RSN: Garrison Keillor | In a Troubled Time, It's Time to Make a Perfect Day
04 October 20
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Garrison Keillor | In a Troubled Time, It's Time to Make a Perfect Day
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog
Keillor writes: "Birthdays are an expression of love, nothing more, nothing less. Tyrants do not get beautiful birthdays like the one on Saturday: to be surrounded by sycophants and security men, with loyal followers cheering from the plaza below as you stand on your balcony - it's not the same thing."
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Chief Justice John Roberts at the State of the Union address. (photo: Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Will Hear a Case That Could Destroy What Remains of the Voting Rights Act
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two consolidated cases that could eviscerate the right to be free from racial discrimination in voting."
And Republicans are poised to gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
he Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two consolidated cases that could eviscerate the right to be free from racial discrimination in voting. And the Court agreed to hear these cases just weeks before the Senate is likely to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, giving a Republican Party that is often hostile to voting rights a 6-3 majority on the nation’s highest court.
It’s difficult to exaggerate the stakes in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee.
The cases involve two Arizona laws restricting the right to vote. One law requires ballots cast in the wrong location to be tossed out, while the other prevents individuals from delivering another person’s absentee ballot to the elections office. But as these cases arise under the Voting Rights Act — a seminal law preventing racist voting laws, that the Supreme Court has already weakened considerably — they provide a conservative-majority Supreme Court the opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
Early Friday morning, the White House revealed that President Donald Trump tested positive for Covid-19. But that news will, at most, impact just one presidential election. The Court’s decision in the Democratic National Committee cases, by contrast, could fundamentally reshape all elections moving forward. It could allow racist voter discrimination to run rampant throughout American democracy. And it potentially endangers the ability of the Democratic Party, with its multiracial coalition, to compete in all future elections, at least at the national level.
We cannot know yet what the Supreme Court will do in this case. Perhaps two Republican justices will get cold feet and agree to save the Voting Rights Act. Or perhaps Democrats will win a landslide victory in the upcoming election and pack the Supreme Court with additional justices — stripping the GOP of its Supreme Court majority in the process.
Barring such events, however, American democracy is in terrible danger. The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Democratic National Committee cases could threaten the fairness of American elections for years to come.
The two cases concern Arizona laws that make it harder to vote
The specific issue in the Democratic National Committee cases concerns two Arizona laws that require certain ballots to be discarded. One law requires voting officials to discard in their entirety ballots cast by voters who vote in the wrong precinct (rather than simply not counting votes for local candidates who the voter should not have been able to vote for).
The other law prohibits “ballot collection” (or “ballot harvesting”) where a voter gives their absentee ballot to a third party, who delivers that ballot to the election office. (Arizona is one of many states that impose at least some restrictions on ballot collection.)
Both of these laws disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. As a federal appeals court explained in an opinion striking down the two laws, “uncontested evidence in the district court established that minority voters in Arizona cast [out of precinct] ballots at twice the rate of white voters.” And Hispanic and Native American voters are especially likely to rely on a third party to ensure that their ballot is cast.
One reason for this disparity is that some parts of the state require voters to cast their ballot in counterintuitive locations. Some Maricopa County voters, for example, were required to “travel 15 minutes by car (according to [G]oogle maps) to vote” in their assigned polling location, “passing four other polling places along the way,” according to an expert witness.
In addition, according to the appeals court, many Arizona voters of color lack easy access to the mail and are unable to easily travel on their own to cast a ballot. As the appeals court explained, “in urban areas of heavily Hispanic counties, many apartment buildings lack outgoing mail services,” and only 18 percent of Native American registered voters have home mail service.
Meanwhile, Black, Native, and Hispanic voters are “significantly less likely than non-minorities to own a vehicle” and more likely to have “inflexible work schedules.” Thus, their ability to vote might depend on their ability to give their ballot to a friend or an activist who will take that ballot to the polls for them.
The legal rules implementing the Voting Rights Act are complicated. And the specific legal rules governing these cases are impossible to summarize in a concise way. Courts have to consider myriad factors, including “the extent of any history of official discrimination” in a state accused of violating the Voting Rights Act, and “the extent to which voting in the elections of the state or political subdivision is racially polarized.”
In any event, a majority of the appeals court judges who considered Arizona’s two laws determined that they violate the Voting Rights Act.
