Computer, heal thyself! With menacing bugs and viruses floating around the internet, such a command would be useful. In fact, it may be moving toward reality.
A glimpse of “self-healing” computers unfolded in a massive Las Vegas ballroom Thursday night, and the moment evoked crucial leaps in computer development, such as when IBM’s Deep Blue beat a reigning world master at chess in 1997 and more recent experiments with computerized self-driving cars.
“The use of credit card cloning devices and radio frequency interception (RFI) at restaurants, bars and public areas is epidemic in Rio,” the department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council warned in a February report published on its website.
Homes associations wield far more power than homeowners realize. That’s because local governments have saved money by ceding HOAs more and more authority over such responsibilities as streets and sewers. Associations can fine you for leaving a garage door open and seize your home over late dues.
“A lot of people don’t realize, especially first-time homebuyers, that when you purchase into these homeowners associations you are giving up some of your constitutional rights and some of your due process rights,” said Dave Russell, who rescued a troubled Arizona condo association and now runs it to much acclaim.
This growing disparity, with Democrats electing ever more women and Republicans ever fewer, repeats at every level of government: U.S. Senate, statewide offices, upper and lower state legislatures, and municipalities. (The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University maintains useful records on this.) What that means is that there’s no sign the GOP’s current woman problem is going to get any better any time soon. Quite the opposite: The pipeline is dry and getting drier, all the way down.
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The decline of the Republican woman is a public relations disaster for the GOP.
It means that every time a male Republican officeholder or candidate puts his foot in his mouth about women—from former Congressman Todd “legitimate rape” Akin to Donald “blood coming out of her wherever” Trump—effectively the only Republicans who can rush to their defense are other men. Whenever Republican leaders gather to speak about welfare, abortion, the minimum wage or pay equity, they look like a bunch of men telling women what’s good for them. The GOP’s few female national officeholders the tend to tire of playing the role of token woman—especially when they think it’ll come at the expense of their reputation back home. You don’t see New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez or New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte on national television much anymore.
But Brazil’s rivers are just the tip of the melting iceberg. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, climate change changes everything—including sports. In the sinking island nation of the Maldives, kabaddi players have told my collaborator Adam Flynn that they are adapting their traditional tag game to be played in shallow water. In Alaska, snow was hauled in by train in March to make the Iditarod sled race possible, and even then parts ran over a bone-jarring mixture of ice and dirt. Climate change combines with countless instances of wrecked ecologies—poisoned waters, polluted skies, and dead landscapes—to form a larger environmental megacrisis that will profoundly shape how we spend time outdoors.
Sizes are random numbers edition (For women, anyway.)
Today we discover the women’s clothes sizes are virtually random numbers surely a business ethics problem if ever there was one. Denying women the most basic information about what they buy is a wrong that takes money out of women’s pockets every single day.
If Donald Trump were elected he could use nuclear weapons on his own authority. If suffering from a concussion, get rest – do not resume sports immediately. And Congress fails in its duty one more time.
“Vanity sizing was done as a marketing tool. I don’t think it’s done as a marketing tool anymore. I think it’s done because the women are getting bigger, and we’re just addressing that,” said Lynn Boorady, chair of the fashion and textile technology department at SUNY Buffalo State, in the video. “The original sizing charts never had sizes 0 and 2. Now we select sizes 0 and 2 because the sizes are getting smaller and smaller and we’re getting larger and larger but we’re also adding at the other end.”
If the United States appeared to be under nuclear assault, the president would have minutes to decide whether the threat was real, and to fire as many as 925 nuclear warheads with a destructive force greater than 17,000 Hiroshima bombs, according to estimates by Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington.
The commander in chief can also order the first use of nuclear weapons even if the United States is not under nuclear attack.
“There’s no veto once the president has ordered a strike,” said Franklin C. Miller, a nuclear specialist who held White House and Defense Department posts for 31 years before leaving government service in 2005. “The president and only the president has the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.”
But if I had known that continuing to play the same day after hitting my head could have done so much damage, I would not have pushed myself. Now that the information about concussions is available, there are more ways to manage the symptoms once they arise. Coaches and athletic trainers are more aware of the negative effects of a single hit to the head, and most of the time, they won’t allow their athlete back onto the playing field. There are preventative measures that youth sports are taking, such as requiring softball pitchers to wear face masks and soccer players to wear padded headbands.
