One final indignity for Trump

As if the other results were not bad enough for Donald Trump, we have the case of Juli Bricksman, a cyclist in Virginia, who in 2017 was being passed by the Trump motorcade and took the opportunity to flip him off.

She later explained why she did it.

“It was just sort of like, here I am on my bike. I’ve got nothing, right?” Briskman told the Guardian in November 2017. “This is pretty much the only thing I had to express my opinion. He wasn’t going to hear me through bullet-proof glass … So that was pretty much how I could say what I wanted to say, right?”

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Intelligent Design Creationism stalwart Philip Johnson has died

Johnson, who died last weekend at the age of 79, was a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley who later in his life and career became an ardent advocate and strategist for promoting intelligent design creationism. He was a key architect of the ‘Wedge Strategy‘ that was revealed in a leaked document, that sought a more ambitious goal than sneaking religion into the scientific curriculum with the goal of overthrowing evolutionary theory, but was a covert assault on the idea of materialism that they felt was dominant in science and the key obstacle to the introduction of religious ideas into science.
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Implications of yesterday’s election results

The US seems to be in perpetual election cycle mode. There were some state and local elections yesterday and the results were interesting. Much attention has been paid to the governor’s race in Kentucky where the incumbent Republican Matt Bevin narrowly lost 49.2-48.8% to Democrat Andy Beshear who has claimed victory even though Bevin has yet to concede. Kentucky is a solidly Republican state though Democrats have won the governorships before and indeed Beshear’s father was governor before Bevin. There may be a recount, though the Republican senate president has ominously threatened to use an obscure state law that has not been used for 120 years that says that the state legislature can decide the result of a ‘contested’ election. Since the legislature is Republican, we know how that will turn out. But if he does carry out that threat, expect to see furious legal challenges.
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Elizabeth Warren’s single payer health care plan

She has released her plan to provide universal health care coverage through a single payer system that will save ordinary people money by producing savings and charging rich people and corporations to pay for it. Naturally, this has aroused opposition from all those who benefit from the current system (hospitals, doctors, health insurance and drug companies). But it is also being criticized by other Democratic candidates such as Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom represent the corporate-friendly Democratic party establishment.
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Grifters gotta grift: Marianne Williamson edition

Many of us assumed that vanity candidates for the presidency did so as a means to gain publicity for their other ventures. Tessa Stuart writes how erstwhile presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, who thinks that it was collective prayer that caused Hurricane Dorian to veer away from the mainland, started hawking various seminars and other products offered by an entity she created called The Williamson Institute. (In case you were wondering, Williamson is still technically in the Democratic primary race though she did not qualify for the third and fourth debates and is unlikely to do so for the fifth.)
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When size matters

There has been a spate of teacher strikes across the country recently and just last week the teachers in the Chicago schools, one of the largest in the country, ended their 11-day strike. Like other teachers who went on strike, they were demanding better salaries, extra resources, and better working conditions but also calling for smaller class sizes. And they won a lot of their demands.

In addition to guaranteeing all CTU members a 16% raise over the life of the five-year contract, the offer invests $35 million in reducing class sizes – up $10 million from the city’s previous offer.

On staffing, the city’s offer guarantees that every school will have a nurse and social worker by 2023. The offer includes 120 new “equity positions” for highest-need schools – such as counselors, restorative justice coordinators and librarians – and additional staffing in bilingual and special education.

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Games rabbis play

I have written many times before about the intricate set of rules that Orthodox Jews have to live by. Some of the most restrictive are those involving the Sabbath and what can and cannot be done during that period. It appears that there are certain things that you can do within the home that you can’t do outside it, such as carrying certain items in public. This can be a nuisance in the modern age when people are used to having their creature comforts available to them 24/7. But not to worry! As in the case of kosher telephones, certified Sabbath mode ovens, and Shabbat elevators, there is a workaround that enables the observant to broaden their activities without incurring their god’s displeasure, and this one involves placing a string known as an eruv around a perimeter that creates virtual doorways that effectively can make an entire neighborhood into the interior of a home. (At least, that is how I think that ‘theory’ works though someone who is more informed on this kind of arcana may be able to add to it.)
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8chan and the issue of speech on the internet

The website known as 8chan has served as a cesspool of bigoted and racist hate mongering for a long time in which posters seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most offensive stuff, all while arguing that they were doing it ironically, ‘for the lulz’ as the kids say these days. They operated with impunity under the shield of free speech and things were going well for them (in terms of reaching their target audience) until three mass shooters in Christchurch (targeting Muslims), Poway, California (targeting Jews), and at a Texas Walmart (targeting Hispanics) posted their hateful manifestos on the website.

This proved to be too much for those companies that had been at least indirectly supporting the site and the internet security firm Cloudflare withdrew its support, thus enabling hackers to invade the site, overwhelm it, and shut it down. The creator of 8chan, an American who lives in the Philippines and seems to covet notoriety, vows to bring the site back in some form with a new name 8kun and different security firm backing it.

The NPR radio program On the Media had a fascinating 17-minute segment tying together 8chan, the people behind it, as well as Q and the QAnon conspiracy theories that spread its message via that site, and the problem of balancing free speech and deplatforming on the internet.

It raises some crucial questions: should tech companies stymie sites like 8chan? Can 8chan stay dead? And what happens to the dark content that flourished on the site — content like the QAnon conspiracy, whose purveyor vowed to only release definitive content on 8chan, lest his narrative gets drowned out by that of impersonators?

Appeals Court rules that Trump’s tax returns should be turned over to prosecutors

For whatever reason, Donald Trump has sought to hide his tax returns from public scrutiny. The grand jury convened by the district attorney for New York County had issued a subpoena to Trump’s accountants to hand over eight years of tax returns returns as part of its investigations. Trump’s lawyers had argued that he had presidential immunity that prevented the release of those documents even though they were for a period that was before he became president.

A US District Court had earlier ruled against him and just today the US Second Court of Appeals also ruled unanimously against Trump. The Appeals Court ruling drew heavily from the Supreme Court case involving Richard Nixon’s claims of presidential immunity and said that Trump’s immunity claims were invalid for many reasons, chief among which were that the documents were being sought from his accountants and not the president himself and only as part of an investigation, so the constitutional issue of whether a sitting president could be indicted did not arise.
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