July 29, 2021

Iranian Defector Dedicates Silver Medal Win In Judo To Israel

Here's a nice Olympics story. We see a lot of anti-semitism in the games sometimes. One guy said, "Nah, I'm good. Oh, and also, fuck you."

Iranian Saeid Mollaei dedicated his silver medal to Israel after finishing second in the Olympics judo event Tuesday behind Takanori Nagase of Japan.

Mollaei, who now competes for Mongolia, defected from his home country of Iran after his team coaches told him to purposely lose in his semifinals match of the 2019 World Judo Championships in order to avoid competing against Israel’s Sagi Muki, the Washington Examiner reported.

“Thank you to Israel for the good energy. This medal is dedicated also to Israel,” Mollaei told an Israeli Sports Channel, according to the Washington Examiner. “I hope the Israelis are happy with this win.”

Muki, who became close friends with Mollaei following the events of the 2019 championship, congratulated Mollaei on his win during a press conference, the outlet reported.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/07/29/iranian-defector-silver-medal-judo-israel/

July 22, 2021

Activision Blizzard Sued Over 'Frat Boy' Culture, Harassment

This is a very big deal, as it's one of the largest gaming companies in the country and around the world. They're the makers of World of Warcraft - the largest Massive-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in the world and Starcraft, which is massive in Asian, particularly Korean e-sports.

Tech has long had a problem with sexism. The gaming industry doubly so. But even by those standards, what's laid out in this suit is horrifying.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/activision-blizzard-sued-by-california-over-frat-boy-culture

Video game giant Activision Blizzard Inc., maker of games including World of Warcraft and Diablo, fosters a “frat boy” culture in which female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, unequal pay, and retaliation, according to a lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

A two-year investigation by the state agency found that the company discriminated against female employees in terms and conditions of employment, including compensation, assignment, promotion, and termination. Company leadership consistently failed to take steps to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, the agency said.

. . .

According to the complaint, filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court, female employees make up around 20% of the Activision workforce, and are subjected to a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” including “cube crawls,” in which male employees “drink copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”

. . .

The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.

I believe all of it. I dated someone who worked for one of the biggest mobile gaming companies in the world. I visited him at his office regularly. It had the usual kitchens full of food. But the kitchens also had special fridges for wine and beer. Many employees openly had hard liquor bottles on their desks. A laid-back atmosphere was encouraged. One time, after a company employee appreciation function full of alcohol, a bunch of us went back to the office for a drink. One guy puked at his desk, and we had to call him an Uber.

I believe everything in this suit.

July 8, 2021

Wow, Tahoe area is getting rocked

Counting 20+ quakes in the last half hour. The biggest is 5.9 so far. And this is 40 minutes after a 4.8 hit a bit east of the Bay Area.

California seems bored today.

June 23, 2021

We screwed our Iraqi service members.

I don’t know if anyone here watches ChubbyEmu. It’s actually a super interesting YouTube channel. he’s an oncological pharmacist. My partner is also a doctor of pharmacology. So, I watch just to be aware.

This . . . broke my heart. The cancers that came back with our soldiers.

This woman is still fighting.

June 20, 2021

How old do you feel?

I had a lot of peers over yesterday. My age. All professionals. We're Millennials approaching middle age now, and this question kept cropping up. We hadn't seen each other in 15+ months, so getting together, it felt like we were different people. We had to get used to each other again.

We don't particularly feel like we grew up.

Don't get me wrong. My friends and I have careers, homes, some have kids. We grew up. But we keep regarding the country and the world as this thing some other people are managing. Not us.

Speaker Pelosi has been in power since 2006. President Biden has been in office for, well, I think before I was born.

We have no investment in what goes on. This all existed before us, and feels like it will exist forever. It won't. But I'm saying, on a pure feeling level.

But I'm wondering, since I know DU skews older. How old do you feel? Did your generation ever have a moment where it was like, "Ok, we have the reins now!"?

June 18, 2021

Is a Chinese defector the reason Biden administration wants an investigation into Lab Leak Theory?

Interesting article from the Daily Beast.

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rumors-of-us-secretly-harboring-top-china-official-dong-jingwei-swirl

Are we ready to stop calling it all a conspiracy theory yet?

