April 21, 2022

Gay Man Sues, Claiming Halloween Store Boss Used Homophobic Slurs and Threatened Him

LGBTQ+ advocacy group Fairness West Virginia filed a lawsuit on Trevor Anderson’s behalf after he says a manager at a Spirit Halloween store threatened him, using anti-gay slurs.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gay-man-sues-claiming-halloween-store-boss-used-homophobic-slurs-and-threatened-him



Trevor Anderson doesn’t recognize himself anymore. He hasn’t felt happiness in such a long time that he misses smiling. Anderson’s friends often tell him that they can see his pain radiating from his body, and he confesses over the phone that it hurts him to “know that they can see.” When he leaves his house, Anderson covers up with a mask and a baseball cap so no one can get a glimpse of his face. He doesn’t want anyone to recognize him and think to themselves, “Oh, that’s the guy I saw on the news.” “It’s ruining my life,” he tells The Daily Beast. “It’s ruining my friendships. It’s ruining my relationships. I’m not Trevor anymore. I can’t believe that one man has completely changed my life, to where I don’t even recognize my feelings and my mind.”

LGBTQ+ advocacy group Fairness West Virginia filed a lawsuit on Anderson’s behalf in March after he says a manager at a Spirit Halloween store in Charleston berated him with homophobic slurs and threatened him. The altercation began, Anderson says, in October when he was returning some items purchased the day before. Anderson had been assembling a costume for a Clue-themed Halloween party, and his inspiration was Mr. Green, portrayed as a closeted gay man in a 1985 film adaptation of the board game.

As a queer person himself, Anderson decided to liberate Mr. Green by giving him a coming out party fit for 2022. Aiming for a more gender-fluid interpretation of the character, he purchased a plaid mini-skirt and a belly shirt, among other random accessories. Some of the items didn’t fit, and he had hoped to either get his money back or receive store credit.

But after approaching the front counter, Anderson says he was confronted by a manager who refused to allow him to return the purchases. Identified in the lawsuit as Thelmon Penn, Anderson recognized the man immediately: Penn was one of several Spirit Halloween employees who he alleges followed him around the store the previous day while he decided what to buy. Anderson says he wondered at first whether the staffers thought he was stealing, before he realized that they just wanted to gawk at him.

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April 21, 2022

The Superhighway versus the World-Island

Stepping back to look at the big picture for America's foreign policy and global strategy

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-superhighway-versus-the-world



Since the start of the year, crisis and war in Ukraine have dominated the world’s attention – and understandably so. The stakes are undeniably high for the United States and its NATO allies in Europe, as well as other nations around the world who rely on Ukrainian grain to feed their own people. But it’s important to step back and look at the bigger strategic picture, to think in broader and more basic terms about the nature and scope of geopolitics in the modern world.

It’s a world defined by the transformations – technological, political, social, economic, informational – wrought by the Industrial Revolution. These realities have been with us since at least the late nineteenth century, when steamships and telegraphs began to bind the world together in ways previously unimagined. We can trace the origins and antecedents back even further to the Enlightenment era if we want, with the American and French Revolutions serving as convenient markers here. But for the sake convenience and simplicity, we can take the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century as the start of the modern era of geopolitics.

What’s more, the Industrial Revolution has been accompanied by an ongoing Information Revolution. Just as steamships and jet airliners drew people and nations closer and closer together physically, the telegraph, radio, communications satellites, and the internet drew us closer and closer together mentally. News of events that once took weeks if not months to travel from one place to another could now be transmitted over the wires, beamed across satellites, or uploaded to social media in mere days, hours, and seconds. We’re now able to see events half a world away in real time, with a level of fine-grained detail that frequently strips away context and clouds our judgment more than it enlightens or sharpens our thinking.

Above all, these deep and profound transformations began to draw North America, Europe, and the Pacific rim together and create a new and truly global strategic geography for the first time in human history. Whatever their other disagreements, strategists from Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman in the first half of the twentieth century to Zbigniew Brzezinski in the second all saw control of Eurasia – what Mackinder later christened the “world-island,” and consists roughly of modern Russia, China, and Central Asia – as the ultimate objective of geopolitics and national statecraft. But these assessments downplayed the very changes that occurred as these intellectuals formulated their ideas, though Spykman’s notion of a worldwide balance of power between “continental zones” represented an important advance in geopolitical thinking.

