June 29, 2019

"Local "Proud Boys" try to intimidate the King County Library System's Drag Queen Story Hour

Local “Proud Boys” and others opposed to the King County Library System’s Drag Queen Story Hours showed up in Issaquah on Wednesday to voice their opposition to the events. The showing comes ahead of major Pride celebrations and after recent anti-LGBTQ vandalism in Renton that the FBI has started investigating.

At a June 26 King County Library System (KCLS) board meeting, large groups of both supporters and opponents of the events showed up to voice their opinions. This included some who may be associated with the Proud Boys, a right-wing violent street fighting organization.

KCLS spokesperson Julie Acteson said both sides followed meeting protocol, but that so many people showed up to testify, the public comment was split into two parts.

At the Issaquah gathering, a group of about 10 men wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and black shirts with Operation Cold Front logos and the words “security” and “press” stood at the front of the room on either side of the audience. Others, attendee Kate Solomon said, wore knock-off Fred Perry shirts — which have become associated with Proud Boys and the alt-right.

Solomon attended the meeting in support of the storytime events and was joined by others from the LGBTQ community. While she thinks the Drag Queen Story Hours are a “wonderful thing,” she notes there has been a lot of harassment occurring over the past couple of weeks.

Pride flags were torn down in front of businesses and there has been a concerted effort to share the private information of local drag queens on social media, a practice commonly known as doxxing. Similar behavior was displayed at the Issaquah meeting, she said.

http://www.issaquahreporter.com/news/opposition-and-supporters-of-drag-queen-story-hour-make-showing-in-issaquah/

June 19, 2019

Making filthy air great again to pwn libs...

US air quality is slipping after years of improvement



Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it’s troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.

There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed just the opposite, saying earlier this month in Ireland: “We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m president.”

That’s not quite the case. There were noticeably more polluted air days each year in the president’s first two years in office than any of the four years before, according to new Environmental Protection Agency data analyzed by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration is expected to replace an Obama-era rule designed to limit emissions from electric power plants on Wednesday. Called the Clean Power Plan, it would have gradually phased out coal-burning power plants that emit both air pollutants and heat-trapping gases responsible for climate change.




The EPA quietly posted new air quality data online last month that shows a recent uptick in polluted days.

Five hundred and thirty-two American metro areas reported a total of 4,134 days in 2018 when the official air quality index passed 100, which means it is unhealthy for people with heart and lung disease, the elderly and the very young. That’s about 15% more bad air days per city than the average for 2013 to 2016, America’s clean air heyday.

<snip>

In an email, the EPA told The Associated Press the increase in unhealthy air days in 2017 “is largely associated with wildfires” in the west and it is studying 2018 before officially announcing its annual air trend data.

Air pollution experts agree wildfires likely have had a role, along with random variation, a stronger economy which leads to more consumption of fuels, and a changing climate. Higher temperatures increase the chances for fires and smog.

Even with the recent stagnation, there are far fewer bad air days now than in the early 2000s, 1990s and 1980s. Perciasepe said what’s happening now is a “tug of war” between the worsening effects of warming on air quality and cleaner air from less coal use and more efficient cars.

But if regulations on coal plants, cars and other emissions are relaxed, the air quality will deteriorate, said Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor Neil Donahue.

https://www.apnews.com/d3515b79af1246d08f7978f026c9092b

ps: How does the top right photo make America great again?

June 19, 2019

Inside the traumatic life of a Facebook moderator

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1141316396942602240

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1141316399039766528

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1141316400994238466

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1141316402990727169

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1141317045881069569

be warned, this is hard to watch:

June 18, 2019

Why the Paper of Record Hates Cartoons

Cartoons are powerful—so much so that The New York Times is cracking down on them.
By Jeet Heer

Utopias are defined as much by what they exclude as by their promises of plenitude. Plato dreamed of an ideal republic free of pestilent poets. The editors of The New York Times, more mundanely but equally tellingly, aspire to a newspaper that employs no cartoonists. In the wake of a controversy over the international edition of the Times running a cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu that was widely condemned as anti-Semitic, the newspaper severed its relationship with the syndicate that supplied the offending image and now has let go of the services of two in-house cartoonists, Patrick Chappatte and Heng Kim Song.

Speaking for many in his profession, Joel Pett, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist for Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, decried the decision as “chickenshit and cowardly.” More politely, CNN’s Jake Tapper told The Daily Beast that this was “just one more nail in the coffin of what is a struggling art form, given how corporate America has taken over local newspapers and gutted the industry.”

It’s undeniable that editorial cartooning, even more than journalism as a whole, is in crisis. A 2012 report by the Herblock Foundation found that there were fewer than 40 editorial cartoonists with newspaper-staff jobs in America, a steep decline from more than 2,000 such positions in the beginning of the 20th century. The situation has gotten only more dire since that report, with the high-profile firing of Rob Rogers from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for penning anti-Trump cartoons. Newspaper editorial cartooning is well on the path to extinction, a dire end for a vital art that has been inextricable from modern political protest.



<snip>

In truth, the Times has long viewed editorial cartoons with sniffy disdain. For most of its existence, the Times, along with The Wall Street Journal, was one of the few newspapers that ran no cartoons at all. In the golden age of political cartooning, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had Bill Mauldin, The Washington Post had Herblock, The Village Voice had Jules Feiffer, and The New York Times had nobody.

The fired Patrick Chappatte recalls that in 1995 an art director at the Times told him, “We never had political cartoons and we will never have any.” Chappatte sneaked into the Times through the back door, in the international edition. There was a brief period where even the domestic Times carried cartoons, but that ended a year ago.



more: https://www.thenation.com/article/new-york-times-netanyahu-cartoon-bennet/

June 4, 2019

These aren't Democratic policies...

and this Delaney guy needs to be kicked to the curb. He sounds like fuckin' Howard Schultz.

https://twitter.com/DanRiffle/status/1135550692633038848