President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.9 billion in February to deal with the impending outbreak of Zika in the United States. Congress finally began working on the request in May, with the Senate passing a bipartisan compromise that was about $800 million short.
The bill got tanked in a partisan squabble last month afterRepublicans decided to add in contraception restrictions, a pro-Confederate flag provision, extra cuts to Obamacare, and a measure to exempt pesticides from the Clean Water Act, even though those pesticides don’t target Zika-carrying mosquitoes.
They then departed for a seven-week break while sending a sternly worded letter to Obama, saying he should take aggressive action to battle Zika using the $589 million the administration transferred from other programs, taken primarily from the ongoing Ebola response. GOP lawmakers have also complained recently that the money is not being spent quickly enough, with nearly two-thirds still available.
Is Data Our Problem??(This is an interesting take on modern politics – I recommend careful reading. This is a good one.)
In this year’s election cycle, the restless, anti-establishment anger is palpable, and shared by voters on the left who felt the Bern and on the right who love the Donald. Both are animated by a conviction that the moneyed class and corporations have hijacked our democracy. Emerging from their conventions, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will vie to win over these disaffected voters. Right now, both candidates are missing a potent opportunity to publicly recognize that it is not only money producing outsized influence in our democratic system. It is data.
Congress failed to act on the Zika virus(Yes, this is another article on the same subject – I have a lot of anger on this topic. A deadly virus that also causes birth defects is predicted to enter the United States and our congressional response was an extra long vacation. Yes, they did pass a bill to fight the Zika virus — it also defunded parts of Obamacare, defunded Planned Parenthood, protected the confederate flag and removed regulations from some pesticides. Apparently holding the lives of Americans hostage is good politics.)
Irresponsibility of this kind should outrage the nation, but our stores of outrage are largely spent. Members of the House and Senate turn every issue into partisan Kabuki theater — a ritual performance of ideological difference in which real-world problems are never solved. And so the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants goes unaddressed. Crumbling bridges and roads remain unrepaired. Social Security and other entitlements go unreformed. A proposal to prevent people on terrorist watch lists from buying firearms dies in committee. The Zika battle is starved of funding. On and on it goes, even as these public servants spend much of their time fundraising for their next re-election campaign. When Donald Trump supporters are asked why they support someone so rude and reckless, they say, “Washington is broken. We need someone who’s a little crazy to shake it up.” Even if their choice of medicine is questionable, you can’t argue with the diagnosis.
Absolutely filthy. A cleanup was promised ahead of the Games, but the state government spent only $170 million of a pledged $4 billion on the effort, citing a budget crisis. Surf still churns with sludge, and garbage floats freely; in many places, raw sewage flows directly into the streams and rivers that feed Olympic sites. “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap,” Dr. Daniel Becker, a Rio pediatrician, told The New York Times. The Associated Press found dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria in the waters. In some cases, the virus loads were up to 1.7 million times the level considered hazardous on a Southern California beach. The U.S. rowing team will wear seamless double-layered unisuits made with antimicrobial material to help protect them from the contaminated water.
Clinton opened up a 15-point margin in theMcClatchy-Marist survey, 48% to 33%, which was conducted as Trump feuded publicly first with the Muslim parents of a slain American war hero and then House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the GOP’s most popular and powerful figures.
Last month, Clinton held a narrow 3-point advantage, 42%-39% in a McClatchy-Marist poll.
In an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton’s edge is 9 points (47% to 38%), cushioning what was a 5-point advantage in early July. A CNN/ORC poll this week showed Clinton with a similar 9-point edge over Trump nationally.
Fennell’s organization urges parents and caretakers to read its safety tips, which include looking in the back seat each time you get out of the car and putting something you need in your back seat — a cell phone, handbag, employee ID or briefcase — to ensure that you check.
KidsAndCars also suggests leaving a large stuffed animal in the child’s car seat and then placing the stuffed animal in the passenger seat as a visual reminder to remove the child when he or she is in the car seat in the back.
