Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2041 - THE WORLD IS ON FIRE IN TRUMP'S AMERICA - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE FOR 2009.19
I really hate that I am calling our nation "Trump's America" in the blog post title, but I am trying to make a point. Wait for it...
I work on these HODGE PODGE posts all week, often starting the next one while still finishing the current one just to shuffle off excess content or to set the next theme if I have ideas for more than one at a time,
And so, I had already decided to call this one what you see above, the world is on fire, and this is Trump's America, when on Friday late in the afternoon I learned that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away.
So devastating.
I will fill the section of My Twitter messages with more, but for now, just this:
This blog entry is about the state of the world right now, and the death of the greatest currently living (until today) Supreme Vourt Justice and one of the most heroic and amazing women of my life time only feeds my theme. The world is on fire. This is Trump's America.
On the face of things, my theme may seem unfair. The theme uses the current devastating tragedy of out of control, multiple, destructive wildfires out here in the west (California, Oregon, and Washington) as a symbol for all of the things in the world that have set fire to our nation: the pandemic, police brutality, police murder of innocent black men and women, use of our nation's military against peacefully protesting citizens, divisive antagonisms that fuel a current ideological civil war in which reasonable compromise is less and less possible, hate crimes, gender-based-hate crimes, racism, hate and fear f radical socialism, hateful spew of vitriol and lies from not just the president but a hate cartel of his toadies and cronies, weaponization of the government and its laws and policies against its own people, the lack of condemnation of truly dangerous and grotesque conspiracy theories by the president of the United States, mischaracterizing public health measures like wearing a mask as political issues, condemnation of public health policies as the work of dictatorships, science denial, climate change denial, rejection of implicit bias everywhere in everything, denial of systemic racism, sowing distrust of ethical journalism as #FakeNews, and need I go on or do you get the idea?
THE WORLD IS ON FIRE.
And the occupant in chief of the White House, our house, the people's house keeps forgetting that he is supposedly president of United States.
Not that he is MY president.
He is not.
I do not recognize his authority over me or anyone, and I will continue to fight against him and his insane agenda of lies and vicious invective and insult. Like this. Here's some truly crazy shit from yesterday.
Voting starts in Virginia TODAY, and we are going to WIN. You have a crazy Governor who wants to take away your guns, which he will do without me in office. He is in favor of executing babies after birth - this isn’t late-term abortion, this is a step way beyond! Vote for me...
...I’m playing for your guns, and I’m playing for your values. For all the Federal Employees in Virginia, remember, it was me that got you the Federal Pay Raises, not Sleepy Joe Biden. I’ll be having a Big Rally in Virginia, to be announced soon! https://t.co/WwzdPhDkAZ
At least yesterday's brand of crazy from Mr. "I'm-a-gonna skip presidential briefings with my cabinet and task forces because Fox News and OAN are all the briefing I need and they show lots of pictures" shows some sounding VERY DESPERATE and almost panicked in his tweety frenzy.
What the actual fuck is he talking about? EXECUTING BABIES after they are born? Look no further for proof that this person has lost his mind but is somehow still functional and not on 100 mg of Thorazine gour times a day with a drool cloth duct taped to his chin.
Oh yeah, back to what I was saying about how he forgets he's president right now and not Joe Biden.
What's amazing is that he keeps pointing to the civil unrest in the streets of some cities and claims that it's the America we will live in if Biden/Harris are elected. But that's happening now. It's nt a preview for a new Terminator movie.
He wants people to believe that the violent protests are much more widespread than they are and are the fault of democrat governors and mayors.
He has made other bizarre statements on why Biden has not imposed a national plan for the pandemic. Biden has a plan, but it's not implemented because HE IS NOT PRESIDENT.
It's like Trump is living in two worlds. The future world of what he claims America will be like without him, which is happenign now, much of it due to his failure as a leader or just a sensible human being with compassion for other people, and the current world in which he got his puppet masters in Russia to rig the 2016 election for him, and so Donald Trump believes himself to be president and many others have bought into this fallacy.
Trump could have taken swifter action reduce and stall climate change and maybe the current rash of wildfires could have been avoided or have been less severe.
Donald Trump could have said and done the right things to assuage socially conscious people who are fed up with systemic racism and the murder of innocent people of color that may have quelled or stopped protests entirely rather than fascist actions that have only stoked those fires of passion and commitment. Trump could have not chosen to tear gas and have protestors out front of OUR HOUSE, the White House, violently herded aside for his photo opportunity as a "law and order" president holding a Bible he has never read upside down in front of a church where he has never worshipped and whose clergy did not even know he was going to stage this spectacle to his own hubris.
Donald Trump could have prevented the death of thousands and thousands of people, at least 37,000 and maybe as many as 100,000 or more if he had modeled good public health policy, acted more swiftly with real travel restrictions, and mobilized the force of the federal government for PPE, plans, policies, and action to respond like a LEADER and not a petulant child whining that no one likes him and everyone is mean to him as he tries to rig the presidential election in his favor.
And these are just a few of the fires in his years as the occupant of the White House.
There's more. There's the situation with immigrants. The Wall. Health care. Taxes. Securing greater benefits for the wealthiest. Endorsement of white supremacy, lauding of "confederates" as heroes, and denigration of the military as "losers and suckers."
And he has whipped a sector of the nation's less intelligent people (I know I am on thin ice with that claim but watch for MONDAY's post in which I try to defend it) into a frenzy of bloodlust, anger, rage, resentment, and bile that reminds me of the throwing of "infidels" to the lions during the Roman Empire, purportedly (there's some doubts) to have taken place, though possibly not in the Colosseum: Damnatio ad bestias.
When I see a bumper sticker that reads: "Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again," then I know it's not issues and ideological disagreement fueling the choice of a presidential candidate, it's something more base and sinister, which is why referring the Trumpists as his "base" seems to be the right language.
It's all sickening and grotesque and wholly UNAMERICAN, not democratic, and so hateful the exalted founding fathers of alleged "god-like" status would not stop vomiting if they were alive to witness it.
And yet when the world is on fire and all seems hopeless as the agent of death has all the power (or so it seems) and hope is fleeting because the God of Thunder has lost his great hammer Mjolnir and Thanos looms, closing in for the kill, will there be a savior, will Captain America arrive just in time, able to wield the hammer, and strike down the doombringer?
Captain America Lifts Thor's Hammer Mjolnir Scene - AVENGERS 4 ENDGAME (2019)
Movie CLIP 4K
fuck yeah.
There's some good variety in this one. There's some local flavor (Spokane), some thing with Chris Evans for which the fan support was adorable, which almost makes up for the all the hateful and outrageous shit elsewhere in this blog post.
By tomorrow, Johns Hopkins official numbers of U.S. dead by Covid-19 will be over 200,000. Yeah, just as bad as the flu. By some accounts, the death toll s already over 200K as President Tweets A Lot wants to rewrite American history the MAGA way, hide CDC data, and appoint a new Supreme Court Justice at warp speed to help him rig the election since he already told voters to commit federal voting fraud crimes and no one charged him aiding and abetting.
Whatever.
The Kroger employees who don't know a fucking rainbow from a heart with a colored outline need the literacy test for functioning in our society administered.
Why can't we just weed out all the stupidest among us? Oh wait... that's his entire BASE as we wll see...
So, as one of my new favorite voices of America says, LET'S GET AFTER IT.
This edition has a lot, and I am sticking with the categories. Here we go.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Massive clouds of smoke from the Pacific Northwest wildfires lingered over the region Sunday, posing serious health risks for millions of people and complicating firefighting efforts even as crews reported progress in slowing some of the blazes.
The air quality across Oregon was listed as “hazardous” or “very unhealthy” by state environmental officials, and a dense smoke advisory from the National Weather Service remained in effect for much of the state until late Sunday or at least noon local time on Monday. Oregon officials said Sunday evening that crews are struggling to contain more than 30 fires still raging across the state — one of them stretching more than 55 miles wide, part of a burned area larger than Rhode Island.
No, ANTIFA did not start these wildfires.... Here's a fuckton of Facebook posts accusing Antifa of starting wildfires despite Facebook promising to ax them. But Media Matters, I feel like you're forgetting the Truth Sandwich. Don't just throw up a bunch of false shit, I started wondering if Antifa was starting wildfires. (MediaMatters)
THIS IS WHY I DON'T LIVE IN SPOKANE
What is wrong with people? I have friends who haven't worked in six months. SIX. Count up whatever numbers go to six. I can't see a parent right now. It's face underwear. Put on your face underwear. https://t.co/AWHxDlMBga
The fact that someone has to explain that it is not okay to violate someone's privacy like that is astounding, let alone the fact Chris Evans suffers from crippling anxiety. Everyone making jokes at Chris Evans' expense or sharing/saving the picture needs to grow up.
