May 24, 2018

Ah said stand up. Boy.

May 10, 2018

Sarah Braasch, the white woman who called police on Black grad student defends slavery...

I Love Hate Speech’: Sarah Braasch, the white woman who called police on Black Yale grad student for napping in dorm, defends slavery and supports burqa ban in writings



Here are five things to know about Sarah Braasch, the woman who called the police on a fellow Yale graduate student for taking a nap in a common room.

1. She is working on her fifth degree

According to her bio on Yale’s website, Braasch is working on her fifth degree, a PhD in philosophy. She already has two engineering degrees, a law degree (she’s a member of the New York State Bar), and a master’s degree in philosophy. The bio says her master’s in philosophy was obtained so “to address the sub-human legal status of the world’s women at the source, the philosophical foundations of law.”

2. She won a middle school class debate about the Civil War with pro-slavery arguments

In a 2010 blog post for Humanist, Braasch recalled a time in middle school when her classed was assigned to debate the pros and cons of slavery.

“I know, in retrospect it seems a bit odd to me as well. But, in a sense, what better way is there to learn about any historical subject than to debate it? And rather than debate the subject from the perspectives of late twentieth-century teens, we approached it as if we were abolitionists or southern plantation owners during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency,” she wrote.

Braasch continued:

“I was placed on the pro-slavery side of the argument. I remember spending many an hour in the local public library poring over Time Life books… And then I had a eureka moment. Some—not many, but some—of the slaves didn’t want to stop being slaves. A small number wanted to remain with their owners or return even after being freed. I knew I had just won the debate. And indeed, I did. I led our team to victory. The pro-slavery contingent defeated the abolitionists because, in a democracy, in the land of the free, who are we to tell people that they can’t be slaves if they want to be? Who are we to tell someone that she has to be free? Who are we to tell someone that she has to be regarded as fully human?”

3. She supports banning burqas

In that same Humanist blog post, which was ultimately about a law banning burqas, Braasch wrote about being against hate speech legislation.

“For the record, I am an incipient First Amendment lawyer and a staunch church-state separatist. I am an intractable free speech defender and a vehement opponent of hate crime legislation. I stake the claim that morality has no place in the law. I support the anticipated public burqa ban in France. And I would support a similar ban in the United States and anywhere else in the world.”

4. She is against hate crime legislation

From a 2011 blog post on Patheos : “Hate crimes legislation is stupid. Seriously stupid. Abominably stupid. I hate hate crimes legislation. But, I love hate speech. Hate crimes legislation has a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association.”

5. She refers to her time as a Jehovah’s Witness as being a “slave”

Braasch left the Jehovah’s Witness faith as a teenager and looks upon her time in that religion as enslavement. “I was a slave who extolled the virtues of being a slave. I was a slave who insisted that I had chosen slavery of my own free will, of my own volition, as a conscious and educated choice. Because, you see, I was a Jehovah’s Witness who had been brainwashed from birth to believe that God had created me subhuman–below man,” she wrote in a blog post.

more: https://thegrio.com/2018/05/10/sarah-braasch-yale-grad-student/

Also, Braasch has since deleted her twitter account.

And here I am feeling sympathy for her current situation

May 7, 2018

Be Best Plagiarist

Melania Trump Cyberbullying Booklet Appears to Be Copied From FTC Booklet Released During Obama Administration



Two years ago, Melania Trump copied several lines in her Republican National Convention speech from an address Michelle Obama delivered in 2008. On Monday, Melania Trump formally announced the launch of an anti-cyberbullying initiative. As part of the initiative, the White House released a booklet that, in the words of Melania’s signed introduction, is intended to “help kids act thoughtfully and kindly” online. And, as BuzzFeed News’ Ryan Mac points out, it appears that the booklet was almost completely copied from a document released by the Federal Trade Commission in 2014.

