Mayor Pete Declines To Hit Imaginary Marijuana Joint | Marijuana Moment
my gawd… could he be any whiter???
Uniontown refuses to seat first African-American city treasurer
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!
‘Like sending bees to war’: the deadly truth behind your almond-milk
Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.
…Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.
…Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.
…On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees.
…One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans.
…“We don’t have pests; we have biodiversity,” says Anderson, who primarily sells directly to individual customers through his Anderson Almonds company. Unlike large industrial almond farms that strip the orchard ground bare to more efficiently treat for insects and fungi, Anderson allows a rich understory to grow, which naturally nourishes the soil and strengthens the trees.
Anderson hires a “beekeeper hobbyist” from northern California every spring to install about 20 hives in his orchard. “We have the opposite of colony collapse at my farm,” says Anderson. “My beekeeper brings weak hives down that he wants to recharge on my property.”
Anderson says the tradeoff for not using pesticides is that his annual crop yield is lower – typically about 10,000 pounds – and he keeps his orchard small in order to manage its wildness. “
hmmmm
There are two types of hijabs. The difference is huge.
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?)
Ilhan Omar Promotes Smear Of Famed Anti-Iranian Regime Journalist. Journalist Issues Stunning Response.
Sit down an STFU, Ilhan.
Clearly you aren’t sophisticated enough to see reality for what it is.
The medications that change who we are – BBC Future
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.
Pete Buttigieg Is Still Fighting the Last War | The New Republic
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
How Pete Buttigieg has drawn the fury of the online left
“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…..
Theories About Why Young Progressives Hate Pete Buttigieg So So Very Much
Buttigieg, far more than Biden, has the youth and vigor to command the party for the next generation. And this makes him the graver threat to those arguing for a socialist revolution.
…He initially proposed radical government reforms such as packing the Supreme Court and removing the filibuster, but now he’s recast himself as a moderate unifier. As a result, the left sees him as not just any moderate, but as a moderate masquerading as a wunderkind grassroots progressive. …For the young left, political moderation might be a misdemeanor; but eloquent moderation donning the costume of progressive activism is first-degree phoniness that merits the punishment of crude criticism.
…[Buttigieg’s] candidacy violates a certain unwritten law of U.S. electoral politics. American voters have historically appreciated candidates who, from a socioeconomic perspective, identify “down”: Franklin D. Roosevelt was a traitor to the upper class; Trump is the real-estate billionaire who speaks for coal miners; Bernie Sanders is the septuagenarian senator who rallies the young left. But there’s not a deep history of successful candidates who appeared to identify “up,” like a young, nonmillionaire, small-town mayor who aligns himself with cosmopolitan capital. Identifying down can be a proxy for authenticity, but identifying up invites accusations of inauthenticity.
…The diverse and angry and hyper-educated Millennial-and-Gen-Z cohort are a rising power on the cusp of a potentially seismic moment in American political history, and their most successful representative is a candidate who, it turns out, doesn’t really represent them.
Why Young Progressives Hate Pete Buttigieg – The Atlantic
hmmm
How Pete Buttigieg went from war protester to serving in Afghanistan
He was the brainy son of two Notre Dame professors, but the armed forces held an allure.
…After graduation, he continued to work in party politics, campaigning in Arizona for John F. Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid. When Kerry lost, Buttigieg’s boss, future assistant defense secretary Doug Wilson, invited him to Washington.
“I think he was interested in coming back with me because he saw this as an opportunity to learn about foreign policy and international affairs.”
…He became increasingly active in Democratic politics and increasingly opposed to the national security policies of President George W. Bush.
…Buttigieg quickly fell in with Democrats who were supportive of military power even as they condemned the way it was wielded by the Bush White House. They called themselves the Truman National Security Project.
…Buttigieg finished his degree in economics at Oxford in 2007 and moved to the Chicago office of McKinsey & Co. For the next year, the consulting gig that would make him an expert in grocery pricing also gave him his first taste of a war zone. Buttigieg visited Iraq and Afghanistan as part of U.S. government-funded projects to stimulate private-sector development in countries still engulfed in violence.
