The ‘deep story’ white conservatives tell themselves

One of the questions that many people ask themselves is how it is that so many people buy into what the conman Donald Trump is selling them even when it seems that he is working against their own interests. University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild says that it is clear that Trump is the culmination of a process that first came to the forefront with the Tea Party. She had earlier decided to try to set aside her preconceptions and explore the Tea Party phenomenon and spent five years having in-depth interviews with people in the heart of Tea party country and Trump’s election came during her research.

She has produced a book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right where she sets out her findings.
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Mercenaries as proxies for direct US military involvement

That the US is overtly involved in so many wars and military actions around the world is well known, though many people might be surprised at the large numbers of bases and small scale military operations that are going on. Less well known are the covert operations run by the CIA and the more covert branches of the military. Even less well known are those where the US employs mercenaries, usually former US military personnel, to achieve its goals of propping up unsavory leaders or deposing those whom the US dislikes. Matthew Cole and Kim Ives write about a botched mercenary operation to funnel money and arms in support of embattled Haitian president Jovenel Moïse.
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The secret weapon to stop Brexit

Remember Uri Geller? The guy who claims to bend spoons with his mind but failed miserably when confronted with a test on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show where Carson has followed James Randi’s advice and prevented Geller from getting prior access to the props? But despite repeated exposure and humiliations, he keeps coming back, even telling gullible people that the CIA and Mossad use his powers.
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Chelsea Manning in solitary confinement – again

I have written many times before about how the US prison system imposes needlessly cruel conditions on those unfortunate enough to get caught in its clutches, The latest example of this is that whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent to prison again and is being kept in solitary confinement, a practice that most civilized nations consider barbaric and torture. The US government hates Manning with a passion because she exposed the murderous actions of its troops in Iraq.
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Shining a light on how Congress really works

Thanks to commenter efogoto, I saw the second part of the Seth Meyers interview of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she explained what the Green New Deal is about and the difference between a resolution and a bill. She also explained a photo that she had posted on Twitter that showed lines of homeless people sitting in the hallways outside congressional hearing rooms. They were not there to plead their own case. Instead she said that lobbyists hire homeless people to keep places in line for them for congressional hearings so that lobbyists end up occupying all the seats in the hearing rooms, shutting out anyone else.
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The petty cruelty of the US prison system

I came across this article about Selene Saavedra Roman, a young woman who worked as a flight attendant for the American airline Mesa, who was detained for six weeks upon the return of her flight from Mexico because she is the child of undocumented immigrants. She is one of the many ‘Dreamers’, recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, that the Trump administration is cracking down on.
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The menace of philanthropists

I have reached such a level of cynicism that now when I hear someone described as a philanthropist, I immediately assume that they must be really awful people who have either got their money by practices that abuse and exploit people or that they are personally abusive to those immediately around them or most likely both, and they are now using their gifts to hide the ugly sources of their wealth or to buy silence. The burden of proof has shifted to them to show that they are not awful people.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Seth Meyers’ show

Among other things he asked her why her questioning of people in congressional hearings was so much better than that of so many other congresspeople. She replied that she has excellent staffers and since she pays all her staffers a living wage, two of them could give up the second jobs that they worked in order to make ends meet, and thus can devote all their energy to the work in Congress. She also gave examples of some of the ridiculous questions that Republicans, weaned on an exclusive diet of Fox News, ask of witnesses and also of her.

Rich new trove of Cambrian fossils found

The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the discovery of a vast range of fossils of organisms that existed about 500 million years ago. The first discovery of them was made in the Burgess Shale region of Canada in 1909 and other troves were later found in China and Australia. But now comes a report of an extremely rich new trove that has been discovered, again in China.
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What were they thinking?

The fear that has been generated by school shootings in the US has prompted some districts to adopt measures that seem utterly wrongheaded. An elementary school in Indiana ran a drill to prepare for school shootings that involved teachers getting fired at with plastic pellets.

The incident, acknowledged in testimony this week before state lawmakers, was confirmed by two elementary school teachers in Monticello, who described an exercise in which teachers were asked by local law enforcement to kneel down against a classroom wall before being sprayed across their backs with plastic pellets without warning.

“They told us, ‘This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing,’” said one of the two teachers, both of whom asked IndyStar not to be identified out of concern for their jobs. “They shot all of us across our backs. I was hit four times.

“It hurt so bad.”
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One of the teachers said she was waiting in the library with her colleagues as the first small group of teachers was led into a classroom for one session.
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She said she had welts and one spot where the pellet broke her skin. It was scabbed over for several weeks.

What exactly was the lesson being sent by shooting at teachers? That bullets hurt? I think that everyone already knows that. If at all, shooting them with pellets might convey the wrong message that bullets are not lethal.

People go into the teaching profession to teach, not to be police deputies or the targets of a shooting exercise. I find it incredible that school districts agree to this type of ‘training’.