Above, you can see the two documents’ covers. Here’s another side-by-side:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/melania-trump-cyberbullying-booklet-apparently-plagiarized.html

May 7, 2018

Donald Trump and the Media's Quest for a Goldilocks Conservative

At a company-wide town hall-style event in early April, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, and his star writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates engaged in some candid public soul searching about how it is the venerable magazine, founded by abolitionists over 150 years ago, had hired (very briefly) a writer who advocated state-sanctioned hanging of women who abort pregnancies, and compared a small black child he encountered on a reporting trip to “a three-fifths scale Snoop Dogg” who gestured like a “primate.”

<snip>

The weeks in between have been as revealing about the nature of that movement as any since Trump announced his candidacy. Conservatives spent much of spring championing EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the most corrupt cabinet official in modern history, and a man Kevin Williamson, the fired Atlantic columnist, praised as a “true believer, who’s “serious about this rule-of-law stuff,” because Pruitt is a friend of industry and a climate-science denier. They are currently fretting that the coal baron Don Blankenship, a viciously racist felon who cost 29 of his miners their lives, will win the GOP Senate primary in West Virginia—not because the Republican Party objects to nominating bigoted criminals to run for high office, per se, but because they worry Blankenship is likely to lose in the general election. Perhaps the central objective of the movement at the moment is to discredit the FBI and the Department of Justice so that Trump’s supporters don’t abandon him and the GOP if and when Special Counsel Robert Mueller concludes Trump obstructed justice, or conspired with Russian intelligence to subvert the 2016 election, or laundered money, or multiple of the above.

Not every conservative supports every facet of this agenda, of course, including Williamson, whose one big ideological heresy as a conservative is his opposition to Trump. But every facet of it flows from the same wellspring of right-wing contempt for modern culture, and for sources of neutral authority (science, law, journalism) that get in the way of conservative objectives.

<snip>

And yet all this stretching and compromising to represent more viewpoints, and present an olive branch to Republicans, has largely served to advance the careers of NeverTrump conservatives who represent a minuscule fraction of the American right, and buy no good will. To truly mirror the full range of American political ideas, publications like The Atlantic or the Times would have to hire genuinely pro-Trump writers, who would excuse away or deflect from Trump’s racism and dishonesty and contempt for competing institutions with propaganda.

This hasn’t happened precisely because all the key decision makers understand Trumpism is beneath the best standards of opinion journalism. During and after the election, CNN hired a slate of pro-Trump commentators to appease Trump, and succeeded only in debasing itself. But Trumpism is the political style of the overwhelming majority of conservatives in the country. Most journalists have not reckoned with what that means for their industry, which is committed to values like empiricism and reason, but also to demonstrating neutrality toward America’s mainstream ideological movements. To the mission of the vocation, but also to accommodating people and ideas that are fundamentally hostile to that mission. Yet clearly one commitment or the other has to give.

At one point in their conversation, Coates and Goldberg appear to reach agreement that The Atlantic can avoid more Williamson-style fiascos by recommitting to basics. “If we publish kick-ass stories, very little of this will actually matter,” Coates said, leading to a brief discursion about the importance of reporting as a method: Reporting makes opinion journalism more persuasive and enduring by weeding out bad assumptions and other nonsense.

They’re correct about this, but they never grapple with why: Why is it that holding writers to strict standards of empiricism, logical rigor, and broad-based information-seeking will clear out the Williamson-style landmines editors like Goldberg have stepped on? Why do conservatives run either too hot, or too cold, but never just right? The answer is there. It may be the single most important thing to know about American politics today, and Donald Trump made it plain for all to see. But few journalists can bring themselves to say it out loud.

more: https://crooked.com/article/donald-trump-unmasking-america/

May 4, 2018

Now-Worthless Theranos Investments Reportedly Cost Walton Family, Betsy DeVos Hundreds of Millions

I wish every silicon valley startup existed solely to bankrupt millionaires and billionaires.



Wealthy elites sank more than $600 million into Theranos, the rapidly flatlining blood-testing startup, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

The startup’s CEO and founder Elizabeth Homes, once dubbed “the next Steve Jobs,” brought in multi-million dollar investments from big names like Education Secretary Besty DeVos and the Walton family. Now, newly unsealed documents, made public in the course of a fraud suit against Theranos, have revealed the dire finances of a company plagued by scandals, layoffs, and lawsuits. The WSJ says the top-dollar investments are now “essentially worthless.”

