GOP - LGBTQI+ kids, we will only admit you exist when we’re actively trying to ruin your lives.
President Biden:
"I want every member of the LGBTQI+ community — especially the kids who will be impacted by this hateful bill — to know that you are loved and accepted just as you are," Biden tweeted on Tuesday. "I have your back, and my Administration will continue to fight for the protections and safety you deserve."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbot begins gruesome persecution of trans children and their parents | Boing Boing
Texas Governor Greg Abbot has ordered Family and Protective Services to investigate all trans children in Texas and their parents. Threatening criminal action, Abbot is demanding teachers, doctors and caregivers report any child suspected of being trans and parents who support them.
Abbot’s letter to Family and Protective Services makes it clear that parents consenting to gender-conforming surgery or other medical, or therapeutic interventions for their child will be considered child abuse in Texas.
What a colossal horrifying excuse for humanity.
Canada should be preparing for the end of American democracy
The trucker convoy is one small example of what can happen here when the dangerous forms of anti-democratic rhetoric south of the border spread into Canada.
The people in Ottawa aren’t protesters, they’re occupiers. They reject the use of democratic rhetoric in favour of authoritarian rhetoric, and they aim to dismantle the system that makes protest and free speech possible in the first place.
Measles Makes Your Immune System Forget Its Protections Against Past Illness
Historically, contracting the measles has been linked to subsequent illness (and possibly death) from other causes. In the past few years, scientists have discovered why this is: measles causes “immune amnesia”.
Louisiana candidate for Senator burns up a confederate flag in this new kickass ad | Boing Boing
And after explaining how Jim Crow never left Louisiana and the South, he ends the ad saying, "Our system isn't broken — it's designed to do exactly what it's doing, which is producing measurable inequity. … I do believe the South will rise again, but this time it will be on our terms."
Here's the DFEH lawsuit against Tesla, and it's way more serious than the company made it sound - Electrek
Because the factory was racially segregated, Defendants’ workers referred to the areas where many Black and/or African Americans worked as the “porch monkey station.” Defendants’ workers with tattoos of the Confederate flag made their racially incendiary tattoos visible to intimidate Black and/or African American workers. Racial slurs were also dispensed in Spanish and included “mayate” and “negrita.” Additionally, Defendants’ workers referred to the Tesla factory as the “slaveship” or “the plantation,” where Defendants’ production leads “crack[ed] the whip.” Many Black and/or African American workers understood these terms to be references to how Defendants treated its Black and/or African American workers. One Black worker heard these racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day.
Watch: Texas GOP candidate stumbles after admitting she thinks it's wrong that kids can't laugh at "the transgenders" | Boing Boing
Yang went to a fancy law school, got lucky, and here he is.
The thing about “he can’t be racist, he has black friends” and its variants is that it betrays an assumption that racism is logically coherent, a faculty of the human mind rather than a poisoning of its spirit.
Elon Musk accuses AP reporter of being a lobbyist, sets fans against him on Twitter over Tesla recall article - Electrek
Elon Musk is accusing an Associated Press reporter of being a lobbyist over an article about NHTSA’s recall of Tesla vehicles in the Full Self-Driving Beta program. Now his fans are attacking the journalist on Twitter.
He’s almost as bad as Agent Orange, lord dampnut.
Trump escalates racist rhetoric, plays on white grievance at recent rallies | MPR News
Let me fix that headline: Trump/Conservative Voters say violence against the government is sometimes OK
That’s the people who are most invested in breaking Democracy in favor of minotry rule forever.
Math that roughly…
3/5 of Americans actually vote of have their votes counted properly.
2/5 of those voters are die-hard GOP or Trumpers… But due to gerrymandering, their counts get amplified already to allow for the repeated popular-vote losing presidencies of GOP candidates.
That being said, they are dead afraid of demographics taking those tried-and-true cheating methods away from them, and afraid of being treated the way they’ve treated those out-of-power.
Several restaurants and bars are suing the city of Minneapolis - and Mayor Jacob Frey - over the vaccine and test mandate that took effect earlier this week.
The lawsuit filed Thursday calls on a judge to toss Frey’s order, which requires venues serving food or drink to require proof of vaccination or a negative professionally-administered COVID test.
