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 #2230 - Years That Ask Questions - Years That ANSWER - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE for 2103.27
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2230 - Years That Ask Questions - Years That ANSWER - WEEKLY HODGE PODGE for 2103.27
Hello again and welcome to the WEEKLY HODGE PODGE, a repository for some of the best and worst things I read this week, sometimes with curating and sometimes with none.
Categories are back!!
I am tired of "political correctness," which is just a bullshit way of saying "shit I do not have to worry about."
How about just less hate speech?
And so, why are people so angered (triggered?) by so-called "liberal" political correctness, which we should rename as "compassion, empathy, and kindness for others."
I have been reading Don Lemon's new book This is the Fire, an homage to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (which I plan to read next), and in the book, as he marched to his closing, he invoked the quote in the banner image above from Zora Neale Hurston's seminal and essential book Their Eyes Are Watching God.
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
Which year is this one? Because it seems to me that 2020 was a year that asked questions.
Lemon writes passionately about racism and slavery, "choosing to build an economy on the backs of abducted salves and indentured immigrants, our forefathers embedded dangerous fault lines deep beneath the crust of a towering nation that would evolve out of tyranny, through struggle, into greatness" (192).
Reparations?
White debt?
Manifest Destiny?
Lemon makes a great point to all those who argue (weakly) that reparations to the ancestors of the slaves would simply be a re-distribution of wealth. He claims simply that this argument proceeds from the assumption that the wealth was ever distributed in the first place.
Contrarians cannot argue the point Lemon makes in that quote, the point that the country was inarguably built on the labors of slaves and later "freed" black folk laboring under the new economic slavery and later Jim Crow.
He asks how this all ends? How does racism end? How does the exploitation of the ancestors of slaves end? How does the "uncivil war" that pits self-proclaimed patriots, unwilling to embrace change, against progressives still fighting for the changes promised by the Emancipation Proclamation and later the Civil Rights Act. "How does this end?" he asks (193).
"We know how it doesn't end," Lemon continues (193), "It doesn't end with the savage putting down of a slave uprising in Louisiana or the tear gassing of protestors on the streets of Washington DC. It doesn't end with half-measures, murders, marches, political correction, token wokeness, or ceding of the soul that engenders neighbor-hate and self-loathing. All these have been tried. Instead of answers, every wasted arrow that sought to silence rather than solve this problem hammered the question home, over, an endless drumbeat:
How does this end?
How does this end?
How does this end?
"People, there is no end. The answer is a new beginning, and that can be forged only in the crucible of a compassionately radical change" (Lemon, 193).
Lemon is as critical of "fake wokeness" as he is of denialists who want to claim that racism is not an issue anymore or that black people who "play the race card all the time" are over-sensitive. Because racism is "our national malady" and "a contagious assailant we've hosted for four hundred years" (Lemon, 163), Lemon argues that racism is so entrenched in the national consciousness of white people that it takes vigilant and constant self-introspection and action to overcome it. "Many who consider themselves "woke" are still part of the problem," Lemon proclaims. "They mask the deeply embedded proclivities of racism in a well-intentioned effort to keep it from spreading, but when it comes to actually solving the problem, they're no more helpful than the denialists, who claim their real problem is the cleansing fever burning in our streets. We are all vulnerable to the cascading systemic effects of this disease. Even within the Black community, not one of us is immune" (Lemon, 163).
Lemon sets forth some guiding principles for the so-called "woke" in a prescriptive fashion for the book he heralded as "what I say to my friends when they ask me about racism."
"We must engage with and advance meaningful, well-organized, nonviolent activism, supporting it with our presence, voices, and resources," he writes (181).
"Vote.
March.
Donate to well-researched causses.
Educate yourself and think before you tweet.
"Keep you eyes open and cameras at the ready, recognizing how important it is to focus the conversation with images that document incidents of racism and provide incontrovertible evidence for those seeking justice...Listen thoughtfully and speak mindfully, with the purpose of healing... the moment you're in now is the moment that matters" (181).