Theranos’ biggest investors reportedly include the Walton family, which put in $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, the largest individual investor, who put in $121 million; Betsy DeVos, who invested $100 million; and the Cox family, of Cox Media, which invested $100 million. The documents do not include the identities of shareholders or investors who gave money before 2013.

The fraud suit was brought by venture capitalist Robert Colman, who invested $15 million in Theranos in 2013. Theranos is facing multiple fraud suits from investors, all claiming Holmes misled investors on the core mission of Theranos: micro-sample blood testing. The Securities and Exchange Commission launched a civil fraud investigation against Holmes, ending in a $500,000 penalty and 10-year-ban from holding an executive role in a public company.

more: https://gizmodo.com/now-worthless-theranos-investments-reportedly-cost-walt-1825775178

May 1, 2018

The White House Correspondents' Dinner Has Always Been A Bad Idea by Parker Molloy

Each spring, journalists, politicians, and celebrities make their way to the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association is a time-honored tradition that dates back almost a century.

But it needs to end.

<snip>

The dinner, which dates back to 1921, has been the setting of an uncomfortable standoff between journalists and the people they cover. President Calvin Coolidge first attended the gathering in 1924, as have 14 other presidents since. In the 1980s, the WHCA began hiring comedians to “roast” the people and organizations in attendance, a tradition that continues today. In 1993, C-SPAN began airing the event live, putting the awkward hobnobbing on display for the whole world to see.

Since then, critics have argued that the event has become a bloated spectacle that gives Americans an unflattering look at how Washington journalism’s proverbial sausage is made. In 1972, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson even warned of the coziness between journos and politicos at events like the Correspondents’ dinner: “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists — in Washington or anywhere else that they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in.”

<snip>

Michelle Wolf, the comedian hired as the evening’s entertainment, did what she was brought there to do: She poked fun at the powerful. The jokes were biting, but they weren’t in any way out of the ordinary for the event. Her observations included the fact that Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies a lot (this is objectively true), that Trump might not be as rich as he claims he is (there’s a lot of evidence to suggest this is the case), and highlighted the hypocrisy of self-professed “pro-life” members of Congress who pay for their wives and mistresses’ abortions in secret (just last year a Republican member of the House retired for this very reason).

<snip>

With their inability to recognize their error, the WHCA illustrates exactly why its sycophantic relationship with politicians is unhealthy for the industry and for democracy as a whole. Like Thompson says: If you’re afraid of upsetting the powerful and losing access, if you’re afraid of making them dislike you, how are you supposed to hold their feet to the fire?

Washington journalists, and the WHCA specifically, need to recognize the crucial role they play in our country. Journalism is one of the only professions given an explicit shoutout in the Constitution, and for good reason: Journalists need to serve as a check on our government’s worst impulses.

more: https://www.good.is/articles/ending-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner

May 1, 2018

The Hill won't attend the WHCD without major reforms

Profiles in Cowardice...

The Hill to end attendance at WHCA dinner without 'major reforms'

The Hill said Tuesday it is pulling out of future White House Correspondents' dinners without “major reforms” to the event following the controversy that erupted over comedian Michelle Wolf’s performance at this year’s dinner on Saturday.

“The Hill, which has participated in the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) dinner for many years, does not plan at this time to participate in the event moving forward,” James Finkelstein, The Hill’s chairman, wrote in a letter dated Tuesday to Steven Thomma, executive director of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

“In short, there's simply no reason for us to participate in something that casts our profession in a poor light. Major changes are needed to the annual event,” the letter states.

Finkelstein’s letter criticized Wolf’s performance as “out of line” and said that The Hill hoped the dinner could get “back to talking about the importance of the Fourth Estate without the kind of ugly sideshow that completely overshadowed the event this year.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/media/385636-the-hill-to-end-attendance-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner-without-major

May 1, 2018

Jeff Bezos is an asshole. "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is...

....by converting my @amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it."