Take these: pic.twitter.com/cZ9Ir254yH
ELECTION 2020 THIS NEXT BIT MAY BE THE MOST VILE THING IN THE ENTIRE ENTRY -
A whistleblower claims there “mass hysterectomies” at an ICE detention center. They also refused to test detainees for COVID-19. (Law and Crime)
Trump impeachment witness Alexander Vindman describes the President Patsy as Vladimir Putin’s "useful idiot.” (The Atlantic)
I moved on her very heavily. Part three of E. Jean Carroll's series interviewing her fellow Trump molestees, and oh, the fun and laughter the crones have because what are they going to do, not that??? — The Atlantic
If major publications have to detail what happens if the sitting president refuses to accept his election loss, it's possible that we're already soaking in a constitutional crisis. (Financial Times)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/twitter-flags-trump-tweet-encourages-vote-twice.html Twitter once again flagged a tweet from President Donald Trump, this time for a message that sure made it seem like the commander in chief was encouraging some people to vote twice. The social media platform placed a warning label on one of the tweets Trump sent Saturday. Twitter placed a “public interest notice” on the message and limited its circulation for violating its policies, “specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice.” In his message, Trump called on North Carolinians to potentially vote twice by saying they could send in their mail-in ballot and the go to their polling station to see if it was counted and if they saw it wasn’t they could cast another ballot. “Don’t let them illegally take your vote away from you!” Trump wrote.
The tweet itself wasn’t as blatant as previous comments by Trump in which he outright called on supporters to vote twice in order to test the system. But even under the conditions outlined by Trump in the tweet voting twice is illegal. One person who made that clear was North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who responded on Twitter with a message to voters: “Do NOT do what the president directs.” Stein went on to write a thread detailing all the different ways voters in North Carolina could cast their ballot. Stein noted that the “only GOOD thing” about Trump’s tweet is that he “FINALLY encourages voters to VOTE BY MAIL.”
President Donald Trump spent the weekend campaigning in Nevada, where he told a crowd on Saturday that he will “negotiate” over a third term to which he feels “entitled.” With less than two months until Election Day, the president also reportedly, once again, disregarded measures that could stop the spread of the coronavirus and, at another point, inspired a “Lock him up!” chant about former president Barack Obama.
"And 52 days from now, we're going to win Nevada, and we're going to win four more years in the White House," Trump said Saturday. "And then after that, we'll negotiate, right? Because we're probably, based on the way we were treated, we’re probably entitled to another four after that."
Trump’s professed entitlement aside, it’s unclear how a businessman with a career like his would “negotiate” his way around the U.S. Constitution, though his relationship with the document has been characterized by what critics have
Questions about Trump’s understanding of the nation’s founding document date back to the 2016 campaign trail. But critics have also raised alarms over his willingness to ignore the Constitution.
Trump’s capacity for disregard was on display Sunday in Henderson, Nevada, where CNN reported his indoor rally ignored the state’s ban on gatherings of more than 50 people. According to CNN, thousands attended what was the first indoor Trump rally in nearly three months. The most recent indoor event prior to this was a June 20 rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where state officials saw record-high numbers of COVID-19 cases three weeks later.
At the same Sunday rally, Trump again claimed that Obama was “caught spying on his campaign,” an allegation some say is an oversimplification of an FBI investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russian operatives. In Nevada, Trump was again decrying his unfair treatment when he invoked the “Obama spying” theory, prompting the aforementioned “Lock him up!” chants from the crowd.
“He got caught. We caught him cold, we have him cold. Now, let’s see what happens,” Trump said before the crowd began to chant. It’s unclear what evidence Trump has, but, according to PolitiFact, neither congressional nor Justice Department investigations into the FBI’s conduct found any Obama or White House influence over those operations.
Trump’s push in Nevada comes as it is apparently one of several states that could be key to the 2020 presidential election. Hillary Clinton won the state by about 27,000 votes in 2016, but a former Bernie Sanders campaign advisor warned in an interview with Vox, published last week, that unemployment in the state could be a factor.
“It worries me that the donor class and the consultant class think that Nevada is a safe blue state, but what they don’t realize… is that the entire Culinary Union is laid off,” Chuck Rocha, who spearheaded Sanders’s successful bid with the Latinx vote in Nevada, told Vox, explaining that the union normally has members canvassing to get out the Latinx community’s vote. “The entire [Las Vegas] strip is shut down, for the most part. So there’s astronomical unemployment there.”
They
voted for him and now regret it. Why White women are turning away from Trump.
She’s part of a group of White women, especially those who are middle- or working-class, who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in the last election but are determined to vote for Biden this year.
Those women, who have been targeted by both campaigns, loom large in a presidential race that could, like 2016’s, be decided by shifts among a few sets of voters in the highly polarized nation.
Although Clinton won the majority of votes from women in 2016, she lost to Trump among White women. Since then, however, polls have shown Trump weakening among those voters.
Even slight changes in November among White women could play a deciding role in several states that Trump won in 2016 by a razor-thin margin, especially Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Biden’s pitch has been a simple one: He’s not Trump. Biden has promised to replace the chaotic tone of Trump’s White House with calm and bring the nation out of its multiple crises. Much of the Democratic convention focused on Biden’s life story, especially the challenges he has overcome, and numerous speakers attested to his humanity — characteristics that typically matter more to women voters than men. Biden also selected a woman as his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.).
The Trump campaign has tried to win these White women back by emphasizing the president’s focus on “law and order,” opposition to abortion rights and the strength of the economy before the coronavirus pandemic. Trump made this appeal himself with his tweets: “Suburban Housewives of America . . . Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”
For the past several weeks, a neon pink “Women for Trump” bus has traveled through suburbs in the swing states, starting in Pennsylvania, stopping to allow female surrogates to reassure the women they meet about the president’s intentions.
The Trump campaign isn’t subtle. In an ad over the summer titled “Break In,” an older white woman is watching news coverage about activist demands to “defund the police” when she spots a burglar scouting her home’s perimeter and begins to dial 911. As the burglar attempts to force his way in, we hear Sean Hannity’s voice coming from the television, talking about how Joe Biden is “absolutely on board with defunding the police.” Before the woman can alert the authorities, the intruder crowbars his way into the home. He approaches her, and, following an implied assault, the phone falls to the ground.
“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” the screen reads.
The ad is a lurid rehash of Trump’s 2016 campaign strategy: using fear of American carnage to mobilize elderly white voters. The political problem that the Trump campaign now faces, though, is that those voters—older, white women, specifically—don’t feel safe in Donald Trump’s America.
In 2016, older voters were one of Trump’s best demographics. According to exit polls, while Hillary Clinton won voters 45 and under by 14 percentage points, Trump won voters 45 and older—the larger age cohort—by 8 points. A separate Pew Research Center study of the electorate found that voters 65 and older were Trump’s strongest overall age demographic last time around. He won them by 9 points.
But while the country has spent four years bracing itself for a replay of November 2016, with eyes fixed on the same Pennsylvania-to-Wisconsin battlegrounds as before, the age-demographic landscape of the presidential contest has been quietly and dramatically rearranged. Although polling in recent months has shown Trump maintaining his advantage among the 50-to-64-year-old cohort, support among those over 65 has moved sharply toward Biden. In a national survey from Monmouth University released on Aug. 11, for example, which gave Biden a 10-point lead overall, Biden was leading registered voters over 65 by 17 points. That would represent a shift of 26 points among the oldest measured demographic from 2016. A Quinnipiac national poll from mid-July, meanwhile, showed Biden’s lead among the 65-plus at 14 points.
Surveys since the two conventions, and the Trump campaign’s blitz to hang urban riots and violence around Democrats’ necks, largely show Biden’s strength among seniors remaining steadfast. A CNN national poll released in early September saw Biden leading among the 65-plus set by 17 points, while a Quinnipiac national poll saw him leading by 4. In some recent state polls where Biden’s margins are tightening, meanwhile, seniors are no longer a bonus demographic contributing to a prospective Biden landslide—they’re the ones responsible for Biden holding onto his lead. An early September Quinnipiac poll of Florida, in which Biden led overall by 3 points, saw him leading among the 65-plus by 10; a Monmouth poll of Pennsylvania, in which Biden led overall by 4, showed him with an 11-point edge among seniors. The Biden campaign spent heavily in swing states over the summer trying to preserve this advantage.
Is this the battle we expected? After the 2016 election, Democrats felt their restoration hinged on rebuilding the Obama coalition, by drastically improving turnout among young people and minorities and mitigating their damage among the white working class. Those improvements are still important. But Biden is creating his own coalition, and some of the most dramatic movement that’s taking place, and some of the aggressively contested terrain down the stretch, is among older white voters in both the Sun Belt and the Midwest. Now, the Biden campaign has the opportunity to do something that Democrats haven’t done since the 2000 campaign: win seniors. If Biden succeeds, it will be a catastrophic blow to the Trump campaign.
“Seniors were a strength group for Trump in 2016. They were a strength group in 2018. Given the challenges we have with other voter groups, we’ve got to work to bring them back into the fold,” Glen Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies, a top Republican pollster and strategist, told me in July. I asked him how optimistic he was about the ability of the Republican incumbent—who, at the time, was embarking on one of his ephemeral pivots to a “new tone”—to do this.
Joe Biden hugs Bill Alexander during the Democratic Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 21, 2019.Joshua Lott/Getty Images
Remember when we thought the onslaught of Tea Party dentists running for office was bad? Oh, how young and innocent we all were then. This year, we've got multiple people running for office who make the tricorn-hat wearing hat dipshits who thought Obama was a secret muslin look like, well, tricorn-hat wearing hat dipshits who thought Obama was a secret muslin but who at least didn't believe that Donald Trump was waging a secret war against Satanic pedophiles who drink the blood of children to get high.
