Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Saturday, February 20, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2195 - President Lex; President Gas - Weekly Hodge Podge 2102.20



 A Sense of Doubt blog post #2195 - President Lex; President Gas - Weekly Hodge Podge 2102.20

Greetings readers, Thanks for tuning in.

original above images died here

https://www.denofgeek.com/comics/lex-luthor-and-the-three-times-he-was-elected-us-president/

This is the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE. 


Looking back on the HODGE PODGES I have posted this last twelve months, consecutively since April first except for one short break at Christmas, I have explored many themes and often assembled a vast variety of materials, so much so that I created sections to separate the content. I am proud of this work.


The Hodge Podge posts have also been among the most popular posts I make each week. But lately, there has been some sky-rocketing.


Blog post #2171 from January 27th recorded a record 754 number of views.


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2171 - BURN AFTER READING - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2101.27

Other January posts have all received over 400 views with the one I did on lizard people receiving 534 views.


A Sense of Doubt blog post #2160 - The Coming of the Lizard People - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2101.16


I wonder how many of those views are actual people and how many are bots. Also, I wonder how I arrived at these views. Students? Twitter and Facebook hash tags?


I am encouraged by the numbers even if many are web-scraping bots, and I am also somewhat chastened to share HODGE PODGE posts like today’s with so little content compared to the rest.


As always there’s the weekly pandemic report, and though cases are plummeting and Johns Hopkins does not yet have the U.S. death total over 500K, World Meter that aggregates data from more sources has the death total at nearly 508K.


The rest of the content is more of the squabbling between democrats and republicans that we have come to loathe.


But there are some good bits here.


I took the theme from one article showing a clip of Lex Luthor as president and Superman confronting him. This thought of “President Lex” led me to think of “President Gas” by the Psychedelic Furs, which surely I have shared at some point in the recent past, though not as part of a theme.


And there’s more about AOC being awesome because she is.


Also, space stuff, which I always feature, so both the cool landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance on the red planet and news about dark matter and the first discovered black hole being more massive than we thought.


That’s all. I have to get to work.


See you all next week.

"PRESIDENT GAS" - Psychedelic Furs

psychedelic furs - president gas 1982 london









God Tells 'Prophet' He's Gonna Smite All The Social Media Companies And Make Trump President Again

Robyn Pennacchia
February 19, 2021 02:14 PM

According to a recent report in the New York Times, Christian prophets are on the rise. No longer are religious leaders content with simply interpreting what the Christian God wants or thinks by reading the Bible, they are having regular conversations with him, in which he assures them that he agrees with them and that everything they want (and that those who give them money want) to happen will happen.

There are more people than ever claiming to be Christian prophets, and amazingly, God told practically all of them that Trump was going to win the election. Some of them have since backtracked and admitted they were wrong, but others are standing resolute in their continued belief in the Second Coming of Donald Trump.

Via Politico:

"The January 20 inauguration date doesn't really mean anything," [self-declared Christian prophet Johnny] Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other "credible" Christian prophets around the world had likewise declared that Trump, somehow, would be restored to power soon.

Indeed, Enlow was not alone out on that limb. Greg Locke, a Nashville pastor with a massive social media following, said after Trump's loss that he would "100 percent remain president of the United States for another term." Kat Kerr, a pink-haired preacher from Jacksonville, Florida, declared repeatedly last month that Trump had won the election "by a landslide" and that God had told her he would serve for eight years. In his video, Enlow went further. "There's not going to be just Trump coming back," he said. "There's going to be at least two more Trumps that will be in office in some way." Donald Trump, he proclaimed elsewhere, was "the primary government leader on Planet Earth."

One of those prophets is Nathan French, and God has told him that not only is Donald Trump going to be president again, but that he will be smiting the social media companies what done him wrong.

Via RightWingWatch:

"The Lord said this morning, he told me, 'It's unwise to pick a fight with a reigning champion,'" French claimed. "He said, 'Nathan, I'm going to overturn [the election], and I'm going to reinstate Trump.' And so I realized that not only has God chosen President Trump and Melania, but when you mess with God's plan, then you come against God himself, and you pick a fight with God."

