Trump blocked me on Twitter. Not any more.
As well as missing important announcements on Twitter, I’ve had to forfeit my right to dissent. A court ruling changes that.
Trump blocked me on Twitter. Not any more.
As well as missing important announcements on Twitter, I’ve had to forfeit my right to dissent. A court ruling changes that.
For the first time, a federal court has ruled that President Donald Trump is in violation of US citizens’ first amendment rights. Was it because he was silencing the media? Not for lack of trying, but no. Was it because he was handing down dictums from on high about whether football players should be able to kneel or not? Nope!
It’s because he blocks political dissent on his self-described favorite mode of communicating with the American public: Twitter.
Like many Americans who are mortified that we have an illegitimate, bumbling, shambolic mound as president, I often took it upon myself to let him know that I did not agree with him. Since most of his mewlings showed up on Twitter, that’s where I decided to let him know what I thought of him.
Sometimes, my replies to his tweets would be silly. But many times, I’d cite sources and articles that completely and accurately disputed what he was tweeting about, like in February 2017, when he insisted that the majority of the country supported his Muslim ban. It was patently and demonstrably false, and I replied to him with a link to an article to that effect.
In late May 2017, Trump blocked me for saying, “this is pretty much how the whole world sees you” accompanied by a gif of the pope rolling his eyes at Trump. Apparently, that was the last straw as far as he was concerned. I logged back in several hours later to find that not only was I blocked, but many of my Twitter pals had been blocked as well. …
Parkland survivor David Hogg aims to ‘create the NRA – except for the opposite issues’
Rather than head to college, Hogg plans to hit the campaign trail in key districts to increase the youth voter turnout rate.
David Hogg: ‘You never get numb to these things, but I feel like American society gets kind of desensitized.’
In the past three months, David Hogg has helped organize a protest march that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people around the world. He and his younger sister have written a book about the birth of a new, youth-led gun control movement after the school shooting at their high school in Parkland, Florida. And when a Fox News host mocked him for not getting into college, the 18-year-old sparked an advertiser boycott of her show.
But the real impact of Hogg and his fellow Parkland students’ activism will depend almost entirely on what happens in November’s midterm elections – whether he and other teenage gun violence prevention activists can deliver on their vow to get National Rifle Association-backed candidates voted out of office.
That’s why Hogg is looking at voter data in places like Republican congresswoman Mia Love’s district in Utah.
“The youth voter turnout rate is around 6%. Six!” Hogg said in an interview with the Guardian on Monday in New York, where he was accepting an award for his advocacy. Love, he said, had received about $63,000 from the NRA. “If we can double the turnout rate, we could probably change the election, and get someone that’s not supported by the NRA elected,” Hogg said. His full goal: for youth turnout in Utah to be “80%. At least.”
Hogg wasn’t necessarily going to be focusing on Love’s district, he said. “It’s just a case example.” …
The Only Way to Find Out If the President Can Be Indicted
Scholars disagree on existing precedents—and the question won’t be settled until evidence leads a prosecutor to try it. Indict America’s Shithole and let the courts sort it out.
Can the president be indicted while in office? Rudolph Giuliani, at this writing one of President Trump’s lawyers, apparently wants the public to believe that there is a clear answer to that question—the one that by coincidence favors his client.
The one thing I am sure of is that there’s no clear answer.
To begin with, no one suggests that a president can never be indicted for crimes committed in office or out of it. Of course he can. The question is whether a president can be indicted while in office.
There’s no caselaw, but we have four interesting government memos dating back half a century. I reviewed them, and asked six prominent legal scholars how we should look for an answer.
Start with the memos—one issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) during the waning days of the Nixon presidency; a contemporaneous memo by the late Robert Bork, then solicitor general, advising a district court that a vice president could be indicted; a 2000 opinion by the OLC reaffirming the 1973 opinion; and, finally, a 1998 opinion by a lawyer in Kenneth Starr’s Office of the Independent Counsel investigating President Bill Clinton.
