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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:19:56 GMT -8
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman "Where's the self-help section?" She said that if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
Google Lies About the Friendly SkiesThe way Google calculates the climate impact of your flights has changed, the BBC has discovered. Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. That's because the world's biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator. "Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions. The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners". In July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2.  |
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:27:40 GMT -8
Arrested For WWB (Watering While Black)
A Black pastor in Alabama said he was wrongfully arrested and charged with a crime while watering his neighbor's flowers.
In the 20-minute-long video, obtained by NBC News, a Childersburg officer approaches Jennings while he is standing on the side of a home watering plants. When the officer asks Jennings what he is doing, Jennings responds, "watering flowers."
The officer asks if a car parked in the driveway belongs to Jennings but Jennings says it is his neighbor's car. The officer asks Jennings if he lives at the home and Jennings explains that he does not.
The officer then tells Jennings that police received a call about a suspicious person at the home.
"Who's saying that?" Jennings asks.
"They called about it. ... I don't know," the officer responds.
"I'm supposed to be here. I'm Pastor Jennings. I live across the street," Jennings says as he continues to water the flowers. "I'm looking out for they house while they gone."
When the officer asks for identification, Jennings declines to provide it, telling the officer that he has not done anything wrong. He also tells the officer that he's former law enforcement.
"You want to lock me up. Lock me up. I'm not showing y'all anything," Jennings says. "I'm gonna continue watering these flowers. ... I don't care who called y'all. Lock me up and see what happens."
Jennings is ultimately placed in handcuffs for not providing identification.
The ordeal started because Jennings' neighbor, a white woman, called police to report a suspicious person. (Apparently watering flowers is suspicious to a Karen.)
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:29:56 GMT -8
I Wonder If Anyone Checked His Grades Before Electing Him to be a Judge
With the end of Roe v. Wade, abortion and reproductive rights have become a deciding factor for voters nationwide. Proving once again that local elections matter, Florida voters ousted two officials who were openly against abortion rights in two separate elections on Aug. 23.
In addition to removing Florida Rep. James Bush from office, Jared Smith, a judge in Florida’s Hillsborough County, also lost his reelection.
Prior to the election, both Bush and Smith received widespread condemnation for their views. While Bush crossed party lines as the only Democrat in the state legislature who voted on a 15-week abortion ban and the anti-LGBTQ "Don't Say Gay" bill, Smith denied a 17-year-old girl an abortion without parental consent, claiming her school grades demonstrated a lack of “intelligence or credibility.”
While judicial races often have little to no national attention, the race between Smith and his opponent Nancy Jacobs made headlines nationwide, especially after Smith's decision to deny the teen an abortion.
In the case’s initial ruling in January, Smith became focused on the teen’s grades over other evidence. In his ruling, he said that while the teen said she made mostly Bs in her testimony, at the time of the ruling her GPA was 2.0—reason enough to deny her request for an abortion.
“The court found her intelligence to be less than average … she claimed that her grades were ‘Bs’ during her testimony, her GPA is currently 2.0,” Smith wrote according to court documents. “Clearly, a ‘B’ average would not equate to a 2.0 GPA.”
Smith even claimed that the teen should not get an abortion due to the fact that she does not care for younger family members. However, others noted the teen did not have younger siblings for this claim to apply.
Additionally, Smith argued the teen “has never had any financial responsibilities, even so much as paying her own cellphone bills.” Yet the appeals court found that at the time of the hearing, the teen worked about 20 hours a week, had $1,600 in savings, two credit cards, and paid for practically everything but her cellphone bills.
While Smith attempted to discredit the girl and use her grades as evidence, the appeals court saw through it and ruled in favor of the teen. The court not only debunked Smith’s claims but found that he abused his discretion.
At least he isn't in favor of sterilizing her so dumb people can't have babies.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:33:24 GMT -8
Of Course He Did
Donald Trump pressured the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to skip safety tests so that vaccines could roll out before Election Day. And how both Trump and now-Senate candidate Mehmet Oz pushed the agency to promote drugs that did not work.
Staffers at the FDA tried to point out that not only would cutting back on phase III testing violate the agency’s rules and possibly result in distributing an unsafe product, it could also lead to exactly the kind of public distrust in vaccines that was already spreading among Republicans. And, for once, the public would have had a good reason.
