U.S. District Court Judge John W. Lungstrum dismissed every one of the Hartes’s claims. Lungstrum found that sending a SWAT team into a home first thing in the morning based on no more than a positive field test and spotting a suspect at a gardening store was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment. He found that the police had probable cause for the search, and that the way the search was conducted did not constitute excessive force. He found that the Hartes had not been defamed by the raid or by the publicity surrounding it. He also ruled that the police were under no obligation to know that drug testing field kits are inaccurate, nor were they obligated to wait for the more accurate lab tests before conducting the SWAT raid. The only way they’d have a claim would be if they could show that the police lied about the results, deliberately manipulated the tests or showed a reckless disregard for the truth — and he ruled that the Hartes had failed to do so.
Less than a month after taking office, Kentucky’s newly elected Republican Gov. Matt Bevin reversed a move by his Democratic predecessor that had restored the voting rights of about 140,000 former felons.
Those impacted, who are overwhelmingly African American and lower income, had already completed their felony sentences but remained permanently disenfranchised. The order excluded those convicted of violent crimes, sex crimes, bribery or treason.
Bevin’s move Tuesday night goes against promises he made during the campaign to keep the restoration of voting rights in place. He even told reporters in November that he would stand up to his own party on the issue and convince them it was the right thing to do. Now, thanks to his order, tens of thousands of Kentuckians will not only lose the opportunity to regain their voting rights, they will also be permanently unable to serve on a jury, run for office, or obtain a vocational license.
In another executive order this week, Bevin reversed former Gov. Beshear’s move to raise the state’s minimum wage for government workers and contractors to $10.10 an hour, bringing it back down to $7.25 an hour. About 800 state workers who have already gotten raises will be able to keep them, but new hires will now have to start at the lower pay rate. In the order, Bevin hinted that he would prefer the state have no minimum wage at all: “Wage rates ideally would be established by the demands of the labor market instead of being set by the government,” he said.
After Dalene Bowden, a food service worker at Irving Middle School in Idaho, gave a free hot lunch to a 12-year-old girl who said she was hungry and didn't have any money, she was fired even though she offered to pay for the meal.
Clifford Cain Jr., a retired electrician in Baltimore, was used to living on a tight budget, carefully apportioning his Social Security and pension benefits to cover his rent and medication for multiple sclerosis.
So Mr. Cain was puzzled when he suddenly could not make ends meet. Months later, he discovered why: A debt collector had garnished his bank account after suing him for about $4,500 the company said he owed on an old debt.
Mr. Cain said he never knew the lawsuit had been brought against him until the money was gone. Neither did other Baltimore residents who were among the hundreds of people sued by the collector, Midland Funding, a unit of the Encore Capital Group, in Maryland State Court. Some of them said they did not even owe any money, or their debt had long expired and was not legally collectible, according to a review of court records.
In any case, the Encore subsidiary was not licensed to collect debt in Maryland.
Yet when Mr. Cain brought a class action in 2013 against Midland Funding, the company successfully fought to have the lawsuit dismissed.
If the plaintiffs wanted to try to recover their money, they would have to do so in private arbitration. And because class actions are banned in arbitration, Mr. Cain and the others would have to fight the unit of Encore — one of the largest debt buyers in the country with vast legal resources — one by one.
In a notice received by Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast late Monday, an official with the Department of State Health Services informed the Houston-based provider that it would not renew its contract for HIV prevention services.
The long-standing grant, which funds HIV testing and prevention services, was set to expire on Dec. 31, according to the notice which was obtained by The Texas Tribune.
“There will be no further renewals of this contract,” a DSHS official wrote in the notice to Planned Parenthood.
The contract is federally funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but managed by the state. A spokeswoman for the CDC said she was unaware of the state’s notice and did not immediately provide comment.
By ending Planned Parenthood’s contract, the state is cutting off almost $600,000 in annual funding, which the health care provider used for HIV testing and counseling, condom distribution and referral consultations.