Photo by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons license 2.0
President Joe Biden yesterday put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of fixing immigration issues at the US-Mexico border, yet another in a long list of messes left by the previous administration. In addition to sorting out the logistics of the current increase in arrivals of unaccompanied minors, Harris will lead the administration's discussions with Mexico and the three "Northern Triangle" countries in Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to improve conditions in those home countries so people will be less inclined to migrate to the US.
A senior administration official said Harris' role would focus on "two tracks": both curbing the current flow of migrants and implementing a long-term strategy that addresses the root causes of migration. Cabinet members, including the secretary of state, are expected to work closely with Harris on these issues.
At a meeting on immigration yesterday, Biden said that he'd learned from his time working on immigration issues as Barack Obama's veep that "if you deal with the problems in the country, it benefits everyone." He said the previous occupant of the White House had largely ignored issues that drove migration, from gang violence to damage caused by natural disasters. But Joe what about the all the big ugly fences we got? Weren't they worth it?
Harris acknowledged that "there is no question that this is a challenging situation," and
said she planned to work with a number of stakeholders including the private sector, civil society and members of Congress who share the administration's interest in addressing the root causes of migration.
So it's a heck of a big job, but Harris seems like a great choice to handle it. NBC News says that Harris and Biden have already established a close working relationship, and that a "senior administration official" said Biden thought her work as California's attorney general would be useful to her, particularly her experience dealing with human rights and with organized crime. That official notes that "Biden has said over and over again that 'the person I trust most, the person I turn to when there's a hard issue, is Kamala Harris'."
Harris's biggest challenge will be balancing the goal of reducing undocumented immigration while also respecting migrants' rights, a matter that the previous administration didn't much bother with. At the meeting yesterday, Harris emphasized those goals:
While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek.
While Republicans have been trying to hype up the problems at the border — and there really are issues with adequately housing all the minors, mostly older teenagers, who have been crossing the border to request asylum — NBC News also points out that
Undocumented immigration tends to increase seasonally in the early spring after the cold winter months and ahead of the summer when border crossings can be deadly. While data shows a sharper increase in border crossings this spring compared to previous seasons, some experts say that increase is expected given the pent-up demand from people who had delayed their journeys amid the pandemic.
So yes, the overcrowding in border facilities needs to be solved; the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Health and Human Services Department, has been opening up more shelters to accommodate the kids who are crossing the border until they can be placed with sponsors, usually family members already living in the US. One thing that will help is that Team Biden recently terminated the odious Trump administration policy that shared HHS information on sponsors with ICE, which led to people being arrested and deported when they tried to get kids out of HHS custody.
We're pretty confident Harris will be up to the job. For instance, she's already opposed by just the right people, like Arizona's Republican Governor Doug Ducey, who whined that, "At no point in her career has she given any indication that she considers the border a problem or a serious threat." That's probably because people fleeing horrible situations in their home countries aren't a threat, dude. If we really want to ease problems at the border, we'll need to work with the countries people are coming from, so they'll have less reason to leave. Yes, madness, we know.
The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party is on the defensive after calling Michigan’s top three elected officials “witches” who need to be “softened up” so they can be “burn[ed] at the stake,” and quipping that “assassination” is a remedy for Michigan Republicans who had supported the impeachment of former President Donald Trump.
Ron Weiser, who was elected co-chair of the party in February, is also a member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents. After his comments were reported Friday by the Detroit News—a day after he’d made them to a local Republican meeting—his fellow regents called on him to resign from the university’s board. Late Friday Weiser tweeted that his comments about murdering fellow Republicans who had supported impeachment were “taken out of context,” and that he would never advocate for violence. But he didn’t address his misogynist attacks on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Attorney General Dana Nessel.
The three women have been under threat from state Republicans and right-wing activists upset for the last year about coronavirus restrictions and election procedures, particularly after Trump lost the state by roughly 150,000 votes in November. In October, state and federal agents disrupted a plot to kidnap and murder Whitmer by right-wing extremists who had stormed the state capitol with weapons in April 2020 to protest coronavirus business shutdowns. Some members of the group had met with state Republican legislators. In December, armed protesters upset about the election gathered outside of Benson’s home. Earlier this week, Nessel told a congressional committee that public officials in the state are under a “deluge” of threats so numerous that her office has had to adjust its capacity to review them.