One of them is Marjorie Taylor Greene, a woman who, by all rights, should be standing on a street corner screaming about socialism or aliens or how the end is nigh, and pretty much the only thing that might have kept her out of Congress, Democratic challenger Kevin Van Ausdal has dropped out for "personal and family reasons." He has done this too late for Democrats to replace him. Van Ausdal posted a non-explanation to Twitter last night, which said "The next steps in my life are taking me away from Georgia," noting that he wanted to give the party a chance to replace him, which they legally cannot do in Georgia 60 days prior to an election.
He wrote:
I want you all to hear this from me directly — I am heartbroken to announce that for family and personal reasons, I cannot continue this race for Congress. After lengthy discussions with my team, attorney, party officials and others, the answer was clear, stepping aside would be best for the voters. The next steps in my life are taking me away from Georgia, so I will be disqualified from serving in Congress and will give the party a chance to put forward a candidate that can carry this fight to the end.
When I started this, it was because I wanted to talk about what is happening to real people every day and how none of the anger and divisiveness was making anything better. This rhetoric has turned into dangerous extremism, like the candidacy of Marjorie Greene. I will put every resource, every bit of knowledge into the campaign that comes behind me to defeat Majorie and restore hope to the people of Northwest Georgia. Thank you.
Again, the party cannot nominate someone to replace him, because it is less than 60 days away from the election. It is currently 52 days away from the election. Had he done this a week and one day earlier, they would have been able to do that.
The statement from his campaign manager, also published to Twitter, oddly noted that Van Ausdal was "safe" — though possibly this could have been due to rumors that he was dropping out due to threats from QAnon people.
He said:
"I want to be clear about this: the campaign is still here and working to do all that needs to happen moving forward. Our finances are intact and Kevin is safe. We remain dedicated to supporting Democrats in finding a replacement for November, as Kevin addressed in this statement earlier today. We are in communication with the Democratic Party of Georgia, which is currently reaching out and working with the Georgia Secretary of State's office to name a new nominee and move forward."
Again, the deadline to put someone else on the ballot was 8 days ago.
Now, you are perhaps thinking to yourself "Well he had better be a serial killer about to get caught, on the run from the mob, dealing with a hostage situation or something like that, if he's going to drop out this late in the game." He is not. In fact, according to a campaign aide who spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
His campaign aide later told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Van Ausdal quit his bid after his wife served him divorce papers and he was poised to move in with relatives in Indiana.
"We told him there's no wiggle room here," said Michael McGraw, the candidate's principal consultant, who added that Van Ausdal didn't face any threats or coercion to leave the race. "We are deeply saddened because the campaign was taking off in a lot of ways."
Look, I get it. It probably seemed like a bad idea to sign a lease not knowing if he was going to actually get the job in Congress. But dude — sleep on a couch for a month, Kevin.
I mean, I'm not saying that it would be great for Kevin Van Ausdal to join Congress. If he's dropping out of a Congressional race to go live with his parents because he got served with divorce papers, he seems a little bombaleed himself. Clearly, it would have been a good idea for at least one other person to run in that primary, perhaps someone who was more heavily vetted, but either Van Ausdal or a German Shepard would have been better than Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green.
Sure, it's a heavily Republican district, but given that the Republican candidate is a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who casually threatens to murder other members of Congress, Democrats might have had a shot. Now they got nothing.
[Associated Press]
The west coast is on fire, and the outside of my Portland, Oregon, house is like the inside of a New York bar prior to Micxhael Bloomberg's smoking ban. Fortunately, Donald Trump had time to sit down with Fox News's Jeanine Pirro for another unhinged interview where he insisted he's the only one who can save the nation from his own presidency.
Judge Jeanine, without any self-awareness, claimed Trump ran in 2016 as the “law and order" candidate. Here in reality, Trump's campaign was more or less a criminal enterprise, one that produced more felons than the Legion of Doom. Even if Donny "Tiny Hands" wasn't a glorified mob boss, he actually sucked at maintaining “law and order."
PIRRO: It's almost prescient to think that four years later [law and order] is one of the main issues.
Uh, it's not “prescient" to identify a problem and fail to fix it, which Trump boasted he alone could do. That's a broken campaign promise, not fortune telling. Unfortunately for George H.W. Bush, he didn't have Fox News in 1992: “You ran as the 'no new taxes' candidate, which is almost prescient when you consider that four years later we have all these new taxes."
PIRRO: So, we've got this anarchy going on in the streets.
There is no “anarchy." There are in fact wildfires that have killed more people and destroyed more property than any riot. Children have died, but Trump doesn't care because he can't blame their deaths on immigrants or protesters.
Last week, we learned Trump admitted to Bob Woodward in February that he was lying to the public about the coronavirus. He's since tried to compare himself to Winston Churchill during World War II: He was just presenting a stiff upper lip, cheerio, and all that bleach, because you don't want the president creating a panic. It's an absurd excuse when all he does is spread nightmare campfire tales about Black Lives Matter mobs invading the suburbs.
Trump claimed — without evidence, naturally — that “super liberal people" are paying these “anarchists and agitators." To do what, you might ask? Trump shared some vague details of their diabolical scheme.
TRUMP: Did you see what happened over the weekend with the people walking up to a restaurant and grabbing the steak off the plate? And biting the steak and then dropping it. Two elderly people having dinner at a restaurant, and they walk in and they take a steak and they take the potato and eat it.
This sounds like a version of Elaine and Jerry's bet in the Chinese restaurant episode of “Seinfeld." If this did happen, it's unclear why George Soros would need to pay people to be hungry and desperate. Millions of Americans are method-acting the hell out of that part. The unemployment rate in New York City, for instance, is around 20 percent. It was “just" 12 percent in the Taxi Driver era. Trump is a monster, so all he can see is undesirables hassling people fortunate enough to have financially weathered this economic collapse. The unemployment rate could be 80 percent and conservatives would still insist they have a constitutional right to never see poor people.
Pirro joked with Trump about Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler's lousy approval numbers, because they apparently think Wheeler is running against Rudy Giuliani in November instead of progressive Sarah Iannarone. Trump insists that if Wheeler opened the door to his goon squad, Trump could fix everything with morale-improving beatings. He said Oregon Governor Kate Brown is better than Wheeler, which is objectively true, but not for the reasons Trump thinks. This was the point in the interview where Trump bragged about the extrajudicial killing of a murder suspect.
TRUMP: We sent in the US Marshals for the killer ... the man that killed the young man in the street ... just shot him.
Army veteran Michael Forest Reinoehl was a suspect in the shooting of right-wing extremist Aaron "Jay" Danielson at a Portland protest. He claimed in a Vice interview that he acted in self-defense, just like Kyle Rittenhouse, who is still alive and will have what we here in these United States call a “trial" with lawyers inside a courtroom. The president doesn't bother with “alleged" or “suspect." He just tries and convicts the guy because he shot one of his supporters.
TRUMP: [He] cold-blooded killed him. He didn't like his hat.
We don't approve of any form of gun violence, but before he died, Reinoehl gave his reasons and they had nothing to do with Danielson's haberdashery.
"You know, lots of lawyers suggest that I shouldn't even be saying anything, but I feel it's important that the world at least gets a little bit of what's really going on," Reinoehl said. "I had no choice. I mean, I, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn't going to do that."
Reinoehl was shot and killed outside his own home as the marshals tried to arrest him. That is not the preferred outcome. Due process is a still a thing here. Or maybe it isn't. Trump is president, after all.
TRUMP: Two and a half days went by. I put out: “When are you going to go get him?" And the US marshals went in to go get him. And in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight.
This wasn't the OK Corral. The marshals allege that Reinoehl "produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers." In cop-speak, that probably meant he was holding a gun or reaching for a gun or maybe waving his hand in a gun-like manner. If he had fired the gun, they'd have said so.
TRUMP: This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I'll tell you something -- that's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.
Trump might as well say that anyone who opposes him will “sleep with the fishes." He's an autocratic thug with no respect for democracy.
There are 50 days remaining until we can vote his ass out of office. Let's make them count. Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.
During the Obama administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) did nice things like fight in court for the notion that yes, Title IX prohibits gender discrimination, therefore it prohibits discrimination against transgender people, hello, "gender" is right there in the word, you dipwads.
They fought for the notion that discrimination against LGBT people was, again, gender discrimination. The Supreme Court (with NEIL GORSUCH!) ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination, but in so many ways, the Trump adminstration has stomped on the rights of LGBTQ people across America, often in the name of RELIGIOUS FREEEEEEEEDOM!
Well, they're at it again. And this time, they're doing it dumber than ever.
Trump's EEOC has sued Kroger, you know, the place what sells the strawberries and the Ding Dongs, for violating the RELIGIOUS FREEEEEEDOM of two old dumbass women who worked there in Conway, Arkansas. The case was filed in the Eastern District of Arkansas. You see:
Kroger, one of the country's largest supermarket chains, is being sued in federal court after two former employees claimed they were wrongfully terminated for refusing to wear an apron with a rainbow symbol.
The ex-employees, who identify as Christian, cited religious objections in their refusal to wear what they believed was an "endorsement of the LGBTQ community," according to the lawsuit.
You ready for the punchline?
No, you wait.
