation that led to a highly classified intelligence assessment, part of which was made public in January 2017. Trump has questioned the finding of Russian meddling and has asserted that government agents biased against him conducted a “witch hunt” into whether his campaign conspired with Russia.
The potential for Russia to spread falsehoods — and to develop increasingly sophisticated techniques to do so — is one of the bigger concerns that U.S. officials have as the 2020 election approaches, Demers said.”It’s possible that you will see the creation of false documents,” Demers said. “They could be mixed in with real information, which would make it very difficult to discern the difference. I worry about that as the next evolution of some of their means.”
…Russia has been openly promoting the controversy over Biden and Ukraine, feeding information back into the U.S. where there is an audience that’s receptive to it, Watts said.
Russia has been using its state-run media RT and Sputnik News to selectively promote favorable and unfavorable information about presidential candidates, according to an analysis by the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Foreign Influence Election 2020.
…Russia has a history of staging cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns in Ukraine, where it annexed Crimea in 2014 and backs armed separatists in the eastern part of the country.
The Justice Department exposed Russia’s interference in the 2016 election through public indictments of operatives who hacked Democratic organizations, leaked information damaging Clinton and used social media to sow divisions.
U.S. Probes If Russia Is Targeting Biden in 2020 Election Meddling
hmmm
“Having the audacity — because that’s what it is — to exhibit self-sovereignty has always been a privilege reserved for men, especially white men,” she told CNN. “Yet here is Meghan exhibiting this ‘audacity’ and it’s being … pushed forward by a white man who happens to be her husband.”
Eubanks argues that Prince Harry presenting a united front with his spouse “triggers people” because it places “a white Prince of royal blood and a black American woman commoner” on equal footing.
“That sight doesn’t sit well with everyone due to how they’ve been conditioned to view women and people of color, whether they realize it or not.”
…Some observers believe Prince Harry is extra protective of Meghan because of how his mother, the late Princess Diana, was treated by the media towards the end of her life.
“He seemingly never recovered from the anguish he saw her go through at the hands of the British press and the critics,” said Eubanks. “He seems to have pledged to never let that happen to his wife and children. “
Coming or going, Meghan gets the blame — and it’s because of her race – CNN
Sigh…
irginia jurors in 2017 requested 132 years of prison for a man who stole car tires. The jurors may have been unaware that taxpayers could pay more than $25,000 a year to keep someone incarcerated—so by proposing their sentence, they were also suggesting that society fork over $3 million. For tires.
…Americans pay tens of billions of dollars a year for state prisons, despite declining crime rates. But historically, prosecutors and judges haven’t had to think about these hefty costs.
…Tallying the price of sentences seemed sensible to him, especially because he knew prison wasn’t just expensive, but also likely to increase a person’s chances of committing more crimes later.
Should Judges Have to Weigh the Price Tag of Sending Someone to Prison? – Mother Jones
hmmm
In the past 20 years, deaths from suicides, alcohol poisoning, and drugs have skyrocketed, achieving numbers not seen since the 1930’s. What is interesting is that there is one demographic that has seen a rapid rise in these types of deaths: single white men.
The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.”
…While all the other groups are getting richer, the white working class (and particularly males) are getting poorer.
This type of downward trend can have great negative effects on the mindset of people. If you are feeling that your life is not improving, but actually getting worse, and that you will never be able to achieve the lifestyle that your parents (or even you) had in the past, your psyche can go into feelings of depression and despair. This then makes you much more prone to seeking radical solutions to your perceived problems.
…The deaths are mostly among less educated white males, which is the same demographic that overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2016 election.
If you further look at the statistics, there is a strong correlation between counties with high rates of deaths of despair among less educated white males, and votes for Trump. You can see that many of these men tried to solve their problems by doing extreme things: either drowning themselves in drugs and alcohol, committing suicide, or voting for Donald Trump.
…As many ancient philosophers have noted, people are social animals and need contact with other human beings to prosper. Unfortunately, in the modern world, these basic connections between people are being lost, as the social space becomes more and more impersonal, with growing loneliness being the result.
…People have a need to belong. They are tribal in nature, which is very easy to exploit in pitting people against each other and creating “us” versus “them” types of dichotomies.
…You don’t really have too many prospects of getting out of this situation, and things seem to be getting worse.
