October 13, 2020

Michigan billboard campaign contrasts Trump's words against Jesus'

(Detroit Free Press) HOLLAND — A national nonprofit is launching an anti-Trump billboard campaign targeting Christian voters in the Holland and Grand Rapids area.

The campaign, called "His Words Matter," is an effort by the liberal evangelical group Vote Common Good to persuade Christian voters that the things President Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail and in office "stand in opposition to the words of Jesus Christ."

The billboards juxtapose quotes from the president with the words of Jesus.

One billboard, for example, shows an image of Jesus with the phrase "Turn the other cheek," drawn from Jesus's words in Matthew 5:39, next to an image of Trump and the words "I'd like to punch him in the face," a comment Trump made about a protester who was removed from one of his 2016 campaign rallies. ..............(more)

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/10/13/billboard-contrasts-words-trump-jesus/5976842002/

October 13, 2020

The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?

The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist?
The region is unravelling faster than anyone could once have predicted. But there may still be time to act

Gloria Dickie
Tue 13 Oct 2020 05.00 EDT


(Guardian UK) At the end of July, 40% of the 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf, located on the north-western edge of Ellesmere Island, calved into the sea. Canada’s last fully intact ice shelf was no more.

On the other side of the island, the most northerly in Canada, the St Patrick’s Bay ice caps completely disappeared.

Two weeks later, scientists concluded that the Greenland Ice Sheet may have already passed the point of no return. Annual snowfall is no longer enough to replenish the snow and ice loss during summer melting of the territory’s 234 glaciers. Last year, the ice sheet lost a record amount of ice, equivalent to 1 million metric tons every minute.

The Arctic is unravelling. And it’s happening faster than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago. Northern Siberia and the Canadian Arctic are now warming three times faster than the rest of the world. In the past decade, Arctic temperatures have increased by nearly 1C. If greenhouse gas emissions stay on the same trajectory, we can expect the north to have warmed by 4C year-round by the middle of the century. .............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/oct/13/arctic-ice-melting-climate-change-global-warming

October 13, 2020

I sent in my absentee ballot and verified that it was received.

Doing my part to get the Uhaul over to 1600 Pennsylvania.

October 13, 2020

These Michigan regions are key to 2020 election

(Detroit Free Press) For Joe Biden to beat President Donald Trump, he’ll likely need to take back Michigan, a state that historically has been more supportive of Democrats than most others in the Rust Belt.

No state won by Trump in 2016 was closer than Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a mere 10,704 votes — or about two-tenths of 1%. His path to the White House was forged by breaking through the traditionally Democratic “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

It was close in all three states. But as former first lady Michelle Obama said at the Democratic convention, Trump’s win in Michigan amounted to a difference of only about two votes for every precinct in the state.

....(snip)....

The outcome, however, will still largely come down to these areas:

Detroit



Four years ago, Clinton did remarkably well in Detroit, winning 95% of the vote. That was down only slightly from the 97.5% that Obama got here in 2012 when he beat Republican Mitt Romney.

Even so, the difference was large enough that, had she matched Obama's support, she likely would have won Michigan. ............(more)

https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/politics/elections/2020/10/12/michigan-battleground-regions-2020-trump-biden-detroit/5828629002/

October 12, 2020

Donald Trump's great performance nears its dramatic climax: Stay tuned!

Donald Trump's great performance nears its dramatic climax: Stay tuned!
Is Trump just a performer or a would-be fascist dictator? If you see a contradiction, you're missing the point

ANDREW O'HEHIR
OCTOBER 12, 2020 5:05PM


(Salon) If it weren't for the human lives damaged or destroyed by Donald Trump's presidency — the 215,000 or so killed by the coronavirus is only the beginning, of course — the whole insane experience could be understood as a brilliant, confrontational work of performance art. It's a vulgar and moronic performance, to be sure, and one that pushes the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief to its outer limits. But it's also a work of indisputable genius, one that has hypnotized media and public around the world for the better part of five years.

