November 19, 2020

Chewbacca comforting this young lady who is fighting cancer is the Twitter content I needed today...

https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1329469910163009538

November 19, 2020

Dashcam video provides details of fatal law enforcement shooting of two Florida teens

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/18/us/cocoa-florida-brevard-deputies-shot-teens/index.html

Four days after a sheriff's deputy fatally shot two Black teenagers in the coastal Florida city of Cocoa, prompting a state investigation and outrage in a community demanding answers, authorities released a 56-second dashcam video of the deadly encounter. The video clip, posted on the Brevard County Sheriff's Facebook page Tuesday evening, shows deputies attempting to stop a car last Friday after what Sheriff Wayne Ivey said was an investigation into a possible stolen vehicle.

The footage shows two marked sheriff's cruisers following the car carrying the teenagers through a residential neighborhood as it pulls into a driveway before the driver backs out and faces two deputies with their guns drawn. A deputy is heard on the camera's audio commanding the driver at least eight times to stop. There is no audio for the first 36 seconds of the video.

In a statement released with the video, Ivey said the driver "turns and accelerates the vehicle" toward the deputy, who was "then forced to fire his service weapon in an attempt to stop the deadly threat of the car from crashing into him." Ivey said, "You can actually see the tires of the vehicle turn sharply as the car accelerates" toward the deputy, who was "in immediate danger of being struck by the vehicle." The sheriff said two firearms were recovered in the car. There were at least three occupants.

The teenagers who were killed were identified as Sincere Pierce, 18, and Angelo Crooms, 16, who the sheriff said was the driver.
Until Tuesday, authorities had provided few details about the deaths of the two young men -- which occurred amid a national reckoning over racial injustice in America, following the police killings of other Black men and women such as George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, among others.

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November 19, 2020

On His Way Out, Donald Trump Wants To Break The World

There could be ramifications that outlive the Biden administration and possibly a dozen subsequent administrations

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/on-his-way-out-donald-trump-wants



by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- The American system of justice has never indicted, arrested or prosecuted an ex-president before. Then again, we’ve never had a president as unforgivably corrupt as Donald Trump. Amazingly, however, Trump’s corruption led to the one and only time an ex-president has been investigated by the Department of Justice. Some time ago Trump, filled with piss, vinegar, and transfats, ordered his attorney general and personal fixer Bill Barr to investigate Barack Obama and now-president-elect Joe Biden for allegedly spying on Trump’s campaign. They didn’t spy on the campaign, but facts don’t matter anymore to 73 million Americans who still inexplicably support the outgoing regime. As far as we know, Barr and U.S. attorney John Durham are still investigating the Obama administration -- to this day. The precedent that once stood for 240 years ended with Trump. As we’ve all witnessed, however, Trump always makes things worse for Trump. So, unless he somehow scams his way to a pardon before the inauguration, it’ll be entirely in keeping with the new precedent for the incoming Justice Department to investigate Trump for his myriad crimes. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to prison, but it’ll surely indicate that the rule of law isn’t dead. Not yet.

And during the last two weeks alone, Trump’s given the proper authorities plenty of material to work with. In addition to all the obstruction of justice charges in the Mueller report, in addition to his confessed quid-pro-quo with Ukraine in an attempt to cheat in the election, and on down the line, Trump is currently attempting to overrule democracy itself by engaging in both legal yet frivolous lawsuits as well as outright treasonous attacks on the democratic process itself. And this, perhaps above all else, can’t be allowed to go unpunished. At some point, Trump ordered his loyalists in various cabinet-level agencies to do whatever’s necessary to disrupt the transition, potentially crippling the incoming Joe Biden administration before the new president is even sworn in. First, we learned this week that Trump ordered Health and Human Services to stonewall the Biden team -- in the midst of a worsening pandemic. CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported: Some Health and Human Services staffers instructed today that if anyone from President-elect Joe Biden's team contacts them, they are not to communicate with them and are to alert Deputy Surgeon General Rear Admiral Erica Schwartz of the communication per an administration official.

