FDA green-lights season’s updated mRNA COVID vaccines | CIDRAP

Source: FDA green-lights season’s updated mRNA COVID vaccines | CIDRAP

DNC Evening 4: Kamala Harris Accepts the DNC Nomination for President | 3CHICSPOLITICO

DNC Evening 4: Kamala Harris Accepts the DNC Nomination for President

Tonight, the Vice President will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for President or the United States of America.

Source: DNC Evening 4: Kamala Harris Accepts the DNC Nomination for President | 3CHICSPOLITICO

What’s In A Smile? Hope & Joy For Starters | Filosofa’s Word

I’ve seen a number of criticisms from those on the political right about Kamala Harris’ smile, her easy laugh, and I keep thinking that some have become so inured to Trump’s constant bleakness, his constant darkness, that they’ve forgotten how to enjoy life!  That, plus the fact that while they would really like to criticize her on the basis or her gender and ethnicity, they know that won’t likely win them any friends, so they had to find something to criticize, and they fixated on the fact that her smile lights up the room.

I think political analyst and opinion writer Frank Bruni says it best in his newsletter today …


HARRIS’S IS A DELIBERATE SPARKLE. NOT UNLIKE … RONALD REAGAN’S

By Frank Bruni

22 August 2024

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

Source: What’s In A Smile? Hope & Joy For Starters | Filosofa’s Word

Microplastics Found in Human Brains – Yale E360

The new study unearthed microplastics in the livers, kidneys, and brains of human cadavers, with brain tissue containing up to 20 times more plastic than the other organs. More concerning, the brains of people who suffered from dementia contained significantly more plastic than the brains of healthy people. The findings, which are still undergoing peer review, were shared by the National Institutes of Health.

“It’s pretty alarming,” lead author Matthew Campen, of the University of New Mexico, told The New Lede. “There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with.”

Source: Microplastics Found in Human Brains – Yale E360

Finding the Secret Hitler: How Fascism Begins – DER SPIEGEL

…If Trump wins the election, Kagan believes, the old system will be destroyed. It will be, the historian believes, an unimaginable political disruption, as though everything would collapse on the first day. Kagan believes he will use the Department of Justice to take revenge on his enemies and militarize migration policy to round up hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. The system of checks and balances would gradually be eroded. First, the immigrants would lose their rights, followed by opposition activists, who would be arrested and prosecuted.” For me, that’s enough,” says Kagan. “Even if the system looks the same.”…

…So how does fascism work? Modern-day fascism, Stanley writes, is a cult of the leader in which that leader promises rebirth to a disgraced country. Disgraced because immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals and women have taken over the media, the schools and cultural institutions. Fascist regimes, Stanley argues, begin as social and political movements and parties – and they tend to be elected rather than overthrowing existing governments….

Stanley describes 10 characteristics of fascism.

First: Every country has its myths, its own narrative of a glorious past. The fascist version of a national myth, however, requires greatness and military power.

Second: Fascist propaganda portrays political opponents as a threat to the country’s existence and traditions. “Them” against “us.” If “they” come into power, it translates to the end of the country.

Third: The leader determines what is true and what is false. Science and reality are seen as challenges to the leader’s authority, and nuanced views are viewed as a threat.

Fourth: Fascism lies. Truth is the heart of democracy and lies are the enemy of freedom. Those who are lied to are unable to vote freely and fairly. Those wanting to tear the heart out of democracy must accustom the people to lies.

Fifth: Fascism is dependent on hierarchies, which inform its greatest lie. Racism, for example, is a lie. No group of people is better than any other – no religion, no ethnicity and no gender.

Sixth: Those who believe in hierarchies and in their own superiority can easily grow nervous and fearful of losing their position in that hierarchy. Fascism declares its followers to be victims of equality. German Christians are victims of the Jews. White Americans are victims of equal rights for Black Americans. Men are victims of feminism.