Merry Christmas! (See, I have no trouble with wishing people a Merry Christmas.) And a belated Blessed Yule.
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| The moment of solstice. |
A 14,000-year-old thigh bone suggests a mysterious prehistoric humanoid species may have lived alongside humans in southwest China.
The partial femur was discovered in Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, in 1989, but researchers recently published their analysis of the finding in the journal PLoS One, reported Sci-News.com.
The thigh bone is small like the primitive species Homo habilis, with a narrow shaft, and thin outer layer, but the walls of the shaft are reinforced in high-stress areas and the primary flexor muscle is very large and faces backwards, researchers said.
The Maludong humanoid likely weighed about 110 pounds, which is considered very small by pre-modern and Ice Age human standards.
At the outset of the Republican debate on CNN last night, moderator Wolf "Rejoice in My White Stubble of Journalistic Integrity" Blitzer informed the candidates, "You all have different approaches to keeping the country safe. And that will be the focus of tonight's debate." Yet for a debate on "the security of this nation," the threats discussed were few and, frankly, exceedingly rare. Chances are pretty damn good that you're never going to be attacked by a radical Muslim extremist terrorist supervillain flying Godzilla or whatever the fuck we're supposed to be afraid of.
MARCO RUBIO: As I’ve said, that would be conceding that the current Constitution is somehow wrong and needs to be fixed. I don’t think the current Constitution gives the federal government the power to regulate marriage. That belongs at the state and local level. And that’s why if you want to change the definition of marriage, which is what this argument is about.
1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?
2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state?
It’s not about discrimination. It is about the definition of a very specific, traditional, and age-old institution. If you want to change it, you have a right to petition your state legislature and your elected representatives to do it. What is wrong is that the Supreme Court has found this hidden constitutional right that 200 years of jurisprudence had not discovered and basically overturn the will of voters in Florida where over 60% passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in the state constitution as the union of one man and one woman.
Also, Marco Rubio is a smarmy little creep.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeted a planeload of weary Syrian refugees landing in Toronto early Friday, telling the first to disembark that “you’re safe at home now” as he handed them winter coats.
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“Tonight they step off the plane as refugees, but they walk out of this terminal as permanent residents of Canada,” Mr. Trudeau told government employees gathered at the airport.
“This is a wonderful night where we get to show not just a planeload of new Canadians what Canada is all about, but we get to show the world how to open our hearts and welcome people who are fleeing extraordinarily difficult straits,” the prime minister said.
Ellis County Constable Mike Jones, who once referred to Muslims as "rock monkeys" and called for executing the entire family of anyone who kills an American, responded to the plan to house the unaccompanied children on his Facebook page Wednesday.
“Shouldn’t we be moving be moving them closer to the border so we can kick their butts back across the Rio Grande?" Jones wrote. "I am told these illegals are NOT Syrians, but are South Americans. Are you kidding me? Are we supposed to believe anything the Obama administration tells us?"
Jones, whose Facebook page show photos of him wearing 2nd Amendment tee shirts, added that because the federal government isn’t providing security, local law enforcement will be on a heightened state of alert, and noted, "We are oath keepers," a reference to the so-called patriot movement that some see as right-wing vigilantes.
“My advice to everyone is to remain vigilant, to carry your weapon at all times,” Jones wrote. “Do not hesitate to call 911 if you suspect something is going on. Let us check it out. Meanwhile we will be working hard to get these folks out of Ellis County.”
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
Brian Beutler puts it all together in long form:
While closing the country to foreign Muslims altogether is a radical idea relative to our founding ideals and current policy, it is but an incremental step relative to the outer bounds of legitimate debate in the GOP primary. Republican presidential candidates have supported discriminating against Muslims in our refugee policy, and opposed the very notion of a Muslim-American president, all without subjecting themselves to universal condemnation. The most surprising part of the latest Trump story is that it proves a Republican candidate can take Islamophobia too far for his party’s tastes.For most liberals, and for the Trump-backing or Trump-curious segments of the right, the Trump phenomenon needs little further explanation. The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.
