TVER, Russia (AP) — Anastasia Bubeyeva shows a screenshot on her computer of a picture of a toothpaste tube with the words: “Squeeze Russia out of yourself!” For sharing this picture on a social media site with his 12 friends, her husband was sentenced this month to more than two years in prison.
As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin’s interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the issue.
At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.
A 2002 Russian law defines extremism as activities that aim to undermine the nation’s security or constitutional order, or glorify terrorism or racism, as well as calling for others to do so. The vagueness of the phrasing and the scope of offenses that fall under the extremism clause allow for the prosecution of a wide range of people, from those who set up an extremist cell or display Nazi symbols to anyone who writes something online that could be deemed a danger to the state. In the end, it’s up to the court to decide whether a social media post poses a danger to the nation or not.
In February 2014, when Ukraine was in the middle of a pro-European revolution, President Vladimir Putin signed a bill tightening penalties for non-violent extremist crimes such as hate speech. In July of that year, three months after Russia had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, he signed a bill making calls “to destroy” Russia’s territorial integrity a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. The new amendment makes the denial of Russia’s claims on Crimea an even greater offense if the statement is made in the press or online, even on a private social media account.
Many of the shares that led to the recent rash of convictions were of things critical of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine.
This was true of the articles and images shared by Bubeyeva’s husband, a 40-year-old electrician from Tver, a sleepy provincial capital halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.
“Andrei Bubeyev thinks that he was charged as an example so that other ordinary citizens would be discouraged from expressing their opinion,” said his lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina.
Bubeyev spent a lot of time online, sharing links to various articles on his VKontakte page and engaging in political debates on local news websites, his wife says.
In spring 2015, he left town to work on a rural construction site. After investigators couldn’t get through to him on the phone, they put him on a wanted list as an extremism suspect. When Bubeyev stopped by to visit his wife and young son at their country cottage, a SWAT team stormed in and arrested him.
His wife now lives alone with their 4-year-old son in a sparsely furnished apartment on the ground floor of a drab Soviet-era apartment block. After her husband was arrested, Anastasia Bubeyeva, 23, dropped out of medical school because she couldn’t find affordable day care for her child, who still wears an eye patch for an injury he suffered when he bumped his head during the raid.
Several months after his arrest, Bubeyev pleaded guilty to inciting hatred toward Russians and was sentenced to a year in prison. His offense was sharing articles, photos and videos from Ukrainian nationalist groups, including those of the volunteer Azov battalion fighting Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Among them was an article about the graves of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and a video describing Russia as a “fascist aggressor” and showing Russian tanks purportedly crossing into Ukraine.
Less than two weeks after the verdict, Bubeyev was charged again. This time, he was accused of calling for “acts of extremism” and “actions undermining Russia’s territorial integrity.” He had shared the picture of a toothpaste tube and also an article under the headline “Crimea is Ukraine” by a controversial blogger, who is in jail now, calling for military aggression against Russia.
“He was interested in politics, read the news, shared things, but he did it for himself. It was like collecting newspaper clippings,” his wife said. “His page wasn’t popular — he only had 12 friends. He couldn’t have aimed to coerce anyone into anything.”
The new charges were soon followed by a damning report on local television station Tverskoi Prospekt. The program showed an anonymous blogger complaining about social media users who voiced their support for Ukrainian troops and were “ready to back a coup in Russia and take up arms and kill people as the Nazis did.” The television report claimed that the blogger’s complaint had prompted the prosecution of the electrician.
On May 6, Bubeyev was convicted and sentenced to two years and three months in prison.
Also this month, a court in the Caspian Sea city of Astrakhan sentenced a man to two years in prison for his social media posts urging Ukrainians to fight “Putin’s occupying forces.”
In December, a court in Siberia sentenced a man to five years in prison for “inciting hatred” toward residents of eastern Ukraine in his video posts. In October, a court in southern Russia sent a political activist to prison for two years for an unsanctioned picket and posts on social media criticizing Putin and calling for southern Russia to join Ukraine.
The articles, photos and videos that landed Bubeyev in prison were posted on his page on VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social media network with 270 million accounts.
VKontakte founder Pavel Durov sold the site and fled Russia in 2014, claiming that he had come under presser from the security services for VKontakte to disclose personal data of the users of a group linked to a protest movement in Ukraine. The company is now controlled by the media holding of Kremlin-friendly billionaire Alisher Usmanov.
Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova group, says roughly half of the convictions of hate speech online are about posts on VKontakte, which he said might be because its administration might be easier for the Russian police to deal with than that of foreign-owned social media.