OK, so Brenda Lawson and Trudy Rickerd, who were 72 and 57 respectively when Kroger fired them, are the plaintiffs here. And they worked at the Kroger, slinging strawberries and Ding Dongs. And they were fired because they were supposed to wear these doohickeys on their aprons, and they would not wear them because they were pretty sure Jesus would roast them on a spit in hell for all eternity if they did, as a symbol of His true and abiding love.
It was a gay symbol, or so they said. Was it two men doing buttfucks on Fire Island while watching "Golden Girls"? No, that's what they wear at Publix. (LIES, WONKETTE LIES.)
It was a rainbow, they said.
You ready for the punchline?
No, you wait.
They wanted to just cover up the gay symbol, we guess to hide it from Christ, who we never took for being so easily fooled. Kroger said NO, YOU PUT THE BIG DILDO ON YOUR APRON AND GO KROGER-ING! Except it wasn't a dildo, it was a rainbow, they said.
The lawsuit states that both women "believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible" and "hold a sincerely held religious belief that homosexuality is a sin." Lawson and Rickerd both, it continued, each "believed wearing the logo showed her advocacy of the [LGBTQ] community, which she could not do."
You're gonna wanna remember the thing about the "literal interpretation of the Bible" when we tell you the punchline in a minute.
NBC News asked Kroger if it was forcing these ladies to wear the official symbol of gay upon their bosoms, and Kroger would not comment, on account of the ongoing lawsuit, in which the women are asking for all kinds of GoFundMe-style bullshit from Kroger, owing to their "emotional pain and suffering, humiliation, inconvenience, and loss of enjoyment of life."
Well, if they're not feeling "humiliation" yet, they should be, and so should the Trump EEOC. Internet sleuths did some sleuthing to see what kinda ghastly "RuPaul's Drag Race" aprons they're makin' the Arkansas ladies wear upon their bosoms at the Kroger in Conway, and they discovered ... this:
Look, here it is on some Kroger employees!
Kroger via PR Newswire
That, children, is not a rainbow, neither the kind what God made after He had a holy tantrum and killed everything on earth with a flood, nor the kind He makes in the sky whenever two men or two women who love each other very much decide to bang the spitfire out of each other.
That is a heart with three outer layers, in the primary colors of yellow, blue, and red.
For any Arkansas readers (and we are from there, so fuck off), let's review:
A rainbow is the thing with seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, which you can remember with the helpful acronym ROY G. BIV.
The longest-running gay rainbow symbol was only six colors, because fuck indigo. (The original had hot pink in it, according to Wikipedia, which is a free website available to the plaintiffs in this lawsuit and the Trump EEOC.) There are other versions of the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag, newer, more inclusive versions, what have black and brown and light blue and pink, recognizing the racial diversity of the community, and also transgender people.
There is no version of the gay rainbow symbol or flag what is red, yellow and blue and shaped like a heart.
As it turns out — AS IT TURNS OUT! — that symbol is for what appears to be some kind of corporate bullshit Kroger campaign about "purpose and promise," regarding how employees serve their customers or something. We found this out from Google, which is also a free website available to the plaintiffs and to the Trump EEOC:
At Kroger, Our Purpose is to Feed the Human Spirit™. We do that through Our Promise to be friendly and caring, provide everything fresh, to uplift every way, and improve every day.
Look, pictures!
But sure, y'all. Keep fightin' your fight for "religious freedom."
You don't look like hateful dumbfucks or anything. Surely not. Nope!
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THE PANDEMIC
Trump officials interfered with CDC coronavirus reports. I thought we knew this? Did we not know this? Guess I better read the tab. (Politico)
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT - JOHNS HOPKINS
Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statisticsfor a wide audience of caring people around the world.
Over the past 15 years, our statistics have been requested by, and provided to Oxford University Press, Wiley, Pearson, CERN, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Atlantic, BBC, Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology, Science Museum of Virginia, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Kaspersky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon Alexa, Google Translate, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the U2 concert, and many others.
This local news report on an insane anti-mask protest in St. George, Utah, from August 21 has gone so viral in the past 24 hours that it is featured on literally all sections of the internet right now. If you somehow have not seen it, please watch it and weep for your country.
It is not an "SNL" sketch. The local news reporter, Katie Karalis, interviews people at the protest and pushes back NOT AT ALL against the batshit claims made by these people, who vote. (Good job, local news reporter! You are WINNER.)
There's the child who incorrectly says the flu kills more people than the coronavirus. That kid's parents vote. There is the woman who — really — said, "When George Floyd was saying 'I can't breathe,' and then he died. And now we're wearing a mask, and we say 'I can't breathe,' but we're being forced to wear it anyway!" (SPOILER, that lady does not appear to have died of "mask." She votes, though, we bet.)
There's the old woman who says:
"I'll tell ya another reason I hate masks -- most child molesters love 'em!"
That is this QAnon crap, and it is bugfuck. That old lady has been convinced that "most" child molesters just love masks, and no we don't know why these people think imaginary "child molesters" just loooove masks, but she probably votes.
The local journalist doesn't push back on claims that coronavirus is a "hoax" or that "asymptomatic carriers simply do not exist."
People on the internet really want to believe this video is some sort of hoax. It does feel like an "SNL" sketch, it is such a parody of itself.
It's real, y'all. A significant portion of the American population has gone utterly bugfuck. And they follow literally the stupidest man alive on the entire planet, who happens to be the sitting president of the United States. He feeds off their bugfuck, and they feed off his bugfuck.
Hey, here he is yesterday in California, where it is literally on fire, telling a real scientist that ACTUALLY global warming is fake, and that it's going to start getting cooler any minute now:
And you know why else we don't like SPLODEY TREES? Because child molesters just LOVE 'em!
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
We are 49 days from the election. Seven weeks. All the news is like this right now. For evidence of that, stay tuned to your local Wonkette today!
And catch up on Trump idiot Michael Caputo, the science-free moron most famous for showing up just about everywhere in the Trump-Russia scandal, who now works at the Department of Health and Human Services to feverishly bury actual science on the pandemic from the CDC.
In case you didn't hear, he's yelping on Facebook that the CDC and the armed liberals are going to murder him, and he's seeing very long shadows on his ceiling, and they are scare him.
Again, 49 days. If we don't beat the absolute crap out of these people WITH VOTES, MICHAEL CAPUTO, STOP PISSING YOUR PANTS, on November 3, we ain't gonna have a country anymore.
REFUTATION South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette tested positive for COVID-19 days after attending the Cook Out Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. The NASCAR event had about 8,000 spectators including Evette, her husband, and Governor Henry McMaster and his wife. The state has had a confirmed 6,912 coronavirus cases and 177 deaths in the past week. (The Greenville News) https://www.wonkette.com/tabs-wed-sept-16-2020
No, it's not manslaughter. It's worse.
It's impossible to know exactly how many lives would have been saved if Trump had been a president of below-average competence who simply followed the lead of his administration's own disease control experts. David Leonhardt's estimate of 145,000, which is the number of Americans who would be alive if our share of global virus deaths was the same as our share of the world population, seems reasonable. But we don't have a sub-replacement-level president of below-average competence. We have a sociopathic narcissist who knew exactly how dangerous the virus is, but who was dead-set from the very beginning on lying to the public and actively opposing and undermining his own government's capacity for effective pandemic response. And all because he thought it would make him look bad, hurt the economy, and hurt his re-election chances.
Suppose Trump in January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers, had ensured that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests available before the United States) and had built up a robust system of contact tracing (Congo has better contact tracing than the United States).
Last month’s controversial testing guidelines that suddenly deviated from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s previous stance to encourage Americans to get tested for the coronavirus were not formulated by the agency’s scientists and were posted on the CDC’s website without undergoing the normal scientific review process, the New York Times reports. Instead, the guidelines—which were revised to recommend that individuals exposed to the virus but not exhibiting symptoms should not get tested—were composed by the Department of Health and Human Services and posted to the health agency’s site over the objections of CDC scientists.
“The document contains ‘elementary errors’—such as referring to ‘testing for Covid-19,’ as opposed to testing for the virus that causes it—and recommendations inconsistent with the C.D.C.’s stance that mark it to anyone in the know as not having been written by agency scientists, according to a senior C.D.C. scientist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of repercussions,” according to the Times. “The information comes mere days after revelations that political appointees at H.H.S. meddled with the C.D.C.’s vaunted weekly reports on scientific research.”
The general suspicion is that the Trump administration is trying to suppress the number of positive cases by discouraging testing of asymptomatic cases, even though they are widely considered a significant driver of the virus’s spread. How do we know that the Trump administration might just want to keep that number down via reduced testing? Because the leader of the Trump administration, President Donald Trump himself, has suggested so over and over and over again.
Fewer tests, fewer cases of the coronavirus! 1+1=Apple. Absolutely genius. It’s, of course, not an actual solution, but the appearance of one, which is all Trump has ever been after—at least until Nov. 3, after which, one way or another, he won’t even have to feign interest. That’s why there are more and more accounts emerging of political fiddling with the scientific process of assessing the U.S. pandemic response. The decision of what to do with the scientific information, and how to implement it, is surely a political decision, but the actual science upon which decisions are being made shouldn’t be. The CDC is set to issue new, revised guidelines shortly, which the Times reports have been written by a scientist at the CDC, but are currently being edited by HHS and the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Here is the full Redfield quote, so you can see how "confused" he was about the efficacy of masks:
"I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%. And if I don't get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will," Redfield told lawmakers during public testimony, adding that the American public has not yet embraced the use of masks to a level that could effectively control the outbreak.
