Friday Reads: The Media Should Stop giving Nincompoops a Platform

Posted: April 23, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: , , | 6 Comments

Portrait of a Man,
Erich Heckel ,1918

Good Day Sky Dancers!

This is not the post I intended to write today. I figured I would have to take a look at the US re-entering the Climate Change Agreement or the Putin Pull out or some other kind of change we get since we got rid of the Previous Guy. Instead, I got treated to an entirely huge number of wipipo who really don’t need any sort of media attention at all.

In fact, they need to take their little whiny white asses back to whatever miserable enclave they sprang from to whack off to black and white TV from the 50s and leave the rest of us safely unaware of their existence.  They do not have economic angst. They have a bad case of fascism, racism, and misogyny all wrapped up in a desire to replace democracy with white nationalism. It’s all so they can feel safe and good about themselves.

So, this bigoted idiot from Las Vegas was given print space  by the Orlando Sentinel.  He argues that Disneyland and Disneyworld should be there to give him his fantasy of white smeared with THAT sort’ve christian hegemony.  He expects the entire organization should just exist only to humor his white supremacist fantasies just because he spends money there.  The most distasteful thing in the article wasn’t the headline on how Disney Corp’s  wokeness was ruining his good times. It was that he expected every one else to just go ahead and playact whatever offensive stereotype generations of their family try to escape from.  Poor little white toad.  “I love Disney World, but wokeness is ruining the experience | Commentary”.  I just hope he stays away from New Orleans.

That spell is broken when the immersive experience is shattered by the real world. And boy, has Disney been breaking the immersion.

Recently, Disney announced that cast members are now permitted to display tattoos, wear inclusive uniforms and display inclusive haircuts. Disney did all of this in the name of allowing cast members to express themselves.

Man in Brown, Erich Heckel, 1912

His favorite thing to do first was the Pirates ride where he was regaled with kidnapped women in chains crying while guys yell “Marry a wench”.  White Toad misses him some slavery.  Then, there’s the entire longing for the Song of the South and the guide on the African river tour.  I’ll leave it to your imagination about how he misses his black friends on those rides.

Go read it and go look at the face of the ugly American tourist that every one in the world–and around here where you have to deal with them–wants a cattle prod and the ability to stuff their asses on a plane and send them back to Stupidlandia.  There’s some unwokeness for you!   I’m tired of them thinking we’re all here to affirm there ignorant bigoted ass and superstitions. Take your damn money!  Visit Hitler’s birthplace!  Get it out of your system!

Which brings me to the next phase of the Covid 19 Crisis.  This is where we spend tons of money telling those same ignorant asses to go get their ignorant asses to the nearest place they can GET a vaccination.  Then, roll up a sleeve and take it like an American!  Do it for your country! Do it so you do not kill other people! The shot is not going to turn you into some woke liberal!  Believe me on that one!  Education was already wasted on you!

And of course, twitter responds:

The worst thing is these people actually vote the local village idiots into Congress and we get this “GOP Sen. Ron Johnson Criticizes ‘Big Push’ To Get Everyone Vaccinated”   This is from that outrageously liberal rag Forbes.

In an interview with conservative Wisconsin radio host Vicki McKenna, herself a vocal coronavirus vaccine skeptic, Johnson launched into a condemnation of “vaccine passports,” a credential that would allow businesses to verify vaccination status.

But Johnson also went a step further, declaring he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people,” arguing their distribution should be “limited” to those most vulnerable to coronavirus, and asking, “if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?”

Erich Heckel, Man on a Plain, 1917

Which brings me to FaceBook and  their idea of wokeness.  I’ve had a comment censored for “bullying” because I refer to these people as Plague Rats.  Believe, me I have sympathy for that rats who had no idea they were spreading the Bubonic plague.  However, these human beings should know better.  My doctor daughter told me I had to realize these people don’t have access to good information and they are surrounded by the same kinds of people.

However, their so-called leaders like Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson, John Neeley Kennedy, and the like are the Pied Pipers of spreading ignorance. They are either idiots themselves like Johnson.  But worst, they play at idiocy because they can fleece idiots for power and money. Why does any one actively choose counterfactuality?  Are facts that threatening to them?  I frankly think they just like to be told they’re right and go do whatever the fuck they want no matter how hateful or destructive or life threatening it is.