Five years ago today, a young girl named Amaya was legally adopted by her foster parents.
Two weeks ago, Amaya was featured in American Girl magazine. In her own words she shared the story of coming from the foster care system, becoming part of her permanent family, as well as the charity work she and her parents do in support of other foster kids.
Not long after the magazine was published, right-wing watchdogs One Million Moms called for a boycott of American Girl Doll and their magazine, warning parents against exposing their daughters to such a family.
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| (L to R) Greyson, Daddy Rob, Makai, Amaya, Dada Reece, Tristan |
As I mentioned, Amaya and her family are involved in charity work related to foster kids. Amaya’s father, Rob, is also a former foster kid. As a child, he recalls arriving at the home of foster parents with his few earthly belongings in a trash bag. This is not an uncommon occurrence. This is still happening today.
Rob co-founded Comfort Cases with the mission of providing a brand new suitcase, duffel bag, or backpack (along with toiletries, pajamas, stuffed animals, etc.) for every foster child in need. Since the organization’s start in October 2013, Comfort Cases has assembled and donated over 10,000 cases.
• Comfort Cases held its annual Holiday Packing Party on November 21, assembling 500 more cases than the previous year, a 70% increase.
• The total number of cases collected and distributed in 2015 topped 10,000 — 4,000 more than 2014, and an increase of 65%.
• With contributions coming in from all over the world, monetary donations to Comfort Cases will triple what they were in 2014. That’s 300%, folks.
Headmaster Thomas McLaughlin told KSAT-TV that three of the school’s 241 families have removed their children in protest of the decision.
“There have been some [pushback] based on this communication and the direction that the school is moving that have concluded that this school may not be the right fit for them and their family,” McLaughlin said, adding that feedback from an overwhelming majority of families has been positive.
News media are confounded by The Donald. They have long politely overlooked conventional lies, such as claims that cutting taxes will reduce the federal budget or that Democrats hate Jesus. Now they’re covering a national candidate who is spewing lies at unprecedented rates (except perhaps by Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, both of whom seem to be fading). If someone bravely corrects The Donald and explains that what he is saying is demonstrably, verifiably, I’ve got it right here in black and white not true, he just repeats his lie even more loudly.
And people like the Hot Air commenter eat it up, because he is showing them the universe as they want it to be. They’re not going to give that up easily.
Black holes are known for their voracious appetites. These bodies -- formed when a massive star collapses upon itself -- have occasionally been described as the “vacuum cleaners” of the universe and are notorious for their tendency to wreak havoc on the usual laws of physics that govern the rest of the cosmos.
Now, for the first time ever, scientists have witnessed a black hole swallowing a star and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light -- a rare event that occurs when a star stumbles across a black hole’s gravitational well.
Greenwald on the CNN debacle:
Labott’s crime wasn’t that she expressed an opinion. It’s that she expressed the wrong opinion: after Paris, defending Muslims, even refugees, is strictly forbidden. I’ve spoken with friends who work at every cable network and they say the post-Paris climate is indescribably repressive in terms of what they can say and who they can put on air. When it comes to the Paris attacks, CNN has basically become state TV (to see just how subservient CNN is about everything relating to terrorism, watch this unbelievable “interview” of ex-CIA chief Jim Woolsey by CNN’s Brooke Baldwin; or consider that neither CNN nor MSNBC has put a single person on air to dispute the CIA’s blatant falsehoods about Paris despite how many journalists have documented those falsehoods).
So, you now, this is where we are now. We've got the media suspending reporters for tweeting "lady liberty bowed her head" after the House voted yesterday to stop Syrian refugees frm coming into the country, even as many of their biggest stars have been behaving like a bunch of hysterical schoolgirls 24/7 ever since Paris. We have the front-runner of the Republican party talking about he necessity to "do things that were unthinkable even a year ago" and "bombing the shit out of them." He also said we would have to have Muslims register with the government to be tracked by a database.(No word on whether it will be necessary to sew some kind of symbol on their clothing...)
