May 30, 2017

Gay son of Indian immigrant likely to be Ireland's next leader

(CNN)He was 22 when he entered Irish politics. At 27, he was elected to parliament. At 36, he publicly came out as gay. And now, at 38, Leo Varadkar, the son of an Indian immigrant father and an Irish mother, appears on course to become Ireland's next prime minister.

The young Dubliner, currently serving as Ireland's Minister for Social Protection, announced his campaign to succeed Taoiseach Enda Kenny, prime minister since 2011 and leader of the ruling Fine Gael party since 2002, shortly after Kenny announced he would be stepping down earlier this month.

Varadkar's only opponent is Housing Minister Simon Coveney, who hails from a family of Fine Gael stalwarts. While Coveney appeals to the party's more conservative membership outside of the capital city, many see Varadkar as a fresh face for urban voters while still appealing to the party's rural base.

Varadkar has managed to shore up the support of many of his fellow Fine Gael parliamentary members, whose say counts for 65% of the final vote; the party members and local politicians make up the other 35%. A decision is expected by June 2.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/30/europe/leo-varadkar-ireland-prime-minister-bid/index.html

May 29, 2017

Angela Merkel Drinking Beer After Shading Trump Is The Most German Thing Ever

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spent Friday and Saturday at the G7 in Italy, battling President Trump on issues of climate change, trade, and refugees.

Then she came home and told everyone on Sunday that Germany could basically no longer fully rely on Trump's America and post-Brexit UK.

Then she had a beer.




https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/prost?utm_term=.ntJexJWBKj&ref=mobile_share#.fkAwNOW3zV

Like a boss!

I like a leader who can drink a real beer, and full liter of it!

May 27, 2017

A Chinese company is offering free training for US coal miners to become wind farmers

If you want to truly understand what’s happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that’s a real place).

The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state’s mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It’s the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets.

The news comes from an energy conference in Wyoming, where the American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer, announced the free training program. More than a century ago, Carbon County was home to the first coal mine in Wyoming. Soon, it will be the site of a new wind farm with hundreds of Goldwind-supplied turbines.

Goldwind sees the ex-miners as a font of the sort of technical knowledge—mechanical and electrical engineering, on par—with the experience of working in difficult conditions required to run and maintain a wind farm. Adapting coal-mining skills to wind farming seemed a natural fit. “If we can tap into that market and also help out folks that might be experiencing some challenges in the workforce today, I think that it can be a win-win situation,” David Halligan, chief executive of Goldwind Americas, told the New York Times.



The loss of coal jobs, in Wyoming and across the country, can be attributed partly to increasing mechanization and partly to the falling demand for coal. Despite Trump’s promise to bring back coal jobs, the department of labor reports that in the first quarter of 2017, there were 8% fewer coal jobs (more than 6,000 positions) compared to the same period the year before.

As the US’s largest coal supplier, Wyoming has to date resisted the rise of renewable energy—despite having some of the highest annual wind speeds and lowest population densities in the country, making it ideal for wind-farming. In fact, Wyoming is the only state in the US that levies taxes on wind-energy generation, a policy that’s scared away wind-farm developers, despite the billions of federal subsidy dollars available for them. But opportunities like the Goldwind project—while unlikely to absorb all coal miners who have lost their jobs—may change the narrative in Wyoming, so that it looks more like the one the world’s bought into.

https://qz.com/990192/a-chinese-company-wants-to-retrain-wyoming-coal-miners-to-become-wind-farmers/

Maybe Trump will have coal miners build the wall and have Mexico pay for it right after his super secret plan to defeat ISIS. Send natural gas back where it came from. Build a wall to keep out fracking.

Retraining for other skilled trade jobs is the way to do it. Coal jobs are never coming back.

May 26, 2017

Why this photo of political spouses and partners is making waves

(CNN)What's the first thing you noticed about this picture of political spouses and partners, other than Melania Trump's continued mastery of the color black?

It's probably the man in the back row, standing out against the nine women pictured. That's Gauthier Destenay, the First Gentleman of Luxembourg and the husband of the world's only acting openly gay prime minister.

Destenay and Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel wed in 2015, right after Luxembourg legalized gay marriage. When Bettel won the Prime Ministership in 2013, he was already in a civil partnership with Destenay and their sexualities were not a secret.

To be clear, Bettel isn't the only gay prime minister ever, just the only one in office right now. Former Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo and former Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurõardóttir were both public about their sexualities.

Can you name the rest of the people in this photograph? We'll help you out:

First row: First Lady of France Brigitte Macron, First Lady of Turkey Emine Gulbaran Erdogan, First Lady of the US Melania Trump, Queen Mathilde of Belgium, Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg's partner Ingrid Schulerud, Partner of Bulgaria's President Desislava Radeva, partner of Belgium's Prime Minister Amelie Derbaudrenghien

Second row: First Gentleman of Luxembourg Gauthier Destenay, partner of Slovenia's Prime Minister Mojca Stropnik, and First Lady of Iceland Thora Margret Baldvinsdottir.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/world/luxembourg-prime-minister-husband-gauthier-destenay-trnd/index.html

I was expecting more men in this photo. There are a lot of female leaders in Europe.