Viewed through the dark lens of a fully nihilistic or totalitarian aesthetics, where the work of art transcends all ordinary morality — and if Donald Trump had a theory of aesthetics, that would be it — even the cruelty and recklessness of his performance is an aspect of its brilliance. From the beginning, Trump told us that he could commit murder in public without alienating his supporters. Many of us understood that as a figure of speech. His greatest and most malicious accomplishment in public life (so far) has been to prove, on a grand scale, that it was literally true.

To cite another example, there is no viable argument that the partnership between Trump and Stephen Miller, his most notably sadistic adviser, has been politically successful. Almost all of their vindictive anti-immigrant agenda has been wildly unpopular, and much of it has been abandoned or thrown out by the courts. But as a theatrical display of faux-macho dominance, fueled by shared bitterness and unconcealed racial resentment, the Trump-Miller act has been immensely satisfying to its intended audience.

To suggest that Trump is fundamentally a salesman, a con man and a performer is certainly nothing new. He has been shaped by the worlds of New York real estate, tabloid publicity, professional wrestling and reality TV, where bullshit is everything and even the physical reality of land, buildings and human bodies is a disputable afterthought. But some people seem to get stuck on an imaginary dichotomy or contradiction between Trump as showman and Trump as wannabe tyrant, as if his oft-expressed desire to seize full power and rule forever were not in itself an aspect of the performance.

.....(snip).....

Given the pimped-out, pseudo-Wagnerian theater of TrumpWorld, a spectacular auto-da-fé is the only remotely adequate way to bring down the curtain. He will of course proclaim this self-immolation to be a great victory, and as seen in the rearview mirror of history, he may have a point. Like Satan, Trump has shown us how far we have fallen and how easily we are corrupted. To see him as the villain of the story is missing the point. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/12/donald-trumps-great-performance-nears-its-dramatic-climax-stay-tuned/

October 12, 2020

'He just thinks about himself': America's reckless, ill president

'He just thinks about himself': America's reckless, ill president
Trump and his circle have disregarded basic health protections and shown willful indifference towards the safety of others

Ed Pilkington
@edpilkington
Mon 12 Oct 2020 03.00 EDT


(Guardian UK) Of all the cornucopia of tone-deaf and offensive remarks made by the president of the United States in almost four years in office, one proposition he made to the American people last week must surely rank among the top 10.

“Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he said in a tweet. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

Donald Trump posted those words at 2.37pm on 5 October from the luxury of his four-room suite in Walter Reed medical center. He was surrounded by a team of a dozen world-class doctors infusing him with a unique cocktail of experimental drugs for Covid-19 that would have cost an ordinary American hundreds of thousands of dollars to procure.

About an hour earlier, data scientists at Johns Hopkins University released their latest figures for the pandemic. They showed that at least 7.5 million Americans had contracted the disease, and that 209,881 had died – a death rate towering over most developed countries and 2,000 times that of humble Vietnam.

.....(snip).....

It is hard to overstate the willful indifference towards the health and safety of those around them – and of themselves – that such behavior entailed. In a wider sense, it also exuded a disregard for the security of the American people, sending a message that health protocols are for wimps, even within the beating heart of the US government. ...........(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/12/donald-trump-covid-reckless-president

October 12, 2020

Donald Trump's health: A new front in the right's long war against reality

(Salon) Last Sunday morning, the medical team supervising President Trump's care at Walter Reed Medical Center returned to the microphones to address misinformation they had divulged the previous day. The president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, admitted he had obfuscated the fact that Trump had been administered oxygen and explained his misleading statements by saying he was "trying to reflect the upbeat attitude" of Trump and "didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction…"

This bizarre episode capped off a truly strange weekend in which the condition of the president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, was puzzled over as one conflicting account after another battled for precedence. It was reminiscent of the propaganda-laden crises of authoritarian states and failed nations, times in which leaders were either perfectly healthy or functionally dead and crises either under control or raging unabated.

