Links - 3rd June 2023 (2)

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Macbeth - "‘It's a play that is extremely concerned with liminality, with the relationship between between different things connected and divided. I think that's a critical thing. Liminality is a threshold, it's like a doorway. And so there's the space in between this liminal space in between, which makes it unclear whether you're inside or outside, when you're standing in your threshold of your door, where are you? Are you outside? Or are you inside? And I think the play is, is concerned at all kinds of levels, with this notion of a threshold, with this notion of permeable boundaries, but also boundaries that, that separate.’...
‘It's not quite clear at the beginning of the play, who you're seeing, it's not clear that they are witches. I mean, if you put them in pointy hats, then it's obvious they're witches. But I think the play want us to ask these questions.’
‘It’s not clear that they’re women‘...
‘That's exactly right.  So what the play is doing is it's asking us to explore the threshold between the supernatural and the human, the threshold between the female and the male, the threshold between Scotland and England, for that matter. The threshold between the past, the present, and the future, the play is so much about being caught in the present, trying to go towards the future. And being unable to do that, in many ways... it's also related to the difference and the similarities between imagination and reality. And Macbeth is, is caught throughout the play in a situation where he actually can't separate his fantasies, his fears and reality’...
‘That's why it's a tragedy, if Macbeth was an evil person or the helpless victim of supernatural powers beyond his ken, it will just be, it wouldn't be a tragedy, it would be just bad luck, or it would be his just desserts. But the fact is that he has this potential to be a radically different kind of human being. And in spite of that, the poor fella, finds himself trapped in the role and the destiny of a murdering medieval warrior.’"

Thailand bans Macbeth film Shakespeare Must Die - "Thailand's film censors have banned an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, saying it could inflame political passions in a country where it is taboo to criticise the monarchy.  The Thai-language film Shakespeare Must Die tells the story of a theatre group in a fictional country resembling Thailand that is staging a production of Macbeth, in which an ambitious general murders his way to the Scottish throne... The director called the ruling absurd and a reflection of the fear in Thai society.  "I feel like we are heading to a very dark, dark place right now, a place full of fears and everyone has to be extra careful about what they say," she said, adding that the character resembling Thaksin could represent any leader accused of corruption and abuse of power.  "When Cambodians watch this they'll think it's Hun Sen. When Libyans watch it they would think it's Gaddafi.""
From 2012

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Alan Turing - "‘Remember how large the working staff at Bletchley Park was, 10,000 or more people working on this system, that was an image and model of the kind of power that an electronic, programmable, internally stored, modifiable computer run by electronics could do. And perhaps most importantly, as Andrew has pointed out, the way in which Turing's combination of a penetrating insight into what electronics and digital electronics especially could do with the idea of what programs could do, especially if the machine could modify its own programs, all of that was being developed at Bletchley Park.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Deism - "‘In 17th century England, the public hangman would burn banned books. He could warm his hands on anything published by deists. They were free thinkers who argued that God began the universe and then stood back. And people could only understand God by reason and not by revelation. It was part of an enormous wrench away from the church. Deists were attacked by clerics who dealt in revelation and by philosophers who thought that reason had its limits. But their ideas were influential, as the church began to lose importance in the state during the Enlightenment… since the Reformation, how free were people to think of a religion that was different from an established church?’
‘Well, they were free to think of a different religion, to live very limited extent, but they certainly weren't free to to publicize ideas about a different religion. And a fundamental feature of deism is that its writings are produced sideways, we might say. Irony, even sarcasm is a way in which religious ideas that are unwelcome to authorities are produced.’...
'Presbyterians are often particularly challenged by deism... Presbyterianism is a religion which which intensely values, the role of the pastor and also of the elders in a Christian community. And it's a it's a very communal religion, but it's also a religion that insists upon the importance of authoritative figures serving in a, in a disciplinary and in a pedagogic fashion. And they, the Presbyterians, therefore, clearly regarded deism as especially challenging to those honorable principles of their religion.'...
‘Part of what went wrong for deism in a way is that it a lot of its stronger arguments just got subsumed into into the fringes of Christianity.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Mary Astell - "‘Just because a word doesn't exist in the 17th century, it doesn't mean that the concept doesn't. And it seems to me that if you take the view that feminism is the belief that women, as a class are oppressed, and that that's wrong, then I think that we can call Astell a feminist, it seems to me that she had a very rich, thick understanding, a structural understanding of the ways in which women were oppressed, not just through the kind of violence and force and clear government but also through language and ideas and norms and stereotypes’...
'Mary Astell invokes the status of a slave on behalf of aristocratic white women living in Chelsea, and, and that, you know, when there were chattel slaves from Africa, walking the streets of London at the time, and of course, subsequent feminists have, subsequent black feminists have precisely looked on in amazement at the way in which white feminists have gone on about marriage or slavery and thought: you have no idea.'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Zong Massacre - "‘It needs to be remembered that the Caribbean plantation colonies were the most profitable colonies in the British Empire, Jamaica foremost among them. So one thinks of, you know, the North American colonies, the 13 colonies and the British Empire, especially Americans think of it that way. But there were actually 26 on the eve of the American Revolution. And by far, the most profitable, the most militarily significant, the best politically connected of these colonies were in the Caribbean, with, again, Jamaica, being at the heart of it. As long as that trade remained profitable, as long as those plantations needed those laborers, there were going to be people who were going to profit by filling that need.’...
'Even after 1807, with the Abolition Act, the Navy are paid prize money for every African captive that they managed to, in inverted commas save from the slave trade. So even the abolition act uses the indexing of money to African life into the period of abolition. And I think that's something which we struggle today to reconstruct in our heads, but was very much central to British commercial practices, and British state practices regarding law, the use of the Navy, and warfare.'"
The 15th century poll tax was an indexing of money to British life. So presumably British subjects then were slaves too

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, John Wesley and Methodism - "‘John Wesley's upbringing was pretty unconventional because he was brought up in a tense and pretty insecure environment. This is partly because of his parents turbulent marriage, Samuel and Susanna Wesley fell out about politics in 1701. And they'd separated and lived apart for about eight months. But eventually they were reconciled. And in fact, Suzanna went on to have five further pregnancies, but their relationship was pretty strained… they fell out because Suzanna had become a Jacobite, she rejected the revolution of 1688 and didn't believe that, James II had stopped being king, whereas Samuel Wesley had accepted the revolution and regarded William III as the lawful king.’
‘How did it become so acute for that, them to separate?’
‘Well, it was a matter of their salvation. They believed that well, in Samuel’s case believed that he’d taken an oath to William III, and therefore, he was imperiling his salvation if he didn't hold firm to that. Suzanna took the opposite view and felt that because she had accepted James II as her king, she would imperil her salvation if she changed her king midstream, so to speak’...
‘Women outnumber men two to one in Methodist churches’...
‘Well, in some ways, of course, that's not unusual for minority religions. There's a common pattern there where women are often in the majority in emerging or minority religious movements. And one of the reasons put forward for that sometimes is that, of course, since they didn't often have a public or civic role, they had less to risk. So for instance, as a dissenter in this period, you couldn't go to university, you couldn't hold public office. Well, if you're a woman, you couldn't do that anyway. So for some, in some ways, you could say women were slightly more free to follow their conscience. But of course, in addition to that Methodism, specifically did offer them much more of an opportunity to contribute, because of the emphasis on lay participation. So it was true for both men and women that they were expected to recount their experiences, their conversion experiences as women was as valid as those of men. their day to day experiences and spiritual progress, were also as valid and needed the same analysis and careful attention. And that was very rare. There were very few opportunities in this period for women to hear their own voice, to have an opportunity to speak, even if it was in a, you know, a semi private forum of the societies. We shouldn't overstate this, of course, because it wasn't revolutionary in terms of giving opportunities for women. Most of the leadership roles went to men, and only very few women were allowed to preach in the 18th century and they had to be quite exceptional.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Eclipses - "‘I suppose that the most famous biblical one at least is the whole question of the crucifixion, and the darkness at noon, and many artists have painted the crucifixion showing an eclipsed sun. But as Caroline said at the very start, that cannot have happened. The reason is that the crucifixion took place at Passover. And Passover is the time of the full moon. And at full moon, you can have a lunar eclipse, but not a solar eclipse. However, there are some records that claim that the night of the crucifixion, the moon rose blood red, and as we already heard, that is one of the signals of a total lunar eclipse. And you can have a lunar eclipse at Passover. And indeed, you do the calculations back and there was a total lunar eclipse on Friday, the third of April 33 AD, and it was just after sunset in what is now modern Israel.’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Great Gatsby - "'It's about sleaze and and you know, gangsters and it's about these kind of really tawdry people behaving badly. And these empty rich people. And and and they're all really vulgar. And so this was all stuff that you would have been reading about in tabloid fiction, you would have been reading about it in the magazines, and then the gossip magazines, the celebrity magazines of the day. So the analogy that I always use is imagine if if today somebody wrote an absolute masterpiece, but it was about the Kardashians, I don't think anybody would be able to see past the fact that it was about the Kardashians to recognize it as a major work of art, because the subject matter would be seen as so definitionally trivial, so definitionally tacky, that all of the quote unquote serious critics might say what's very well written, but why would you waste all of your energy writing so beautifully about the Kardashians? And and I don't think that we would have the capacity to see the way that it cuts through our moment and see something profound about our society. That it you know, that it that it pins to the wall, absolutely nails. And in this case, in the case of The Great Gatsby, is also hitting the hitting the core of of where American society was going. So it's something that has that has opened up for us through time.'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Plague of Justinian - "‘The problem with Procopius’s account are the numbers he ascribes to the mortality.’
‘He looked back to Athens in the fourth century BC, about 8 or 900 years earlier. And Thucydides’s description of that. What does he draw from that?’
‘Well, the first thing to say is that that's, that's an entirely normal thing to do for a highly literate, well educated person at this period. They're very keen to demonstrate their classical credentials, so to speak. And so using and quoting from ancient sources, is entirely normal. And so one would expect Procopius to do precisely that. But you're quite right that he does, indeed, take the passage written by Thucydides, about a plague outbreak in Athens, which almost certainly wasn't bubonic plague, although we don't know either way. And he elaborates on that and uses that as the basis for his account of the terrifying impact of this outbreak in Constantinople in 540.’"

