Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalRon DeSantis is following a trail blazed by a Hungarian authoritarian
In June of last year, Hungary’s far-right government passed a law cracking down on LGBTQ rights, including a provision prohibiting instruction on LGBTQ topics in sex education classes.
About nine months later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” up through third grade. According to some knowledgeable observers on the right, these two bills were closely connected.
“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did last summer,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. “I was told this by a conservative reporter who ... said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”
(When I asked DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw about a possible connection, she initially denied knowing of Hungarian inspiration for Florida’s law. After I showed her the quote from Dreher, she did not respond further. Dreher did not reply to two requests for comment.)
It’s easy to see the connections between the bills — in both provisions and justifications. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described his country’s anti-LGBTQ law as an effort to prevent gay people from preying on children; Pushaw described Florida’s law as an “anti-grooming bill” on Twitter, adding that “if you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer” — meaning a person preparing children to become targets of sexual abuse, a slur targeting LGBTQ people and their supporters that’s becoming increasingly common on the right.
This is not a one-off example. DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/4/28/23037788/ron-desantis-florida-viktor-orban-hungary-right-authoritarian
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Except that FloriDUH isn't a separate country---yet.....
The Kremlin Keeps Trying to Call Volodymyr Zelenskyy a Drug Addict
For the past five months, the Kremlin has been waging a disinformation war to discredit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by labeling him a drug addict—and its latest effort involves Elon Musk.
Last week, in a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel called “Special Operation in Ukraine”, the administrators published a video showing Zelenskyy speaking to the new owner of Twitter.
The video was first published back in March on Zelenskyy’s own Instagram page, but the video the pro-Kremlin channel posted last week showed a white powder on the desk next to the Ukrainian president.
“We don’t know whether it was editing or just Zelensky’s [sic] cameraman was also on drugs and missed such a moment in the frame,” the text accompanying the video said.
A side-by-side analysis of the two videos clearly shows that the white powder was added in afterwards, and several fact-checking organizations have debunked the video.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gpd3/russia-zelenskyy-drug-addict
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Propaganda so bad as to be truly laughable. Now Putin, OTOH, especially recently.....
One of my girls came to breakfast with a mouthful
Winnie showed up with a chipmunk dangling from her mouth. Yep, my little one-eyed wonder hunts too. She saw Vicky come running down the stairs, and went over to greet her. The chipmunk seized its opportunity and limped into an overturned trashcan that serves as a sometime shelter for one of the girls while both of them watched it. Finally Vicky darted in after it and ran off with it. Winnie watched for a brief second, then gave the feline equivalent of a shrug and went off to eat Rachael Ray kibble, which she may find more palatable than raw chipmunk.
The Supreme Court seems fed up with a Trump judge who sabotaged Biden
Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump judge in Texas who essentially seized control of much of the United States’ southern border policy, appears likely to join the small cohort of Republican judges who went so far out on a limb that even this Supreme Court will not tolerate their behavior.
Last August, Kacsmaryk ordered President Joe Biden’s administration to reinstate a Trump-era policy colloquially known as “Remain in Mexico,” which requires many migrants who arrive at the US-Mexico border to stay in Mexico while their asylum case is pending in the United States. But Kacsmaryk read federal immigration law so narrowly that even President Donald Trump’s version of this program wasn’t harsh enough to comply.
Indeed, as Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone conceded during an exchange with Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday morning while the Supreme Court was hearing the case, under Kacsmaryk’s reading of federal law, no administration has ever complied with that law since it was enacted in 1996.
The case is Biden v. Texas, and it concerns what options are available to the federal government when it is confronted with an asylum seeker at the Mexican border. Under Kacsmaryk’s incorrect interpretation of federal immigration law, the government only has “two options vis-à-vis aliens seeking asylum: 1) mandatory detention; or 2) return to a contiguous territory.”
Kacsmaryk’s reading isn’t just wrong, it is obviously wrong. On its face, federal immigration laws give the government at least four options when confronted with an asylum seeker at the Mexican border. It can do what Kacsmaryk says, or it can grant parole to someone seeking admission to the United States “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” And, when parole isn’t available, the government can also release an immigrant into the United States on “bond of at least $1,500.”
As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted during the oral arguments, the case largely turns upon the proper meaning of the words “significant public benefit.” Arguing on behalf of the Biden administration, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said that these words permit the government to reserve its limited detention space for immigrants who present a danger to the public or who might be a flight risk, and to parole other immigrants.
https://www.vox.com/2022/4/26/23042653/supreme-court-remain-in-mexico-trump-biden-texas-immigration-border-asylum
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Even Alito? Huh.
The surprising complexity of a classic Chinese condiment
Oyster sauce is a much-loved ingredient of the Chinese dinner table. How is it made, and why is it so irresistible?