The Court could deal a fatal blow to an already ailing Voting Rights Act
Much of the Voting Rights Act no longer functions due to conservative decisions weakening that law. But at least one important prong of the law remains intact and continues to provide a meaningful shield against racist voting laws. The Democratic National Committee cases endanger this remaining shield.
Less than a decade ago, the Voting Rights Act provided three protections against racist voter discrimination. Section 5 of the law required states with a history of racist voting practices to “preclear” new election rules with officials in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides two separate protections against voter discrimination. It prohibits election laws enacted with racially discriminatory intent, and it also prohibits any state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
But the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively deactivated Section 5’s preclearance regime. And the Court’s decision in Abbott v. Perez (2018) held that lawmakers enjoy such a strong presumption of racial innocence that it is now extremely difficult to prove that those lawmakers acted with racist intent — so difficult that it may be impossible except in the most egregious cases.
The two Democratic National Committee cases involve the third prong of the Voting Rights Act: the so-called “results test” that prohibits many election laws that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.
As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully fought to convince President Reagan to veto the law establishing this results test; some of his memos from that era even suggest that the results test is unconstitutional. And Roberts is, if anything, the most moderate member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.
Now that these cases are before the Supreme Court, in other words, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority could potentially dismantle the results test. At the very least, it could water down that test to such a degree that it no longer provides a meaningful check on racism in elections.
Simply put, the right of voters of color to cast a ballot is now in greater peril than at almost any point since the Jim Crow era. Cases like Shelby County and Perez already stripped the Voting Rights Act of much of its force; the Democratic National Committee cases could finish that job.
These cases, moreover, are not just a historic threat to the right to vote. They are potentially a historic threat to the Democratic Party’s ability to compete in US elections.
Because voters of color in general, and Black voters in particular, are especially likely to vote for Democrats, Republican lawmakers can use race as a proxy to identify communities with large numbers of Democratic voters. They can then enact election laws targeting those communities, confident that the law will mainly disenfranchise Democrats.
The Court’s decision to take these cases, in other words, puts the debate over whether Democrats should add additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to dilute its Republican majority into stark relief. If the Democratic National Committee cases end badly for the Voting Rights Act — and if Democrats control Congress and the White House when these cases are handed down — Democrats may have to choose between radical steps like packing the Court or being permanently exiled to the political wilderness.
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A far right rally in Portland, Oregon on 26 September 2020. (photo: Maranie R Staab/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump-Linked Consultant Tied to Facebook Pages Warning Election Will Cause Civil War
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "A militia-promoting father and son duo of fake news publishers and a Trump-connected social media consultant are linked to pages which promote the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to sidestep Facebook's fact-checking system."
Network run by fake news-publishing father and son spreads word to Trump supporters they should prepare for violence in November
Comments on their Facebook pages and other materials obtained by the Guardian show that some rank and file Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they should prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.
The network is comprised of websites owned and operated by Dino Porrazzo Sr and Dino Porrazzo Jr, whose company, AFF Media, is headquartered in Pinon Hills in California. The pair have been running rightwing websites since at latest 2013, according to DNS website records.
The Porrazzos now run a network of websites that enthusiastically promote Trump, and far right anti-government militias like the Three Percenters, and offer distorted versions of current events. One of their Facebook pages, “Prepare to Take America Back” (PTTAB) at the time of reporting had 794,876 followers. Analysis with social media metrics tool Crowdtangle shows that over the last three months PTTAB posts have been shared over 141,000 times, and on average 9,600 times a week.
At that time, the page’s header featured the logo of the Three Percenters, a decentralized group that the ADL calls a “wing of the militia movement”; a group of armed men in tactical gear; and a modified copy of the US presidential seal.
In general, the page promotes conspiracy theories and criminal allegations about Democratic party politicians, liberal celebrities and leftist protesters, some of which – like persistent claims that Hillary Clinton will be imminently arrested – overlap with aspects of the so-called “QAnon” conspiracy theory movement.
The page makes free use of political memes, but many posts link to a small cluster of rightwing websites designed to appear like news outlets. Increasingly, over the course of 2020, the page has been warning of a stolen election, and suggesting this will lead to civil war.
Repeatedly in September, the page linked to a story on the website Right Wing Tribune, headlined “Radical Left Prepares For ‘Mass Public Unrest,’ ‘Political Apocalypse’ And Possible Civil War Should Be Expected If Biden Loses [Opinion]”, with Facebook captions including “the left wants war”.
The story had a limited basis in fact, in that a number of progressive groups had met in early September to discuss the prospect of civil unrest and political violence after the election with a belief that the violence they were anticipating would be coming from Trump supporters and the far right.