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April 21, 2022

The End of Airplane Masking Feels Momentous

Why is this mandate different from all other mandates?

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/cdc-mask-mandate-transportation-planes/629614/

https://archive.ph/2UgKw



If you commuted to work today on a bus, train, or metro system, you probably saw more mouths and noses than usual. On Monday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a CDC rule that mandated masks on all U.S. transportation networks, including in airports and on planes. Airline passengers who were mid-flight when the news broke cheered and ripped their masks off, discarding them in trash bags that unmasked flight attendants helpfully brought up and down the aisle.

https://twitter.com/AnnWyattLittle/status/1516206715838083081
https://twitter.com/rawsalerts/status/1516240296962633728
Over the past several months, vaccine requirements in restaurants, mask mandates in schools and retail spaces, and testing requirements for workers have all been reversed. But the end of airplane masking in particular has inspired a disproportionate reaction—of both extreme relief and utter outrage. One pilot reportedly called the end of the mandate “the most important announcement I’ve ever made.” An ER doctor wondered how “people who claim to love kids are totally cool” with babies dying from COVID. Why, exactly, is this rollback so different from all other rollbacks?

https://twitter.com/tmprowell/status/1516417858623967248
https://twitter.com/ben_dietd/status/1516191733645975554
https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1516193198204329984
In some ways, the masking rules on transportation should matter less for public health than other masking mandates, not more. Most people who don’t work in transportation probably spend relatively little time in train stations, buses, and Jetways, as compared with workplaces, where mask requirements are already scarce. Joseph Allen, who directs Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, told me that, in general, ventilation is also better on trains and airplanes than it is in restaurants, offices, and homes. (That’s true only as long as the HVAC system is actually turned on, which it tends not to be while a plane is on the tarmac.) On buses, ventilation depends on whether the driver has the vehicle in air-recirculation mode. “There’s been too much attention on the risk in airplanes for a long time,” Allen said. “Airplanes are not where super-spreading is happening.”

In the broadest sense, removing the transportation-network mandate is not likely to have an enormous, near-term effect on the trajectory of the pandemic. Even if mask compliance on subways and buses suddenly went down to, say, 10 percent in a major American city, any increase in cases or hospitalizations “would probably be small—small to the level of not being detectable by our current surveillance systems,” David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me.

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April 20, 2022

Russia tests nuclear-capable missile that Putin calls world's best

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-tests-new-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-2022-04-20/



LONDON, April 20 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it had conducted a first test launch of its Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, a new and long-awaited addition to its nuclear arsenal which President Vladimir Putin said would make Moscow's enemies stop and think.

Putin was shown on television being told by the military that the missile had been launched from Plesetsk in the country's northwest and hit targets in the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east. The Sarmat has been under development for years and so its test-launch is not a surprise for the West, but it comes at a moment of extreme geopolitical tension over the war in Ukraine.

"The new complex has the highest tactical and technical characteristics and is capable of overcoming all modern means of anti-missile defence. It has no analogues in the world and won't have for a long time to come," Putin said. "This truly unique weapon will strengthen the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure Russia's security from external threats and provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country."

Russia's nuclear forces will start taking delivery of the new missile "in the autumn of this year" once testing is complete, Tass quoted Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Roscosmos space agency, as saying on Wednesday. Russia's defence ministry said the Sarmat was fired from a silo launcher at 1512 Moscow time (1212 GMT) and the training warheads reached a test range on Kamchatka, nearly 6,000 km (3,700 miles) away in the Pacific.

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April 20, 2022

London mayor will not halt M&S demolition as "grounds did not exist" to intervene

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/04/13/m-and-s-demolition-london-mayor-decision/



London mayor Sadiq Khan will not intervene to stop the controversial demolition of the Marks and Spencer store on Oxford Street after a "thorough assessment" of its carbon footprint. Following a review, the mayor of London's office has determined that the demolition of the art deco Marks & Spencer (M&S) flagship store can proceed as it conforms to the London Plan, a framework that sets out standards for the development of the UK capital.

