Violence against women

Just one day after the murder of eight people that included seven women, six of them Asian, the House of Representatives voted to renew the Violence Against Women Act. When it was first passed in 1994, it was so uncontroversial that it passed the House of Representative by a voice vote and in the Senate by a margin of 95-4. But that was at a time when the Republican party still had some level of decency. This time, what was shocking was that while all Democrats in the House voted in favor of it, only 29 Republicans did so, giving a total in favor of 244 while 172 Republicans voted against it. Senate Republican are expected to try and block it altogether. McConnell refused to bring up the reauthorization in 2019 which is why it has lapsed.
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Sidney Powell now says that she was just kidding all along

Remember Sidney Powell, the member of Trump’s crack (or should I say cracked) legal team that accused Dominion Voting Systems of orchestrating a massive fraud that deprived Trump of. his election win? Dominion sued her for defamation and was asking for $1.3 billion in damages. Well, she has now come up with a defense that no one in their right mind could have thought that she was serious, despite her going on TV, meeting in the White House with Trump, and giving press conferences multiple times making those allegations.
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Trying to understand the wide variations in covid death rates across the globe

It used to be a pretty good rule of thumb that whenever any catastrophe had global consequences, poorer nations would be much harder hit than the richer ones. Hence you would have expected that in many poorer countries, and in the poorest parts of those countries where people live crowded together with inadequate sanitary conditions, the deaths from the pandemic would have skyrocketed. And yet one of the notable features of this pandemic is the reversal of this pattern.

In the March 1, 2021 issue of The New Yorker Siddhartha Mukherjee looked at one particular case of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai that is the largest in Asia where “a million residents live in shanties, some packed so closely together that they can hear their neighbors’ snores at night. When I visited it a few years ago, open drains were spilling water onto crowded lanes.”
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The Amazon unionizing fight approaches the end

There is an important vote taking place that will end on March 29th and that is whether workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama can form a union.

Workers’ ballots must reach the National Labor Relations Board regional office in Alabama by 29 March to be counted. A majority of the ballots cast determine the outcome of the election, with around 5,800 employees eligible to vote.

Ballots for the election went out to workers on 8 February. Amazon’s attempts to delay the vote and force an in-person election were denied by the National Labor Relations Board.

The union effort has received several high profile endorsements, including a video released by President Joe Biden asserting his support for workers’ right to organize unions, endorsements from several members of Congress, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Republican Senator Marco Rubio, other labor unions such as the NFL Players Association, the MLB Players Association, support from Black Lives Matter and several local organizations.
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Evangelical churches should stop trying to have it both ways

It turns out that the pastor of the evangelical church that the shooter who is accused of killing eight people including six Asian women in Georgia attended has some rancid views about women.

In recorded sermons that have since been deleted from the church’s web site, lead pastor Jerry Dockery decried “radical feminism” and criticized recent shifts in gender roles as the work of Satan.

“Radical feminism has engulfed our culture like a tsunami,” Dockery told his congregation on September 20, 2020. “We’re now striving for gender neutrality, for gender fluidity, you name it. It’s just gender whatever-you-want. And I would say to you that this is a blatant, a blatant—I will say it one more time—a blatant guidance, direction and strategy of Satan to oppose and usurp the authority of God.” 
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Bernie Sanders, soothsayer

Eight days before the election on November 3rd, Bernie Sanders warned Jimmy Fallon about what he feared might happen if Trump lost. In fact, his prediction was so spot-on and that I am not sure why the Trumpers are not using it to claim that he was the mastermind behind the plan to steal the election.

That is exactly what happened. The reason that Trump’s plan went agley in a big way was that Fox News, along with AP, called Arizona for Biden at 11:20pm on election night, giving Biden 264 electoral college votes, short of the 270 required for victory but close enough that Trump’s claim to have won immediately rang hollow. This is why he was so furious with Fox and tried unsuccessfully to try and get them to retract.

The person in charge of their decision desk who made the call was later fired and described the ‘murderous rage’ that he was subjected to from conservative viewers.

Conspiracy theorists and white supremacists are targeting cell phone towers

In testimony before Congress, the director of the FBI Christopher Wray warned of the rising danger of domestic extremist violence that he says is metastasizing across the country. For the longest time dating back to the J. Edgar Hoover era, the FBI focused much of its efforts on infiltrating antiwar groups and others that were largely peaceful and engaged in promoting civil rights and on behalf of minorities and women, and tended to ignore the threat posed by white nationalists and violent militias. It has taken the Trump era of supporting and inciting those groups for them to wake up to the reality of where the real danger of violence lies.

The insurrection on January 6th was just one manifestation of this trend. Ken Klippenstein reports on other actions that some groups extremist groups are up to.

AS THE BIDEN administration turns its attention to an infrastructure system beset with problems, a strange new issue has emerged: conspiracy theorists. That’s according to a detailed intelligence report, produced by the New York Police Department and obtained by The Intercept, which finds that cellphone towers and other critical infrastructure have become an attractive target for conspiracy theorists, especially in the weeks and months following the presidential election.

Conspiracy theorists, joined by far-right white supremacist groups, “increasingly target critical infrastructure to incite fear, disrupt essential services, and cause economic damage with the United States and abroad,” the report states. Blaming “the current contentious domestic political environment,” the document, issued on January 20 by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau and marked as “law enforcement sensitive,” describes a rash of attacks, some of which involved strikingly sophisticated planning.

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The Trumps’ shameful lack of leadership in fighting vaccine hesitancy

An NPR poll found little differences in vaccine hesitancy between white, Black, and Latino groups.

Among those who responded to the survey, 73% of Black people and 70% of White people said that they either planned to get a coronavirus vaccine or had done so already; 25% of Black respondents and 28% of white respondents said they did not plan to get a shot. Latino respondents were slightly more likely to say they would not get vaccinated at 37%, compared with 63% who either had or intended to get a vaccine.

However, there were big differences between politically aligned groups.

Among Republican men, 49% said they did not plan to get the shot, compared with just 6% of Democratic men who said the same. Among those who said they supported President Trump in the 2020 election, 47% said they did not plan to get a coronavirus vaccine compared with just 10% of Biden supporters.

Similarly, compared with “big city” respondents, rural residents were more likely to say that they did not plan to take a coronavirus vaccine.

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The madness of US gun policies

We have yet another mass shooting in which a young man killed eight people, six of them young Asian women at three different massage parlors in Georgia. He was apprehended that same day because his parents identified him from surveillance footage after the first shooting and told police that his vehicle had a tracking device and how they could track him down. He seemed to be on his way to Florida to commit more murders.
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