Nevertheless, the Right Wing Tribune piece concluded with a conspiracy theory: “These groups are heavily focused on removing President Trump from office as well as different scenarios which all lead to a second revolution in which they control our nation as a “New America”.”
Similarly distorted stories warning of a “siege of the white house”, peppered the page throughout September and warnings of a post-election civil war were posted over the last year.
Last November, the page linked to a site called Flag and Cross, and a story which it described as an “excellent opinion piece”, entitled “Winning the New Civil War (OPINION)”.
The piece claimed on the basis of antifascist protests and comments by Democratic politicians that, “We have many strong indications that this is a hot war”.
The transparency page for PTTAB discloses that PTTAB is managed by Southern California-based AFF Media Inc, and that the Vici Media Group “partners with this page”.
According to California records, AFF Media was incorporated on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, 20 January 2017; in other documents, Dino Porrazzo Jr is listed as CEO and CFO, and Dino Porrazzo Sr as secretary. But the Guardian has discovered that the Porrazzos are further involved in running a dizzying array of interconnected sites and social media pages. The Annenberg Public Policy initiative lists two of their websites on its “Misinformation Directory” of “websites that have posted deceptive content”.
One of the listed sites is Right Wing Tribune. But all of the other sites linked to by the PTTAB Facebook page also appear to belong to AFF, with similar design, shared bylines and shared source code.
The Porrazzos have been previously reported as having links to the Three Percenters, a decentralized, national militia movement that the Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes as anti-government extremists.
Their online empire is large. Another Parazzo site, Flag and Cross is listed as the administrator of another Facebook page, United States Constitution, which has 1.2 million followers.
A Guardian review of that site’s content shows a similar pattern of linking to Porrazzo-connected websites, and warnings of civil war stretching back to the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Becca Lewis researches online extremism and disinformation at Stanford University. In a telephone conversation, she said that the page and the associated websites represented a sophisticated effort to skirt Facebook’s fact-checking efforts.
“It seems as though they are being very strategic in their messaging so as to not be shut down,” Lewis said, adding that viewing the ostentatious labeling of opinion as an effort to sidestep fact-checking is “absolutely a reasonable assumption”.
In June, Heated reported that climate change deniers were exploiting the same loophole to “make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it “opinion”. In August, NBC reported that Facebook had systematically relaxed its fact-checking rules for conservative outlets and personalities.
In a telephone conversation, Dino Porrazzo Jr asserted that PTTAB had had “zero fact-check violations”, characterizing his websites as “opinion websites based on fact”. Asked if they were fact-checked at all, Porrazzo said “no”, but added: “I don’t work at Facebook”. Asked if he thought that there really was a civil war coming, Porrazzo accused the Guardian of “writing a hit piece to get me thrown off Facebook”, and then ended the conversation.
Facebook Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Porrazzos also have links to Republican officials.
The registered agent for the company is an elected official in California, Ensen Mason, who was elected as San Bernardino county auditor-controller in California as a nonpartisan candidate, but who is listed as a member of the San Bernardino Republican party.
In an email, however, Ensen Mason said that in relation to the Porrazzos, his accounting firm’s role “is strictly limited to accounting services and registered agent”.
The Vici Media Group, meanwhile, is run by Patrick Mauldin, who is a social media consultant for the Trump campaign and other Republican politicians, and his brother, Ryan.
The company was hired in 2016 by one-time Trump campaign manager and recently-resigned campaign consultant, Brad Parscale, to be part of the team that was widely credited with winning Trump the election. In June, Patrick Mauldin was identified as the creator of a fake Joe Biden site that was compared in New York Times reporting to “disinformation spread by Russian trolls”.
In an email, Ryan Mauldin disavowed the Porrazzos’ publishing output, writing, “Vici Media Group was engaged for a small, non-content-related project by the managers of the page.”
Mauldin added, “We have no input on the content published by the various sites or the comments made on that content. We are not working for the Trump campaign.”
Mauldin did not immediately respond to attempts to further clarify the nature of their work for the Porrazzos, and to clarify New York Times reporting as recent as June 2020 that said Patrick Mauldin was on a retainer for the Trump campaign, and considered a “rising star”.
Porrazzo refused to specify the nature of AFF’s relationship with Vici Media Group.
