The Democratic candidates’ donor bases

The New York Times has some nice graphics of the donors to the various candidates. What is clear is the Bernie Sanders has the broadest base of support that spans the entire country, rural and urban. His support is so wide that the others get obliterated so they had a second graphic without Sanders. We then see that next to him, Elizabeth Warren also has a nationwide base, while all the other candidates tend to have most of their support from their local regions.
[Read more…]

NYT’s reporter’s corporate ties and sources

That the major media have institutional biases that cause them to frame politics in ways that are beneficial to the establishment is not news. But the way this works is not by the people who own or run the media giving orders to those below, though in some cases such as Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes at Fox News that does happen. How the media filters work is by hiring people who share the values of the institution and then letting them report ‘freely’, since you can be sure that they will believe what they are saying. Such reporters will be outraged if they are accused of bias because they have internalized all the biases and do not see them as such. This is a much better propaganda model than giving direct orders because the propaganda is so invisible. (Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann explored these and other media biases in their excellent book Manufacturing Consent.)
[Read more…]

The problem with e-scooters

Sometimes the stupidity of some people just amazes me. Take this tragic case of a 30-year old man who was killed because he was riding his e-scooter on an expressway in France. These vehicles are just motorized versions of the scooters we used to play with as children where you had to propel yourself forward by pushing on the ground with your legs. I have not seen them on the streets in the US but they seem to be popular in Europe.

The details that I have highlighted are just appalling.

A 30-year-old man has been killed after being hit by a motorbike while riding his e-scooter on a French motorway.
…

The accident happened around midnight on Friday on the A86 at Velizy-Villacoublay, 4km from Versailles to the south-west of central Paris.

The scooter rider was not wearing a helmet and was reportedly travelling in the fast lane when the motorbike hit him from behind. Initial police reports said it was not clear if the scooter had lights.

[Read more…]

What happens when you attack a Democratic party establishment favorite

Matt Taibbi writes that what happened to presidential candidate Tulise Gabbard when she attacked Kamala Harris during the second round of debates is a telling indicator of how the mainstream media operates. Harris has been trying to rewrite her history to portray herself as having been a ‘progressive prosecutor’ as attorney general in California when in reality she was pretty much a standard prosecutor who prided herself on being ‘tough on crime’ and throwing as many people in jail as possible even for minor offenses and blocking attempts to clear those who felt that they had been wrongfully convicted.
[Read more…]

The Epstein saga continues to unfold

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.
[Read more…]

What cowards they are

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.
[Read more…]

Getting ready for a no-deal Brexit

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.

US politicians hide their nonbelief

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.

[Read more…]