Now we have the leading establishment candidate saying we have to "shut down" not just mosques but websites, cafes, diners --- anyplace where radicals are being inspired. He left out libraries and book stores but surely that was an oversight.
It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.
France is in a state of shock this morning in the wake of a near-simultaneous rolling attacks at six different Paris locations Friday night by gunmen and suicide bombers. The situation is still fluid and details are coming in by the moment. More than 120 have been killed and dozens are in critical condition in hospitals. The latest word as I write this is that the Islamic State claims responsibility. That claim is unverified. The identity and nationality of the attackers as well as victims is still being investigated.
“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said. “Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.”
In the Old Testament, Joseph, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. He eventually rose to become a top aide to the Egyptian pharaoh, advising him of a dream vision he had of coming years of famine in the ancient kingdom. Joseph’s sage advice of the coming famine (and directions to store gain) helped the Egyptians survive the famine.
Carson said the design of the pyramids made clear they were for grain storage.
“And when you look at the way that the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they’d have to be that way for various reasons. And various of scientists have said, ‘Well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they have special knowledge and that’s how—’ you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you.”
Talking with Newsmax, a right wing website, Santorum was asked about HERO and a case involving a transgender girl being barred from using the girl's locker room at school. . . .
"I don’t know why children at that age — why this is even an issue, the idea that we are introducing this type of real dangerous confusion for young people at this early age. Do we really care about what we’re doing to millions of children who don’t have gender confusion and basically introducing the subject and saying, ‘maybe you should, maybe this is something you should start thinking about at age seven’?," a rambling Santorum asked.
"I mean this is really dangerous and it’s going too far because it is having an impact on not just folks who may be in a difficult situation at an early age but many who would never have been in that situation but now are being confronted with it."
Think of it this way. If I devoted this space to explaining that supply side economics doesn't work, starting wars is a bad idea, or opposition to gay marriage is hypocritical, Constitutionally unjustifiable, and ignorant, how interesting would that be for you to read? In the last 15 years how many times would you estimate you've read those arguments? How many times have you made them or explained this to someone unwilling or unable to understand them? How many sentences into that post would your eyes glaze over and your mouse begin poking around for something more interesting?
It's just too much effort to continue to take these people seriously. The leading GOP candidates are an actual reality TV troll, a clinically insane man who hears voices from god, a woman whose entire resume is a series of staggering failures in the corporate world, and George W. Bush's dumber brother.
After five years of bitter clashes, Republican congressional leaders and President Obama on Monday night appeared to settle their last budget fight by reaching a tentative deal that would modestly increase spending over the next two years, cut some social programs, and raise the federal borrowing limit. . . .
The agreement would raise spending by $80 billion over two years, not including a $32 billion increase included in an emergency war fund. Those increases would be offset by cuts in spending on Medicare and Social Security disability benefits, as well as savings or revenue from an array of other programs, including selling oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserves. The Medicare savings would come from cuts in payments to doctors and other health care providers.
An accord to lift the debt ceiling and settle the spending impasse before then would free Mr. Ryan to begin his speakership without a pending crisis, and potentially empower him to pursue some of the bold ideas he has put forward previously on tax and budget policy that helped catapult him to prominence and led to his being chosen as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2012.
In 2008, there were financial bailouts for megabanks and foreclosures for homeowners. There was vulture capitalist Paul Singer seizing an Argentine naval vessel in a dispute over debt in 2012. There was the European Central Bank bringing Greece to heel this summer after voters in January elected Alexis Tsipras to end the “vicious cycle of austerity.” Coming Soon: TPP. There are probably other cases as well. If it was not clear already who is really running the planet, here is another clue.