Meme - Avery Edison @aedison: "every time i drink milk i remember my roommate who used to put powdered milk in his milk so he could drink "more milk per milk""
Open-Concept Living Space of... : "We're drinking 1 or 2% milk and he's out there drinking 115% milk."

Meme - "My old person trait is that I think a website should work in a web browser and not try to open an app"
"My old person trait is I think video games should work without needing access to the Internet"
"My old person trait is that I think when I purchase a product, that it should be complete and functional and also that I should actually own it."
"My old person trait is that I think I should be able to talk to an actual person in order to resolve issues with my bills without waiting on hold for 30+ minutes."

Giving the middle finger is a 'God-given right,' says Quebec judge - "Giving someone the middle finger is a "God-given" right that belongs to all Canadians, a Quebec judge said as he recently acquitted a Montreal-area man of criminal harassment and uttering threats.  In his ruling, Quebec court Judge Dennis Galiatsatos wrote that not only was Neall Epstein not guilty, but the fact that he was arrested and prosecuted at all was a bewildering injustice...   Naccache alleged that Epstein also made a throat-slashing gesture and said he feared Epstein would come back and try to kill him — claims that the judge did not accept.  "On what basis did he fear that Mr. Epstein was a potential murderer? The fact that he went for quiet walks with his kids? The fact that he socialized with the other young parents on the street? If that is the standard, we should all fear that our neighbours are killers-in-waiting"...   He called it "deplorable" that the complainants "weaponized the criminal justice system in an attempt to exert revenge on an innocent man."  Naccache said he thought Epstein regularly and surreptitiously filmed him and his family. In reality, the judge concluded, it was Naccache who had been filming Epstein and other neighbours from cameras mounted outside the home in which he lived with his parents and brother. He also had cameras on his motorcycle and in his parents' cars...  Galiatsatos wrote that he wished he could literally — not just figuratively — throw the case out of court.  "In the specific circumstances of this case, the Court is inclined to actually take the file and throw it out the window, which is the only way to adequately express my bewilderment with the fact that Mr. Epstein was subjected to an arrest and a fulsome criminal prosecution.""

Honey Lemon Water: An Effective Remedy or Urban Myth? - "Honey has been linked to a few science-backed health benefits, but it’s important to note that most of these benefits are associated with the raw, unfiltered type.  This is because high-quality, unfiltered honey has more beneficial compounds and nutrients than processed, filtered honey... In a review of 26 studies that included over 3,000 people, honey was more effective at healing partial-thickness burns than conventional treatments. Additionally, honey may be an effective treatment for diabetic foot ulcers... It is thought that honey’s healing properties come from the antibacterial and anti-inflammatory compounds it contains.  In fact, studies suggest that honey may have a protective effect against over 60 different species of bacteria... One study found that a dose of honey was more effective than cough medicine at suppressing coughing and improving sleep in children and teens with upper respiratory infections"

Meme - "*they used cgi to fake the moon landing*
cgi in 1996: *Lara Croft with pointy boobs*"

Meme - "Men dont have trust issues...we stick our dicks in a mouth full of teeth...if that aint trust..idk wat is"

Meme - "As I gazed into her eyes, my knees got weak and I could feel the butterflies in my stomach. I knew right and there... I had roofied the wrong glass."

Meme - "When you miscalculate the dick to cheek ratio and realize you're not equipped for this mission *Donald Duck and Pig*"

Meme - "Tigers have "false eyes" on the back of their ears to discourage predators from attacking them from behind"
"I am slightly less terrified of tigers and 1000X more terrified of whatever the fuck a tiger considers a predator"

Meme - "The perfect keyholder doesn't exis... *Barry Wood sitting on a bed silhouette*"

Fendi Removes Scarf That People Say Looks Like a Vagina - "Fendi, for example, has designed a $990 pink circle scarf printed with the brand's signature logo and lined with brown fur.  The "Touch of Fur" stole is available in blue and red, but online shoppers have stayed fixated on the pink version that's no longer available on the website."

Meme - "Sauce cat is now 7 sauces"
"Americans, they'll use anything but metric!"

Meme - "Pawn: reaches the other end of the board
King: I have decided I am now arab and can have more than one wife."

Meme - "Me: "Harder daddy"
Guy stabbing me:"

Meme - "TOYOTA FORTUNER
ANNEE 2013
AUTOMATIQUE ESSENCE
GRAND ECRAN PLAQUE RECENTE
106mil KM.
7PLACES
CLIMATISE
FULL OPTIONS
MUTE RECEMMENT
Conduite par un blanc"

Toddler laughs as five firefighters try to free him - "A laughing toddler in Cornwall was rescued by hero firefighters after they battled free him from a locked car while he watched from the driver's seat.  Little 14-month-old Brandon Emery was seen bearing a huge, adorable grin as he clutched the steering wheel of his mother's Rover Streetwise after accidentally locking himself inside."

Headteacher took own life after hearing Ofsted were going to downgrade primary school, family say - "Ruth Perry, who had been principal at Caversham Primary School in Reading since 2010, took her own life in January this year, after being told the school was being downgraded from Outstanding to Inadequate.  Her devastated family say the 53-year-old was left a 'shadow of her former self' as a result of the inspection, and that she had described it as the 'worst day of my life'."
On Facebook a lot of people were blaming Ofsted. If a student kills himself after failing his exams, we must abolish exams. If an employee kills himself after getting a bad performance review, we must abolish performance reviews

Meme - "WHEN THE WORK GETS HARD REMEMBER WHY YOU'RE DOING IT.
*strippers, cocaine*"

Meme - "Great run. You lost 79 kg *arm with smartwatch ripped off by bear*"

Being proud of Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar win goes against religion, says M'sia preacher - "A preacher in Malaysia, known for his hardliner views, has hit out at actress Michelle Yeoh's historic Best Actress Oscar win.  Celebrity Muslim preacher PU Syed Mohd Bakri Syed Ishak said it is wrong to be proud of Yeoh’s victory, and he is not walking back his words.  He asked on Instagram: “How is winning an Oscar something to be proud of?”  “How does it make Malaysia proud? What’s to be proud of?"  “We cannot be proud of something that doesn’t benefit the faith,” he added.  “Leave it to the faithless.”... He took to Facebook on March 3, 2023, to criticise Blackpink for hosting their concert amid serious floods that have hit the country.  In 2019, he slammed K-pop boyband BTS as demonic and said their music would only lead Malaysians astray."

M'sia broadcaster censors Oscar presenters' bodies in news bulletin about Michelle Yeoh's win - "In a snippet posted on the Buletin TV3 official Facebook page, Jessica Chastain and Halle Berry, who were the Oscar presenters for the Best Actress category, were shown with their entire bodies blurred out leaving only their faces visible.  For closed-up shots of the duo, only their cleavage was blurred out... But the practice of censoring bodies appears to be a longstanding one.  One person on Twitter commented that men's bare chests were not spared from censorship either, suggesting that there is at least some equity... There have also been multiple reports in recent times of women being denied services at or entry to public places, due to the enforcement of dress codes, which can be arbitrary, and where women are expected to cover up in the name of maintaining modesty even when they were already properly clothed"

Major South Korean Broadcaster Removed 'Ladies' From Michelle Yeoh's Oscars Speech
A Korean speaker was saying this was because of translation issues and that the original could be justified

Meme - "Me paying the hooker with the money I stole from her kids piggy bank while she was in the bathroom shitting out my cum:"

Meme - "Safety WARNING! Opening this box will result in Death by Electrocution & a €50 Fine"

Meme - Jesus H Christ @ThatBloke_Jesus: "Remember when I wasted years of my life as a carpenter making tables and shit before I realized I could do magic"

Meme - "The safe word is Worcestershire."
"But I can't pronounce that."
"Exactly."

Meme - "Men...follow me for more parenting tips! You are welcome!
*changing baby's diapers by holding down his arms with dumbbells*"

Meme - "To whomever decided on the placement of the subtitles... HE'S A SAINT! *subtitles not covering breasts*"

Health, Sex and Dreams: Don't dream it's over - FML - "Today, I was cockblocked by a machine. I'm in the hospital so I'm attached to the typical machines that monitor vitals, including heart rate. I fell asleep and had a sex dream which made my heart rate go up, which set off the beeping from the machine monitoring my vitals. Bam, I woke up, sex dream over. FML"

Love, Pregnancy, Cheating and Miscellaneous: News to me - FML - "Today, my colleague rushed off to the hospital for the birth of his first son. Having met his wife at the Christmas party a couple of years ago, I called to congratulate her. Shame I didn't realize it was his mistress having the baby. Guess who broke the news to the wife. FML"
From France

Work: Work name - FML - "Today, I found out the girl my husband's been calling "Sister" isn't actually his sister, but instead a hooker whose work name is "Sister". FML"

Meme - "Her husband is blind *Indian woman with huge belly button*"

Meme - "Mary! I'm back from work.... *Dove silhouette banging woman's silhouette doggy style*"

Meme - "Omiya Station *bird changing 大 to 犬*“

Of Course NPR and the BBC are State Media

Of Course NPR and the BBC are State Media

"National Public Radio (NPR) announced that it is leaving Twitter, after the platform “falsely labeled” it as “state-affiliated media.” This is the “the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries,” the indignant NPR huffed. Twitter CEO Elon Musk had the label changed to “government funded,” but this was still too much for NPR, which claims that – while it does receive government funds – such a label would tarnish its “credibility” and could somehow even “endanger journalists.”