May 26, 2017

DU ads offering me a free duffle bag if I join the NRA

and apparently they sell insurance for guns too

May 25, 2017

Black Farmer Calls Out Liberal Racism In Powerful Facebook Message

A black farmer has the internet talking after posting a powerful message on social media about race relations in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Chris Newman, owner of the Sylvanaqua Farms in Albemarle County, shared his thoughts on a recent “Love Trumps Hate” counter-protest on Saturday. The rally was held in response to white supremacist Richard Spencer leading a protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“I’d like to appreciate [the Love Trumps Hate rally],” Newman wrote in a Facebook post published on May 17. “But frankly I just don’t.”

Newman went on to call out the subtle racism of his neighbors, who purport to be progressive and inclusive but have yet to acknowledge the fact that Charlottesville is, by his estimation, “the most aggressively segregated place” he’s ever lived in.

The farmer recounted that he’s been racially profiled and questioned by police several times after receiving “strange looks from a passerby.”

“It isn’t Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black,” Newman wrote. “It’s nervous White women in yoga pants with ‘I’m with her’ and ‘Coexist’ stickers on their German SUVs.”

The farmer went on to suggest that residents of the town who are interested in racial progress should consider how to effect change in their own everyday lives.

“People are so busy going after that easy fix, going after that Confederate flag, that they’re not doing the hard thing, which is thinking, how did we get here, and how the hell do we dig out of institutional racism,” Newman wrote.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-farmer-calls-out-liberal-racism-in-powerful-facebook-message_us_5925a027e4b0650cc020eb4d

The racism on our side is more subtle. It rears it's racist head in sneaky ways. Often by people who mean well and don't know or don't want to know they're doing it.
*********************************************************************************
Full Text of Chris Newman's Facebook Post:
A message to Charlottesville about Lee Park from your local Black farmer:

I know some folks are really feeling themselves about this whole Love Trumps Hate counter-rally to Richard Spencer's punch-worthy shenanigans in Lee Park. I'd like to appreciate it, but frankly I just don't.

I've lived in several cities and visited many more before Charlottesville. I like this town for its natural beauty, it's small size, the friendliness of its people, and its food. But folks, here's something else: Charlottesville is by far the most aggressively segregated place I've ever lived in or visited. And that seems a strange thing to have to say about a town that hosts a public university.

I say "aggressively" for two reasons. One, because of how assertive police (and the citizens who summon them) are here with racial profiling. It got so bad in 2014 - 2015 that I stopped renting farmland on estates where I could be easily seen from the road, and I stopped making food deliveries into wealthier neighborhoods because of how often police would "happen by" and sometimes even question me five or ten minutes after I got a strange look from a passerby (usually someone jogging, but occasionally someone in a car). I'm not a paranoid kinda guy, but this happened way too often to be a coincidence.

It isn't Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It's nervous White women in yoga pants with "I'm with Her" and "Coexist" stickers on their German SUVs.

Second is the sheer degree of cultural appropriation going on with businesses in the city proper. It's little things - e.g. shops and other businesses incorporating wide swaths of hiphop culture into their branding while having not a single Black owner, partner, employee, or vendor. And those businesses are KILLING IT here. This is a town where Blackness advances White-owned brands and subjects Black-owned businesses to inspection by law enforcement.

Do you really think that problem comes from people like Richard Spencer?

Check out C'Ville Weekly's Instagram feed when you get a moment, and try not to notice that the few depictions of Black people are limited to sports, singing, criminal justice, or single parenthood. White people, meanwhile, are represented as political activists, chefs, cogs in the gig economy, musicians, dancers, people who get married, visual artists, songwriters, architects, landscapers, thespians, artistic directors, wedge-heel-wearing rugby players, dog lovers, farmers, firefighters, and people who play with their kids in cul de sacs.

Richard Spencer is not the editor of C'Ville Weekly.

Truth is, as a Black dude, I'm far less bothered by the flag wavers in this picture than this town's progressives assuming its race problem has nothing to do with them. The former is a visual inconvenience. The latter could leave my daughters without a father.

So please, put down the candles and instead ask yourself: why is my city like this? Why is life like this for Black people in my wonderful city? The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park.

May 24, 2017

The Emancipation of the MILF

Does sexual freedom belong only to the young? Claire Dederer doesn’t think so. By KIM BROOKS

About six years ago, Claire Dederer realized she had a problem. The problem had to do with sex. It had to do with desire. It had to do with being a middle-aged wife and mother and needing and wanting to be seen and known by new people in a new way, maybe even by people she didn’t particularly like or love or respect all that much. Her problem had something to do with sex but didn’t stop there. It assaulted her notions of what it meant to be a grown-up woman in the world and wanting to have romantic encounters with men who were not her husband. She loved her husband. Obviously, she loved her children, her family, the life they had built together. And at the same time, a part of her wanted to step outside the boundary of the polite, middle-class domestic life they’d drawn around themselves. Or, to put it more crudely, she wanted to fuck around.

