Facebook Are ‘Morally Bankrupt, Pathological Liars
— The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner John Edwards by way of The New Zealand Herald
He was talking about how Facebook (#DontGiveAZuck) has dissembled and obfuscated on the mosque shooting video, but applies pretty much universally.
Stanislovas Tomas, who is running for a seat in the EU Parliament, kjust smashed a plaque commemorating Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika:
A Lithuanian lawyer smashed a controversial plaque honoring a Nazi collaborator in Vilnius, which a local court recently ruled may stay.
Stanislovas Tomas, a human rights lawyer running for election to the European Parliament, was filmed smashing the plaque honoring Jonas Noreika on Sunday and streamed it on Facebook. He reported his actions to police and waited to be arrested next to the plaque with a sledgehammer.
Last month, a Vilnius court dismissed an American Jew’s lawsuit against a state museum’s glorification of Noreika, citing the complainant’s “ill-based” intentions.
………
Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Eastern Europe director, for years has argued that Noreika became a mass murderer after his appointment in 1941 as head of Siauliai County under the German Nazi occupation.The case is thought to be the first in which civil servants publicly defended in court the actions and good name of an alleged collaborator with the Nazis.
In documents submitted to the court, the center claimed Noreika’s actions could not be judged posthumously and that in any case there is no evidence to suggest he perpetrated war crimes.The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish Community of Lithuania, and one of Noreika’s grandchildren, Silvia Foti, dispute this.
(emphasis mine)
The court ruled no evidence, despite the fact that one of his own grandchildren was a part of a lawsuit calling him a genocidal monster.
Here’s a hint for the people of Eastern Europe: Just because the Soviets Union did bad things does not mean that Nazis, or those who enthusiastically prosecuted genocide for the Nazis, were good people.
Woke military recruiting ads. Who Knew?
And Kirstjen Nielsen has resigned as Director of Homeland Security:
President Trump announced Sunday that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will leave her post, ending a rocky run as the top official in charge of implementing the president’s hard-line immigration policies.
The decision, which Trump announced on Twitter, comes just two days after the president abruptly pulled back his nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement because he said he wants “to go in a tougher direction.” The moves signal that Trump is seeking to shake up his team amid frustration over the spike in migrant families crossing the southern border.
Trump tweeted that Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, will lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on an acting basis until a permanent replacement for Nielsen is chosen.
………
In her resignation letter, Nielsen wrote that she had “determined that it is the right time for me to step aside.”
I don’t know what led to this, but it further reinforces the fact that the Trump administration is a complete sh%$ show.
Polish nationalists demonstrated in Manhattan Sunday against a proposed U.S. law that would provide compensation to victims of the Holocaust who had their property seized during the war. Their contingent of several dozen protestors was met by a counter-protest group.
The demonstration comes as there has been considerable pushback from Poland and the Polish government against the historical evidence of Polish participation in the carrying out of the Holocaust in Poland. Last year, Poland passed a law effectively making it illegal to blame Poland or the Polish people for Nazi crimes. The law passed amid widespread sentiment in the country that Poland has been falsely accused of playing a role in the Holocaust, and its government has insisted that international media not use phrases like “Polish death camp” when referring to Auschwitz, which is in Poland.
On Sunday, several protestors carried signs reading “Holocaust Industry,” “Treat anti-Polonism like anti-Semitism” and “Stop slandering Poland in the media.” Others spoke to the considerable losses that the Polish population endured under Nazi occupation.
………
Jewish author and artist Molly Crabapple reported hearing anti-Semitic comments from the protestors.
“There were over a hundred Polish nationalists out- everyone from the elderly to mothers with little kids,” Crabapple wrote on Twitter. “One woman touched my arm and told me the Jews of Warsaw were mostly killed by other Jews.”
Crabapple also noted that one person told her that the Jews were responsible for Russian invasions of Poland.
There are so few Jews left in Poland.
Why can’t the knuckle draggers find someone else to hate?
Boeing’s decision Friday to reduce the production rate on the 737 MAX was a surprise in timing and scope.
This came so quickly and was steep, cutting production from 52 MAXes per month to 42. It comes on the heals [sic] that a second software problem was found, delaying submission of the MCAS software upgrade to the FAA for review and approval.