Of all the intriguing condiments in Chinese cooking, there is one whose moniker probably raises more questions than it answers: that is, oyster sauce. How, you might wonder idly, can such a pale, briny food item as the oyster, rarely cooked, produce something so deeply brown and velvety?
Even if you've never used it yourself, you've almost certainly had oyster sauce many times, in a wide variety of familiar Chinese dishes. The comforting savouriness of beef with broccoli owes much to this glossy brown sauce, and chow mein, likewise. Oyster sauce is salty and sweet, with a kiss of ginger and a strong umami punch. It has a long history, one that runs in parallel with that of other delicious brown gooey sauces from around the world.
Oyster sauce gets its colour from a source known to everyone who's browned bacon or onions: the Maillard reaction, in which heat causes proteins and sugars to react together, deepening in hue as they become even more delicious. The sauce is made from the liquid oysters have been poached in, boiled until it's caramelised and dark and then enriched with soy sauce and spices. It is not, like a fish sauce or Worcestershire sauce, usually a product of fermentation. In one charming video, a couple in Shenzhen, China, demonstrate the traditional method with many hours of simmering in a wok (a bottle of beer appears part way through – the perfect accompaniment to some fishy hijinks).
Interestingly, while it has likely been made for ages, oyster sauce as a marketable concept is not terribly old. It was in 1888 that the founder of the most prominent oyster sauce brand, Lee Kum Kee, began to package and sell what company legend describes as an overboiled oyster soup turned to briny, savoury goo. Since its founding in Zhuhai, China, the company has become a global condiment behemoth. It's not the only sauce on the market, but it is everywhere, and chances are, if you've had oyster sauce, you've had Lee Kum Kee.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220426-the-surprising-complexity-of-a-classic-chinese-condiment
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This made me hungry for dinner, and I haven't even had lunch yet......
The Anti-Vax Trucker Convoy Made One Crucial Error in Messing With Oakland
Everything seemed to be going just peachy for the anti-vaccine trucker convoy’s triumphant return to California but then they went to Oakland.
The convoy participants made a crucial error when they decided to protest a local politician (who proposed an abortion bill they oppose) and rolled into the a quiet Oakland neighborhood of Rockridge last Friday. As chronicled in a YouTube video by Rise Images, the truckers were flipped off by Oaklanders, sworn at, had their progress stalled by a man just simply standing in the road and, of course, got their big rigs egged.
The counterprotesters were well-resourced, with supply lines amply filled with eggs ready to be hurled against chrome and the unvaccinated.
One trucker, angry at the yolk slowly oozing down the side of his truck, got into a face-to-face with a mask-wearing resident who was happily tossing eggs.
“Hey you got a problem?,” the enraged trucker asked the resident before adamantly telling him to “Get the fuck out of here.”
“No,” the resident replied coolly.
As the trucker walked away in a huff, the masked man calmly continued to pelt his truck with eggs. Attempting to enact revenge for the attack, the trucker pulled out his most fearsome weapon, and began to blare his horn. In response the counter-protestors pulled out a full flat of eggs and, well, I’m sure you can put two and two together.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7da78/the-anti-vax-trucker-convoy-made-one-crucial-error-in-messing-with-oakland
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Read on. It gets better.
The 19th-Century Woman's Secret Guide to Birth Control
IN 1878, SARAH CHASE WAS on the lecture circuit. A graduate of a homeopathic college and a single mother, Chase made her living in Manhattan giving talks at community spaces around the city and, afterwards, selling what contemporary police reports and newspapers called “vile articles,” including sponges, syringes, and instructions for how to, in the parlance of the era, “bring down the menses,” in other words, induce an abortion.
Examples of the kind of ad hoc birth control devices that Chase sold are now on display at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History at Case Western Reserve University, where visitors can peruse objects and exhibits covering ancient times to the present that demonstrate that women have always shared information about how to control their reproductive health—and others have always tried to stop them.
In the 19th century, Chase’s livelihood raised the hackles of one of the most infamous anti-birth control crusaders of modern times: Anthony Comstock, the lobbyist behind the eponymous laws that criminalized selling birth control in 1873. In an episode chronicled by Andrea Tone in Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, Comstock set up a sting operation to catch Chase in the act and promptly served her an arrest warrant.
This was the wild west era of birth control and abortion, the period after Comstock’s laws went into effect in 1873 and before Margaret Sanger’s clinics in the 1910s. A cursory, top-down look at history suggests that in this period, birth control was illegal, abortion was unheard of, and women were at the mercy of biology when it came to controlling their reproductive fates. Indeed, in 2017, a journalist stated on NPR that abortion was not a part of American life in the 19th century because the word “abortion” appeared in no newspapers from that time (an assertion that was later corrected thanks to an outcry from historians).