Meanwhile, the content of the Porrazzo pages does appear to trigger extreme responses among users. Hundreds of user comments on the page’s posts suggest the use of violence against perceived political enemies. On a 5 September post linking to a Right Wing Tribune article suggesting that Democrats will foment civil war if Biden loses, one user commented, “a short civil war with the democrats and those who support socialist policies will go a long way to help Make America Great Again”.
Another connects civil war to their belief that a Trump loss is impossible, writing “If [Biden] wins, it’ll be from fraud on an industrial scale, and the lesson that’ll have to be taught for that will necessarily be no less industrial.”
Many welcome the prospect of armed conflict – one writes “That’s fine with me open season on democrats!”. Another deployed accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse as a positive example, writing “I think it will be more whining, crying, rioting, looting and a lot of Kyles protecting their cities, towns and neighborhoods.”
Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, Lewis, the extremism researcher, said: “This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.”
On links to the Trump campaign, she said that the distorted content and the violent user comments formed a kind of “feedback loop”, and that “Trump and his campaign staff have been masters at exploiting these feedback loops”.
On Tuesday night, meanwhile, following the Guardian’s outreach to the Porrazzos and Facebook that day, Dino Porrazzo announced on Twitter that he “HAD TO DELETE A FEW ARTICLES I WROTE TODAY BECAUSE THEY WERE DEMED FALSE BY BASEMENT DWELLING LIBERAL FACT CHECKERS”.
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Cineworld. (photo: Reuters)
Regal-Owner Cineworld Considering Closing All US, UK Screens
Kate Holton and Aakriti Bhalla, Reuters
Excerpt: "Cineworld, the world's second-biggest cinema operator, said it was considering temporarily closing all its screens in the United States and Britain after studios pulled major releases such as the latest James Bond film."
The Regal cinema owner, which began reopening in July after COVID-19 lockdown restrictions started to ease, employs 37,482 people across 787 venues in the U.S., Britain and central Europe, with 546 sites in America.
“We can confirm we are considering the temporary closure of our U.K. and US cinemas, but a final decision has not yet been reached. Once a decision has been made we will update all staff and customers as soon as we can,” the company said.
Earlier, a person familiar with the situation had gone further, saying Cineworld would close all its U.S., UK and Ireland screens this week.
The release of the new James Bond movie, “No Time To Die”, was pushed into next year on Friday, crushing hopes for a 2020 industry rebound as rising rates of the coronavirus prompt new restrictions and keep viewers away.
Britain’s Sunday Times said the London-listed company had written to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Culture Minister Oliver Dowden to warn that the industry was becoming unviable.
It warned investors on Sept. 24 that it might need to raise more money if its sites were forced to shut again, after it swung to a $1.64 billion first-half loss. Its shares have fallen 82% this year.
Efforts to get audiences back into theatres have proved disappointing. While bigger chains like AMC Entertainment, Cineworld and others have reopened many locations, crowds have been thin. Small and mid-sized theatre companies have said they may not survive the impact of the pandemic.
Cineworld had said viewers returned to watch “Tenet”, a Christopher Nolan spy thriller that became a test case for the wider industry when it became the biggest release to open in cinemas in late August since schedules were torn up in March.
But the postponement of Bond, plus delays to other big releases such as superhero movie “Black Widow” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” give cinema lovers little reason to return.
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Protesters chant in front of a fire near the North police precinct during a protest against racial injustice and police brutality on September 6, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
What to Do When Your Country Turns Into a Dumpster Fire
Michael Harriot, The Root
Harriot writes: "America is America-ing again."
As a certain coronavirus-y occupant of the White House brazenly intensifies his all-out assault on the Constitution, media, truth, law, order, equality, democracy and everything this beloved country supposedly stands for, our fellow Americans find themselves in a state of confusion and outright despair after wrongly assuming a free supply of “liberty and justice for all” was included in their membership package.
For years, political scientists, historians and a well-regarded organization called “Every Black person who ever existed” have diagnosed America with a neurological condition colloquially known as “being fucked up.” If you, or someone you know, watched the presidential debate and now suffer from the condition experts have termed What Happened to the Illusion of Truth, Equality, National Exceptionalism and Superiority Syndrome (WHITENESS), have no fear, your friendly neighborhood negroes are here.
Luckily (for you, not for us. This shit kinda hurts), Black people have acquired a few useful survival skills born from 401 years of navigating chaos and disorder in a country that ignores our concerns; tramples on our rights and historically called for white supremacists to “stand by” whenever we asked the nation to stop being so damn racist. So, to address the concerns of those who are beginning to suspect that their country might be trash, The Root has created this handy-dandy, eight-step guide to help our Caucasian counterparts survive and—dare I say—thrive, under these adverse conditions.
