August 18, 2021

'Don't come here'-Swedish city of Gavle flooded after DOUBLE a month's worth of rain falls overnight

https://www.thelocal.se/20210818/swedish-cities-flooded-after-double-a-months-worth-of-rain-falls-overnight/



People in Gävle are being urged to stay inside after double that of one month’s worth of rain fell in just the space of a few hours. Just before 3am on Wednesday, fire and rescue services in the Gävle area sent out an official warning, urging people to stay at home due to heavy rain and flooding. The warning was lifted later in the morning, but people were still told to be cautious after landslides were reported and roads caved in.

“Police are therefore urging residents of the Gävleborg region not to head out on the roads unless they have to. Police are also urging travellers not to come to Gävleborg,” read a statement on the regional police authority’s website on Wednesday. Several buildings and roads were flooded after 140 millimetres of rain came down in the east coast city between 8pm on Tuesday and 4am on Wednesday, weather agency SMHI told the TT newswire. Normally, around 70 millimetres fall over the whole month of August.

By 10am, SMHI said 161.6 millimetres of rain had come down, breaking the region’s previous rain record of 125.8 millimetres. Schools had been set to open in Gävle on Wednesday, but were closed and students were sent home due to the weather conditions. Preschools remained open with limited staffing. No trains were running between Borlänge and Falun in the Dalarna region on Wednesday morning.



The rain subsided by Wednesday afternoon, but class-one warnings (the least serious on a scale from one to three) for high river flows were in place for Gävleborg and Dalarna, as well as class-one warnings for heavy rain in Norrbotten and the Jämtland mountain regions.



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August 16, 2021

QMAGAt white nationalists/neo nazis, Taliban stanning

https://twitter.com/EyesOnTheRight/status/1427339170620616712

August 12, 2021

This is pure nitrous I fucking love it. #GetVaccinated

https://twitter.com/Tim_Tweeted/status/1425593946395320326

August 12, 2021

Bernard Arnault's dethroned Bezos as the world's richest & becomes the 2nd person worth over $200bn

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#1a2bcf563d78

August 12, 2021

New U.S. Census Data to Set Off Bruising Gerrymandering Battle

Let the Gerrymandering (and the Legal Battles) Begin

The Census Bureau will release data on Thursday, kicking off a huge fight over political redistricting, with control of Congress potentially hanging in the balance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/us/politics/census-redistricting-data-gerrymandering.html



The Census Bureau will release long-awaited district-level results on Thursday, setting off what is expected to be the most bruising, litigious and consequential redistricting battle in a generation, with control of Congress hanging in the balance and gerrymandering threatening to lock in quasi-permanent majorities in state legislatures across the country. With Democrats clinging to a slim margin in the House of Representatives, control of the chamber in 2022 could be decided through congressional redistricting alone: Republican-leaning states like Texas and Florida are adding new seats through reapportionment, and G.O.P.-dominated state legislatures will steer much more of the redistricting process, allowing them to draw more maps than Democrats.

In a matter of days — if history is any guide — as soon as state officials can crunch census data files into their more modern formats, an intense process of mapmaking, political contention, legal wrangling, well-financed opinion-shaping and ornery public feedback will unfold in statehouses, courthouses, on the air and even on the streets in regions of special contention. The redistricting fight arrives amid one of the most protracted assaults on voting access since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, an effort that has made the right to vote among the most divisive issues in American politics. And redistricting will take place this fall without critical guardrails that the Voting Rights Act had erected: a process known as preclearance that ensured oversight of states with a history of discrimination. The Supreme Court effectively neutered that provision in a 2013 ruling, meaning that it could take lawsuits — and years — to force the redrawing of districts that dilute the voting power of minority communities.

The looming nationwide struggle over congressional and state legislative maps will also occur on an extraordinarily accelerated timeline. The necessary census data is arriving months later than normal because of pandemic-related delays, leaving state legislatures, independent commissions and others responsible for drawing new maps to work extremely quickly to establish new districts before primary contests begin next year. The compressed schedule has already led to some pre-emptive lawsuits, mostly filed by Democrats, even before any maps were drawn. The two parties and allied outside groups have set aside tens of millions of dollars to pay for legal challenges. “For both parties, redistricting is like an amped-up war this cycle,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Whatever it takes, people will do.”