Meanwhile the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is also throwing a hissy fit over being pasted with the same label, saying it “is, and always has been, independent,” and is merely “funded by the British public.” Also complaining is Voice of America (VOA), which, despite literally being run by an arm of the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, claims that, “The label 'government funded' is potentially misleading and could be construed as also 'government-controlled' – which VOA is most certainly not.”

Each outlet claims it maintains “editorial independence” from the state despite receiving government funding, and so doesn’t deserve to be called “state-affiliated.” Regardless of what you think of Musk or Twitter, this is absurd. Let’s leave aside VOA, which was literally founded to conduct information warfare abroad on behalf of the United States, first in WWII and then during the Cold War, and is therefore so obviously state-affiliated that its claims otherwise are not really worth addressing. The BBC and NPR are only marginally less obvious in being state media.

It would actually be more accurate, however, to call these outlets “Party-State” media...

These media outlets rely on government cash. This is most egregious in the case of the BBC, with 71% of its total revenue in 2022 coming from the BBC “licence fee”... 

While the BBC claims it can operate with nearly three-quarters of its funding coming from the government (whoops, I mean "the public”) and still remain independent in its coverage, this is clearly nonsense. Any organization that relies overwhelming on a patron for its continued financial existence will do what that patron wants. Obviously. And thanks to leaked emails and WhatsApp messages we can peruse a real time record of how the government leveraged this deference during the pandemic, with, for example, an “IMPORTANT ADVISORY” email sent from senior BBC editors to reporters informing them that Downing Street was “asking” if they could please avoid using the word “lockdown” to describe shutting people in up in their homes – and thus only “curbs” and “restrictions” appeared in BBC headlines the next day. This has hardly been limited to pandemic exceptions. As one BBC inside source told The Guardian: “Particularly on the website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.”

The government has no need to tell the BBC what to write, however, merely to politely suggest, or to reach out to “correct” some “misinformation,” and the BBC makes some voluntary editorial changes, independently. 

Canadian media is today another good example of how this works, what with Justin Trudeau’s government having rolled out a budget in 2019 pledging to hand out $600 million in new state subsidies to favored media companies, conveniently doing so just ahead of elections. Those determined to be “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations,” such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) got massive regulatory subsidies and tax credits; “unqualified” media got to try to compete against this cartel on their own. Understandably, Canadian media outlets therefore have a strong incentive to remain on the government’s good side. Thus when Trudeau wants something, such as to smear his opponents as Nazis, he has no need to do so himself; he need only wonder it aloud – “will no one rid me of these troublesome truckers?” – and his will be done, independently. Trudeau himself has since developed the confidence to quip in public that the media “lets us off the hook for a very good reason, because we paid them $600 million." But interpreting this as anything more than a joke is misinformation, according to fact checking conducted by Canadian state media (sorry: “publicly funded” media).

So as Musk himself put it to an NPR reporter: “If you really think that the government has no influence on the entity they're funding then you've been marinating in the Kool-Aid for too long.” (NPR unironically described this statement as Musk having “veered into conspiratorial territory.”)

NPR also relies on government funding, though less so than their British and Canadian comrades. While NPR is loudly claiming it only receives about 1% of its money from the government, this downplays the reality by referring only the national-level organization and not to NPR’s local and affiliate radio stations, which do much of the actual work (and which then send a portion of their revenue upward). Those stations are far more reliant on government funding:

Funnily enough, NPR in the past hasn’t been shy at all about stating (over and over again) how utterly it relies on government funding. “Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR,” it still declares on its own website (bold in the original). “The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.”...

Anyone with enough experience abroad in the developing world may have heard the term “GONGO” before. A GONGO is a “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.” GONGOs are set up by governments to advance their interests “independently” through “civil society,” though typically no one in the more honestly corrupt parts of the world really pretends they are actually very independent. While often taking on flourishing lives of their own after their birth, such NGOs can help accomplish various missions helpful to the state, in all kinds of ways.

The “censorship-industrial complex” exposed by the “Twitter Files” is a telling example of this utility. When Washington’s permanent administrative state, including federal government agencies like the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and State Department, set out after 2017 to protect the American public from ever voting the wrong way again by systematically filtering their access to information, they couldn’t do this all by themselves. So instead they adopted a “whole-of-society approach” to the “War on Disinformation” and set up a thick network connecting technology and media companies, universities, and NGOs, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy. Many of these outfits were in turn funded by the same group of aligned “philanthropic” foundations, such as the Knight Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. (The 20% of NPR funding coming from “Foundations” and “Colleges and Universities” should also take on new meaning in this context.) As a DHS memo first made public by the journalist Lee Fang described it, the explicit strategy was to use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda” due to their being formally independent “civil society” organizations...

When media like NPR want to claim “editorial independence” from state power they inevitably point to their reporters having relentlessly challenged the Trump administration. But this ignores the signal fact of American politics since 2016: Donald Trump was elected to the nation’s highest office, but was not a Party member in good standing. All the power of the Party instantly revolted against this intrusion, causing the all-consuming elite freak-out that ensued, has yet to subside, and will not subside until a similar oversight is deemed structurally impossible.

In such a closed party-state system very little direct coordination is necessary. Typically no editor has to be called up and told what to say. The pressure of ideological conformity easily serves this role"

Conflict of interest is only a problem when the party is not liberal

Links - 3rd June 2023 (1 - Plastics & Recycling)

Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia - "Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore...   None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore.  Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse.  But that’s not what happened to the shoes donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some cases traveling hundreds of miles to different corners of the vast archipelago, the location trackers showed."

Grocers gear up to fight inclusion of compostable bags in plastics ban - "the official regulations, published in June in the Canada Gazette, say there isn’t enough evidence that plant-based “compostable” plastic alternatives will fully break down in nature. As a result, Calgary Co-op’s bags and others like them will be treated in the “same manner as their conventional plastic counterparts,” according to the government. In other words, they’re forbidden as of the end of next year...   The Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers (CFIG) has opted to back Calgary Co-op in its fight, warning a ban on compostable bags could impact grocers across the country...   The City of Calgary tested the Co-op bags at its municipal composting facility and found they successfully break down... The federal government’s ban will put an end to all manufacturing of plastic shopping bags for domestic sale by the end of the year. Stores must stop using them by December 2023, and manufacturers have to stop making them for export by the end of 2025.  The manufacturer that supplies Calgary Co-op will lose roughly half its sales due to the ban, according to Jerry Gao, chief executive and founder of Calgary-based Leaf Environmental Products Inc.  “It’s in the millions for sure,” he said.  Gao said banning compostable bags will also chill innovation in Canada, which could become a leader in manufacturing compostable plastics because they are often made using starch from corn — a crop grown in abundance here."

Plastic bag bans may unintentionally drive other bag sales - "while plastic grocery bags are viewed as a single-use item, they often find a second use as liners for small trash cans. When these shopping bags are taxed or taken away, people look for alternatives -- which means they buy small plastic garbage bags... while sales of small garbage bags jumped after policies were implemented, sales of larger 13-gallon trash bags -- the size often found in kitchen trash cans -- remained relatively unchanged. This further underscored the double life of plastic grocery bags...  "Carryout grocery bags were substituted for similar sizes of trash bags before implementing the regulations," he wrote in the paper. "After the regulations came into effect, consumers' plastic bag demand switched from regulated plastic bags to unregulated bags."  The unintended increase in trash bag sales could also be measured by weight. By purchasing 4-gallon trash bags, plastic consumption increased by between 30 and 135 pounds per store per month. The sales of 8-gallon trash bags created an additional 37 to 224 pounds of plastic per store per month."
Plus, supermarkets pay less for bags than individuals, so elasticity of cost absorption aside there're equity concerns

Why Do Some People in New Jersey Suddenly Have So Many Reusable Bags? - The New York Times - "Nicole Kramaritsch of Roxbury, N.J., has 46 bags just sitting in her garage. Brian Otto has 101 of them, so many that he’s considering sewing them into blackout curtains for his baby’s bedroom. (So far, that idea has gone nowhere.) Lili Mannuzza in Whippany has 74.  “I don’t know what to do with all these bags,” she said.  The mountains of bags are an unintended consequence of New Jersey’s strict new bag ban in supermarkets. It went into effect in May and prohibits not only plastic bags but paper bags as well. The well-intentioned law seeks to cut down on waste and single-use plastics, but for many people who rely on grocery delivery and curbside pickup services their orders now come in heavy-duty reusable shopping bags — lots and lots of them, week after week. While nearly a dozen states nationwide have implemented restrictions on single-use plastic bags, New Jersey is the only one to ban paper bags because of their environmental impact. The law also bans polystyrene foam food containers and cups, and restricts restaurants from handing out plastic straws unless they’re requested... Compared to single-use plastics, the more durable reusable bags are better for the environment only if they are actually reused. According to Shelie Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, a typical reusable bag, manufactured from polypropylene, must be used at least 10 times to account for the additional energy and material required to make it. For cotton totes, that number is much higher... The ban in New Jersey, which applies to grocery stores 2,500 square feet or bigger, is meant to encourage in-store shoppers to skip single-use plastic and paper entirely, and instead bring their own reusable bags. But that, of course, doesn’t work for most online orders... Dr. Miller said the bag situation in New Jersey was emblematic of a lot of environmental policies. “If we don’t pay attention to the unintended impacts of policies such as the plastic waste ban, we run into the potential of playing environmental Whac-a-Mole,” she said. “We solve one environmental problem only to create or exacerbate another problem.”"