Then suddenly, you are confronted with people saying that you are privileged based on your race or sex. You look around, notice your squalid surroundings, reflect on your meager job prospects, and your non-existing love life, and say to yourself: “privilege my ass!”
However, you continue facing attacks on your identity. You start taking these attacks more and more personally, as they lower your self-esteem even more. You start feeling as if you are under attack.
…Today’s toxic climate creates the right conditions for normal people to fall through the alt-right rabbit hole.
…Woke culture and calling people out not only creates divisions, but doesn’t help the people it is supposed to help. Most people coming from minority background don’t care about political correctness. In fact, they want the same things that people from the deprived white male working-class want.
… Shame based political discourse as practiced by woke social justice warriors, not only doesn’t improve social justice for minorities, it just degenerates the political discourse and is incredibly counter-productive.
This One Little Forgotten Statistic Might Hold Clues To Why Trump Won The 2016 Presidential Election
hmmm
Mayor Pete Declines To Hit Imaginary Marijuana Joint | Marijuana Moment
my gawd… could he be any whiter???
Under state law, some elected officials are required to be bonded.
Hodge says she was denied a bond after City Council member Martin Gatti made a racist comment to the bonding company.
“This councilman told the bonding people ‘this colored girl’ shouldn’t sit as the treasurer for the city of Uniontown,” said Joel Sansone, Hodge’s attorney.
Uniontown refuses to seat first African-American city treasurer
Good lord!
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said, “To me, the hijab means power, liberation, beauty and resistance.”
…There are two vastly different kinds of hijabs: the democratic hijab, the head covering that a woman chooses to wear, and the tyrannical hijab, the one that a woman is forced to wear.
…In Saudi Arabia, the abaya and niqab, allowing only women’s eyes to show, are not legally imposed, but the patriarchal society makes wearing them essentially compulsory.
Women who live under these forms of hijab effectively live under a gender apartheid. The coverings mark women as lesser citizens, legally and socially unequal. In Iran, there are restrictions on women’s ability to travel, obtain a divorce or enter sports stadiums. A woman’s courtroom testimony is in most cases given half the weight of a man’s. The forced hijab honors neither tradition nor religion; it is a powerful tool of misogynist oppression.
…These women aren’t seeking the hijab’s eradication; they are simply demanding the right to choose what they wear. They hunger for the sort of liberty that is the cornerstone of U.S. democracy. We are pleased to see Omar proudly exercise her right to don the hijab. In an era when nativism is rising in the United States and in many other countries, it is important for those who support the values of a pluralistic society to stand up for the rights of their threatened minorities. In that spirit, we wholeheartedly stand with our Muslim sisters in the West and support their choices.
In return, we ask the global sisterhood to stand with Iranian women as they fight against the mandatory hijab.
There are two types of hijabs. The difference is huge. – The Washington Post
Sorry, ladies, Hope your holding your breathe. Omar isn’t exactly known for supporting women she doesn’t feel a kinship with. (Nancy Pelosi vs. “The Squad” anyone?)
Sit down an STFU, Ilhan.
Clearly you aren’t sophisticated enough to see reality for what it is.
We’re all familiar with the mind-bending properties of psychedelic drugs – but it turns out ordinary medications can be just as potent. From paracetamol (known as acetaminophen in the US) to antihistamines, statins, asthma medications and antidepressants, there’s emerging evidence that they can make us impulsive, angry, or restless, diminish our empathy for strangers, and even manipulate fundamental aspects of our personalities, such as how neurotic we are.
…One reason medications can have such psychological clout is that the body isn’t just a bag of separate organs, awash with chemicals with well-defined roles – instead, it’s a network, in which many different processes are linked.
For example, scientists have known for a while that the medications used to treat asthma are sometimes associated with behavioural changes, such as an increase in hyperactivity and the development of ADHD symptoms.
…The list of potential culprits includes some of the most widely consumed drugs on the planet, meaning that even if the effects are small at an individual level, they could be shaping the personalities of millions of people.
…Mischkowski’s own research has uncovered a sinister side-effect of paracetamol. For a long time, scientists have known that the drug blunts physical pain by reducing activity in certain brain areas, such as the insular cortex, which plays an important role in our emotions. These areas are involved in our experience of social pain, too.
…The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day.