"This is what the Lord said to me this morning," French continued. "He said, 'Big tech companies will begin to crumble if they continue to come against God's anointed.' When the Lord speaks through his prophets and prophetic people, it is his own words, and they will not return void. So when the flesh and the way that seems right to a man—which is like leaning on your own understanding—stands against the Lord's words or those he's chosen as mouthpieces, they basically pick a fight with the reigning champion, and that's just going to bring a KO. So God's gonna knock out, he's gonna wipe out everything that comes against what he's preparing to release, which is the Third Great Awakening."

I have some questions! If the infallible deity I don't believe in can have their plans "messed with" by Twitter and Facebook and also the millions and millions of voters not voting for the presidential candidate of their choice, are they truly infallible? Or was it just God's job to "anoint" Trump and tell his prophets about it, and then everyone was supposed to go along with them? Because that doesn't seem like a very solid plan to me. Especially when said prophets seem a little kooky.

Let's be real. It's pretty hard to act surprised that no one listened to God's prophets, because of how anyone can say they are a prophet. Even James Randi never invented a test for that one. Anyone can say they are anything, really. I could say that I have the ability to channel a Lemurian warrior who lived 35,000 years ago or that I am the reincarnation of Jesus/George Washington and there would be loads of people out there who would respond, "Oh wow, that sounds great and entirely plausible, would you like to have all of the money?"

But I don't because I am not a bad person. That's the line we're going with anyway.

Anyway! Isn't God supposed to be able to predict the future? So why didn't he see this coming and make all the social media companies crumble before the election? Because now he has to do this whole awkward thing and somehow finagle a way to make Donald Trump president again, all these months after the election.

That seems like the kind of thing a fallible deity might have to do!

There is another possibility, outside of God not existing and these people just being scam artists, which I personally believe is the case here. God could be playing a trick on these people. Like that time he told that guy to go and kill his baby and then was like "Psych! Please do not actually kill your baby! I was just kidding!" Perhaps he is just going around telling these Christian prophets that he's gonna make Trump president again, when he is not going to do that, because he thinks it's funny to mess with them. Or because he wants them to be super wrong about a thing, as publicly as possible, so that stupid people stop giving them their money.

[RightWingWatch]








Chuck Schumer Really Pissed That Most Senate Republicans Are Traitors

Stephen Robinson
February 14, 2021 11:30 AM

The one-term loser's second annual impeachment trial ended as we expected, if we've paid attention, or feared if our heads are stuck in West Wing episode. The Senate failed to convict the insurrectionist in chief, although Democrats gained nine more votes than last time. At this rate, we might finally hold him accountable at the third annual impeachment.

I'm not so cynical that I don't find it dispiriting. After too many trips on the karma-less merry-go-round with Lex Luthor, an alternate universe Superman finally cracked. President Luthor mocked his faith in the system: "You're as much responsible for this as I am. So go ahead, fix it somehow, put me on trial, lock me up, but I'll beat it. And then we'll start the whole thing all over again."

And we will.

Chuck Schumer has received a lot of criticism because he wasn't personally able to awaken consciences in 43 Republican senators. He's the Majority Leader not the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. People are also frustrated that he didn't go to the mattresses against the GOP, but he's also not Michael Corleone finally settling all family business.

Republicans and byzantine Senate rules are solely to blame for the latest and likely not the last travesty of justice related to President Klan Robe. Schumer made that very clear in his post-travesty floor speech. It was remarkably similar to one Mitch McConnell gave where he also read the defendant for filth.The minority leader was like the attorney on Law & Order who represented an obviously guilty and repulsive client. They'd admit the guy is slime but explain to the jury why it was their duty to acquit: “You don't have to like my client. I certainly don't. He makes my skin crawl. I can't even look him in the face, but the CONSTITUTION!"

Those were strawman defense attorneys, of course, designed to have copaganda TV audiences rooting against "search warrants" or any other namby-pamby legal rights that protected rapists. Schumer wasn't having McConnell's crocodile tear appeals to constitutional duty. Republicans aren't usually big on letting off on a technicality the ring leaders of gang violence and terrorist attacks. They are usually foaming at the mouth to tell a bad guy that his diplomatic immunity's just been revoked. Now they're suddenly the ACLU but just for powerful white people ... so basically the GOP as it's always existed.

SCHUMER: None of the facts were up for debate. We saw it. We heard it. We lived it. This was the first presidential impeachment trial in history in which all Senators were not only judges and jurors, but witnesses to the constitutional crime that was committed.