…It was only after Barack Obama was elected, and just months before Buttigieg would launch his own political career, that he finally walked into the recruiting office.
Only then did he decide to join a conflict that six years earlier he had denounced from the stage of an antiwar rally.
…Buttigieg, Peter, 27-year-old Harvard grad. Polyglot Rhodes scholar. McKinsey management consultant. Nordic poetry fan.
…Because of his pedigree, Buttigieg glided straight into the Navy Reserve’s direct-commission officers program, bypassing the more time-consuming training route of other branches.
…Buttigieg was sworn in as an ensign in September 2009. A few months later, he announced he would challenge Indiana’s Republican state treasurer, Richard Mourdock, in the 2010 election.
…Buttigieg made little of the fact that he was a Midwestern mayor, not even telling the roommate who shared his trailer. His liberal politics were also a mystery to his commander, a Mormon and staunch conservative.
…He [now] believed that the Afghan war was a necessary response to the 9/11 attacks but that it had gone on too long.
How Pete Buttigieg went from war protester to serving in Afghanistan – The Washington Post
hmmm
House impeachment deposition transcripts of Jennifer Williams and Tim Morrison released
Former NSC official Tim Morrison testified that he had heard from Sondland that US aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the country announcing an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
Morrison’s testimony, which was released by House impeachment investigators on Saturday, adds additional corroboration to the testimony of others, like US diplomat Bill Taylor.
…Williams also provided details on Pence’s September 1 meeting with Zelensky and highlighted how concerned the Ukrainian President was about US military aid being withheld, saying it was the first question he asked Pence when the press left their bilateral meeting in Warsaw, Poland. In his response, Pence said he wanted to hear about the progress of “reforms” in Ukraine so he could relay them to Trump.
hmmmm
A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem – Not A Technology Problem
Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own. Schools no longer teach source triangulation, conflict arbitration, separating fact from opinion, citation chaining, conducting research or even the basic concept of verification and validation. In short, we’ve stopped teaching society how to think about information, leaving our citizenry adrift in the digital wilderness increasingly saturated with falsehoods without so much as a compass or map to help them find their way to safety.
A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem – Not A Technology Problem
hmmmm
Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us
Horowitz finds a litany of false and even falsified representations used to continue the secret investigation targeting the Trump campaign and its associates.
…From the outset, the Justice Department failed to interview several key individuals or vet critical information and sources in the Steele dossier. Justice Department officials insisted to Horowitz that they did not interview campaign officials because they were unsure if the campaign was compromised and did not want to tip off the Russians. However, the report says the Russians were directly told about the allegations repeatedly by CIA Director John Brennan and, ultimately, then-President Obama. So the Russians were informed, but no one contacted the Trump campaign so as not to inform the Russians?
Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us | TheHill
hmmm
A revolution betrayed: The tragedy of Indonesia’s Jokowi
Jokowi has embraced hardline Islamists and members of the former dictatorial regime. And to make matters worse, he is sidelining political reform, including weakening anti-corruption agencies, in order to push through infrastructure development and please the country’s reactionary forces.
A revolution betrayed: The tragedy of Indonesia’s Jokowi | Asia | Al Jazeera
hmmm
Buttigieg’s New Foreign-Policy Tune
When Buttigieg talks about foreign policy, he sounds more like a Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant than like a midwestern mayor or a veteran—“challenges and opportunities,” “You’ve got diplomatic, economic, information, and cybertools in your toolkit in addition to the hard-security assets.”
Buttigieg’s New Foreign-Policy Tune – The Atlantic
hmmmm
Mainstream media sees a puzzling obstacle to Pete Buttigieg’s rise: The voters
“an old person’s idea of what a young person should be like.”