You may feel overwhelmed by the rapidly spreading dumpster fire that you are currently inhaling but as someone whose been there, let me assure you:
You get used to it.
Step 1: Accept that your country might be trash.
I was Colin Kaepernick’s protest-years-old when I realized that some people actually believe that bullshit in the national anthem. Look, I imagine it feels good to romanticize the past but if you squint really hard at any history book during the twilight’s last gleaming, you might discover that Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814, when America allowed still the state-sanctioned practice of enslaving Black people.
The U.S. would continue to permit its citizens to purchase human beings for another half-century, long after Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands stopped that slavery bullshit. While racism exists in varying forms everywhere, those countries didn’t replicate the uniquely American versions of Jim Crow, color-based disenfranchisement and legalized second-class citizenship that still exist in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
To be fair, I was disappointed when I learned that Minnesota didn’t have berets made out of raspberries, crying doves or a single inch of purple precipitation.
Step 2: Realize you’re part of the problem.
Are you outraged that everyone is mute while the current administration tries to sabotage vote-by-mail efforts? Were you frazzled by a clarion call to MAGAmuffin poll watchers?
Well, you probably should’ve said something when Georgia’s Republicans purged 200,000 ballots in Georgia. I bet you cried when they tossed another 209,000 over registrations in Wisconsin. How about when they reduced early voting hours in Ohio? Did you say something about the “poll tax” on Florida felons? Did you share the study that shows Black people wait longer to vote? How did you react when all those Black votes vanished in Georgia?
I know, I know—those incidents of voter suppression didn’t affect you.
Those purges, poll taxes and disappearing votes mostly affected Black people, so you probably didn’t say anything. Perhaps that’s why the country wasn’t up in arms. That’s actually a good point.
But if you silently watched watching someone plan a robbery, you can’t cry when they take your shit.
There have been many corrupt, racist liars who tried to destroy America. There will always be corrupt, racist liars who will try to destroy America. But this country won’t be destroyed by corruption, racism, or lies. It will be because someone recognized the corruption, racism and lies and said:
“___________ .”
Step 3: Stop loving America so damn much.
You were rightfully appalled when Trump shouted out a violent white supremacist group in front of 70 million Americans. Aside from the fact that The Root has been reporting on the Proud Boys and similar groups for nearly four years, who even knew they existed?
Of course, those violent, right-wing extremists didn’t spontaneously manifest themselves into existence. They probably came from the right-wing militias who claim to want to “protect the Constitution.” Or maybe they came from the innocuous far-right groups whom the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been warning us about for years.
The nativist movement of the 1830s, the Ku Klux Klan, the nativist movement of the 1920s, the Nazi movement, segregation movement and the alt-right all evolved from supposedly “patriotic” groups who were intent on protecting American values and keeping “America First.”
But America isn’t lines on a map or words on a piece of parchment. America is just people. Whenever someone cloaks themselves in the false flag of “love for country” or refers to themself as a “patriot,” they are usually preparing to grab their tiki torches and long guns so they can ignite a dumpster fire and start killing people who don’t look like them.
Step 4: Don’t fan the flames.
Even if you don’t agree that Black lives matter; even if you don’t like seasoning, even if you refuse to accept the infinite amount of studies proving systemic racism exists in voting, policing, criminal justice, education and healthcare, why would you fight against addressing these problems?
Can we agree that police kill too many human beings? Why not just try to improve all schools? Shouldn’t everyone have better-paying jobs? Why would anyone want more people in jail or more people dying because they can’t afford healthcare?
Why fight the good shit?
This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to know why anyone would support a murderer, oppose an increase in the minimum wage or repeal a law that increased the number of insured Americans. There are also white people who can’t afford insurance. There are more poor and unemployed white people. You know cops shoot white people too, right?
As the Trumpocalypse devours your beloved country, we will remember how you gathered around the fire and watched us burn. And when we begged you to help us extinguish the flames, you replied:
“Nah. I gotta roast these marshmallows.”
Step 5: Choose a side.
Perhaps this dumpster fire was ignited by people who only consider their needs instead of thinking about the greater good. Whether it’s a global pandemic, “economic anxiety” or the prospect of a post-election free-for-all, you’re going to have to pick a team to represent you in the Great American Shitshow.