A spokesperson for Whitmer said Friday that the comments are “destructive and downright dangerous,” pointing to the foiled kidnapping plot and the fact that state party leaders had helped organize travel to the January 6 protest and storming of the US Capitol. Later in the day Whitmer jokingly tweeted a picture of herself holding a copy of “The Witches Are Coming,” a 2019 book by the writer Lindy West.
Benson issued a statement calling Weiser’s statements “horrifically reckless and unconscionable,” and noted that this kind of rhetoric can be “later used as justification for very real threats made against government officials, election administrators, and democracy itself.” She also tweeted a picture of the good witch from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Nessel initially tweeted an image with the three women wearing witch hats with the message: “Witches who magically decrease Covid spread, increase voter turnout and hold sexual predators accountable without any help from the legislature? Sign me up for that coven.” Later in the day she tweeted again:
Number one: As fun as it is to watch Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger beat the shit out of Georgia Republicans and Donald Trump and all the other people who tried to steal the election for Trump, it's important to remember he is not actually "good." He's not above voter suppression, when it's done politely enough for his tastes. For instance, he's totally down with cutting way down on absentee voting in Georgia. Indeed, he's pretty much fine with rolling back voting rights.
Number two: That doesn't mean we can't LOVE watching him beat the shit out of wingnuts even worse than him. We are not here to steal your joy. We just want you to experience that joy in context.
And with that, we present to you Brad Raffensperger's review of Sidney Powell's jackass response to Dominion Voting Systems' $1.3 billion lawsuit against her. You know, her response that argues that nobody is fool enough to think Sidney Powell brings FACTS to an argument, in court.
The headline of Raffensperger's statement is "The Kraken Cracks Under Pressure: Sidney Powell Claims 'No Reasonable Person Would Conclude That [Her] Statements Were Truly Statements Of Fact.'" Yes, he (or his team) really wrote that.
And then he began:
Kraken lawyer ...
Yes, he just referred to her as "Kraken lawyer." Because that is what she is now.
And then he called her a grifter:
Sidney Powell admitted in a filing in federal court that "no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact." Powell made the filing in response to a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
"In the face of legal action, Sidney Powell admitted that her effort to make millions lying to the American people had no facts to begin with," said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
And then he blamed her directly for losing the Senate for the GOP, which is funny, but also reminds us that he's a dirty Republican:
"While the loss of the Senate due to her lies will have ramifications for years ...
Yes, good ones! Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are badasses! Anyway, back to Whack-A-Kraken:
"I most sympathize with those who believed her in the first place and who she now considers not reasonable enough to realize she should not have been taken seriously."
Brad Raffensperger says bless your heart to all the idiots dumb enough to believe Sidney Powell, and points out directly to their faces that her own response to getting sued for $1.3 billion was to say they were idiots who didn't realize she shouldn't be taken seriously.
And it just goes on like that, quoting from Powell's response to the Dominion lawsuit just like Wonkette did, and it's great.
We would include Sidney Powell's response to Raffensperger, but she's banned from Twitter, and therefore we deem it not worth our effort to even go find out if she responded, like, where would you even look?
Following the mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, the Senate is poised to spring into inaction on a pair of gun safety laws recently passed by the House. The measures, aimed at making sure all firearms sales are subject to background checks, are just about the mildest possible step toward strengthening gun control, but they're unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to pass in the Senate because that's just how extreme Republicans are about guns.
Still, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), for whom the Sandy Hook massacre was a defining moment, says he thinks "universal background checks" could pass:
We're going to sit down with Democratic leadership this week and talk about the path forward. [...] I think we've got two weeks of recess in which I think there'll be a lot of conversations, across the aisle, about the path forward on background checks.
You'd certainly think so. Polling consistently shows the vast majority of Americans (between 83 and 90 percent, depending on the poll) support background checks for all gun sales; and for that matter, the idea has very high support among gun owners and even members of the National Rifle Association. Those numbers just aren't reflected among members of the House and Senate, though, because with few exceptions, it's virtually impossible for a Republican who supports even the smallest curbs on guns to win a primary.