The former president inspired, directed, and propelled a mob to violently prevent the peaceful transfer of power, subvert the will of the people, and illegally keep that president in power.

There is nothing—nothing—more un-American than that.

There is nothing—nothing—more antithetical to our democracy.

There is nothing—nothing—more insulting to the generations of American patriots who gave their lives to defend our form of government.

This was the most egregious violation of the presidential oath of office and a textbook example—a classic example—of an impeachable offense, worthy of the Constitution's most severe remedy.

In response to the incontrovertible fact of Donald Trump's guilt, the Senate was subject to a feeble -- and sometimes incomprehensible -- defense of the former president. Unable to dispute the case on the merits, the former president's counsel treated us to partisan vitriol, false equivalence, and outright falsehoods.

McConnell claimed that the twice-impeached thug's actions on January 6 didn't meet the narrow legal definition of “incitement." Schumer called bullshit:

Here's what the Republican leader of the Senate said: the mob that perpetrated the "failed insurrection" was on January 6th "was provoked by President Trump."You want another word for "provoke?" How about: "incite."
Still—still!—the vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus, including the Republican leader, voted to acquit former President Trump, signing their names in the columns of History alongside his name—forever.

January 6th will live as a day of infamy in the history of the United States of America. The failure to convict Donald Trump will live as a vote of infamy in the history of the United States Senate.

Five years ago, Republican Senators lamented what might become of their party if Donald Trump became their presidential nominee and standard-bearer. Just look at what has happened. Look at what Republicans have been forced to defend. Look at what Republicans have chosen to forgive.

The former president tried to overturn the results of a legitimate election—and provoked an assault on our own government—and well over half of the Senate Republican conference decided to condone it.

The most despicable act that any president has ever committed and the majority of Republicans cannot summon the courage or the morality to condemn it.

This trial wasn't even about choosing country over party, even not that. This was about choosing country over Donald Trump. And 43 Republican members chose Trump. They chose Trump. It should be a weight on their conscience today. And it shall be a weight upon their conscience in the future.

Schumer is rightly pissed, but he shouldn't imagine that the gaping holes where most Republicans souls are will trouble them. All they understand is power. Don't wait for history to judge them, as you drive down Confederate Slave Owner Avenue (see how that turned out?). We must extract a price from Republicans today and every day afterward. Don't give up, blame Democrats, and stay home in 2022. That's what Republicans want. That's how Republicans win. It's time to break the pattern.

[CNN]

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.



F*ck You, Mitch McConnell

Jamie Lynn Crofts
February 14, 2021 01:00 PM

Mere minutes after voting to acquit Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell took the Senate floor to make a strong case for ... why we should convict Donald Trump.

Except for some steaming mastodon dung at the end, it was a pretty good speech. (Here's the transcript.)

And you know what? He can take his meaningless platitudes and shove them ... wherever it would cause him the most pain and discomfort.

For four years, Mitch and Trump worked hand-in-hand to do as much as they possibly could to destroy our country

Some might say Mitch's speech was an act of cowardice, but not me. I, for one, think it was incredibly brave for the man who is the actual reason the trial didn't take place sooner to then stand up and say he couldn't vote to convict solely because the trial didn't take place sooner.

"There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day," said the man who had just voted to acquit, thus leaving open the possibility of Trump running again in 2024 and doing the exact same thing again.

The speech began, "January 6 was a disgrace." And it was.

So was yesterday's vote.

Mitch McConnell full well knows that what happened on and before January 6 was an attack on our entire constitutional system. He knows Donald Trump sent an angry mob to the Capitol building to murder him and overthrow the government. And yet, he still couldn't bring himself to vote for conviction.

In so doing, Mitch basically just admitted that he believes there is a January exception for presidents committing high crimes and misdemeanors, as long as we're talking about a Republican. (No, no I do not take their phony "beliefs" seriously. And neither should you. Three words: Amy. Coney. Barrett.)
At the end of the angry take-down of the former president, Mitch then tucked his tail between his legs, repeated the bullshit party line, and slunk off the floor.
No serious person actually believes it is unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial after a person has left office, especially if that person is impeached while they are still in office. Former presidents are entitled to a number of benefits, including a six-figure annual pension, lifetime Secret Service protection, and up to $1 million in travel expenses annually — and the only way to take that away is through the impeachment process.
And we all know Mitch and his brethren have absolutely no problem completely reversing course, regardless of what they said in the past, the second the shoe is on the other foot. If not, we would be talking about who Joe Biden is going to appoint to fill RBG's seat.

