Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalWhy Trump appears deeply unnerved as Capitol attack investigation closes in
Donald Trump is increasingly agitated by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter, and appears anxious he might be implicated in the sprawling inquiry into the insurrection even as he protests his innocence.
The former president in recent weeks has complained more about the investigation, demanding why his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, shared so much material about 6 January with the select committee, and why dozens of other aides have also cooperated.
Trump has also been perturbed by aides invoking the Fifth Amendment in depositions - it makes them look weak and complicit in a crime, he has told associates - and considers them foolish for not following the lead of his former strategist Steve Bannon in simply ignoring the subpoenas.
When Trump sees new developments in the Capitol attack investigation on television, he has started swearing about the negative coverage and bemoaned that the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was too incompetent to put Republicans on the committee to defend him.
The former president’s anger largely mirrors the kind of expletives he once directed at the Russia inquiry and the special counsel investigation when he occupied the White House. But the rapidly accelerating investigation into whether Trump and top aides unlawfully conspired to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory at the 6 January joint session appears to be unnerving him deeply.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/20/capitol-attack-investigation-closes-in-trump
'We're not backing down': the Texas church fighting for abortion rights
In the late 60s, the burgeoning movement to legalize US abortion state by state found an unlikely yet loyal ally – a contingent of women at the First Unitarian Universalist church in Dallas, Texas.
In lieu of knitting sessions and bake sales, the church’s Women’s Alliance advocated for abortion rights and even had a hand in legally supporting Roe v Wade, the pivotal US supreme court case that protects abortion care in the US as a constitutional right.
The trailblazing women laid the groundwork for not only the church’s intrepid commitment to reproductive freedom over the decades, but today’s growing pro-choice faith community movement in Texas.
“These women had the foresight at the time to understand that abortion rights wasn’t just a debate for the moment but would be very important to future generations of women,” says Kathleen Campbell, current president of the Women’s Alliance.
“They also understood that one of the core teachings of the church is the belief that every human is worthy of love and dignity and that a woman’s right to control her own body and reproductive future is a very natural extension of that principle.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/20/texas-church-fighting-abortion-rights
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Good stuff farther down in article! Read on!
Revealed: the Florida power company pushing legislation to slow rooftop solar
The biggest power company in the US is pushing policy changes that would hamstring rooftop solar power in Florida, delivering legislation for a state lawmaker to introduce, according to records obtained by the Miami Herald and Floodlight.
Florida Power & Light (FPL), whose work with dark money political committees helped secure Republican control of the state Senate, is lobbying to hollow out net metering, a policy that lets Florida homeowners and businesses offset the costs of installing solar panels by selling power back to the company.
Internal emails obtained from the Florida Senate show that an FPL lobbyist, John Holley, sent the text of the bill to state senator Jennifer Bradley’s staff on 18 October. FPL’s parent company contributed $10,000 to Bradely’s political committee on 20 October. A month later, Bradley filed a bill that was almost identical to the one FPL gave her. Another lawmaker introduced the same measure in the House.
Bradley said the donation was unrelated to the bill.
“Any decision I make to file legislation is based entirely on whether it’s in the best interest of our state and my district,” she said. “This discussion about fairness in metering is happening in legislatures across the country and it’s time for it to happen in Florida.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/20/revealed-the-florida-power-company-pushing-legislation-to-slow-rooftop-solar
Why are US rightwingers so angry? Because they know social change is coming
While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.
In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.
When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.
There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/20/rightwingers-us-social-change-coming
We're Doing All the Wrong Things to Fix Traffic in the U.S.
Some 300 years ago, when Londoners were railing against the city’s filthy streets and proposing ways to make them cleaner, the philosopher Bernard Mandeville did the opposite. He argued that dirty streets were a welcome sign of prosperity—“a necessary evil, inseparable from the felicity of London.” Once people “come to consider, that what offends them is the result of the plenty, great traffic, and opulency of that mighty city,” he wrote, “if they have any concern in its welfare, they will hardly ever wish to see the streets of it less dirty.”
Today, can we say the same thing about the quest to rid our streets of traffic congestion?
In many ways, traffic is for today’s society what filth was to 18th-century London. We grit our teeth through traffic jams, we measure and rank cities’ congestion, and we clamor for solutions. Our driving ideal is exemplified in car commercials, where a single vehicle has the city streets entirely to itself as it glides to a glamorous destination. But if the destination is so alluring, wouldn’t there be lots of other people and cars on their way? We forget that traffic is a sign of success.
Since the 1950s, efforts to do away with traffic congestion have inevitably been linked with urban decline. Decades ago, deindustrialization, urban renewal, and freeway construction cleared wide swaths of inner cities in places like Kansas City, Syracuse, and Miami—often targeting African American neighborhoods—and made it easy to drive through them. What made it even easier was the decline in commercial activity that ensued, which left the cities blighted with empty storefronts and office towers. Streets once filled with people interacting with one another were replaced by roads populated by people encased in fast-moving steel boxes. Cities made for speedy driving, it turns out, are cities made for little else.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/were-doing-all-the-wrong-things-to-fix-car-traffic-in-america-but-here-are-some-better-solutions?ref=home
The Dumbest Drug Scare Stories of 2021
The media likes to write about illegal drugs mainly because the media likes to scare people. It’s part of a longstanding deal between newspapers and readers: We’ll shock you, you’ll enjoy being shocked, we make money.
Drugs are one of the easiest subjects to embellish due to a mixture of most people’s lack of understanding and their readiness to believe anything in a landscape many perceive to be teeming with immorality.