In Portugal's elections earlier this month, Socialists, Communists, and the Left Bloc had won enough seats to form a coalition government, displacing the center-right Forward Portugal Alliance (PAF). And then?
Elections in Portugal this week offered the latest sign that when an individual European nation’s voters challenge eurozone austerity policies, the monetary union -- and the international creditors it represents -- takes precedence. Portugal’s president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, fueled an ongoing debate about the future of European democracy on Thursday when he reappointed an outgoing center-right prime minister despite election results that gave three left-leaning political parties the majority of seats in parliament.Silva asked incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho to remain and to form a new government. Opposition Socialists threaten to bring down his government with an immediate vote of no confidence.
On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked [Bob] Woodward what he expects from Paul Ryan. Well, since Bob spent hours interviewing him three years ago, he just thinks the world of the Budget Munster. Woodward thinks he's
a real Conservative, the 'big ideas person.' He vibrates reasonableness, he is calm, he has a possible path for doing deals with Obama in the last year.
Since we are on Fox 'News,' no one asks exactly what these big ideas are and who will suffer the most as a result of his bold plans.
Woodward truly thinks that Ryan wants to 'fix the government' by reforming entitlement spending. Fixing the government by hurting the poor is hardly considered a solution for millions of Americans who will suffer from his bold ideas.
Speaker John Boehner announced on Friday that Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) will lead the House Select Committee On Planned Parenthood, along with seven other anti-choice Republicans. the outgoing Republican noted the group will be called the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s new Select Investigative Panel, and "will focus on the grisly practices of big abortion providers."
"Recent videos exposing the abortion-for-baby parts business have shocked the nation, and demanded action. At my request, three House committees have been investigating the abortion business, but we still don't have the full truth," Speaker Boehner said in a statement. "Chairman Blackburn and our members will have the resources and the subpoena power to get to the bottom of these horrific practices, and build on our work to protect the sanctity of all human life."
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| Pluto |
Lastly, Pluto is sweetly colorful. Look at it through New Horizons' color camera and you'll see "spectacular diversity," the researchers write. The pictures we've all seen are no forgery — Pluto really does have a very distinct color palette. The Cthulhu Regio registers as a deep red, the western section of the heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio is a much lighter, pink-ish red, and the eastern half is lighter still. These colors come from refractory organics known as "tholins," the result of frozen nitrogen and methane in the soil (and atmosphere) being irradiated by UV rays and charged particles.
Charon is also heavily cratered like Pluto. The New Horizons team believes some of these craters (specifically, the ones located in what's known as Vulcan Planum, which is found to the southeast of Charon's massive canyons) appear be about 4 billion years or older, which could link them to the Late Heavy Bombardment that happened in the early days of our Solar System. Charon also has a massive network of canyons. These fractures cuts across most of Charon's southern hemisphere, with the two largest — named Macross Chasma and Serenity Chasma — run for 1050 kilometers. At its widest, Serenity Chasma measures 60 kilometers across and runs, in places, 5 kilometers deep.
The reflective properties of Nix indicate that the small moon is likely covered in water ice. Hydra is also non-spherical, measuring 43 kilometers by 33 kilometers, with a diameter of about 41 kilometers. It also has a highly reflective surface, and is likely covered in water ice.
That confounded the New Horizons team. "How such bright surfaces can be maintained on Nix and Hydra over billions of years is puzzling," they write. Radiation or impacts with other objects should have darkened and reddened the surfaces of these moons over time, they say. What's also still unknown with any degree of certainty is the mass, volume, or density of these moons.
“I’d rather have people be in a position where they’re aggravated with me so I can accomplish something, than have them love me and accomplish nothing,” Kasich told the audience during an event in Concord, New Hampshire. “I’m not there to run a popularity contest.”
The former governor of Ohio preceded the remarks by asking the crowd how many of them knew how much their initial Social Security payments would be. Two people raised their hands to indicate that they did know.
“What if I told you that your initial benefit was gonna be somewhat lower in order to save the program?” he asked. “Would that drive you crazy?”