The choice isn’t between Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, or even white vs. Black, Indigenous, People of Color Who Use The Correct Bathroom and Have Missionary Sex For Jesus. You have to make a choice between good and evil; right vs. wrong.
Here are your choices:
- People who believe Black lives matter or people who aren’t bothered by videos of Black people getting shot in the face.
- Lower taxes or poor people having access to well-funded schools, community resources, living wages, higher education and affordable healthcare.
- A global pandemic that disproportionately kills poor people or wearing a mask to Walmart.
- Guns vs. guns—but with some common sense rules.
- The right to vote or the right to vote if you have an ID, have never committed a crime, are employed by a company that will let you off work, live in a white neighborhood and don’t mind waiting in line.
- Lawry’s vs. a dash of salt.
Step 6. Do what Black people do.
Now that your country is in flames, you’re gonna need someone to show you how to survive the fire. Although there are many people who have endured hardship and suffering, there is only one group of people whose record proves them worthy of your allegiance.
Team Black people.
This is not to say that white people aren’t survivors. They survived the bloodiest conflict in American history but they were fighting white people. They survived the Great Depression because the New Deal simply took the tax dollars paid by Black America and built the white middle class. They barely make it through the horrific tan suits; terrorist fist bumps and hidden birth certificates during the Obama presidency and all they had to show for it was free health care, a healthy economy, an international climate change agreement a nuclear-free Iran and five Rihanna albums.
Black people, on the other hand, survived slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, separate but equal, Red Summer, redlining, the civil rights movement, Nixon, the War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan, two Bushes and Donald Trump. And we did it with twice the unemployment, unequal schools lower pay, housing inequality, financial discrimination, racial terrorism and no health care.
And, just as she did during Trump’s reign of terror, Rihanna released very little music during Reconstruction.
See? We been doing this shit.
Step 7: Don’t just stand there! Do something!
We know you’re not an experienced firefighter but you can lend a hand by:
- Voting for someone who’s not a white nationalist.
- Saying something every time you spot a microscopic bit of injustice or inequality.
- Not calling the police every time you feel uncomfortable or upset.
- Fighting for what’s equality even if it costs you some privilege.
- Not reflexively choosing to protect whiteness over righteousness.
- Stop buying Katy Perry albums.
- Listening to Black women.
- Seriously, stop calling the cops all the goddamned time!
- More seasoning.
- Paying Black people the same thing you pay white people
- Supporting diversity and inclusion by raising your hand and asking: “Why are there no Black people here?”
- Remember that thing I said about calling the cops? Okay...Just checking.
8. Let it burn.
And finally, I know it feels terrible to watch something you love be destroyed by racism, apathy, hate and incompetence but you have to look at the bright side.
You’re gonna get a brand new country!
Sometimes, you can change a system by enacting fairer rules and injecting equity into the equation. But sometimes you have to raze everything to the ground and start all over. You can’t fix anything without dismantling the parts that are already broken.
This is just the breaking part.
The Founding Fathers were essentially wig-wearing members of antifa. The federal government put down a white supremacist rebellion and we called it a “Civil War.” Examples of previous dumpster fires include the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, the War Between the States and the white supremacists, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the anti-war movement and every attempt at a reboot of the Fantastic Four.
And if this makes you uncomfortable, there’s also an online version of this article that isn’t filled with as much sarcasm, profanity and “race-baiting,” which eloquently says:
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
America has always been trash.
And sometimes, the things that should have been discarded are politely hauled away by people whom we have charged with that task. But there are times when those people don’t do their jobs and the racist, incompetent, corrupt debris starts to stink so bad that some of us can’t take it anymore.
And now, you are “some of us.”
Welcome to the fire.
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A woman points to a voting notebook before voting in Noumea, New Caledonia. (photo: Mathurin Derel/AP)
New Caledonia Rejects Independence, Will Stay Part of France
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "People in the southern Pacific French territory of New Caledonia have once more voted to stay with France, narrowly rejecting independence in a tightly-fought referendum."
Majority of voters choose to remain part of France, instead of backing independence, in second of three possible referendums.
With all ballots tallied from the territory’s 304 polling stations, the “No” vote on Sunday won with 53.26 percent.
Turnout was reported to be very high in the second of three possible referendums on independence, at roughly 80 percent of the
180,000 New Caledonians eligible to vote.
By refusing independence, the territory of 273,000 people will keep generous subsidies from France, which provides $1.5bn in financial support annually.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a speech from the Elysee palace, welcomed the result with a “deep feeling of gratitude”.