https://twitter.com/KristenhCNN/status/1329126563514904578

How many people will die for Trump’s tyrannical hissy fit? It’s too early to tell but a solid guess would be “many.” Without official government information about the pandemic, Biden and his newly assembled team of COVID experts are effectively operating with one hand tied behind their backs. It gets worse. CNN also reported Wednesday that Trump and his henchmen are planning to intentionally sabotage Biden on foreign policy. A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out. In other words, stir up total chaos in the world for no other reason but to soothe Trump’s fragile, deranged, malevolent, deformed ego. Depending on where the fires are -- probably several in the Middle East alone, possibly one gigantic one in Iran -- there could be ramifications that outlive the Biden administration and possibly a dozen subsequent administrations. If he does it, the blowback will be immense, catastrophic, and unstoppable -- terrorist attacks, retaliation against overseas allies, or worse. Long before he lost the election, many of us predicted Trump’s temper tantrum on the way out. He’s that kid who wings the board game across the room when he’s losing. He’s that screaming German kid in that viral video. Only instead of breaking toys and computers, Donald Trump is breaking the world.



Oh, and there’s still more. As I predicted back in July, Trump continues to sue various swing states to get vote-by-mail ballots thrown out. He hasn’t won any of these lawsuits, mainly because they’re laughably incompetent. Surprise, surprise. Now, he’s apparently moving on to more extreme legal measures. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Trump has sued Nevada’s electors -- the actual officials who cast their votes in the Electoral College on December 14. The latest challenge from the Trump campaign does not name state or Clark County election officials as defendants. Instead, it names the electors who are set to cast their Electoral College votes for Biden next month after the election gave the former vice president a 33,596 -vote victory in the state. One of Nevada’s electors tweeted: I have just been informed that the Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit against me as an elector for the state of Nevada. Me a homeless veteran who is nonetheless continuing to do her duty to the American people. Enough is enough. It doesn’t matter whether charges stem from election interference or whether this generates more public outcry for prosecuting Trump and his regime. Either way, there has to be accountability beyond simply losing the election -- beyond being a one-termer -- beyond losing the popular vote twice. As we learned before World War II and during the Cold War, appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive. Walking away from Trump and his crimes will only guarantee that the next Trump will be even worse.

https://twitter.com/BrieforNevada/status/1328853651088048128

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November 19, 2020

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed: A victory for salmon, two tribes and the Klamath River

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-11-17/klamath-river-basin-dams-pacificorps-gavin-newsom-yurok-karuk-salmon-warren-buffett



After an uphill two-decade-long struggle in one of the nation’s most contentious watersheds, campaigners in the Klamath River Basin moved to the brink of a momentous, well-deserved victory Tuesday. PacifiCorp, a Pacific Northwest utility that owns four environmentally and culturally disastrous dams that span the Klamath, announced via Zoom and YouTube that it had withdrawn its last objection to their demolition. All that’s needed now is an expected final approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the massive dam removal project could be carried out in 2023.

During the livestream announcement, Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Kate Brown of Oregon, the chairmen of two Klamath Basin tribes and an executive representing PacifiCorp’s corporate owners took a public victory lap, unveiling an agreement that squarely meets objections raised by FERC to an earlier plan. At the turn of this century, when leaders of the Yurok and Karuk tribes launched the campaign to take down the dams, the goal was a long shot. They mounted a grass-roots movement, hired capable scientists and lawyers, and built relationships with legislators, government agency officials and even some farmers and ranchers, their putative foes. Despite major setbacks, they didn’t give up.

“Hard projects like this never happen just because they’re the right thing to do,” Brian Johnson, California director of Trout Unlimited, which worked with the tribes, told me. “They happen when a group of people decides that failure isn’t an option.” At first, PacifiCorp refused to consider dam removal at all, then in 2010 agreed to the idea but balked at accepting liability for any unbudgeted costs that might arise from demolition. When FERC insisted in July that the plan couldn’t proceed unless PacifiCorp accepted a share of potential liability, the deal nearly broke down. Newsom and Brown came to the rescue, authorizing their two states to take on what is projected to be a minimal risk of unbudgeted costs.

