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Terrorism is surging in the US, fueled by right-wing ideologies
BUCKING THE TREND
Terrorism is surging in the US, fueled by right-wing ideologies
BUCKING THE TREND
Pictured above: White nationalists in Charlottesville.
Terrorism is in retreat around the world. Attacks fell from about 17,000 in 2014 to about 11,000 in 2017, and dropped almost 40% in the Middle East. Yet not in the US.
The country is seeing a surge in terrorism. There were only six attacks in the US a decade ago, but 65 in 2017. The number of fatalities is also increasing.
Most attacks in 2017 were thought to be motivated by right-leaning ideologies, a Quartz analysis of data from the Global Terrorism Database shows. Out of 65 incidents, 37 were tied to racist, anti-Muslim, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-government, or xenophobic motivations.
That list includes the case in which neo-Nazi extremist James Fields is accused of driving into a crowd of counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia last year, killing one person. It also includes attacks on a gay bar in Puerto Rico, mosques in Washington, Texas, and Florida, and a vehicle decorated with Jewish iconography in New York. …
Online security cameras let Californians livestream the burning of their homes
As wildfires burn across the state, residents view the destruction first-hand: ‘That was a moment I’ll never forget’
California man watches wildfires almost destroy his home on camera – live
The Holy fire was raging through southern California’s Cleveland national forest, and his family had already complied with a mandatory evacuation order, but Daniel Perez decided to take the risk anyway.
At lunchtime on Thursday 9 August, Perez convinced public officials to allow him to return to his evacuated neighborhood for one last thing: to turn on his home security cameras, connect them to the internet, and point them in the direction of the oncoming flames.
“I went back to work, went about my day, occasionally checking my phone,” Perez recalled. “Then, around 4.45pm, I noticed that my cameras went into night vision.”
Through the dark pink tint of the night vision lens, Perez watched as “little glowing things” – burning embers, he soon realized – blew toward his house.
“When they landed, they stayed glowing, and I said, ‘OK, here we go,’” Perez said. “I just watched live as everything went from normal to up in flames, and I’m just sitting at work, shaking.” …
Why Recycling Doesn’t Work
You may use the blue bin, but it doesn’t mean you’re helping the environment.
MOST canadians know the ritual: check the pickup schedule, sort the waste items, clean the jars, make sure the junk mail isn’t stained with coffee grounds. Then fill up the blue box (or blue bag, or blue cart, depending on the city), and on the appointed day, haul it to the curb. It’s an activity that Canadians have participated in eagerly for almost thirty years. Of the three Rs drilled into our heads in school—reduce, reuse, recycle—recycling is the only one that most of us regularly practise. In 2011, according to a survey by Stewardship Ontario, three-quarters of Ontarians considered the weekly act of sorting and disposing as their “primary environmental effort.”
But as much as Canadians love the blue box, “its role in [our] hearts and minds…is much larger than its actual environmental impact,” wrote Dianne Saxe, Ontario’s environmental commissioner, in a report last October. In fact, recycling is one of the least environmentally friendly “environmental” things one can do.
After being picked up, enormous volumes of recyclable waste are unloaded at a local materials-recovery facility (mrf, pronounced like “smurf”), dumped onto conveyor belts, and passed through a battery of sieves, magnets, optical sorters, and manual workers who separate each item into its own stream—plastic, paper, metal, and so on. The batches from each stream are then sent to gigantic balers, squeezed into cubes, and sold, often by middleman companies, to “end markets.” These are the manufacturers, in Canada and around the world, that profit from turning our waste into something new—toilet paper, perhaps, or plastic lawn furniture, egg cartons, or drywall. More than a public service, recycling is largely a commodity business, as dependent on supply and demand as any other. When municipalities produce more recyclable garbage than end markets can absorb, the value of the product decreases, and in the selling market, Canada faces competition from countries across the world.
The limitations of a market-driven system mean that, once industrial- and commercial-waste streams are factored in, about two-thirds of Canadian waste still ends up in landfills.
Recycling persists not because it’s efficient (it isn’t) or effective (it’s much less so than we think) but because we feel obligated to do it.