Bubeyev’s defense claimed that the privacy settlings on his account made the articles he shared available only to him and his 12 friends. Sidorkina, his lawyer, said she has no explanation for how the security services found his posts unless they received the credentials to his account from VKontakte.
VKontakte declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.
Russia faced a surge of racially motivated attacks against Central Asian migrant workers in the 2000s, but the crime rates dropped drastically after dozens of neo-Nazis got lengthy prison sentences for extremism.
Rights activists and lawyers who have worked on extremism cases say the drop in violent hate crimes sent police and investigators scrambling to prosecute people for non-violent offenses to show a solid record of tackling extremism.
The Moscow-based Center for Economic and Political Reform said in a 23-page report on extremism law released this month that most convictions for this type of crime resulted in fines or a few days in custody, with the aim of boosting the crime statistics.
But as tensions with neighboring Ukraine heated up, courts across Russia began to hand out more and more prison sentences for hate speech, the report said.
Many of the hate speech convictions do deal with dubious content, but the severity of the punishment doesn’t seem to correspond to the level of public danger posed, said Verkhovsky of Sova.
“These cases are very arbitrary because there are lots more people out there who have done the same thing. Such enforcement of the law does not address or combat radical activities,” he said. “No one knows where the red line is: It’s like roulette.”
Glyphosate. Yeah, it’s from Monsanto. It’s in those bottles of Roundup you’ve seen in your neighbor’s garage.
So perhaps it will be no surprise that independent testing by the University of California San Francisco found this chemical herbicide in the urine samples of 93% of Americans.
With vast swathes of our country covered in genetically-modified crops that require the use of Round-up to kill the weeds (and any collateral plants and animals that aren’t engineered to resist glyphosate), that’s not surprising.
And possibly you also won’t be surprised by the fact that many authorities think glyphosate is perfectly safe. The World Health Organization (WHO) in March of 2015 declared it as a ‘probable human carcinogen‘ but more recently a new safety review by the WHO and the US Food and Agriculture Organization said glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in people.
Amazingly, WHO says these two views are not contradictory. Instead the first declaration was about glyphosate as a possible ‘hazard’ for humans while the second assessed glyphosate’s ‘risk’ to humans.
Glyphosate enters our body through crop residues in GMO foods like soy milk and corn flakes, but it also used on non-GMO row crops like wheat and even on row veggies like spinach, thus it may be in a variety of foods, from bread to beets to beer.
The UN/FAO group making the new safety review gave glyphosate an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of up to 1 milligram of glyphosate for every kilogram of body weight.
Testing carried out at the University of California at San Francisco, paid for by The Detox Project (an NGO that helps the public test for chemical levels) showed that most people (93% of a test pool of 131) have glyphosate in their bodies. That’s a small test sample, but still significant. Children had the highest average levels.
So, whether risk or hazard, what should you do?
If you, like me, would rather stay away from glyphosate, eating an organic diet is a great first step. Or, you can test yourself, then go organic, then retest.
Secondarily, read some of the research around glyphosate – there’s currently debate raging in the EU on whether to reapprove use of this herbicide, and some nations such as the Netherlands are saying ‘no’ to glyphosate.
Does creating a world that works for everyone take away individual choice?
BY HARV BISHOP
Conservative critics of the mission of creating a world that works for everyone fear that individual choice in New Thought churches will go the way of the dodo bird if helping others becomes the norm.
Some conservatives believe they will be forced to sit through sermons grounded in liberal politics, for them something akin to wearing rough, itchy wool underwear. They fear church-goers will be forced to give time to liberal causes in order to feel like they belong.
Where, I ask, is this mythical New Thought church where conservatives are being forced to do things they don’t want to do?*
Were they drugged and came to at a Bernie Sanders rally?
Were they forced to sit through Al Gore documentaries at church?
We’re they compelled to buy cakes at LGBTQ-owned bakeries?
Do they fear that the power for good in the universe is all bottled up by liberals and they can’t use it anymore?
And, more seriously, does working for a world that works for everyone in any way imply that the longstanding New Thought hallmark of individual growth and helping people heal their lives will go away? Can we focus on the inward and the outward at the same time?
Of course we can.
When did simple human decency and helping people become liberal or conservative?
One interesting model of a spiritual organization both healing individuals and helping in the world is the International Association for Human Values founded by the Indian teacher Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. The organization offers both programs for people to reduce stress and live happier lives and reaches out to affect the world at large.
“Since my childhood, I’ve never seen so much of water in the stream and in my farm” said an Indian farmer in an area plagued by drought. The grateful farmer and many other people benefited from the Al Jagruti Abiyaan project sponsored by the organization. The program stemmed erosion, recharged wells and supplied clean drinking water.
And here is another remarkable thing.