Since oil prices began to fall in mid-2014, cheap crude has been blamed for 195,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to a report published on Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
It’s an enormous toll that is especially painful because these tend to be well-paying jobs. The average pay in the oil and gas industry is 84% higher than the national average, according to Goldman Sachs. The cuts have occurred at a time when many other corners of the American economy have been adding jobs.
A police officer in southern Virginia was convicted of manslaughter and jurors recommended a sentence of two and a half years in prison on Thursday for his fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old during a confrontation over a suspected shoplifting.
If Trump withdraws from the presidential race, the responsibility for choosing his replacement will fall to the RNC. (That’s the Republican National Committee, made up of about two hundred party leaders, not the Republican National Convention, made up of thousands of delegates. The Committee could theoretically reconvene the Convention to hold the vote, but they won’t.)
So the Republican National Committee would get together somewhere, and elect a new nominee. This would likely be Mike Pence, since he’s the veep nominee—picking anyone else would divide the party further, and that’s the last thing they’ll want in the wake of a Trump schism. Pence isn’t widely hated, and putting him in the slot could be framed as a pro-forma thing, so that’s what they’d be most likely to do.
When the Trump train grinds to a halt, mainstream outlets will see more lost funding and more layoffs, leading to poor coverage of the new administration and an even more fractured political discourse. The media has learned that the exploitation of violence, riots, and bigotry brings clicks and cash. This is not a new lesson — as the old saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads” — but the 2016 campaign has shown the mainstreaming of extremism to be uniquely lucrative. As the two disaffected white fan bases described above lash out at Clinton, her supporters, and non-white citizens, we should expect these men to be portrayed as one of two equally legitimate “sides” — not as a threat to the safety of other Americans, but as a mainstream perspective. As with Trump, the shock will eventually fade, and continual exposure to extremist views will make it harder for Americans to recognize them as such.
The emphasis on diversity and identity politics reflects the extent to which the Democratic Party has become the party of the well-off professional class. For party leaders, it’s easier to target voters on pure identity than it is on class, because the former doesn’t impede the neoliberal economic order to which Democrats have been utterly complacent. Of course, this isn’t really a problem for people who are well-off, because people who are well-off have the luxury of focusing solely on identity politics. Meanwhile, the vast majority who aren’t well-off must resort to identity politics (see: God and guns) because their economic concerns are of ZERO concern to the professional political classes in both parties.
Trump probably wasn’t deliberately referencing the most famous joke in Zoolander when he demonstrated his ignorance of/contempt for the distinction between adjectives and adverbs.
Not knowing the difference between doing good and doing well is more than a grammatical error – it is a severe ethical and imaginative failing as well. It’s possible to re-organise the English language to reduce or amplify the number of parts of speech. Horne Tooke, in the eighteenth century, thought that only nouns and verbs were essential categories, and every other part of speech was merely a contraction of what might be a periphrastic application of nouns and verbs. But Horne Tooke, eloquent writer that he was, still knew the difference between describing a thing and describing an action.
It’s hard to believe that these dairies will expose even more hideous crimes committed by Himmler (although it is possible). But their main value lies in the hope that they will help shed light on one of the world’s most revolting crimes against humanity.
Today, we discover in our first story that a single person, a doctor, made life much more difficult for the tobacco companies. In our second story, Washington State is suing Comcast on behalf of the state’s consumers. According to the law suit Comcast violated consumer protections slightly less than two million times. (Ouch!) And will noise cancelling headphones make listening to music safer and more common? That’s a little of what’s going on today!
In an old war, a new front had opened. Tobacco kills six million people a year: the McKinsey Global Institute deems it humankind’s greatest self-generated social burden, ahead even of war and terrorism. Yet as an issue, observes King’s colleague Clare Payne, it has receded in public consciousness: “There’s this tendency for people to think: ‘Oh we’re done with tobacco, aren’t we? Everyone knows. It’s just a choice thing for people now.’ When we’re actually in an epidemic – history’s first epidemic of a non-communicable disease.”
To restore it to the headlines, then, is no mean feat. “She’s a star,” says Cary Adams, CEO of the Union for International Cancer Control, who just over a year ago put King in charge of the Global Task Force for Tobacco Divestment. It’s not a mantle that rests easily with King. All the 41-year-old oncologist at Melbourne’s Epworth Healthcare feels she’s done is take to heart her hippocratic oath, especially the injunction to “do no harm”.