Former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn also tried to point out something else: None of this would be secret. The process by which vaccines go through phase I, phase II, and phase III testing is highly consistent. The manufacturers had already made information on the initial rounds public, and it was already known when the final phase would be complete. If the FDA had moved faster, they either would been forced to line up their panel of experts and ask them to approve medication for which the results were not yet in, or simply overturn all their processes. Either way, it would have been “obviously reported, and would further reduce vaccine confidence.”
When Trump was not pushing the FDA to ignore safety rules or making attacks on agencies and individuals, he played another important role: trying to make the FDA approve drugs that were not proven to work, in particular the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine.
With Trump acting as the central promoter, FDA officials were “inundated” with demands to make the drug available. That included messages and public statements from Dr. Oz, who “called for patients to immediately begin receiving the treatment.”
Oz also wrote to Jared Kushner. “We have a potential pandemic solution at our finger tips,” while pushing an unverified report that the drug had left “100% of trial patients free of virus” in a French clinic. Oz called for distribution of hydroxychloroquine to be a “national priority,”
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:34:31 GMT -8
Are You Better Off Than You Were Two Years Ago?
No one can argue with President Joe Biden’s job record—more than 9.5 million unemployed Americans found jobs over the past 18 months, and the unemployment rate fell from 6.4 to 3.5 percent.
Whether Americans’ incomes are higher is more complicated, because the pandemic disrupted the economy in so many ways. First, GDP collapsed in 2020, and unemployment soared—followed by massive public spending that extended into Biden’s term in 2021 and helped us recover. But supply problems, especially energy, ignited inflation, and spending, worsened it. While the fast-rising employment has produced a record 14.9 percent surge in overall wage and salary income since Biden took office, how much has inflation eaten away at those unparalleled gains?
For all of the “pain at the pump” stories, the answer is that wages and salaries have kept pace with inflation since Biden took office—and by this measure, most Americans are much better off than before the pandemic hit in 2020, and before he took office in 2021.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:39:42 GMT -8
DeathSentence Finds the Sleaziest Way to Attack Fauci
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday, calling for someone to “grab” the nation’s top infectious disease expert and “chuck him across the Potomac.”
“I’m just sick of seeing him! I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, said to cheers during a campaign stop on his “Keep Florida Free Tour.”
Thank you, Dr. Fauci!
For the last three years, this trim, gray-haired doctor with the wire-rimmed glasses has been the vessel into which the country has poured all its fears and frustrations. He is hero and tormentor. Truth-teller and unreliable narrator. He has borne our angst. And through it all, he’s shown the public nothing but patience and decency — and only the occasional flares of angry exasperation mostly reserved for a senator named Rand Paul (R-Ky.) whose preferred response to the pandemic might be summed up as do-as-little-as-possible.
Throughout his career, Fauci, 81, has dealt with a host of virologic menaces — AIDS, Zika, Ebola, covid-19 — but it may be that none have been quite so confounding as disinformation, as the disregard for facts, as the demonization of intelligent inquiry. This is a scourge of our own deliberate making. As he said during a recent interview on MSNBC, the country is at a place “where we can see something in front of our very eyes and deny it’s happening.”
So many of our growing cultural bugaboos came to a head in our reckoning with Fauci. He is an intellectual at a time when many deem book-learning dangerous and cheap. He epitomizes academic journals and peer-reviewed articles. Meanwhile, folks are burning books they don’t like or they don’t understand or that simply make them sad. As a scientist Fauci deals in facts, when so many barter in free-floating feelings. He focuses on a singular truth, when so many others rhapsodize about speaking their personal truth. We want to kill the messenger, ignore his message and bury the horse he rode in on.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:43:18 GMT -8
Can These Two Guys Just Destroy Each Other?
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as “a pawn for the Democrats” and said he should “immediately” be replaced.
Trump, who soured on McConnell after the Senate leader condemned Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and acknowledged President Joe Biden’s election victory, has renewed his attacks since last week, when McConnell gave a downbeat assessment of his party’s prospects of winning Senate control in the November election. Without naming anyone, McConnell cited “candidate quality” as a factor — an apparent swipe at struggling Trump-endorsed candidates like Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, and J.D. Vance in Ohio.