Trump says Redfield would also tell you he "didn't understand the question," because of how he is such an idiot, we guess.
The truth is that Trump is just really fucking mad that the CDC director is pissing all over the Hail Mary he wants to throw to save his re-election, which is magically delivering a beautiful vaccine a couple days before November 3.
WHO
reports highest one-day increase in global coronavirus cases since pandemic
began
The World Health Organization on Sunday reported the highest one-day increase in coronavirus infections since the pandemic began: more than 308,000 new cases. India, the United States and Brazil logged the largest numbers of new infections on Sunday.
The WHO also warned that Europe will see a surge in coronavirus-linked deaths in the fall as new infections have been soaring over the past weeks to levels not seen since the spring.
Here are some significant developments:
At least 190,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States. More than 6,488,000 cases have been detected since February.
A top communications official for the administration’s coronavirus response urged President Trump’s supporters to prepare for an armed insurrection after a contested election and accused government scientists of “sedition” in a Facebook Live chat.
Orders by Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Wolf to limit gatherings and close non-essential businesses to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus were unconstitutional, a federal judge said on Monday.
States that have reopened bars experienced a doubling in the rate of coronavirus cases three weeks after the opening of doors, on average, a Post analysis found.
Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have sought to change, delay and prevent the release of reports about the coronavirus by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because they were viewed as undermining President Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.
Turns out, it’s not just non-Trumpy Americans that are disappointed in how their country has responded to the coronavirus—the rest of the world is even more appalled. A new, 13-nation survey by the Pew Research Center out this week found that belief in the U.S. and its leadership—which nosedived after the election of Donald Trump—has essentially fallen off a cliff as Trump has overseen America’s cataclysmic response to the pandemic. Pew found that traditional American allies now held a lower opinion of the U.S. than at any point over the past two decades.
Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain? These aren’t exactly modern day hotbeds of anti-American sentiment. Trump and his nihilist politics of selfishness have, of course, played a significant role in that erosion of support, but, even more practically, the rest of the world simply has a more accurate understanding of the disastrous U.S. coronavirus response in absolute and comparative terms. A median of a measly 15 percent of respondents in the countries surveyed said the U.S. had done a “good job” in dealing with the outbreak.
Nearly 1,300 people died yesterday in the U.S. from Covid. That’s almost as many that have died, in total, in Germany since the outbreak began. There were also 40,000—and perhaps even 50,000—new cases yesterday in the U.S. The number of U.S. cases is trending down at the moment, which might feel like a relief, but it’s only a relief relatively speaking; it’s certainly not success. That’s a distinction that is apparently pretty clear if you’re not in the Fox News bubble.
The pandemic has, in essence, proved what the rest of the world suspected all along of Trump—that he can’t be trusted to “do the right thing,” even notionally. The elevated plateau of public trust in the era from 2008 until, oh, say, Nov. 8, 2016, we’ll call the Obama plateau.
As a point of reference, it’s not just that the rest of the world doesn’t trust Trump in absolute terms, they trust him less to do the right thing than freaking Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The Associated Press:In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations. President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.
Six days. That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus. But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time -- the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.
Praising his own virus response as deaths near 200,000, Trump says, "if you take the blue states out, we're at a level I don't think anybody in the world would be at." pic.twitter.com/ezAU5IJIcQ
Here’s an insight into how the Trump administration views citizens protesting: Federal officials, according to a whistleblower, sought a “heat ray” weapon that had been considered ethically dubious even in a wartime setting to use against anti-police brutality protesters outside the White House this summer. National Guard Maj. Adam DeMarco told lawmakers that the Department of Defense’s top military police officer sent an email June 1 asking the D.C. National Guard whether it had a weapon called an Active Denial System or ADS. The ADS, which was designed by the military two decades ago, is a weapon that operates much likes a microwave, and makes its targets feel as if their skin is burning. DeMarco was included on the email as the ranking D.C. National Guard officer that day. The ADS was part of a larger buildup of weapons, lethal and nonlethal, that could be deployed against protesters. “The ADS can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin,” the military police officer said in the email. “The effect is overwhelming, causing an immediate repel response by the targeted individual.” The weapon had previously been considered unsuitable even for wartime deployment, but the officer said it “can provide our troops a capacity they currently do not have, the ability to reach out and engage potential adversaries at distances well beyond small arms range, and in a safe, effective, and nonlethal manner.” “The technology, also called a ‘heat ray,’ was developed to disperse large crowds in the early 2000s but was shelved amid concerns about its effectiveness, safety and the ethics of using it on human beings,” the Washington Post reports. “Pentagon officials were reluctant to use the device in Iraq. In late 2018, the New York Times reported, the Trump administration had weighed using the device on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border—an idea shot down by Kirstjen Nielsen, then the Homeland Security secretary, citing humanitarian concerns.”
and let us remember that not all of those killed make the national news as widely or as well proliferated as the George Floyds, Jacob Blakes, and Breonna Taylors.
That's not because the news media does not care.
It's because the murders are too many and it's difficult for the news reporters to report them all equally.
To bring a sedition case, prosecutors would have to prove there was a conspiracy to attack government agents or officials that posed an imminent danger
Attorney General William Barr told the nation’s federal prosecutors to be aggressive when charging violent demonstrators with crimes, including potentially prosecuting them for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government, people familiar with the conversation said.
In a conference call with U.S. attorneys across the country last week, Mr. Barr warned that sometimes violent demonstrations across the U.S. could worsen as the November presidential election approaches. He encouraged the prosecutors to seek a number federal charges, including under a rarely used sedition law, even when state charges could apply, the people said.
The call underscores the priority Mr. Barr has given to prosecuting crimes connected to violence during months of protests against racial injustice, leading to major property damage, as President Trump has made a broader crackdown on the violence and property destruction a key campaign issue. U.S. attorneys have broad discretion in what charges they bring.
A Washington State Trooper works the scene at Tanglewilde Terrace where law enforcement shot and killed a man who is reportedly Michael Forest Reinoehl on September 3, 2020 in Lacey, Washington.Nathan Howard/Getty Images
President Donald Trump appeared to give a nod to law enforcement officers killing suspected criminals, describing the death of an alleged shooting suspect by U.S. Marshals as “retribution.” Speaking in an interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, Trump spoke of the incident in which a law enforcement officer killed a self-described anti-fascist activist earlier this month in Washington state as they sought to arrest him on suspicion that he fatally shot a right-wing protester in Portland. Trump seemed to endorse the killing. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him,” Trump told Pirro. “And I will tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”
A Washington State Trooper works the scene at Tanglewilde Terrace where law enforcement shot and killed a man who is reportedly Michael Forest Reinoehl on September 3, 2020 in Lacey, Washington.Nathan Howard/Getty Images
President Donald Trump appeared to give a nod to law enforcement officers killing suspected criminals, describing the death of an alleged shooting suspect by U.S. Marshals as “retribution.” Speaking in an interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, Trump spoke of the incident in which a law enforcement officer killed a self-described anti-fascist activist earlier this month in Washington state as they sought to arrest him on suspicion that he fatally shot a right-wing protester in Portland. Trump seemed to endorse the killing. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him,” Trump told Pirro. “And I will tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”
Trump on a purported antifa sympathizer who allegedly killed someone in Portland being killed by federal forces: "This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I'll tell you something -- that's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution." pic.twitter.com/WfIP9b37sA
Trump was referring to the killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl on Sept. 3. Reinoehl was a key suspect in the killing of a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a protest in Portland on August 29. In an interview published by Vice News hours before he was killed, Reinoehl said he acted in self-defense. “You know, lots of lawyers suggest that I shouldn’t even be saying anything, but I feel it’s important that the world at least gets a little bit of what’s really going on,” Reinoehl said. “I had no choice. I mean, I, I had a choice. I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that.” Reinoehl, an Army veteran, said during the interview that he provided “security” at Black Lives Matter protests.
Investigators work near a tarpaulin covering the body of a man who is reportedly Michael Forest Reinoehl after he was shot and killed by law enforcement on September 3, 2020 in Lacey, Washington.Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Shortly after that interview was published, law enforcement agents shot and killed Reinoehl as they moved to arrest him. Officers claimed Reinoehl was brandishing a weapon but it isn’t clear whether he fired at police. No law enforcement officers were injured. “Initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers,” the Marshals Service said in a statement. “Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene.”
Witnesses have differing accoutns of what happened that day. One person who witnessed the killing said Reinoehl was clutching his cellphone when two unmarked cars showed up and officers began firing. “Officers shot multiple rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl before issuing a brief ‘stop’ command, quickly followed by more rapid-fire shooting by additional officers,” according to a statement provided by the witness. Two other witnesses who were nearby though say they saw Reinoehl open fire and the officers fired back. “It reminded me of a video game,” one of the witnesses said.
Conservatives lately love to compare Black Lives Matter protesters to the Confederacy. That's as ahistorical and gross as comparing the Jewish George Soros to the Nazis, which conservatives have also done, a lot. Tuesday, enemy of the site Mark Levin complained on his radio show about people trying to overthrow the government. Horrors! He didn't mean the officials within the Trump administration who are actively stripping our democracy for parts. No, the true threat to Mom and her frozen apple pie is people vandalizing statues of American traitors.