Despite the pressure to hurry, it could be September before mapmakers are able to give much indication of how new districts are shaping up, further ratcheting up the pressure on states with constitutional mandates to finish redistricting this calendar year. In the decade since the last round of map-drawing, two Supreme Court decisions have altered the landscape for Democrats, voting-rights groups and civil rights leaders in pushing back against what they deem egregious gerrymandering. In 2019, the high court ruled that gerrymandering for partisan gain was beyond the reach of federal courts, leaving such claims to be argued at the state level. Gerrymandering to dilute minority voting power is still illegal under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, but experts worry that now it could be possible to disguise a racial gerrymander as a partisan one. More concerning for voting rights groups was the 2013 ruling’s removal of the preclearance requirement in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. While preclearance scarcely prevented all gerrymandering, experts argue that it created a deterrent and that its absence this year opens the door to abuse.

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August 12, 2021

This Is How To Stop The Next Republican Coup

We now know how far Republicans will go to win elections, so now is the time for Democrats to prevent them from attempting another violent coup.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/this-is-how-to-stop-the-next-republican



In the far distant past of post-9/11 2001, the Republican Party was so patriotic that not being a Republican probably meant you hated America. We know this because Republicans told us so on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But that was then, this is now. These days, to be a Republican means actively and openly rooting for America to lose. Zack Beauchamp of Vox explains:



America, The Beautiful. America, The Enemy

Let’s skip the thought exercise where we imagine how the right would react if the left did this. We already know Republican hypocrisy has no limits and Republicans have no shame. Instead, pay attention to the fact that Republicans are not just rooting for Democrats to fail, but America itself. Republicans, once the most vocal defenders of all things America, are now Team “Anyone but America”. They swoon over the dictators of other countries that oppose the United States. Mind you, these are the same people who demanded the execution of those who did not think we should invade Iraq. Why? Because they were not sufficiently loyal to America. Fast forward twenty years and Republicans think bloodthirsty maniacs like Viktor Orban are heroes while spitting on their own government:

https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1423000298956726273
Tucker Carlson sure has a funny way of upholding the GOP slogan of “America First”. But he’s far from alone. The core ideology of the right wing is no longer “America, the beautiful” but rather “America, the enemy”:

https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1366407391533760518
Republicans openly talk about their support for authoritarian regimes and how enamoured they are of coups that topple democracies. Disgraced former Trump national security adviser and current treasonous pig Michael Flynn called for one right here in America to screams of delight from a Republican audience:

https://twitter.com/MC_Hyperbole/status/1399129297240084489
Where’s The Love?

These are not people who love America. These are people who hate everything about the country they are living in and are plotting to destroy right in front of us. They hate our laws (except when they can be used to oppress people they hate), our system of government (except when it can be used to oppress people they hate), and they hate the culture (except, ah, you get the idea). They want to rewind America to a past where instead of being imaginary victims, they can be the racist monsters they dream of being but with none of the consequences. You can take a deep dive into the numerous pathologies at the heart of the Republican hatred for the United States but it all boils down to one simple fact: Even in an electoral system heavily tilted in favour of the Republican Party, they are slowly but steadily losing. Of the last eight presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote seven times. Even with extreme gerrymandering and even more extreme voter suppression, they lost control of the House and the Senate under Trump. Republicans are openly bragging about using even more extreme versions of both to take back Congress but it’s clear that, sooner or later, the GOP will start losing every election. Faced with this reality, Republicans had a choice to either modify their politics to appeal to a wider base or embrace fascism. Once the GOP decided to centre its entire message around White grievance and racism with the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, there was no going back. To truly shift the party away from racism would have been (and remains) electoral suicide.

The Politics Of Hate.................

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August 12, 2021

Invasion of the Baby-Haters

Conservatives like J. D. Vance have invented a bogeyman of childlessness, and are using actual kids as political pawns.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/jd-vance-childless-left-culture-wars/619705/



Desperate times demand that America’s babies and children stand up and man the ramparts of the culture wars. The latest recruitment effort began with a declaration by the Ohio senate candidate J. D. Vance, who held that the “childless left,” exemplified, in his view, by politicians like Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, is turning the country into a rump state of imperious cat ladies. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country,” Vance argued, by way of remedy, “but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children … We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed.” It’s no armed insurrection, but it’s still a sorry fate for a generation of children who, by no fault of their own, are being transformed into a political talisman for the right. And for no reason: Most people, regardless of politics or identity, end up having kids at some point.