And, just when we haven’t got enough if attention and money starve reality tv show personalities going doing the politics road we get this  from Axios:  “Scoop: Caitlyn Jenner makes it official for California governor’.  Dear wisdom beings haven’t we suffered enough?

Jenner said in a statement that “Sacramento needs an honest leader with a clear vision” and that “for the past decade, we have seen the glimmer of the Golden State reduced by one-party rule that places politics over progress and special interests over people.”

  • The statement decries California’s taxes as “too high” and criticizes an “over-restrictive lockdown” response to the COVID pandemic including on in-person schooling.
  • “This is Gavin Newsom’s California, where he orders us to stay home but goes out to dinner with his lobbyist friends.”

“Self-Portrait With Raised Bare Shoulder,” by Egon Schiele,

It says she’s trying to not run as a Trumpist but gee, that last bit screams I’m part of the cult!  Does it not?  Please!  No more celebrities in an Executive position.  Nothing good ever comes from that!  I’m still reeling at the idea of Matthew McConaughey running for Governor in Texas. Dubya couldn’t say anything over Republican atrocities of the last 12 years but by gosh he’s got an opinion on that.  Well, not an opinion per se. It’s more of an admonition.

Former US President George W Bush commented on actor Matthew McConaughey’s possible run for Texas’ governor calling it a “tough business”.

During an appearance on the Today show, co-hosted by his daughter Jenna Bush Hager, the previous Texas governor turned president said: “I read that about Matthew, yeah… I tell you this, it`s a tough business” when asked about the 51-year-old actor’s chance of winning in the 2022 race

At least Texas Governors don’t do as much as the usual state governor does.

Erich Heckel: Seated Man, 1909

Politico has one thing right today: “It’s been exactly one year since Trump suggested injecting bleach. We’ve never been the same. It was wild in the moment. In time, it came to symbolize the chaotic nature of the presidency and the early Covid fight.” It still symbolizes the way Republicans are dealing with it.

One year ago today, President Donald .Trump took to the White House briefing room and encouraged his top health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting Covid. It was a watershed moment, soon to become iconic in the annals of presidential briefings. It arguably changed the course of political history.

Some ex-Trump aides say they don’t even think about that day as the wildest they experienced — with the conceit that there were simply too many others. But for those there, it was instantly shocking, even by Trump standards. It quickly came to symbolize the chaotic essence of his presidency and his handling of the pandemic. Twelve months later, with the pandemic still lingering and a U.S. death toll nearing 570,000, it still does.

For weeks, Trump had been giving winding, stream-of-consciousness updates on the state of the Covid fight as it clearly worsened. So when he got up from the Oval Office to brief reporters gathered in the The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on April 23, there was no expectation that the day’s proceedings would be any different than usual.

Oskar Kokoschka (1908)

So, there are tons of folks with “vaccine hesitancy” and I’ve bumped into a few. I ask why and just sit back and listen. I eventually just say that I couldn’t live with myself if I was responsible for some one’s death and move on.  But here’s a bit from VOX if you’re interested. It sums up some survey data.

The share of adults surveyed who are vaccinated or are willing to be vaccinated has grown from 72 percent to 77 percent from January through the end of February, a rise that reflects the increased availability of vaccines. However, the share of unvaccinated adults who are hesitant to get a vaccine has remained constant, at around 23 percent. It is this group that poses the greatest challenge to health care officials hoping to vaccinate the population to the point of herd immunity to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Some respondents hesitant about vaccination indicated general health concerns. Forty-five percent of those who said they definitely would not get the vaccine feared side effects, and 40 percent said they wanted to wait to see if vaccines were safe. (The vaccines have been shown to be safe and have generally mild side effects under clinical trials.) Others cited more conspiratorial reasons, with 29 percent of people not wanting the vaccine saying they didn’t trust vaccines and 27 percent saying they didn’t trust the government. Meanwhile, 20 percent said they didn’t think the vaccines work. People could select multiple reasons for not wanting a vaccine.