LEVIN: It's an amazing thing, as I keep saying. Early on during this you might recall the — the mostly peaceful protesters who were pulling down statues [...] Indiscriminately. It didn't matter they were abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant — as well as Confederate generals, as well as Catholic icons.
No memorial to Abraham Lincoln was vandalized this summer. Protesters have demanded the removal of two statues in Washington DC and Boston that feature a freed, formerly enslaved person kneeling at Lincoln's feet. It isn't the best demonstration of the American concept that we are all born with inalienable rights. They aren't granted to us by generous white men who deserve a thank-you shoe shine.
Side note: At the Emancipation Memorial's unveiling in 1876, Frederick Douglass dragged the statue and Honest Abe. The brother wasn't in a foot-kissing mood.
DOUGLASS: Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.
He was preeminently the white man's president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.
Had it existed at the time, Ye Olde Fox News would've condemned Douglass's “divisive" remarks, and that's even with former Confederate soldiers hosting the network's prime time lineup.
LEVIN: Nancy Pelosi got out and — Eva Pelosi — and she said, "These Confederate generals, they should be removed."
Why? Why should they be removed?
"Because they were trying to overthrow the government." That's what she said.
Yes, it's a reasonable position, unless you're afraid that if we stop glorifying white supremacists, we'd have no other white men to admire. Relax: We'll always have Chris Evans and the impressive contents of his camera roll.
LEVIN: And that's exactly what Antifa and Black Lives Matter is doing and they don't talk about that.
It's difficult to talk about things that aren't happening. It's why I rarely mention my Untitled Bebe Neuwirth Musical project.
And that's real — you know, they're not statues. Those are real people with real Molotov cocktails.
White American men protested the British Tea Act by illegally boarding ships and hurling chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. In today's dollars, that was $1.8 million worth of property damage.
This expensive vandalism escalated into the American Revolution.
However, when protesters today talk about “revolution," they're referring to lawful, constructive change. The Constitution put mechanisms in place for non-violent overthrows of the existing government. The first was arguably the fourth presidential election, which started ominously enough on October 31, 1800, and ended on December 3.
Thomas Jefferson was the Democratic-Republican candidate, and incumbent President John Adams represented the Federalist party. Very different political philosophies and views of governance were on the ballot. The Federalists preferred a strong, central government. Adams had gone sort of Bill Barr during his one term and passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it harder for immigrants to become citizens and restricted statements critical of the government.
The First Amendment wasn't even nine years old and America had shrugged it off when it became inconvenient.
You've probably seen Hamilton so you know how this turns out, but it wasn't until February 17, 1801, that Jefferson was elected the next president. Aaron Burr almost won, which seems less crazy now given the current White House occupant.
The point here is that overthrowing the government — non-violently — isn't a bad thing, even if the new government is too inclusive and democratic for Levin's tastes. The defeated Federalists accepted the results of the election. The future Confederacy in 1860 didn't and responded with violent insurrection. It's the current president who is attempting to undermine faith and trust in our elections, and it's his supporters who are most likely to grab a gun once the Biden/Harris ticket hits 270 electoral votes.
Huddle up, kids! I'm about to tell you Uncle George Soros's One Weird Trick for making money. READY?
Figure out the difference between reality and the BS people believe because they want it to be true, and bet the spread. You can call it arbitrage, or use his own "Theory of Reflexivity" terminology, but that's basically it. George Soros didn't invent it, and he sure as hell didn't make the laws that allow it, but he did use them and his own prodigious intellect to make billions betting against the British pound in 1992. For which he was labeled "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England." Welcome to being a Jew in the modern world -- play the game by rules you didn't set up, then get called a cheater when you win.
Yes, this is less worse than African Americans having to work twice as hard to get half as far. But we are not in competition for world's most oppressed minority. It's not a zero-sum game, and we all need to lift each other up. Indeed, George Soros spent tens of billions of dollars lifting up poor people across the globe and promoting democracy. And that's why Republicans hate him. Because in their screwed-up worldview, a man who put up $35 million to secure matching federal funds to get every poor kid in New York City $200 for school supplies is an existential threat to the American way of life. Very Christian!
And he did flee the Nazis, by the way. Trump's bigoted base happily swallows lies peddled by Fox and the wingnut demimonde that Soros was a collaborator who led Jewish deportees to their deaths, or even that he was an SS officer. In fact, he was a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Hungary, using false papers claiming to be a Christian child, who fled to England, started out hawking souvenirs, and wound up with a master's degree from the London School of Economics. He became the most successful hedge fund manager in history, and went on to donate at least $20 billion to making the world a fairer place through various pro-democracy and pro-Democratic efforts. Which is philanthropy and political activism when your side does it, but is nefarious fifth-column stuff when the donor is on the other side. And so much the better if he's an un-photogenic Jew with an accent!
Soros used his fortune to promote marijuana decriminalization, death with dignity, and the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He also established a mega-philanthropy called the Open Society Foundations which makes grants to hundreds of charities across the globe. Hence the ubiquitous allegations that "Soros-funded" entities are somehow controlling every liberal cause in America. Because George Soros funded OSF, and OSF funded the Center for Popular Democracy, and one of the protestors confronting Jeff Flake in the elevator about his support for Jude Rapenough works for CPD, so obviously George Soros is paying for an astroturf campaign to take out Kavanaugh. Right? Look, it makes total sense if you're a Nazi. Or maybe you're just Nazi-adjacent -- like you don't burn a cross in the yard, but the idea of some secret Jewish cabal manipulating the media to undermine the country doesn't sound completely insane to you.
Because it is. Completely. INSANE.
And you might not be a racist if you think OSF's efforts to close the black achievement gap and end racial bias in police searches are a danger to society. But you're definitely racist-adjacent. And you might not be a gay basher if you have a problem with OSF-supported NGOs that lobby for marriage equality in the EU or decriminalization of homosexuality in India, but you're definitely basher-adjacent. And you might not be a fascist if you have a problem with supporting free speech in Hungary and journalists in Afghanistan who cover government corruption, but you're definitely fascist-adjacent. And you might not be a Putin stooge if you think OSF's support for democracy in former Soviet republics like Ukraine, Georgia, and the Czech Republic is a bad thing, but you're definitely stooge-adjacent.
And you might not be an anti-Semite if you run ads claiming that an octogenarian Holocaust survivor who has given more than half his fortune to help lift up the poor and disenfranchised is somehow paying an army of Honduran migrants to invade Texas, but you're definitely ... NOPE, YOU'RE DEFINITELY AN ANTI-SEMITE.
Even if your allergist, your dentist and your gastroenterologist are all Jewish. Even if you have a Jewish son-in-law. Even if you support Israel. Even if you take a hundred million dollars from Sheldon Adelson.
Because it doesn't matter if you don't personally hate Jews. If you are willing to trade on vicious lies and stereotypes for a political win, then you simply don't care that you are making Jews everywhere less safe. Which is exactly how George Soros wound up with a bomb in his mailbox the same week 11 elderly Jews gathered for Sabbath prayer were murdered in Pittsburgh.
So, yeah, Kevin McCarthy, you're an anti-Semite.
And Donald Trump, shockingly, also an anti-Semite.
And Ron DeSantis. VIDEO REMOVED:Ron DeSantis rants about #SorosConspiracy hours after #DevicewasSent Andrew Gillum ahead in polls
And Mike Huckabee, also a huge anti-Semite. Even though he has that weirdass plaque in Yardenit, Israel, on the banks of the Jordan River where they sell "holy water" to unsuspecting tourists who get all pissy because there's so much Jewish history in Jesus's land, and someone on the tour bus said that maybe nobody from the "real" bible was even baptized here at all, and the hotel never serves sausage at breakfast, just funny-looking cheeses!
And Chuck Grassley is an anti-Semite.
And Matt Gaetz is an anti-Semite.
And. And. AND.
Which is goddamn shameful, since George Soros is a HERO. He's given away billions of dollars to help other people. Not because he wants a tax break like the Koch brothers. Or a casino license like Sheldon Adelson. Or to make himself viceroy of Afghanistan, like Erik Prince. Or to destroy public education and replace it with Jesus, like Eric's sister Betsy DeVos.
George Soros just wanted to make the world a better place, so he did.
Here's what he said to NPR about the 2009 gift to New York kids.
"Philanthropy has been badly hit by the financial crisis and so the usual donors actually are cutting back. I feel that people who can afford it should step up to the plate and actually increase their philanthropic donations."
The gift is being made by Soros' Foundation to Promote Open Society, the sister organization to the Open Society Institute. Under the program, families on food stamps or other forms of public assistance will automatically receive the funds. "They don't have to ask for it. And that's one of the things that appealed to me — that there are no strings attached and they don't need to apply — it just comes to them," Soros says.
Soros also was the recipient of aid when he was a student at the London School of Economics. To make ends meet, he worked at night as a waiter. But when his tutor found out about it, she submitted his name to the Quakers, he says, and he subsequently received a check for 40 pounds.
"And it touched me, I must say; I felt then that this is a very nice way to help people," Soros says. "And so it gives me personal satisfaction to be able to do it on a much larger scale."