“This case is a classic example of a big corporation deceiving its customers for financial gain,” Ferguson said in a statement. “I won’t allow Comcast to continue to put profits above customers – and the law.”
“Not every Washington consumer can hire an attorney to take on a powerful interest who doesn’t play by the rules,” Ferguson said in a press conference Monday morning. “A lot of times you don’t even know they’re not playing by the rules.”
Noise-canceling headphones have microphones that listen to the sound coming from the outside world – the chatter, traffic or building work – and actively mute those frequencies. Amazon is proposing a design, for which the company has just been awarded a patent, that would analyze the incoming noise and listen for specific trigger words, phrases or sounds – for example, “Hey, Judy.”
Upon recognizing the keyword or phrase, the device would temporarily stop canceling noise so that the headphone wearer could hear outside sounds. The patent documents suggest that the same temporary suspension of the noise-canceling capabilities could also be triggered by an electronic, non-audio signal sent from a second device, such as a doorbell.
Women whose fathers, brothers or husbands happen to have political careers are treated as mere appendages of their male relatives – to be judged, critiqued and shamed for the sole purpose of reflecting embarrassment back on to the male politician. Just consider the media treatment of Justine Miliband, who was torn down for not having a homely enough kitchen, or Samantha Cameron, who was eviscerated for wearing a sleeveless dress to a church service.
Since 2000, nearly five million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared– a third of the entire manufacturing workforce. Using government statistics, one group estimated that over 60,000 US factories have closed in the last 15 years.
One of those factories belonged to my mom and dad.
If Donald Trump’s daughter was sexually harassed at work, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” the Republican candidate told an interviewer on Monday.
The question, specifically framed around the allegations against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, came in an interview with USA Today. Ailes has been accused of sexual harassment by over 20 women since former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit against him on 6 July. Most recently, Laurie Luhn, a former Fox News booker, has accused Ailes of maintaining a sexually coercive relationship with her. Ailes has denied all the allegations.
So, forget about that justice thing, just move on to the next job! jp
Seventy-two nomadic herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised in far north Russia after the region began experiencing abnormally high temperatures
“There is a lack of political will, meaning no pressure to implement the law – it doesn’t even stop at the stage of failing to arrest those who are already sentenced for practising FGM,” she explained. “The clear fact that there was no single report coming from the state itself shows the state doesn’t fulfil its role to protect the women right to health and life. The state has a responsibility to supervise the clinics – plus public and private hospitals,” she added.
I can’t help but believe that if you’re cutting flesh off of a woman to protect your manhood, you haven’t got much. jp
“I think I have made a lot of sacrifices,” he blustered. “I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve done – I’ve had tremendous success.”
Stephanopoulos appeared incredulous. “Those are sacrifices?” he asked.
“Oh sure,” said Trump. “I think they’re sacrifices.”
If you think this will disturb or cause second thoughts in Trump voters, you’re mistaken. His appeal isn’t based on the more common moral standards. jp
Mikkelson owns and runs Snopes.com, a hugely popular fact-checking site which debunks urban legends, old wives’ tales, fake news, shoddy journalism and political spin. It started as a hobby in the internet’s Pleistocene epoch two decades ago and evolved into a professional site that millions now rely on as a lie-detector. Every day its team of writers and editors interrogate claims ricocheting around the internet to determine if they are false, true or somewhere in the middle – a cleaning of the Augean stables for the digital era.
“There are more and more people piling on to the internet and the number of entities pumping out material keeps growing,” says Mikkelson, who turns out to be a wry, soft-spoken sleuth. “I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump.”
At the DNC Labor Caucus meeting on Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave a similar warning, urging Democrats to make a stronger case to the working class.
“You see a real economic anxiety and anger. That’s what’s driving this election,” he said. “There has been an economic recovery under Obama, but who has had the benefit of the recovery? Not the working man or woman. Wages have been flat for 20 years while everything else has gone up. And no one is talking enough to that issue.”
Two companies that run food service at the U.S. Capitol will pay a million dollars in back wages to almost 700 workers who they cheated out of their pay, the Department of Labor announced Tuesday.