As for past impeachment trials that happened after people left office? Well, we don't know. He just kind of ignored that.

Nancy Pelosi, who had not planned on joining the House managers' press conference after the vote, felt compelled to join the group after seeing Mitch's speech. She blasted the former majority leader for his bullshit, saying, "It is so pathetic that Senator McConnell kept the Senate shut down so that the Senate could not receive the Article of Impeachment and has used that as his excuse for not voting to convict Donald Trump."

We agree.

And look, there was plenty to agree with in Mitch's speech. He also suggested that Trump could still face criminal charges and civil actions. "President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen," McConnell said. "He didn't get away with anything. Yet."

And YES, PLEASE! Before there can be any unity, there needs to be accountability. We are waiting with bated breath for Tish James, Cy Vance, or some other prosecutor to bring charges against the most corrupt president in American history.

But that doesn't change the fact that Mitch McConnell is a slimy, smelly invertebrate. Actually, sorry. That's mean to invertebrates.

Mitch McConnell has spent his entire career trying to further entrench power for the Republican Party and himself, with no regard for how he was destroying our country's institutions. He has spearheaded or been complicit in everything that got us to this point.

So forgive me if I don't care to sit here and be lectured by one of the biggest villains in American history.

I believe that Mitch actually is pissed off at what Donald Trump did. But I don't fucking care. Put your money where your mouth is or STFU.

I would say that I hope that at least he feels guilty about his not guilty vote, but that would require Mitch McConnell to have the ability to feel things.

Thanks for the speech, Mitch.

Go to hell.

youtu.be

[ Transcript / Video ]

Follow Jamie on Twitter!

Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons.


Unemployed Florida Man Throwing Tantrum About Mitch McConnell, We Guess

Evan Hurst
February 17, 2021 09:25 AM

SOMEBODY is all dressed up with no way to tweet:

Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.

Cool, the Republican Party is still feasting on the scraps of its own ass and we can go back to whatever we were doing before this, the end.

OK fine, we will give 600 more words to this.

Donald Trump is very upset because Mitch McConnell said all those mean things on the Senate floor about how, despite his "not guilty" vote, Trump is totally guilty, and can totally go to jail for all he cares, who cares, not Mitch, hashtag Turtle Power.

Trump is also mad McConnell then followed that up with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying basically the same thing, but with a lot more two-faced emphasis on how it's all really the Democrats' fault. He still said the shit about how the criminal and civil justice systems are free to have their way with Trump's ass, though.

Further, Trump may be mad that McConnell did an interview this weekend where he said he's focused on winning the Senate back for the GOP in 2022, and doesn't particularly care whether that means supporting candidates Trump likes or candidates Trump does not like.

So Trump, in true whinyass fashion, decided to release a barely literate, whinyass statement through his PAC full of his whinyass complaints about McConnell.

Excerpts, with a few of our editorial comments thrown in in place of ellipses:

The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political "leaders" like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm. [BLAH BLAH BLAH]

In 2020, I received the most votes of any sitting President in history, almost 75,000,000 [but not as many as the actual winner of the election! BLAH BLAH BLAH]

And in "Mitch's Senate," over the last two election cycles, I single-handedly saved at least 12 Senate seats, more than eight in the 2020 cycle alone [BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH]

Many Republicans in Georgia voted Democrat, or just didn't vote, because of their anguish at their inept Governor, Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and the Republican Party, for not doing its job on Election Integrity during the 2020 Presidential race. [Cool, he's still telling his fascist Big Lie, because he's too small a man to accept that the entire world hates him and just go fuck off somewhere and shut his mouth forever, anyway BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH]

My only regret is that McConnell "begged" for my strong support and endorsement before the great people of Kentucky in the 2020 election, and I gave it to him. He went from one point down to 20 points up, and won. How quickly he forgets. [Mitch McConnell was never not going to win that Senate race, sorry Amy McGrath stans, but it's true, anyway BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, BLEE BLAH, BLEE BLAH, THE END]

Cool statement, President Lost Cause. You sure did tell him! Unfortunately, it seems McConnell prefers presidents who weren't defeated.