Seventh: Fascism ensures law and order. The leader determines what law and order means. And he also determines who violates law and order, who has rights and from whom rights can be withdrawn.

Eighth: Fascism is afraid of gender diversity. Fascism feeds fears of trans-people and homosexuals – who aren’t simply leading their own lives, but are seeking to destroy the lives of the “normal people” and coming after their children.

Ninth: Fascism tends to hate the cities, seeing them as places of decadence and home to the elite, immigrants and criminality.

Tenth: Fascism believes that work will make you free. The idea behind it is that minorities and leftists are inherently lazy.

If all 10 points apply, says Stanley, then the situation is rather dicey. Fascism tells people that they are facing and existential fight: Your family is in danger. Your culture. Your traditions. And fascists promise to save them.


Fascism in the U.S., Stanley says, has a long tradition stretching back deep into the last century. The Ku Klux Klan, he says, was the first fascist movement in history. “It would be misguided to assume that this fascist tradition simply vanished.”

That tradition can still be seen today, says Stanley, in the fact that a democratic culture could never fully develop in the American South. That has now resulted in election officials being appointed in Georgia that aren’t likely to stand up to repeated election manipulation attempts by Trump followers. “Trump,” says Stanley, “won’t just spend another four years in the White House and then disappear again. These are not normal elections. They could be the last.”

Source: Finding the Secret Hitler: How Fascism Begins – DER SPIEGEL

The fight to save last of L.A.’s historic Japanese fishing village – Los Angeles Times

Months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese American fishing community on San Pedro’s Terminal Island was given 48 hours to pack its belongings before it was forced into incarceration camps throughout the West. After the evacuation, most of its village was razed…

What’s left of the Terminal Island village is a stark contrast to what once was a bustling village of about 3,000 people and the backbone to the fishing industry from the turn of the last century to World War II. Cannery workers listened for the sound of whistles that signaled boats coming in with the day’s catch. The area was filled with storefronts and homes, a Japanese gate that graced the entrance to a Shinto shrine, a Buddhist temple, a Baptist church, a bank, a school and halls for people to gather for meetings and celebrations. Tuna Street was considered the central shopping area.

According to the Los Angeles Conservancy, a 1917 article in Pacific Fisherman said “the Japanese taught the Americans and all the others how to catch tuna in commercial quantities and they are the best fishermen in the game. As a result, the packers vie with each other in providing them with attractive quarters close to their respective plants.”

Miho Shiroishi, 91, was born on the island in the 1930s. She still drives to the area simply to remember life before the war. Her mother and four siblings were forced into a camp when she was 9 while her father was forced into another. When she returned, her home on Cannery Street no longer existed. But at least the streets, she said, remained.

“I’m going to be 92 this year in November, but I’m still able to drive. So I go to Terminal Island as often as I can,” Shiroishi said. “Without [the two buildings], what do you have? Nothing.”

The president of the Terminal Islanders Club and one of Yamamoto’s friends from kindergarten, Terry Hara, said that plans for the buildings’ future should be a collaboration of ideas “with everybody’s best interest at heart.”

Hara, who was the first Asian American promoted to captain at the Los Angeles Police Department in 1998 and whose parents lived on Terminal Island, said that he and others believe that preserving history is key to educating people about the past.

Source: The fight to save last of L.A.’s historic Japanese fishing village – Los Angeles Times

FDA OKs new COVID-19 vaccines, shots should be available in days – Los Angeles Times

U.S. regulators approved updated COVID-19 vaccines on Thursday, shots designed to more closely target recent virus strains — and hopefully whatever variants cause trouble this winter, too.

With the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance, Pfizer and Moderna are set to begin shipping millions of doses. A third U.S. manufacturer, Novavax, expects its updated vaccine version to be available a little later.

“We strongly encourage those who are eligible to consider receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine to provide better protection against currently circulating variants,” said FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks…

Source: FDA OKs new COVID-19 vaccines, shots should be available in days – Los Angeles Times

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