The seven plaintiffs include the bars Sneaky Pete’s and the Gay 90s, as well as restaurants Smack Shack and Jimmy John’s. In their lawsuit, they say the testing requirement window is too narrow and they point to the absence of a declared statewide COVID emergency.
Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter announced the measures last week as state data showed COVID cases increasing dramatically.
Trump officials interfered with the 2020 census beyond cutting it short, email shows
A newly released Census Bureau email written during former President Donald Trump's administration — when Wilbur Ross, shown at a 2020 congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., served as the commerce secretary overseeing the census — details how officials interfered with the national head count.
Andrew Harnik | AP file
Former President Donald Trump's administration alarmed career civil servants at the Census Bureau by not only ending the 2020 national head count early, but also pressuring them to alter plans for protecting people's privacy and producing accurate data, a newly released email shows.
Trump’s political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses,” according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau’s deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants.
At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College.
Despite the 14th Amendment’s requirement to include the “whole number of persons in each state,” Trump wanted to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census counts used to reallocate each state’s share of congressional seats and electoral votes.
While the former president’s unprecedented push did not reach its ultimate goal, it wreaked havoc at the federal government’s largest statistical agency, which was also contending with the coronavirus pandemic upending most of its plans for the once-a-decade tally. The delays stemming from COVID-19 forced the bureau to conclude that it could no longer meet the legal reporting deadline for the first set of results and needed more time.
The administration’s last-minute decision to cut the counting short sparked public outcries, including a federal lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
But its interference in other areas related to the 2020 census largely flew under most radars. The newly released email — first reported by the New York Times and obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School through an ongoing public records lawsuit — details the wide scope of its attempts to buck the bureau’s experts and tamper with the count.
According to the document, the agency’s career civil servants saw when to end counting as a “policy decision that political leadership should make.”
But the methodologies and procedures for filling in data gaps, reviewing the counts for errors and protecting the confidentiality of people’s information should strictly stay in the lane of civil servants at “an independent statistical agency,” the email says.
Trump officials — including Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary — however, “expressed interest” in many technical areas, including exactly how the bureau could produce a state-by-state count of unauthorized immigrants and citizenship data that could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.
The email suggests that the bureau’s civil servants were planning to discuss their concerns with Ross through the end of 2020.
The bureau’s public information office did not immediately respond to NPR’s questions about whether those discussions took place.
The Census Bureau’s civil servants tried to be transparent
Before President Joe Biden reversed the directive last year, it called for information that would allow the president to leave out the numbers of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the congressional apportionment count.
According to an August 2020 email by Jarmin — the bureau’s highest-ranking civil servant — the agency had received, months before the memorandum, “asks” for information related to a federal lawsuit focused on the same topic. Like Trump, the challengers in the lawsuit — the state of Alabama and Republican Rep. Mo Brooks — wanted undocumented immigrants excluded from the numbers used to reallocate House seats and electoral votes.
The bureau, however, was “consistently pessimistic” on the feasibility of “removing undocs from the apportionment count,” Jarmin warned in the email to two Trump appointees — then-Director Steven Dillingham, who ultimately resigned following whistleblower complaints, and Nathaniel Cogley, who served in the newly created, controversial role of deputy director for policy.
Still, civil servants attempted to be transparent about how they tried to create the data ordered by the former administration.
“We recommend that we do a federal register notice on the methodology because transparency requires that the American public understand how we derived the counts of unauthorized immigrants and have the opportunity to comment on that methodology,” said a slide titled “Communication Strategy Decision” for an August 2020 briefing.
No such notice appeared in the federal government’s official journal of record.
There are concerns of future interference with the census
In response to the newly disclosed documents, Arturo Vargas — a longtime census advocate and CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund — said in a statement that the efforts of the bureau's career professionals to resist Trump officials' pressure and "protect the integrity of census operations were nothing short of heroic."
On Tuesday, the Biden administration’s Scientific Integrity Task Force, which includes Jarmin, issued a report warning that the bureau and other federal statistical agencies “must protect against interference in their efforts to create and release data that provide a set of common facts to inform policymakers, researchers, and the public.”
The report presented the Trump administration’s decision to end 2020 census counting early as a case study, noting that the bureau’s internal watchdog, the Commerce Department inspector general’s office, concluded that the rushed schedule put the quality of the results at risk.