So anyway, Trump is mad. According to Politico, the toddler-grade statement above "could have been far worse." Apparently an earlier incarnation of the statement "mocked McConnell for having multiple chins." Indeed, according to Politico's source, "There was also a lot of repetitive stuff and definitely something about him having too many chins but not enough smarts."

So whoop-dee-doo, the breaking news here is that Trump has somehow become even more of a Little Man Syndrome loser ever since he left the White House with his tail between his legs in disgrace.

In summary and in conclusion, the GOP is still beating the shit out of its own face, Trump is causing it, McConnell and the GOP completely deserve every bit of this, uh oh, we have reached the end of giving 600 more words to this, peace out, fuckers.

[statement from President Whinyass]


NAACP Sues Trump For Violating Klan Act, And It Seems *Pretty Goddamn On Point*

Jamie Lynn Crofts
February 17, 2021 04:04 PM

The NAACP suing Donald Trump under the Ku Klux Klan Act. Does it get much better than that?

Actually, it does! Just add in a Black congressman, Rudy Giuliani, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, and we have got ourselves a party! Except by "party," I mean federal lawsuit.

Representing Congressman Bennie Thompson, on Tuesday the NAACP filed Thompson v. Trump, suing the former president, his former lawyer, and the two Nazi-adjacent organizations for their parts in the January 6 insurrection and attack on the Capitol. (Side note: Did you know that the Proud Boys have registered as a fucking LLC? Yeah. "Proud Boys International, LLC." And the Oath Keepers are incorporated as a non-profit. So that's ... a real thing.)

Like the NAACP said when it filed the suit,

The coup attempt was a coordinated, months-long attempt to destroy democracy, to block the results of a fair and democratic election, and to disenfranchise millions of ballots that were legally cast by African-American voters.

Remember last weekend, when Mitch McConnell voted to acquit Donald Trump and then gave a long speech about how we should convict Donald Trump? (Have we said "fuck Mitch McConnell" yet today? Fuck Mitch McConnell.) One of McConnell's "points" was, "We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one."

But, as we all know too well, the American legal system works exactly in the way it was intended — to insulate powerful white men from accountability.

Here's our first post-presidency test balloon.

Here's the deal

The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, 42 U.S.C. § 1985, is a Reconstruction-era law aimed at allowing federal intervention when southern state and local governments that were literally being run by the Klan orchestrated and/or turned blind eyes to things like civil rights violations and lynchings. After the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant used it to prosecute klansmen in federal court. Since the end of Reconstruction, it has rarely been used.

Under the KKK Act, people can't

conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person [...] holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States [...] from discharging any duties thereof; or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave any [...] place[] where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or [...] to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties.

Well all these years later, that seems pretty on-point! As described in the suit,

Enacted as the "Ku Klux Klan Act" in 1871, Section 1985(1) was intended to protect against conspiracies, through violence and intimidation, that sought to prevent Members of Congress from discharging their official duties. The statute was enacted in response to violence and intimidation in which the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations were engaged during that time period.

And the 150-year-old law is actually super relevant at this particular moment in history, since, you know, these assholes just tried to throw a racist coup. After all,

The insurrection was the result of a carefully orchestrated plan by Trump, Giuliani and extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, all of whom shared a common goal of employing intimidation, harassment and threats to stop the certification of the Electoral College. They succeeded in their plan. After witnessing Capitol police barricading the doors of the House chamber with furniture, Congressman Thompson and fellow lawmakers donned gas masks and were rushed into the Longworth House Office Building where they sheltered with more than 200 other representatives, staffers and family members.

The complaint requests compensatory and punitive damages as well as a court order finding Trump, Giuliani, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys violated the KKK Act and prohibiting them from doing the same thing again. (In December, the NAACP filed a separate suit accusing Trump and the Republican Party of a "coordinated conspiracy to disenfranchise Black voters" with all of their attempts at voter disenfranchisement after the 2020 election.)

Plaintiff Bennie Thompson, Mississippi's sole Democratic member of Congress, was on the House floor when the mob took over the Capitol. He "feared for his physical safety[,] [...] feared for his life[,] and worried that he might never see his family again." He heard rioters "pounding on the door of the House chamber" while he was inside "and saw security guards move furniture to blockade the door."