SFW about WaPo - he's as fucked up as Trump/Theil/Koch/etc...



Jeff Bezos is worth $131 billion, according to Forbes, and the Amazon founder and CEO is clear about the primary way he plans to spend that much money: getting to space.

"The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it," Bezos says in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, published by Business Insider on Saturday.

Bezos says his work on Blue Origin, his space company, "is the most important work that I'm doing."

"Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune," he says. "I am currently liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you're right, you're not going to spend it on a second dinner out."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/30/jeff-bezos-says-this-is-how-he-plans-to-spend-the-bulk-of-his-fortune.html

April 30, 2018

Getting Republicans Elected Every November-Second Green Party candidate turns out to secretly be a..

Second Green Party candidate turns out to secretly be a Republican shocking!

Scrambling for ways to hold on to power through November’s midterm cycle, it seems Republicans are opting to back phony Green Party candidates in hopes of confusing voters.

After all, in a close contest a Green Party candidate siphoning away a few thousands votes from Democrats could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

<snip>

The the latest instance involves incumbent Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY). It turns out the one-time Green Party candidate Michael Zack, who abruptly dropped out this month after questions were raised about his background, used to intern in Collins’ office.

“The former Green Party candidate in a Congressional race has been exposed as a Republican plant with ties to the GOP congressman he supposedly sought to challenge,” the Daily Beast reports.

Previous and since-removed social media posts tag Zack as a far-right conservative. He’s not someone committed to the Green Party agenda of ending war and advocating for clean energy.

more: https://shareblue.com/republicans-fake-green-party-candidates-chris-collins-new-york-ny-27/

April 30, 2018

The worthless Washington media

The worthless Washington media by Ryan Cooper



The U.S. is a rotten basketcase of a nation, with an ancient and constantly backfiring Constitution, a severe case of declining empire neurosis, and an executive branch shot through with criminals and scam artists.

The elite press corps of the imperial capital plays an important part in our government's corruption, as was on vivid display once more with the tired charade of the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. Comedian Michelle Wolf did what political comedians are supposed to do — use jokes to cut through the comfortable hypocrisy and expose some unpleasant truths, namely that the Trump administration is full of disgustingly amoral cretins. Much of the assembled crowd of bigshot reporters then played their part, performing scandalized outrage in defense of the corrupt regime.

<snip>

I was a bit curious to see if things would change this time, as Trump is not even bothering to hide how he is using the presidency to enrich himself, multiple former administration and campaign officials are under indictment or have pleaded guilty to serious crimes, and Trump himself is constantly whipping up psychotic anti-media hatred. Indeed, during the dinner itself, Trump was lambasting the media at a rally: "Is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondents' Dinner? Is this more fun?" (The crowd roared.)

But no. When Wolf launched a few mild zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway — saying that Sanders' "smoky eye" makeup was made from "burnt facts," speculating about how to get Conway trapped under a tree, and attacking CNN for profiting off the Trump presidency — most of the elite D.C. press leaped to their defense. CNN's Chris Cillizza said Wolf was bullying Sanders. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski tweeted that Wolf's makeup joke was "deplorable." The New York Times' Maggie Haberman wrote that it was "impressive" that Sanders didn't walk out. "Being mean isn't funny," whined Politico Playbook. "It's mean." Mike Allen, the dean of D.C.'s political journalists and (not coincidentally) an extraordinarily ethically compromised person himself, announced: "Media hands Trump big, embarrassing win."

<snip>

Let's be frank here: The basic job of Sanders and Conway is to lie and dissemble on behalf of a corrupt president who has taken vicious media-baiting far beyond the Spiro Agnew level. They do it nearly every time they open their mouths. That it is possible to react to these mild insults outside of this overtly and personally threatening context is final confirmation that the above journalists are not capable of perceiving the reality of the American state, much less how they are enabling it. As Alex Pareene once noted, "These people practice a form of corruption in which the corrupt individual literally cannot understand why anyone wouldn't consider him or her a stalwart and productive member of society."

more: http://theweek.com/articles/770441/worthless-washington-media