April 12, 2019

Some people are uncomfortable with touchers like Biden. Should they set the rules?

The unwritten rule can be as indelible as any chiseled into a tablet. That’s its genius and its curse. But because norms recalibrate, and today’s are still sorting themselves out, not everyone got the invisible memo that says a person shall not hug, pat, brush, graze, stroke, clasp, rub, squeeze or nuzzle another without first obtaining or at least intuiting consent.

Joe Biden certainly didn’t get that memo. He has operated on his own tactile terms for years, and now he faces an unexpected hurdle as he ponders a twilight run for the White House. Several women have said that when Biden’s exuberant greetings or gestures of support involved touching them, they felt uncomfortable, leading some progressives to hint that he should sit this one out.

Manhandling, assault, uninvited sexual touching — that sort of contact has long violated social norms (as well as laws). But the move to regulate behavior that makes people “uncomfortable”? This treads on newer turf. Life presents “uncomfortable” moments daily, after all, and they differ from person to person. Should rejecting discomfort be the new norm? Should it be what makes me uncomfortable? Which comfort level should dictate? Good luck finding the line of demarcation. Even if we could, such a taboo would set up a Blakeian battle pitting innocence against experience. “Someone should put the bloody brakes on it,” says Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University and an evangelist for social touch.

Norms governing touch are headed to a place where they can cause harm, says McGlone, who studies C-tactile afferents, the nerve fibers that respond to gentle touch. C-tactile afferents are “beautifully, exquisitely evolved,” McGlone says, and without the touch that they respond to, babies have weaker neural responses and longer hospital stays, do not gain as much weight and are more at risk for autism. But the benefits derived from this nerve fiber — he’s fond of calling it “the Higgs boson of the social brain” — don’t end in infancy. McGlone points to higher rates of mortality among lonely people, who make up a large proportion of the elderly. What do the lonely elderly have in common? They don’t get touched, he says. “Don’t piss around with 3 million years of evolution,” McGlone admonishes. It “doesn’t make mistakes.” Social touch is “a biological necessity.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/some-people-are-uncomfortable-with-touchers-like-biden-should-they-set-the-rules/2019/04/12/9f8a49da-5bbb-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html

March 6, 2019

TERRA INCOGNITA: GROWING ANTI-JEWSH RHETORIC IN THE U.S.

They say that Anti-semitism isn't systemic. Jews are white supremacists. Jews have dual loyalty and pledge allegiance to Israel. That is the new nexus of anti-Jewish rhetoric percolating up in the US among activists and even in Congress.

It began innocently enough with criticism of Israel and attempts to connect that criticism to other social justice priorities. But over time, the whispering campaign has grown to a crescendo that legitimizes a worldview that is rapidly becoming more toxic. We need to understand this growing discussion as part of a puzzle. Each piece forms its part, and together the parts become a milieu that fosters hatred against Jews in the US.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Growing-anti-Jewsh-retoric-in-the-US-582468

March 4, 2019

Purple Daisy

March 1, 2019

Warding off hunger, Venezuelans find meals in garbage bins

CARACAS (Reuters) - Tony, a 36-year old security guard, rummages through the garbage bins of a wealthy district in Caracas on his days off work, scavenging for food as Venezuela’s economic meltdown has left even the employed struggling to find enough to eat.

“I smell it and if it smells good, then I take it home,” said Tony, who declined to disclose his last name because he does not want his wife and four children to know how he has been putting food on their table for more than a year.

He said he typically finds scraps of meat, cheese and pieces of vegetables on his garbage runs. “I wash it with vinegar, a lot of water, and I add onion and sauce.

Scenes of Venezuelans picking through garbage in a search for something to eat has for years been a symbol of the nation’s economic meltdown, which has been marked by widespread shortages of food and medicine as well as hyperinflation.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-trash/warding-off-hunger-venezuelans-find-meals-in-garbage-bins-idUSKCN1QI503

March 1, 2019

What makes her a "progressive prosecutor" exactly?

Kamala Harris takes hits on her criminal justice Record



As Kamala Harris positions for a likely presidential run that could be announced as early as this week, the California senator fielded an early hit on her criminal justice record Thursday in the form of a scathing opinion piece in The New York Times.

Digging into Harris' long and complex record as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, University of San Francisco associate law professor Lara Bazelon took central aim at Harris' contention that she was a "progressive prosecutor," who sought to right injustice and change the criminal justice system from within.

"Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as district attorney and then the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent," wrote Bazelon, the former director of Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. "Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/politics/kamala-harris-criminal-justice/index.html

She supported three strikes laws which disproportionately affected PoC, supported the death penalty, actively kept innocent people in prison, tried to put parents in jail because their kids skipped school, and just a few years ago, laughed at the idea of marijuana legalization.

February 12, 2019

not even close to the truth

This is where liberals seem to go off the rails.

Jews were living in Israel when the British were fighting off Romans. Your own messiah was living in JUDEA as a JEW in the year 1.

Why is it so hard for you to admit that the Arabs conquered Israel, Levant and Mahgreb?

It's the real history.

Stop making excuses for Arab imperialism.

February 12, 2019

where are the phonecians?

Where are the philistines, the amorites, the hitites, the Byzantines, the canannites, the ottomans, the babalonians?

All gone, except the Jewish tribe and some remnants of other indigenous groups like the Samaritans.

The Jewish people are indigenous to Israel, Judea and Samaria. The Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. Our rights are described in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If you have a problem with that then you have a problem with all indigenous groups like NAs and First Peoples of Canada. There is no difference.

The Palestinian Arabs and their supporting Arab countries lost a war of Genocide against the early Zionists are were rewarded with refugee status and concurrent payments. Interestingly the nazis were not given refugee status after WW2 and no one seemed to care when the west and Russia carved up Germany, in violation of international law.

If anyone owes the Palestinians anything it's Jordan and GB, the Israelis have tried time after time to work things out, even ceding land, to no avail.

You know the real irony here is that Israel liberated Palestine in 1967 from Jordan and Egypt after the Arabs second attempt at genocide failed, no one seemed to care when they illegally annexed the west bank and Gaza, wonder why.

If Israel hadn't liberated Palestine in 1967 there would be no such thing as a Palestinian, they would be Jordanian or Egyptian.