Plastic, Paper or Cotton: Which Shopping Bag is Best? - Sustainable Living - "Life cycle studies done in Europe and North America have determined that, overall, plastic bags are better for the environment than paper or reusable bags unless the latter are used many times...   Generally speaking, bags that are intended to last longer are made of heavier materials, so they use more resources in production and therefore have greater environmental impacts. To equal the relatively low global warming impact of plastic bags, paper and cotton bags need to be used many times; however, it’s unlikely that either could survive long enough to be reused enough times to equal the plastic bag’s lower impact."

Britain's Plastic Bag Fee Is Producing a Huge Spike in the Consumption of Thicker, 'Reusable' Plastic Bags - "The results of plastic bag bans and restrictions are frequently disappointing, and occasionally counter-productive. Take the United Kingdom, where a country-wide bag fee is encouraging consumers to switch from single-use bags to thicker, reusable bags that use more plastic... A University of Sydney study of local bag bans in California found that while they got rid of single-use plastic bags, they encouraged customers to buy thicker garbage bags as substitutes...   To that end, the Greenpeace/EIA study recommends either hiking fees on "bags for life" to 70 pence (about $1), or banning them entirely, in order to get people to finally remember to bring their own bags to the grocery store."
It doesn't matter if the environment suffers, because virtue signalling is more important
Of course the gospel cannot be questioned, so they can only double down. I guess it doesn't matter that poor people will be even more badly affected by higher prices (or no bags to buy), or that in other contexts we are told that poverty imposes a cognitive load on poor people so they can't make good choices

Plastic waste and the recycling myth - "Germans are proud of their recycling system. Even children's books spin the tale of the colored bins.  Indeed, the nation is celebrated as a recycling role model around the world. When Germany introduced its recycling system with the "green dot" as a symbol in 1991, it was unparalleled...   According to official statistics, 48.8 percent of that plastic waste was recycled in Germany.  But that figure is deceptive, says Philipp Sommer, a circular economy expert with the German environmental and consumer protection association Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH).  "We assume that only 38 percent was actually recycled," he told DW.  Germany is not alone in opaque statistics. The lobby group Plastics Recyclers Europe says that reported recycling rates across European countries don't reflect how much material is actually recovered.  "The numbers are based on the amount of plastic waste collected rather than the amount of plastics finally recycled," Antonino Furfari, managing director of the lobby group, told DW...   All of the "rejected" waste is either sent to landfills, where it sits for centuries, or to incineration sites where it gets burned for heat or energy generation. Yet, this is counted as "recycled."   Another oft-forgotten fact about recycling is that the recovered material degrades in quality. Recycled plastic packaging can therefore not simply be used to produce new packaging material.  Recycled plastic bags, sandwich wrappers and juice bottles are typically turned into flower pots, coat hangers and other products that don't require high-quality material, such as that associated with food.  Experts call this "downcycling."...   "We only have 'real' recycling with reusable bottles that are collected [from consumers with help of a deposit system] via supermarkets," he adds.  Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate — or PET — can be cleaned and refilled 25 times before they get recycled. Glass bottles can see 50 uses or more before they need to be recycled...   Plastic is cheap, robust and lightweight. It has transformed the way we consume — and in short, made our modern lifestyle possible.  Packaging based on synthetic polymers has allowed supermarkets to offer a wider range of fresh produce that stays fresh longer. Computers, toothbrushes and synthetic clothing contain plastic.  Modern medicine has also greatly benefited from the disposable plastic syringe...   Although some talk of turning back the clock to a pre-plastic era, plastic's ubiquity in our modern lives would make this a huge challenge."
After they got over the surge in endorphins over recycling, Germans moved on to wrecking their power supply with "renewable" energy. What will be the next obsession?

Is Plastic Recycling A Lie? Oil Companies Touted Recycling To Sell More Plastic - "when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.  "I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable." But it's not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite... Without question, plastic has been critical to the country's success. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel."
It's easier to blame big companies than the virtue signallers perpetuating feel-good eco-myths (even when presented with evidence that they're wrong)
Plasticphobes demand that plastic be eliminated but never consider the implications

Shoppers at major supermarkets to pay at least 5 cents per disposable carrier bag from mid-2023 - "Shoppers at any of the major supermarket chains here can expect to pay at least five cents for each disposable bag, regardless of material, they take from around the middle of next year.   The charge, which will be determined by supermarket operators, will be applied only at supermarkets run by operators with an annual turnover of more than S$100 million...   Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu, who announced this in Parliament during her ministry’s Committee of Supply debate on Monday (March 7), said that this initiative will hopefully "encourage Singaporeans to adopt sustainable habits and bring our own bags when shopping at supermarkets and other stores"."
RIP rubbish chutes, especially the pneumatic ones. RIP the environment too, since reusable bags are worse for the environment under real life conditions
It's easier to ban plastic bags than fix waste disposal infrastructure - that's why China did it

Amidst Bag Legislation Trend, Survey Shows 'Reusable' Shopping Bags are Minimally Reused - "although many believe 'reusable' bags are more environmentally friendly than the alternatives, shoppers routinely forget them at home and use them far less frequently than intended.  And, when 'reusable' bags are used, they are often never cleaned.  "While most consumers said they prefer 'reusable' bags, 61% reported that they used plastic bags during their last grocery shopping trip," said Jason McGrath, the study's lead researcher. "The actual reuse rate of 'reusable' grocery bags is only around 15 times, but there is an assumption that people are reusing them at a much higher rate."   "The findings also demonstrated that consumers prefer to have paper and plastic alternatives when it comes to the checkout aisle," added McGrath...
40%: the percent of grocery trips consumers forget their 'reusable' bags and must use the plastic or paper alternative at the store.
14.6 times: the calculated reuse rate of non-woven polypropylene shopping bags in their lifetime.
3.1 times: the calculated reuse rate of low density polyethylene shopping bags in their lifetime."
Given that polypropylene bags need to be used 37 times to break even environmentally (vs a 'single use' plastic bag), it is clear that reusable bags are worse for the environment (especially since 'single use' plastic bags are usually reused, meaning 'reusable' bags need more uses to break even

Many support EPA ban on throw-away utensils - "more than 60 percent of the nation's population welcomed the administration's decision to allow food service operators to begin providing free plastic bags to customers.  The administration began to restrict the use of plastic bags in 2003.  The ban prevented the owners of department stores, shopping malls, hypermarkets, convenience stores, fast food restaurants and regular restaurants from providing free plastic bags to their customers.  A customer must pay NT$1 to NT$2 for a bag.  This year, however, the administration decided to begin allowing free plastic bags to be offered by food service operators.  The administration made the decision because of concerns that plastic bags used for food or soup could pose a health risk if they were reused."

Plastic or glass: a new environmental assessment with a marine litter indicator for the comparison of pasteurized milk bottles - "LCA results show that R-PET bottle gives the lowest contribution to global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, terrestrial acidification, fossil resource scarcity, water consumption and human carcinogenic toxicity, followed by PET bottle, returnable glass bottle, and finally non-returnable glass bottle. Glass is the worst packaging option because of high energy demand in the bottle production and its weight and in the transport phase. Some improvements can be obtained with returnable glass, but even if we consider that a bottle could be reused eight times, results are not comparable to the PET or R-PET bottles used only once"
The irony is that plasticphobes tend to be climate change hystericists