"After a thorough assessment of this proposal, including the total carbon footprint involved, it was determined that grounds did not exist to allow the mayor to intervene," said a spokesperson for the mayor of London. "The mayor can only intervene in council planning decisions where the proposed scheme does not conform with the London Plan."



City of Westminster will make final decision

The City of Westminster approved plans to replace the store with a building designed by UK studio Pilbrow & Partners last November. This decision was initially reviewed on 7 March by London mayor Khan, who chose not to intervene despite widespread condemnation of the plans for its embodied carbon and heritage impacts.

However, his office reviewed the decision again last week after it published updated planning guidance on whole-life cycle carbon assessments. The decision not to intervene means that the fate of the building will be determined by the City of Westminster. "[The decision] will therefore remain with Westminster City Council to determine the application," added the spokesperson for the mayor of London.

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April 20, 2022

AI threatens to increase inequality

The debate on AI has focused mainly on its potential effect on employment. The impact on equality should not however be missed.

https://socialeurope.eu/ai-threatens-to-increase-inequality



‘Human capital’—the economic value of our cognitive and noncognitive capacities—is our most important asset. According to recent World Bank estimates, the value of human capital globally amounts to 64 per cent of total capital, while in the advanced-country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development it is typically worth four to six times as much as physical capital. Human capital is decisive not only for welfare but also for growth, social mobility and income distribution.

Among these latter variables, the link between growth and inequality has been contentious in economic research. Three or four decades ago, the consensus in the profession was that inequality was beneficial for growth—indeed this was deemed so self-evident that empirical testing was unnecessary. When the matter was eventually investigated, the picture appeared mixed. Most studies however relied on the Gini coefficient—a spectrum between zero and one as inequality ranges overall from non-existent to infinite—as a measure of inequality. But this is a blunt instrument: two societies with the same Gini may be very different, so the lack of stable statistical correlations between growth and the coefficient should have been no surprise.

Among a smaller group of studies though, in which inequality was disaggregated into the income shares of different strata, the picture was clear: the larger the shares of the lower strata, the higher the growth rate. This was confirmed in a study of OECD countries. Nonetheless, the idea that equality is costly in terms of growth is still promoted in public debate, including by ostensibly qualified participants.

Important role

Human capital plays an important role here. As the OECD study showed, individual mobility is higher in more equal countries. The likelihood that young people whose parents have high- or medium-level education will choose higher education themselves is relatively independent of the degree of social inequality, but for children whose parents have only basic education, there is a strong negative link. High inequality is thus connected with low upward mobility.

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April 20, 2022

Putin's Unholy War - Putin, the Patriarch, and the corruption of Orthodox Christianity.

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/625f207c9cda680020dd1c82/russia-ukraine-invasion-religion-holy-war/



By Tom Nichols

For most of the Christian world, Easter is over. For Orthodox Christians, however, Easter week has just begun—and Russia, the largest Orthodox country in the world, is still relentlessly pursuing the invasion and barbaric destruction of its mostly Orthodox neighbour, Ukraine. In fact, the renewed Russian offensive in the Donbas, replete with day and night bombardment of mostly Orthodox, mostly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine, began just after Russians and Ukrainians observed Palm Sunday.

I note this because I, too, am an Orthodox Christian, and I am watching one nominally Orthodox nation try to slaughter another. In most of my comments on the Russian war against Ukraine, I’ve tried, as best I can, to provide you with dispassionate analysis. But I hope this week you’ll allow me a few personal observations as I head toward Easter. I realize that sometimes the cold equations of political analysis can seem far removed from our emotions, and so I thought I would share with you some of my own.

Although my career was mostly spent as a scholar and Russia expert, it is difficult for any area specialist to be completely objective about the countries they study, because our lives end up unavoidably connected to the subject of our profession.

