|
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
|
Republicans cut through to a core freedumb issue. And like all their other crackpot legislation, it thrills the goobers, and costs the state nothing in taxes. Starting this fall, adults in Texas can openly carry knives with blades longer than 5.5 inches. In fact, swords, spears, daggers, sabers, bowie knives and machetes are all perfectly fine to tote around.
I'm absolutely speechless.
Embarrassed.
Horrified.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/12/kid-rock-senate/4736...
President Donald Trump, who has remained out of public view since returning from Europe late Saturday, welcomed evangelical leaders into the Oval Office on Monday for a prayer session. Photos posted by some of the invitees show the group surrounding Trump and laying their hands on his shoulders as his head is bent in prayer.
By Katie Mettler @ WashingtonPost.com,July 11
Good things do happen, and can serve as inspiration. With videos.
Mr Pence told an American radio programme, hosted by a right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh: “The heartbreaking story of the 11-month-old Charlie Gard in England is a story of single-payer healthcare. We hope and pray that little Charlie Gard gets every chance." No tragedy or grieving family anywhere on earth is spared partisan political exploitation by Republicans. They have no morals, no compassion, no shame, no decency.
Alliance of 2,000 organizations says the two companies’ dominance in online advertising and traffic has created an unsustainable future for journalism
News outlets are seeking permission from the US Congress for the right to negotiate jointly with Google and Facebook, two companies that dominate online advertising and online news traffic.
The News Media Alliance, which represents nearly 2,000 news organizations in the US and Canada, says that because of those two companies’ dominance, news publishers are forced to “surrender their content and play by their rules on how news and information is displayed, prioritized and monetized”.
“These rules have commoditized the news and given rise to fake news, which often cannot be differentiated from real news,” the alliance said in a press release on Monday [....]
Things are so bad in Venezuela that people are rationing toothpaste
By Rachel Krygier @ Washington Post from Guarenas, July 10
[....] 700 percent annual inflation and chronic shortages of food and medicine have changed the meaning of Venezuela’s “minimum” in profoundly painful ways [.....]
With Venezuela’s currency rapidly losing value, the new minimum wage is enough for only about six pounds of milk powder or five cartons of eggs. At the country’s informal exchange rate, the raise brings the average worker’s income to roughly $33 per month. That is far below the minimum monthly wage in neighboring Colombia — about $250 — or even Haiti, where it is $135 [.....]
Since 2014, the proportion of Venezuelan families in poverty has soared from 48 percent to 82 percent, according to a study published this year by the country’s leading universities. Fifty-two percent of families live in extreme poverty, according to the survey, and about 31 percent survive on two meals per day at most. Households that depend on breadwinners earning up to twice the minimum wage are in the latter group [....]
By Max Ehrenfreud @ Wonkblog @ Washingtonpost.com, July 10
[.....] Led by Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate minority leader, Democrats in Congress are developing an economic agenda that could serve as a statement of the party's principles in next year's midterm elections. Schumer has suggested the document would be public in the coming weeks, although Democratic aides have cautioned that no date is set.
But while Democrats are unified in opposition to the president, they're split over an agenda of their own — particularly when it comes to bringing back working-class, white voters who flocked to Trump in 2016 [....]
"Which side are you on?" That is the question for Democrats, writes Mike Konczal, an expert on the financial industry at the progressive Roosevelt Institute, on Vox.
The shift follows a gradual trend among Democratic voters toward more progressive politics. The share of Democrats calling themselves liberal has increased from 27 percent in 2000 to 42 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center. There are now more ordinary people in the party who describe themselves as liberal than who describe themselves as conservative or moderate [....]
By Azam Ahmed @ NYTimes.com, July 10
MEXICO CITY — A team of international investigators brought to Mexico to unravel one of the nation’s gravest human rights atrocities was targeted with sophisticated surveillance technology sold to the Mexican government to spy on criminals and terrorists.
The spying took place during what the investigators call a broad campaign of harassment and interference that prevented them from solving the haunting case of 43 students who disappeared after clashing with the police nearly three years ago.
Appointed by an international commission that polices human rights in the Americas, the investigators say they were quickly met with stonewalling by the Mexican government, a refusal to turn over documents or grant vital interviews, and even a retaliatory criminal investigation [....]
While he was around the grownups at the G20, for three whole days, President Stupid had to more-or-less suck in his bloated, malignant narcissism.
Twitter Trump is in fact the Real Trump.
If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!