The Cotton Tote Crisis - The New York Times - "An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its overall impact of production, according to a 2018 study by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark. That equates to daily use for 54 years — for just one bag. According to that metric, if all 25 of her totes were organic, Ms. Berry would have to live for more than a thousand years to offset her current arsenal. (The study has not been peer-reviewed.)  “Cotton is so water intensive,” said Travis Wagner, an environmental science professor at the University of Maine. It’s also associated with forced labor, thanks to revelations about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, which produces 20 percent of the world’s cotton and supplies most Western fashion brands. And figuring out how to dispose of a tote in an environmentally low-impact way is not nearly as simple as people think.  You can’t, for example, just put a tote in a compost bin: Maxine Bédat, a director at the New Standard Institute, a nonprofit focused on fashion and sustainability, said she has “yet to find a municipal compost that will accept textiles.”  And only 15 percent of the 30 million tons of cotton produced every year actually makes its way to textile depositories.  Even when a tote does make it to a treatment plant, most dyes used to print logos onto them are PVC-based and thus not recyclable; they’re “extremely difficult to break down chemically,” said Christopher Stanev, the co-founder of Evrnu, a Seattle-based textile recycling firm. Printed patterns have to be cut out of the cloth; Mr. Stanev estimates 10 to 15 percent of the cotton Evrnu receives is wasted this way.  At which point there is the issue of turning old cloth into new, which is almost as energy intensive as making it in the first place. “Textile’s biggest carbon footprint occurs at the mill,” Ms. Bédat said. The cotton tote dilemma, said Laura Balmond, a project manager for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular campaign, is “a really good example of unintended consequences of people trying to make positive choices, and not understanding the full landscape.”  How did we get here?  Arguably, it was the British designer Anya Hindmarch who put the reusable cotton bag on the map. Her 2007 “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” tote, created with the environmental agency Swift, sold for around $10 (£5) in supermarkets. It encouraged shoppers to stop buying single-use bags and went effectively viral... The idea, said Shaun Russell, the founder of Skandinavisk, a Swedish skin care brand that is a registered B Corp — or business that meets certain standards for social or environmental sustainability — is “to use your customers as mobile billboards.” It’s free advertising. “Any brand that claims otherwise would be lying,” he added... Aesop, which is also a registered B Corp, first introduced them as shopping bags a decade ago; Ms. Santos said customers consider them “an emblematic part of the Aesop experience.” So much so that the brand receives angry emails when they don’t arrive with online orders. “Abuse would be the right word,” she said, describing it over a Zoom call from Sydney. (Ms. Santos said customers wanting to offload their excess bags can return them to stores, though Aesop doesn’t advertise that possibility on its website or in-store.) Cotton bags have long existed in luxury; shoes and handbags come in protective dust wrappings. But the supposed sustainability of totes means more brands than ever are packaging wares in ever more layers. Items that don’t even need protection from dust, like hair scrunchies, organic tampons and facial cleansers, now arrive swaddled in a sleeping bag.  “It’s just packaging on top of packaging on top of packaging,” said Ms. Bédat."
Virtue signalling often leads to worse outcomes
To continue to promote plastic hysteria, the article ludicrously claims that you can't say cotton is worse than plastic, but all analyses point to that

Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage? - "University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor started studying bag regulations because it seemed as though every time she moved for a new job — from Washington, D.C., to California to Australia — bag restrictions were implemented shortly after. "Yeah, these policies might be following me," she jokes. Taylor recently published a study of bag regulations in California. It's a classic tale of unintended consequences... these bag bans did what they were supposed to: People in the cities with the bans used fewer plastic bags, which led to about 40 million fewer pounds of plastic trash per year. But people who used to reuse their shopping bags for other purposes, like picking up dog poop or lining trash bins, still needed bags. "What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned," she says. This was particularly the case for small, 4-gallon bags, which saw a 120 percent increase in sales after bans went into effect. Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. "So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags," Taylor says. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year.  Plastic haters, it's time to brace yourselves. A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel and heavy machinery. While paper is biodegradable and avoids some of the problems of plastic, Taylor says, the huge increase of paper, together with the uptick in plastic trash bags, means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions. That said, these bans do reduce nonbiodegradable litter... Taylor says a fee is smarter than a ban. She has a second paper showing a small fee for bags is just as effective as a ban when it comes to encouraging use of reusable bags. But a fee offers flexibility for people who reuse plastic bags for garbage disposal or dog walking."

Commentary: Reusable containers are not always better for the environment than disposable plastic ones - "reusable containers could actually be worse for the environment than their disposable counterparts.  Reusable containers have to be stronger and more durable to withstand being used multiple times - and they have to be cleaned after each use - so they consume more materials and energy, increasing their carbon footprint... Styrofoam containers are by far the best option for the environment among single-use food containers.   This is mainly due to their use of only 7.8g of raw materials compared with PP containers’ 31.8g. Also, they require less electricity for production compared with aluminium containers.  Even a reusable container would have to be reused between 16 and 208 times for its environmental impact to equal that of a single-use Styrofoam container... When it comes to endangering our landscapes, reusable containers are always a worse option - regardless of the number of times used - due to the electricity required to heat the water for washing them. This is thanks to the emission of substances like heavy metals in electricity generation, which are toxic to many land-based organisms.  Similar results to ours have been reported for coffee cups, with one study concluding that it takes between 20 and 100 uses for a reusable cup to offset its higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to a disposable cup... reuse is a considerable challenge for an industry optimised for on-the-go consumption.  Unless it is highly convenient or they are offered an incentive, such as money back, customers are not likely to carry around empty containers until they can return or reuse them. There are also potential issues with liability for food poisoning and cross-contamination from allergens when reusing containers.   Despite this, reuse has been shown to work in the takeout sector, as with reusable box schemes like reCIRCLE in Switzerland. However, systems like this require considerable investment, particularly to help customers return containers.  A more promising model may be one where the vendor directly collects empty containers from the customer to be refilled with the same substance, in the style of old-fashioned milk delivery rounds. Similar models, like Terracycle’s Loop, aim to reuse each container up to 100 times."
The usual canard about polluting waterways is thrown out - pretending that the problem is single use materials rather than waste disposal. And of course wasting everyone's time by making people lug around containers is supposed to be a good thing

Should plastics be a source of energy? - "Some municipalities didn’t even bother sorting. They just baled up all the unsorted plastics and tried to sell it. Chinese recyclers were ready buyers. In China, they would mostly pluck out the same three valuable plastics and then discard the rest—not always in a proper landfill. The West Coast, with its cheap freight rates to China, was particularly addicted to this system. In a letter to local officials this May, Scott Smithline, director of California’s Department of Resources Recycling & Recovery, acknowledged that two-thirds of the recyclables collected in California were being sent abroad, more than 60% of that to China.“All they were doing was transferring the landfill from their state to a foreign country”... Some jurisdictions have temporarily suspended recycling programs. In other places, recyclables are piling up and even being landfilled... Proponents of waste to energy say the technology is cleaner than other power sources. According to SWANA’s O’Brien, waste-to-energy plants emit less CO2, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides than coal-fired power plants do per unit of power."

FACT CHECK: Reuse of Plastic Bottles - "What's False
Reusing single-use PET bottles doesn't cause them to release carcinogenic DEHA into the fluids they contain; freezing plastic water bottles doesn't cause them to release carcinogenic dioxins into the fluids they contain.
What's Undetermined
Whether heating some types of plastic bottles could increase the leaching of harmful phthalates into the fluids they contain."

Climate change: obsession with plastic pollution distracts attention from bigger environmental challenges - "plastic pollution – or more accurately the response of governments and industry to addressing plastic pollution – provides a “convenient truth” that distracts from addressing the real environmental threats such as climate change... there are no conclusive studies on population level effects of plastic pollution. Studies on the toxicity effects, especially to humans are often overplayed. Research shows for example, that plastic is not as great a threat to oceans as climate change or over-fishing... environmental news has been dominated by the issues of plastic pollution. So it’s not surprising that so many people think ocean plastics are the most serious environmental threat to the planet. But this is not the case"
In general, the reality is that obsessing about minor or non-problems means we ignore real or major ones - which is a reason to oppress victim culture

Biodegradable plastic alternatives not necessarily better for Singapore, say experts - "You might think that switching from single-use plastics to biodegradable plastic alternatives is good for the environment but in Singapore, there are “no effective differences”, experts said. They often end up in the same place - the incinerator... Biodegradable plastic wastes make a difference to the environment only when they are buried in landfills... "it might even be more expensive to incinerate biodegradable plastics," said Assoc Prof Tong. He explained that this is because some biodegradable options take more resources to produce, which make them more expensive. The opinion squares with what Dr Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for the Environment and Water Resources said in Parliament in August - that a life-cycle assessment of single-use carrier bags and disposables by the National Environment Agency (NEA) found that substituting plastics with other types of single-use packaging materials is “not necessarily better for the environment”... "In addition, oxo-degradable bags could interfere with the recycling process when mixed with conventional plastics... Although biodegradable alternatives may not make a difference to the environment, several companies here have already made the switch... Despite the belief that they are better for the environment, experts said a larger carbon footprint could be created in producing them... Many biodegradable materials can only break down under specific circumstances, many of which cannot be provided by natural environments... the carbon footprint for cornware is high compared to regular plastic, and based on the NEA study, it is not clear whether it can be recycled. “Furthermore, cornware is made from corn starch extracted from kernels, which makes one wonder if the same resource could have been used for food instead of convenience”"
Feeling good and smug is priceless

Why glass jars aren’t necessarily better for the environment than plastic ones - The Washington Post - "Glass peanut butter jars are another example of the way “natural” living and “environmental” living diverge. Other examples include industrial pet foods, which are better for the environment than “natural” alternatives, and canned fruits and vegetables, which are, in some cases, easier on the Earth than fresh produce. As the small-scale Vermont Peanut Butter Co. writes on its Web site in defense of its plastic tubs: “Glass is almost 1 lb heavier, which increases shipping costs and requires more gas and oil to transport. If you practice recycling, the plastic jar is a greener way to go.” The science supports this position. A 2008 comparison of glass and plastic baby food jars, for example, found that the glass jars produce between a quarter and a third more greenhouse gases than plastic jars. In fact, the plastic jars bested the glass in almost every category: They released fewer carcinogens into the air, sent fewer pollutants into waterways and required less acreage. A year later, an assessment of soft drink containers also found plastic superior to glass. (The study was funded by a plastics manufacturer, but the company that conducted the review is independent and widely respected.) The results were broadly similar to the baby food study, with glass producing approximately four times as much greenhouse gas as plastic... peanut giant Planters cut packaging weight by 84 percent by switching from glass to plastic jars. That affects most aspects of an environmental assessment. Lighter products require fewer raw materials, which means they take less energy to make and usually produce a smaller carbon footprint. They take less energy to transport to the consumer, and it’s easier to dispose of them when the peanut butter, baby food or soda runs out."