Sometimes, it’s an adversarial relationship: In my youth, I was a Reaganite Cold Warrior, and I never hesitated to say so even in discussions with Soviet military officers. (One Soviet colonel told me that he appreciated that kind of honesty more than false good wishes, and we toasted—repeatedly—to our mutual candour.) In midcareer and middle age, however, I changed course, and I ardently hoped for the success of Russian democracy. I was a vocal advocate for better relations with the new Russia, including security cooperation and the reduction of nuclear arsenals. In my 40s, I became the adoptive father of a daughter born in Russia, a great joy that has produced an all-American kid who knows much about her own heritage—a birth right I would never take from her.

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April 20, 2022

With Joy and Fear, Americans Watch Sweeping Mask Rules Vanish

“Up to them,” President Biden told reporters in New Hampshire on Tuesday when he was asked whether people should continue to wear masks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/us/covid-masks-planes.html

https://archive.ph/6uokR



It began in midair. Shortly after a federal judge struck down mask requirements on planes, pilots got on intercoms to share the news, and some passengers tore off their masks with whoops and glee.

Jonathan Russell Biehl, a pilot for Delta, was halfway from Tampa to Minneapolis on Monday night when the announcement came. “The day I’ve been waiting for,” he called it. But on another flight bound for Los Angeles, Brooke Tansley, who was flying with two children too young to be vaccinated, said she felt scared as the passengers around her slipped off their masks. “All I could do was hope it’s going to be OK,” she said.

By Tuesday, more than a year after the country imposed strict masking requirements on airplanes and public transportation to combat the spread of the coronavirus, a judge’s determination that the federal government had overstepped its boundaries rippled across the country. The unexpected ruling by one judge in Florida instantly reshaped travel for millions while sharpening political divisions over the virus and sowing new confusion over where, exactly, Americans now need to mask up.

As much as ever, the country’s pandemic rules are a confounding patchwork. Mask requirements were toppled for many subways, buses and ride-share services. But the rules remained in place in several major cities. Subway riders in New York City were still required to wear facial coverings, but New Jersey Transit riders just across the Hudson River were allowed to take theirs off. In Philadelphia, where officials had reinstituted an indoor mask requirement this week, people were allowed to go maskless on trains and buses.

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April 20, 2022

What the hell is up with the Cleveland Plain Dealer? They endorsed Nina Turner again.

Nina Turner in the Democratic primary for the 11th Congressional District

https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2022/04/nina-turner-in-the-democratic-primary-for-the-11th-congressional-district.html

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We endorsed Nina Turner last year, and do so again this year. She has the passion, experience, toughness and out-of-the-box thinking to give Cleveland a powerful, socially committed and independent congressional voice, much in the spirit of the late U.S. Rep. Lou Stokes, who successfully fought for this majority minority congressional district. In backing 2009 Cuyahoga County corruption reforms, Turner stood up to the Democratic Party. In 2012, she successfully fought for the downstate GOP votes then-Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson needed to make his Cleveland school reform plan a reality..

Brown is congenial and pleasant, but often leaves the impression she’s speaking talking points, not convictions. And her determination to stay on as chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party during both the August election and this election shows a troubling lack of fair play. Brown has also drawn fire for seemingly taking credit for federal earmarks for her district that were requested well before she joined Congress.

The contours of the 11th District (and of the other 14 congressional districts in Ohio being mapped this year) are still being litigated, but Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has directed county boards of elections to use the state’s disputed congressional map for the May 3 primary. It’s possible the map won’t be finalized for this congressional election cycle at all, meaning new boundaries may have to wait for two years from now.

With some bumps along the way, and considering how recently she was elected, Brown has conducted herself reasonably well, shown relish for the job and a commitment to important Democratic issues like voting rights reform -- although she should step down as party chair. But a fighter is what Greater Cleveland needs in Congress, especially with the strong possibility of a GOP takeover of the House. And a principled and focused fighter is what Greater Cleveland will get in Nina Turner.

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April 19, 2022

CRO-MAGS 💀 - 2020 (Full EP Audio)

Label: Arising Empire – none
Format:
Box Set, EP, Limited Edition
Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, White
Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Red
Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Blue
Country: Europe
Released: 9 Apr 2021
Genre: Rock
Style: Hardcore