The vaccine rollout has been marred by misinformation, especially on social media. Some of the top narratives around the vaccine on social media include mentions of coronavirus conspiracy theories involving microchips and Bill Gates, according to new data from media insights company Zignal Labs. There’s also a conspiracy theory known as “the Great Reset,” the debunked idea that the coronavirus was created by the government to take control of the global economy.

Facebook, which has long been a bastion for the anti-vaccine movement, helped Carnegie Mellon survey its users for the report and is hoping to lead a large inoculation information campaign. After trying for years to crack down on vaccine misinformation, Facebook finally banned users from sharing anti-vaccine content in February. But vaccine misinformation can still be found on the site. A recent Washington Post report by Elizabeth Dwoskin examined internal documents at Facebook that suggest QAnon-supporting groups and a relatively small number of influential people are responsible for a significant share of vaccine skepticism on the site.

Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant | Egon Schiele 1912

It’s still pretty obvious by the way the Republicans keep acting, what they keep saying, and the fanatical way they are trying to stop POC from voting that they are still not beyond the previous guy.  We will not get pass Covid-19 until they get pass the previous guy. We’re going to spend time in a lot of states stopping anti-democracy legislature .   We will be watching a lot of bad court decisions come out of courts too.

A lot of those bad decisions will be written by appointments of the previous guy. Kavanaugh’s et al overturn of prior Supreme Court precedent on sending teens to prison for life stands as a most horrific example.  Sotomayor wrote an especially scathing minority opinion.  This is from Esquire and Charles Pierce.

From out of the recently Trumpified Supreme Court came yet another decision that murdered precedent. Delivering the death blow was Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This was a major flex for the carceral state and a major hit to criminal justice reform. It not only closed off future improvements in that regard, but also undercut what few accomplishments already exist.

The case was Jones v. Mississippi. Over the years, the courts began to look askance at the idea of handing juveniles sentences of life without parole, essentially warehousing individuals for decades in the horrors of the American penal system for crimes they committed as minors. Twice since 2012, the Supreme Court has decided that such sentences were in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. With a single decision, Kavanaugh, good Jesuit-educated lad that he is, and six of his colleagues decided that, instead, such sentences were both just and commonplace. It is yet another example of the current majority’s enthusiasm for gutting precedent while pretending that it’s not, and it is a monstrous legal offense against humanity.

By those two precedents, judges had to conduct separate proceedings before sentencing juveniles to life without parole and to provide a public explanation for those decisions. The 6-3 decision on Thursday for which Kavanaugh wrote the lead opinion effectively wipes out those two requirements which, in tandem, had reduced radically the number of juvenile convicts doing life without parole. And, in keeping with how that new conservative majority on the Court operates, Kavanaugh argues that he is keeping faith with those decisions he is obviously eviscerating. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas at least acknowledged that the Court was overturning precedents set in cases he considered wrongly decided.

I’m really beginning to understand why Buddhists want to deconstruct egos and Abstract expressionists deconstruct the human image.  To borrow something old testament … All is vanity.

With this, I  end with an appropriate song.  Sing it Pete!  (See he does more than provide background music for car ads)

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Thursday Reads: Civil Rights Struggle, Syria Intervention, NYPD Spying, Boston Bombing, and “League of Denial”

Posted: August 29, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Withers_07

Good Morning!!

I’ve got so much news for you this morning, I don’t know if I’ll have room in a reasonable-length post, so I’ll get right to it. I’ll begin with some stories on yesterday’s 50th anniversary of the March On Washington.

PBS had an amazing interview with Rep John Lewis in which he recounted his memories of that day in 1963 and the speech he gave as a youthful leader in the Civil Rights Movement: ‘I Felt That We Had to Be Tough’: John Lewis Remembers the March on Washington. I hope you’ll read the whole thing, but here’s a brief excerpt:

REP. JOHN LEWIS, D-Ga.: On that day, I was blessed.

I felt like I had been tracked down by some force or some spirit. I will never forget when A. Philip Randolph said, “I now present to you young John Lewis, the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”

And I went to the podium. I looked to my right. I saw many, many young people, staffers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, volunteers. Then I looked to my left. I saw all these young people up in the trees, trying to get a better view of the podium.

Then I looked straight ahead. And I saw so many people with their feet in the water trying to cool off. And then I said to myself, this is it, and I went for it.