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/19th-century-birth-control-dittrick
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I hope Anthony Comstock is STILL burning in hell!
College Applicants Are Avoiding Schools in Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans States
Prospective college students once interested in schools in states like Texas and Florida are now scratching those options off their lists, college counselors across the country told Politico in a recent series of interviews.
“Students have told me, ‘I really want to go to Texas [the University of Texas at Austin], but I’m taking them off my list,’” college admissions consultant Christina Taber-Kewene told Politico. Taber-Kewene is based in New Jersey and primarily works with students living in the Northeast. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t want to go to school in a state where I won’t have reproductive rights access.’” She added that some students have told her they “don’t want to send money to a state” that’s banning abortion.
Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of the college consulting company LifeLaunchr, told Politico he’s seen a “much greater number of students who say they don’t want to go to public [schools] in Florida,” and that “students will say they don’t want to support that state and don’t feel safe there.” Florida’s recent anti-LGBTQ law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law may not directly impact universities in the state, as it focuses on K-12 education, but institutions of higher education in conservative states often face threats and punishment from their state governments over speech issues. It doesn’t help that the “Don’t Say Gay” law has increasingly become synonymous with the state of Florida itself.
Florida is one of several states that’s recently passed anti-LGBTQ and particularly anti-trans legislation, as several move to push gender-affirming health care out-of-reach and enact bans on trans student athletes, likely alienating prospective college students in the process.
https://jezebel.com/college-applicants-are-avoiding-schools-in-anti-abortio-1848837851
What If Unhoused People Designed Their Own Homes?
Unhoused individuals are often subject to “about us, without us” plans, which helps to explain what the industry calls the “service-resistant.” Israel Muñoz, who lived in a tent on and off for about five years before landing at Homefulness, explains that “very restrictive” rules kept him from traditional shelters: “The people humiliate you. That’s a reason a lot of people live in the streets instead.” At Homefulness, Muñoz feels part of a family, one that keeps him busy and away from his addictions. “Here it’s not like, ‘I’m the manager,’” he says. “If you got issues with anybody, we cancel everything and we sit down. The whole village.”
Homefulness began over a decade ago by renovating an abandoned bungalow and has slowly grown with volunteer architects and engineers. Eight residents will welcome at least a dozen more once fully occupied. By Gray-Garcia’s ad hoc accounting, building it cost over half a million dollars. None came from the usual “politrickster” and “philanthropimp” sources, she boasts, but instead largely from the “solidarity family”—a group, now numbering more than 100, of supporters and graduates of Tiny’s workshops deprogramming “folks with race and class privilege.” While donations to its 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible, Tiny insists, “this is not charity. It’s poverty reparations.”
“You don’t get to have any agenda-setting power just because you throw down a bunch of money,” says Cecilia Lucas, a lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Global Poverty and Practice program, who has been one such supporter for eight years. Lucas says the model of giving helps materially secure people “rethink your concepts of expertise and knowledge production.”
“There’s something really magnetizing about Tiny,” says Lucas, who has lectured with Gray-Garcia. Tiny approached the appearances as political performances, arriving in character as a homeless person who starts going through the garbage bins. Once the audience is sufficiently uncomfortable, they’re let in on the shtick. It’s a comment on “how people quickly get called insane and seen as trash,” Lucas says.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/oaklan-homefulness-unhoused-homeless-housing-townhome/
He 'would be alive today': Police decision in Cedric Lofton case infuriates advocates
An employee at a Wichita, Kansas, juvenile center said a police officer changed his answers on an intake form for a 17-year-old who was in custody, potentially preventing the teenager from receiving medical care that, according to his family’s lawyer, would have saved his life.
Staff members at Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center held Cedric Lofton down for more than 30 minutes during a struggle with authorities after his arrest around 1 a.m. on Sept. 24, 2021. Advocates have said the teenager, who was in foster care, had been experiencing a mental health crisis at the time.
Authorities said Lofton had been “behaving oddly” when he arrived at the center. The Wichita Eagle recently reported that, as a result, an officer initially indicated on an intake form that Lofton showed signs of “acute illness” and “intoxication.”
The officer then left to consult other officers on how to categorize Lofton’s state, Jodi Tronsgard, who oversees admissions at the juvenile center, said at a March 7 Sedgwick County Community Task Force meeting. When the officer returned to Lofton, he decided not to classify him as needing medical attention, saying, according to Tronsgard, “‘We are going to go with no.’”
Tronsgard continued: “So, he was informed that if you answer ‘yes’ to these questions, you have to leave and take the youth for a medical or mental health release. And then, hearing that, he goes and then responds ‘no’ to these questions.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cedric-lofton-death-kansas-teenager-advocates-say-prevented-rcna25600
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Lazy bastard. Didn't want to take him for evaluation.
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