February 15, 2021

MSNBC, please stop talking about Trump. Give it a try, just for a day or two.....

..... I just turned off Hallie Jackson. Enough with Trump and the "future of the Republican Party".

February 15, 2021

We Worried About Kids and the Internet. We Should Have Been Worried About Adults.

(Slate) “Youngsters Falling Prey to Seducers in Computer Web,” screamed a 1995 headline in the Los Angeles Times. The article by Kim Murphy detailed two instances of runaway teenagers whose parents were sure had been victims of adult predators who groomed them online. The subheading was catchy: “Once candy was the lure. Now strangers are using cyberspace e-mail to attract minors into harm’s way.” Articles like this in major newspapers as well as newsweeklies were part of the discussion of internet dangers that led to congressional action on the topic in the mid-’90s.

But despite our fears over the past few decades, it was not children who were especially vulnerable to the corrupting influences of the internet. It was adults, millions trapped by a collective confabulation spun about pedophilia rings, a stolen election, and a messianic version of Donald Trump.

The internet is not the first new funnel for information that has channeled influence. Over more than a century, Americans have expressed their concerns about each new form of media through fears about children and youth. Younger Americans were supposed to be especially vulnerable to undue influence, influence that would come through direct exposure to cheap publications, movies, radio, television, and the internet. Over multiple generations, Americans tried to guide, control, or censor access to these media under cover of this supposedly greater vulnerability.

But with every new medium, adults are the real suckers.

In the early 20th century, cities attempted to control popular films that were a primary form of entertainment for young working-class women who would crowd into theaters. Concerned about how the cheap nickelodeons showing films with racy plots would influence female sexuality, cities pressured theater owners and filmmakers into the beginnings of a voluntary censorship system. ..............(more)

https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/moral-panics-technology-internet-children-adults.html

February 15, 2021

Student debt is driving more Americans to donate their eggs -- and some suffer lasting complications

Student debt is driving more Americans to donate their eggs — and some suffer lasting complications
I interviewed egg donors around the world. Only in America is it common to sell one's eggs to fund one's education

By DIANE TOBER
FEBRUARY 15, 2021 12:30AM


(Salon) Janine* was raised by a single mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. With resources tight, both she and her sister needed to find a way to put themselves through college. Her sister started donating her eggs for pay once she turned 20, working two jobs and struggling to stay in school. When Janine turned 19, she started donating eggs as well. "I was a desperate college student, living paycheck to paycheck," she told me "So, when my sister told me I could make $7,000 donating eggs, I jumped at the chance. You have to get an education. If it weren't for that desperation, most women wouldn't do it."

The cost of college tuition in the US across all sectors has more than tripled in the past twenty years—well beyond the cost of inflation—making education out of reach for many. The rapidly rising cost of education has led to a rise in student loan debt as parents and students borrow to help ensure their dream of future success.

I've learned through my interviews and surveys with more than 600 egg donors that student debt burden leads some Americans to make medical decisions they might not otherwise make.

Egg donation can help people create the families they desperately desire, and many egg donors have no complications and find egg donation rewarding. However, it is not a medical procedure to be entered into lightly, or under financial duress. Over 60 percent of the US donors I surveyed agreed that "financial need strongly influenced my decision to donate." Forty-five percent had between $10,000 and $100,000 of student loan debt, some with more than that, and spent the money from their egg donations to pay down that debt and other education costs. ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/14/student-debt-is-driving-more-americans-to-donate-their-eggs--and-some-suffer-lasting-complications/

February 14, 2021

With New Lobbying Clout, Big Pot Has Arrived: Cannabis Weekly

(Bloomberg) Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco have garnered a formidable reputation in the lobbying arena over the years. Big Pot is now looking for a piece of the action.

Disparate players from the cannabis industry banded together last week in a new organization, called the U.S. Cannabis Council, to push their interests in Washington, D.C., and state capitals. Meanwhile, Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc. and Corona beer producer Constellation Brands Inc. are becoming more prominent in advocating for their marijuana investments.

The efforts put muscle behind an industry that has grassroots momentum but lacks a unified voice. Given how many causes it’s rallying behind -- proffering cannabis as a solution to problems as diverse as the opioid epidemic, the pain of chronic diseases, pandemic-related unemployment and America’s racial divide -- the lobbying machine is poised to become a major player.

There’s plenty of room to grow. Last year, just $4 million was spent on marijuana lobbying, according to Open Secrets. That’s measly compared to the $27 million that was spent by tobacco lobbyists, and roughly $30 million from the beer, wine and liquor industry. .........(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-14/with-new-lobbying-clout-big-pot-has-arrived-cannabis-weekly?srnd=premium

February 14, 2021

I Wish I Knew How to Quit You....

GOP Finds It Hard to Quit Trump, Forcing a Post-Trial Reckoning


(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s impeachment trial exposed the political dilemma for Republicans struggling to move past the former president, as a majority of GOP senators show they are unwilling to publicly defy him without knowing how tight a grip he still has on the party’s base.

Forty-three Republican senators voted to find Trump not guilty at the trial’s end on Saturday, enough to acquit him on the single impeachment count. A conviction likely would have prevented him from ever running again, but instead he got a reprieve that allows him to remain a presence in Republican politics for now.

That may ultimately force a reckoning for Republicans, who lost the White House and the Senate in 2020 under Trump’s leadership and who may hope the stain of a double impeachment and a deadly riot at the Capitol will deny him a future in the party.

Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who voted to acquit the former president, said Trump’s actions will make it hard for him to go forward as a leader of the GOP or a candidate for president again in 2024. .............(more)

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/gop-finds-it-hard-to-quit-trump-forcing-a-post-trial-reckoning

February 13, 2021

'The moral centre': how Jamie Raskin dominated the stage at Trump's trial

(Guardian UK) Jamie Raskin had finished a face-to-face interview with the Guardian and was on his way home. It was late on Saturday night in October 2018. But then he thought of a point he hadn’t made and, ever fastidious, restarted the conversation by phone.

“Straight white men are already a minority in the Democratic caucus but when the big blue wave hits, we’re going to be moving much closer to parity in terms of women and men, at least on the House side,” he said, a prediction that came true a month later in the midterm elections.

He had only taken office himself in January 2017, representing Maryland’s eighth congressional district. Just four years later, the proud progressive finds himself lead prosecutor in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Senators, pundits and millions of TV viewers have heard his deceptively soothing tones eviscerate the former president.

They were doubly awed when he wove together the political and the personal to share unfathomable grief: his 25-year-old son, Tommy, killed himself on New Year’s Eve after years of struggle with depression. Tommy was buried on 5 January – the day before a violent mob mounted a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. ............(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/13/jamie-raskin-trump-impeachment-trial

February 13, 2021

Representative government, but of whom?

https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1360703942255067137?s=20

February 13, 2021

Detroit's Pages Bookshop to host virtual chat with 'Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide' authors

(Detroit Metro Times) "America is the only advanced nation with a health insurance system that crumbled in the face of COVID-19," an excerpt from Medicare for All: A Citizens Guide reads. "In the United States, millions lost their health insurance along with their jobs as a deadly contagion spread all around them."

The book, released earlier this month, was written by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician, epidemiologist, public health expert, and progressive activist who served as Detroit’s health director and ran for governor in 2018, and Micah Johnson, a resident physician in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Medicare for All: A Citizens Guide is an examination of the American healthcare system, as well as how universal healthcare might function, what it would cost, and the benefits to ensuring affordable coverage to all Americans.

Pages Bookshop in Detroit will host a virtual conversation with both El-Sayed and Johnson to discuss the book and its findings from 6:30-7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9. ..........(more)

https://www.metrotimes.com/the-scene/archives/2021/02/12/pages-bookshop-to-host-virtual-chat-with-medicare-for-all-a-citizens-guide-authors-abdul-el-sayed-and-micah-johnson

February 13, 2021

Calhoun County GOP censures Rep. Meijer over impeachment vote

The Calhoun County Republican Party's executive committee in west Michigan has censured GOP Rep. Peter Meijer over his vote to impeach former President Donald Trump.

The censure, which is a symbolic gesture of disapproval, is the first censure that Meijer has received since the freshman lawmaker joined Democrats and nine other Republicans last month to impeach Trump for his role in instigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. .........(more)

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/13/rep-meijer-censure-calhoun-county-gop-republican-impeachment-vote/4472858001/

February 13, 2021

America's Sickness Goes Far Beyond Trump

America's Sickness Goes Far Beyond Trump
Only by acknowledging the racism, materialism and militarism that animate our country can we begin the process of healing.

ANDREW BACEVICH FEBRUARY 11, 2021


This article first appeared at TomDispatch.

When Martin Luther King preached his famous sermon ​“Beyond Vietnam” at Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, I don’t recall giving his words a second thought. Although at the time I was just up the Hudson River attending West Point, his call for a ​“radical revolution in values” did not resonate with me. By upbringing and given my status as a soldier-in-the-making, radical revolutions were not my thing. To grasp the profound significance of the ​“the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” to which he called his listeners’ attention was beyond my intellectual capacity. I didn’t even try to unpack their meaning.

In that regard, the ensuing decades have filled a void in my education. I long ago concluded that Dr. King was then offering the essential interpretive key to understanding our contemporary American dilemma. The predicament in which we find ourselves today stems from our reluctance to admit to the crippling interaction among the components of the giant triplets he described in that speech. True, racism, extreme materialism, and militarism each deserve?—?and separately sometimes receive?—?condemnation. But it’s the way that the three of them sustain one another that accounts for our nation’s present parlous condition.

Let me suggest that King’s prescription remains as valid today as when he issued it more than half a century ago?—?hence, my excuse for returning to it so soon after citing it in a previous TomDispatch. Sadly, however, neither the American people nor the American ruling class seem any more inclined to take that prescription seriously today than I was in 1967. We persist in rejecting Dr. King’s message.

....(snip)....

By now, it should be incandescently clear that our own forever wars of the twenty-first century, fought on a distinctly lesser scale than Vietnam, though over an even longer period of time, have had a similar effect. The places that the United States bombs, invades, and/​or occupies typically fall into the category of what President Trump once disparaged as ​“shithole countries.” The inhabitants tend to be impoverished, non-white, non-English speaking, and, by American standards, often not especially well-educated. They subscribe to customs and religious traditions that many Americans view as primitive if not altogether alien.

That the average G.I. should deem the lives of Afghans or Iraqis of lesser value than the life of an American may be regrettable, but given our history it can hardly be surprising. A persistent theme of American wars going back to the colonial era is that, once the shooting starts, difference signifies inferiority. .............(more)

https://inthesetimes.com/article/america-donald-trump-militarism-vietnam-martin-luther-king-jr