Facebook Axed Pro-Vaccine Ads From Hospitals and Health Orgs, Let Anti-Vaxxer Ads Slip Through
Ugh
Category: Media and Culture,
Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota
State regulators were on the scene Wednesday afternoon, and they estimated that the area of the spill was 1,500 feet long by 15 feet wide. Glatt said some wetlands were affected.
…The company was still working to contain the spill Wednesday afternoon.
…It has experienced problems with spills in the past, including one in 2011 of more than 14,000 gallons of oil in southeastern North Dakota, near the South Dakota border.
In 2017, the pipeline leaked an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil onto agricultural land in northeastern South Dakota, in a rural area near the North Dakota border.
Keystone pipeline leaks oil in northeastern North Dakota – StarTribune.com
hmmm
World Series: Astros must pay a steeper price beyond firing assistant
[The Astros] finally stumbled upon the decision to fire assistant general manager Brandon Taubman for his expletive-laced tirade supporting an alleged domestic abuser directed at three journalists, all of them women, in the Astros locker room Saturday night after the American League Championship Series.
…In their Thursday statement, the Astros did say that they were wrong about this, and “sincerely” apologized to SI’s Stephanie Apstein, who exhibited the professionalism, grace and class to try to get a comment from the Astros Monday before writing even one word about this troubling incident, only to be trashed by the Astros PR people, who really should be joining Taubman in finding a new line of work.
Let’s go back to that Monday statement. The Astros called Apstein’s story “misleading and completely irresponsible,” then proceeded to make up a story to cover for Taubman. “We are extremely disappointed in Sports Illustrated’s attempt to fabricate a story where one does not exist.”
World Series: Astros must pay a steeper price beyond firing assistant
wow…. F’ the Astros
The women who fall into America’s white power movement
“Like 70 percent of the time, the women earn the money and the men do podcasts. And they do podcasts about how women shouldn’t have jobs.”
…”It was unconscionable for me to justify creating manipulative content to draw young women into an organization where they were going to alienate themselves from friends and family and open themselves up to predatory men,” she said.
…The movement emerged from the same parts of the internet as violently misogynist groups like incels, or involuntarily celibate men. She says, “I don’t think it’s even possible to have an alt-right movement without the underlying misogyny.”
Women recruiters in these movements are caught in a “really toxic stew of misogyny and self-loathing,” Reaves says. But at the same time, they’re morally implicated.
…Samantha and her former IE friend both say the alt-right was like a cult, in that it separated people from their families and friends and demanded total ideological adherence.
“Like any cult, they want to expose you to as much as they can, but not so much you just turn away,” the woman said. The one difference is that there’s no single leader who dictates the culture and doctrine. Instead that’s created and enforced by largely anonymous people on message boards and in chat rooms, each one trying to one-up the others by posting more cleverly racist and cruel jokes.
“It never was past me that this stuff was dark,” Samantha says. “You become so numb to it… I don’t know if I ever thought it was funny. I don’t know if I ever explicitly said it wasn’t funny.”
How women fall into America’s white power movement – CNN
hmmm
Romney on Trump
“By all appearances, the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling,” Romney tweeted earlier this month.
In recent weeks, the senator’s acts of rebellion against the commander in chief have been flagrant: from publicly confirming “Pierre Delecto” as the secret identity he used to counter Trump on Twitter to bashing Trump’s Syria policy on the Senate floor to positioning himself on the front edge of any move by GOP lawmakers to break away and either censure the president or vote to remove him from office if the House follows through with impeachment.
Here’s the price Mitt Romney is paying for standing against Trump
hmm
In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal
Snowden, of course, is the former intelligence contractor who, in 2013, leaked documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, dispelling any notions that the National Security Agency and its allies were playing a quaint game of spy vs. spy, limiting their dragnet to specific persons of interest.
…Sweeping up phone records of Americans citizens, eavesdropping on foreign leaders, harvesting data from internet activity: For revealing these secret programs and more, Snowden was deemed a traitor by the Obama administration, which charged him with violating the Espionage Act and revoked his passport, effectively stranding Snowden in Moscow, where he has been living ever since.
…The internet of the 1990s was a liberating space, he says, where adopting and discarding different avatars could open up possibilities for more authentic expression and connection.
