Category Archives: Fail!
Military Members and Their Families Respond to John Kelly’s News Conference – The New York Times
‘The immediate family are not the only people devastated.’Gen. Kelly’s conduct here is disgraceful and dishonorable.I write this as a member of a proud military family. I am the wife of a Naval Academy graduate and former Navy pilot who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. I have spoken to my husband about Gen. Kelly’s actions.How dare Gen. Kelly criticize Congresswoman Wilson, who was in the car with Sgt. Johnson’s family when the President called. She is grieving, too — she had a long personal relationship with Sgt. Johnson since he was a child, which is why she was invited by his family to be in the car when they went to the airport to meet his coffin. Surely Gen. Kelly knows that the immediate family are not the only people devastated by the death of one of our brave members of the military! Unlike Gen. Kelly, the congresswoman heard what Trump said. She heard it because Sgt. Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, a pregnant 24-year old with two small children, put the call on the speakerphone. Mrs. Johnson was devastated because Trump didn’t even know Sgt. Johnson’s name, which is what Congresswoman Wilson stressed, not his incredibly tone-deaf comment that “he knew what he signed up for.”This is the same Gen. Kelly who is not offended by Trump’s disgraceful attacks on John McCain and the Gold Star Khan family. Wow, just wow!— CA Reader, in California
Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story | Dame Magazine – does anyone need another reason to leave Twitter? Encourage celebrities to leave as well!
Indeed, the kind of harassment Leslie Jones faced is exactly what Black women have had to deal with on Twitter, day-in, and day-out, for years. But without the prominence of being Leslie Jones, one doesn’t get the benefit of personal intervention from Jack Dorsey.“It’s the gamificiation of hate,” says author Mikki Kendall. “I was going to leave Twitter at one point. It just wasn’t usable for me. I would log on and have 2,500 negative comments. One guy who seemed to have an inexhaustible energy would Photoshop my image on top of lynching pictures and tell me I should be ‘raped by dogs,’ that kind of thing.” When Kendall was living in Tennessee, she says she received a picture of her and her family in a photo that “looked like it had been sighted through a rifle.” She was also doxxed—that is, had her address posted online. She moved shortly thereafter. “I had two minor children in my home then. I had to do something different.” She lives on the southside of Chicago now and says she feels much safer. “No one’s going to come for me here. If they do, I’d like to watch them try.”Kendall has been deft at figuring out tech-savvy ways to both document and battle online harassment. She did a “race swap” experiment with a white guy—they traded Twitter avatars. “For me, it was like, Oh my God, it’s so quiet! People told me how smart I was and perceptive,” she says. Kendall has also figured out how to turn the tables on the algorithms by coding her own auto-blockers that sniff out potentially harmful Twitter accounts and blocks them.When I asked her why she thought Twitter wasn’t more responsive to reports of abuse on the site, she said, “Being a white guy on Twitter is a whole other world. I think that what’s happening with Jack and Biz (Twitter executives) is they’re experiencing a whole other Twitter.”White supremacists have used Twitter to target Jews, as well, in ways both banal and life-threatening. In June 2016 several highly visible Jewish political reporters began to report a barrage of online harassment that involved a symbolic gesture: triple parentheses placed around their names, like (((this))). The ADL added the triple parentheses to their catalog of hateful symbols. One report called them “the digital equivalent of a yellow star,” intended to separate Jews from the rest of the population and pave the way for worse.
Source: Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story | Dame Magazine
Automation: A woman’s place is in the home – at least according to AI… | In English | EL PAÍS
Researchers at Virginia University have released a report confirming a frequent criticism – that far from avoiding human prejudices, artificial intelligence compounds them.The investigation focused on two image banks commonly used to train computers to process images. In 33% of the photos of people cooking, the cooks were men. Following attempts to “train” the computer in recognition, the software continued to believe that 84% were women and only 16% were men.“We know that technology fed on big data can enhance prejudice because the prejudice is implicit in the data,” according to the report. The research shows that if sexual discrimination exists in the original data, predictive technology will identify and highlight it.
Source: Automation: A woman’s place is in the home – at least according to AI… | In English | EL PAÍS
University of Cincinnati to allow white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus – Columbus – Columbus Business First _ UC President not smart enough to realize that no one invited him to speak – but it’s ok that a UC Policeman murdered a local Black-American neighbor and got away with it?
University of Cincinnati President Neville Pinto issued a statement Friday evening saying that the university had a First Amendment obligation to allow a white nationalist, Richard Spencer, to speak on campus.