The disturbing truth is that this seemingly inexplicable moment is the result of a decades-long war over the very nature of reality within America. I had struggled to understand this before writing "American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People" and finding that modern American history has been dominated by this conflict and the Republican Party's insistence on constructing an alternate reality to aid in its consolidation of power.

.....(snip).....

But with more than 214,000 deaths so far during the coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous consequences of climate change as evident as the flaming maelstroms on the West Coast — not to mention an ailing president who is either all better, improving or gravely ill, or maybe all three at once — it is time to recognize the manipulation that has occurred and the necessity to move beyond a war on objective reality. As perhaps even President Trump's partisan doctors could be made to admit, propaganda simply does not exist at the microscopic level. ....(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/11/donald-trumps-health-a-new-front-in-the-rights-long-war-against-reality/

October 12, 2020

In the stunning yet grim "The Last Ice," melting glaciers and development threaten Inuit way of life

In the stunning yet grim "The Last Ice," melting glaciers and development threaten Inuit way of life
The Nat Geo Wild film captures how these indigenous people are suffering from cultural and environmental changes

GARY M. KRAMER
OCTOBER 12, 2020 2:00PM


(Salon) The stunning National Geographic documentary, "The Last Ice" may sound like it is about climate change — and the film does address that hot-button issue — but its greater focus is the cultural changes that have impacted the Inuit communities in the Pikialasorsuaq region, where Canada and Greenland meet.

The film, directed by Scott Ressler, is a clarion call. The Inuit community depends on the animals as well as the ice, which is being threatened not just by melting, but by the white man's development. Greed is prompting Russians, Europeans and the Chinese, to look into shipping routes, oil extraction, and tourism in the area, hoping to pump billions of dollars into the global economy.

As the documentary shrewdly shows, this is not the first time Inuit in the Eastern Arctic have been exploited. John Amagoalik, dubbed "The Father of Nunavut," (he was instrumental in lobbying for native rights and securing a land claim agreement) remembers being treated, "Not as a human being, but as less than a human being," when his community was forcibly relocated. Moreover, Danish and Canadian governments took children to residential schools to "civilize" them and, as Amagoalik says, "Turn them into white people." He reports on the physical, mental, and even sexual abuse that took place as a result. Other stories of colonialization and outsiders coming into the Inuit's homeland are recounted as well.

....(snip)....

While the people and the sense of place is appealing, "The Last Ice" is not a tourist advertisement. The testimonies of the subjects, who mourn the breakdown of their way of life, are affecting and impassioned. This important documentary provides a vital, humanizing glimpse into a community of indigenous people and their way of life that is, like the melting glaciers, changing much too quickly and not by choice. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/12/the-last-ice-review-nat-geo-wild-indigenous/

October 12, 2020

Detroit opens 21 new satellite sites for voters to pick up and drop off absentee ballots.

(NYT) Election officials opened 21 satellite voting sites on Monday in Detroit, where election headquarters and city hall have been open for absentee voting for the past 10 days. The new sites, set up across the city, allow voters to pick up or drop off absentee ballots.

A handful of communities around the state have opened additional satellite offices for absentee voting, but Detroit’s effort, which also includes 30 ballot drop boxes around the city, is the largest effort in Michigan.

The number of people who have requested absentee ballots — more than 2.7 million, according to Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson — has far exceeded the 1.1 million people who voted absentee in 2016. More than 380,000 people have already returned their absentee ballots. ....... (more)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/us/elections/detroit-opens-21-new-satellite-sites-for-voters-to-pick-up-and-drop-off-absentee-ballots.html

October 12, 2020

Monkey flinging s***

President Donald Trump on Monday angrily attacked protesters in Portland, Oregon who pulled down statues over the weekend and suggested they were less than human.

Reacting to reports of statues being toppled in Portland, the president took to Twitter to once again call for statue vandals to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

“Put these animals in jail, now,” the president wrote. “The Radical Left only knows how to take advantage of very dumb “leadership” fools. This is Biden! Law & Order!” .....(more)

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/trump-calls-protesters-animals-who-should-be-put-in-jail/