These International Association for Human Values programs are driven from the bottom up by volunteers rather than the top down. No one is forced to do anything and it’s the same in New Thought.
Shankar (who has spoken at Mile Hi Church of Religious Science, the largest New Thought center in the world) believes in setting a big vision, says Lata More, a meditation teacher for the organization. A big vision draws volunteers because people fundamentally want to be of service, she says. Volunteers create and design the projects, which are then supported by the organization. Other projects include empowerment programs for Iraqi women, disaster relief, and meditative stress reduction for veterans and prisoners that has been proven to help PTSD.
There you have it: No coercion, volunteer driven.
Creating a world that works for everyone certainly qualifies as a big inspiring vision.
To those who say a world that works for everyone is unattainable and Utopian, remember that representative democracy, ending slavery and child labor, voting rights for women and African-Americans and same-sex marriage were once also regarded as Utopian.
A world that works for everyone will always be a journey more than a destination, but heaven help us if we give up on that journey.
*This is not an idle challenge. If you know of a New Thought church that has crossed the line and not been politically inclusive, leave a comment.
Within a few years we are going to be knee deep, worse than even now, in blood in our schools and businesses. That statement is simple enough to explain. Our society is going through a multitude of changes. And being bluntly honest, not all of them are for the better. In fact some are for the worse.
We want everyone to like us and everyone to be equal to everyone. But that isn’t realistic or practical, is it? Everyone gets a ceremony and trophy. No one learns how to fail in life. Then when they get older & do fail… they don’t know how to cope with it.
And while it’s not a good thing, parents continue to teach their kids how to expect to have everything they want handed to them on a silver platter on bended knee. And if it’s not then they step in and try to fill the gaps left by mean old bullying society. They hover over their precious lil angels for life and coddle them and don’t let them fail which also means they don’t succeed without ‘mommies’ help.
There are many, far too many, reports where students spend more time on the phone with their parents, mainly mom, than with their studies. And when it comes to athletics it can be worse. And if they get a failing grade at whatever level of school… The teacher, system, administration is against their angel because they are____ fill in your own words.
Jeremy Schapp, ESPN Radio, interviewed a few college coaches on their athletes a few years ago. They said that more than a few of their athletes called or were called by their parents as many as 10 to 20 times a day! And both the parents and kids get very upset if they aren’t excused to go talk to their protector/angel. And this usually results in a report to the Athletic Director or other administration.
Then there are those of this generation who take their parents to job interviews. Then it is the parents who ‘grill’ & question the interviewer about the job and not the one who is supposed to be getting interviewed. And as with college, they talk to their parents at all times of the work day when something upsets them & things don’t go their way.
And this generation is just the first wave of these kids. And we can see problems with them in the educational system and subsequently the work world, where we will have to deal with their shortcomings. Now being fair, not all of these kids are like this. Some are actually hard working people, like their (great) grandparents were post WWII. Some are even model successful entrepreneurs.
But, there are numerous stories out there about how these kids can’t either find or keep a job and end up living at home until their 30s or 40s. They have been taught they deserve $50,000, or whatever figure you wish to place here, a year. And they can sit around and don’t have to work too hard to keep it, until they get bored in a few minutes, then they can quit. The problem, again, is that they were never taught to take criticism or fail, not to mention that mommy & daddy are always there to catch them if they fall.
In the business world today I have noticed that so many of the younger people don’t care about doing a good job. These people have no clue what customer service is nor do they know how to talk to people or accept the fact that people have problems that they are supposed to solve. And the worst part of this is that they don’t seem to care. And it really doesn’t matter if it is a disabled person like me or a perfectly capable person who needs guidance to find the coffee in a new store.
So as they start getting older and start experiencing a new reality with their managers, either their age, younger, or older, they will become more frustrated. As they become more frustrated and fail for the first time in their lives… They are going to get upset, angry, and begin to retaliate against those people who have wronged them for no reason, they will be more apt to pick up a firearm and settle it to show them that they can’t talk to them that way.
They will do what makes them feel good, just like the 80’s with the start of mass workplace violence, about themselves, because that’s what they were taught, do what you have to make yourself feel better, empowered, & increase your self-esteem, no matter what it is.
If you don’t think that’s true, look at drug use amongst younger people. What about acceptance of things that even a generation ago would have been considered abnormal? And some of those were so abhorrent it would draw a horrified gasp from our parents and grandparents not to mention society.