He then heard the rioters trying to break into the chamber refer to Speaker Pelosi as a "bitch," saying they wanted to get their hands on her[.]

Along with the other members of Congress who were terrorized by the mob, the congressman had to wear a gas mask, hide on the floor, and then escape through a tunnel out of the building. He then had to shelter in place with a few hundred other people, including his shithead colleagues who refuse to wear masks to prevent the spread of a deadly disease.

Congressman Thompson told the NYT:

"I feared for my life," Mr. Thompson said. "Not a day passes that I don't think about this incident. I was committed to seeing justice brought to this situation."

He added: "This is me, and hopefully others, having our day in court to address the atrocities of Jan. 6. I trust the better judgment of the courts because obviously Republican members of the Senate could not do what the evidence overwhelmingly presented."

Representatives Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) plan to join the lawsuit as plaintiffs in the coming weeks.

The quest for accountability

This is the first lawsuit filed against the former president for his role in the January 6 insurrection, but it probably won't be the last. However, the NAACP will face some hurdles in its quest to hold the 45th president accountable.

It's all but certain that all of the defendants will use the First Amendment as a defense for their indefensible actions. Don and Rudy, to be sure, will be like, "We just said WORDS! FREE SPEECH! CANCEL CULTURE! dfsjaklewaio;rweajdfskl fjdsklf. MAGA!"

I'm sure we will hear more about Brandenburg v. Ohio, which Trump's lawyers absolutely butchered at the impeachment trial.

For the record, Brandenburg actually does not say that the president is allowed to incite all the insurrections and stage all the coups he wants. Rather, it specified that, because of the First Amendment, people can't be criminally charged with incitement just for telling people to do illegal things UNLESS what they said was both directed to and likely to get people to break the law. Gee, doesn't that sound like something that recently happened?

Another legal issue that will be interesting to watch is what the court actually has to say about the law the NAACP is suing under. Because the KKK Act doesn't have much modern precedent to rely on, how it ends up being enforced is really anybody's guess.

Like Steve Vladeck told CNN, the KKK Act

was specifically meant to provide federal civil remedies for federal officers who were prevented from performing their duties by two or more individuals, whether federal marshals in the post-Civil War South, federal judges in un-reconstructed lower courts; or federal legislators. [...] It's not at all hard to see how that provision maps onto what happened on January 6 — where, quite obviously, two or more people conspired to prevent the Joint Session of Congress from performing its constitutional function of certifying President Biden's Electoral College victory. The harder question is whether Trump himself can be connected to that conspiracy.

Joe Sellers, a partner at Cohen Milstein, the firm the NAACP is partnering with for this case, said "[t]he fact that there's very little precedent [involving this section of the statute] is a reflection of how extraordinary the events were that give rise to this lawsuit."

Kim Gardner, St. Louis's first Black chief prosecutor, used this statute to sue her own police force for all of its racist bullshit, but her suit was dismissed last fall.

This is going to be an uphill battle for the NAACP but is surely one they are prepared to fight. And if this case is allowed to proceed, the NAACP will get to conduct discovery, take depositions, and really dig into what Trump, Guiliani, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys actually did on January 6 and the roles they played in the failed coup.

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson told the New York Times that the decision to request punitive damages was an intentional decision and "rooted in a history of tools that have worked to fight back against white supremacy."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Ku Klux Klan that bankrupted a chapter," he said, referring to a 2008 judgment against a Kentucky-based Klan outfit that ordered the group to pay $2.5 million in damages. "This is very similar. If we do nothing, we can be ensured these groups will continue to spread and grow in their boldness. We must curb the spread of white supremacy."

Godspeed and good luck!

Here's the full complaint:

[ NAACP / Complaint / NYT ]




Rush Limbaugh, Funny How? What Was It You Liked About Him, Conservatives? Please, Be Specific.

Stephen Robinson
February 18, 2021 08:55 AM

(Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons license 2.0)

Conservatives are mourning the loss of Rush Limbaugh, who died Wednesday. I don't begrudge their sorrow or their affection for the radio host, who the Associated Press claimed "laid waste to political correctness with a merry brand of malice." Like Belize from Angels in America, I believe everybody's got to love something. But just out of idle curiousity, how exactly did he brighten their lives?