Vance’s proposal was a hit on Fox and Friends, and The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, picked up the line of thinking in another segment that aired on the network earlier this week, arguing, inter alia, that “woke, socialist progressives” hate babies “more than anything else,” and that the left detests the fact that there are children, period. All the usual suspects—radical environmentalists agitating for depopulation, career-oriented girl bosses, critical race theorists—made their usual appearances, each offered as evidence of a leftward political bent that’s thoroughly anti-child.

Is it so? Seldom has it been harder to say what huge political coalitions like “the left” and “the right”—which, in the United States, are primarily characterized at the moment by infighting and high-stakes factionalism—think as corporate entities. Nor is it easy to make a statement about politics or culture that will actually be received with any kind of sincerity. The culture wars have ground on so fiercely and for so long that the very infrastructure of public debate has become one of its chief casualties; even if it were still possible to know with certainty what “the left” thinks of babies, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to say. Nobody would believe it, anyway.

And so whether you believe it is ultimately a matter of what kinds of media you like to consume. Our radically polarized discourse rewards the most outrageous expressions of either side’s respective ideas, which makes locating totally obnoxious political positions not just effortless but nearly unavoidable. If you want to find a self-identified progressive chastising breeders for saturating the planet with carbon-emitting, snot-slinging vectors of pollution and disease, some social-media site’s genius algorithm will serve such a person up to you without delay. Now that political victories are scored in liberal tears or conservative outrage, the incentives to pursue anything else are fairly minimal.

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August 11, 2021

Kepa the hero as Chelsea beat Villarreal on penalties to win Uefa Super Cup

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/aug/11/chelsea-villarreal-super-cup-final-match-report



Talking points can arrive when you least expect them. With a minute remaining of a humdrum, lethargic extra-time that Chelsea and Villarreal could clearly have done without, Thomas Tuchel made his first bold move of the season. Kepa Arrizabalaga, a £71m player named among the substitutes for the Super Cup, stepped forward to replace Edouard Mendy. Tuchel’s strategy was to be fully justified as Kepa, at full stretch to his right, batted away Raúl Albiol’s penalty to claim the trophy for Chelsea. The scale of celebrations from the Champions League winners – and the dejection easily visible among the Villarreal contingent – painted a picture of something that mattered.

Kepa’s contribution, such a belated one, was crucial. And yet it will be a surprise if he plays against Crystal Palace on Saturday. “We needed to do what was good for the team,” shrugged Tuchel. “Kepa has the better percentages at saving penalties.” Data gurus have a lot to answer for.

With Romelu Lukaku set to begin imminently for Chelsea, Tuchel must be content. His team were dominant in the first half here, with the failure to fully capitalise on that pressure likely to be offset by the prolific Belgian striker’s return. Villarreal, so pleasing on the eye under Unai Emery, offered considerably more threat in the second period but Chelsea looked – as should be the case – the superior side. Tuchel had gone to great length during pre-match media duties to emphasise the significance of a fixture many would not unreasonably regard as a glorified friendly, even going so far as to suggest that he would be “angry” should any of his players treat Villarreal lightly.

This game was played amid a broader, uplifting context. There was a time when Belfast would never have been deemed suitable – or, to be precise, safe – for a marquee game such as this. Northern Ireland’s societal growth, the redevelopment of Windsor Park itself and the nation’s international football momentum as started by Michael O’Neill were all factors that made this venue choice sensible. European or global events need no longer be shielded from a city reborn.

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https://twitter.com/btsportfootball/status/1425575480946745347

August 11, 2021

Joe Manchin voices 'serious concerns' about $3.5tn budget after Senate approval

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/aug/11/senate-budget-bill-manchin-schumer-joe-biden-covid-coronavirus-latest-updates?page=with:block-6113c94b8f0892081f6d324d#block-6113c94b8f0892081f6d324d

Senate Democrats approved the blueprint for their $3.5tn budget bill early this morning, after a marathon session that included an hours-long “vote-a-rama” on the proposal. The 50-49 vote fell along party lines, as Senate Republicans continued to fiercely criticize the bill as a reckless spending spree. Because Democrats are advancing the bill using reconciliation, they do not need any Republican support to pass it.