The men and women who serve Congress its food clawed their way into Washington’s conscience over the past couple of years with a series of strikes and walkouts as part of a campaign for higher wages and union rights. The strikes at the Capitol and in other federal buildings in the Washington, D.C. area helped persuade President Obama to issue three executive orders mandating higher wages and stronger workplace protections for workers hired by federal contractors.
A handful of workers became the face of the union-backed Good Jobs Nation campaign with wrenching stories about earning too little to survive in D.C. or to keep their families together. But the penalties handed down Tuesday suggest the federal contractor taxpayers pay to staff cafeterias on Capitol Hill were not just paying too little to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living. They were outright breaking the law.
Dimon forgot to mention in his op-ed that he received a raise this past January himself, which looks very different than the one given to front line bank workers. JPMorgan Chase’s board raised Dimon’s salary from $20 million to $27 million.That’s a 35 percent increase in just one year!
Dimon makes roughly $13,000 an hour. In three hours, he earns the same salary as a full-time Chase employee making $15 an hour. Raising wages for bank workers is the right thing to do, but a miniscule raise—estimated by the Economic Policy Institute at just 3.2 percent annually when adjusted for inflation over the next three years—doesn’t go nearly far enough toward addressing income inequality or the hostile work conditions for frontline bank workers.
Today’s edition opens with a report that the pilot of a downed hot air balloon had problems with drunk driving and was it the Russians who attacked the Democratic party’s computers?
A disgraced trader says banking hasn’t changed while Kevin Roberts explains women – badly. Women may or may not (probably not) get a fair shake from the media while Massachusetts ends previous salary inquiries to help women make more money. Finally, the feds are cracking down on debt collection practices.
The pilot killed along with 15 other people in the crash of a hot air balloon in central Texas on Saturday had numerous convictions for drunk driving and at least one drug-related charge dating back to 1990, according to online records.
The balloon, flown by Heart of Texas Hot Air Balloon Rides chief pilot and owner Alfred “Skip” Nichols, hit a power line, setting its basket on fire, and plummeted into a pasture near Lockhart, about 30 miles (50 km) south of the state capital Austin, killing all aboard.
The Kremlin says it had zero involvement in the hacking of Democratic Party emails while U.S. officials say the hack originated in Russia. We may never know who is right, but one thing is for sure – Russia had motive, capability and form.
Seen through Kremlin eyes, Moscow would only be doing what it feels the United States has been doing to it for years anyway – interfering in a geopolitical rival’s domestic politics in an attempt to destabilize and shape events.
I asked him if behaviour in banking had changed since he was found guilty in 2012 of two counts of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison.
“No, certainly not,” he answered.
“I think the young people I’ve spoken to, former colleagues I have spoken to, are still struggling with the same issues, the same conflicts, the same pressures to achieve no matter what.
“And this goes back to the structure of the industry. People are required to take risk to generate profit, because yields in the industry are consistently compressed.
In the interview, published on Friday, Mr Roberts said the “debate is all over” about gender diversity in the advertising industry.
He goes on to say that rather than holding ambitions to progress into the higher echelons of management, many women – and men – simply want to be happy and “do great work”.
He adds: “…they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy.
“So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem.
“I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”
Researchers at Kellogg business school in Illinois found that companies which appoint female chief executives and receive a lot of media attention see a decline in their share price.
Companies that appoint female bosses and don’t receive a lot of attention are more likely to see a rise in their share price.
Under the existing terms of the £18bn project, a Chinese company is to finance a third of the new Hinkley Point C reactors and may later build a Chinese-designed nuclear power station in Essex.
So what’s the difference between a French company and a Chinese one when it comes to the UK’s critical infrastructure?
How you answer that question depends on your assessment of China and its intentions.
The law takes a step that is completely unique: it prohibits employers from asking prospective hires about their salary histories until after they make a job offer that includes compensation, unless the applicants voluntarily disclose the information. No other state has such a ban in place.
Many employers require applicants to give them a salary history at the outset or during the initial steps of the hiring process, usually to determine how much they should be paid and whether the employer can afford their salary. But this disadvantages women, who, thanks to a variety of factorsthat can include outright discrimination, make less than men on average. Women make less than men in their first jobs even when education and field are taken into consideration, and they are also penalized in salary negotiations, while men get an advantage. If the next employer bases a salary on the previous one a woman was earning, that discrimination will only be furthered.
