Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalDonald Trump Jr. Is Going Full QAnon
Donald Trump Jr. is now posting memes implying the media is downplaying child sex trafficking, the latest example of his embrace of the fringe far-right and the conspiracy theories that define it.
The former president’s oldest child is one of the most prominent conservatives on social media, and over the weekend he posted an image to his 5.2 million Instagram followers which said: “They should start reporting the number of kids that go missing every day the way they report COVID numbers.”
The meme Trump posted has existed since last year, and hits two targets with a lot of overlap: QAnon’s obsession with child sex trafficking and the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 700,000 Americans but many on the far-right nonetheless believe has been overblown.
“I’d be much more interested in this… and I imagine this would be much more enlightening to others as well,” Trump Jr. said in the caption. He also tagged Gina Carano, the actress and former MMA fighter who was dropped from the cast of ‘The Mandalorian’ earlier this year after she compared criticism of conservatives to treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvzw9z/donald-trump-jr-qanon-conspiracies
High schoolers are training to drive 18-wheelers amid a shortage of truck drivers
When thinking about the trucking industry, the first thing that comes to mind about its drivers is that they tend to be older — industry experts say the average trucker is 54 years old. But given the nationwide truck driver shortage, that's now changing.
A high school in California is now training teens to enter the industry through its truck driving school program.
Patterson High School in Patterson, Calif., is one of the first non-vocational high schools in the country to offer a truck-driving program for students.
The elective course, which is open to seniors, is a part of the school's Career Technical Education Program — helping students learn workplace skills through hands-on training.
"A lot of [students] who enroll in the course have never considered trucking as a career," instructor Dave Dein told NPR. "Trucking doesn't have a great reputation and it comes with a lot of misconceptions about what exactly a truck driver is."
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/13/1045463623/high-schoolers-are-training-to-drive-18-wheelers-amid-a-shortage-of-truck-driver
Even Colorado's Largest Wildfire Was No Match For Beavers
Deep in the Cameron Peak burn scar, nestled among charred hills, there’s an oasis of green — an idyllic patch of trickling streams that wind through a lush grass field. Apart from a few scorched branches on the periphery, it’s hard to tell that this particular spot was in the middle of Colorado’s largest-ever wildfire just a year ago.
This wetland was spared thanks to the work of beavers.
The mammals, quite famously, dam up streams to make ponds and a sprawling network of channels. Beavers are clumsy on land, but talented swimmers; so the web of pools and canals lets them find safety anywhere within the meadow.
On a recent visit to that patch of preserved land in Poudre Canyon, ecohydrologist Emily Fairfax emphasized the size of the beavers’ canal network.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t even count them,” she said. “It’s a lot. There’s at least 10 ponds up here that are large enough to see in satellite images. And then between all those ponds is just an absolute spiderweb of canals, many of which are too small for me to see until I’m here on the ground.”
https://www.kunc.org/environment/2021-09-23/even-colorados-largest-wildfire-was-no-match-for-beavers
Kentucky's backroad churches may be key to saving hospitals overwhelmed by COVID
In the end it was the delta variant that drove Rose Mitchell, 89, down the winding mountain road in Smilax, Ky., to the Full Gospel Church of Jesus Christ to get the shot. Her pastor, Billy Joe Lewis, had told his congregation that, No, ma'am, a COVID-19 vaccine would not leave the "mark of the beast" nor rewrite their genetic codes.
Mitchell, who has known the deaths of eight of her 13 children over the years, was done taking chances with the virus stealing up the valleys along Cutshin Creek.
"That stuff's getting so bad, I was afraid to not take it," she says, sitting in her daughter's car in the church parking lot. "I said, 'Well, if all the rest of them are going to take it, I'll take it too.' "
Kentucky is in the midst of a COVID-19 wildfire that is sparing no part of the state; new case counts topped 4,000 a day for much of September, before easing somewhat this month. Hospital intensive care units are still at capacity in some regions, with COVID-19 patients occupying half the beds. Gov. Andy Beshear has called the situation "dire."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/17/1046098823/covid-vaccine-kentucky-rural-churches-save-hospitals
Billionaire Marc Lore outlines how he will build the inclusive, Utopian desert city Telosa
Marc Lore grew up wanting to be a farmer – reveling at the idea of "something growing from nothing" – all while watching his father unafraid to take chances with ambitious business ventures.
The 50-year-old billionaire developed his appetite for taking risks from his father, Peter, and it's that foundation in childhood that's propelling him to now focus on a spellbindingly ambitious endeavor that many experts and pundits are deeming near impossible.
Lore, the former president of Walmart e-commerce and co-founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com, is attempting to spearhead the conceptual and financial building blocks for Telosa, a Utopian city in the middle of the desert announced last month.
Telosa's location is being targeted in the Appalachia or American West desert with plans to shepherd in a reformed version of capitalism with a focus on societal inclusion over division. Lore envisions Telosa having equal access health care, excellent schooling and safe environments for families, regardless of income. Even further, he aims for Telosa to be a diverse place housing various races, genders, sexual orientations, religions and political affiliations.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/17/how-billionaire-marc-lore-plans-create-utopian-desert-city-telosa/5991523001/
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NOT doing it in the desert would be a good start, because water. I don't suppose he thought of that.....
