The 20-year old man who scared the daylights out of people by walking through a Walmart in Missouri wearing body armor, a bullet-proof vest, and carrying a loaded rifle and extra ammunition, all mimicking the shooter in El Paso has been arrested for ‘making terrorist threats’.
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UPDATE: Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead in his jail cell.
The court documents about the lawsuits brought against Jeffrey Epstein that a judge ordered to be unsealed have been released and they contain explosive new allegations of a vast operation to get underage girls to perform sex act on Epstein and his friends and associates. The Daily Beast has gone through the 2,000 pages of unsealed documents and provided some of the most sensational findings.
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Vox had a sobering series of graphics on the 2,180 mass shootings since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of 20 elementary school children and six adults, an act so horrendous that it seemed that it should spark serious actions to curb such atrocities. And yet, nothing happened. One of them was a telling graph plotting for a number of countries the number of guns per 100 people versus the number of gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. The US is an extreme outlier for both.
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She shreds all the bogus alternative explanations for mass shootings put forward by Donald Trump and the Republicans in order to deflect attention from the real problem: there are too many damn guns in the country.
It looks like the way that the UK political system is set up, the new prime minister Boris Johnson can force through a no-deal Brexit on October 31 even if there are massive defections from his Conservative party that lead to it losing a vote of no-confidence.
No 10 has not ruled out scheduling an election in the immediate days after leaving the EU on 31 October if Boris Johnson is forced into one by the loss of a confidence motion, according to party sources.
Speculation about the timing of an autumn election is rife as Downing Street tries to figure out how to deal with the fallout if Tory rebels join with opposition parties to vote down the government.
Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s most senior aide and “assistant to the prime minister”, has told ministers and officials that the government is prepared to call an election to be held after 31 October and leave anyway if it loses a confidence vote.
…Labour could hold a confidence motion in Johnson’s government as early as the first week of September to test whether he commands the support of the House of Commons.
There would be a subsequent 14 days in which MPs could try to form an alternative government but a general election would be triggered if they could not manage to do so.
Opponents of a no-deal Brexit would want an election to happen before 31 October in order to prevent a crash-out, but the Fixed-term Parliaments Act gives discretion to the incumbent prime minister to name a suitable polling day.
Since Johnson and his key advisor Dominic Cummings seem determined to leave the EU, it looks like a done deal with very few options available to those who think a no deal Brexit would be a disaster.
It should be no surprise that in the US, politicians are wary of saying that they do not believe in any god. They definitely shy away from the label of ‘atheist’ since that is viewed negatively and saying that they are humanist or not being willing to answer about their religious beliefs is as far as they seem to think it is safe to go, even as public acceptance of nonbelief is on the rise.
Non-believers remain few and far between in American politics. In Congress, the only one to publicly “come out” as such is Jared Huffman, a Democrat representing California’s second district and a leading proponent of impeachment of Donald Trump.
Huffman announced in late 2017 that he is a humanist, not an atheist. In an interview at his Capitol Hill office, he characterized himself as “non-religious, humanist, spiritual albeit without any particular dogma. I’m a spiritual drifter. ‘Seeker’ would be a perfectly good word, too.”
…“Atheism seems to bring with it the notion of being anti-religion as opposed to non-religious,” he said. “I prefer non-religious because I just want everyone to make their own religious choices. I’m not against them having religion.
…“I have many fellow travellers, very few publicly. I think there’s still fear of this conventional wisdom that being an atheist or agnostic or a non-believer is somehow the worst possible thing in politics. My experience has been that that’s not the case, but how you do it matters.”
…In Congress, too, Christians are still overrepresented when compared with the general public, according to the Pew Research Center. About 23% of the public say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”.
The number of non-Christian members of Congress is now 63, Pew says, made up of 34 Jews, three Muslims, three Hindus, two Buddhists, two Unitarian Universalists, and 19, including the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who decline to specify a religious affiliation.
… are those dangerous people with milkshakes.
When deciding which candidates to support, one looks to see positive endorsements, i.e., support and contributions from people and organizations whom one respects. But negative endorsements (i.e, if they are supported by people and organizations one detests) can also be useful
And on the latter score, we see Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg get big donations form Wall Street executives and Harris also gets from the pharmaceutical industry executives even after she claims she rejects them.
I am not surprised about Biden and Harris because they are the Democratic party establishment candidates and so cater to the big business interests but the news about Buttigieg is disappointing.
Once again, we see the New York Times falling over itself to paint Trump in as good a light as possible, like it did earlier when it refused to use the term ‘racist’ to describe his nakedly racist tweets. It is part of its long-standing policy of deference to the powerful and wealthy.
Let this front page serve as a reminder of how white supremacy is aided by – and often relies upon – the cowardice of mainstream institutions. https://t.co/ynjgtT66yI
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 6, 2019
The family of Parker Mustian clearly had not heard that great song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (see below). PZ brought this young man’s story to my attention.
Parker Mustian, a 16-year-old former student at Cardinal Newman high school in Columbia, South Carolina was arrested by local law enforcement officers last month after he appeared in a pair of racist “public service announcements” that were circulated among students at his school.
Mustian is further alleged to have threatened to “shoot up” the Catholic school following his expulsion last month.
“Howdy, I’m Parker Mustian and I hate black people,” the teen begins in the first clip. “They’re the worst. They’re stinky and they just suck. They’re just bad people.”