Challenging racial supremacy — from Charlottesville to Tel Aviv | +972 Magazine
as long as our recognition and understanding of racial supremacy begins and ends with groups of enraged men chanting and beating up people of color, leftists, and anyone else they see as a target, we will never approach the depth of reckoning needed to effect meaningful change.Racist mobs are not the load-bearers of supremacy; they are its outgrowths. Income inequality; disparities in incarceration rates; education gaps; housing discrimination; lack of representation: these are the constant reality of the effects of racial supremacy, and they pose a far greater challenge than the iconography of statues, ruins and flags. It is our tragedy, and our indictment, that it takes physical violence to make us see what has always been there.———————As I was writing these words on October 7, a group of torch-carrying white supremacists—led by Richard Spencer—again gathered at the Lee statue in Charlottesville, not two months after one of their number murdered Heather Heyer. May her memory be a blessing, as well as the memory of all those killed by the racist mentality she died protesting.
Source: Challenging racial supremacy — from Charlottesville to Tel Aviv | +972 Magazine
Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin Risk Their Reputations – The New York Times
In the early stages of promoting Trump’s tax cut, they have made a series of statements that are blatantly false — not merely shadings of truth or questionable claims but outright up-is-down falsehoods mocked by various fact-checkers. The statements make the two look more like Trump press secretaries than serious business executives whom members of Congress can trust.They fall into two main categories. The first is who benefits from the tax plan. “Wealthy Americans are not getting a tax cut,” Cohn said on “Good Morning America.” He was echoing a promise that Mnuchin had made before the inauguration: “Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”No one needs to read a sophisticated analysis (although you can do that, as well) to know these claims are ridiculous. Trump’s tax plan is reducing the top income-tax rate to 35 percent, from 39.6 percent. It is deeply cutting corporate taxes, which benefits people who own a lot of stock. It is eliminating the estate tax.Want to guess how many families in New York State — population 20 million — are wealthy enough that they’re likely to pay any estate tax next year, according to an estimate based on I.R.S. data? Just 470. The number is so low in Montana, Vermont, West Virginia and four other states — likely fewer than 10 families in each — that the I.R.S. doesn’t provide details, to avoid privacy concerns.There is no way to make up for tax cuts this large by eliminating deductions, as Mnuchin claimed. The administration isn’t trying very hard, anyway. The deductions for charitable donations and mortgage interest, including on second homes, will remain.
Bulgaria and their rightwing’s love affair with Nazi’s – will preside over EU for a year…
Volen Siderov, the head of one of the three parties (“Ataka”), forming the United Patriots, once called on the Roma minority (Gypsies) to “behave themselves,” if they did not want to be deported to India. In a book, he wrote that “a gang of Jews” have “ruined the orthodoxy.”[4] Valeri Simeonov, Chair of a second party in the United Patriots, the “National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria” (NFSB), referred to Roma as “human-like creatures, who have become beasts,” and said that their children were playing “in the streets with pigs.”[5] Since May 4, Simeonov has been in office as the Vice Prime Minister, in charge of the economy and demography, as well as being Bulgaria’s Commissioner for Integration.
Twice, photographs have already emerged showing high-ranking officials of Bulgaria’s government, elected to office in May, in poses honoring the Nazis. May 17, Pavel Tenev, Minister of Regional Development, at the time, was forced to resign, after publication of a photo, showing him with his right arm extended in a Nazi salute, standing in front of a wax figure of a Nazi officer in Paris’ Musée Grévin. May 19, another photo was published on the internet, showing the freshly appointed department director in the Ministry of Defense, Ivo Antonov, also giving the Nazi salute in front of a Second World War tank of the Wehrmacht. (On the right, german-foreign-policy.com documents a segment of this photo.) His most senior employer, Defense Minister, Krasimir Karakachanov, Chair of the IMRO-Bulgarian National Movement, refused to fire him.[6]
Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com
Guggenheim drops artworks after threats of violence – IFEX – Real threats or fake threats from Putin/Russian Fakes trying to undercut culture and trust?
The Guggenheim’s alarming action continues a growing worldwide trend in which threats of violent protest are silencing artistic expression and posing a danger to free speech in general. Whether or not the provocations of artists are defensible or morally unacceptable, we need to take an uncompromising position against threats of violence. When cultural institutions cave in to such threats, others who are convinced of the moral rectitude of their cause are encouraged to embrace similar tactics. This time it is animal rights activists. Next time it could be religious or political extremists.
Source: Guggenheim drops artworks after threats of violence – IFEX
Hurricane Maria: I thought the response would be different to past disasters — but it wasn’t – ABC News – Even the Aussies can see Puerto Rico is being screwed!
The Government needs to stop saying it’s all OKThe Trump administration has been criticised for its slow response.But really, the big mistake it has made has been to repeatedly claim that everything is OK when it’s plainly not the case.


















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