• 88 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When Trump loses the coming election, a peaceful transfer of power should go from Biden to Harris, but Trump has worked to dismantle norms such that we must now expect that he will contest the results, tell his supporters he won, and worry about those angry supporters being goaded into attacks on poll workers, judges, Congress, and federal buildings.

    Vance is already feigning ignorance of how he and Trump create violence.
    Excerpt of Vance/Bash kerfuffle (page is not the full conversation):

    … You accused me of causing a bomb threat. Doesn’t that mean I should shut up about the residents of Springfield? Don’t you realize you’re engaged in basic propaganda to silence the concerns of American citizens?

    DANA BASH, CNN: I was quoting the actual mayor of Springfield, Ohio, who, after the bomb threats, was begging federal officials to stop putting negative attention on his city. I’m not talking about the policies…

    They are making a peaceful transfer more difficult by telling lies, spurring on their most violent supporters, and then denying all culpability. Sadly, doing so may spread from their fanatics to a larger population as evinced by yet-another-gunman-incident.




  • Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:

    But he woman’s doctor told police that the defendant had tested positive with a rapid test before telling him that she “certainly won’t let herself be locked up” after the result.

    Instead she left her apartment and talked to people without a mask, ignoring her mandatory quarantine and positive test.

    Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections:

    Its manifesto has promised a pardon for anyone convicted of breaching coronavirus rules and to repay any fines imposed during the pandemic.

    The manifesto says coronavirus regulations were encroachments on fundamental rights “accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing.”


  • Not all Americans eat beef equally, data shows. Last year, Rose and his colleagues published a study looking at U.S. government data of the diets of more than 10,000 Americans. They found that on a given day, 12% of Americans account for half of all beef consumption. That 12% was disproportionately men.

    I’m confused by this because I want it to mean the same 12% all the time, but I suspect they mean that it is a different 12% from one day to the next.

    “Many men do reduce their meat consumption or are willing to,” says Joel Ginn, food and psychology researcher at Boston College, “but there are hurdles that they’ve had to overcome.”

    Manly men advertising meat – and Joe Rogan??? I guess all kinds of guys what to be oh so manly, but when I think of macho men, he’s just not on that list.

    Seeing someone in your close personal circle, or celebrities like athletes, make a behavior change can be an important piece of the puzzle, says Daniel Rosenfeld, psychology and food researcher at UCLA. “The way to get some people to eat less meat is to get other people to eat less meat,” he says.

    Personally, both myself and my better half enjoy the newer fake meat burgers. They really are a satisfying way to get a ‘manly’ burger.





  • Refresher on McCabe from The Guardian:

    McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department.

    I mention this because y’all know that Trumpers will immediately brush off McCabe’s comments as a known-bad-guy who was fired for being so awful and is now trying to get revenge.


  • You’re right. I hear you. Intellectually, I understand that the conservative/fundamentalist mindset gives higher importance to following leaders and is more triggered by moral disgust. I understand that a conservative may feel a liberal is less moral because liberals ‘lack’ a moral imperative to follow leaders simply because they are leaders. I even accept that agreeing to a premise has utility by getting everyone to work towards a common goal. Unfortunately, I get stuck on the bit where the premise seems illogical to me, or the leader seems to be obviously lying. That’s the part where any intellectual understanding of why someone might choose to ignore obvious red flags flies to the wayside and I can’t figure out what to do about it.

    I’m pretty sure that journalists should continuously report which things are unfounded lies, but I don’t think that will sway those who believe those lies. It might, however, convince the continuously emerging crop of newly interested people to be skeptical.


  • I spent a good while writing up a reply, but it was long and the main point was: while any group of 100+ people is likely to have a bad actor, you look for credible proof (like Edward Snowden showing evidence rather than Sidney Powell saying she had ‘visions’). Side bit: tales of killing/eating/sexually-exploiting babies and pets by a GROUP should always be taken as a manipulative lie because it always is. When some whacko actually tries that crap, the Boys in Blue get up in arms – even if it means ignoring pressure from their bosses, “He’s Illuminati. Let it go.” No. That sort of thing gets exposed.











  • That’s it. Audubon sucks. I was immediately reminded of a recent Vox story on How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact

    The National Audubon Society, the beloved bird conservancy organization, rewards regenerative ranchers with its seal of approval in the form of a label that reads “Grazed on bird friendly land” and “Audubon certified.” Such beef can be purchased at about 250 retail and online stores.

    Then there’s how Massachusetts Audubon pretended it was going to chop down its trees so it could continue NOT cutting them to get paid to preserve them for carbon-offsets. Propublica:

    However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state’s rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.

    Then there’s E & E News (politico) discussion of Audubon’s internals:

    The organization’s former president and CEO, David Yarnold, resigned under pressure in 2021, following POLITICO’s reports of widespread staff dissatisfaction at Audubon, especially among workers of color and the LGBTQ community (Greenwire, April 21, 2021).

    An external audit later substantiated some of those claims, and pointed to widespread cultural problems. “Nearly all of the women we interviewed and many of the men commented that implicit bias toward women and people of color is prevalent at Audubon,” the audit found (Greenwire, May 6, 2021).


    Refugio Mariscal, a former geographic information systems analyst in Audubon’s Great Lakes regional office, said that management at the national level had “almost gotten worse since Yarnold left.”

    “I would say as a person of color, there’s still a lot of issues that Audubon needs to deal with,” he said.

    Mariscal left Audubon in January for a job at another environmental nonprofit. He said workplace issues at Audubon, plus better pay at the new job, factored into his decision.

    “The general culture within Audubon is not very welcoming to staff,” he said in January. “They seem to have a tough time letting go of their old ways of doing things.”