…What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessed — not just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever? Should such sensitive work be outsourced to private contractors? What entails effective “oversight” if the public is kept in the dark? When can concerns about “national security” slip into bids for unchecked power?
In Edward Snowden’s New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal – The New York Times
hmmm
Edward Snowden: My Hope in Obama Was ‘Misplaced’
Snowden also wrote that America had engaged in “self-destruction” after 9/11, “with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars.”
…“I fully supported defensive and targeted surveillance,” Snowden writes, but he called the government’s “bulk collection” of data hypocritical. According to The New York Times, Snowden felt like Obama was doubling down on the Bush administration’s surveillance programs.
Edward Snowden: My Hope in Obama Was ‘Misplaced’
hmmm
Trump wrongly tells female astronauts they’re first women to spacewalk
“This is the first time for a woman outside of the space station,” Trump, who appeared to be reading from a script, said on the phone call. “They’re conducting the first-ever female spacewalk.”
In fact, the first woman walked in space in 1984 — the cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya holds that record. The NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to do so later the same year.
…”We don’t want to take too much credit because there have been many other female spacewalkers before us,” Meir, who was doing her first-ever spacewalk, said. “This is just the first time that there have been two women outside at the same time, and it’s really interesting for us. We’ve talked a lot about it up here, you know, for us, this is really just us doing our jobs. It’s something we’ve been training for for six years.”
Trump wrongly tells female astronauts they’re first women to spacewalk – Business Insider
mmmhmm
He was undocumented. Now he’s exposing detention center abuse
Roughly, 85% reported that immigration detention facilities failed to provide adequate food and water and that they were unable to sleep due to overcrowding, cold temperatures and other conditions. Only 20% reported being able to take care of basic hygiene, such as showering and brushing their teeth.
More than half said they faced verbal abuse inside detention, with some saying they also suffered physical abuse. Roughly 25% also had their property seized when taken into detention, including important documents and cash that was not returned to them, he said.
A majority said they were forced to return to Mexico without any further investigation of the violence they might face there, which Wong said was a direct violation of the policy.
While waiting in Mexico, one out of four said they were threatened with physical violence, and more said they ended up homeless.
…Individuals are getting instructions about critically important steps in languages that they don’t speak: often Central American asylum speakers who speak an indigenous language by default are given instructions in Spanish. In San Diego, there are a lot of different languages – Asian Indians seeking asylum who speak Hindi were given instructions in English or Spanish. I find it hard to believe that we as a country can’t find a Hindi speaker.
He was undocumented. Now he’s exposing detention center abuse | US news | The Guardian
sighh
“Whoa,” says Edward Snowden as Sanders vows to end prosecution of whistleblowers under Espionage Act
Asked if the Espionage Act of 1917 should be used against those who raise the alarm about government wrongdoing, Sanders said, “Of course not.”
“The law is very clear: Whistleblowers have a very important role to play in the political process and I am very supportive of the courage of that whistleblower, whoever he or she may be,” Sanders said of the individual who filed the complaint about Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Grim pointed out that the 1917 law “had largely gone out of fashion until it was deployed heavily by the Obama administration, which prosecuted eight people accused of leaking to the media under the Espionage Act, more than all previous presidents combined.”
hmmm
HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ to stall Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds
Two top officials with the Department of Housing and Urban Development admitted at a congressional hearing this week that the agency knowingly missed a legally required deadline that would have made desperately needed hurricane relief funding available to Puerto Rico.
…The housing agency was supposed to issue funding notices to 18 states affected by disasters on Sept. 4. They published all the notices except Puerto Rico’s. The publication of the notice would have allowed Puerto Rico to start drafting a plan that would create the structures needed to manage the much-needed funds.
…Woll admitted that HUD had “no statutory authority” to miss such a deadline.
…“As the HUD Inspector General’s letter clearly states, HUD officials misled congressional staff about the conclusions of the IG’s review of Vivienda’s capacity to administer disaster recovery funds in an attempt to justify their violation of the law,” Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., who brought up the letter during the hearing, told NBC News.
…So far, Puerto Rico has received only the first $1.5 billion of a total of $20 billion granted through the agency’s Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program, or CDBG-DR, for infrastructure repairs and rebuilding homes.
Experts have anticipated that the flow of housing funds will be paralyzed until HUD appoints a financial monitor for Puerto Rico.
HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds
sigh…
How California’s data privacy law will change your online experience — no matter where you live
The California law goes further than any other U.S. law when it comes to who has access to a consumer’s personal data online. Beyond opting out, individuals can ask the company for what reason the data is being collected and sold, learn about the types of third-party companies buying the data and find out the financial incentives for the business selling user data. The law also applies not just to an individual, but personal data for a household or connected devices.
hmmm
Leo Lech not entitled to money after police blew up his Colorado home, court rules
Robert Jonathan Seacat, had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora. …A police officer pursued him in a high-speed chase until Seacat parked his car. …He climbed the fence on the other side — and then, shortly thereafter, came upon the Lech residence.
A 9-year-old boy, John Lech’s girlfriend’s son, was home alone at the time. …“He said, ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to get away,’ ” Lech said. Minutes later, the boy walked out of the house unharmed.
…Police had pulled into the driveway. Seacat fired a shot at them through the garage.
…Thus began the 19-hour standoff.
“They proceed to destroy the house — room by room, by room, by room,” Lech said. “This is one guy with a handgun. This guy was sleeping. This guy was eating. This guy was just hanging out in this house. I mean, they proceeded to blow up the entire house.”
…[the victim’s] expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.
“This has ruined our lives,” he said.
…On Tuesday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit unanimously ruled that the city is not required to compensate the Lech family for their lost home because it was destroyed by police while they were trying to enforce the law, rather than taken by eminent domain.
…The court said that Greenwood Village was acting within its “police power” when it damaged the house, which the court said doesn’t qualify as a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. The court acknowledged that this may seem “unfair,” but when police have to protect the public, they can’t be “burdened with the condition” that they compensate whomever is damaged by their actions along the way.
…Police must be forced to draw the line at some point, [the victim] said — preferably before a house is gutted — and be held accountable if innocent bystanders lose everything as a result of the actions of law enforcement.
…“This can’t go on in this country,” he said. “There has to be a limit. There has to be accountability.”
Over a shirt and some belts from WalMart???! That’s beyond unnecessary escalation all the way to egregiously irresponsible to start with and then the city refuses to pay more than $5000? Criminal.
Becoming by Michelle Obama review: race, marriage and the ugly side of politics
First ladies both feed into, and reflect, our patriarchal values, and so, in this world still so intolerant of female domination, making their husbands look good inevitably involves diminishing themselves, and a decoupling from their own achievements, so as not to outshine the president.
…But this protective love of Obama’s childhood did not shut out the communal sense of suffering and injustice that is, for any observer of America, impossible to avoid. The neighbourhood she grew up in was transformed by white flight, and later “deteriorated under the grind of poverty and gang violence”. An early experience with the police via her beloved brother Craig taught her that “the colour of our skin made us vulnerable.” Persistent experiences of discrimination bred in her family “a basic level of resentment and mistrust”.
Most of Obama’s narrative on race, however, comes courtesy not of her own perspective, but that of the many commentators who weaponised her blackness against her. “The rumours and slanted commentary always carried less than subtle messaging about race, meant to stir up the deepest and ugliest kind of fear within the [white] voting public.
…The New Yorker magazine cover depicting her as an armed Black Panther, for example, the time Fox News ran an onscreen graphic describing her as Barack Obama’s “Baby Mama” – like the earlier “welfare queen” trope, a dog whistle appeal to the idea that, if the black family is at the root of America’s problems, how could one of them possibly be part of its solution? Or the time Fox host Bill O’Reilly said: “I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there is evidence.”
…During Barack Obama’s tenure, it was Michelle Obama’s roots in the African American experience, in the history of the south that she understood innately as “knit into me”, that lent him crucial legitimacy among black voters. It resurfaces here, adding the profound warnings of past suffering to the observation that, as she sees the Trumps take over the White House, …“the kind of overwhelmingly white and male tableau I’d encountered so many times”.
sigh…
Cillizza on Obama’s words on ‘cancel’ culture
The underpinnings of this worldview — is that there are only good people (aka people who agree with me on all things) and bad people (those who don’t agree with me on everything.) There is no gray area. It’s black or it’s white.
The point Obama is making is that politics — and life — are rarely that cut and dry.
What Barack Obama gets exactly right about our toxic ‘cancel’ culture – CNNPolitics
Mostly silliness but he right on about the binary nature of it.
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 