So what are our options in attempting to prevent rivers of blood in schools & businesses in the coming years? Stop sheltering our kids. In real life, not everyone gets a trophy or a pat on the back for a good job. Some people fail and some have success. But you have to make your own success with no one to necessarily count on for help
None of us died of abuse or because our parents were hard on us. None of us were sickened by our parents forcing us to take responsibility for what we did wrong. We all survived into adulthood climbing on trees, rock piles, playing chicken with cars, & playing with toy guns, cowboys & Indians, war, aliens & spacemen, or whatever it was. I believe that it cemented the United States as a place where we could do such things without an overbearing government telling us we couldn’t because it was politically incorrect!
So we can either step back or start teaching our kids to fail and that not everyone deserves a trophy and let kids be kids, no matter how or what they play. Some of them, and us of my generation, will not be patted on the back or congratulated, mainly because we and our managers thought it was our job and nothing exceptional when we did do something right and for the betterment of the company/client.
I would prefer to stay in business and train people how to avoid both WPV and SV. But is being honest, open, and free in the cards with this new generation? Or are we going down the garden path, where everything is sunshine, roses, & rainbows with unicorns & fairy’s playing in a field of poppies?
The fact that the war on terror has been expensive will surprise no one. Since 2001, the U.S. government has laid out mind-boggling sums to keep the homeland safe from violent extremists.
There was the $30 billion raise for the FBI that didn’t see 9/11 coming and $70 billion for the bureaucrats who have consistently failed to keep our airports safe. Add in more than $200 billion for a new Cabinet-level department to coordinate all of this activity and half a trillion for mass surveillance, plus the incredible costs of a decade and a half of military action abroad, and the total comes to a whopping $4 trillion. Where did all that money go?
FBI: $30+ Billion Despite the FBI’s failure to predict what was coming on 9/11, that agency’s budget has more than tripled since 2001. Has all the extra spending at least reaped positive returns in the form of stopping future violent incidents? Much to the contrary, there is evidence that the bureau has manufactured more terrorists via its entrapment operations than any foreign entity could have hoped to recruit inside the United States.
The FBI, which pockets $5 billion a year for its counterterrorism programs, has profited mightily from ginning up bogus plots that generate lurid headlines. For instance, a September 28, 2011, FBI press release trumpeted the arrest of Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen, on charges that he planned to use “large remote controlled aircraft filled with C-4 plastic explosives” to “destroy the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.” The culprit, a 26-year-old Bangladeshi American suffering from seizures and being treated for severe depression, had been bankrolled and enticed to embrace a scheme he almost certainly wouldn’t have considered on his own.
As a 2014 report by Human Rights Watch and Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute noted, “Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases.” That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize the informants’ job in many of these instances was to trick otherwise innocent people into signing on to illegal plots of the government’s own invention. In one case, a judge concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make a “terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”
Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimates that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. A 2011 report by the New York University School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice examined several high-profile cases and found that “the government’s informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States.”
Ohio State University professor John Mueller, co-author of Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism, observes that no terrorist entity within the U.S. was able “to detonate even a simple bomb” in the decade after 9/11. Aspiring terrorists even “have difficulty putting together bombs,” he says. “At the [2013] Boston marathon, two bombs went off and killed three people in a crowded area. So they finally actually got a bomb to go off but it wasn’t exactly terribly lethal.” Almost all the bombs involved in terrorist plots in the U.S. have been FBI-built duds—like most of the prospective terrorists. Security expert Bruce Schneier captured that genre in his classic 2007 essay, “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot.”
The last 15 years have seen the U.S. pour more than $30 billion into the bureau’s anti-terrorism efforts even though there’s no evidence of widespread domestic terror threats not created by the FBI. As reason contributor Sheldon Richman pithily summed up: “Most would-be terrorists appear to be misfits who couldn’t bomb their way out of a paper bag and wouldn’t even try without goading by an FBI informant.”
Transportation Security Administration: $70 Billion President Barack Obama in 2013 offered up the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as an example of a federal agency that posed no threat to Americans’ rights. “I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports,” he said.
But the most visible symbol of the domestic war on terrorism is the “whole body scanner” you have to pass through at more than 400 domestic airports. After spending more than $70 billion on the TSA and its army of 45,000 screeners, airport security continues to be a farce.
The TSA has hardly helped its own case. By boasting about its “see-all” scanners, the agency riled up those who, shockingly, objected to having photos of their birthday suits added to their federal dossiers. The machines were widely denounced as “virtual strip searches” that reveal in humiliatingly granular detail everything from whether a male is circumcised to whether a female wears nipple rings. Many travelers also expressed apprehension about the health implications of stepping into scanners that rely on radiation to penetrate people’s clothing—perhaps with good cause. An investigation by ProPublica and PBS NewsHour revealed that the machines could cause up to 100 cancer cases per year among travelers.