Cloaked in mystery, the drug world is presumed to be populated by shameless monsters capable of anything. So for the media and politicians who want to push a message, the drug zone is a free-for-all, where the truth is malleable and reality and fiction are interchangeable.
As a result, there exists a goldmine of narco-nonsense that has been reported and said about drugs over the last century.
Unsurprisingly over the last 12 months, with COVID-19 putting people in a near-constant state of low-level panic, the table has been set for some fanciful narcotic content. Indeed, the drug bullshit detector went into overdrive. So here are the best worst narcomania-infused tales from 2021.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dbzj/the-dumbest-drug-scare-stories-of-2021
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#6 was on full display in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago when cops were called to administer Narcan to SROs and a school nurse who "touched or inhaled" fentanyl from a vape pen a student brought to school. The school was then shut down for the rest of the week to be "decontaminated".
There's a huge rat problem. Vigilantes with dogs think they can fix it
This will come as no surprise to anyone but New York City has a rat problem.
Two million rats call the city home, thriving on the streets, in sewers, in both abandoned and un-abandoned buildings, in the parks, in the subways, in shoe stores and in restaurants.
The problem is getting worse. Rat sightings increased by 40% in the first 11 months of 2021 compared to 2019, apparently spurred by cuts to trash collection and street-cleaning services. At the same time, the pandemic-induced closure of restaurants deprived rodents of a regular source of food, leading to hungry rats being forced to travel further, and more openly, in search of nourishment.
But rats are hardly a new issue in New York. For centuries they have presented a seemingly unsolvable problem, despite a variety of efforts. Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a $32m rat-tackling effort in 2017, and workers laid more rat poison and traps. The sanitation department has blasted dry ice into rats nests. Building owners have been fined into cleaning up their trash, while at least one heron has leant a hand, swallowing a rat in one gulp in Central Park.
None of it has really worked, which is where Rats comes in. The group has been hunting rats with dogs in New York since 1995, operating a sort of canine-vigilante service, summoned to infested neighborhoods via Facebook or email. The Rats method of rat control – documented in grisly detail online – isn’t for everyone, but it receives scores of requests from New Yorkers each year. In a city this rat strewn, it seems people are willing to try anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/19/new-york-city-rat-problem-vigilantes-with-dogs
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Terriers doing what terriers were bred to do.
Well, this is ironic!
Necklaces and accessories claiming to "protect" people from 5G mobile networks have been found to be radioactive.
The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionising radiation.
It urged people not to use the products, which could cause harm with long-term wear.
There is no evidence that 5G networks are harmful to health.
The World Health Organization says 5G mobile networks are safe, and not fundamentally different from existing 3G and 4G signals.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59703523
'Shopping cart killer' behind at least 4 Virginia slayings, police say
Virginia police on Friday said they arrested an alleged serial killer who they say is behind at least four homicides in the state since August.
They said the alleged serial killer, Anthony Eugene Robinson, 35, has been dubbed "the shopping cart killer" because of his modus operandi.
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said he meets victims on dating sites and then at motels.
“After he inflicts trauma to his victims and kills them, he transports their bodies to their final resting place, literally, in a shopping cart. And there’s video to that effect,” Davis said.
Three of the victims identified so far are women; the identity of a suspected fourth victim has not yet been determined due to decomposition, police said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/serial-killer-may-4-slayings-virginia-police-say-rcna9178
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I go by one of his "dump sites" often if I take the back way home from town. It's behind Lowe's and the Candlewood. Yikes!
Could Deion Sanders tip college football's power balance toward Black schools?
Deion Sanders is the ultimate jack of all trades. As a college athlete at Florida State he starred at football, baseball and track. Selected fifth in the 1989 NFL draft Sanders instantly proved a triple threat as a cornerback, special teams returner and situational wide receiver. When he wasn’t dazzling on the gridiron he wowed Major League Baseball as a bag-swiping outfielder, becoming the only player to appear in a World Series and Super Bowl. Throughout Neon Deion crackled with charisma and swagger – delighting the masses with his brash fashions, touchdown dances and gift of the gab. In retirement he continued to enthrall as a television analyst, preacher and reality TV star.
Still: when the football hall of famer decided to try his hand at coaching football, it felt like a gig too far. Although he gathered some experience at the high school level in Texas, Sanders looked ill-prepared to make the jump to Jackson State – a south-central Mississippi outpost at quite a remove from the spotlight. A historically black college (or HBCU), Jackson State competes in the shadow of the Alabamas and Michigans of the land and operates under an anemic athletic budget. Sanders’s bold move looked like a bored celebrity trying his hand at coaching and threatened to go down like his attempt to run a charter school, an abject failure.
But in less than a year Sanders has established himself as a whiz at this job, too. This fall he led the 11-win Tigers to their first conference title in 14 years, and was named as one of the nation’s best college football coaches. On Saturday the Tigers play South Carolina State in the Celebration Bowl — the de facto championship game for HBCUs. His son Shedeur, the Tigers’ star quarterback, was recognized as one of the nation’s best freshmen. All the while the Tigers broke attendance records, averaging more than 42,000 spectators.
The star power of Coach Prime – that’s his name; don’t leave out the “coach” part – has turned out to be an effective lure for top-shelf talent. On Wednesday he shocked college football by signing Travis Hunter, the nation’s top-rated high school prospect. A multi-talented player in the Sanders mold, Hunter chose Jackson State after committing to Florida State, the college where Sanders made his name. Clips of Hunter’s dramatic commitment reveal were quickly followed by images of Florida State fans burning Sanders’s jersey. This wasn’t a one-off. This was a turning point.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/dec/17/deion-sanders-jackson-state-coach-hbcus-college-football
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