If you thought the US justice department was corrupt under Donald Trump …

…. get a load of what is happening in Brazil. The Intercept has published, along with major Brazilian media, a series of articles that constitute a brutal expose of how the current justice minister Sergio Moro, supposedly an anti-corruption crusader as a judge, engaged in utterly distorting the judicial system in order to convict political opponents, including former president Lula, on corruption charges. The scandal was triggered by the leak of a massive trove of secret documents from an anonymous source, a la Edward Snowden.
[Read more…]

If Carl Sagan had been a creationist …

Via reader and commenter Golgafrinchan Captain, I watched this amusing video narrated by ‘Reverend Carl Sagan’ about why biblical revelation is superior to science. It is an imagining of what Sagan, the creator of the popular series Cosmos, might have produced if he were an ‘intelligent design creationist’ instead of the freethinking scientist that he was.

Rick Snyder faces at least a small consequence for his actions

Rick Snyder was the governor of Michigan during the period 2011 to 2018. During that time, he appointed an ’emergency manager’ to replace the elected city government of the city of Flint and that manager switched the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the highly polluted Flint river without putting in place adequate cleaning up processes. The result was devastating for the residents of that impoverished city. They got filthy water with dangerously high levels of lead that led to all manner of ailments. This also led to one of the lowest points of the Obama presidency when, as Michael Moore showed in his documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, Obama flew in in grand style, staged a photo op where he pretended to drink the water, and then swept out again without doing a damn thing, infuriating the residents who had been hoping that he would take the major drastic actions required to clean up their water.
[Read more…]

The pundits are way behind the times and the candidates

Rebecca Traister writes thoughtful pieces examining important issues. I last linked to one of her articles where she argued that the sexual abuse issues highlighted by #MeToo was a watershed moment for the feminist movement. She now has another excellent article where she examines how far behind the times the political pundit class is, which is why so many of them tend to see only Joe Biden as ‘presidential’ and ‘electable’, because he reflects the entitlement period from which they too emerged
[Read more…]

Are plants conscious?

My late cousin was a serious grower of roses with his flowers winning awards at local shows. On a visit to his garden once, I noticed that he had placed a radio in the middle of all the rose bushes and he told me that he had heard that plants thrive on music. I too had heard this but dismissed it as the whimsy of plant lovers. I even teased him by asking him which roses bushes were not performing up to his expectations and when he pointed them out to me, I gave them a stern talking to.
[Read more…]

The census shambles

I wrote earlier about how people who work for the Donald Trump administration eventually end up losing all self-respect as they are forced to defend the indefensible. This happened in the case of a veteran lawyer Sarah Fabian in the justice department as she tried to defend the government’s practice of denying basic health and sanitary essentials to detained migrant children.

We now have another career justice department lawyer seeing any sense of credibility and integrity slip away as he tries to cope with the utter shambles of the Trump policy on the citizenship question on the census form. I earlier wrote how, following the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the citizenship question because the government’s reasons for including it were ‘contrived’ and thus not credible, the Department of Commerce formally stated that it was no longer going to pursue the matter and that the census forms were being printed without the question. This would normally be the end of the story.
[Read more…]

There are always grey areas in the law

A driver of a minivan in Nevada was pulled over by police because he was alone in a lane reserved for high-occupancy vehicles that require at least one extra person. His justification? He worked for a funeral parlor and he had a corpse in the cargo area in the back. While the police officer let him off with a warning, it appears that it is not at all clear if a dead body meets the requirement.

Nevada’s HOV rules do not clarify whether an occupant must be breathing and leans on federal law, which is not much clearer.

An official with the Federal Highway Administration said it is up to individual states to define what an occupant is – and referred the USA Today Network to the Nevada Department of Transportation for additional information.

The undercover hearse driver pulled over in Las Vegas Monday assumed the body in the back counted toward the two or more occupant requirement for the lane – but Nevada Highway Patrol says passengers must be alive and breathing in order to be counted.

“When you talk about high occupancy vehicle lanes, you’re talking about seats – so a person would need to occupy a seat to qualify,” said Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Jason Buratczuk. “This person was obviously a decedent and in the cargo area of the car, so they would not qualify for the HOV lane.”

There seems to be a general rule that you can never make a law that covers all contingencies. New cases will always arise that fall in the grey areas.

Via David Pescovitz.)

The horrible conditions in speed warehouses

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight exposes the horrible conditions in the warehouses that serve companies that seek to make speed of delivery the main selling point, because that results on demands on the workers who have to rush around to fulfill those orders. Amazon is of course the gorilla in the business, driving up the demands on its workers to the breaking point while at the same time fighting their efforts to unionize.


[Read more…]

Trump might suggest Ivanka to head the IMF

hristine Lagarde, the current head of the International Monetary Fund, has decided to leave that post to become head of the European Central Bank. This leaves a vacancy to be filled at the IMF. The IMF plays a major role in the economies of developing countries and has been accused of pushing austerity policies at the expense of people’s welfare, policies that have harmed the poor and led to destabilization of nations.
[Read more…]