When people understandably began requesting to be screened instead by the magnetometers that the agency had relied on since 2002, the TSA began inflicting “enhanced patdowns” on anyone who “opted out.” As USA Todayexplained, “The new searches…require screeners to touch passengers’ breasts and genitals,” thus leading some travelers to quip that TSA actually stands for “Total Sexual Assault.”
Adding insult to injury, the agency failed to adequately test the whole body scanner machines to ensure they were effective before installing them throughout the country. Last June, a leaked secret report revealed that TSA agents failed to detect 96 percent of the weapons and mock bombs smuggled past them by inspector general testers.
Worse still, those scanners can do nothing to protect Americans from TSA employees themselves. Some 70,000 passengers have filed complaints against the agency regarding theft or destruction of their property, and more than 500 TSA agents have been fired for stealing travelers’ property, including one Orlando screener who confessed to taking 80 laptops. An agent at the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airport filched $50,000 from travelers in a six-month span and was arrested only after he was caught with a passenger’s iPad in his pants.
TSA Behavior Detection Officers: $1 Billion Besides subjecting passengers to invasive electronic searches, the TSA relies on a secret list of 94 “behavioral indicators” to suss out who it believes has treacherous intentions. Among the agency’s catalog of suspicious activities are giveaways like avoiding eye contact and appearing nervous while traveling. In 2011 CNN revealed that the TSA sees “very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures” as one telltale warning sign. It seems the TSA is the only security agency in the world to believe that would-be terrorists precede their attacks by taunting guards.
More than $1 billion has gone toward paying to have thousands of TSA “Behavior Detection Officers,” or BDOs, roam America’s airport terminals. They peer into travelers’ faces to detect “micro expressions” signaling trouble, do “chat downs,” and select lucky travelers to receive the “third degree.” More than 100,000 people have been referred for additional interrogation or arrest since Obama took office, and yet the program has not caught a single terrorist.
In one of the least surprising developments of recent years, minority groups have received the brunt of BDO attention. More than 30 TSA agents complained in 2012 that the behavior detection program at Boston’s Logan Airport had become “a magnet for racial profiling.” Among the “terrorist” profiles that the officers used were “Hispanics traveling to Miami or blacks wearing baseball caps backward.” The Newark Star-Ledger reported in 2011 that Mexican and Dominican travelers were being scrutinized, searched, patted down, questioned, and often referred up the chain of command, “with bogus behaviors invented by the screeners to cover up the real reason the passengers were singled out”—namely, for being the wrong color.
TSA agents told The New York Times in 2012 that the profiling occurred “in response to pressure from managers to meet certain threshold numbers for referrals to the State Police” and other authorities. “The managers wanted to generate arrests so they could justify the program.…Officers who made arrests were more likely to be promoted,” they said. In June 2013, the DHS inspector general revealed that the TSA’s BDO training program was abysmal: Even though the program had been running for six years, the agency “had not developed performance measures,” could not “accurately assess” its effectiveness, could not “show that the program is cost-effective,” and could not provide any justification for expanding the corps of officers.
The buck stops here. Anyone ever heard that little axiom before? The idea behind it of course is that when you’re the president, “passing the buck,” or in other words shirking responsibility isn’t supposed to be tolerated.
So how come I keep hearing ardent, die-hard, scream in your face Hillary supporters swearing up and down it won’t be the fault of Ms. Clinton, but rather Bernie or Busters, who cost her the election in November, should the unthinkable happen and Trump best her? But, isn’t that a little ridiculous on its face? For starters, if keeping Sanders supporters happy was important to the Democratic machine and Clinton’s team, they probably should have dialed-back the “you’re not one of us” rhetoric a smidge. Secondly, it really flies in the face of reality. Independents make up more of a voting bloc than Republicans or Democrats, so if your candidate fails to win in November, it’s because he or she couldn’t inspire enough people who don’t “Rah-Rah Sis Boom Bah!” over the donkey team, not because of any other factor.
You have to be enticing as a candidate to more than just those who swallow the blue state pill. Obama seemed to understand the importance of a coalition of voters; whereas Clinton with all the accusations of Bernie Bros (remember “Obama Boys” anyone?), seems to have decided to go old school and just assume the support of her own party’s faithful be enough in November. And hell, I’m not a fucking prognosticator, so maybe it will be enough to carry the day. But if it’s not, and she doesn’t inspire enough people outside of the bluest of blue acolytes, you cannot blame those of us who decided not to cater to fear mongering. You cannot blame people like me who live in states that are safely blue for sending a message to the DNC that we’re done with predestined candidates.
You have to blame your own failed candidate in that scenario.