“To date,” the report added, “no individuals have been held accountable for these allegations.”
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit [www.npr.org.](https://www.npr.org.)
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.
Morrison then continued, listing the pathway to fascism in ten steps:
Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.
Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
Maintain, at all costs, silence.
As I have said before, you can see many of these steps playing out right now in America, orchestrated by a revitalized and emboldened right-wing movement that has captured the Republican Party. Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism, recently wrote of Morrison’s speech:
Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.
Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices — ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.
Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.
In the 80s and 90s, hacker culture was flush with tech utopians who thought that computer networks in general, and cryptography in particular, would allow them to route around the world's problems. These nerdy, young, sheltered, wealthy white men believed that you could code your way to freedom and good governance, and they could thereby avoid the yoke of whatever oppression they were suffering.
For many of these people, the oppression they felt seemed mainly to be paying taxes, or being told that they couldn’t hoard guns, or that they simply couldn’t get to do whatever they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it. That latter particularly sociopathic part of hacker culture now calls itself “black hat”, but the Libertarian end of it, that metastasized out of hacker culture and took over the tech industry in toto.
Something I was disappointed about on last week’s anniversary of the terrorist attack on Congress was too much emphasis on Trump’s role in what happened on that day, as if focusing on him somehow makes it possible that the rest of the Republican Party can jettison this bad seed at some point without losing face and American politics can get back to the bipartisan business as usual. This is a total fiction, and as Stanley correctly notes, this shift towards fascism is a party-wide effort that preceded Trump and will outlive him.
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Officials who later visited the restaurant suspected that the pork had not been stored at a safe temperature. They found that Smokehouse 1776 had no "cold holding" or "hot holding" mechanisms in place, and that the restaurant "does not maintain temperature logs so there was no way of showing that food was kept at proper temperatures." [...] They also reported "bare hand contact with ready to eat foods, no handwashing station [and] no barrier protection from insects."
No wonder she’s anti-regulation.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has a "position on, you know, Jews, right?" | Boing Boing
She asked, "Is there any kind of — I mean, how would you even know if a — if a school taught all religions are bigoted and biased or, you know, Catholics are bigoted or, you know — or we take a position on the Jewish-Palestinian conflict because of our position on, you know, Jews, right?"
Timothy Leary interview from Folsom prison | Boing Boing
With society moving closer to prioritizing mental health instead of stigmatizing it, it's no coincidence that alternative treatments such as psilocybin are getting a second look. Gee, if only someone with, I don't know, let's say a doctorate in neuroscience could've mentioned the effectiveness of psychedelic drugs decades ago.
Watching Dr. Timothy Leary’s interview from prison is surreal for several reasons. The least of which is that Nena von Schlebügge, the woman at the beginning of the video, would eventually become Uma Thruman’s mother. Leary crackles with humor and verve as he rattles off a slew of prescient visions that reflect modern attitudes on drugs at the clinical level.
Stripped of the era’s hysteria, Leary appears less like a lunatic and more like a man who’s in on a hilarious cosmic joke. Even if you’ve seen the video before, it’s worth another viewing. Who knows what else Leary might be predicting from the past?
I’ve read a bit of Leary’s writings, along with Robert Anton Wilson’s non-fiction that interacts with him… He was so far ahead of his time early on, before the drug war radicalized him.
If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.
Female Doctor Who robs boys of role models, claims Tory MP - BBC News
The “QAnon shaman”—Jacob Chansley, the tattooed dude having an Excellent Adventure in Mike Pence’s Senate chair on January 6—put a photogenic face on the insurrection, and on Trump’s Idiocracy. Barechested, covered in neo-pagan tattoos, brandishing a spear, and sporting a fur headdress with horns, Chansley was catnip to media outlets. Was he a Burning Man bro gone MAGA? Adam Ant on ayahuasca? Or, as one YouTube wag put it, what you get “when you throw a Republican, a ton of shrooms and MDMA, a scratched DVD of Vikings Season 1, and a sweaty yoga mat into a boiling pot”?
Several restaurants and bars are suing the city of Minneapolis - and Mayor Jacob Frey - over the vaccine and test mandate that took effect earlier this week.