The results are: three “no indictment” opinions, and one “yes indictment” opinion. Perhaps by coincidence, the three “no indictment” opinions were issued by executive-branch lawyers (who work for presidents), while the “yes” opinion came out of the Starr probe, which pursued Clinton with a passion and finally got him impeached. …
‘It’s wrong to stink up other people’s lives’: fighting the manure lagoons of North Carolina
Pigs outstripped people in Duplin county long ago – but now the residents are fighting back.
Two poles that once hoisted a clothes line stand rusting and unused in Elsie Herring’s back garden in eastern North Carolina. Herring lives next door to a field where pig manure is sprayed and the drifting faecal matter wasn’t kind to her drying clothes.
“The clothes would stink so you’d wash them again and again until they fell apart,” said Herring, whose family has lived in Wallace since her grandfather, a freed slave, purchased land in the 1890s.
Elsie Herring and her dog, Midnight, at her home which has been in her family for generations.
“You stand outside and it feels like it’s raining but then you realise it isn’t rain. It’s animal waste. It takes your breath away. You start gagging, coughing, your pulse increases. All you can do is run for cover.”
For years here in North Carolina – the second largest pork-producing state in the US – the pigs have been outstripping the humans. They currently number around 38 to one in Duplin county, with the impact, say local groups, falling disproportionately heavily on African-Americans, Latinos and native Americans. But in the last few weeks, two court decisions may have tipped momentum in a new direction, awarding compensation and bringing in new penalties for polluters.
The pig farms of North Carolina produce around 10bn gallons of faeces a year, which is more than the volume of waste flushed down toilets by the human population of Germany. The waste falls underneath slatted floorboards and is discharged into murky lagoons that sit beside the barns. There are around 4,000 of these cesspools in North Carolina. …
Ed. It was not coincidental that I linked a story about pig shit following one about human shit. Both stories are barely uninteresting at all things.
A psychologist explains why technology’s impact on your brain is probably overblown
OVERDOING IT
“Technology addiction” is scary, but unfounded, argues a psychologist.
How concerned should people be about the psychological effects of screen time? Balancing technology use with other aspects of daily life seems reasonable, but there is a lot of conflicting advice about where that balance should be. Much of the discussion is framed around fighting “addiction” to technology. But to me, that resembles a moral panic, giving voice to scary claims based on weak data.
For example, in April 2018, television journalist Katie Couric’s “America Inside Out” program focused on the effects of technology on people’s brains. The episode featured the co-founder of a business treating technology addiction. That person compared addiction to technology with addictions to cocaine and other drugs. The show also implied that technology use could lead to Alzheimer’s disease-like memory loss. Others, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, have linked smartphones with teen suicide.
I am a psychologist who has worked with teens and families and conducted research on technology use, video games and addiction. I believe most of these fear-mongering claims about technology are rubbish. There are several common myths of technology addiction that deserve to be debunked by actual research.
Technology is not a drug
Some people have claimed that technology use activates the same pleasure centers of the brain as cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine. That’s vaguely true, but brain responses to pleasurable experiences are not reserved only for unhealthy things. …
Ed. You don’t have to be reading these barely uninteresting at all things. You can go outside and play instead.
I spent my morning riding my bicyce. I used technology – Rony Seikaly’s Sugar Free Radio deep house mixes – to put my brain in a blissed place as I rode.
GOTCHA
Exclusive: FBI Seizes Control of Russian Botnet
The FBI operation targets a piece of sophisticated malware linked to the same Russian hacking group that hit the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
FBI agents armed with a court order have seized control of a key server in the Kremlin’s global botnet of 500,000 hacked routers, The Daily Beast has learned. The move positions the bureau to build a comprehensive list of victims of the attack, and short-circuits Moscow’s ability to reinfect its targets.