Debt collectors, either in-house or third-party entities in the business of trying to get people to pay up debts that they owe for things like student loans or medical bills, have become notorious for their often harassing tactics. Consumers have complained of debt collectors calling them endlessly while threatening violence, lying, and using profane language in trying to cajole them into paying, sometimes for debts they don’t even owe.
But on Thursday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, released new proposed rules to rein in the industry, the first time a federal regulator is cracking down on the industry in nearly four decades. It wants to limit how many times a collector can contact a consumer, require them to have better information about the debts they try to collect, and make it easier for consumers to fight debts they say they don’t actually owe.
Ransomware attacks have generally been used to hit individuals, but recent months have seen the attacks evolve and lock down files at a much larger scale. Several instances of hospitals and healthcare providers being hit have created considerable scare, while several universities have also been locked out of their extensive databases by the cryptoviruses. In total, the extortion tactics are expected to cost nearly $1 billion in losses to businesses and organizations going forward according to the FBI.
The tech-aloofness of the two nominees marks a sharp break from President Barack Obama, who fought to keep a mobile phone when he entered the White House, spends downtime surfing his iPad and wrote about his awe at the power of the internet in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope.” That raises the prospect that the next occupant of the Oval Office — charged with making decisions on issues like encryption, the fight against a social-media savvy Islamic State, and the growing automation of the American economy — will be less familiar with consumer technologies than the average citizens who use them.
“These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley.
President Barack Obama asked for $1.9 billion to fund the Zika response back in February. The Senate eventually passed a bipartisan measure in May that would have provided $1.1 billion. But that measure differed from a version taken up in the House, and Republicans ultimately modified the bill to add provisions targeting Planned Parenthood, preserving the Confederate flag, taking money from Obamacare and weakening the Clean Water Act regarding pesticides.
Democrats objected to the added riders and voted against the bill just before Congress left, saying that Republicans should ditch the ideological additions and just use the original Senate bill that had gotten 89 “yes” votes. Republicans declined.
Successful politicians don’t choose political narratives at random. They understand that voters’ beliefs about the state of the nation are inevitably shaped by their life experiences and the ideological and cultural lenses through which they interpret them. That was as true in the 1980s as it is today. Consider a blue-collar worker who moved from a devastated Rust Belt town to a bustling Sun Belt suburb in 1984, just as the local economy was starting to boom. To this young woman, the idea that it was “Morning in America” felt exactly right. She had chosen to leave her past behind, and all the union bosses and tax-and-spend liberal politicians that came with it. Reagan’s individualistic ethos resonated with her experience, and it made her feel like the author of her own life.
But what of the blue-collar worker who remained in that same Rust Belt town and who lived through the nightmare of deindustrialization? What if this other woman saw friends lose their jobs and their homes, and what if she herself had to turn to food stamps to keep her family afloat? It’s easy to imagine her scoffing at Reagan’s rhetoric and feeling drawn to darker rhetoric. Democrats in the Reagan era didn’t sound downbeat and nostalgic because they hated America, regardless of what their Republican critics might have claimed. They came across as pessimistic because they wanted to craft messages that resonated with their voters, many of whom felt their world was crumbling around them.
Thus, Trump is a Frankensteinian monster, created by Republican elites who thought they could pander to their reactionary base indefinitely while serving Wall Street and corporate America in Washington. Trump is a demagogue, of course, and it’s hard to tell what he truly believes in and what he says to rile up resentful, paranoid and bigoted Americans. But it’s clear what his movement — let’s call it Trumpism — is and what it isn’t.
Trumpism is not a conservative ideology or movement, nor is it rooted in conservative principles. Its adherents do not want to safeguard traditional institutions or preserve the status quo; rather, they strive for its complete destruction. Reporter James Kirchick provided an interesting insight into the mind of a typical Trumpets when he asked prominent Trump supporter and writer Milo Yiannopolous what actual Trump policies he favors, to which the writer replied that Trump supporters don’t care about policies, “They [just] want to burn everything down.” This is nihilism, not conservatism.