You’ll have to reflect on whether finger-wagging, hand-wringing and insulting Sanders supporters was a wise decision. You’ll have to think about whether generalizing us all as young, white, millennial men who want “Free Stuff” really made you that much different than Mitt Romney in 2012. You’ll have to square yourself with the idea that you turned off a shit load of people who helped you do the impossible eight years ago, then four years later, by electing the first person of color to the highest office in the land. You’ll have to do some serious soul searching to figure out if “otherizing” Sanders fans was the way to go.
And you’ll likely just Nader us all, won’t you? Oh, and speaking of Nader…I forget, who won Al Gore’s home state that year? Was it Al Gore? Would those electoral votes have made Florida and therefore the Supreme Court irrelevant?
Asking for a friend.
There’s nothing pragmatic about choosing a candidate because you’re afraid of the other candidate. Especially in a country with checks and balances so rigorous it stymied a president like Obama. It’ll never cease to amaze me that liberal Americans who watched what obstructionism did to Obama are suddenly convinced Trump will rule with the same iron fist conservatives accused Obama of running his dictatorial presidency with.
Also, I know I haven’t been a Democrat my whole life, but I don’t remember there being a clause when I registered that said I had to vote for anyone I didn’t want to, just because they were also a Democrat. Let’s be really, really real here shall we? A hundred years ago, it was Democrats lynching black folks in the South. It was Democrats fighting to keep Jim Crow alive and well. Hell, a racist genocidal asshole president who thankfully will be moved to the back of the $20 bill soon started the damn party. Now, it’s the Republicans that are and have been courting the scum of the earth for votes. So why the fuck any rationally thinking person would throw-in with a political party to the point that they decide blind allegiance to it is better than critical thinking is beyond me.
Whatever happened to a candidate actually earning someone’s vote? Perhaps if Clinton and her campaign hadn’t been so busy implying that young women were going for Sanders because they want to get laid by so-called feminist icons, maybe she’d have done better with the youth vote. You know, that same youth vote that Barack Obama leveraged like a champion, twice? You might remember Obama from previous electoral victories we all came together to secure. But it’s not just young people that Clinton and her team have turned off. It’s Democrats that lean toward the New Deal, and there are still quite a few of them left, as it turns out.
If Clinton’s supporters aren’t willing to extend the olive branch, why the fuck should Sanders supporters just fall in line? Oh, I know, because it’s only Sanders supporters who have said horrible things to Clinton supporters and about Hillary right?
ANAHEIM — Ravaged by injuries, the Los Angeles Angels are taking a chance on Tim Lincecum, the two-time NL Cy Young Award winner who is coming off major hip surgery and looking to regain his career.
He signed a $2.5 million, one-year deal on Friday, eight months after having left hip surgery. He didn’t pitch after June 27 last year with the Giants because of injuries.
“I’m anxious, excited and a little nervous,” Lincecum said by phone. “I’m pumped to see what I can do out there on the field. I know what I’m fighting for and that’s to get back to a starting role.”
He didn’t sign with a team after finishing a $35 million, two-year deal last season.
General manager Billy Eppler said Lincecum would need 20 to 30 days to get ready. He will initially report to the team’s spring training facility in Arizona, where he’s been living for the last nine months.
“The common denominator of these star-level players is they know their body really well,” Eppler said. “We’re relying a lot on the player. He’ll tell us when he’s ready because he’s earned that.”
Lincecum’s free-agent deal with the Angels includes $1,175,000 in performance bonuses and $500,000 in roster bonuses. He would receive $25,000 for making 11 starts, $50,000 for 13, $100,000 for 15, $200,000 for 17 and $400,000 each for 19 and 21 starts.
In addition, he would receive $125,000 each for four, 30, 60 and 90 days on the active roster, excluding disabled list days spent due to a right hip injury.
The Angels certainly need the help. They have 10 players on the disabled list including pitchersGarrett Richards, Andrew Heaney, C.J. Wilson,Huston Street and Cory Rasmus. Tyler Skaggs is recovering from Tommy John surgery and is on the minor league DL with Triple-A Salt Lake.
“Tim is an outstanding pitcher, one of the most competitive pitchers that has ever taken the mound,” Angels manager Mike Scioscia said. “That will go a long way to offset maybe some of the velocity changes that have happened over the last four, five years with Tim. He still has plenty of fastball, his off-speed pitches are still terrific, so when you put that whole combination together he’s going to go out there and give us a chance to win games.”
Lincecum said his landing leg is stable and he has freedom of motion for his unique delivery. Before the surgery, his biggest issues were lack of stability and strength as opposed to pain.
“Success will be being healthy at the end of this season and seeing where I’m at after that,” he said.