June 16, 2021

Why Twitter and cancel culture is toxic

And I'm not talking about how Republicans use the term. I'm talking more towards the Twitter bullying that has become part of our everyday lives. If someone says something you dislike, you have to go gather up a mob and try to ruin that person's life and career.

Story one I just caught today.

https://pagesix.com/2021/06/14/michael-costello-alleges-chrissy-teigen-and-monica-rose-blacklisted-him/?utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter

Costello, 38, alleged that in 2014, the 35-year-old Teigen “apparently formed her own opinion of me based on a Photoshopped comment floating around the internet which has now been proven to be false by Instagram and since taken down.”

He said he attempted to explain the mixup — which apparently made it seem as if he’d used a racial slur — to Teigen, who he claims “told me that my career was over and that all my doors will be shut from there on.”

Costello goes on to claim that fashion industry colleagues and friends told him that Teigen and her stylist Monica Rose had allegedly “gone out of their way to threaten people and brands that if they were in any shape or form associated with me, they would not work with any of them.

“Each time I have pleaded with Chrissy Teigen or Monica Rose to see the whole story before believing a false narrative a former disgruntled employee cast upon me, they didn’t give me the time of day,” he added.

Costello posted screengrabs purportedly showing a direct message thread with Teigen in which she claimed, “Racist people like you deserve to suffer and die. You might as well be dead. Your career is over, just watch.”
see also

“I didn’t see the point of living,” Costello wrote. “There was no way I can ever escape from being the target of the powerful elites in Hollywood.”

All that was needed was one celebrity and an internet mob to make this man's life a living hell. This behavior is constant. It's ugly. It's cheered when it's against someone we don't like. Perpetuated. Encouraged.

It's bullying. I'm so glad Teigan is now herself being cancelled. She earned it.

Story two. https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/03/28/why-is-lindsay-ellis-cancelled-twitter-drama-explained/

Some months ago, an essayist and author, Lindsay Ellis, compared Raya and the Last Dragon to Avatar: the Last Airbender. As a huge fan of Avatar (I've watched through the animated series three times), I said the exact. same. thing. about Raya when I watched it. I turned to my partner about midway through and said, "This is just Avatar but by Disney. They even have a Zuko in here!" For whatever reason, it was on a few weeks back, playing in the background at my niece's graduation party. Some of the kids hadn't seen it. About halfway through, an Asian cousin turned to his other Asian cousin and said, "They're ripping off Avatar!"

A lot of people felt this way. But no. Comparing one Asian thing to another Asian thing was racist, and Twitter went to absolute town on this woman. It was vicious, and it was nasty.

Now, I love Lindsay Ellis. She's very progressive and does a lot of literary deep dives into modern pop culture. If you've never seen her YouTube channel, she's always worth it. She posted a video about the whole ordeal. It's worth the watch if you have the time. She pile drives Twitter into the floor.



Note all the pain she goes through, just because people are hateful and bored, and she had an opinion about something that a lot of people shared that wasn't even remotely racist.

Twitter is a shitty, toxic, bullying place. What Twitter is all . . . well, atwitter about any given day isn't generally a good thing much of the time. It's a mob gone wild, without any real accountability due to anonymity. I don't think we should be supporting this sort of thing.

I wish we'd get less of it posted here. JMO.

June 15, 2021

Meanwhile at a S.F. Walgreens

In case people are curious why businesses are leaving the city.

https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1404573344309989380/pu/img/3sDDsMzrPYhYSoMB?format=jpg&name=900x900

Edit: My apologies. I didn't realize the video link wasn't working for all people. Here's an ABC story which should have working video.

https://abc7.com/shoplifting-video-san-francisco-walgreens-theft/10791421/

June 6, 2021

Manchin will be on Meet the Press, which just started

I discovered locast.org (I'm a cord-cutter). I only use it to watch local news for the most part. But this morning . . .

In case you felt your Sunday morning needed to involve screaming at something.

May 17, 2021

How much do you exercise?

I'm not a star member yet, so I can't make a poll.

However, I've been seeing posts about depression, lethargy, ill health, etc. So I wanted to make a poll.

How much do you exercise? What kind? Do you see any improvement in mood? Feel better/worse? Do you sleep better? Is your sleep worse?

Especially with the pandemic and quarantine, I'm wondering how much these negative feelings and perceptions are correlated to physical inactivity.