Just like Bill and just like Obama, Hilary figures we liberals will finally in the end hold our nose and vote for her. So she selects Tim Kaine to show us who’s the realist, who’s the boss, who’s running this show. It might not work this time. jp
“This kind of behaviour is what we call ‘normalisation of violence against women’ and it is really, really scary and damaging,” she wrote. “… Every time you ‘playfully’ tell a woman to get back in the kitchen, every time you smack a girl on the bum because it’s funny, every time you make a joke about rape, YOU are contributing to a society where unfortunately women are not safe.”
Most of all, Trump voters want respect. They want respect for their long hours of work that risks their bodies, for the hands caught in vices, backs wrenched by weights, and knees torn. They want respect because they are doing dangerous work, but their pay has been flat for decades.
They want respect because they haven’t just lost economically, but also socially. When they turn on the TV, they see their way of life being mocked and made fun of as nothing but uneducated white trash.
With Trump, they are finding someone who gives them respect. He talks their language, addresses their concerns. Sometimes it is celebrating what defines their neighborhood, what they in Parma have in common: being white. They and Trump are playing in dangerous territory, with the need for respect tipping into misplaced revenge.
Now, after over two years of delicate negotiations, Congress is finally introducing such a law — the federal revenge porn bill — which, if passed, could help revenge porn victims like Vora prosecute their aggressors.
The Intimate Privacy Protection Act (IPPA) was introduced by Rep. Speieralongside co-sponsors Ryan Costello (R-Pa.), Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Thomas Rooney (R-Fla.), and Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.).
Revenge porn is the layman’s term for nonconsensual pornography, a crime that typically involves sharing or publishing nude or sexualized images of someone without their consent. Emerging alongside increased access to smartphones and social media, revenge porn often looks like what happened to Vora, but it can take various forms. In one of the highest-profile revenge porn cases, rapper 50 Cent published a privately acquired sex tape starring the ex-girlfriend of one of his rivals in order to shame him. The woman, Lastonia Leviston, sued and was awarded a $7 million settlement.
Like so many of us, I have my browser set to remember all of my login credentials, so when I get the occasional request to re-enter information, I draw a blank. Far too many times, I enter the information I think is correct, only to get that annoying red text: “Your username and password is incorrect. Please try again.”
Rage.
Passwords used to make sense. They were first used in the 1960s to protect critical computer systems from unauthorized access. A limited number of people used these systems, and each person likely only had one password to remember.
The failings of this crony capitalist dynamic have been noticed within the NFL as well. Asked last month what he would do were he the league’s president, Seattle Seahawks defensive star Richard Sherman was quick to point the finger at subsidies. “I’d stop spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stadiums and probably get us out of debt and maybe make the billionaires who actually benefit from the stadiums pay for them,” he said. “That kind of seems like a system that would work for me.”
When billionaires con the public into paying for their expenses, the public loses. In many cases, long after the stadium is demolished taxpayers are still paying on the bonds that paid for the construction. This isn’t rocket science. Giving multi-billionaires huge sums of tax money is a form of theft. That it happens so regularly is a savage indictment of the insularity, stupidity and lack of a public service mission in our morally bankrupt ruling class. jp
Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.
The decades-long destruction of American manufacturing profoundly changed the working class — neighborhoods, jobs and families. What had once been nearly universal, guaranteed well-paying jobs for young men fresh from high school graduation were yanked overseas with little regard for the devastation left behind.
To add insult to injury, the loss of manufacturing jobs was often heralded as a sign of progress. As the economic contribution of these former working-class heroes to our nation dwindled and the technology revolution sizzled, in many people’s minds, millions of men became zeroes. They seemed to be a dusty anachronism in a sparkling new economy.
That these people, their lives and their jobs meant and mean so little to our ruling class is a giant exclamation point on the need for system wide change. When millions of peoples’ lives become irrelevant, it is time to boot out the current band of besotted fools who told us that all these trade deals and all the job destruction were good things. jp
But nothing seemed to stop Trump. And now, joined by Gov. Mark Pence, the most extreme anti-woman vice presidential candidate in a generation, a man who spouts nothing but reckless, vicious and hateful rhetoric is just one step away from the nation’s highest office.
But there is one group that can and will stop him: women. Women, who have been so frequently criticized, derided, humiliated and underestimated by Trump, will be the ones to bring him down.