It helps us feel better about the waste we produce: according to one estimate, 850 kilograms of garbage, per capita, every year. …
5 Acts Of Ridiculously Disproportionate Revenge
Batman once said “When seeking out revenge, moderation is the key.” Sadly, in the height of passion, there have been people who refused to heed the words of the World’s Greatest Detective, and instead took their revenging to stupidly absurd levels in order to get payback. Like …
5. A Guy Faked A Kidnapping Because Of A Botched Website
Daniel Shea wanted to start a website for his yoga business. This wasn’t hot yoga or that goat yoga; this would end up being Impersonating the FBI and Committing Felonies yoga. It’s very niche. See, Shea hired a company called Goozmo to make his website, and I don’t know what they did, like if they installed Flash or some shit, but the dude haaaated what they gave him.
He hated it so goddamn much that he went online and bought a fake FBI hat and patch, a gun, a tactical vest, a Taser, handcuffs, and even a knife to complete his disguise, as he explained to the real cops after the fact. He then traveled from Oregon to Colorado, where he hired another man at a gym and told him this was all part of a prank on some friends. Then he raided the Goozmo offices.
Pretending to be a federal agent, Shea allegedly took employees “into custody” and demanded $50,000 for the $30,000 he felt he wasted on the website. Why? Because it ruined his life. That’s a thing websites do sometimes. Usually Reddit. Point is, police say Shea tased these dudes, assaulted them with the knife, and threatened them with his gun. Imagine the Saw level of murder engineering this guy puts into dealing with shit like road rage or produce that goes bad right after he buys it.
When the employees of a web design company shockingly didn’t have $50,000 on hand, the plan was to allow them to maybe mortgage their houses. Shea reportedly let them go to take care of their financials, with the threat that if they went to the cops, someone would murder their families. But they went to the cops anyway, because fuck a yoga vigilante. He got super arrested and charged with about a dozen crimes, none of which were Felony-Level Bafflingly Over the Top Dickishness. …
Ed. Note where this happened.
Happy together: lonely baby boomers turn to co-housing
For older people, co-housing offers a sense of community without losing independence.
Residents of Phoenix Commons, a co-housing community in Oakland.
When Rose Mark retired from being a teacher, she and her husband decided to leave their bustling San Francisco neighbourhood to find somewhere they would feel safer. One problem: the booming local tech scene had turbocharged demand for homes, and they found themselves outbid time and again.
As well as security, Mark craved a connection with her neighbours. Previously, she would be lucky to get a quick “hi” on the street. “I’m very friendly. I’ve lived in many different neighbourhoods in San Francisco,” she says. “I’d try to make friends but there wasn’t a sense of community.”
Then, among the artist studios and loft apartments on the colourful streets of Jingletown, Oakland, Mark found an answer: the Phoenix Commons, a co-housing community for over-55s. Residents own their modest homes while sharing spacious communal areas, including a kitchen, movie room and a hot tub. The community is self-managed, residents work together in committees and each night a group of volunteers cooks for everyone.
The four-storey complex of 41 units is designed to foster a sense of community. Apartment windows face each other and walkways create a visible sense of life and movement.
Mark was one of the first to move in, two years ago. She appreciates how much residents help each other, from sharing food to supporting someone through the death of a partner. “My friends jokingly call this the Commune,” she says. “If they could witness life here, it might allay some of their fears about giving up their independence. It is an incredible feeling of security, safety and peacefulness.” …
Disenchantment Subverts the Cartoon Fairy Tale
Matt Groening’s new Netflix series pushes the envelope, but not far enough.
Disenchantment’s biggest middle finger to fairy-tale tropes comes midway through the first episode, when Princess “Bean” Tiabeanie (Abbi Jacobson) refuses to marry the prince she’s been contracted to by her father. But the subtler subversions are more satisfying. Bean’s getting-ready routine involves not bluebirds and singing mice, but leeches, one for each cheek to give her a healthy glow (“Whores rouge, ladies leech,” Bean’s maid says, cheerily). Hansel and Gretel aren’t innocent orphans, but sadistic wretches who do much worse than eat an old lady’s dream house. Bean’s magical companion isn’t a godmother or a genie, but a literal demon who encourages her worst impulses to drink, gamble, and wreak havoc on the kingdom.