The production rate cut is effective in mid-April. This is lightning speed in this industry, where rate breaks, as changes are called, typically have 12-18 month lead times.
Boeing hasn’t announced what the second software problem is. LNA is told it is the interface between the MCAS upgrade and the Flight Control System, but specifics are lacking.
LNA interprets these combined events as indicative the MAX will be ground well past the Paris Air Show in June.
The impact to Boeing is going to be huge: customer compensation, deferred revenue, lost revenue, potentially canceled orders and potential lost orders in sales campaigns. The hit to the Boeing brand and impacts of multiple investigations won’t become clear for months to come.
Also, we are seeing airlines scrambling to lease aircraft to replace their grounded MAX airliners.
Boeing is in a world of hurt.
Thank the anti-vaccine movement:
The US has seen more reports of measles cases in the first three months of 2019 than in the whole of last year, health officials said this week.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday reported 387 measles cases so far in 2019, 15 more than the total number of cases last year. The numbers make 2019 the second-worst year for measles since the United States declared itself measles-free nearly two decades ago.
………
The number of measles cases typically declines in the summer months, but experts worry the early 2019 numbers indicate the disease is on the rise.
“My concern is that this is trending the wrong way,” said Dr Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and author of the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.
“It’s getting worse, it’s not getting better,” he added.
………
Dr Barbara McAneny, president of the American Medical Association, cautioned against exemptions to immunizations “solely as a matter of convenience or misinformation” because they increase the risk for vulnerable people, such as children who are too young to be vaccinated or children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, such as cancer.
“Getting vaccinated not only keeps individuals from becoming ill with the measles but also helps prevent further spread to loved ones, neighbors, co-workers and others in close contact,” McAneny said.
What has happened is that a bunch of selfish idiots have been relying on herd immunity, and the inevitable has occurred: there is now a sufficient number of unvaccinated people that herd immunity is no longer effective.
Authorities need to get seriously medieval on the anti-vaxxers.
The French have instituted a digital services tax, and the United states is unamused:
France will stick to plans for a tax on digital giants such as Facebook and Apple, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Friday, despite angry opposition from Washington.
Last month, France unveiled draft legislation to set a three percent tax on digital advertising, the sale of personal data and other revenue for any technology company that earns more than 750 million euros ($841 million) worldwide each year.
The effort comes amid rising public outrage at the minimal tax paid by some of the world’s richest firms which base operations in jurisdictions that charge low rates.
“We are determined to implement a tax on the largest digital companies to bring more justice and efficiency to the international tax system,” Le Maire said as he arrived in Bucharest for talks with his eurozone counterparts.
“All states take their own free and sovereign decisions on tax matters,” Le Maire added.
………
Le Maire spoke just hours after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised his objections to the tax as he met French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Washington.
Pompeo said the tax would hurt US companies “and the French citizens who use them,” according to the State Department.
The US has opened several fronts against the tax, announcing in March that Washington was considering a complaint to the World Trade Organisation that the levy was discriminatory.
Tax evasion is central to the business models of many (most) of the internet giants, and all of the talk of changing the tax code to work with this is just that, talk.
What France has enacted is a relatively elegant solution to the problem, and it address a problem present in more universal solutions: That aggressive lobbying by the tech firms, the economics term is “rent seeking”, would have watered down any proposal to meaninglessness.
John Oliver observes the obvious about Vince McMahon and WWE, that their personnel policies are abusive beyond belief, “When you’ve lost the moral high ground to the f%$#ing NFL, you are morally subterranean.”
It appears that Democratic Party rich pig donor types are upset at small donor donations becoming a bigger part of the process:………
Friction within the Democratic Party over how its members should raise money is nothing new. But in the early stages of the 2020 election, it’s become a thornier topic than in campaigns past. Top donors have grown increasingly convinced that campaigns are foolish in their belief that online fundraising will be a panacea. A new class of younger campaign operatives, meanwhile, see the traditional big-moneyed donor as a relic of the past, desperately clinging to an outdated model that amplified their influence.
