https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/14/andrew-yang-is-running-president-havent-heard-him-you-will-soon/?utm_term=.2ff8bd88448a

Andrew Yang has been getting a lot of calls lately.

His inquirers — donors, supporters, journalists — usually want to talk to him about robots and free money and something he calls “human-centered capitalism.” But first, they all ask some version of the same thing: “So, who is Andrew Yang?”

And it’s a fair question. Because most people don’t know the answer.

But this week, Yang, an entrepreneur and veteran of the tech industry, became the latest — and, perhaps, least likely — Democratic presidential candidate to meet the requirements necessary to appear in the party’s first debate in June.

It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office — and it also may have paved the way for another neophyte to wind up on a crowded debate stage, next to a half dozen senators and a former vice president.

Yang announced Monday that he surpassed 65,000 donors, the Democratic National Committee’s threshold for participants in the first two debates. A party official said the DNC won’t announce the slate of debaters until at least two weeks before the event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/03/10/white-couple-mixed-race-baby-forbidden-adoption/?utm_term=.4e55c7201898



After Frank and Kara Speltz got married in 1965, the couple found out they couldn’t have children.

Depressed, Kara, then 28, began calling local adoption agencies in the nation’s capital to see if they could adopt. Private agencies in Washington, including Catholic Charities, said the waiting lists were so long that it would take at least five years to adopt a healthy white baby.

Longing for a child, the white couple, who were involved in the city’s civil rights struggles, began to research how they could adopt an African American child instead. A year after their wedding, they contacted D.C.’s Department of Public Welfare and Junior Village, the city’s overcrowded home for orphaned and destitute children. Both organizations turned them down, saying it was against their policies to allow adoptions between whites and blacks.

“We were shocked and absolutely furious they wouldn’t let us adopt an African American child,” Kara Speltz remembered. “I was so angry that they didn’t care enough about these kids.”

In interviews, they both said they understood the official resistance and social pressures they would face if they adopted a black baby.

At the time, they were involved in community outreach in the largely African American community surrounding St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church three miles from the White House.

Frank Speltz was a former seminary student at Catholic University who left after he was punished for attending a demonstration to end segregation at Washington Hospital Center.

Kara shared Frank’s social engagement and was very active with the Catholic Worker Movement. In fact, the couple spent their honeymoon in 1965 sleeping on the floor of political radical Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker offices in New York City.

https://www.boredpanda.com/national-geographic-instagram-photography-contest/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

#1 Grand Prize Winner Ketan Khambhatta


#2 Finalist Adam Kiefer


#3 Chaitanya Deshpande


#4 Sebastien Nagy


#5 Anuroop Krishnan


#6 André Musgrove

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/08/business/us-oil-exports-saudi-arabia/index.html

New York (CNN Business)Move over, Saudi Arabia. America is about to steal the kingdom's energy exporting crown.

The United States will surpass Saudi Arabia later this year in exports of oil, natural gas liquids and petroleum products, like gasoline, according to energy research firm Rystad Energy. That milestone, driven by the transformative shale boom, would make the United States the world's leading exporter of oil and liquids.

That has never happened since Saudi Arabia began selling oil overseas in the 1950s, Rystad said in a report Thursday.
"It's nothing short of remarkable," said Ryan Fitzmaurice, energy strategist at Rabobank. "Ten years ago, no one thought it could happen."

The expected breakthrough reflects how technology has reshaped the global energy landscape. Drilling innovations have opened up huge swaths of oil and natural gas resources that had been trapped in shale oilfields in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere.

Led by shale, US oil production has more than doubled over the past decade to all-time highs. The United States now pumps more oil than any other country, including Russia and Saudi Arabia.

"The shale boom has driven incredible increases in production," said Fitzmaurice. "US production is off the charts."
With ample supply at home, Congress in 2015 lifted the 40-year oil export ban. Overseas oil sales have exploded since then. And the

US Gulf Coast is racing to build facilities that can handle surging foreign demand for US crude.
"Excess fossil fuels from America will find plenty of eager buyers in fast-growing Asia," Per Magnus Nysveen, senior partner at Rystad Energy, wrote in the report.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-right-wingers-are-going-crazy-about-meat

When liberals called for gun control, conservatives rushed to gun stores and rifle clubs. When Democratic cities suggested banning plastic straws, right-wing Twitter personalities posed with straws to own the libs. Now, amid a liberal-driven call for vegetarianism, a wave of conservative media personalities are promoting all-meat diets.

Meat is poised to be the next proxy battleground in a left-right culture war.

Vegetarians skew left. Meat production, particularly beef, creates more greenhouse gases and requires more energy than vegetable farming, leading environmentalists (statistically a left-leaning set) to call for meat reduction. In response, an all-red meat “carnivore diet” is surging in popularity among conservatives; Fox News has done so many segments where an anchor debates a feminist vegetarian in front of a steak they’ve become formulaic; Ted Cruz wrapped bacon around the barrel of a gun to cook it, ostensibly to upset liberals.

InfoWars founder Alex Jones laid out the looming debate on a platter in August 2016 when, apparently unprompted, he tweeted a picture of himself red-faced and glowering over a platter of uncooked sausages, steaks, and meat patties.

“Celebrating Americana with some Red Meat,” Jones tweeted, “f-you Obama!”

Why would then-President Barack Obama, a meat-eater, care about Alex Jones’ lunch? With the exception of the time Jones blamed a spicy bowl of chili for his memory loss during a court appearance, why would anybody care about Alex Jones’ lunch? The implication was clear: Obama and his ilk wanted to take away America’s meat, just like they were coming for guns and Confederate flags and all manner of totems beloved by conservatives who believe themselves besieged by the left.

And just as a set of too-online conservatives pose with plastic straws or carry automatic rifles in public with the hopes of upsetting liberals, some meat-eaters double down on their diets in response to vegetarianism.