The solution is to stop electing Republicans, but we're stuck with the bunch we currently have for a while.
Murphy told NBC News he thinks the contrast between the high support for background checks and the inaction resulting from the need to pass bills with a supermajority just might be the lever for getting rid of the filibuster.
"If a measure that has 90 percent to 95 percent public support can't pass the Senate just because of our rules — not because it doesn't get the majority of support in the Senate — then something's really wrong here," Murphy said. "Democracy dies when things that have the majority of support in Congress, the support of the president and 90 percent public support can't become a law."
The last major effort to pass a strengthened background check law, the 2013 bill sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania), received a majority of votes in the Senate, but not the 60 it needed to actually move forward, which is part of why we're here again. Incredibly, now neither Manchin nor Toomey seem likely to support the bills passed by the House, which cover a wider range of gun sales and transfers (Manchin-Toomey only expanded background checks to cover private sales at gun shows and internet sales).
In a carefully parsed utterance, Toomey said, "I still support background checks on commercial sales. [...] We're having preliminary conversations and I hope we can get something across the goal line. But, you know, it's very difficult." Yeah, "commercial sales" isn't all sales.
Manchin also opposes the House bills because they would cover private sales and transfers between family members, with an exemption for some gifts from one family member to another.
"I come from a gun culture," Manchin told reporters. "Commercial transactions should be background checked. Commercial — you don't know a person. If I know a person, no."
So that's a useful quote, if only to nail down 2021's weasel words for inaction on guns.
And then there are the loonies, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Nobody even likes him in Texas), who may have intended to make a brilliant point about how terrible Democrats are, but underlined just how common massacres have become. After mentioning the mass murders in Atlanta and Boulder, Cruz listed a number of mass shootings just in Texas, which you might think would be an argument in favor of stopping the slaughter.
But instead, he followed that litany of death by complaining that "Every time there's a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders." You know, all these mass killings, every time.
Cruz promised he and Sen. Chuck Grassley would reintroduce a bill they like that would "target the bad guys, the felons, the fugitives, those with mental disease" and keep them from buying guns, with super tough penalties it they did. However, that bill would only provide even smaller, incremental improvements to the existing background check system. Its one redeeming feature is a provision criminalizing straw purchases of firearms, which, sure, let's do that.
But as long as there's a filibuster, and for that matter, a Congress terrified of the NRA, we may never get stronger background checks, to say nothing of passing a renewed assault weapons ban, as Joe Biden's calling for, or more serious safety measures like gun licensing.
Still we have to hope Chris Murphy's optimism gets us somewhere. Call your senators and tell them to pass the House background check bills — If the Senate can't take that very minimal step, we'll at least have a stronger case for fixing that undemocratic body.
A classroom in a shelter at Ft. Bliss, 2017. HHS photo.
It turns out that the COVID-19 pandemic, the rickety vaccine roll-out, and the recession weren't the only problems Donald Trump ignored while trying to overturn democracy following the 2020 election. NBC News reports that the Biden transition team alerted Trump administration officials to a rise in unaccompanied minors crossing the border back in early December, calling on them to prepare to house the incoming teenagers, but the Trump team just sat around with their thumbs up their asses until a few days before Biden was inaugurated. That's according to "two Biden transition officials and a U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions." NBC News 'splains,
The Biden transition team made its concerns about the lack of shelter space known to Trump officials both at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, laying out the need to open an influx shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, and to issue what's known as a "request for assistance" that would start the process of surveying new sites for expanded shelters, according to the transition officials.
As we've noted and as Joe Biden pointed out at his press conference Thursday, arrivals of migrants at the border tend to be a seasonal thing, regardless of who's in office. Now we know the Trump team knew there were a lot of unaccompanied minors coming, but didn't do much of anything to prepare for them. After all, by the time the numbers really started growing, it would be Joe Biden's problem, and even better, it could be spun as a "crisis" he'd caused.
One of the former transition officials said, "They were sitting on their hands. [...] It was incredibly frustrating." Why yes, we bet it was!