So far, the latter side is winning the argument. To date, almost all of the candidates running for president have said that they will not raise money from political action committees. Others, like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have pledged not to host high-profile fundraisers or even place phone calls with wealthy donors. And others, like Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), have said they will forgo contributions from executives in specific industries.
………
Several major party fundraiser told The Daily Beast that donors have signalled to the campaigns that they want the field to narrow before deciding who to back. “Most high level donors are staying on the sidelines anyway,” said Tim Lim, a Democratic strategist and fundraiser. “They won’t want to pick sides right now in this insane primary.” But in private conversations, a more damning assessment is offered: The campaigns themselves just aren’t that good at cultivating donor networks beyond their home turfs.
Translation: The big donors are upset that they aren’t being schmoozed.
………
For all those complaints, few were willing to draw direct lines between the lack of engagement with big-dollar donors and the fundraising totals that the four top Democrats reported. But several among more than a dozen donors, operatives, and campaign veterans interviewed argued that it was a contributing factor and all described the totals as a variation of “underwhelming.”
Translation: Where are our consulting fees for schmoozing said big donors?
………
“What Obama did is he decided he would run in three primaries. And in order to do that David Plouffe [his campaign manager] ran a Republican campaign. It was businesslike. They decided what they needed financially for those three primaries and they raised what they needed to. That was really smart. And when Iowa occurred things just exploded,” said another major Democratic donor. “Now you have the reverse where Bernie and certainly Beto are betting on the internet. And that’s fine. But are you going to be able to raise $125 million in a year online? More importantly, if these campaigns aren’t run like a business, you are screwed.”
Yeah, and that worked out so well: Half-assed policies led to historically disastrous Democratic Party routs, no prosecution of corrupt bankers, a health plan that was a big wet kiss to the insurance companies, etc.
………
“A good fundraising program is like a good retirement portfolio,” said Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. “You’re not depending on any one thing. Low-dollar donors are like equity or stocks. It is very volatile. Everybody thinks about windalls but no one thinks about deserts. But both happen.”
Operatives on some of the current Democratic campaigns argue that a mixed-bag approach along the lines of what Mook outlined comes with some downsides. A candidate who is willing to embrace big-dollar fundraisers and bundled money (numerous maxed-out contributions raised by a network of donors) will become inherently less attractive to small-dollar givers. And as that happens, the candidate will become ever more reliant on the former than the latter.
But not everyone buys this logic. There is a brewing fear among some operatives that the party has overestimated voter aversion to big donor culture and are foregoing financial support for no reason other than they think it will sell with the public.
Ummm ……… Robby Mook set over a billion dollars on fire, and still lost to an inverted traffic cone.
Sorry, but the fact the usual suspects are whining is a plus, not a minus.
Video has emerged of soldiers on a shooting range in Kabul firing at a target of Jeremy Corbyn. MOD confirms it as legit: pic.twitter.com/qOr84Aiivj— Alistair Bunkall (@AliBunkallSKY) April 3, 2019
Fascist Much?
Not much, it appears.
A video has emerged showing British soldiers engaging in target practice of a Jeremy Corbyn poster :
A video showing soldiers firing at a Jeremy Corbyn poster for target practice demonstrated a serious error of judgment, an Army chief has said.
Brigadier Nick Perry said the Army was taking the matter “extremely seriously” and would fully investigate.
“The video shows totally unacceptable behaviour that falls far below the behaviour that we expect,” he said.
Labour leader Mr Corbyn said he was “shocked” by the clip; his party said it had confidence in the investigation.
Mr Corbyn added: “I hope the Ministry of Defence will conduct an inquiry into it and find out what was going on and who did that.”
The short clip shows four paratroopers in uniform firing down the range before the camera pans to the target, a large portrait of the Labour leader.
Brig Perry, commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, said there were currently 400 soldiers from his brigade working with Nato and Afghan partners in Afghanistan, where the footage is thought to have been filmed.
I’m wondering whether these are simply idiots who should be expelled from the military, or if it’s some sort of message that someone is trying to send to Corbyn.
I really hope that it is the first.
Bernie Sanders was on The Daily Show, and I thought that he slayed.
My son was in paroxysms of political bliss.
Both were intensely amusing.