…But Golomb’s most unsettling discovery isn’t so much the impact that ordinary drugs can have on who we are – it’s the lack of interest in uncovering it. “There’s much more of an emphasis on things that doctors can easily measure,” she says, explaining that, for a long time, research into the side-effects of statins was all focused on the muscles and liver, because any problems in these organs can be detected using standard blood tests.
The medications that change who we are – BBC Future
Not sure why this would be surprising or counter-intuitive.
The Mayor Pete rising now is not the candidate who initially broke out with praise of the Green New Deal and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. In his place, we find something more conventional. “While he hasn’t pivoted 180 degrees on policy proposals,” The New York Times recently reported, “Mr. Buttigieg has gradually reinvented himself as more of a moderate.”
…In 2003, his senior year at Harvard University, he took the Democratic Party and its standard-bearer at the time, John Kerry, to task in columns for The Harvard Crimson. Timid and tired messaging, he argued in one, put Democrats at risk of “losing a critical, though unseen, fight—the struggle over the language of American politics.”
“The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary,” he wrote.
…Buttigieg’s donors have discouraged him from promoting institutional reforms. “Multiple financial bundlers told the campaign that the Supreme Court and Electoral College proposals were not popular, according to people familiar with the discussions,” the Times’ Reid Epstein wrote. “Mr. Buttigieg has since quietly dropped them from his stump speech.”
…In a 2005 piece, the Forward’s E.J. Kessler referred to the Truman Project as “a new generation of hawkish Democrats rethinking security questions in a post-9/11 world.”
…The central irony of the Buttigieg candidacy is that his array of meritocratic credentials has set him on his way towards becoming one of the least formally qualified presidents in American history.
…On foreign policy, Buttigieg’s background suggests a preoccupation with strength and a confidence that American military power can be wielded responsibly and unashamedly with the right person in charge, that person preferably being Pete Buttigieg.
This is among the many things about Buttigieg—next to the talk about freedom and security, the educational credentials, the military service, and his invocations of religion—that make it seem as though he’s been engineered as a response to Republican Party of 2004.
Pete Buttigieg Is Still Fighting the Last War | The New Republic
hmmm
“The nature of presidential politics is the better you do, the more you are tested,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist of his campaigns. “Buttigieg has made a pretty remarkable progress in 2019. Now he is being tested as a legitimate top tier candidate and we’ll see how he handles it.”
…The youngest candidate in the 2020 presidential race, at age 37, isn’t doing well with young Democratic voters. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Buttigieg gets the support among just 2% of voters under 35. And in an average of CNN polling in October and November, Buttigieg gets slightly better with 8% of voters under 35 — still a single-digit number.
…”I thought it was condescending.”
…”I didn’t feel like he was very clear and candid,” said another student.
…Among some people in [his] generation, his current political positioning has filled them first with disappointment, then with rage.
“He tried to fashion himself as someone more progressive on the outset and is now caving,” said Jordan Uhl, 32, a progressive organizer who has been a vocal anti-Buttigieg voice. “You could say similar things about Biden, but Pete is much more brazen about it.”
…”He’s phony,” said Adam Jentleson, when asked why he opposes Buttigieg’s candidacy so strongly.
…”He’s been validating Republican lines of attack consistently in ways that, if Warren and Bernie were the nominee, will give Trump a lot of footage to use in ads against them.”
Online, criticism of Buttigieg seems to be snowballing from questioning his moderation to suggesting that he is a Trojan Horse. His harshest critics pin him with the worst of descriptors, including one recently who called him “racist, arrogant, dangerous, a warmonger and not qualified to be president.”
…They view him as beholden to corporate interests, unable to win over the diverse Democratic base that these activists take pride in, and disinterested in the systemic change they believe the country desperately needs on issues like the influence of big money on politics and climate change and systemic racism.
…His candidacy, in their view, is akin to the vanity project of an overly ambitious, privileged white man.
…The controversy over his time at McKinsey as a management consultant has fueled accusations that he is bought and paid for by corporate interests.
…For others, the part of Buttigieg’s identity that is the most salient is not that he is gay, but that he is white, which they believe has insulated him from the kind of scrutiny that other candidates have been subjected to.
… When asked if the protests bother him. “It’s a little hard to have a conversation with them, so I don’t know for sure.”
How Pete Buttigieg has drawn the fury of the online left – CNNPolitics
oh my…..
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