And for this they slapped him with every anti-Semitic conspiracy trope in the book and accused him of a plot against America. So, yeah, the GOP has an anti-Semitism problem. To wit, they're a bunch of craven bigots who don't care if they get us all killed. Sorry, Republicans -- the shoe fits, and you all chose to wear it.
[NPR] Follow your FDF on Twitter! Wonkette is, oddly, unfunded by George Soros and the OSF. We are funded ONLY by YOU. Be the George Soros you want to see in the world!
May her memory be a blessing. For us it is and always will be. Honor her singularly important work by fighting like hell for the living, for equality and justice, and for democracy in this country.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a legal pioneer for gender equality whose fierce opinions as a justice made her a hero to the left, died Sept. 18 at her home in Washington. She was 87. https://t.co/G8qsYn3Kgd
“The Senate will continue to observe the ‘Biden rule’ so that the American people have a voice in this momentous decision” -- Mitch McConnell, 269 days before the 2016 election when Justice Scalia died.
One good thing about the pandemic is that it really reveals the stupidity of sectors of our population who skipped a lot of science class and missed those Sunday school classes about caring for others. https://t.co/hoVSIqNUKl
Apparently repeated cries of "I am a reporter," a press badge around the neck, and complying with directives of police is now illegal.
L.A. deputies tackled and arrested a reporter. Her videos contradict their claims about the incident. https://t.co/bJDtLV8Izk
Update: One male deputy and one female deputy were ambushed as they sat in their patrol vehicle. Both sustained multiple gunshot wounds and are in critical condition. They are both currently undergoing surgery. The suspect is still at large.
For the next 24 hours or so, this documentary about my late friend Dwayne McDuffie is free to watch, courtesy of DC Fandome. Yeah, I know it's the other guys, but you should still watch it. https://t.co/vFaShbX2ef
Cubs' Mills no-hits Brewers for baseball's 2nd no-hitter
MILWAUKEE -- From college walk-on to major league starter, Chicago Cubs right-hander Alec Mills had to earn most every break he got.
On the brink of big league history, he was happy to welcome this bit of luck: expecting to see two-time batting champion Christian Yelich in the on-deck circle, Mills looked over and saw his backup instead.
"That kind of surprised me," he said.
This one surprised just about everyone.
Mills cruised through baseball's second no-hitter this season in just the 15th start of his career, completing the gem in a 12-0 romp over the Milwaukee Brewers on Sunday.
Mills got Jace Peterson -- who replaced Yelich, the 2018 NL MVP, on defense late in the blowout -- to hit a routine grounder to shortstop Javier Baez with two outs in the ninth. Baez completed the play, and the Cubs swarmed around Mills, tearing off his cap and pulling at the smiling right-hander's uniform after his first career complete game.
"It just hasn't really hit me yet," the 28-year-old said. "It's kind of crazy, I didn't even know how to celebrate. Just something that all came together today. Obviously a memory I'll have forever."
Mills (5-3) threw 114 pitches and hardly had any close calls in Chicago's 16th no-hitter. Avisail Garcia almost got to him twice, hitting a line drive to right in the first and nearly legging out an infield hit to shortstop in the sixth. Garcia crossed first and immediately called to the Brewers dugout for a review, but after a very brief stoppage, the Brewers opted not to challenge.
Mills would have faced Garcia again in the ninth, but Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell pulled the 2017 All-Star along with Yelich in the eighth with his team trailing big. Mills struck out Garcia's replacement, Tyrone Taylor, for the second out in the ninth.
"Taylor hitting there and then Peterson, I had no idea they were in the game," Mills said.
Mills struck out five and walked three. His five strikeouts are the fewest in a Cubs no-hitter since Ken Holtzman in 1969. He only induced five swings and misses, tied with Oakland's Dallas Braden during his perfect game in 2010 for fewest in a no-hitter since at least 1988, per Stats Inc.
"I can promise you it was not a slow heartbeat," Mills said. "I had to kind of take a seat and calm myself down. It was tough. I had to take a lot of deep breaths and get into a good mindset."
Mills was a 22nd-round draft pick by Kansas City in 2012 and had Tommy John surgery in 2013. He had started just six major league games prior to this season but cracked Chicago's rotation because of an injury to Jose Quintana.
He went 2-0 with a 1.38 ERA in his first two starts, struggled in his next five but pitched solidly Tuesday against the Reds with six shutout innings. The no-hitter dropped his ERA to 3.93.
Not bad for a player who didn't get a college scholarship. Mills was a walk-on at Tennessee-Martin.
"Never give up," Mills said. "You know, some people are going to tell you you can't do it or you're not good enough. That's just one person. So just keep working. Just persevere."
Mills happily took high-fives as teammates got close during the celebration -- a no-no no-no amid the coronavirus pandemic that didn't concern players in the moment.
Their yells of congratulations echoed around the empty stadium, which has yet to have Brewers fans in attendance for a no-hitter. Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano had thrown the only no-hitter at Miller Park, against the Houston Astros on Sept. 14, 2008. The Cubs played the Astros in Milwaukee because of damage in the Houston area from Hurricane Ike.
Baez was anxious to be part of history as the ground ball for the final out came his way.
"I just wanted the ball hit to me," Baez said. "Then I was making sure the ball was in my glove."
Mills completed the Cubs' first no-hitter since Jake Arrieta did it twice in eight months: at the Los Angeles Dodgers on Aug. 30, 2015, and at Cincinnati on April 21, 2016.
Milwaukee had not been held hitless since Detroit's Justin Verlander pitched the first of his three no-hitters on June 12, 2007. It's the fourth time the Brewers have been no-hit.
Held without a hit through three innings, the Cubs broke through against Milwaukee in the fourth against starter Adrian Houser (1-5) due in large part to shoddy fielding by the Brewers. Kyle Schwarber drew a one-out walk, Baez reached on an error and Jason Heyward followed with a bloop double to left to drive in a run.
With the infield in, Jason Kipnis hit a ball directly to Brewers second baseman Keston Hiura, who had it slip out of his hand as he tried to rush a throw to the plate, allowing a run to score.
Victor Caratini followed with a run-scoring bloop single and Ian Happ connected for a two-run single as the Cubs scored five runs in the inning, all unearned.
"Nothing went right today. We didn't play a good game," Counsell said. "We played a poor game and we lost. We have to turn the page and know that there's still a lot of important baseball left in front of us."
David Bote's two-run homer later in the fifth extended the lead to 9-0. Caratini's run-scoring double in the seventh put the Cubs up 10-0. Chicago added a pair of runs in the ninth off Orlando Arcia, the Brewers shortstop who came on to pitch the final inning.
Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves (and Money)
Hatched by a 20-year-old college student, the Birds Aren’t Real movement has drawn intrigue and scorn on Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter.
The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy after he refused to kill and replace billions of birds with drones. The U.S. government is sequestering a team of Boeing engineers in Area 51 for a secret military mission. Our tax dollars have been funneled into building the “Turkey X500,” a robot used to hunt large birds.
Combine all these conspiracies and you get Birds Aren’t Real, a nearly two-year-old movement that claims the CIA took out 12 billion feathered fugitives because directors within the organization were “annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal matter on their car windows.” The targets were eradicated between 1959 and 1971 with specially altered B-52 bombers stocked with poison. They were then supplanted with avian-like robots that could be used to surveil Americans.
Sounds extreme but also somewhat fitting, given the landscape of today's social discourse. By surfacing murky bits of history and the ubiquity of Aves, Birds Aren’t Real feeds into this era of post-truth politics. The campaign relies on internet-fueled guerilla marketing to spread its message, manifesting through real-world posters and Photoshopped propaganda tagged with the “Birds Aren’t Real” slogan.
For much of its devoted fanbase, Birds Aren’t Real is a respite from America’s political divide—a joke so preposterous both conservatives and liberals can laugh at it. But for a few followers, this movement is no more unbelievable than QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory turned marketing ploy that holds that someone with high-level government clearance is planting coded tips in the news. Therein lies the genius of Birds Aren’t Real: It’s a digital breadcrumb trail that leads to a website that leads to a shop full of ready-to-buy merchandise.
The creative muscle behind the avian-inspired conspiracy (and thinly disguised marketing scheme) is 20-year-old Peter McIndoe, an English and philosophy major at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. McIndoe first went live with Birds Aren’t Real in January 2017 at his city’s Women’s March. A video from the event shows McIndoe with a crudely drawn sign, heckling protesters with lines like, “Birds are a myth; they’re an illusion; they’re a lie. Wake up America! Wake up!” The idea of selling Birds Aren’t Real goods, he says, came after the stunt gained traction over Instagram.
Posted by EditorDavid from the burning-like-a-silver-flame dept.
CNET describes Venus as "a toxic, overheated, crushing hellscape where nothing can survive." But they reported Friday that one astronomy team's hypothesis published last month "could prompt a reevaluation of how and where we look for life in the universe."Carl Sagan speculated about life in the clouds of Venus back in 1967, and just a few years ago, researchers suggested that strange, anomalous patterns seen when looking at the planet in ultraviolet could be explained by something like an algae or a bacteria in the atmosphere. More recently, research published last month in the journal Astrobiology, from leading astronomer Sara Seager at MIT, offers up a vision of what the life cycle above Venus might be like. Seager has been a 21st century leader in the search for exoplanets, biosignatures, and worlds similar to our own. She's currently the deputy science director for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission (aka TESS).