Researchers have determined that cats actually know their names, but they just don’t care:
More than 3,000 years ago in Egypt, a tabby called Nedjem is thought to have roamed the royal household of Thutmose III. History doesn’t record whether Nedjem — whose name means ‘sweet’ or ‘pleasant’ — learnt to respond when called. But a study published on 4 April in Scientific Reports1 suggests that at least some modern housecats can distinguish their names from similar-sounding words, although they register recognition with the merest twitch of the head or ear.
“Cats are just as good as dogs at learning — they’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learnt,” says John Bradshaw, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who specializes in human–animal interactions.
The study took advantage of a technique known as ‘habituation–dishabituation’, commonly used in animal-behaviour studies. Atsuko Saito, a cognitive biologist at the University of Tokyo, and her colleagues visited 11 households with pet cats (Felis catus) and asked the owner to read a list of four nouns to their pet. These words were of the same length and rhythm as the cat’s name.
Most cats showed subtle signs that they were paying attention at first, by moving their head or ears. But by the fourth word, many had essentially stopped listening and their physical response was less pronounced. When their owners uttered a fifth word — the cat’s name — Saito’s team watched closely to see whether the pet displayed a stronger physical response than it had to the previous word.
The team found that 9 of the 11 cats showed a statistically significant (albeit subtle) heightening of their response when they heard their names. That alone does not prove that the felines recognized their monikers: a cat might have shown a stronger response to its name because that word was more familiar than others used in the test.
I am so not surprised.
Trump has strongly opposed this, so a veto is likely, but the War Powers Act resolution requiring a US withdrawal from Yemen is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:
The effort was a top priority for House Democrats after they took control in January amid a worsening humanitarian crisis on the ground in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels have sought to overthrow the country’s government, prompting a Saudi bombing campaign that has lasted nearly four years.
It also reflects broad dissatisfaction on Capitol Hill with Trump’s foreign policy — in particular, his posture toward Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The situation in Yemen is appalling, and the actions, politics, and ideology of our erstwhile ally, the House of Saud, is even more appalling.
Our continued support for the maniacs in Riyadh serves no one but a handful of psychopathic royals.
While a part of this is the inherent bias of the programmers, and a blithe attitude about the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular, but a bigger part is because pandering to people basest inclinations is profitable.
You wave a wand, and call it tech, and suddenly not renting to black people (Air BnB), not giving rides to black people, and Facebook’s ads as shown below, but (because it’s all “science” and computers) it’s all good:
How exactly Facebook decides who sees what is one of the great pieces of forbidden knowledge in the information age, hidden away behind nondisclosure agreements, trade secrecy law, and a general culture of opacity. New research from experts at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the public-interest advocacy group Upturn doesn’t reveal how Facebook’s targeting algorithms work, but does show an alarming outcome: They appear to deliver certain ads, including for housing and employment, in a way that aligns with race and gender stereotypes — even when advertisers ask for the ads to be exposed a broad, inclusive audience.
………
The new research focuses on the second step of advertising on Facebook, [what they do after the customer fills out their ad preferences] the process of ad delivery, rather than on ad targeting. Essentially, the researchers created ads without any demographic target at all and watched where Facebook placed them. The results, said the researchers, were disturbing:
Critically, we observe significant skew in delivery along gender and racial lines for “real” ads for employment and housing opportunities despite neutral targeting parameters. Our results demonstrate previously unknown mechanisms that can lead to potentially discriminatory ad delivery, even when advertisers set their targeting parameters to be highly inclusive. [emphasis mine]
Rather than targeting a demographic niche, the researchers requested only that their ads reach Facebook users in the United States, leaving matters of ethnicity and gender entirely up to Facebook’s black box. As Facebook itself tells potential advertisers, “We try to show people the ads that are most pertinent to them.” What exactly does the company’s ad-targeting black box, left to its own devices, consider pertinent? Are Facebook’s ad-serving algorithms as prone to bias like so many others? The answer will not surprise you.
For one portion of the study, researchers ran ads for a wide variety of job listings in North Carolina, from janitors to nurses to lawyers, without any further demographic targeting options. With all other things being equal, the study found that “Facebook delivered our ads for jobs in the lumber industry to an audience that was 72% white and 90% men, supermarket cashier positions to an audience of 85% women, and jobs with taxi companies to a 75% black audience even though the target audience we specified was identical for all ads.” Ad displays for “artificial intelligence developer” listings also skewed white, while listings for secretarial work overwhelmingly found their way to female Facebook users.