When one audience member responded that it would “upset” them, Kasich told them, “Well, you’d get over it, and you’re going to have to get over it.”
Kasich later made a similar statement about Medicare, saying that any voter wanting him to “ignore the fact that it’s going broke” would not like him.
In a brief interview later, he accused Democrats in turn of allowing Social Security to “get to a point where it could go bankrupt.”
“We’re getting close to Halloween, and they just want to scare people,” Kasich added.
If Obergefell is accepted as binding law, the consequences will be grave. Of the results that can be predicted with confidence, four stand out: First, society will be harmed by being denied the right to hold out as normative, and particularly desirable, the only type of human relationship that every society must cultivate for its perpetuation. This compelling interest is strengthened by the fact that there is strong evidence to support what common sense suggests, namely, that children fare best when raised by their married mother and father who are both responsible for bringing them into the world and who provide maternal and paternal influences and care.
Second, individuals and organizations holding to the historic and natural understanding of marriage as a conjugal union—the covenantal partnership of one man and one woman—will be vilified, legally targeted, and denied constitutional rights in order to pressure them to conform to the new orthodoxy.
Third, the new jurisprudence of dignity is unlimited in principle and will encourage additional claims to redefine marriage and other long-established institutions.
Fourth, the right of all Americans to engage in democratic deliberation, and ultimately self-government, will be decisively undermined.
Any decision that brings about such evils would be questionable. One lacking anything remotely resembling a warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution must be judged anti-constitutional and illegitimate. Obergefell should be declared to be such, and treated as such, by the other branches of government and by citizens of the United States.
While our planet may have survived September’s “blood moon”, it will be permanently destroyed on Wednesday, 7 October, a Christian organization has warned.
The eBible Fellowship, an online affiliation headquartered near Philadelphia, has based its prediction of an October obliteration on a previous claim that the world would end on 21 May 2011. While that claim proved to be false, the organization is confident it has the correct date this time.
“According to what the Bible is presenting it does appear that 7 October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which, the world will pass away,” said Chris McCann, the leader and founder of the fellowship, an online gathering of Christians headquartered in Philadelphia.
“It’ll be gone forever. Annihilated.”
McCann said that, according to his interpretation of the Bible, the world will be obliterated “with fire”.
Using the power of government to subvert the government is itself insurrectionist. Which tells us two things — the insurrectionist strain in voters of the American Right (per their arguments in favor of "gun rights") is matched by the insurrectionist strain in their leaders and those who hold office in their name.
▪ So ask yourself — Why is the rest of the country not treating this insurrection as an insurrection, like the Whiskey Rebellion, instead of treating it as just another difference of political opinion? In other words, why are we not treating the virtual (and sometimes literal) armed rebels in the hills as a threat to the existence of our government?
That's a serious question. The rest of the country does not see the American Right as an insurrection, is determined not to, in fact, and also is encouraged not to. The reasons they don't and won't see the insurrection as an insurrection are both revealing and determinative of the outcome. After all, would the modern and mainly corrupted Democratic Party be able to sell its own brand of "rule by the rich" if they didn't have Republicans to point to as political enemies, instead of what they are, enemies of the state itself?
And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.
This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.
But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists—who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”—that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted.
I had a different group of pieces I've been working on recently, revolving around a recent interview by Noam Chomsky that touches on our so-called "capitalism" and also on the Bernie Sanders candidacy. But this video sets that up nicely. It's a ten-minute speech by long-time British politico and Labour Party member Tony Benn, sadly recently deceased.
So privatization is a deliberate policy, along with the destruction of local democracy and the destruction of the trade unions to restore power back to to where it was. And what we're now back in, that's what the whole crisis is about, the restoration of power to those who've always controlled the world, the people who own the land and the resources and all the rest of it. And that is something we need to understand. ...