Seager and her colleagues suggest that the most likely way for microbes to survive above Venus is inside liquid droplets. But such droplets don't stay still, as anyone who's ever seen rain knows. Eventually they grow large enough that gravity takes over. In the case of Venus, this would mean droplets harboring tiny life forms and falling toward the hotter, lower layers of the planet's atmosphere, where they'd inevitably dry up. "We propose for the first time that the only way life can survive indefinitely is with a life cycle that involves microbial life drying out as liquid droplets evaporate during settling, with the small desiccated 'spores' halting at, and partially populating, the Venus atmosphere stagnant lower haze layer," the paper's summary reads. These dried-out spores would go into a sort of hibernation phase similar to what tardigrades can do, and eventually be lifted higher into the atmosphere and rehydrated, continuing the life cycle.
This is all speculation. Fortunately for Venusian life hunters, a number of astronomers and their instruments are trained on the complex planet. NASA is even considering a mission, dubbed Veritas, that could depart as soon as 2026 to orbit and study Venus and its clouds.
Meanwhile, more data from Venus, and perhaps new discoveries, may soon be incoming. The forecast for the planet remains, as it has for some time, cloudy with a chance of microbes.
Posted by EditorDavid from the we-are-the-world dept.
This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:As part of this week's IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with Fortune 500 companies.
"The rewards for participants are substantial," explains Big Blue. "For every student who finishes Level 1, IBM will donate to the UN World Food Programme #ShareTheMeal... In celebration of IBM Z day, we will double the donation for all students that complete Master the Mainframe Level 1 between Sept 15 — 30 2020. Just 1 hour of your time will feed 4 children for a day.""Through three interactive Levels, you will access a mainframe and get skilled up on the foundations of Mainframe," according to IBM's announcement at MasterTheMainframe.com, "including JCL, Ansible, Python, Unix, COBOL, REXX, all through VS Code. Round it all out with a grand challenge where you craft your own fully-equipped Mainframe creation."
"One mainframe is equivalent to 1,500 x86 servers," the site notes. It also points out that mainframes handle 30 billion transactions every day, "more than the number of Google searches every day" — including 87% of all credit card transactions, nearly $8 trillion payments a year.
There are very few things we can count on in this world anymore, but one thing that remains fairly consistent is that the One Million Moms Who Are Actually Like Maybe Three Moms are usually mad about something stupid in a way that is, traditionally, pretty hilarious.
This week is no exception. They're mad at Dole. Like, the fruit company, Dole. Are they mad at them for like, something to do with farm worker's rights, or allegedly funding paramilitary death squads in Colombia, or like, that whole thing in Nicaragua where they were allegedly using an illegal pesticide that caused sterility in their workers? Ha! No. It is a commercial. There's a commercial they don't like and would like to see taken off the air, please and thank you.
The series of commercials they are upset about feature adults using the term "fruit bowl" as a substitute for swears or other things they don't want to say in front of their kids. Particularly since one of these commercials features a lesbian couple, and you know they don't cotton to that!
Dole is currently airing three different commercials that substitute the literal meaning of the words "fruit bowl" with very inappropriate connotations. It's part of an advertising campaign the company coined "Quaran-Tension," Dole's attempt to cast a humorous light on the angst created by the COVID-19 quarantine. But Dole fails miserably at its efforts to be funny.
The commercials use "fruit bowl(s)" as code words for intimacy, in place of swear words, and as a demeaning reference to children.
Oh wow, really? That is totally not a thing parents do or a reason why I am super good at swearing in Italian.
Here, they describe the offending ads:
Here is the dialogue from one commercial that features a set of grandparents and one of their grandchildren: "Well, with the grandkids home now, finding alone time is a challenge. That's why we have a secret love language. … You in the mood for fruit bowls? … I would love some. …" (Then a granddaughter interrupts: "Can I have some fruit bowls too?") "We are eating a lot of fruit bowls, just not having a lot of fruit bowls."
Another ad features a couple saying the following: "Times are stressful, but we are trying not to swear in front of the kids. So, we use 'fruit bowl' instead. Fr*it B*wl! What the fr*it b*wl?! We eat a lot of fr*it-b*wling fr*it b*wls."
The third commercial features two lesbian moms who are frustrated over their kids' behavior. They use "fruit bowls" as a code word to talk about their kids in front of the kids. The mothers are regretting and questioning whose idea it was to even have these "fruit bowls."
Seems like maybe they are scraping the bottom of the fruit bowl here. But they claim that their big fear here is that this will lead children to go out into the world and start saying "fruit bowl" all of the time instead of properly swearing like decent, wholesome children.
The insinuations and tone in these ads are offensive because of what is represented, and the fact that children actually appear in the commercials is also disturbing. It's sad that a well-known company has made a deliberate decision to produce a controversial commercial instead of a wholesome one.
One Million Moms finds this marketing campaign highly inappropriate. All three of Dole's fruit bowl ads are irresponsible and tasteless. It is extremely destructive and damaging to impressionable children viewing the commercial. We all know children repeat what they hear.
These ads are airing during prime time, when families are likely watching. Dole should be more responsible in its marketing decisions. Let Dole know that as a parent and a customer you are disgusted by its recent marketing choices.
Dole needs to know parents do not approve!
Oh yeah, I'm sure that's every parent's biggest concern right now. That kids are gonna be scarred for life over a freaking ad for pineapple.
Psychologist: When did this all start?
Patient: Well, I saw this ad for fruit one time and it just was so traumatic that three years later, I was smoking banana peels. It haunts me to this day.
The actual petition they want people to sign is wonderfully melodramatic.
I am highly offended by Dole's "fruit bowl" commercials. It is an irresponsible marketing campaign to insinuate profanity, use code words for sex in front of children, and degrade the value of children in an advertisement. Everyone knows children repeat what they hear. Foul language, a liberal agenda, and sexual innuendos are not necessary to sell your products. I urge you to cancel these commercials immediately. Until you clean up your advertising, I will no longer buy your products.
So good.
This isn't cancel culture, of course. Only liberals do cancel culture. This is simply being very offended by a fruit commercial and demanding it be taken off the air. Totally different thing.
It is, however, your open thread. So enjoy!
Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks. These are important for keeping our community safe. But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone.
I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.
From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.
Harmful Content
First, harmful content. Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits — from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, we have a responsibility to keep people safe on our services. That means deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more. We continually review our policies with experts, but at our scale we’ll always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with.
Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree. I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own. So we’re creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions. We’re also working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.
Internet companies should be accountable for enforcing standards on harmful content. It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the internet, but when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach.
One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and measure companies against those standards. Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.
Facebook already publishes transparency reports on how effectively we’re removing harmful content. I believe every major internet service should do this quarterly, because it’s just as important as financial reporting. Once we understand the prevalence of harmful content, we can see which companies are improving and where we should set the baselines.
Election Integrity
Second, legislation is important for protecting elections. Facebook has already made significant changes around political ads: Advertisers in many countries must verify their identities before purchasing political ads. We built a searchable archive that shows who pays for ads, what other ads they ran and what audiences saw the ads. However, deciding whether an ad is political isn’t always straightforward. Our systems would be more effective if regulation created common standards for verifying political actors.
Online political advertising laws primarily focus on candidates and elections, rather than divisive political issues where we’ve seen more attempted interference. Some laws only apply during elections, although information campaigns are nonstop. And there are also important questions about how political campaigns use data and targeting. We believe legislation should be updated to reflect the reality of the threats and set standards for the whole industry.
Privacy
Third, effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and I agree. I believe it would be good for the internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework.
New privacy regulation in the United States and around the world should build on the protections GDPR provides. It should protect your right to choose how your information is used — while enabling companies to use information for safety purposes and to provide services. It shouldn’t require data to be stored locally, which would make it more vulnerable to unwarranted access. And it should establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes.
I also believe a common global framework — rather than regulation that varies significantly by country and state — will ensure that the internet does not get fractured, entrepreneurs can build products that serve everyone, and everyone gets the same protections.
As lawmakers adopt new privacy regulations, I hope they can help answer some of the questions GDPR leaves open. We need clear rules on when information can be used to serve the public interest and how it should apply to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Data Portability
Finally, regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.
This is important for the internet — and for creating services people want. It’s why we built our development platform. True data portability should look more like the way people use our platform to sign into an app than the existing ways you can download an archive of your information. But this requires clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services.
This also needs common standards, which is why we support a standard data transfer format and the open source Data Transfer Project.
I believe Facebook has a responsibility to help address these issues, and I’m looking forward to discussing them with lawmakers around the world. We’ve built advanced systems for finding harmful content, stopping election interference and making ads more transparent. But people shouldn’t have to rely on individual companies addressing these issues by themselves. We should have a broader debate about what we want as a society and how regulation can help. These four areas are important, but, of course, there’s more to discuss.
The rules governing the internet allowed a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives. It’s time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for people, companies and governments going forward.
Your comrade Eva presents us this gift: a listing of all Don Martin's MAD Magazine onomatopoeic disgust sounds, alphabetically. — Doug Gilford's Mad Cover Site
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2009.19 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1905 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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![The Completely Mad Don Martin #10 [Don Martin's best cartoons from Mad magazine]: Martin, Don: 9780446376617: Amazon.com: Books](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/516r+tSTN+L.jpg)
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