………
In the case of housing ads — an area Facebook has already shown in the past has potential for discriminatory abuse — the results were also heavily skewed along racial lines. “In our experiments,” the researchers wrote, “Facebook delivered our broadly targeted ads for houses for sale to audiences of 75% white users, when ads for rentals were shown to a more demographically balanced audience.” In other cases, the study found that “Facebook delivered some of our housing ads to audiences of over 85% white users while they delivered other ads to over 65% Black users (depending on the content of the ad) even though the ads were targeted identically.”
Facebook appeared to algorithmically reinforce stereotypes even in the case of simple, rather boring stock photos, indicating that not only does Facebook automatically scan and classify images on the site as being more “relevant” to men or women, but changes who sees the ad based on whether it includes a picture of, say, a football or a flower. The research took a selection of stereotypically gendered images — a military scene and an MMA fight on the stereotypically male side, a rose as stereotypically female — and altered them so that they would be invisible to the human eye (marking the images as transparent “alpha” channels, in technical terms). They then used these invisible pictures in ads run without any gender-based targeting, yet found Facebook, presumably after analyzing the images with software, made retrograde, gender-based decisions on how to deliver them: Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.
So, not only does Facebook allow advertisers to discriminate, bigotry is baked in their whole “Social Graph”.
This is not surprise.
Even if Facebook weren’t evil, and they are very evil, this is a part and parcel of the whole techno-utopian delusion that permeates the whole misbegotten industry.
The pilots of Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 apparently followed the proper steps to shut down an errant flight control system as they struggled to regain control of the 737 MAX aircraft shortly after takeoff. But according to multiple reports, data from the ill-fated aircraft’s flight recorder revealed that the anti-stall feature of the aircraft’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was triggered at least three times—and at least one time after the pilots followed the correct steps to shut it down.
Both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal report that the air crew followed procedures laid out by Boeing following the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX in October, according to officials briefed on the initial findings of the investigation. But the pilots failed to regain control of the system, and the MCAS was reactivated again—triggering yet another automated correction of the aircraft’s stabilizers that would have pushed the nose of the plane down.
………
To prevent the MCAS from continually pushing the nose down in the event of bad sensor data or some other software failure, Boeing instructed pilots to deactivate the system using procedures already in place for dealing with runaway stabilizer control systems in other 737 aircraft—flipping two stabilizer trim “cutout” switches to the “cutout” position. Failure to do so could result in the system pushing the stabilizers to their movement limit—putting the aircraft into a steep dive. The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines flight did flip the cutout switches, and they cranked the controls to attempt to regain positive stabilizer control. But they continued to have difficulty controlling the aircraft.
It is not clear at this point whether the pilots purposely reactivated the MCAS’ stabilizer control or if the software reactivated on its own after shutdown. While a Wall Street Journal source said that it appeared the pilots turned the system back on in hopes of regaining control over the stabilizers, Reuters reports that the software may have reactivated without human intervention, and further investigations of that possibility are ongoing.
………
If the air crew did follow Boeing’s instructions on recovering from an MCAS system failure, the information emerging from the Ethiopian Airlines crash investigation raises more questions about Boeing’s response to the Lion Air crash five months earlier and the Federal Aviation Administration’s review of that response.
Every time we get more information on MCAS and the crashes, it just gets worse and worse, and now it seems that there are some very basic problems on their factory floor, as the Air Force has paused deliveries of the KC-46 tanker because of problems with foreign objects being found in delivered aircraft.
Seriously, that is aircraft building 101: Don’t leave sh%$ in a plane when it rolls off the production line:
The Air Force has stopped accepting deliveries of Boeing Co.’s new refueling tanker aircraft for the second time in a month because of debris found in closed compartments, according to Secretary Heather Wilson.
The halt in deliveries of the KC-46A Pegasus is the latest issue to plague the $44 billion effort to create the first U.S.-built flying gas station for the Pentagon’s fleet since the KC-10A Extender in 1981.