The problem was made worse by the coronavirus pandemic, which meant that HHS's system of shelters was only able to house half its normal capacity under social distancing rules. That's part of the reason HHS hasn't been able to quickly move kids from crowded Border Patrol intake stations to its own facilities. Biden said at his presser yesterday the administration is doing all it can to get minors out of those overcrowded border stations, which Biden called "totally unacceptable."
After the Biden transition team told Trump officials about the growing numbers of unaccompanied kids in "multiple meetings, multiple times a week" starting in December, Trump's HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally did something. On January 15, Azar issued that "request for assistance" so the search for places to house incoming minors could start. Even so, the Carrizo Springs HHS facility didn't open until the Biden administration did it in February; other sites at military bases and convention centers are only now starting to be opened, including the expansion of capacity by another 500 beds at Carrizo Springs.
"In a transition team, you don't have hold of the buttons of power. You can advise, you can strongly direct, you can strongly recommend, but at the end of the day, the outgoing administration was responsible for action and they just didn't take it. They gave no reason," the Biden transition official said.
Maybe we should put up some kind of monument to the four years of the Trump administration, with "IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS BAD" carved in granite.
NBC News also quotes an unnamed "senior Trump administration HHS official" who said that at the time Trump slunk off to Florida on January 20, "we were confident we had enough beds to handle any pre-existing surge from the last 20 years." After all, didn't HHS have thousands of empty beds in its existing HHS shelters, where the total capacity was 13,000 beds? Bit of a problem with that confidence, though, since only half the capacity on paper was really available due to the pandemic safety rules.
Warnings about the shortage of shelter space weren't only coming from the Biden transition, though; another official who "served under both the Trump and the Biden administrations" told NBC News that career HHS staff warned about the lack of space.
The official said it was "irresponsible of the Trump administration not to listen to us when we were throwing up red flags."
"The writing was on the wall," the U.S. official said. "It was not at this level yet, but if the number of beds needed was going up, what do we do?"
Haha, as if the Trump people would ever listen to their enemies in the incoming administration or the Deep State! Experts are bad.
There was one other factor at play, of course, which is that under the guise of the pandemic, Trump's DHS was simply not admitting anyone claiming asylum at all. It used a public health ruling from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to deport all asylum seekers, including minors. Yes, even after the administration was told to knock that the fuck off:
Shortly after the election, on Nov. 18, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could no longer expel children under that CDC authority, leading the numbers of children entering the U.S. to begin climbing. That injunction was later lifted, but the Biden administration made the decision to allow unaccompanied migrant children fleeing violence to enter the U.S. to pursue asylum.
We should also note that Biden has not yet lifted that health rule, known as "Article 42," for any but unaccompanied minors, and is still using it to expel adults and families. That's not good!
The ACLU, which sued the Trump administration over the practice, saying it violated asylum seekers' due process rights, is continuing the lawsuit against the Biden administration. Some "open border," huh? But there again, the actions of the Trump administration have added to the problem: To get back to the rule of law, the Biden administration has to undo the mess that Trump and his team of fascists created. And as soon as we go back to a constitutional immigration process, the Right will again scream about Biden's having caused a "crisis."
A sitting Democratic state representative from Georgia was detained by state troopers shortly after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a restrictive voting rights bill into law, according to local news reports and videos circulating on social media.
Video shows police handcuffing Rep. Park Cannon after she knocked on the door of the chamber where Kemp was signing a law that restricts access to the polls and makes it easier to overturn lawful elections. Cannon was one of several people protesting outside the governor’s chamber.
It’s unclear what, if anything, Cannon has been charged with. A Georgia Capitol Police representative reached by phone was unaware of the details of the arrest, and the state’s Public Information Office did not respond to a request for comment before the time of publication.
As my my colleague Ari Berman reported, the bill is “a major power grab” passed “on a party-line vote.” Stacey Abrams called the measure a part of a push to restrict voting that is “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Breaking: Brian Kemp signs 95 page Georgia GOP voter suppression bill allowing GOP takeover of state/county election boards, unlimited challenges to voter eligibility, restricting drop boxes & making it crime to give voters food & water in line. It will be challenged in court
He's baaaaaaack! Steven Biss, libelslander lawyer to the stars, has blessed us with another BATSHIT INSANE complaint to brighten up this fine spring day.