Lincecum won the Cy Young Award in 2008 and 2009 and made four All-Star Game appearances. He helped the Giants win three World Series titles in five years, and he had a pair of no-hitters against San Diego during an 11-month span between the 2013 and 2014 seasons.
“Is he going to be the version of himself six, seven years ago?” Eppler said. “I don’t know, but the circumstances were right for us to take this chance.”
The Giants were the only other team Lincecum has ever pitched for, and he said they showed some interest. However, his desire to start didn’t match up with the Giants’ plans.
“It is tough because I’ve had a lot of emotions and time built up with them,” he said.
The 31-year-old right-hander went 7-4 with a 4.13 ERA in 15 starts last season. He threw a showcase for interested clubs May 6 in Arizona.
NEW YORK — Robin Wright recently demanded to be paid the same as co-star Kevin Spacey for her work on “House of Cards,” the 50-year-old actor told a roomful of activists, philanthropists and media on Tuesday at the Rockefeller Foundation.
“I was like, ‘I want to be paid the same as Kevin,’” said Wright, who plays Claire Underwood, the sinister counterpart and co-conspirator to Spacey’s President Frank Underwood on Netflix’s popular show. Wright is a producer and occasional director for “House of Cards.”
“It was a perfect paradigm. There are very few films or TV shows where the male, the patriarch, and the matriarch are equal. And they are in ‘House of Cards,’” said Wright, who had been talking about the problem of equal pay for women more generally.
“I was looking at statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on that moment. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,’” Wright said with her trademark blinding-white grin. “And they did.”
LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS
Wright’s co-star on “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey, was reportedly making $500,000 an episode in 2014.
Clad in towering, strappy black heels that would do her fictional counterpart proud, Wright covered a wide range of topics — from equal pay and conflict minerals in Congo to politics and parenting — during an hourlong conversation with Judith Rodin, president of The Rockefeller Foundation. The event was the first in a series the foundation is hosting called “Insight Dialogues,” conversations with thought leaders and activists hosted here in New York. The Huffington Post is a media partner on the series.
Spacey was reportedly making $500,000 per episode for his work on the series back in 2014, before season 3 of the show debuted. At the time, insiders said that number might move up to $1 million, making him one of the highest-earning TV or streaming actors. Last year, Forbes reported that Wright made $5.5 million for her work on the show, which would be around $420,000 an episode.
The fourth season of the series debuted in March and delved even more deeply into Claire’s character. She truly seemed to strike out on her own, sparring with her equally formidable mother and plotting behind Frank’s back in her quest to become a political force in her own right. What’s more, Claire seems never to remove her four-inch stilettos, sparking an avalanche of think pieces across the Internet.
Wright joins a growing group of women in Hollywood who are becoming more vocal on the issue of equal pay. Last year, Jennifer Lawrence drew widespread attention for speaking up about making less than her male costars on “American Hustle,” and since then she’s been a forceful advocate for pay equity.
NETFLIX
Wright as Claire Underwood in her perfect heels.
Wright told her personal story after Rodin asked her what barriers she faced as a woman in Hollywood. The actor, who shot to stardom after playing Jenny in the iconic 1994 movie “Forrest Gump,” said her career trajectory later fell off track after having children with then-husband Sean Penn. Her two kids are now in their 20s.
“Because I wasn’t working full time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket. If you don’t build salary bracket with notoriety and presence, you’re not in the game anymore. You become a B-list actor. … You’re not box office material,” Wright said. “You don’t hold the value you would have held if you had done four movies a year like Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett did during the time I was raising my kids. Now I’m kind of on a comeback at 50 years old.”
EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP
Jennifer Lawrence was one of the first actors to speak up about pay last year in an essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter newsletter.
Wright was in New York promoting a documentary she co-produced and narrated about the tragic situation in Congo, a country being essentially looted by corporations for the minerals that go into making consumer electronics. The film, “When Elephants Fight,” premiered Sunday night. It takes its name from the proverb “When elephants fight it’s the grass that suffers.”
“When I learned of this crisis almost 11 years ago, I was so disappointed for not knowing,” Wright said Tuesday. “I held my cell phone to say goodnight to my daughter and realized the minerals in the Congo were housed in this device. I was holding war in my hand.”
Public Domain Mosaic from the ancient Roman Villa Romana del Casale (286–305 AD)
It’s no secret that being active keeps you healthy, but new research expands the scope of its benefits.
If you don’t enjoy being physically active, add this to the list of annoying things you don’t want to hear. On the other hand, if you love to move, this may be music to your ears; exercising hypochondriacs, commence rejoicing! And for those of us who embrace the sustainable nature of preventative medicine, it’s more fuel for inspiring a healthy lifestyle.
