Sofi’s choice

Some of you may have read the novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron or seen the film starring Meryl Streep that was based on it. It was based on events in Nazi Germany and the event that gave rise to the title was when Sophie, a Polish Catholic, was sent to Auschwitz and the doctor in the camp forced her to choose to send either her son or her daughter to be gassed immediately, while the other child would be permitted to remain in the concentration camp.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s jail conditions

Jeffrey Epstein faces a fairly long period in pre-trial detention period in jail, now that his request for bail and to be under house arrest has been denied. Since the crimes with which he is charged are so awful and the judge found that he is obviously both a flight risk and a potential danger to other people, the denial of bail is not unreasonable. I became curious about what kind of conditions he faces while facing trial since we know that even after his conviction of sex crimes in 2009 in Florida, he was only assigned to the local country jail and was allowed out six days a week to continue his business, whatever that was, returning to the jail only at night.
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Brace yourself for a massively racist election

With his tweets demanding that four congresswomen of color go back to where they came from, and presiding over a rally where his supporters chanted “Send her back” about one of them Ilhan Omar while he looked on, Donald Trump has gone into full-bore racist mode and it is clear that almost all Republicans are still supporting him but are desperately trying to avoid answering whether his tweets are racist

It should be clear to everyone that Donald Trump’s re-election strategy is to go full-bore racist. The hard-core racists are loving it. His manifest lie, again caught on tape, that he tried to stop the chants is designed to give his kinda-sorta racist supporters an excuse that they can believe in and continue to support him while denying that they themselves are racist.
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Epstein denied bail

In a ruling that should not have been a surprise convicted sex offender, and all-round creep Jeffrey Epstein’s request for bail was denied because the judge thought he not only posed a credible flight risk but also posed a threat to the community. This is a man who should not be allowed anywhere near young girls and women.

“The government has established danger to others and to the community by clear and convincing evidence,” the Manhattan federal court Judge Richard Berman said on Thursday. “I doubt that any bail package can overcome a danger to the community.”
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But prosecutors portrayed Epstein as posing a risk. Authorities found possibly thousands of photographs in Epstein’s home showing young women, and “at least one individual in those photos … has self-identified as a victim of the defendant,” prosecutor Alex Rossmiller told Berman during Monday’s bail arguments.

“Just this morning, the government became aware that in a locked safe in the defendant’s mansion there were piles of cash, dozens of diamonds, and a passport appearing to be issued from a foreign country with a photo of the defendant and a name on that passport that is not the defendant’s name,” Rossmiller also said.

If an extremely wealthy person facing a possible lifetime in prison with multiple lavish homes in several countries and private jets and even his own damn island is not a flight risk, then the term would have ceased to have any meaning.

So now he will have plenty of time to reflect on the utter misery he has caused to so many women.

Learning from Nigeria on battling the anti-vaxxers

Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were three countries where anti-vaccination campaigns led by Muslin clerics and fanatics seriously set back the very real chance to globally eradicate polio. But Shobana Shankar writes that a vigorous campaign waged by Nigeria to combat the anti-vaxxwers provides useful lessons to the US as it finds itself having to deal with its own anti-vaxxers.

To consider that Nigeria, infamous for anti-vaxx campaigns leading to polio outbreaks, has any lessons for Americans may be shocking.

But as measles cases in the U.S. climb to an all-time high after the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, U.S. public health officials have been looking for ways to address the problem.

As a researcher on religious politics and health, I believe that Nigeria’s highly mobilized efforts to eliminate polio can teach America how to reverse the increase in measles cases and shore up its public health infrastructure. Working with international partners, Nigerians have combated misinformation, suspicion of vaccine science and religion-based boycotts to go from ground zero for polio on the African continent in 2003 to nearly polio-free in 2019.
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Nigerians understood that simply ostracizing religious communities would not work. Anti-vaxx politics tapped into mistrust of government and “others” that ran deep in a diverse but divided society, where religious, regional and ethnic loyalties took priority over national unity.
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The polio infrastructure in Nigeria immerses experts and local communities in an ongoing relationship. It is an elaborate multilayered surveillance system, with many strategies and functions, from mundane visits to weekly record reviews at health centers in polio-affected areas.
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Nigeria spent over US$8 million on surveillance alone and expanded polio capabilities to fight other diseases like measles and rubella. While the system puts a heavy workload on health officials, it points the way for how the American public health system can reshape existing structures for the current era. America led international health partnerships for decades, but the time has come to follow other countries’ lead.