The new Netflix animated series from Matt Groening is The Simpsons’ creator’s first new show in almost two decades. If Futurama, his 1999 sitcom set in the 31st century, used the future to explore the ever constant frailty of the human condition, Disenchantment uses the past. Set in Dreamland, a kind of Game of Thrones meets Hans Christian Andersen fantasy world, it’s populated with elves, gnomes, giants, ogres, fairies, and mermaids. But the gag is the same. The landscape is less garishly drawn than The Simpsons and Futurama: It’s a world that evokes the pastel-colored illustrations from children’s books, even though Groening’s signature bug-eyed style remains unchanged. The question is, with so many Groening-inspired innovators having created their own animated worlds since then, does it still feel relevant?
Not entirely. Disenchantment takes advantage of its new streaming platform to push the adult-content envelope, but not for any reason other than that it can. It’s not here to slyly probe the tragicomic balance of being alive, like BoJack Horseman, or satirize the agonies of adolescent sexuality, like Big Mouth. It’s designed simply to entertain, which—for the most part—it does. It’s occasionally frustrating, only because there’s so much contemporary insight to be teased out of the stories Groening uses as his source material. Disenchantment positions its antiheroine as if the show’s going to reinvent the fairy tale for a new generation, but it doesn’t seem entirely confident about how to do so. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
What do you do if you’re the county Republican Party in El Paso, Texas — where the population is Hispanic and President Trump is wildly unpopular?
You try to recruit new American citizens into the GOP minutes after they take the oath of citizenship. Get ’em while they’re fresh.
On Wednesday, 947 new citizens hailing from 49 different countries took the oath in the El Paso Coliseum just a few miles from the U.S. southern border. Most of the oath-takers have lived in the U.S. for years, and the vast majority of them came here from Mexico.
“So often the impression is the Republican party is anti-immigrant,” said Bob Peña, executive director of the El Paso GOP. “No, we’re anti illegal immigrant.”
VICE News followed the El Paso GOP as it tried to make the Republican case to the new citizens — and found themselves trying to make the party of Trump appealing to Mexican-Americans.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Michael Kosta reports on the rising profitability of hating Donald Trump after Peter Strzok raises half a million dollars to cover his legal fees on GoFundMe.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Fascism, do the kids really dig it or is it just a phase? Meet the young’uns representing hate and intolerance up and down the ballot.
Got a hankerin’ for just immigration policies? Well hop on in cause Girl Fieri is introducing you to the undocumented immigrants that make your food and Padma Lakshmi is there to supervise.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the President’s former confidante Omarosa Manigault Newman releasing another secret tape, as Trump’s legal team threatened the special counsel in the Russia investigation.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Omarosa reveals another recording of her conversation with Lara Trump offering her money to keep quiet.
Trump responds to the press’ pleas for a free press by attacking the free press.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
お尻を入れると片手がどうしても入らないまる。If Maru puts his buttocks in the bucket, his one hand never fits into it.
FINALLY . . .
The Problem with Better Zoos
More humane zoos made for smarter, healthier animals — which have gotten really good at escaping from zoos.
One day in 1979, Jon Coe was perched at his drawing board inside the Seattle offices of Jones and Jones Architecture when the phone rang. Coe answered and was greeted by a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who wanted to know if Coe had designed the new gorilla exhibit at the city’s Woodland Park Zoo.
For decades, it was standard practice to house gorillas under lock and key, often in laboratory-like enclosures that were easy to clean. But at Woodland Park, gorillas were now roaming outdoors among vegetation on terrain that mimicked their native habitat. Strategically placed moats kept the exhibit free of imposing visual barriers, and there were burly trees for the gorillas to climb — an idea that for years had been written off as too risky.
Eager to extoll the many merits of the exhibit, Coe said that he and his associates were indeed the visionaries behind it.
“Then what do you think of the gorilla escape?” the reporter asked.
Unbeknownst to him, a 468-pound silverback gorilla named Kiki used a tree limb as a makeshift ladder to scale one of the dry moats and escape. A grounds crew first spotted Kiki at the polar bear exhibit, where he seemed to be sitting in peace. Next, he went to the Nocturnal House, where he broke into the kitchen, feasted on a stash of papaya and blueberries, and then checked out some Australian potoroos. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?