“It’s been quite a night,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote. “We still have a ways to go, but we’ve taken a giant step forward to transforming America. This is the most significant piece of legislation that’s been considered in decades.”

But there are still serious hurdles ahead for the bill. One of the most centrist members of the Senate Democratic caucus, Joe Manchin, said after the vote that he has “serious concerns about the grave consequences” of another large spending package.

“Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession – not an economy that is on the verge of overheating,” Manchin said. If Schumer cannot keep Manchin on board, the bill will not pass the evenly divided Senate, so the stakes could not be higher.

https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/1425435209244332032

August 11, 2021

The Fastest-Growing Group of American Evangelicals (Latino)

A new generation of Latino Protestants is poised to transform our religious and political landscapes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/latinos-will-determine-future-american-evangelicalism/619551/



In 2007, when Obe and Jacqueline Arellano were in their mid-20s, they moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Aurora, Illinois, with the dream of starting a church. They chose Aurora, a midsize city with about 200,000 residents, mostly because about 40 percent of its population is Latino. Obe, a first-generation Mexican American pastor, told me, “We sensed God wanted us there.” By 2010, the couple had “planted a church,” the Protestant term for starting a brand-new congregation. This summer, the Arellanos moved to Long Beach, California, to pastor at Light & Life Christian Fellowship, which has planted 20 churches in 20 years. Their story is at once singular and representative of national trends: Across the United States, more Latino pastors are founding churches than ever before, a trend that challenges conventional views of evangelicalism and could have massive implications for the future of American politics.

Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church and converting to evangelical Protestantism in increased numbers, and evangelical organizations are putting more energy and resources toward reaching potential Latino congregants. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the country, and Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity—meaning they tend to go to church, pray, and read the Bible more often than both Anglo Protestants and Latino Catholics, according to Mark Mulder, a sociology professor at Calvin University and a co-author of Latino Protestants in America. At the same time, a major demographic shift is under way. Arellano, who supports Light & Life’s Spanish-speaking campus, Luz y Vida, told me, “By 2060, the Hispanic population in the United States is expected to grow from 60 million to over 110 million.” None of this is lost on either Latino or Anglo evangelical leadership: They know they need to recruit and train Latino pastors if they’re going to achieve what Arellano describes as “our vision to see that the kingdom of God will go forward and reach more people and get into every nook and cranny of society.”

The stakes of intensified Latino evangelicalism are manifold, and they depend on what kind of evangelicalism prevails across the country. The term evangelical has become synonymous with a voting bloc of Anglo cultural conservatives, but in general theological terms, evangelicals are Christians who believe in the supremacy of the Bible and that they are compelled to spread its gospel. Some Christians who identify with the theological definition fit the political stereotype, but others don’t. That’s true among evangelical Latino leaders too—they have very different interpretations of how the teachings of Jesus Christ call them to act. Every pastor I spoke with told me that they want to see more Latino pastors in leadership positions, and they each had a different take on what new Latino leadership could mean for the future of evangelicalism. When we spoke over the phone, Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and the pastor of New Season Worship, in Sacramento, California, told me, “We’re not extending our hand out, asking, ‘Can you help us plant churches?’ We’re coming to primarily white denominations and going, ‘You all need our help.’ This is a flipping of the script.”

Although Latino congregations are too diverse to characterize in shorthand, one of the few declarative statements that can be made about Latino Protestants is a fact borne out with numbers: They are likelier than Latino Catholics to vote Republican. The expansion of Latino evangelicalism bucks assumptions that Democrats and progressives will soon have a clear advantage as the white church declines and the Hispanic electorate rises. “Some counterintuitive things that have happened [in our national politics] would make more sense if we better understood the faith communities that exist within Latinx Protestantism,” Mulder told me over the phone, alluding to the differing perspectives Latinos hold on many issues, including immigration, and how more Latinos voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 than in 2016. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Protestant affiliation correlated more with Hispanic approval of Trump’s job in office than age or gender.

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excellent longform article, much more at the top link