@raphjd Imagine if you also got outraged at the inequitable policies that led to 23% of last year's layoffs (layoffs, not for-cause firings) being minority employees, despite minorities only making up 18% of the school's workforce.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-governor-desantis-defends-dont-say-gay-bill/](link url)

Apparently, Florida's conservative government believe that our LGBT+ community needs to be erased in order to comfort shitty parents' ignorance.

Interestingly, I've read the Bill and it doesn't actually limit speech to LGBT+ discussions. I seriously hope that some LGBT+ parents sue the shit out of some Florida school systems for mentioning or showing depictions of heterosexual relationships. Teaching about man/woman, husband/wife, or mommy/daddy relationships also violates the Bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/nyregion/trump-fraud-lawsuit-ny.html

Trump reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. It will be interesting to see if the US Attorneys investigate for violations of Federal law based on the evidence transmitted to them by the NY AG's office.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-life-herschel-walker-paid-for-girlfriends-abortion-georgia-senate

As the Bible says, "Do as I say, not as I do!" Herschel Walker, running for Senator in Georgia, believes that there should be no exceptions to the ban on abortions, not even rape or incest... Except when it's his girlfriend that's pregnant! In that case, he's perfectly willing to fund her getting her inside's scraped like a fisherman's knuckles.

What an absolute hypocrite! This man is such a moron. It will be a sad day for Georgia, and the country, if he wins this election.

LINK: Trump Wanted I.R.S. Investigations of Foes, Top Aide Says

The reason Trump is convinced that the multiple tax cases and DOJ investigations against him are nothing more than political hit jobs and witch hunts designed to make him look bad, is because that's what he himself did while in office.

"While in office, President Donald J. Trump repeatedly told John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, that he wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service...
...
Mr. Kelly said that along with Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe, Mr. Trump discussed using the I.R.S. and the Justice Department to investigate the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan; Hillary Clinton; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Mr. Trump; Peter Strzok, the lead F.B.I. agent on the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. official who exchanged text messages with Mr. Strzok that were critical of Mr. Trump."

I guess Shakespeare was right. The lady doth protest too much, indeed.

@blablarg18 said in Douglass Mackey case: USA criminalizes memes. Literally.:

First, you are literally a conspiracy theorist.

No, he was charged with criminal Conspiracy Against Rights. Wow, you are a monumental dumbass! He was literally charged with, and convicted of, C-O-N-S-P-I-R-A-C-Y!

I don't have to be a conspiracy theorist--he was convicted of it. No theory necessary.

"Cadre"? Really? OK what about them? Why aren't they prosecuted?

The criminal complaint listed four co-conspirators, but only by their Twitter ID# (long alpha-numerical string).

So far, journalists have been able to determine that co-conspirator #1 was an alt-right, neo-Nazi and QAnon botmaster only known by his Internet handle "Microchip."

Co-conspirator #2 is Anthime "Baked Alaska" Gionet; a white nationalist arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan.6 and known for having participated in the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA.

Co-conspirator #3 is a pro-Trump far-right activist and propogandist who goes by the Internet handle "Nia."

I don't think the fourth co-conspirator has been identified yet.

The fact that Mackey was successfully prosecuted for Conspiracy likely means that the co-conspirators will be prosecuted as well, since their trials will be easier after the first conviction.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that Gionet would be the next to be prosecuted because they know their identity. Who Microchip and Nia are offline may not yet be known by the government. I believe the government only knew who Mackey was because his real name was outed in a Gab post by white nationalist GOP candidate Paul Nehlen after they had a disagreement.

Prosecution could not show EVEN ONE SINGLE voter whose legit ballot had been affected. Not one.

First, he wasn't charged with altering or tampering with ballots; he was charged with Conspiracy Against Rights, meaning they were alleging his misinformation interfered with people exercising their right to vote. So, why would the prosecution need to present altered or tampered with ballots?

Second, the government could charge Mackey with Conspiracy even if his whole group had failed to achieve any results. Conspiracy does not require a completed or successful other crime in order to be prosecuted. You are being prosecuted for conspiring to commit the other criminal act, not the other criminal act itself. The actus reus that constitutes the crime is the conspiring with others.

Sorry @blablarg18 but Tucker Carlson can try to spin this (and you can continue to mindlessly parrot him) all he wants, but Carlson's just wrong on this one, as he is about a great many things.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/22/desantis-slavery-curriculum/

Apparently, Florida wants to indoctrinate its children into believing that human chattel slavery was a good thing.