After an unbroken string of "successes" representing such luminaries as Dan Bongino in a suit against the Daily Beast; PragerU stickin' it to YouTube for tortious cancel culturing; and Devin Nunes versus Twitter, CNN, the Washington Post, Ryan Lizza, and a cow avatar, Biss is back with another razzledazzle lawsuit against CNN on behalf of Mike Flynn's very not-crazy brother and sister-in-law. And he's bringing everyone's favorite insurance lawyer Jeremy Zenilman along for the ride, since they did such a bang-up job together when they took on CNN last time.
That's right, baby, Earthlink & Hotmail, Attorneys at Law, are back with the smackdown.
Okay, everyone take three deep breaths and we will dive into this magnificent dumpster fire together.
READY?
See, on February 5, the network aired a story by reporter Donie O'Sullivan titled "CNN Goes Inside A Gathering Of QANON Followers." And in the middle of the report, there was a one-second clip of Mike Flynn and his annoying family saying, "Where we go one, we go all."
It's at the 1:25 mark — blink and you'll miss it. The clip came from a video posted by Flynn himself to his now-suspended Twitter account.
CNN never named Jack and Leslie Flynn, neither in the February broadcast nor in the original story it posted online when Flynn tweeted the image out in July. Nevertheless the couple insists that they were defamed and grievously harmed by the suggestion that they might be associated with a weird cult.
"On February 4, 2021, CNN falsely accused Plaintiffs of being 'followers' and supporters of the 'dangerous', 'violent', 'racist', 'extremist', 'insurrectionist', 'domestic terrorism' movement – QAnon," they insist in an Olympic-level feat of copy pasta.
Then CNN compounded the injury when Anderson Cooper talked about QAnon on a February 26 broadcast. Cooper never mentioned the Flynns, but obviously this reopened the wound inflicted three weeks before, since that one second blip of Jack and Leslie was still top of mind for CNN viewers.
And how very dare CNN suggest that "Where we go one, we go all" is a known QAnon catchphrase?
The phrase "where we go one, we go all" was first engraved on a bell on one of President John F. Kennedy's sailboats, acknowledging the unity of mankind. In his video published on July 4, 2020, General Flynn intended to encourage people to think about being good citizens, to love country and be good patriots. The video had nothing to do with QAnon or recruiting "digital soldiers" for an apocalyptic reckoning.
LOL, nope.
Anyway, Jack and Leslie Flynn would never have anything to do with QAnon, as you can see from this Tweet they included in their very serious lawsuit.
.......................
Why would CNN sayimplysubliminally suggest such terrible things about Jack and Leslie Flynn, you are wondering?
CNN is an agent of the Democratic Party and a Democratic Party trumpet. CNN recruits, hires and promotes journalists who share its extreme ideology and political viewpoints. CNN harbors an institutional animosity, hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will towards the Flynn family, and, in particular, General Flynn. This animosity, bias, prejudice and desire to harm motivated CNN to publish the intentionally false statements and insinuations about Plaintiffs at issue in this case. CNN intended to inflict harm through knowing or reckless falsehoods. CNN published the false statements as part of a broad, pretextual, premeditated and ongoing disinformation campaign against General Flynn orchestrated by political operatives and agents of the Democratic National Committee ("DNC") for whom CNN acts as a surrogate and bullhorn. CNN fears General Flynn. The purpose of the national campaign is to impair or abrogate General Flynn's ability to run for political office in 2022 or 2024 or his ability to support another candidate for office.
It's so obvious!
Jack and Leslie have suffered terribly since CNN flashed their photo onscreen for one second last month, forever linking them with "a domestic violence [sic] extremist group." For instance, "Jack is afraid that he will be terminated for the first time in his life" from his job as a general manager at a seafood wholesaler. He didn't get fired, but he worries about it, you know. And Leslie has been a stay-at-home mother for 15 years.