That's been a little unclear. The tributes have poured out like rancid milk. They look fine from a distance but smell off upon closer examination.

Twitter

Republican Chuck Grassley from Iowa tweeted:

Sad abt Rush Limbaugh's death he was a gr8 American patriot who really helped the conservative cause & will hv a decades long impact on the movement I kno listeners will miss him gr8ly.

“Patriot" is an interesting description. Bob Hope was a conservative Republican and undeniably a patriot. He performed for troops stationed overseas for 50 years. It was an act of kindness that extended beyond politics. Limbaugh described servicemen and women who spoke out against the Iraq War as “phony soldiers."

How did Limbaugh help the conservative cause? What was his actual impact on the movement? Matthew Gertz from Media Matters noted how vague rightwing remembrances of Limbaugh are. They're "curiously short on quotes from the show that he did for several decades." Chadwick Boseman died tragically young yet social media was flooded with clips that highlighted his work and demonstrated his generosity.

Twitter

It's not a coincidence that those who remember Limbaugh less fondly are the ones filling his virtual scrapbook with direct quotes and videos from his career. Limbaugh was born in Missouri, and that state's former Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, tweeted this tribute:

He was a Missouri institution. We rarely agreed, but no one can deny his influence. My best to his family, especially to my law school buddy, his younger brother Doc.

One of their many differences of opinion, I assume, involved Michael J. Fox, who started trending on Twitter around the same time Limbaugh's death hit the news. Back in 2006, Fox appeared in a political ad for McCaskill, who supported embryonic stem cell research. Fox has Parkinson's disease and has devoted his life to finding a cure and helping others who share his condition. Limbaugh accused him of faking his symptoms in the ad. It was repulsive but illustrative of how both men lived. Fox's guiding philosophy is unwavering optimism and humble gratitude despite whatever challenges we face. Limbaugh's was cruelty.

Conservatives have struggled to reconcile this truth. Republican politicians rationalized their support for him, no matter how grotesque his latest comment, by claiming he's “just" an entertainer, a funny guy ... but funny, how? His “humor" was mean-spirited, always punching down even when his targets were powerful people. Yet Limbaugh also spoke at CPAC and presidential candidates curried his favor, afraid of what he'd tell his “dittoheads" at home. This dynamic is one that the GOP would maintain with the former White House squatter.

So many conservative tributes hailed Limbaugh as a humorist, you'd think he was a pro-racial-discrimination Mark Twain. Once again, few examples were shared of his comedic artistry. It reminds me of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where we were told how funny the sketch comedy within the series was but we were never shown any compelling evidence.

Twitter

Rich Lowry tweeted:

Liberals who didn't listen to Rush, and just read the Media Matters accounts, never understood how *funny* he was. What set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.

I'm not sure “making fun of someone with Parkinson's" would play any better if you actually saw it. Lowry suggests that liberals never listened to Limbaugh, yet they were the ones sharing his “greatest hits" Wednesday. Like most of Limbaugh's defenders, Lowry told us that he was “wildly entertaining" but, even during a lengthy Twitter thread, never got around to including any LOL moments. That's what usually happens when legitimately funny people die, but there is no good in Limbaugh's career to be interred with his bones.

Limbaugh was a bully and a coward (his entire show was a “safe space"). He taught a generation of white people that it was OK to laugh at the vulnerable and ridicule the already despised. He never articulated a coherent philosophy other than liberals and minorities bad. One of his most enduring contributions to the political discourse is calling feminists "feminazis," presumably because feminists support abortion rights, although that's ascribing too much nuance to his name calling.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said that Limbaugh “inspired millions of conservatives," but she doesn't say if it was the “Homeless" or “AIDS" updates that moved them. Conservatives romanticize Limbaugh as a fearless truth teller, but the reality was more sinister. If someone trips and falls, the human impulse is to go and help. Limbaugh would point and laugh. That's not fearless. It's petty. And there's no truth in calling a law student a “slut."

I think the true appeal of Limbaugh's show was like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio. Visitors were given permission to indulge their worst impulses and over time they lost their humanity. Grassley is tragically correct that Limbaugh had a lasting impact on modern conservatism. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a designer imposter Limbaugh on social media, and now she's in Congress.