…Buttigieg, whose support among African Americans nationally was, as recently as August, roughly 0% (and who had quite possibly leaked a memo putting that down to black people’s homophobia), had been promoting his “Douglass Plan for Black America” in materials that deceptively implied the endorsement of hundreds of black South Carolinians. All three of the prominent leaders named at the top of one press release (Intercept, 11/15/19) said they were misrepresented.
…The alleged “Buttigieg boom” may now be crumbling under the candidate’s stubborn opacity around his funders and great swaths of his career, as well as the entry into the field of fellow centrist Michael Bloomberg.
…Media have a practice of outsizing the attractiveness and viability of centrist candidates, including shielding them from critical examination.
Mainstream media sees a puzzling obstacle to Pete Buttigieg’s rise: The voters | Salon.com
hmmm
Xed Out: Why Generation X Is Leaving Boston’s Workforce
“We didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about ourselves as a generation,” says Michael Borum (born in 1970), the digital strategist for an international nonprofit based in Boston. “We are too busy getting shit done.”
…We were the kids who were told we could do anything we set our minds to, but we were given no guidance on how. We had to figure it out ourselves. We have been hit with a major economic crisis during nearly every formative moment of our lives.
…Gen Xers launch more startups that have paid employees—the true economic engine of the United States—than any other generation.
…Still, most of us are rank-and-file employees. We’re trying hard to make the most of our peak earning years. According to an Experian study, we are burdened with more debt on average than either the boomers or millennials (not surprising, since we’re putting kids through college and still paying off our mortgages). We’re not sure that Social Security or Medicare will be around when we retire.
Most important, we haven’t made a big deal about any of this, and neither has anyone else. In a recent study by the Pew Research Organization, members of all three generations were asked if their generation was unique. Six in 10 boomers and millennials said yes. Less than half of the Gen X respondents said yes.
…We were too busy doing the work. Unfortunately, that means we haven’t made much of a stink about our feelings, or what we’re entitled to, or what we deserve because of how productive, innovative, and independent we are. We also didn’t make much of a stink about things we definitely should have, such as sexual harassment and gender, age, and racial discrimination.
…My editor cared not a single iota about my feelings, whether I was being triggered, whether I felt unsafe or uncomfortable or scared. Over time, thanks to being thrown into the deep end of that particular pool over and over again, I learned to swim. I built up the psychic armor I needed to do the job, in which I regularly got yelled at by my editor, sexually harassed by one of our ad staffers, and very drunk with my coworkers. I didn’t expect any special accommodations and neither did anyone else. That armor has been my most valuable asset in the workplace. My Generation X compadres come with this asset as well.
…“I think the Gen Xers need to realize that their future is based on how well they get along and interact between the massive boomer generation and the massive millennials on the other side,” he says. “They must realize they are a bridge between the two. That’s why Xers must become more social and engaged and interested in their teams.”
Here’s the problem: We really, really don’t want to do that. Gen Xers are lone wolves, used to relying on ourselves, problem-solving, making a path where none exists. We work hard until the job is done. For all these reasons, millennials are our antithesis. They infuriate us.
…There are approximately 10 trillion articles out there about “How to Manage Millennials,” but you already know the drill: Take a deep breath, abandon your expectations, praise liberally, criticize very gently, be patient, and give very, very specific instructions.
Xed Out: Why Generation X Is Leaving Boston’s Workforce
Dayum, sounds like somebody is having trouble at work.
Genealogists outraged by Trump administration plans to hike fees for immigration records
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials declined to explain exactly how they arrived at the new fee amounts. But the agency has said it must increase fees across the board — including substantial hikes for green card and citizenship applications — to avoid a $1.26 billion annual budget shortfall. By law, USCIS must fund itself through fees.
…Some of the files are scheduled to transfer to the National Archives, where they can be accessed free by the public in person, but the vast majority of the information contained in the files is not available outside of the USCIS program, he said.
Venezia said he is puzzled by the jump in fees, especially given that the program nearly tripled fees in 2016, explaining at the time that the new fees would fully cover the program’s costs, he said.
“What could possibly have changed in three years to warrant such a huge increase?” he asked.
hmmm
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 