So, if you add up all the "pain, embarrassment, humiliation, emotional suffering, injury to their reputations, lost future earnings and diminished earning capacity," that math works out to $75 million. If Jeff Zucker could just cut these good people a check, they'll be on their way, please and thank you.
Or, perhaps not. We note that New York, where the case is filed, just reformed its anti-SLAPP statute as a disincentive to just this kind of crap litigation. So the Flynns may live to regret this maneuver — and unlike Dan Bongino, they probably can't just pull the cash to pay CNN's legal fees out of the petty cash drawer.
Ah, well. Fuck around and find out, right? Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to keep refreshing Court Listener until we find out which federal judge wound up with this turd on their docket.
H&M disappeared from the internet in China as the government raised pressure on shoe and clothing brands and announced sanctions Friday against British officials in a spiraling fight over complaints of abuses in the Xinjiang region. From a report:H&M products were missing from major e-commerce platforms including Alibaba and JD.com following calls by state media for a boycott over the Swedish retailer's decision to stop buying cotton from Xinjiang. That hurts H&M's ability to reach customers in a country where more than a fifth of shopping is online. Shockwaves spread to other brands as dozens of celebrities called off endorsement deals with Nike, Adidas, Burberry, Uniqlo and Lacoste after state media criticized the brands for expressing concern about Xinjiang. Brands are struggling to respond to pressure abroad to distance themselves from abuses without triggering Chinese retaliation and losing access to one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets. That pressure is rising as human rights activists are lobbying sponsors to pull out of the Beijing Winter Olympics planned for February 2022. Tencent, which operates games and the popular WeChat message service, announced it was removing Burberry-designed costumes from a popular mobile phone game.
Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.
In a ruling likely to transform the bail system of the nation’s largest state, the California Supreme Court held today that courts must weigh a defendant’s finances in setting bail. “Conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail,” Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar wrote in the court’s unanimous decision, “is unconstitutional.”
California has the second-highest pretrial detention rate in the country, according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice. Roughly 40,000 of the people in California’s jails—more than 50 percent of its total jail population—are incarcerated while awaiting trial. About half of them are there because they simply can’t afford bond. Nationwide, almost three-fourths of the US jail population had not been convicted of any crime, the Prison Policy Institute found in 2020. The pandemic has further prolonged pretrial custody: according to a University of California, Los Angeles, study, 41 percent of Los Angeles County defendants spent six or more months in jail while awaiting trial—up from 35 percent before the pandemic. Of the study’s 400 participants, 94 percent reported inability to pay bail.
Today’s ruling is four years in the making: In 2018, a California appeals court issued a landmark ruling in the same case, In re Kenneth Humphrey, requiring judges to take into consideration a person’s ability to pay in setting bail rather than relying strictly on bail schedules.
In May 2017, Humphrey, a 63-year-old Black man, was charged with theft: stealing $5 and a bottle of cologne from his neighbor at a San Francisco single-room-occupancy hotel in 2017. His bail was set at $600,000; Humphrey did not have $600,000. When he agreed to undergo a drug rehabilitation course, it was reduced to $350,000. He didn’t have $350,000 either.
When Humphrey fought to be released on his own recognizance without money bail, he told the judge about his age, the fact that he was unemployed, and his lack of financial resources. The trial courts denied his request. After much petitioning, Humphrey was released without having to pay bail—he instead had to wear an electronic ankle monitor and participate in a substance abuse program. (One of his lawyers was then-deputy public defender Chesa Boudin, now San Francisco’s district attorney.)
The fight didn’t stop after Humphrey was released. In California’s legislature, Senate Bill 10, which would have replaced the state’s money-based pretrial detention with a system of risk assessments, was signed into law in 2018 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. But Californians voted down a 2020 ballot initiative to get rid of cash bail, preventing the 2018 law from going into effect. Some progressive voters objected to the bias associated with algorithmic, risk-based assessments that might replace cash bail, while conservatives objected on law-and-order grounds—and bail-bonds firms, which feared their doors would be shuttered, objected most loudly of all.