“Mitch McConnell is not an Opposition Leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform. “He is afraid of them, and will not do what has to be done. A new Republican Leader in the Senate should be picked immediately!”
Trump also tore into McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, who resigned as Trump’s transportation secretary days after the Capitol riot. Trump cited an article in the conservative outlet The Federalist reporting the couple have been using their positions to make money in China.
Over the weekend, Trump bashed McConnell as a “broken down hack” and said he should spend more time and money helping GOP candidates than “helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!”
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:44:53 GMT -8
Sean Insanity Complains That His Staff Is Being Helped
Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday blasted President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive some student debt after acknowledging that it would likely benefit some of his own staffers.
Conservatives and Fox News hosts were up in arms over Biden’s announcement Wednesday that certain borrowers earning less than $125,000 annually may be forgiven up to $20,000 in student loan debt.
Hannity, who’s reportedly paid upwards of $30 million a year, noted that there were Fox News employees who could be eligible to have some of their debt canceled.
“The people that likely will benefit the most are middle class. You know, think about it. You get out of college, you’re not making a lot of money,” Hannity said on his radio show Wednesday. “We have a lot of young people that work on my TV show, they’re not making a $125,000. They’re now eligible to get in some cases up to $20,000 and in other cases $10,000. This is New Green Deal radical socialism.”
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:46:04 GMT -8
How Many Porn Stars Are You Worth?
“Jimmy Kimmel Live” guest host Simu Liu said Donald Trump’s PAC is donating $650,000 to the Smithsonian to fund portraits of the former president and his wife, Melania Trump.
Or, in terms the ex-president can understand, enough to “buy the silence of three porn stars.”
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:48:24 GMT -8
Every Night DeathSentence Prays, "Please Indict Him, Merrick!"
Earlier this summer, Donald Trump’s formerly rock-solid support among Republicans seemed to be wavering as a majority of party loyalists said they were open to backing a different GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
But the FBI’s decision to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property for highly classified documents on Aug. 8 — coupled with the former president’s furious pushback — appears to have changed that.
According to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, a majority of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now prefer Trump (54%) over “someone else” (34%) for the 2024 nomination. Right before the Mar-a-Lago search, those numbers were 47% and 38%, respectively.
Likewise, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (34%) was within striking distance of Trump (44%) in a one-on-one matchup before the Mar-a-Lago search. Since then, Trump has opened up a wider 18-point lead — 49% to 31% — over his potential rival, according to the new poll.
Yet at the same time, a full 56% of Americans say Trump should not be “allowed to serve as president again in the future” if he is “found guilty of mishandling highly classified documents” — which is precisely what the FBI is investigating him for. Only 26% say Trump should be permitted to assume the presidency again in that scenario.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:49:53 GMT -8
A Vaccine For a Virus You Probably Never Heard Of.
Pfizer announced Thursday that its vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus was more than 85% effective in preventing lower respiratory tract illness in older adults.
The New York-based pharmaceutical company released findings from the Phase 3 clinical trial investigating its RSV vaccine candidate when administered to participants ages 60 and up. The investigational vaccine targets both A and B strains of the virus, making it bivalent.
"We are delighted that this first bivalent RSV vaccine candidate, RSVpreF, was demonstrated to be efficacious in our clinical trial against this disease, which is associated with high levels of morbidity and mortality in older adults," Dr. Annaliesa Anderson, senior vice president and chief scientific officer for vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in a statement Thursday.
RSV is a common virus that affects the lungs and breathing passages, usually causing mild, cold-like symptoms but sometimes leading to serious conditions. Although most people recover within a week or two, the virus can be dangerous, especially for infants and older adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:55:52 GMT -8
Welcome to the Hotel California. Remember to Plug in Your Car
California is expected to ban the sale of new gasoline vehicles by 2035 as the state takes dramatic steps to reduce emissions and combat the climate emergency.
In a vote on Thursday, state regulators are expected to approve a plan to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars over the next 13 years in America’s largest auto market. The move is being hailed as a major victory that could point the way forward for others.
“This is monumental,” said Daniel Sperling, a member of the California Air Resources Board (Carb), to CNN. “This is the most important thing that Carb has done in the last 30 years. It’s important not just for California, but it’s important for the country and the world.”
The vote comes two years after the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive order requiring the sale of new cars to be zero-emission.