On meeting with President Kennedy before the March, and how the podium and the crowd came to be so diverse:

He [JFK] didn’t like the idea of a March on Washington.

When we met with him, A. Philip Randolph spoke up in his baritone voice we met with the president. And he said, “Mr. President, the black masses are restless. And we are going to march on Washington.”

And you could tell by the movement of President Kennedy — he started moving and twisting in his chair. And he said, in effect, that if you bring all these people to Washington, won’t it be violence and chaos and disorder?

Mr. Randolph responded and said, “Mr. President, there’s been orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protests.”

And President Kennedy said, in so many words, I think we are going to have problems. So we left that meeting with President Kennedy. We came out on the lawn at the White House and spoke to the media and said, we had a meaningful and productive meeting with the president of the United States. And we told him we’re going to March on Washington.

And a few days later, July 2, 1963, the six of us met in New York City at the old Roosevelt Hotel. And in that meeting, we made a decision to invite four major white religious and labor leaders to join us in issuing the call for the March on Washington.

American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger (left) adopted and helped popularize "We Shall Overcome" by teaching the song at rallies and protests. Here he sings with activists in Greenwood, Miss., in 1963. (NPR)

American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger (left) adopted and helped popularize “We Shall Overcome” by teaching the song at rallies and protests. Here he sings with activists in Greenwood, Miss., in 1963. (NPR)

NPR had a wonderful story yesterday about the history of the Civil Rights Movement’s signature song: The Inspiring Force Of ‘We Shall Overcome’.

It is not a marching song. It is not necessarily defiant. It is a promise: “We shall overcome someday. Deep in my heart, I do believe.”

It has been a civil rights song for 50 years now, heard not just in the U.S. but in North Korea, in Beirut, in Tiananmen Square, in South Africa’s Soweto Township. But “We Shall Overcome” began as a folk song, a work song. Slaves in the fields would sing, ‘I’ll be all right someday.’ It became known in the churches. A Methodist minister, Charles Albert Tindley, published a version in 1901: “I’ll Overcome Someday.”

The first political use came in 1945 in Charleston, S.C. There was a strike against the American Tobacco Co. The workers wanted a raise; they were making 45 cents an hour. They marched and sang together on the picket line, “We will overcome, and we will win our rights someday.”

There’s much more about how the song was passed from group to group and changed over time. Please give it a listen–it’s only about 8 minutes long, but really fascinating.

Not a single Republican appeared at yesterday’s commemoration of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush couldn’t come because of health issues, but John Boehner and Eric Cantor are presumably in good health, but they refused offers to make speeches at the event, according to Roll Call.

That wasn’t a wise choice, said Julian Bond, a renowned civil rights activist, in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon.

“What’s really telling, I think, is the podium behind me, just count at the end of the day how many Republicans will be there,” Bond told news anchor Alex Wagner. “They asked senior President Bush to come, he was ill. They asked junior Bush, he said he had to stay with his father.

“They asked a long list of Republicans to come,” Bond continued, “and to a man and woman they said ‘no.’ And that they would turn their backs on this event was telling of them, and the fact that they seem to want to get black votes, they’re not gonna get ‘em this way.” [….]

Cantor’s decision to turn down the invitation to speak is especially striking given his stated commitment to passing a rewrite of the Voting Rights Act in the 113th Congress, and the many opportunities he has taken over the past several weeks to publicly reflect on the experience of traveling with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., to Selma, Ala.

Sadly, Dr. King’s dream of peace has not made much progress in the past 50 years. And now the U.S. and its allies are considering another military intervention–in Syria.

Fortunately, the UK is now hesitating. NYT: Britain to Wait on Weapons Report Ahead of Syria Strikes.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, who runs a coalition government, is facing political difficulties from legislators mindful of the experience in Iraq, when assurances from Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction proved inaccurate and a false pretext for war.

Mr. Cameron bowed on Wednesday to pressure from the opposition Labour Party and to some within his own coalition who want to allow United Nations weapons inspectors a chance to report their findings and for the United Nations Security Council to make one more effort to give a more solid legal backing to military action against Damascus.

At BBC News, Nick Robinson explains why Cameron “buckled.”