Workers Party

Me: Lol Daniel Goh got expelled from wp

A: yep
WP is going into the shitter for a party that is selling themselves as the good guys

Me: I guess they'll just content themselves with the hardcore anti pap vote

B: i think they're moving further and further left

A: i thought they stopped after RK blew up
when RK was there they were running a steady drumbeat of race/religion issues
using her to spearhead fault lines in these issues
after she left they went quiet on woke
i think Pritam's strategy then was to capture minority vote and swing marginal seats, never mind the damage WP race baiting does to our social fabric
RK was to spearhead this
Daniel wasn't the only one to be expelled, earlier on both of RK's aides who testified at the COP also resigned soon after it ended

people are not stupid, they can read between the lines
those who cause problems for Pritam will go
they didn't lie for the party and cover up for Pritam, so out they had to go

Me: I was arguing with someone once who pretended not to understand that often when people resign they're really fired

A: Pritam did a lot of unwoke things to save his skin after he decided to let her burn
so hard to run on woke ticket

Me: Like putting down "minorities"?

A: like revealing details alleging she had mental illness... etc

actually it's weird, after RK saga some of my zoomer acquaintances became less woke
there will always be the crazies of course, but some of them seem to be asking if this wokeshit is what we really want for sg

B: it was a serious blow to the political woke movement in SG
It took the wind out of their sails

A: the saga has made me suspicious of WP and their grassroots activists
because I know they are not batting for Singapore but the party
if they are ever put in the position where they have to choose between public interest or party interest
they will sell us out so Pritam can retain a position he clearly doesn't deserve.

the right thing to do was for Pritam to resign along with RK, and hand leadership over to the next in command
one can argue if the other 2 needs to be punished for deceiving everyone but Pritam clearly had the full hand in this

they did the two cadre members dirty, and Daniel as well
Daniel did a lot of shit for the party in forming the policy framework that gave them more credibility in the eyes of the public
Loh Peiying served for over a decade and served under Pritam as well
this is how they are repaid

A: you get the sense PAP's interests are more aligned with Singapore's
currently anyway

can't say the same for PE2017
but in general, the broad strokes

WP... under Pritam it seems he is doing whatever is expedient for himself
pick at racial and religious fault lines to capture minority votes
lie repeatedly to the public and even his own party when he fucked up with Rak

he is helping to make a case for PAP supermajority, he has so little integrity I can't trust him not to veto stuff that will help Singaporeans if he stands to benefit from it

C: Did I ever tell u guys the story of how I used to help out at PS' meet the people session? Hahaha

It was 2011. I was an opposition supporter. Went for WP rally, felt strongly for their cause.

When the dust settled and WP won Aljunied, PS reached out to a lawyer friend of mine saying he needed lawyers at his MPS. I thought ok I'll go

So I did.

Very quickly realised it was a shitshow. PS (and I felt WP by extension) was more about optics than actual work.
They didn't bother to research and find out what G schemes are available. Or how to qualify residents under those schemes.

Their appeal letters are just:

My resident X came to see me. He has this [issue].

Please assist.

Wtf might as well don't write?

Then when the appeals invariably fail? The WP folks will say, "Yah see how the G and the civil service all bully us. Just because the letter is on WP letterhead."

It's like the North Koreans saying on the radio that, "The capitalist American devil's are bombing us again" whenever their shit infrastructure fails and they have blackouts.

But they genuinely believe it. They genuinely believe its not a lack of effort on their part.

I cleaned up their system. Tried to help them draft some template letters, with placeholders for info that needs to be obtained from residents. Not sure if they bothered to use it.

I left after about 6 months. Disillusioned

***

Daniel PS Goh:

"My retirement from politics is complete. I am still away on the work trip, and video-calling home, my older boy was excited about a registered mail and asked to open it, and then exclaimed with some amusement, Daddy you are expelled from the Workers’ Party! My first thought, good job understanding the letter! Well he did accompany me a lot on my WP work for a good part of his early childhood and was my bastion of moral support. Then, he took photos and sent them to me.

Since the Central Executive Committee requested nicely that I not disclose the correspondence due to information about the “inner workings” of the party, I won’t. Though ironically that is the very reason given for the expulsion. Such is the closed loop in the lack of accountability. With this closure, I can now focus on serving my country in my responsibilities in NUS. Gotta update my CV to say I was expelled from WP for calling out the leadership. Anyways, my dear friends, thanks for all the support and concern all these years, they were really important for me during this fruitful political journey! "

Yudhishthra Nathan:

"One evening a decade ago, in a void deck in Sengkang, as we were typing away appeal letters at Lee Li Lian’s Meet-the-People Session, Daniel PS Goh turned to me and asked me whether I’d be interested to come on board the Workers’ Party policy team to work on environmental issues. I asked him if he was sure that an 18 year-old who hadn’t set foot into university yet and hadn’t – to use a contemporary term – “adulted” yet could be of much help. He gave me a reassuring nod in a way perhaps a teacher would give a student.

Indeed, without Daniel’s almost academic approach to policy, the WP probably wouldn’t have had a robust manifesto in GE2015, relevant for modern times. Current WP MPs would do well to remember that it was this manifesto which formed the basis of the one they campaigned and got elected on in 2020.

What the public also probably doesn’t know is that Daniel Goh helped modernise much of the WP’s media outreach efforts through his leadership of the party’s media team. It was a team where it didn’t matter if you were a MP or the newest volunteer – anyone in the team could pitch ideas, could criticise the approach. With Daniel’s encouragement, we dared to try new things on social media to set us apart from the PAP. From day-to-day challenges to contentious Parliamentary debates, we were all on alert to respond. We learnt our limits as a team in GE2015, and spent years thereafter learning from our mistakes. By GE2020, although Daniel was out of the picture by then, those of us involved in the media effort knew how to get things up and running for the campaign thanks to our experience under his able leadership in the years before.

Daniel’s expulsion from the WP is but symptomatic of much bigger problems in the country’s largest Opposition party in Parliament today.

But on a more personal note, I look back fondly on our shared experiences since our days together in the Punggol East Constituency Committee all those years ago. Perhaps with sorrow, for the WP we joined - that rational, progressive force built up in many ways by Mr Low Thia Khiang - was not the WP we left."

Earlier:

Daniel Goh says Workers’ Party disciplinary committee formed to investigate his Facebook posts on Raeesah Khan

"In his Facebook post, Assoc Prof Goh also said that he had asked those questions as a “concerned citizen” and as a party member who believes that “public accountability and integrity are non-negotiable values demanded of our political leaders”.

In issues of grave public interest, he said that questions must be asked about the inner workings of any organisation.

“If asking those questions carry a price, I am willing to pay it, and count it inexpensive,” he wrote...

“I spent nearly 10 years working alongside many colleagues, building WP up as a credible political party, with the core values of integrity, service, and public accountability,” he said.

“In the same spirit of public accountability, I would ask that the party leaders make public the grounds of their decision and explain any disciplinary sanctions they would impose on me.”

He also said that he disagreed with seeing the Government or any political party as “political opponents”.

“As opposition politicians working to advance public interest in a field dominated by the ruling party, it is too easy to fall into a cycle of pride and irresponsibility driven by a persecution complex,” he wrote as he concluded his post.

“The Workers’ Party had placed men and women in Parliament because we believed in looking beyond ourselves and the party itself to build a better and more just Singapore. The party must serve Singapore responsibly.”

In April 2020, Assoc Prof Goh stepped down from the WP central executive committee (CEC), citing health reasons."

Links - 2nd June 2023 (2 - George Floyd Unrest)

Judge finds Ontario women were defamed in social media firestorm over alleged George Floyd post - "Shania Lavallee posted a video on Snapchat of her sister Justine play-fighting with Shania’s boyfriend, as they often did. But within days, a screenshot from the video that showed the boyfriend kneeling on Justine’s back was used to ignite a social media firestorm, and all hell broke loose for the Lavallee sisters. Shania and Justine were fired from their jobs — one at the Canada Border Services Agency, one at a local Boston Pizza — and had other job offers revoked, including Shania’s upcoming job as a teacher. Their home address, phone numbers and email addresses were posted online, leading to the family’s home being egged, their neighbour’s car getting seriously damaged (it was parked nearby), and harassing phone calls pouring in, causing the family to vacate the house for a week. The facts of the case, as laid out in an Ontario Superior Court defamation ruling, show what happens when a snippet on social media is taken from its context and turned into a full-blown mobbing by total strangers. The sisters were castigated as privileged white girls from an Ottawa suburb; in fact, they are both Inuit through their mother’s side, and are registered members of the Native Alliance of Quebec.  The online frenzy was initiated when one of Shania’s followers took a screenshot of the video and shared it to her own followers. That screenshot was then seen by another Ottawa woman, Solit Isak, who is Black and was deeply involved in Black Lives Matter activism on social media. Isak had never met the Lavallees and had not seen the original video, but believed the screenshot showed a racist act of mocking Floyd’s death... Based on the screenshot, Isak waged a social media campaign against the sisters, posting more than a hundred messages slamming them as racists and calling on people to message the sisters’ employers and get them fired. Her followers picked up the cause, as did a handful of media outlets... Shania’s boyfriend was fired from his construction job. Unsuccessful attempts were made to get the Lavallees’ mother, Colinda, fired from her job as an educational assistant at the Ottawa Catholic School Board... Justice Marc Smith found the sisters were defamed by Isak, and ordered Isak to pay $100,000 in general damages plus legal costs — though he acknowledged the sisters are unlikely to ever see this money given Isak is young and was unemployed at the time of her testimony... From the start, the Lavallees have always maintained the video had nothing to do with George Floyd. Isak said she was told that one of the Lavallees had jokingly said “police brutality!” in the video, but later acknowledged under examination that she didn’t know if this was actually true, as she hadn’t seen the video. The lawsuit found no evidence this phrase was said, and both sisters testified it wasn’t... Smith said Isak never made any effort to understand the facts behind the screenshot before posting about it. “She did not verify that this information was true,” Smith wrote. “She did not care at the time. She blindly embarked on a brutal and unempathetic campaign to destroy the lives of two young women, when the evidence clearly establishes that these two women are kind-hearted members of the community with outstanding character.” Smith did not order Isak to apologize, however, saying he doubted Isak would ever accept the sisters’ version of events and that an apology would only bring more abuse onto them.  Despite the court finding, the CBSA told the National Post on Wednesday that it would not be revisiting its decision to terminate Justine’s work with them...   “I believe Ms. Isak was free to view the act complained of as racist and that she ought to have been free to express it,” he said. “I disagree that a white judge should be telling Ms. Isak or any other Black person what is and is not racism.”"