Saying slavery helped blacks by teaching them trade skills is like saying Auschwitz helped Jews hit their target weights. It's an absurd and grossly inappropriate misrepresentation of the atrocity.

If you haven't watched The Last of Us on HBO yet, then you should. It is one of the best video game adaptations ever done. It's a post-apocalyptic world wherein a fungus has taken over the bodies of billions of humans and turned them into "zombies."

Episode 3 is a bottle episode about a gay couple who grow old with each other in the post-apocalypse world.

[https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/us/florida-flagler-county-schools-all-boys-arent-blue-book/index.html](link url)

"A school board member in Florida wants someone to be criminally prosecuted for allowing a young-adult memoir for Black queer boys on school library shelves." I wish we were past this in America, but I guess we're not.

@tj16

Unfortunately, gays are not immune to the toxic paradigm sold by people like Rush Limbaugh. Basically, you take anything in the world that's happening, reduce it to a gross oversimplification couched in emotive terms, and let the audience's outrage convince them of the rightness of your argument. Once you've got them agreeing or buying in on some portion of what you're selling, their innate cognitive dissonance will keep them doing the bulk of the work glossing over or ignoring the patent holes in your worldview.

It's how conservative radio, QAnon, and even some groups on the Left work and perpetuate themselves.

You do realize that the vast majority of those countries use fluoridated salt programs, fluoridated milk programs, or have naturally occurring fluoride levels in their water that renders supplementation unnecessary? Oh wait, you're stupid, so of course you didn't.

@lololulu19 said in Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Democrats control the weather.:

Apparently you never heard of HAARP

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has been called a missile-defense tool and a mind-control device. The truth is a bit less ominous

Ask a HAARP scientist about allegations like this, and he’ll either laugh or lose his temper. “This is completely uninformed,” says Umran Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University whose research group works with HAARP. “There’s absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the Earth’s [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it’s minuscule compared with the power of a lightning flash—and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP’s intensity is very small.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘They Can Control The Weather,’ Promoting Conspiracy About Hurricane Helene

She is a national embarrassment!

@blablarg18 said in USSA watch: Libs openly discuss plans to "torch the Constitution", crush First Amendment:

SCOTUS established idea in 1919 case....... -then overturned it- in 1969 case.

Wow, you are dumb and ignorant.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater was used, in dicta (i.e., not part of the holding of the case) by Justice Holmes in Schenck v, US (1919) as a hyperbolic example of the kinds of speech that the government could punish someone for because it represented incitement to immediate danger/harm.

It wasn't "overturned" (since the concept of 'overturning dicta' is nonsensical) by Brandenburg v. OH. In fact, the Brandenburg court pretty much agreed with that example, since the holding of Brandenburg was that the government's power to restrict freedom of speech was restricted to banning advocacy which is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

The quintessential example of such speech that the government can prohibit is still regarded to be shouting fire in a crowded theater. That's even what you're taught in law school. it is the classic example.

And you should be aware that the government still punishes people for such things. Wasn't it just last year that they punished a Democrat representative for misdemeanor for pulling the fire alarm in Congress to delay a vote?

@blablarg18 said in FBI says: Iran sent stolen material from Trump campaign to Biden’s camp (now Kamabla):

No, Trump didn't use hacked material in 2016. (only Wikileaks did)

From my link:

Trump — even though he had in August been told by U.S. intelligence officials that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was behind the Clinton campaign hack — began citing the stolen material continuously for the rest of his campaign, starting on Oct. 10 and right through Election Day. At rallies around the country that month, he proclaimed, “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks,” and “This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable! You’ve got to read it!”

The hack-and-release operation was the biggest piece of the Russian influence campaign designed to put Trump in the White House, according to investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In total, Trump referred to WikiLeaks by name 137 times in public appearances and media interviews between Oct. 10 and Election Day, according to PolitiFact. There were another two dozen times when he referred to the emails but did not name the entity.

Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The Women Killed by the Dobbs Decision

She already had a 6-year-old son, and decided that she could not raise two more children. But she couldn’t get a termination in her home state. And so she scheduled a surgical abortion in North Carolina, took a day off work, hired a babysitter, borrowed a relative’s car on a false pretext, and got up at 4 a.m. to drive four hours with a friend to the clinic. But they hit traffic, and Thurman missed her appointment. The clinic could not give her another time slot, because so many women from out of state, also facing tough new laws, were booked on that day.