If you think that NSA domestic spying is invasive, you should take a look at what the NYPD has been up to since 9/11. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman of the AP have a new book out called Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America. There’s an excerpt at New York Magazine: The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities. It’s long, but a very important story. Please give it a read if you can.

Yesterday Apuzzo and Goldman published a related shocking story at AP: NYPD designates mosques as terrorism organizations.

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

The documents show in detail how, in its hunt for terrorists, the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files. As a tactic, opening an enterprise investigation on a mosque is so potentially invasive that while the NYPD conducted at least a dozen, the FBI never did one, according to interviews with federal law enforcement officials.

Tsarnaev
Boston Magazine has published more photos from “Behind the Scenes of The Hunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.”  Above is a photo of Tsarnaev exiting the boat in which he hid for hours as law enforcement searched all over Watertown for him. See more photos at the link.

In more hopeful news, one long-hospitalized survivor of the bombings was given the go-ahead to return home to California yesterday: Boston Marathon bomb survivor John Odom set to return home to Torrance (Daily Breeze News).

Nearly five months after a bomb almost took his life at the Boston Marathon, John Odom of Torrance was cleared by doctors on Wednesday to finally come home.

Odom’s wife, Karen, who has never left her husband’s side, has been chronicling her husband’s long recovery on Facebook, called it a “monumental” day.

“It’s official, John is released to go home!!!” she posted on the John Odom Support Page. “Although his recovery is nowhere near complete, there is no medical or physical reason he can’t fly home and continue his recovery in California. We are hoping to be home the end of next week, a few days shy of 5 months since we left on that now famous 4 day trip.”

“Famous” is one way to put it. The couple could have never imagined the journey they’ve been on since April 15.

Read the rest of this moving story at the link.

On October 8th and 15th, NPR’s Frontline plans to show League of Denial, “a two-part two-part investigation examining whether — as thousands of former players allege — the NFL has covered up the risks of football on the brain.” The documentary has so far been produced in partnership with ESPN, but last week the sports channel backed out of the collaboration presumably because of pressure from the NFL. From The New Republic: ESPN Quit Its Concussions Investigation With ‘Frontline’ Under Curious Circumstances.

“Frontline,” the prestigious, multiple-Emmy-winning investigative news show produced by Boston’s PBS member station, announced late Thursday afternoon that a 15-month-old partnership with ESPN in which they published a series of pieces exploring how the National Football League has (and has not) accounted for the relationship between playing football, head trauma, and brain damage, had come to an end. Dating back to last November, “Frontline” had run articles on its site featuring the work of Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, ESPN staffers (and brothers) even as these articles appeared at espn.com and as the brothers did segments for ESPN’s award-winning investigative series “Outside the Lines.” The end result—in addition to abook that the brothers are publishing in October—was to be a “Frontline” documentary, League of Denial (also the book’s title).

According to “Frontline,” the documentary will premiere this season on October 8 and 15, but, “from now on, at ESPN’s request, we will no longer use their logos and collaboration credit on these sites and on our upcoming film.” Executive producer David Fanning and deputy executive producer Raney Aronson expressed their “regret” and credited ESPN with “a productive partnership.” They added, “The film is still being edited and has not been seen by ESPN news executives, although we were on schedule to share it with them for their editorial input.”

Aronson told me late Thursday that ESPN contacted “Frontline” last Friday to request that it remove ESPN’s logo from its website, citing the technicality that it was a “trademark issue.” It wasn’t until Monday, after the latest collaboration was published on “Frontline”’s website and aired on “OTL,” that ESPN also requested that language describing collaboration not be used, and that it became clear the collaboration itself was coming to an end.

The circumstances are indeed mysterious. Perhaps it was over-cautiousness on ESPN’s part or perhaps indirect pressure from the League. If you’re interested in this important story, go read Marc Tracy’s piece at TNR.

A couple more useful links on this story:

PBS: Questions Over NFL Doctor Cloud League’s Concussion Case

Bill Littlefield at NPR’s Only a Game: ESPN And Frontline Part Ways Over ‘League Of Denial’

The authors of the book League of Denial will continue their involvement with the Frontline presentation.

I’m running out of space, so I’ll end there, and add a few more links in the comments. Now what stories are you following today? Please share your links in the thread below.