The Supreme Court ruling follows on the heels of a groundswell of support for criminal justice reforms across the state. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, district attorneys Boudin and George Gascon have barred their deputy prosecutors from seeking cash bail for misdemeanor and non-violent offenses.
Humphrey’s case “challenges this system with a claim as simple as it is urgent,” Justice Cuellar wrote in the court’s opinion. “No person should lose the right to liberty simply because that person can’t afford to post bail.”
Posted by BeauHD from the outdated-info-with-potentially-nullified-results dept.
whh3 writes:The NIAID issued a statement early Tuesday saying that they had concerns about the data that AstraZeneca included in their Monday-morning release touting the effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccine.Slashdot reader phalse phace has shared additional information via The Hill. They write:U.S. health officials from the Data and Safety Monitoring Board issued an unusual statement that it was "concerned by information released by AstraZeneca on initial data from its COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial." This comes less than 24 hours after AstraZeneca said its vaccine had an "efficacy of 79% at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% efficacy at preventing severe disease and hospitalization" and a week after several countries suspended dosing of the vaccine due to concerns of dangerous blood clots.
The Data and Safety Monitoring Board "expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data." As an oversight committee, the Data and Safety Monitoring Board helps regulate and evaluate clinical trials of new medicines to ensure accuracy and adherence to protocols. In a statement released early Tuesday morning, AstraZeneca said the interim results it announced on Monday were current as of Feb. 17. The latest development could throw a wrench in AstraZeneca's plan to seek the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for its vaccine.Additional coverage:The New York Times
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.
rushtobugment shares a report from ScienceAlert:Using the positions and shifting light of stars, both near and far, astronomer Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones has demonstrated the feasibility of autonomous, on-the-fly navigation for spacecraft traveling far beyond the Solar System. "When traveling to the nearest stars, signals will be far too weak and light travel times will be of order years," Bailer-Jones wrote in his paper, which is currently available on the preprint server arXiv, where it awaits peer review from the astronomy community. "An interstellar spacecraft will therefore have to navigate autonomously, and use this information to decide when to make course corrections or to switch on instruments. Such a spacecraft needs to be able to determine its position and velocity using only onboard measurements."
With a catalog of stars, Bailer-Jones was able to show that it's possible to work out a spacecraft's coordinates in six dimensions -- three in space and three in velocity -- to a high accuracy, based on the way the positions of those stars changes from the spacecraft's point of view. "As a spacecraft moves away from the Sun, the observed positions and velocities of the stars will change relative to those in a Earth-based catalog due to parallax, aberration, and the Doppler effect," he wrote. "By measuring just the angular distances between pairs of stars, and comparing these to the catalog, we can infer the coordinates of the spacecraft via an iterative forward-modeling process."
Bailer-Jones tested his system using a simulated star catalog, and then on nearby stars from the Hipparcos catalog compiled in 1997, at relativistic spacecraft speeds. Although this is not as accurate as Gaia, that's not terribly important - the aim was to test that the navigation system can work. With just 20 stars, the system can determine the position and velocity of a spacecraft to within 3 astronomical units and 2 kilometers per second (1.24 miles per second). This accuracy can be improved inverse to the square root of the number of stars; with 100 stars, the accuracy came down to 1.3 astronomical units and 0.7 kilometers per second. [...] The system hasn't taken stellar binaries into consideration, nor has it considered the instrumentation. The aim was to show that it could be done, as a first step towards actualizing it. It's even possible that it could be used in tandem with pulsar navigation so that the two systems might be able to minimize each other's flaws.
Sam Blake, writing at Wolfram Blog:The Zodiac Killer (an unidentified American serial killer active during the 1960s and 70s) sent numerous taunting letters to the press in the San Francisco area with regard to a local murder spree. In these letters, the killer took responsibility for the crimes and threatened to commit further murders. He also included three ciphers, each containing one-third of a 408-character cryptogram. The killer claimed that this cryptogram would reveal his identity when deciphered. The killer sent the fourth and final cipher (discussed in the linked post) to the San Francisco Chronicle after the 408-character cryptogram, deciphered in 1969, did not reveal the killer's identity.
In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I'd been putting off for years. I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2103.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2094 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.
United States
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