It’s a numbers game, plain and simple. Women, who make up a majority of the general population and 53 percent of voters, unsurprisingly have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the man fond of calling them “bimbos,” “dogs” and “fat pigs.”
In fact, more than 70 percent of registered women voters view Donald Trump negatively. And it’s not just Democratic women who dislike him; polls show that nearly half of Republican women primary voters — 47 percent — said that they “could not imagine” themselves supporting Trump, despite the fact that he’s their party’s nominee.
This is a radical time in American politics: a time the pundits and elected politicians thought would never come. After two decades of populist anger, the elderly rebels of Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork army finally stormed the barricades of the establishment and hoisted an orange leader atop the smoking rubble.
“Fatigue is the great equalizer here,” study researcher Stuart Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. “Lift to the point of exhaustion, and it doesn’t matter whether the weights are heavy or light.”
“It is not acceptable that MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco and DAF, which together account for around 9 out of every 10 medium and heavy trucks produced in Europe, were part of a cartel instead of competing with each other,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
The complaint was filed on behalf of more than 50 plaintiffs who have performed with WWE or its predecessors since the 1970s, including Joseph “Road Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis and Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff.
It accused Stamford, Connecticut-based WWE and Chairman Vince McMahon of intentionally classifying wrestlers as “independent contractors” rather than employees, as a means to avoid liability under applicable worker protection laws.
“WWE placed corporate gain over its wrestlers’ health, safety, and financial security, choosing to leave the plaintiffs severely injured and with no recourse to treat their damaged minds and bodies,” the complaint said.
It is sad that a corporate behemoth like WWE can make suck enormous profits and simply evade any responsibility for the broken bodies it leaves behind. jp
These women make the advertising money by winning and winning a lot. They make American soccer a success and get paid less than their male counterparts who are not as competitive. What’s going on here?
Is there a justification here of any significance beyond simple mulish male stubborn pride?
I don’t think so.
Simple business ethics says equal pay for equal work but in this case the women are doing better work and still not getting the same. jp
That’s right! Sexual assault is not an affirmative act committed with intent, it’s a result of raging hormones. Who would’ve thought? In my apparently irrelevant law school, they taught us that rape was an intentional act and punishable by imprisonment and fines. But lo and behold, the new Big Twelve Commisioner has this to say –
“But let it suffice to say as it pertains to all of our institutions, we are very committed as a group of 10 schools to eradicating sexual assault on our campuses. It almost goes without saying that when you combine alcohol and drugs and raging hormones and the experiences of 18 to 22 years old, it’s probably unrealistic to think that these kinds of things are never going to happen.”
It’s just nature. So, you see – we just have to accept that sexual predators are among us. It’s just natural.
And that means that rigorous enforcement of the laws, the jailing and punishment of the perpetrators whenever found – we are not going to talk about that. After all, nature!
Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.
A known contrarian who likened rape culture to Harry Potter (“both fantasy”) and affectionately referred to Donald Trump as “daddy”, he emerged as a spokesman for the “alt-right” in the wake of the Gamergate movement.
Climate change, and other environmental concerns, are unlikely to receive much, if any, attention during the Republican convention in Cleveland this week. This is despite a slew of temperature records being broken – June was the 14th consecutive month of record heat around the world – and extreme examples ofArctic ice decline and drought and wildfires in the US west.
But the Republican gathering has been targeted by conservative voices calling for climate science to be accepted and for national parks to be preserved, rather than opened up for drilling and other development.
Hillary Clinton will make history next week in Philadelphia when she formally becomes the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major party. But she is not the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate: that distinction is held by Victoria Claflin Woodhull. In 1872, she became a third-party candidate, running against the incumbent Republican president, General Ulysses S Grant, and his Democratic challenger, New York publisher Horace Greeley. She would not have been able to vote for herself – that right would not be granted to American woman for another 50 years – but that did not deter this pioneering feminist from making a historic bid for change.
Her life story would not be out of place in a 19th-century novel. It is peopled by a colourful array of charlatans, churchmen, philanthropists and philanderers. It is also a classic American tale: a triumph over adversity – poverty, abusive parents, and a bad marriage – and a rise to prominence in the most vital social movements of the day.
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