The Klamath Basin, which extends diagonally from the Oregon Cascades to the far Northern California coast, once supported the country’s third-largest salmon fishery. But beginning a couple of centuries ago, the river was devastated by mining, beaver trapping, logging, farming and ranching; the dams delivered the crowning blow. Now all the Klamath’s salmonid species are either extinct or in severe decline, the lower river is plagued with the parasite Ceratonova Shasta, which ravages fish, and each summer the reservoirs behind the dams contain stews of highly toxic blue-green algae. Solutions to all of these issues start with dam removal. By itself, the dams’ absence will open up 420 miles of river and stream spawning habitat to salmon, whose numbers and biological diversity are expected to grow substantially as a result. C. Shasta and blue-green algae should both largely disappear.

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November 18, 2020

Arkansas Wants to Give You $10,000 and a Bike to Relocate There

The state is hoping to lure new residents with the incentives.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/move-to-arkansas-new-residents-get-paid-10000-dollars



The pandemic has pushed a lot of people to consider giving up their dreams of big city life in favor of relatively open spaces. After all, being stuck inside isn’t half bad when you’ve got room to roam. Most people are likely considering suburbs near the places they currently live, but it looks like it may be worth thinking outside the box. Take Arkansas, for example. Unless you’re from there and you really love it, or you’ve been there and fell in love, you’ve probably never considered packing up to start a life there.

The Natural State, known for being the capital of things like quartz, spinach, folk music, and archery bow production apparently, has its perks. For one, space, but another major perk is the state is willing to shell out some serious cash if you make the move. Last year, Tulsa, Oklahoma offered major money for remote workers who considered moving there. Topeka, Kansas followed suit with a similar initiative earlier this year. Now, Arkansas is offering up $10,000 and a mountain bike to anyone who packs up their small apartment and heads for Northwest Arkansas, according to a report by Travel + Leisure. The recently announced Life Works Here initiative hopes to attract new residents to the area by offering a cash incentive.

As for the bike, it appears to be a ploy to get said new residents to check out the many paved and mountain biking trails Arkansas has to offer. If you’re not much of a biker, though, you can opt instead for an annual membership to one of several local cultural institutions, like the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Whatever floats your boat. The area is ranked one of the best places to live in the United States. The cost of living is low, there’s lots to do outside, there are tons of art-related activities and institutions, and it’s got a per-capita income 14% higher than the national average. Consider it a well-kept secret.

“Northwest Arkansas has one of the fastest growing economies in the country, but we must increase our STEAM and entrepreneurial talent to ensure economic growth in the future,” said Nelson Peacock, president and CEO of the Northwest Arkansas Council, per the report. There are currently more than 10,000 job openings in Northwest Arkansas and not enough people to fill the available STEAM jobs, Peacock noted. Hence the effort to draw new people to the area. If you’re interested in more information or submitting an application, head over to this site.

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November 18, 2020

these 2 fuckers need to be clapped in irons for sedition

make extreme examples of them or more and more will follow as surely as night follows day

November 17, 2020

Klarna, a Swedish payments unicorn, wants to conquer America

The “buy now, pay later” firm has grown rapidly

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/11/12/klarna-a-swedish-payments-unicorn-wants-to-conquer-america



As a child, when you see your parents struggling, it creates a drive,” says Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive and co-founder of Klarna, an online-payment-processing firm. His family moved to Sweden from Poland in 1981, the year he was born; his university-educated father was unemployed for long spells or just got by behind the wheel of a cab. The experience nurtured a strong ambition “to fix the economy for the family”. Today, just shy of 40, Mr Siemiatkowksi is at the helm of one of Europe’s biggest fintech firms. A funding round in September raised $650m and valued Klarna at $10.65bn. Investors include Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm; Visa, a credit-card firm; and Snoop Dogg, a rapper who performs as “Smoooth Dogg” in a pepto-pink ad for the payments firm. Having gained a foothold in Europe, Klarna has its sights set on America.