A comprehensive new study concludes that in addition to the other known health benefits, exercise appears to substantially reduce the risk of developing 13 different varieties of cancer, reports The New York Times. Researchers have long held that active lifestyles can lessen one’s risk of getting cancer, but those associations were confirmed for just a few common types – like breast, colon and lung cancers.
For the new study, scientists from the National Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and a number of other international institutions analyzed data from a wealth of U.S. and European epidemiological health studies. All told they looked at 12 large-scale studies that included a whopping 1.44 million participants. From The Times:
The researchers focused on specific information for each of those 1.44 million people about whether they exercised, and how vigorously and how often. They also zeroed in on whether and when, after each study’s start, the participant had been diagnosed with any type of cancer.
Then, using elaborate statistical methods, they computed the role that exercise, and in particular, moderate or vigorous exercise such as brisk walking or jogging, seemed to be playing in people’s risks for cancer.
What they found was remarkable. For those who exercised moderately, even if they didn’t spend a lot of time doing it, the risk of developing 13 types of cancer was significantly less than those who were not active. As well as decreased association with breast, lung and colon cancers, they also found a reduced risk of tumors in the liver, esophagus, kidney, stomach, endometrium, blood, bone marrow, head and neck, rectum and bladder.
And the more people exercised, the more risk was reduced; between the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent exercisers, the risk reduction was as much as 20 percent.
The ways that exercise reduces cancer risk is not fully understood, but Steven Moore, a researcher from the National Cancer Institute and the study leader, says that they suspect that changes in hormone levels, inflammation, digestion and overall energy balance are likely to play a role.
Whatever the reasons, “it has few side effects and doesn’t cost much,” says Moore. Now if they could just invent a pill to create the desire to exercise.
The Governors Highway Safety Association’s latest look at what’s happening to pedestrians in America is out, and it is not pretty; there’s a ten percent increase in 2015 over 2014, and a 19 percent increase since 2009. They try to figure out why:
Many factors contribute to changes in the number pedestrian fatalities, including economic conditions, demographics, weather conditions, fuel prices, the amount of motor vehicle travel, and the amount of time people spend walking. Travel monitoring data published by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) indicates that motor vehicle travel on all roads and streets increased by +3.5 percent (+52 billion vehicle miles) for the first half of 2015 as compared with the same period in 2014. A more recent contributing factor may be the growing use of cell phones while walking, which can be a significant source of distraction for pedestrians.
But to be fair, they do not spend any time blaming victims or apportioning blame, saying silly things like 80 percent of accidents are the pedestrians fault. They leave the victim blaming to the states like California, who do the smart phone dumb ad thing:
Instead they focus on the benefits of walking as “ the oldest, most basic, and arguably the most beneficial form of human transportation.” They are actually trying to make it safer for walking and encourage it. They note that 28 percent of trips are less than a mile in length and that moving from a vehicle to the sidewalk can help reduce congestion. They even note that “ motor vehicles are responsible for more than one-half of nitrogen oxide emissions and toxic air pollutant emissions, and one-half of smog-forming volatile organic compounds. Walking is responsible for none of these.” And for once, they make the last mile point, that “Walking is intrinsically linked with public transit, which provides a vital alternative to travel by private automobile.”
Most accidents happen at non-intersections, although a much higher percentage of senior citizens are killed at intersections than other age groups, probably because they are less likely to cross without signals and they are slower.
Metta Letter by cjrobson We all aspire to be more loving, to have more compassion and goodwill for all humanity. It is actually a really easy thing to declare that we have love for all people, that we wish everyone well. Of course the difficulty comes when we move from the general to the specific. […]
Since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, there has been a resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression that is targeting communities of color “with almost surgical precision.” Already this year, states have purged their voter rolls, blocked rights restoration efforts, slashed polling place numbers, restricted early voting, allowe […]
Source: https://www.pxfuel.com Published on July 13, 2020 by Kayla Ulrich As is seen all over the headlines, there’s a rush to get students and teachers back to school. We say come the fall but the reality is most schools go back over summer. This is the same summer that has shown significant spikes in Covid-19 […]
It will take more care than the president is currently demonstrating to loosen restrictions but still protect the vulnerable. By Thomas L. Friedman President Trump at the White House coronavirus briefing on Thursday.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times With each passing day it becomes more obvious how unlucky we are that one of the […]
The U.S. president’s comments prompted doctors and the makers of household disinfectants to issue statements urging people not to ingest or inject cleaning products. DAN EVON PUBLISHED 24 APRIL 2020 Claim U.S. President Donald Trump suggested during a White House briefing that injecting disinfectants could treat COVID-19. Rating True About this rating