The FBI counter-operation goes after “VPN Filter,” a piece of sophisticated malware linked to the same Russian hacking group, known as Fancy Bear, that breached the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 election. On Wednesday security researchers at Cisco and Symantec separately provided new details on the malware, which has turned up in 54 countries including the United States.
VPN Filter uses known vulnerabilities to infect home office routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link. Once in place, the malware reports back to a command-and-control infrastructure that can install purpose-built plug-ins, according to the researchers. One plug-in lets the hackers eavesdrop on the victim’s Internet traffic to steal website credentials; another targets a protocol used in industrial control networks, such as those in the electric grid. A third lets the attacker cripple any or all of the infected devices at will.
The FBI has been investigating the botnet since at least August, according to court records, when agents in Pittsburgh interviewed a local resident whose home router had been infected with the Russian malware. “She voluntarily relinquished her router to the agents,” wrote FBI agent Michael McKeown, in an affidavit filed in federal court. “In addition, the victim allowed the FBI to utilize a network tap on her home network that allowed the FBI to observe the network traffic leaving the home router.” …
5 Heartwarming Stories That Are Also Totally Hilarious
Animals are amazing. They’re delicious, they alert us to earthquakes, and they dramatically die in our arms in order to usher us into adulthood. Maybe that’s why the internet is littered with heartwarming animal stories, to the point where medical experts now worry that our hearts might actually be getting too warm. To help with this very real public health issue which we did not just make up, we present the most heartwarming animal stories we could find … which also come with a nice cool chaser of hilarity.
5. Helicopters Are The Funniest Way To Transport Animals
When asked what they would do with a helicopter of their own, most people respond with, like, “beat traffic,” or “fight crime,” or “attack God.” That’s because some people don’t know that the single best thing you can do with a helicopter is dangle thousands of pounds of animal across the landscape like some kind of horrible meat yo-yo.
This trick’s called “Walking the Goat.”
These are mountain goats, and before you get too concerned, this isn’t some kind of prank or terrifying new thing Amazon is working on. This is science. It’s cool.
You see, when it’s time to relocate animals across mountainous landscapes to friendlier, healthier habitats, a helicopter is the best option available. A truck would have to travel by winding, indirect roads, necessitating that the goat be sedated for longer than is healthy for them. But when transported by air, these goats evidently only need blindfolds and most of a canvas bag to be comfortable. In fact, goat relocation practically mandates a helicopter. After being transplanted, goats have been known to navigate hundreds of miles back to their original homes. So if you wanna lose a goat, you really have to huck that bastard way, way out there.
And they’re not the only ones. …
Amazon confirms that Echo device secretly shared user’s private audio
The call that started it all: “Unplug your Alexa devices right now.”
Amazon confirmed an Echo owner’s privacy-sensitive allegation on Thursday, after Seattle CBS affiliate KIRO-7 reported that an Echo device in Oregon sent private audio to someone on a user’s contact list without permission.
“Unplug your Alexa devices right now,” the user, Danielle (no last name given), was told by her husband’s colleague in Seattle after he received full audio recordings between her and her husband, according to the KIRO-7 report. The disturbed owner, who is shown in the report juggling four unplugged Echo Dot devices, said that the colleague then sent the offending audio to Danielle and her husband to confirm the paranoid-sounding allegation. (Before sending the audio, the colleague confirmed that the couple had been talking about hardwood floors.)
After calling Amazon customer service, Danielle said she received the following explanation and response: “‘Our engineers went through all of your logs. They saw exactly what you told us, exactly what you said happened, and we’re sorry.’ He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes. ‘This is something we need to fix.'”
Danielle next asked exactly why the device sent recorded audio to a contact: “He said the device guessed what we were saying.” Danielle didn’t explain exactly how much time passed between the incident, which happened “two weeks ago,” and this customer service response. …
Joint effort: cannabis lobby heads to Washington to woo US lawmakers
Industry leaders descended on the capital this week amid hopes the country at large is slowly embracing legalization.
