Cartoonist Stephan Pastis often makes fun of the more elaborate coffee culture that has sprung up with its detailed recipes and this cartoon is an example.
What struck me is that the person asking for coffee says “Gimme”, which strikes me as rude. But I am wondering of this is one of those things that used to be considered rude but are transitioning to being acceptable by the younger generation, leaving oldies like me to catch up.
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That pitiful excuse for a human being who benefits from the suffering imposed on the bereaved families of slain children has been ordered by a jury to pay $965 million to some of those families. Twenty six children and six adults were massacred in the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school.
The verdict is the second big judgment against the Infowars host over his relentless promotion of the lie that the 2012 massacre never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away people’s guns.
…The Connecticut trial featured tearful testimony from parents and siblings of the victims, who told how they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show.
Strangers showed up at their homes to record them. People hurled abusive comments on social media. Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal, Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house. Mark Barden told how conspiracy theorists had urinated on the grave of his seven-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the coffin.
…The lawsuit accused Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, of using the mass killing to build his audience and make millions of dollars. Experts testified that Jones’s audience swelled when he made Sandy Hook a topic on the show, as did his revenue from product sales.
Jones’s motivation to do this thing can be put down to the desire to make money. But what makes Jones’s followers do these despicable things to the families? Even if you think the whole thing is a hoax, what motivates you to go to such elaborate lengths to make your point? Don’t these people have lives?
The congressional hearings on the events of January 6th, 2021 and Trump’s role in it will resume on Thursday, October 13th at 1:00pm (ET). It will be streamed on all the major news channels, as well as C-Span and YouTube.
The previous sessions have been riveting.
UK prime minister Liz Truss is said to have “withdrawn the whip” of a cabinet minister named Conor Burns.
A senior Conservative minister, Conor Burns, has been sacked from the government after an allegation of “serious misconduct” relating to his behaviour at this week’s party conference.
Truss asked him to step down from his role as a minister of state in the trade department and he had the Conservative whip withdrawn pending an investigation.
Burns is the sixth Conservative MP to have had the whip withdrawn or quit politics in the past 18 months over allegations of misconduct.
I have written many times before about the serious problems with the (in)justice system in the US in the way that police department and prosecutors tend to value getting convictions more than justice, with the result that many members of poor and minority communities tend to get disproportionately arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned.
But there is another problem and that is the way that crime is covered in the media which, in addition to giving the distorted impression that the level of crime in the country (people who watch the news tend to think that crime is rising each year when it is in fact dropping) adds to the biases in the system.
In another excellent episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at the problems with the media coverage and what can be done.
It was reported yesterday that Bruno Latour, the philosopher of science and anthropologist, had died at the age of 75.
Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.
A pioneer of science and technology studies, Latour argued that facts generally came about through interactions between experts, and were therefore socially and technically constructed. While philosophers have historically recognised the separation of facts and values – the difference between knowledge and judgment, for example – Latour believed that this separation was wrong.
…His groundbreaking books, Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991) offered groundbreaking insights into, as he put it “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history”.
To put that into context, one of his most controversial assertions was the claim that Louis Pasteur did not just discover microbes, but collaborated with them.
In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists.
Because science and its associated technology have been so successful, there is a danger that anything that can be dressed up in the language of science can carry more weight that it merits.
One example is with the use of forensic science in court cases. The ability of modern scientific techniques that can analyze microscopic traces of items at crime scenes and link them to victims and perpetrators (DNA being a good example) has led to the ability to both convict the guilty and exonerate those falsely accused. TV police procedurals also lead to the impression that forensic science is very accurate and even judges can tend to give it greater credibility than it sometimes deserves.
This can result in new techniques being accepted as evidence even when the ‘science’ behind it has not been properly evaluated and is possibly useless, sometimes referred to as ‘junk science’. One example is the so-called science of bite marks.
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After denying that he paid for a woman’s abortion in 2009 and saying that he did not even know the woman, that same woman says that she again became pregnant by him two years later. He asked her to get an abortion again and when she did not, he terminated the relationship. That child is now ten years old.
However, all this has not shaken Desi Lydic’s faith in Walker, as she explains.
Herschel Walker Foxsplained @DesiLydic pic.twitter.com/85eiCyK4nN
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) October 6, 2022
Family members who got the latest covid booster vaccine that targets the omicron strain all reported side effects of fever, chills, and feeling vaguely lousy for a period that lasted 24 to 48 hours. I had scheduled to get mine last Sunday and the day before I met a neighbor on my walk who said that that was the first day she had been outside because she had had a terrible reaction to the vaccine that had knocked her out for three days. As a result, I cleared my calendar for the three days after the shot was to be given, and made all the preparations to be house-bound and possibly bed-bound for that period.
And then … nothing happened. I had no side effects at all. The pharmacist who gave me both the covid booster and the flu shot at the same time said that since I chose to have them on the same arm, that it might be sore. But even that did not happen. The only thing I did out of my normal behavior was drink plenty of fluids, which is what the CDC recommends to alleviate side effects..
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In a welcome move, President Biden has ordered the release of thousands of prisoners who were being held just for marijuana possession or consumption.
Biden on Thursday pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession, a move that senior administration officials said would affect thousands of Americans charged with that crime.
As part of the announcement, Biden also encouraged governors to take similar steps to pardon state simple marijuana possession charges, a move that would potentially affect many thousands more Americans.
And the President will task the Department of Health and Human Services and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “expeditiously” review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law, the first step toward potentially easing a federal classification that currently places marijuana in the same category as heroin and LSD.
“No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana,” Biden said in a video announcing his executive actions. “It’s legal in many states, and criminal records for marijuana possession have led to needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And that’s before you address the racial disparities around who suffers the consequences. While white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates.”
“Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs,” the President said.
The moves Biden announced Thursday stop short of full decriminalization, which has enjoyed growing support among both political parties. But they are the first significant steps taken by a US president toward removing criminal penalties for possessing marijuana.