Klarna is one of several “buy now, pay later” (bnpl) services that have grown rapidly in recent years. Its attraction, for both online retailers and their customers, is simplicity. Instead of entering their card details at checkout, shoppers sign up to Klarna’s app with their email and delivery address, and leave payment to be made in 14 or 30 days. Klarna pays the retailer in the meantime, bearing the risk that shoppers do not pay—something few other fintechs do—while charging the merchant a fee. Customers are recognised when they use the app again, without needing to re-enter their details. Algorithms use publicly available credit information and details of the size, type and timing of the purchase to calculate the chance of fraud, and offer extended-payment plans, for a charge.

The ease of the process hugely increases the “conversion” rate—the share of customers who go ahead and buy an item after putting it into their virtual basket. That is why Klarna attracts retailers like bees to a honeypot. It has signed up 200,000 sellers in 17 countries and captured 10% of the e-commerce market in northern Europe. Etsy, an online marketplace for arts-and-crafts items, signed up on October 26th. Last year Klarna’s revenue jumped by almost one-third to Skr7.2bn ($840m) as the value of wares sold through it rose by 32%. Merchant fees are the main source of its income; it also runs checkout infrastructure for some retailers. Late fees from customers make a smaller contribution.

It was Klarna’s success in Britain—where it has almost 10m customers and this year has opened some 95,000 accounts a week—that made it reckon that it could conquer America, where online-payments firms have typically struggled to gain market share. It began 2019 with its splashy “Smoooth Dogg” campaign and poured funds into its operations in New York, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, ahead of its launch in America. The firm now has 9m customers there, and will probably go public there in the not-too-distant future. It is expanding in other ways, too. Back in Europe, it obtained a banking licence in 2017, and has launched new products in some countries, such as a credit card. It has opened a tech hub in Berlin’s trendy Mitte neighbourhood that employs 500. This helps explain why last year Klarna ran its first loss since it was set up in 2005. “Profitability is for later,” says Mr Siemiatkowski. Demand is certainly on Klarna’s side. According to Kaleido Intelligence, a research firm, bnpl will grow to $680bn in transaction value in 2025 worldwide, from $353bn in 2019, driven by young, credit-hungry shoppers. Covid-19 has only accelerated the rise in online shopping.

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November 17, 2020

Kylie Minogue - Slow (MAJENTA Remix)

Released by:
Red Stars Illegalism
Release date:
24 May 2015

Red Stars Records | ВКонтакте

https://vk.com/redstarsrecords

Based off

Kylie ?– Slow
Genre:
Electronic, Pop
Style:
Electro, Synth-pop
Year:
2003

November 17, 2020

More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can't go on like this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/third-surge-breaking-healthcare-workers/617091/



On Saturday morning, Megan Ranney was about to put on her scrubs when she heard that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. That day, she treated people with COVID-19 while street parties erupted around the country. She was still in the ER in the late evening when Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris made their victory speeches. These days, her shifts at Rhode Island Hospital are long, and they “are not going to change in the next 73 days,” before Biden becomes president, she told me on Monday. Every time Ranney returns to the hospital, there are more COVID-19 patients. In the months since March, many Americans have habituated to the horrors of the pandemic. They process the election’s ramifications. They plan for the holidays. But health-care workers do not have the luxury of looking away: They’re facing a third pandemic surge that is bigger and broader than the previous two. In the U.S., states now report more people in the hospital with COVID-19 than at any other point this year—and 40 percent more than just two weeks ago.

Emergency rooms are starting to fill again with COVID-19 patients. Utah, where Nathan Hatton is a pulmonary specialist at the University of Utah Hospital, is currently reporting 2,500 confirmed cases a day, roughly four times its summer peak. Hatton says that his intensive-care unit is housing twice as many patients as it normally does. His shifts usually last 12 to 24 hours, but can stretch to 36. “There are times I’ll come in in the morning, see patients, work that night, work all the next day, and then go home,” he told me. I asked him how many such shifts he has had to do. “Too many,” he said. Hospitals have put their pandemic plans into action, adding more beds and creating makeshift COVID-19 wards. But in the hardest-hit areas, there are simply not enough doctors, nurses, and other specialists to staff those beds. Some health-care workers told me that COVID-19 patients are the sickest people they’ve ever cared for: They require twice as much attention as a typical intensive-care-unit patient, for three times the normal length of stay. “It was doable over the summer, but now it’s just too much,” says Whitney Neville, a nurse based in Iowa. “Last Monday we had 25 patients waiting in the emergency department. They had been admitted but there was no one to take care of them.” I asked her how much slack the system has left. “There is none,” she said.