Employees at a marijuana dispensary help a customer choose her products, in Portland, Oregon.
More than 200 cannabis industry leaders descended upon Washington this week in the hopes of persuading the US Congress to embrace the growing movement for marijuana legalization.
The marijuana business owners and advocates bustled between the hallways of the House and Senate, meeting with hundreds of congressional offices and rallying on the Capitol lawn over a three-day lobbying tour organized by the National Cannabis Industry Association.
The event, which brought members representing 23 states and the District of Columbia, was not the first of its kind. But the advocates hailed a new front in the battle for federal marijuana reform against the backdrop of a rapid evolution on how the issue is perceived in the nation’s capital.
“There’s an air of legitimacy around our group that makes me hopeful that the stigma is going to fall away,” said Blake Mensing, a cannabis attorney from Massachusetts who helps clients obtain local permits and state licenses for adult use cannabis businesses.
With public opinion polls showing record support among Americans for marijuana legalization, it’s little surprise that the high has spread to Congress. …
Looking for a tiny home? You can buy one on Amazon. No, really.
From 1973 to 2013, the average size of new homes in the United States grew from a little over 1,500 square feet to almost 2,600 square feet, according to Restoring Simple. As the average family size shrank and home sizes grew, the average person in the U.S. gained an abundance of living space.
Then, the tiny house movement came onto the scene. At first, we only heard about tiny homes on TV (check out some of our favorites here), and they weren’t readily available to the average home buyer who didn’t know where to look.
Now, they are relatively easy to find, and you don’t even need a real estate agent — you can just buy one on Amazon.
We scoured Amazon in search of tiny houses for sale and were surprised to find lots of nice-looking mini abodes. Here are just a few. For obvious reasons, these homes aren’t eligible for Amazon Prime shipping, but most do ship for free. …
Americans are excited to make psychedelics mainstream once again
LSDE RIGUEUR
LSD is no longer on the fringes.
It’s difficult to turn on the radio or open a magazine at the moment without hearing about psychedelics. A quick skim of the headlines might suggest the drugs are imbued with medicinal superpowers and Silicon Valley is collectively on one long trip.
There’s currently promising research on the potential medical uses of psychedelics; though hallucinogens have not been approved for such purposes yet, the public response to the advancing trials has been enthusiastic, suggesting that the drugs will be accepted if they are approved. After decades spent banished to the margins of society, psychedelics are determinedly making their way back to the center.
In recent weeks, further psychedelic excitement has been driven by journalist Michael Pollan’s new book How to Change Your Mind, which explores the potential uses of LSD and psilocybin (the key ingredient in magic mushrooms.)
From a scientific perspective, much of what Pollan covers has been in the public sphere for a while. The scientific studies he chronicles are ongoing, and results to date have been reported on by many mainstream publications. Scientists have indeed conducted credible trials whose results suggest psychedelics are effective at treating depression (especially among those who are resistant to existing treatments) and addiction, as well as anxiety among late-stage cancer patients. Collectively, the surge in psychedelic research after several decades when researchers were largely prohibited from studying the drugs is known as a “psychedelic renaissance.” …
Student Punished for ‘Implied Threat’ After Putting High School on Craigslist
While some of his classmates wanted to execute senior pranks that would potentially disrupt classes, Missouri high school student Kylan Scheele opted for some tomfoolery that was a little more chill.
“Other people were going to release live mice or, you know, building a beach in the front lobby area,” Scheele told Kansas City’s Fox affiliate. “And I thought let’s do something more laid back, so I just decided to post the school for sale.”
Scheele listed Truman High School for the reasonable price of $12,275 on Craigslist. His post described the building as a “Huge 20+ room facility” and listed the following selling points, among others:
- “Newly build football field.”
- “Newly added 4 modern day rooms.”
- “Next to Walmart for convenience.”
- “Huge parking lot, great for partygoers looking for somewhere to park.”
- “Bigger than normal dinning room.”