At the time of her realization, Dederer had worked for many years as a critic, first in film and then in books. She never planned to be a memoirist, but found herself splicing more and more personal history into whatever review she happened to be working on. After getting married, having kids, and moving to an island in Puget Sound off the coast of Seattle, she became fascinated by the obsessive parenting culture rampant in parts of the Pacific Northwest, and began writing a memoir that would merge the cultural history of the place with her personal history as a child of a complicated separation.

The culmination of these ruminations, Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, is out this week. In it, Dederer tells the story of what happens when a devoted wife and mother in her 40s, a woman in a basically loving and healthy marriage, stops taking care of everyone, stops subsuming her own needs to those of her children and husband, stops repressing her unruly sexual desires, and starts acting like, well … a man. By modern standards, the author’s misbehavior is mild — there is no marriage-destroying, Eat, Pray, Love–style romance or affair. Instead, she yearns and flirts; she stays out late and takes vacations with her best friend instead of her husband; she has a slew of inappropriate email friendships with various suitors, and at her most reckless, allows an unnamed, famous short story writer from California to stick his tongue in her mouth. And yet, as limited as her indiscretions may be, Dederer struggles to find a name for her new desires. If she were a man, she’d be having a typical midlife crisis. In writing about it, she’d be working in the tradition of Philip Roth, Richard Ford, James Salter, Junot Díaz, and dozens of other 20th-century male authors. She’d be behaving like Bill Clinton, Tony Soprano, Don Draper — and countless other touchstones of middle-aged male sexual freedom. But as a woman, she is setting out into the uncharted territory, suggesting, as a few brave souls have now begun to do, that the MILF might not just be a male fetish and a focus of male desire, but a person in her own right, not just an object, but a subject with things she herself would like to do.

The exploration of a mother’s midlife sexuality might not seem groundbreaking, until you think about how few people are doing it, particularly when compared to the destigmatization and taboo-smashing tell-alls younger women have been enacting in recent years. “It’s funny,” she said, the first time we spoke, “how we’ve finally begun to accept that young women might want to have sex, and that this desire doesn’t make them sluts or whores. But this new acceptance goes out the window when a woman gets married and has a baby, the point after which all her sexual desire should be laser-beam focused at her husband, contained to odious date nights and nap-time masturbation.” Is it possible, she asks throughout her book, that middle-aged wives and mothers might want to have sex, too?

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/05/female-sexuality-desire-what-happens-as-women-age.html?mid=facebook_nymag

I'm posting here instead of GD because this is where the moms are.

May 24, 2017

Manchester attack: Three more arrests in bomber investigation

Source: BBC

Three more men have been arrested as police continue to investigate whether Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi acted alone.
Police arrested the three in the city on Wednesday. Abedi's 23-year-old brother was arrested on Tuesday.
Abedi killed 22 and injured 64 when he blew himself up outside an Ariana Grande concert on Monday night.
The UK terror threat level is now up to its highest level of "critical", meaning more attacks may be imminent.
It means military personnel are being deployed to protect key sites.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40023488

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Pics of victims also at link

May 23, 2017

I'm seeing DU ads to join the Secret Service

https://www.secretservice.gov/join/careers/

Agent Mike must know we are good people to recruit from. Maybe a lot of their staff has been quitting lately?

May 22, 2017

The ugly truth behind Saudi Arabia's love for Melania Trump

(CNN) — Donald Trump's first major trip overseas may be fraught with diplomatic land mines for the President, but the Trump administration can at least comfort itself with the clear hit that Melania Trump has been with the Saudi press.

The fact that Melania is communicating with the media and the public in Saudi Arabia -- mainly through what Saudi news reports have deemed her "classy and conservative" fashion choices -- works well in the notoriously anti-woman kingdom. Her intense appeal makes sense, considering the first lady represents so much that Saudi citizens find familiar and can relate to, especially visually. Melania walks behind her husband, is quiet and reserved, does not make obvious demands (at least not ones we can hear), and most importantly, she looks beautiful and polished.

All of that should come as no surprise, given whom Melania is married to. After all, how the Saudi government likes women to behave is similar to how Donald Trump has said he likes women to behave. And they both prefer women to look pretty in pictures, rather than hold actual positions of power.

Melania's husband and the Saudi government also both know and understand the power and value of a good photo opportunity. In fact, fantastic photo opportunities are something the kingdom values and is hypersensitive about, especially ones that are going to be seen around the world.

For them, Melania Trump was perfectly poised in her black Stella McCartney jumpsuit and gilded gold belt. Melania projected a glamorous image for a country where women live under male guardianship, cannot drive, still do not have the full vote, and cannot travel or seek medical attention without male permission.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/opinions/melania-popularity-saudi-arabia-hossain-opinion/index.html

Conservatives love Saudi Arabia. The cartoon American Dad even had an episode on how it was so appealing that they moved there.

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