Azealia Banks calls critics of shocking dead cat video 'racist' - "Azealia Banks has hit back at critics after posting a disturbing video of herself and a friend digging up her dead cat Lucifer's remains.  The 212 performer posted on Instagram Stories after she shared- and deleted - a disturbing set of clips on Tuesday in which she and another person exhumed the bagged remains of her pet cat who died three months ago. Insisting she hadn't gone on to eat the dead cat's remains, Azealia labelled her critics 'racist,' adding: 'this is very un-black lives matter of you all.'...  'Black people are naturally born SEERS, DIVINERS, WITCHES AND WIZARDS. we have REAL supernatural powers, and the sooner we ALL learn to cultivate them and access them, the sooner we can REALLY fix s***.  This is also not the first time Azealia has been criticized for her alleged treatment of animals. In December 2016 she shared a bizarre Instagram video showing herself cleaning out a cupboard after three years of apparently sacrificing chickens... Banks claimed she spent a weekend at Elon Musk's home while waiting to work with his girlfriend Grimes in a collaboration that never happened.    The controversial rapper claimed Musk was freaking out about having claimed in a tweet last week that he'd already secured funding to take Tesla private. Musk later insisted he's never met the rapper... Banks even suggested that the couple may have invited her to their home for 'some weird threesome sex s**t to begin with.'"

After KC police say they shot armed suspect Leonna Hale, false and inflammatory narratives spread - "After a woman fleeing arrest was shot by Kansas City police for allegedly pointing a loaded gun at officers, an online frenzy peddling false narratives reminiscent of Ferguson began whipping up national outrage.  Unconfirmed rumors and outright falsehoods that the woman was unarmed and cooperative were instantly amplified by hasty, ill-informed news and social media – much to the dubious credit of an eyewitness who made false accusations about what the woman did.  The witness claimed the woman had her hands up – which was untrue, similar to the lie that gave birth to the Ferguson riots of 2014 after the police shooting of Michael Brown. Brown was later proved to be the aggressor.  The eyewitness to the May 27 shooting of 26-year-old Leonna Hale, a convicted felon, also told The Kansas City Star that Hale “did not pull out a weapon” on police, even though that statement has been refuted by every other account of the incident – including a screenshot image from a police body cam showing the woman toting a gun.   That evidence wasn’t enough to quell the hysteria: Anti-police zealots, aided by unskeptical journalists, still claimed that police faked the image. They noted that the picture was grainy, though that’s the case with the vast majority of still-frame photos taken from body cam footage... After having joined with police advocates to cheer on KCPD’s addition of body cams the past few years, anti-police activists now say they don’t believe their own eyes.  “#LeonnaHale’s photo is altered,” one commenter, speaking for others, wrote on Twitter. “It is photoshopped. Wow. The government sanctioned thugs and killers will do anything to cover up their genocide of Black American men, women and children.”  “When the anti-cop activists get their teeth into a story like this, they’re not going to let it go because a lot of people will believe that the photo was photoshopped,” National Police Association spokesperson Sgt. Betsy Smith told The Heartlander. “You’ve got to stoke this hatred and distrust of law enforcement if you’re going to continue with the ‘defund the police, don’t trust police, police are bad’ narrative.”   Making the story even more sumptuous for the blame-the-police crowd was the allegation, soon proved untrue, that Hale was pregnant... Thesource.com nonetheless promoted both untruths – that Hale was unarmed and pregnant – in the headline and lead sentence of its story covering the incident. The outlet has yet to issue a correction... Mother Jones published an “update.”   The magazine’s “update,” which is in large measure a full rebuttal to its own, still online, article, appears below a standing advertisement that reads, “Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter.”  Toriano Porter, a columnist and member of the Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board, furthered the false narratives with a column in the city’s most-read news outlet. “Did Kansas City police shoot a pregnant woman? We need some substance, not cop speak”... the kindling of false stories have already spread their smoke.  The left-wing site Democracynow.org piled on, publishing an article June 1 headlined, “Missouri investigates Kansas City Police Shooting of Pregnant Black Woman Leonna Hale.” That outlet also has yet to issue a correction.  When a large local news outlet such as The Star pushes unsubstantiated and inflammatory rumors in the aftermath of such a volatile situation, it only makes a combustible situation more explosive, says Brad Lemon, president of KC’s Fraternal Order of Police. It also makes police officers’ jobs more difficult and dangerous. “I think one article in the Kansas City Star by Toriano Porter fed a narrative that went national in just hours,” Lemon told KCMO Talk Radio. “So I think it’s time for us to not only correct it, but to call out the people who are doing such a bad job in Kansas City of telling stories.”... "It’s clear all journalistic ethics were thrown out the window during this conversation.”"

order15 on Twitter - "Imagine believing the world is run by white supremacists when on your side is Every major corporation Every financial institution Every public educational institution Every celebrity Every major political party in the west and all mainstream media #BLMprotest #AntifaTerrorist"

Meme - Venn diagram: "looting and rioting Are the only way To overcome systematic racism and bring equality To Black Americans"
"white supremacists are the ones looting and rioting"
Intersection: "Honk Honk 2020"

'JUST BAD JUDGMENT': Two TV reporters suspended, boss fired after Afro-like wigs worn on air | Toronto Sun - "Sinclair Broadcast Group executives apologized for the “poor judgment” that led to the segment, fired the station’s longtime news director, Nick Genty, and indefinitely suspended Chris May and Barry Brandt, the anchor and meteorologist who wore the wigs... “It was a spoof on the ’70s that just went wrong.”"

Black Lives Matter Protests in Africa Shine a Light on Local Police Brutality
I never knew that white supremacy was such a problem in Africa

How Black Lives Matter protests may affect police violence and murders - "There’s long been a fierce debate about the effect of Black Lives Matter protests on the lethal use of force by police. A new study, one of the first to make a rigorous academic attempt to answer that question, found that the protests have had a notable impact on police killings. For every 4,000 people who participated in a Black Lives Matter protest between 2014 and 2019, police killed one less person...   From 2014 to 2019, Campbell tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM protests.  Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests... his research on homicides aligns with other evidence. Omar Wasow, a professor at Princeton University who has done seminal research on the effect of protests, told Vox that the results are “entirely plausible” and “not surprising,” considering existing protest research...   To try to further prove his findings are sound, Campbell also shows that before 2014 there were almost parallel trends of police homicides in both the places that would go on to see protests and places that wouldn’t. That suggests that what changed in 2014 and beyond — regarding both the reduction in police homicides and the increase in murder — is likely the effect of the BLM protests, not some other hidden variable... while randomized trials “in American and European police departments found that body worn camera’s reduced the number of complaints filed by local residents against the police ... they showed mixed effects on use of force by and against police officers.” In a major 2017 study conducted in Washington, DC, the researchers found that “the behavior of officers who wore cameras all the time was indistinguishable from the behavior of those who never wore cameras.”...   Deepak Premkumar, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, found in recently released research that police do reduce their efforts following officer-involved fatalities: Theft arrests fall by 7 percent, and for “quality of life crimes” like disorderly conduct or marijuana possession, arrests decline by up to 23 percent (weed possession alone declines by up to 33 percent)... Campbell observes a 5.5 percent decline in the share of property crimes cleared, which is consistent with police reducing their efforts immediately following the protests."
More evidence for the Ferguson effect
It is better that twenty people are murdered than that one person is shot by the police (probably with good cause)
The body camera studies suggest that many complaints against the police are frivolous (which is why when people know there is video evidence, complaints go down)

Hours after Maxine Waters called for more confrontation, Minnesota National Guard target of drive-by shooting - "Just hours after U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters called upon her followers to get more confrontational, a National Guard security team in Minneapolis was the target of a drive-by shooting. One soldier was treated at the hospital for lacerations from shards of broken glass and other members suffered minor injuries.  The attack happened after Waters called for Minnesotans to get more aggressive in their attacks against “racists”."