In 2021, only 12% of new cars sold in California were zero-emission, according to Carb. The new rule would require the state reach 35% of sales by 2026, 68% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. It would not affect cars that are already on the road.
The measure, which Sperling said he was almost certain would pass, will be among the first of its kind and set an example to other states that often look to California when setting their own standards. Sperling told CNN the proposal faced “surprisingly little debate” and resistance from car makers, which have ramped up production of electric vehicles. General Motors has said it plans to sell only electric vehicles by 2035.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 8:57:58 GMT -8
I'll Bet Starbucks Didn't Have Union Problems in Russia
More than 85 workers at Starbucks who were heavily involved in union organizing efforts at giant coffee chain have been fired over the past several months, according to the workers group Starbucks Workers United.
Workers have filed numerous unfair labor practice charges over the firings and a federal judge recently ordered the reinstatement of seven workers in Memphis, Tennessee, who were fired in February, a ruling Starbucks has said it disagrees with and intends to appeal.
The National Labor Relations Board has issued 21 official complaints against Starbucks, encompassing 81 charges and 548 allegations of labor law violations that are currently under review.
Starbucks has accused the NLRB of favoring the union campaign and called for union elections to be temporarily suspended. The company has vehemently opposed unionization efforts as more than 220 stores have won union elections since December.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 9:02:18 GMT -8
Doesn't Everyone Find Autistic Children Hilarious?
A video of two Republican school board hopefuls, Harry Jackson and Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, appears to show them laughing at a student singing the national anthem during a school board meeting, as reported by local outlet ABC 7 News.
According to the outlet, Fairfax County Republicans held a meeting on Aug. 16 in which the disturbing video was discussed. Stacy Langton, a parent in the county, reportedly brought the incident up. Langton alleged the video shows Jackson and Lundquist-Arora “mocking a severely autistic boy” as he sang the anthem during a previous school board meeting.
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Post by mhbruin on Aug 25, 2022 9:12:12 GMT -8
The QOP Opposes Loan Forgiveness When It Helps Somebody Else
One of the big messages from people big angry about President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan is that it’s just wrong to borrow money and not pay it back, even if you were 17 when the decision was made to borrow the money and it cannot be discharged through bankruptcy like most other debts and the interest means your debt is growing despite your monthly payments. Gosh, lucky for those people there are no other recent cases of government loans being forgiven!
Oh. Wait. Hang on. What’s that you’re saying about the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) forgiving $10.2 million in loans, with an average amount of $72,500 forgiven? (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Huh. Well, I’m sure none of the people angry about student loan forgiveness benefited from that program.
Uh … whoops.
That’s more than $16 million to congressional Republicans alone. Right-wing media organizations also took a lot of money:
The QOP Opposes Loan Forgiveness When It Helps Minorities
Increasingly, consumer advocates also view student loan forgiveness as a mechanism to reduce racial inequality, as well. Numerous studies have shown that student loan debt disproportionately impacts communities of color, and black people in particular:
Federal data released in 2017 showed that nearly half of black student loan borrowers who entered college in the 2003-04 academic year had defaulted on at least one student loan 12 years later.
This same data shows that black students who enrolled in school in 2004 owed more on their student loans after 12 years than the amount originally borrowed.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 77.7% of black students borrow federal student loans to pay for a higher education. This figure is significantly higher than the national average for all students (60%) and for white students (57.5%).
Black students are more likely to attend for-profit institutions. These schools are often accused of deceptive and predatory conduct, and have higher drop-out rates than other colleges and universities. 75% of black borrowers who dropped out of for-profit institutions wound up defaulting on their student loans.
According to the American Council on Education, 30 percent of all 2015–16 bachelor’s degree recipients graduated without debt, but only 14 percent of black graduates left school debt-free. Around one third of black bachelor’s degree recipients accumulated $40,000 or more in debt, compared with 18 percent overall.
According to a study, white borrowers pay down their education debt at a rate of 10% a year, compared with 4% for black borrowers.
These disparities are due to many factors, including educational disparities at the elementary and secondary school level, and more restricted access to college planning and college preparation, as well more limited access to programs like Advanced Placement courses and tutoring. Due to well-documented racial disparities in income, home ownership, and wealth accumulation, more black Americans must rely on debt to finance their college education than their white peers.
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