The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question.” In the imminent future, patients will start to die because there simply aren’t enough people to care for them. Doctors and nurses will burn out. The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers—and they are exhausted.

The struggles of the first two COVID-19 surges in the United States helped hospitals steel themselves for the third. Hardened by the crucible of March and April, New York City built up its ability to spot burgeoning hot spots, trace contacts, and offer places where infected people can isolate. “We’re seeing red flags but we’ve prepared ourselves,” says Syra Madad from NYC Health + Hospitals. Experienced health-care workers are less fearful than they were earlier this year. “We’ve been through this before and we know what we have to do,” says Uché Blackstock, an emergency physician who works in Brooklyn. And with the new generation of rapid tests, Blackstock says she can now tell patients if they have the coronavirus within minutes—a huge improvement over the spring, when tests were scarce and slow. Smaller clinics, nursing homes, and long-term-care facilities are still struggling to provide personal protective equipment, including gloves and masks. “About a third are completely out of at least one type of PPE” despite having COVID-19 cases, says Esther Choo, a physician at Oregon Health and Science University and a founder of Get Us PPE. But larger hospitals are doing better, having built up stockpiles and backup plans in case supply chains become strained again. “The hospital is probably the safest place to work in Iowa, because we actually have PPE,” Perencevich said.

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November 17, 2020

Harry Styles wore a dress on the cover of Vogue - and US rightwingers lost it

The magazine made history by featuring the musician as its first-ever male cover star – but prominent conservatives voiced disapproval over what he was wearing

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/nov/16/harry-styles-vogue-cover-dress



On Friday, storied fashion publication US Vogue made history by featuring British pop singer (and former One Direction heartthrob) Harry Styles as its first-ever male cover star. The cover immediately sparked passionate conversations around masculinity and gendered dressing: Styles dons a voluminous periwinkle blue gown paired with a black tuxedo jacket (both designed by Gucci). The image felt representative of a growing exploration of gender-fluidity and non-binary dressing taking place, popular among the very millennial and Gen-Z shoppers Vogue is targeted towards. However, prominent conservatives – from Candice Owens to Ben Shapiro – voiced disapproval of Styles wearing dresses. Owens wrote on her Twitter page Friday evening: “Bring back manly men.”

https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1327691891303976961

https://twitter.com/voguemagazine/status/1327240359898992646

“There is no society that can survive without strong men,” Owens, a rightwing media powerhouse, said. “The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack.” [sic] Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, appeared to agree with Owens’ attacks. He shared her tweet and added: “Anyone who pretends this is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you like a full-on idiot.”

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1328343297367138304

These comments fit in with how contested and divisive debates around gender expression have become in the US, even when a massively popular musician such as Styles, who identifies as cisgender, engages in progressive developments. This is not the first time Styles has played around with fashion in bold ways. The singer wore a black dress by the Japanese brand Commes Des Garçons on the cover of the Guardian Weekend and defended the queer aesthetics of his visual work. “I’m not just sprinkling in sexual ambiguity to be interesting,” he said. “I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual, but because I think it looks cool.”

Fellow Hollywood stars were quick to come to Styles’ defence. Olivia Wilde, who is currently directing a Styles-led film, replied to Owens’ tweets with: “You’re pathetic.” And The Good Place actress Jameela Jamil tweeted out in Styles’ defence: “Manly is whatever you want it to be.” Meanwhile, others have argued Styles cover may not be enough for increasing acceptance towards non-binary expression and identities. “Harry Styles’ Vogue cover may be historic, but it isn’t radical,” the Daily Beast declared in a headline. If this is the furore a white, cis man wearing a dress on Vogue breeds, it is hard to imagine what a model from a marginalized background – say, a trans woman of colour (which Vogue has yet to feature on its cover) – would face.

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