Donald J. Trump @RealDonaldTrump
Statistics lie or dumbfound? found it fascinating to think of the blind alleys that await the modern neo-Nazi among others on tuning in or sniffing out those attributes as ethnic stereotypes, along with the myriad ways we could kill ourselves trying to be healthy if we pick the wrong thesis to follow. Isn't "Just Give Up" easier, with roughly the same outcome - we die? But then again, did that french fry study really show that eating french fries 2x or more a week kills you early, or that it's an indicator that the rest of your diet/movement sucks too and you'll quickly cash out? (and is it something in the potatoes, or something in fried foods or another correlation/specification?)
And it says a lot about statistics and the danger in the wrong hands for how we "prove things". Tied to Kahneman yet again in the "Law of Small Numbers", where we pump up the significance of things that occur rarely just because we notice them. [something like "if a tree falls in the woods and we notice, does that mean all the trees fell? well, yes, or are in danger of...."].
Another "In the News" piece notes how we all lie, and one of the areas noted is the number of gays - once thought of as 10% of the population, now guessed/measured to be 2-3% only. But if 15 years ago you said it was only 10%, there'd be some complaints about your regressive attitudes and your understanding of human sexuality. And of what importance was the mistaken number in say pushing gay marriage high on the agenda in 2004, and how was it correlated to the fight for more action against HIV/AIDS?
BTW, some analysis of Kahneman's Fast & Slow Thinking notes that he also got some of the issues drastically wrong due to flawed studies, such as whether someone on a winning streak/hot hand really does, along with some examples of priming. I.e. he gives food for thought, but not a complete nutrition still. What to do, epicureans? the more we progress, the more we're in a stir fry or a smorgasbord. i'm hungry, let's eat.
By Robin Wright @ News Desk @ NewYorker.com, July 9
Extracted from: Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz @ The Observer @ TheGuardian.com, July 9 (also with Q & A with author @ end)
[....] The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else. Google was invented so that people could learn about the world, not so researchers could learn about people, but it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the internet are tremendously revealing.
I have spent the past four years analysing anonymous Google data. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche [....]
The Truth About Sex
How many American men are gay? [....]
The Truth About Hate and Prejudice
Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets [...]
The Truth About Girls
The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility. But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents [....]
Can We Handle the Truth?
[....] Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought. But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives [....]
Republican senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Mario Rubio say Moscow cannot be trusted after its alleged election meddling
Trump 'has no desire and no capacity to lead the world'. Trump hastening decline of America and the west, and Trump failed to put Russia and China on the spot by failing to offer a resolution to condemn North Korean missile launch at Hamburg G20.
In 2014, the top states that black millennial migrants moved to were Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. California remained the only state among the top five outside the South. The pattern is different for their white counterparts.
A report released last year by the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, found that between 2000 and 2014 about 61 percent of millennials moving to New York were white, while only 9 percent of 18- to 29-year olds moving into the city were black.
Ben Carson says block grants have lost their punch. The data suggests he might be right.
By Lorraine Woellert @ Politico.com, July 8
San Francisco is one of the nation’s wealthiest cities, reaping the riches of America’s tech economy. Across the country and worlds away, Allentown, Pa., hasn’t fully recovered from the death of Big Steel.
Yet when it comes to federal aid for community development, Silicon Valley wins. Lehigh Valley makes do.
San Francisco will get $19-a-person in community development block grants this year, while Allentown, with twice the poverty and less than half of the median income, will draw a per-capita allotment of $17.53 [....]
Op-Ed By Elizabeth Holtzman @ WashingtonPost.com, July 7
Elizabeth Holtzman, a Democrat from New York, served in the House of Representatives from 1973 to 1981, including on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation.
[....] Presidential self-pardoning would violate the basic structure of our Constitution, and the whole history of the pardon power strongly weighs against the concept.
Presidential power to pardon, including the impeachment exception, is directly modeled on the pardon power of the British monarch. Royal self-pardoning was inconceivable under the British system. Because British monarchs could commit no crime, they had no need to pardon themselves. Self-pardoning, therefore, was never part of the British pardon power — and was not incorporated into the U.S. version. There is no evidence the Constitution’s framers ever contemplated or supported a presidential self-pardoning power, as the debates during the constitutional convention make clear.
When presidential pardoning power was proposed at the convention, an amendment was offered to prevent a president from granting pardons in cases of treason. Supporters thought that would discourage presidents from committing treason. Opponents argued [....]