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Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
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A House Sparrow reaches for tasty Ash tree seeds. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Dylan Petrohilos.
Lauren C. Williams has a very good article up at Think Progress: The internet in Trump’s nation: White nationalist sentiments could force tech companies to finally decide how much unfettered free speech matters online. I highly recommend reading it.
There has been so much written about media lately, from mainstream to social, we’ve hit a saturation point, to say the least. Still, there are important areas to cover. PZ has a post on Pharyngula about the proliferation of fake and bad news sites; I’d like to focus on facebook. Two recent articles focused on Facebook’s problem with fake news, and their need to bow down to conservatives. Facebook has, in many ways, become the Fox News of social media.
Philando Castile (What’s Trending).
The murderer of Philando Castile is going to be charged with second degree manslaughter, an absolute disgrace of a mild slap, given the circumstances and actions of that murder.
Ramsey County Attorney John Choi has announced that the police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile this year will face charges of second-degree manslaughter.
During a news conference on Wednesday, Choi said that after a thorough investigation of the incident, authorities had determined that the use of deadly force against Castile was not justified.
Choi said that Officer Jeronimo Yanez shot Castile a total of seven times, and added that Castile used his final words to tell the officer that he wasn’t reaching for his gun.
All that merits is second degree manslaughter? Seems like straight up murder to me. What about the trauma inflicted on his girlfriend and her small child? Do they count at all? The murder of Mr. Castile was a very loud symptom of the sickness in this country, a sickness which has accelerated and is getting worse by the moment. Trying to downplay the actions of bigoted cops is not going to help. I’m too disgusted for words.
Via Raw Story.
As Democrats were reeling from last Tuesday’s election loss, a radio station in Wisconsin quietly replaced liberal talk with round-the-clock Christmas music.
Just hours after Donald Trump was declared the next president of the United States, Madison’s 92.1 WXXM-FM began pumping the yuletide tunes, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation released a statement to inform listeners that its atheist “Freethought Radio” broadcast had been “unceremoniously yanked off the air locally.”
[…]
But far-right evangelicals like Fox News radio host Todd Starnes celebrated the fact that atheists no longer had a platform in Madison.
“The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a motley crew of atheists, agnostics and free-thinkers just got a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings,” Starnes crowed in a Fox News column on Tuesday. “Well, if that doesn’t curdle an atheist’s egg-nog I don’t know what will.”
What. an. idiot.
Nielsen Audio ratings show that WXXM pulled the highest share of any liberal talk radio station in the U.S. during the summer of 2016.
Well, there’s a fine example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I’m sure round the clock Xmas music, which can drive some people homicidal, will be sure to bring in those high ratings!
Via Raw Story.
[…] Inclusivity and representation aren’t just the responsibility of English and history teachers, said Rifkin, the private school physics teacher. In his class, he’s had students look at the demographics of physicists — a field dominated by white and Asian men —in order to open up conversations about implicit bias, racial privilege, and stereotypes. Both white students and students of color have responded well, he said.
“There was a big spike in the number of white students who say, ‘This makes me more comfortable talking about race, and this makes me recognize that I have advantages in America, and that I can do something with these advantages,’” Rifkin said.
“I saw a big spike in students of color in terms of how comfortable they felt in physics class, and how they identified as a physics students. And that is a slam dunk for me.”
[…]
“There was one white teacher who said, ‘You guys aren’t here to learn. You guys can’t learn. I don’t know why I’m giving you the tests, because you’re not going to do it anyway,” Felder said. “The majority of the students in the middle school were African American, so for a white teacher to say that, that destroys them.”
When you tell students you have high expectations for them, it can influence their academic success, Lauren Mims, the assistant director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, said […]
Think Progress has a good look at educators who are fighting back: These educators aren’t tolerating racism in the classroom.
There aren’t many comments on the article, but they certainly demonstrate how Trumpoids think.
Let’s open with Talking Heads.
Ready for the current state of the climate, and how it’s going to get worse?
The signs are there if you look for them. EPA.
Saad points out that CNN is fully onboard with the normalization.
Trump is the only person elected to the top job without political, diplomatic or military executive experience. And he ran a campaign rooted in breaking the mold of the gridlocked capital city. So no surprise that Trump is already approaching his presidency in an unorthodox manner.
Unorthodox? Really, that’s what they are going to go with. Great. Absolutely nothing about how Trump is an full blown ignoramus, a fraud, a failed businessman, a criminal with court dates coming up, and an unrepentant sexual predator. Nothing about the core of white supremacy now poised to infest the white house, either, because I guess that just got lost in the glitter storm of the new reality show. And that’s what’s happening, that’s the blinder expected to blinker the American public, and unfortunately, in large part, it’s going to work.
Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 16, 2016
“I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” FFS, this gold-plated idiot is treating the presidency like it’s another reality show, where he can do whatever the fuck he likes, and a team will make sure it’s scrubbed up nice for mass consumption. If you find yourself buying this vomit, wake the fuck up. This is not normal, this is not okay, this is terrifying, and it’s a nightmare come true.
The media is busy spinning an old evil, fascism, into a brand new, exciting, “outsider” kind of thing. It isn’t any of that. It’s plain old white supremacy, it’s plain old fascism. You can pour all the glitter you want on it, it’s still rancid shit, and it’s what we are all being fed.
James McDougall has a good article up at The Conversation: No, this isn’t the 1930s – but yes, this is fascism. Highly recommended.
The spread of fascism in the 1920s was significantly aided by the fact that liberals and mainstream conservatives failed to take it seriously. Instead, they accommodated and normalised it.
The centre right is doing the same today. Brexit, Trump and the far right ascendant across Europe indicate that talk of a right-wing revolutionary moment is not exaggerated. And the French presidential election could be next on the calendar.
Yep.
Brittany Daughenbaugh. Facebook.
Brittany Daughenbaugh couldn’t sleep, so the Capital University student decided to go on a Pokemon Go hunt in the early hours of Thursday morning. She had seen the men across Francis Street but paid them no mind. She was on the trail of a good catch.
“Suddenly, they’re behind me,” Daughenbaugh, 20, said Monday. One man wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and the other a “Trump-Pence” sweatshirt.
She said the sweatshirted man grabbed her arm and told her, “Don’t you worry, honey. President Trump says this is OK.” He then punched her in the face and the arm. She fell, hit her head on the pavement and blacked out.
[…]
She wrote a lengthy Facebook post Friday about the attack, in part as a warning to other Capital students to be careful, but also to encourage only nonviolent opposition to the bigotry and aggression.
“Protest and fight, but do it peacefully. Do not burn the flag. Do not vandalize. Do not fight hate with hate,” she wrote. “The only way to fix this is with willpower, passion and love.”
Her post drew scores of comments of support, but one man wrote that the facial bruise in her Facebook photo was a “terrible makeup job.”
“Take your agenda and lies someplace else and quit trying to get attention and smear someone’s name,” he wrote.
Full story at The Columbus Dispatch.
Chicago, ILLINOIS – NOVEMBER 29, 2013: Striking Walmart workers and supporters protest outside a Walmart Neighborhood Market store on Black Friday (Shutterstock).
Walmart has long been the toughest nut for labor organizers to crack, as the company’s brutally effective anti-union campaigns have regularly crushed unions’ efforts to get workers to sign up.
However, a labor group called OUR Walmart has come out with a new mobile application that Walmart workers can use on their phones to help them organize for better wages and benefits — and it seems that Walmart is not happy about it.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart has sent out warnings to all of its employees that they should not download and install the WorkIt app onto their devices because it will allegedly swipe all their important personal information. In reality, the Journal notes, it only asks users to register and share their job titles and Walmart store numbers — and its permissions do not include location data, contacts or photos.
The purpose of the app is to help workers communicate with one another so they can learn about their rights as employees, as well as to develop strategies for improving workplace policies. While there are already a lot of online forums where Walmart employees gather to talk about issues at work, OUR Walmart wants to give employees a centralized hub to help them with all of their complaints and questions.
After 126 years, a lost sketchbook by Vincent van Gogh was revealed to much fanfare worldwide Tuesday — thanks to a Canadian art expert — but not everyone is convinced of its authenticity.
Canadian art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov’s Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook contains many drawings from the most significant period of van Gogh’s life, when he was living in the south of France, working on some of his most famous paintings but suffering from the psychological torment that led him to cut off his ear and spend months in hospital while continuing to create.
[…]
However, as Welsh-Ovcharov launched Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook at press conference in Paris Tuesday morning, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam released a statement disputing the authenticity of the sketches.
The museum states their own experts examined some of the sketches and concluded they are imitations of van Gogh drawings, calling them “monotonous, clumsy, and spiritless.”
This is a real life detective story, stimulated by extraordinary happenings on the film set of ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’. The victim was Jesus Christ and the book slowly unravels who was the actual guilty party. You naturally assume that it was the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate! So we will reproduce here just four pages from the book that proves without a shadow of a doubt that Pilate was not, and could not have been involved in any way in the killing of Jesus Christ. Read and contemplate the full, astonishing implications of the irrefutable evidence that…
Jesus was still alive after Pontius Pilate left Judea.
You can read more at Julian Doyle’s site.
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