It was the second time New Caledonia held such a referendum. Two years ago, almost 57 percent of voters had also rejected independence. A third referendum may be possible in 2022 if a third of the local assembly votes in favour.
New Caledonia was colonised by France in the mid-19th century and won greater autonomy and the right to hold up to three referendums on its political status under the Noumea Accord, signed between French and local leaders in 1998.
The agreement followed a 1988 peace deal that ended decades of conflict between the Indigenous Kanak people and the descendants of European settlers known as the Caldoches. Despite the Noumea Accord’s promise of a “common destiny” for all citizens, Kanaks, who comprise about 39 percent of the population, still experience higher levels of unemployment and poverty, as well as lower achievement in higher education.
In the 2018 referendum, the vast majority of those who voted for independence were Kanak, while those who supported continuing ties with France were either of European descent or from other non-Indigenous minority groups.
For the pro-independence campaigners, full sovereignty would have meant decolonisation, emancipation, reducing inequality, and their right to decide the future of the islands, including realigning their political and cultural allegiances to the wider community of Pacific Islands states.
The loyalists, however, say they are proud of their French heritage and say their high standards of living, as well as the good public services on the archipelago, are in large part due to French subsidies.
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Brown bears. (photo: Roger Borgelid/Mongabay)
As Predators Return to Sweden's Wild, Ecotourism Looks to Change Mindsets
Johan Augustin, Mongabay
Augustin writes: "It's just past 7 p.m. here in the woods along the eastern coast of Sweden. A handful of people are waiting, some of them for the past two hours, peering out from inside a small wooden cabin."
The cabin sits at the top of a hill and has sweeping views of the landscape around it. There are mosquitoes to contend with, but the visitors have to sit still and keep any talking to a whisper. Outside, the tall conifers are completely still, but there’s the occasional flash of life: a woodpecker tap-tap-tapping at a trunk, a jay sweeping in for the seeds in a feeder, and a squirrel foraging among the mossy rocks below. A young buzzard suddenly appears and snags a piece of meat from among the rocks and disappears again, all within the blink of an eye.
The meat, like the seeds in the feeder, has been left there to attract the wildlife. In this case, one of the more elusive inhabitants of the forest: brown bears. Sweden is home to about 3,000 bears in the wild, and Gästrikland has among the highest densities of the animal. “The bears are the ghosts of the forests,” says Vanessa Vogel, a visitor from Germany who’s waiting in the cabin for a glimpse of the animal. “They will show up when you least except it.”
Ten p.m. comes and goes, and then, with no notice — without the slightest sound — there they are: on the path to the cabin, a full-grown female bear and her two cubs. They’re bathed in the shimmering blue light of the Swedish summer night, and they move carefully, deliberately. They’re drawn to the rocks, just 20 meters (66 feet) from the cabin. The mother bear starts rooting around for the meat, but all the while she’s got an eye trained on her two cubs, tumbling playfully around the undergrowth. It’s easy, in this moment, to acknowledge the long-held reputation that mother bears have for being fiercely protective of their young.
The family of three eventually moves on, blending back into the forest. Not long after, two more bears emerge. One of them, a young male, rubs his back against a tree trunk. “Just like Baloo,” Vogel whispers.
Semi-darkness sets in at around midnight, but sunrise is only a few hours away. Soon, a new day will dawn.
Back from extinction
The brown bear (Ursus arctos), or grizzly as it’s known in North America, has a fearsome reputation across its range, where it’s often blamed for preying on livestock and attacking humans.
Sweden had an estimated 1,650 bears in the mid-1800s. But hunting, encouraged by the state through the offer of bounties, pushed the population to about 700 by the mid-1990s, according to a study. More restrictive hunting policies since then, including a ban on killing mother bears with cubs, have seen the bear population flourish. (A 2018 study suggested that female bears were adapting to this loophole by keeping their cubs with them a year longer than previously.)
While hunting is still permitted in the summer months from late August to mid-October, there’s growing social awareness that bears aren’t the fearsome predators they’ve long been made out to be, and are instead shy animals that will avoid humans as much as possible.
Now, much of the tracking and shooting of bears in Sweden is done with cameras, not guns. A thriving ecotourism industry has grown around not just brown bears, but also other wildlife species that were previously nearly wiped out before making a recovery.