- “Reason for sale is due to loss of students coming up.”
- “Named after hometown resident U.S. President Harry S. Truman and his family.”
But while Scheele’s internet high jinks didn’t cause a headache for school janitors or violate any health codes, that “loss of students” comment concerned school administrators enough that they took action. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, will likely reach one of two conclusions about the president: Either there is evidence that he broke the law, or there is not. Mike Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, explains the possible outcomes.
“I remember seeing the ‘Galloping Gertie’ Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse in a Physics class in high school,” Lucy Walker told The Atlantic, “and the surprising image of something as sturdy and robust-looking as a mighty bridge twisting and twirling like rope—and ultimately snapping—has always stayed with me.”
In 2017, Walker, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, was asked to make a short film inspired by the theme of “bridges” for the annual TEDWomen conference. “One of the first things I always do when approaching a subject is to think about poetry on similar themes,” Walker said. Immediately, she called to mind Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem.” Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…
“Bridge Poem” was directed by Lucy Walker. It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent creators, curated by The Atlantic.
Another wonderful week for women, with high highs (Stacey Abrams’s win in Georgia) and low lows (Trump is back on his abortion bullshit.)
For Republicans looking to cut government fat, we found one bloated, cruel, and useless agency that is begging to be abolished. And no, “President” is not considered an agency.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
The deep state is in deep doo doo after the President finally exposed them for what they really are… wait, what are they again?
A court ruling will prevent Trump from blocking Twitter users from following his account.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
まるです１１。-I am Maru 11.- Happy 11th birthday!!
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me commentary on a superhero showdown. SOURCE VIDEO: See the original video in all its glory: https://youtu.be/bsIY-O6Ig1E
I mentioned in yesterday’s video that a surprise was coming. It has arrived. Now I just have to get Max used to it so it can be used.
FINALLY . . .
The ghosts of nature’s past are making a comeback
Alligators live in fresh water. They can handle a few hours of saltwater, maybe a day at most, but fresh is their natural home. It’s textbook biology — yet people keep finding alligators where they’re not supposed to be. In the Florida Keys, for example, they’re regularly observed in mangrove creeks and saltwater canals. Are these creatures strays who’ve lost their way or been driven into marginal habitat by human pressures?
Not necessarily. Instead they might represent an unexpected and possibly wonderful development: large predators rebounding from past persecution and recolonizing their ancestral habitats. So ancestral, in fact, that people don’t even realize they once lived there.
“Recognizing that many large consumers naturally live and thrive across a greater diversity of ecosystems has implications for setting historical baselines,” write ecologists led by Brian Silliman of Duke University. Put another way: the world was once richer than we realized, and it’s becoming so again.
In a study published in Current Biology, Silliman and colleagues reviewed recent scientific records of large-bodied predators observed in “novel” habitat. (A note about that term: in this study, it refers not to so-called novel ecosystems, which contain species mixes for which there’s no historical precedent, but instead conventional habitats which were not considered suitable for these animals. The new mash-ups are called non-analogue communities.) …
PROTIP:
If you’ve misplaced your bearded dragon, Colorado Reptile Humane Society would like a word with you.
Longmont police are searching for the owner of a bearded dragon that was found in a man’s yard Wednesday morning, according to animal control.
The man who found the reptile, which is often kept as a pet, in the area of Alpine Street and Third Avenue thought it was an iguana, according to Animal Control Officer Robin Breffle.
He brought it to the Longmont Humane Society, which can’t keep reptiles. The shelter called animal control, which brought the bearded dragon to the Colorado Reptile Humane Society on Elmore Road. The society posted a photo of it on its Facebook page, asking if anyone had lost their pet.
Breffle believes the reptile was being kept as a pet because it is healthy and slightly larger than average. He also didn’t appear afraid of people. …
WHY IS THIS A BARELY UNINTERESTING AT ALL THING: I live two blocks from where the bearded dragon was found.
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?