The Filipino American family behind Calif.'s new police reform laws speaks out
For the relatives of Angelo Quinto, a 30-year-old Filipino American Navy veteran who died in police custody in California last year, the past nine months have been a relentless cycle of grieving and fighting to ensure no other family has to suffer the same fate. They’ve met with dozens of legislators and spoken at city council meetings to call for systemic changes in law enforcement.
Now, two weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed eight bills aimed at increasing police accountability and reining in excessive force, they said the news has triggered a mix of emotions.
“It was very empowering knowing that what we have done is making a real major impact,” Bella Collins, Quinto’s sister, told NBC Asian America. “But we also remember why we’re there. We remember that my brother is not coming back to life.”
Newsom’s Sept. 30 signing of the Angelo Quinto Act, which bans all police restraint techniques that cause positional asphyxia, marked the culmination of months of community organizing and outrage sparked by Quinto’s death.
Collins said her brother had depression for much of his life, and, after suffering a head injury during an assault early last year, he began experiencing bouts of paranoia and anxiety. On the night of Dec. 23, he had a mental breakdown at home in Antioch, a city about 45 miles east of San Francisco.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/filipino-american-family-califs-new-police-reform-laws-speaks-rcna3030
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"Excited delirium" is bullshit. Post TBI syndrome is NOT bullshit.
Missing cat
Vicky has gone missing. I last saw her when I gave her dinner on her "gotcha day" which was Tuesday of this week. Later that evening we heard some unpleasant "cat conversation" outside the living room window, but to us it sounded like the usual "Get off my lawn!" that has been going on for weeks between her and a large unfriendly black cat who appears out of nowhere and tries to muscle in on my girls' food etc., so we thought nothing of it. However, she did not appear for breakfast or dinner the following day or yesterday, or for breakfast this morning, and I haven't seen her anywhere. I looked all over the property and even in the workshop on the off chance that she might have gotten locked in there...no Vicky. And Winnie has been sticking pretty close to home. I'm worried she may have encountered a coyote or something.
Pregnant at 15, married at 16: She's speaking out to end child marriages
Chloe was a high school student in Idaho when she met a young father online in early 2015. They soon began dating and 10 months later, she was pregnant. But there was a problem: Chloe was 15, and her boyfriend was 22.
Chloe said he convinced her that the only way that he could avoid prison is “if we got married.”
So that’s what they did. On a cloudy day in March 2016, she married her older boyfriend believing it would shield him from statutory rape charges.
“He had researched it,” said Chloe, who was 16 at the time of the wedding and had convinced her mom to consent to the marriage. “He told me, ‘This is what we need to do. And if we don’t and I go to jail, it’s going to be all your fault.’”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pregnant-15-married-16-she-s-speaking-out-end-child-n1281606
Hindu priestesses fight the patriarchy, one Indian wedding at a time
When Sharmistha Chaudhuri decided to get married in her native India, she faced a dilemma.
Chaudhuri, 35, is a PR professional in Austin, Texas. She's independent, educated and has traveled the world. She wanted her wedding to reflect her liberal values and the equal partnership she has with her American fiancé.
But Chaudhuri found some Indian wedding traditions patriarchal. Hindu weddings are usually officiated by male priests. The bride's parents "donate" her to her in-laws. It's typically only the bride, not the groom, who prays for her new family's longevity — and gets her forehead anointed with colored powder to signify she's married.
"I just knew that I didn't want to do this," Chaudhuri recalls. "It was more like, 'How can we do something less traditional?'"
Her like-minded mother found a solution: Instead of priests, they hired four Hindu priestesses to perform a multilingual, egalitarian ceremony, stripped of patriarchal traditions.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/15/1045954728/hindu-priestesses-indian-weddings
Murdaugh Hospital Records Deepen Mystery of Botched Shooting of South Carolina Lawyer
Already under a microscope after the brutal June murder of his wife and son, South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh made national headlines over Labor Day weekend after making an emergency call to authorities to claim an unknown truck driver shot him in the head while he was fixing his car on a remote backcountry road.
For days after the incident that sent Murdaugh to the hospital—and swiftly thereafter to an out-of-state rehab facility—the Lowcountry scion’s legal team repeated the narrative he was the victim of a random shooting and was only saved by a Good Samaritan who happened to drive by. But just nine days later, Murdaugh confessed to authorities he orchestrated the incident in an attempt to secure a $10 million payout for his only surviving son, Buster.
According to Murdaugh, his alleged drug dealer, Curtis Edward Smith, shot him in the head at his behest. But ever since the pair was charged with a slew of crimes, including assisted suicide and insurance fraud, Smith has repeatedly rejected the once-powerful attorney’s version of the events—and claims that he was “set up” to take the fall.
Now, new hospital records obtained by The Daily Beast provide more details about what happened on Sept. 4—and call into question both Murdaugh’s and Curtis’ stories.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-murdaugh-hospital-records-deepen-mystery-of-botched-shooting-of-south-carolina-lawyer?ref=home
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The plot, as they say, thickens...........
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