Beavers were at one point actually extinct in Sweden, hunted for their fur, which was used to make hats, and for their castoreum, a glandular oil secreted from the base of their tails that was believed to have medicinal properties and was used to make perfumes. The Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) was reintroduced into Sweden in 1922, and today thrives in the wild, where its presence has a beneficial effect on other wildlife; a 1999 study found that brown trout in beaver ponds tended to be bigger, and that the ponds also served as an important habitat for the fry of smaller fish.
“They are an important species,” says Simon Green, who works for the ecotourism operator WildSweden. “Biodiversity among birds and insects actually increases by 30% when beavers flood an area, since the dead wood attracts insects and birds.”
Another, much more elusive, animal on Sweden’s wildlife ecotourism circuit is the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). It, too, was hunted close to extinction, before changes to hunting regulations helped it recover. Among these is a compensation scheme under which the country’s Indigenous Sámi reindeer herders receive a payment for each carnivore cub reported in their grazing areas, including lynx. The idea is that the money should compensate for any expected loss to the reindeer herd caused over the lynx’s lifetime. Today, Sweden’s population of Europe’s biggest wild cat stands at about 1,500.
Strong trademark
The Eurasian elk (Alces alces), or moose in North America, is Sweden’s national animal, and a mainstay of both the hunting and wildlife tourism industries.
The country has 400,000 elks, the highest density of any country in the animal’s range. About a quarter of them are killed during the annual hunting season every autumn; by late spring, a similar number of elk calves are born.
Swedes are largely accustomed to seeing elk in the wild — about 6,000 of the animals are killed in traffic accidents every year — so the ecotourism circuit draws mostly visitors from outside the country. Recently, though, with growing anxiety about climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of Swedes are choosing to holiday at home and experience their country’s wildlife for themselves.
“The moose is a strong trademark, and many visitors are curious about the Swedish taiga,” Green says. “We are fortunate with an incredible nature, and with a higher number of mammals and birds than most people are aware of.”
The wolf in the room
While social acceptance of carnivores like lynxes and wolverines is widespread, there’s another animal that has a far more polarizing effect on Swedish society.
There are an estimated 250-300 Eurasian wolves (Canis lupus lupus) in Sweden today. (The number varies because many of the wolves frequent neighboring Norway and may be counted in that country’s population.) Like bears, they were hunted for centuries, often with the state offering a bounty for each kill. By 1966, they were extinct in Sweden. Then, in the late 1970s, a handful of the animals found their way back to the country from a pack in the Russian-Finnish population. Today, licensed hunting of wolves is permitted, but the government sets a strict quota each year.
The reintroduction of wolves across Europe, both naturally and by conservationists, is a controversial issue. Opposition has come from livestock farmers, who say the wolves prey on sheep, and from hunters, who say the wolves kill too many moose.
Marcus Eldh, the founder of WildSweden, says he’s been bringing visitors on wolf-spotting tours since 2007 in the forests of the Bergslagen region. He says that allowing legal hunting of wolves fuels demand that can lead to illegal hunting.
“Suddenly everybody talks about hunting wolves,” he says. “The Finnish wolves also decreased in numbers when Finland opened up the legal hunt.”
He acknowledges that no other animal evokes such polarizing feelings among people: “It’s a mythical animal.”
Symbol of the wild
Bergslagen has the highest density of wolves in Sweden, about a third of the population, which makes the issue among residents here much more complex.
“They just don’t think that the politicians in Stockholm or Brussels show consideration to local people,” Eldh says. “The ordinary people feel left out of decision-making.”
He says he tries to get locals invested in the welfare of the wolves by engaging them as much as possible in his ecotourism operations.
“I order locally produced food and firewood. The guests stay at local hostels and we use local guides. These actions have a positive effect on the villages,” Eldh says.
He adds this has translated into a change in the mindset of the local community, from one that was leery of the wolf safaris to one that’s now more positive.
For Eldh and others in Sweden’s ecotourism industry, the return of iconic megafauna that were either extinct or nearly wiped out is something they see holding steady for the long term.
“The curve points upwards in Europe for all of our four big predators” — bears, wolves, lynxes and wolverines. “People don’t depend on domestic livestock to the same degree as before,” Eldh says, “so I am convinced that the predators will do fine.”
The wolf, in particular, will continue to be a top draw, he says. In his 13 years leading tours to catch a sight of the animal, he’s only seen about 25 different individuals. Listening to the animals howl, he says, still gives him goose bumps.
“It’s a much cooler thing than to just get a glimpse of them,” Eldh says. “To me, they are a symbol of the wild.”
Read the original story at Mongabay
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