Mathematicians urge cutting ties with police - "Ten mathematicians from eight universities and one company wrote an open letter last week calling for mathematicians to cease collaborating with police departments. The letter also urges math scholars to publicly audit influential algorithms and to embed learning outcomes related to ethics in data science curriculums.   "It's a political belief, that collaborating with police in any capacity contributes to white supremacist violence and oppression," said Tarik Aougab, a math professor at Haverford College and one of the letter writers, speaking personally on his motivations. "Really any collaboration between mathematics, which is something that I love and that I find extremely beautiful, and the institution of policing shouldn't happen."  The letter has 1,500 verified signatures from mathematicians...   The letter writers take particular aim at "predictive policing," which involves using data and mathematics to predict where crime will happen...   Although the group has gotten some pushback for not having personally worked with predictive policing mathematics, Aougab said that for them, opposition to the technology isn't based on finding errors in equations or formulas.  "It's not about our mathematical knowledge," he said. "We're using our mathematical knowledge and connections to further a goal that we inherently believe in politically.""
From 2020. Way to ensure more minorities die
Ethics means making algorithmns less accurate to ensure "equity"
When the experts are proclaiming their political bias, are they still to be trusted unconditionally?

Meme - "The Liberal Hero!!!
Someone done this to one of George floydd memorial art pieces
*Floyd pointing gun at pregnant woman's belly*"

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "The three biggest actual problems in the Black community - some of which, certainly, are partly rooted in past racism - are fatherlessness (72% O-O-W birth rate), crime (52% of murders in recent years), and academic disengagement (940 SAT). "Police genocide" isn't in the top 50.
(2) Many of these 2021 problems ~did not exist when ethnic conflict was far worse, do not exist for Black and Asian immigrants today, and exist to the SAME extent for poor Latinos and whites. These, not a rich man's debate about "cultural theft," should be the national focus."

Meme - "We need to have a conversation about race"
"Yes, absolutely, let's talk-"
"No! You need to listen conversation to people of color and believe their lived experiences"
"Ok, so tell me-"
"No! You have no right to demand emotional labor from me!"
"Why aren't you speaking up? Silence is violence!"

Meme - "Keenan Anderson: Black Lives Matter founder's cousin dies after police arrest" "So he was involved in a hit and run road traffic incident, tried to get away jumping into a strangers car, resisted arrest, got tasered, died later in hospital from a cardiac arrest, and a toxicology report showed he had cocaine and cannabis in his system."

How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? - The New York Times - "A handful of cities post data online showing how their police departments spend their time. The share devoted to handling violent crime is very small, about 4 percent."

Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data - "Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out.  In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime... most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action... In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.” “This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.”  Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people... Studies have shown that the average police officer spent about one hour per week responding to crimes in progress, Friedman wrote.  Police spend most of their time on traffic violations and routine, minor issues, like noise complaints"
Yet if they spend more time solving crimes, people will also be upset

Cities Try to Turn the Tide on Police Traffic Stops - The New York Times - "Officials pushing the new rules cite data showing that minor stops not only disproportionately snare Black drivers but also do little to combat serious crime or improve public safety, and some escalate into avoidable violence, even killing officers or drivers... Police chiefs and criminologists say the rule changes amount to the first major reconsideration of traffic policing since the early 1980s, when rising crime rates, a shift toward more proactive policing and the advent of squad car computers for checking driver records helped make pretextual stops a cornerstone of enforcement... Some police unions and officers are fighting the new rules, arguing that pulling over cars to search them is an essential weapon against serious crime... In 2013, Harold Medlock, the now-retired police chief of Fayetteville, N.C., told his officers to quit stopping cars for expired registrations or equipment violations to focus on speeding, reckless driving and other more dangerous infractions... traffic fatalities, the police use of force and citizen complaints about the police all declined during that time — while predictions of an explosion in gun and drug crimes never came to pass."

America's Traffic Laws Give Police Way Too Much Power | Time - "The offenses that populate our traffic codes are so numerous and sprawling that the average driver can scarcely hope to spend a few minutes behind the wheel without committing an infraction. Simply hanging an air freshener from the rear-view mirror or failing to illuminate your license plate can get you pulled over and ticketed in some places. It’s only a matter a time before any driver falls prey to the minefield of traffic infractions that awaits them every time they fire up the engine. As a practical matter, this gives police nearly unbounded discretion to pull over any driver, any time they choose. And one way that they put this discretion to use is by engaging in what’s known as pretextual traffic stops. These are when police have a hunch that a driver has committed a crime (or perhaps the driver just looks “suspicious”), but not enough evidence to stop and interrogate them about it. So instead, police just pull the driver over for a petty traffic offense. Once the motorist is stopped, officers can start questioning her about the non-traffic crime that they’re really interested in. The traffic stop is just a pretext for their true motivation...  So, what’s wrong with pretextual stops? For starters, they don’t make us safer. Rigorous studies have shown that pretext stops turn up evidence of non-traffic crimes at abysmally low rates, and that they have no effect on crime rates. These same studies confirm that when we invite officers to be led by their gut instincts and other unchecked heuristics, it is people of color who are disproportionately affected. Racial disparities in who gets pulled over erode trust in the police, and deepen the perception that police use race as a proxy for criminality. There are roughly 20 million traffic stops every year, many for petty infractions. For drivers like Castile and Daunte Wright, these stops can quickly turn lethal. But the consequences need not be deadly to have lasting effects. Even citations for minor traffic offenses can lead to hefty fines, and for those unable to pay, late fees and even license suspensions. And this is to say nothing of the fright, humiliation, and other indignities that these stops visit upon the innocent."

GA Mom Says Rittenhouse's "Bad" Parents Are To Blame; She Is Then Killed By Her Own Son On Thanksgiving [VIDEO] - "A Georgia family is still in shock as on Thanksgiving, Marcia Chance, 42, was fatally stabbed by her own son. Arriving on the scene, police found Chance inside a Lawrenceville home, on the floor – lifeless."

Meme - "Introducing the Nobel "Mostly Peaceful" Prize Obey!
Nobel peace prize. Black Lives Matter movement nominated for Nobel peace prize. blaque_buffoonery: Never forget. They glorify demons and demonize Angels. It's called satanic inversion. If they say go right, you had better go left"

New Zealand's other pandemic – political correctness - "The humble Eskimo Pie, an ice-cream treat beloved of Kiwis for generations, is to be renamed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the globe. That it wasn’t an indigenous circumpolar person killed by a police officer in Minneapolis makes no difference. It’s now just not cool to call Inuit people – all 183,000 of them – Eskimos. Times change but it’s still a chilling move, if you’ll excuse the pun. No one of Inuit descent has complained about the brand name Eskimo Pies... Nevertheless, the maker of Eskimo Pies, Tip Top, has decided to drop the name so as to be ‘part of the solution on racial equality’. How changing the name of an ice-cream sold for decades in a country more than 12,000 kilometres from even the closest Inuit native is ‘part of the solution to racial equality’ remains unclear... New Zealand Herald reporter Siena Yates. Yates, an entertainment reporter, wrote an op-ed explaining why she’s decided to have weight-loss surgery.  We’re all ‘fatphobic’ apparently. And, as it turns out, racist and a bit sexist. That’s why Yates, a person of colour, is overweight and now in need of surgical intervention. Fatphobia is all related to anti-blackness, says Yates, quoting US academic and author Sabrina Strings who, in her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, said that during times of colonisation and slavery, ‘overfeeding and fatness were evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority’. Sure, journalism these days is a tough gig, but it’s not yet slavery as far as I know. And this diagnosis will likely come as a surprise to the huge numbers of non-slaves also suffering from obesity around the world."

The dangers unarmed individuals pose to police - "When police shoot an “unarmed” individual, the implication or outright accusation by media and activists is often that the deadly force was unjustified because the subject, without a weapon, was “defenseless” and thus could not have posed a threat.  Now a newly published study by two criminal justice researchers paints a far different picture. Their findings should be shared with PIOs and other LEOs responsible for communicating reality to the civilian world. After reviewing all reported cases across a two-year period, the pair found that:
“When police officers used deadly force during an encounter with an unarmed citizen, they were, in fact, facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to themselves or a third person” in nearly 90 percent of the situations.
The rest involved “accidental shootings or unintentional discharges” rather than deliberate targeting.
Unarmed subjects shot by intent included those who were attempting to disarm an officer, drown an officer, throw an officer from a bridge or rooftop, strangle an officer, gesturing as if armed with a real weapon, keeping hands concealed despite commands and charging toward an officer with apparent intent to assault.
“Being unarmed,” the study concludes, “does not mean ‘not dangerous.’”...   With “unarmed” connoting “not dangerous or threatening,” the offender is “often lauded as a martyr in the encounter,” as if he were “someone walking down the street minding their own business” when “summarily executed” by an “unreasonable, biased” cop. “Unfortunately,” the researchers note, “most onlookers believe that if a police officer is not punished for using force against an unarmed person, then they are not held accountable.”...   As a case in point, Shane and Swenson cite the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “where [the] widely held assumptions [that] Brown was unarmed and did not pose a threat to the officer could not be overcome...notwithstanding the factual evidence that Brown physically assaulted the officer.”  When the facts were presented, “a large segment of the population failed to modify” their unarmed-and-defenseless assumption. “Indeed, the objective evidence was rejected...as a product of a failed criminal justice system and illegitimate, biased investigators.”...  “The risk of dying from a police-citizen encounter is exceptionally low and an unjustified fatality is even lower.” It’s a fact that medical errors by doctors and nurses “kill many thousands more Americans annually than do the police.” Some contend that “the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.” Yet there is “not nearly the same level of public outcry” about that as about police shootings."
When the media profits by division
Liberals claim that police deaths are bad (even though they are few in number compared to civilians killing each other) because the police are supposed to protect people so this betrays social trust. Meanwhile, when it comes to medical errors...

Republican attacks on Maxine Waters prove the GOP is committed to a politics of white whining
Incredible spin. The double standards for Waters and Trump are transparent. But it's Salon after all