LGBT protesters crashed the red carpet at the world premiere of Stonewall at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). They say the film downplays the key role that trans people of colour and lesbian activists played in the 1969 riots that launched the gay rights movement in the US. TIFF fans weren't happy to see them. Stonewall’s gay director, Roland Emmerich, tells Daily Xtra he wanted to make a movie for everybody. “I never quite understood this whole word of ‘whitewashing,’” he says.
(1) Sylvia Rivera and was not present at the Stonewall Riots. There is testimony showing that Sylvia wasn't there (please see my reply to Darien Taylor below). So why does the protester in the clip above wear a t-shirt that mentions Sylvia Rivera?
(2) In all these years, no one has ever come forward to suggest that Miss Majors was present during any of the rioting. It's obvious by listening to any interviews Miss Majors has given that she is lying.
(3) The unidentified white lesbian who was the victim of police brutality was exactly that, an unidentified white lesbian. She was not Stormé DeLarverie, who is an African-American. Stomé herself always refused to verify that she was the lesbian in question. The policeman beating the lesbian with his nightstick enraged the crowd of mostly white gay men. The unidentified white lesbian was the victim, not the "leader." The only leader which took action was the crowd itself.
One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”
In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.
Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.
I have seen this resilience during my own research at a device-free summer camp. At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.
In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.
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| The "perp" |
Irving’s police chief announced Wednesday that charges won’t be filed against Ahmed Mohamed, the MacArthur High School freshman arrested Monday after he brought what school officials and police described as a “hoax bomb” on campus.
At a joint press conference with Irving ISD, Chief Larry Boyd said the device — confiscated by an English teacher despite the teen’s insistence that it was a clock — was “certainly suspicious in nature.”
School officers questioned Ahmed about the device and why Ahmed had brought it to school. Boyd said Ahmed was then handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.
“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said, describing the incident as a “naive accident.”
This is, of course a direct outgrowth of the paranoia and nativism that's been with us since 9/11. I wrote about how we reacted to 9/11 in this piece for Salon yesterday and I highlighted this 2002 article by Peggy Noonan that speaks directly to this attitude:
“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt. And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.”You may recall that as the "Shoney's incident" where a middle aged white woman from Georgia got panicked at the sight of 3 "Middle eastern looking" medical students eating and joking around in a restaurant and called the police who instigated a three state manhunt. The students were detained for more than 17 hours and lost their medical residencies at the Florida hospital to which they were enroute. Jeb Bush called the woman to commend her for her sharp observation skills. It was widely celebrated on the right as you can see by Noonan's ugly screed.
There are sprawling industries and self-proclaimed career “terrorism experts” in the U.S. that profit greatly by deliberately exaggerating the threat of Terrorism and keeping Americans in a state of abject fear of “radical Islam.” There are all sorts of polemicists who build their public platforms by demonizing Muslims and scoffing at concerns over “Islamaphobia,” with the most toxic ones insisting that such a thing does not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country, or even as they are physically attacked.
Asked if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances.
“Your brother and your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama,” Mr. Trump taunted the former Florida governor. “It was such a disaster those last three months [of George W. Bush’s administration] that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected.”
Jeb Bush retorted, “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure: he kept us safe.” The audience at the debate cheered.
“You remember the rubble [at the World Trade Center]?” Mr. Bush asked. “He sent a clear signal that the United States would be strong, and fight Islamic terrorism, and he did keep us safe.”
Mr. Trump replied, “You feel safe right now? I don’t feel so safe.”
They terrorized a bright young man for being clever and creative and industrious, showing him that having an Arab-sounding name and brown skin means you are a suspect just because of who you are. The long-term impacts on him could be devastating.
They showed Ahmed’s classmates that it’s okay to treat people who look different or have foreign-sounding names as less than human, stripping away their dignity, and making them look like criminals simply because of who they are, not because of anything they have actually done.
Finally, as my friend Stephanie White put it on Facebook, they taught Ahmed and his classmates that “bigotry still carries the force of law in our country.”