“We actually stopped again,” Wilson said Tuesday at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Wilson told lawmakers that the Air Force found “foreign object debris” in closed compartments of the aircraft.
Elaborating on the trash left behind by workers, Wilson told the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee later in the day that it was a “manufacturing discipline” issue on the assembly line where “we saw a breakdown.”
“If you drop a wrench you have to find a wrench,” she said. “You have to wipe down surfaces so you don’t have pieces of aluminum that over time get in the midst of things and cause serious problems.”
Boeing has lost its way.
It has been relentlessly chasing MBA-think and over-inflated executive compensation, and making aircraft has become secondary.
I so hope that I am flying Airbus to Portland in June.
A judge has reinstated Michigan Governor Snyder as a defendant te Flint water lawsuit, and it appears that said judge is unamused:
A federal judge on Monday allowed a major class-action lawsuit over the Flint water contamination crisis to move forward and reinstated claims against former Gov. Rick Snyder.
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Judith Levy authorizes new evidence in the case that plaintiff attorneys argue shows Snyder was aware of significant risks posed by Flint River water as early as April 2015 but did not inform residents until five months later, when the crisis could no longer be denied.
Levy had dropped Snyder from the case in the fall 2018. But new allegations, if proven true, would show Snyder was “deliberately indifferent” and showed “callous disregard” for the health and safety of Flint residents, she wrote in a 128-page decision reinstating Snyder as a defendant and addressing other claims.
The consolidated class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Flint residents claiming personal injury and/or property damage as a result of the city’s water contamination crisis, including those exposed to lead and at least one person who died due to possible Legionnaires’ disease.
………
Levy on Monday also rejected motions to dismiss “bodily integrity” claims against former Michigan Treasurer Andy Dillon, several other state officials and former Flint emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose.
………The amended complaint allowed under Monday’s decision alleges that Snyder did not do enough to intervene in the lead contamination crisis or warn the public about outbreaks of deadly Legionnaire’s disease.
………
The complaint targets the former governor for alleged “injuries he caused to plaintiffs resulting from his deliberately indifferent deprivation of plaintiffs’ constitutional and civil rights.”
In her decision, Levy called the plaintiffs’ claims against Snyder “plausible” and worthy of additional consideration in court.
………
Furthermore, Levy said, plaintiffs “plausibly state” that Snyder showed a “callous disregard” for the plaintiffs right to bodily integrity. Viewed as a whole, the allegations plausibly describe ‘conscience shocking’ conduct,” she wrote.
………
The class includes about 25,000 individuals but could grow if plaintiffs’ attorneys and the state reach a settlement in the case, Pitt said.
There is a possibility that with that many clients, that Rick Snyder will exhaust his whole fortune in lawyers and penalties.
I hope that this rat-f%$# has his own Eddie Ray Valentine moment.
*Yes this is actually a legal term.
I just came across an article suggesting that the Jewish practice of Shmita could save sustainable architecture.
For those not up on obscure biblical laws, it is the requirement for a field to lie fallow once every 7 years.
When all is said and done, allowing fields to lie fallow, and thus allowing the soil to rest is a good idea.
My problem is not that it’s a just a Jewish idea.
It has been practiced almost universally around the world since the introduction of agriculture by almost every farming society until the advent of modern fertilizer technology.
The idea that this is some sort of uniquely Jewish (and by implication “white”) secret is bullsh%$.
During the 90s, the influencers said millions of lost jobs for the sake of free trade and globalization were worth it. Now, they tell us the loss of several hundred thousand jobs in the insurance industry for the sake of Medicare For All is intolerable. pic.twitter.com/krGH9kdHgC
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) March 24, 2019
The reality of the situation here is that their objection is not to the loss of jobs, but the losses of the idle rich shareholders.
H/t Naked Capitalism
Until 2020, I will no longer discuss the fundraising hauls of various candidates. (the link is about Bernie crushing it)
I understand that campaign donations numbers are a fixture in political coverage, but that is bad and lazy journalism.
This sort of coverage is more than bad, it is damaging.
It replaces the discussion of real issues with meaningful horse race coverage.
I fear that the press coverage this cycle will make 2016 coverage look like Edward R. Murrow.