The big problem is persuading Americans that we can learn from other countries. After all, aren’t we the greatest?

Trump’s latest racist outburst

Donald Trump has been on a racist Twitter tear over the last few days, attacking four progressive congresswomen of color, accusing them of hating America and that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime[-]infested places from which they came”. This ‘go back to your own country’ is what is said by racists when they encounter a person of color or someone speaking Spanish in a public place, because they assume that America is a place only for white people. Of the four, three were born in the US and the fourth Ilhan Omar came as a child as a refugee.
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Thai-Russian relations

Thailand is unique among the nations of South East Asia in that it avoided being conquered by the European powers during their period of colonial expansion. I knew about this and had been mildly curious about how Thailand maintained its independence while the countries around it were falling but had never really followed up the question until I happened to meet a Thai socially recently and posed the question to her.
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Following the Jeffrey Epstein money trail

As I had hoped, many more news outlets have started digging into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s financial background. In my ongoing attempts attempt to try to understand the financial elements of this saga, I found an informative time line of his life that appeared in the Sunday, July 14, 2019 edition of the Plain Dealer that they had created using Vanity Fair and the Miami Herald as their sources.

1953: Born to middle-class parents in Brooklyn.
1969-71: He attends Cooper Union School of Engineering but never attains a degree.
1973: He’s hired to teach math and physics at The Dalton School in Manhattan. Donald Barr, father of current Attorney General William Barr, is the school’s headmaster at the time.
1976: He joins Investment banking company Bear Stearns at the urging of chairman Alan Greenberg, whose son was a Dalton student.
1982: Epstein launches J. Epstein & Co., managing the finances of clients with $1 billion or more.
1990: He purchases a secluded Palm Beach, Florida, mansion, the site of several alleged assaults.
1996: He relocates his company, which he’s renamed Financial Trust Co., to the U.S. Virgin Islands.
1996: Epstein declares a Manhattan mansion at 9 E. 71st St. to be his, but the details are unclear. It’s mentioned by several accusers as the location where they were assaulted.
1998: He buys Little St. James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. ”Everybody called it ‘Pedophile Island,”’ said Kevin Goodrich, who is from St. Thomas and operates boat charters. ”It’s our dark corner.”
2005: A 14-year-old girl says she was paid to give Epstein a massage. The police investigation uncovers that he is in contact with many girls.
2006: In May, Epstein is charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. In July, the investigation is referred to the FBI.
2007-08: Epstein receives a plea deal with Alex Acosta, who was then U.S. attorney for Southern Florida. Epstein receives 18 months in jail but serves only 12. The Miami Herald has since reported that Acosta signed off on a nonprosecution agreement that was ”negotiated, signed and sealed so that no one would know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes.” Acosta went on to become secretary of Labor in April 2017; he resigned Friday amid the growing scandal.
2011: Epstein fails to report as a sex offender to New York.
2015: Virginia Roberts states in a sworn affidavit that he began abusing her at the age of 15 in 1999 while she was employed at Mar-a-Lago.
2018: Beginning in November, the Miami Herald publishes a series outlining Epstein’s sexual misconduct and judicial leniency.
2019: Jennifer Araoz alleges that a woman recruited her outside high school in 2001, and that Epstein later raped her. She was 14.
July 2019: Epstein is arrested July 6 on charges of child sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. He’s accused of paying more than a dozen women and girls to engage in sex acts. Epstein’s lawyers claim that at worst, it was akin to soliciting prostitution.

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Much needed clarity on what Medicare for All means

The idea of Medicare for All has been steadily increasing in popularity, so much so that pretty much all the Democratic candidates for the presidency have endorsed it, a far cry from when Bernie Sanders advocated for it in his 2016 campaign, when it was seen as some kind of unrealistic Utopian goal. As a result, the right wing attacks on it have intensified and they have made all manner of misleading statements about it.

This ad from the Sanders campaign nicely sets the record straight.


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Republicans see migrant detainee abuse. Will they care? Of course not.

A group of Republican lawmakers went to an immigrant detention facility in Texas. Donald Trump had sent them there, supposedly to dispel reports of awful conditions that had been coming from so many different sources. The video below shows vice president Mike Pence, and senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis and possibly other senators visiting a detention center where men were housed in severely overcrowded cages and the guard wear masks to presumably avoid the stench of a large mass of people who have been denied basic sanitary facilities.
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