So Thurman was offered abortion pills instead. These are widely used and overwhelmingly safe and effective for early pregnancies. In less than 5 percent of cases, though, women need another dose, or a procedure called a dilation and curettage (D&C), to empty the uterus completely. In countries and states where abortion is legal, this is a simple and routine procedure that carries little risk.

But not in Georgia. Back home, Thurman’s bleeding would not stop. She went to the hospital at 6:51 p.m. on August 18, and medical examinations showed all the classic signs that her abortion was incomplete, and that the tissue remaining inside her was poisoning her blood. But doctors did not give her a D&C. Nor did they do so the next morning, as her condition continued to worsen. When she was finally taken to the operating theater, at 2 p.m., her condition was so bad that doctors started to remove her bowel and uterus.

But it was too late. Thurman’s heart stopped on the operating table.

LINK: Trump Falsely Accusing Harris Of Using Hacked Material – Which Is Exactly What He Did In 2016

Pro-Trump Media Firm Abruptly Folds After Russia Scheme Exposed

The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media, which has already wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website. Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon told Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

Looks like everyone, left or right, is treating them as radioactive at the moment.

@blablarg18 said in In name of "trans", Paris Olympics have Man beat up Woman on world TV:

Hey genius - In 2020 no one knew.
2023, Khelif got cheek swab.
If it has a Y, it's a guy.

She received the same gender testing in the previous years that she did in 2022 and 2023. Also, the IBA won't say which tests it performed on Khelif and Lin. All we have, to my knowledge, is the increasingly erratic and hysterical statements of the IBA's ex-president on Social Media; though, he hasn't provided any evidence either. Officially, the IBA won't say where, when, or how it tested Khelif or Lin...just that Khelif failed a non-testosterone-based test and that Lin failed a biochemicals test.

Personally, I wouldn't put my faith in the IBA. It's had decades of bribery, cheating, betting, judging and refereeing, and other scandals, which were only exacerbated when it elected Gafur Rakhimov, an Uzbek businessman associated with Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, as its president.

After Rakhimov, they elected Umar Kremlev, a close friend of Vladimir Putin and pro-Russia zealot. He moved IBA's operations to Russia and made it's sole major supporter the state-owned energy company Gazprom. Kremlev isn't a fan of the International Olympic Committee trying to tell him how to run the IBA. He's called the IOC leader a "sodomite" and accused the IOC of supporting anti-Russian organizations such as Common Cause Alliance.

Most Western countries have withdrawn from IBA and joined World Boxing as an alternative ruling body; however, Algiers and Taiwan are still members of IBA. In retaliation, the IBA attempted to ban any athlete who participated in events sponsored by non-IBA organizations.

Kremlev has stacked IBA's board of directors with cronies and prevented attempts by members to elect different leadership by having all of his opposition "disqualified" as candidates for IBA's elections; an action that was later reversed by the international sports arbitration court. However, instead of holding new elections with the now-reinstated candidates, Kremlev merely allowed his board of cronies to "vote" whether they wanted to hold another "vote." They did not...unsurprisingly.

The IOC informed all of its member organizations that Russia and Belarus would be banned from competing under their national flags and anthems in the 2024 Olympics, but the IBA under Kremlev ignored this mandate and allowed Russian athletes to compete.

The IOC has since cut ties with the IBA with the extraordinary remedy of permanently banning it from participation in the IOC. In fact, if the international boxing community doesn't get its shit together, boxing won't even by in the 2028 Olympics.

As stated above, Kremlev is a pro-Russia zealot. But why would he want to punish Khelif? Because she loudly and embarrassingly beat then-undefeated RUSSIAN female boxer Azalia Amineva. They allowed Khelif to box Amineva even though gender testing of Khelif had already been conducted a year prior; however, when Khelif beat Russia's undefeated champion, the IBA suddenly (and with continued refusal to release the evidence) decided to declare Khelif ineligible to fight and retroactively awarded the win to Amineva, protecting her undefeated record.

IMO, Kremlev wanted to fuck with the IOC in retaliation for the IBA being ousted, and he looked around for athletes he had control over (remember, Algiers and Taiwan were still competing in the IBA) that were also going to compete in the Olympics, and he tried to de-legitimize the IOC's boxing this year. It was a two-fer because he also got to protect Russia's undefeated boxing champion.

But you believe anything you want. Personally, I wouldn't put all my eggs into the corrupt IBA basket.