Kayleigh McEnany described herself as “the definition of a Rush baby," and her performance as White House press secretary — the lies, the insults, the childish taunts — bears his mark. Cruelty is Rush Limbaugh's legacy and unfortunately, it shall endure.

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.



PANDEMIC

THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

Photo of flu patients during the First World War



If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.

I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.



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.



Data can be found here, as always: 

This is also a good data site:
Worldometer - Coronavirus info

Last updated: February 20, 2021, 15:33 GMT

 United States

Coronavirus Cases:

28,606,256

Deaths:

507,795

Recovered:

18,803,870
About Worldometer
Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statistics for 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.
Worldometer is cited as a source in over 10,000 published books and in more than 6,000 professional journal articles and was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world.
THE CORONAVIRUS IS MUTATING NOW WHAT?

Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic - The Atlantic

A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918

No image available


SPACE AND SCIENCE



MARS ROVER - Perseverance
















https://medium.com/the-cosmic-companion/seeing-the-fifth-dimension-through-dark-matter-8df0c5be3168



Let the Subatomic Particle In

“I didn’t know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.” — Richard Brautigan



https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/02/13/2315241/can-dark-matter-be-explained-by-a-link-to-a-fifth-dimension

Can Dark Matter Be Explained By a Link to a Fifth Dimension? (popularmechanics.com)

Posted by EditorDavid  from the where's-the-matter dept.
The standard model of physics can't accommodate some observed phenomena, notes Popular Mechanics. Yet "In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension."While the "warped extra dimension" (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model first introduced in 1999, this research, published in The European Physical Journal C, is the first to cohesively use the theory to explain the long-lasting dark matter problem within particle physics...

The scientists studied fermion masses, which they believe could be communicated into the fifth dimension through portals, creating dark matter relics and "fermionic dark matter" within the fifth dimension.

Could dimension-traveling fermions explain at least some of the dark matter scientists have so far not been able to observe? "We know that there is no viable [dark matter] candidate in the [standard model of physics]," the scientists say, "so already this fact asks for the presence of new physics...." This pocket "dark sector" is one possible way to explain the huge amount of dark matter that, so far, has eluded detection using any traditional measurements designed for the standard model of physics. Fermions jammed through a portal to a warped fifth dimension could be "acting as" dark matter...

All it would take to identify fermionic dark matter in a warped fifth dimension would be the right kind of gravitational wave detector, something growing in prevalence around the world. Indeed, the answer to the dark matter conundrum could be just around the corner.


https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/02/20/0020201/the-first-black-hole-ever-discovered-is-more-massive-than-we-thought

Posted by msmash  from the unraveling-mysteries dept.
Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review:Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn't spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region called Cygnus X-1. (We now know the cosmic rays are produced by black holes. Back then, scientists disagreed about what it was: Stephen Hawking famously bet physicist Kip Thorne that this signal was not from a black hole, but he conceded in 1990.) Now, some 57 years later, scientists have learned that the black hole at Cygnus X-1 is much more massive than first believed -- forcing us to once again rethink how black holes form and evolve. This time, the observations were taken from Earth's surface. "To some extent, the result was serendipitous," says James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia, the lead author of the new study, published in Science. "We had not initially set out to remeasure the distance and black hole mass, but when we had analyzed our data, we realized its full potential."

Black holes are objects so massive that not even light, let alone physical matter, is supposed to escape its gravitational pull. Yet sometimes one inexplicably spews jets of radiation and ionized matter into space. Miller-Jones and his team wanted to investigate how matter is sucked into and expelled from black holes, so they took a closer look at Cygnus X-1. They observed the black hole for six days using the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of 10 radio telescopes sited across North America from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The resolution is comparable to what would be required to spot a 10-centimeter object on the moon, and it's the same technique that the Event Horizon Telescope used to snap the first photo of a black hole. Using a combination of measurements involving radio waves and temperatures, the team modeled the precise orbits of both Cygnus X-1's black hole and the massive supergiant star HDE 226868 (the two objects orbit each other). Knowing the orbits of each object allowed the team to extrapolate their masses -- in the case of the black hole, 21 solar masses, which is about 50% more than once thought.
We need to see this one again...





+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2102.20 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2059 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.

Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)