December 29, 2021

Biden Saves Christmas: Holiday Spending At Record Highs

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/biden-saves-christmas-holiday-spending-and

Biden Saves Christmas: Holiday Spending At Record Highs
How will right wing media spin this into a loss for the president?
By John Amato — December 29, 2021


Since November, Fox News and every Republican in Congress was screaming that the Biden administration was destroying our supply chain, so that we would have no products left in the stores during the Christmas season.

Supply chain fears became a mainstay of national polling. Fear of the economy was skyrocketing in the public's mind because of right-wing and Beltway fear mongering.

And then something miraculous happened.

Instead of the Grinch That Stole Christmas, President Biden turned into a belly-laughing Santa Claus with his magical reindeer and suddenly, gifts upon gifts down rained down on the people.

Okay, I kid, but you get the picture.

On Wednesday, CNBC interviewed retail finance and operations executive Jan Kniffen to give his thoughts on the boom in sales and spending for the holidays.



That's the Beltway media's take now, except on Fox News, where they refuse to mention the incredible holiday season we've just had.

Instead, while people are opening presents, right-wing media like Fox News highlight crime rates in liberal cities. (Fox News referenced “supply chain” a staggering 700 times in November; 400 times in December.)

In Eric Boehlert's newsletter he writes, "So much for the empty shelves and delayed packages this shopping season."



And it's not over, because there was a 43% increase in gift cards this year which have not been credited yet.

Merry, Merry and Happy Happy!

December 29, 2021

There's A Literal White Nationalist 'Curriculum' For Home Schoolers

There's A Literal White Nationalist 'Curriculum' For Home Schoolers
White history for white nationalists to teach their kids about white supremacy for white nationhood.
By Rebekah Sager — December 28, 2021


Designed for ages 4 and up, the School of the West bills itself as an online educational resource for home-schooling families. White families, that is.

The focus is on the study of “white wellbeing,” within a curriculum of history, math, science, and the arts designed for “Westernkind,” meaning white boys and girls, according to the site, to help them “develop self-esteem” and “the truth of their heritage.”

snip//

The school additionally links to the Institute of Historical Review, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center published numerous antisemitic materials and hosted a Holocaust denial conference in 2004.

It could be easy to ignore this obviously racist, homophobic, and xenophobic “school” as just another extremist with loony ideas of indoctrinating kids. But the reality is after a term under former President Donald Trump, this is a reverberation of his and his followers’ acceptance of white nationalist ideas gone mainstream.

“Our political environment is more receptive to this sort of messaging at the moment,” Amy Cooter, a sociologist who studies white nationalism and grew up in a private Southern Baptist church school with connections to far-right home-schooling groups, told The Daily Beast.



Look no further than the push to remove books by Black and brown authors in states such as Virginia and Texas.

more...

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/theres-literal-white-nationalist

December 28, 2021

Rand Paul Ridiculed After Accusing Dems of 'Stealing' Elections by Persuading People to Vote for The

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rand-paul-ridiculed-after-accusing-dems-of-stealing-elections-by-persuading-people-to-vote-for-them

Rand Paul Ridiculed After Accusing Dems of ‘Stealing’ Elections by Persuading People to Vote for Them
IT’S NOT FAIR
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Updated Dec. 28, 2021 9:52AM ET /
Published Dec. 28, 2021 6:23AM ET
Shawn Thew/Reuters

December 28, 2021

Private Jet Pilot Heard Screaming 'Oh Shit!' Before Fiery Crash on San Diego Street

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pilot-heard-screaming-oh-shit-before-fiery-plane-crash-near-el-cajon-san-diego?ref=home

Private Jet Pilot Heard Screaming ‘Oh Shit!’ Before Fiery Crash on San Diego Street

FIREBALL
Rachel Olding
Breaking News Editor
Published Dec. 28, 2021 11:19AM ET
Twitter/CBS8


https://twitter.com/i/status/1475677100472344580

December 28, 2021

Latest Leaks From Select Committee Show They Are Honing In: "Multiple War Rooms in Willard Hotel"

https://www.politicususa.com/2021/12/27/latest-leaks-from-select-committee-show-they-are-honing-in-multiple-war-rooms-in-willard-hotel.html


Posted on Mon, Dec 27th, 2021 by Jason Miciak
Latest Leaks From Select Committee Show They Are Honing In: “Multiple War Rooms in Willard Hotel”


As this site has explained before (and all attorneys who read this site already know) there are very few crimes that one can commit for “not doing something.” If one has the ability to easily pull an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, one will not be charged with a crime if one simply lets the bus hit the woman. The very few crimes that do penalize someone for “not doing something” usually involve children, guardians of vulnerable adults, and business employees that have a duty to the company.

Thus, the people that believe that Donald Trump could be charged for “not doing anything” while the Capitol was being sacked by his followers are probably making an excellent political and moral point (while also pointing at very good evidence) but not a crime in and of itself.

For Trump to be implicated in a crime, he would have had to have had prior knowledge of what was planned for the day, agreed to the plan, and have taken one overt act, perhaps a speech in furtherance of that plan. If the Select Committee can prove that Trump did all three of the above, then it has a strong criminal case against Trump, making him a conspirator, every bit as guilty as Flynn, Stone, and the others.

Speaking of which, there is a new leak out that the much-discussed “War Room” in the Willard Hotel has been misreported. There was no “War Room,” there were “war rooms,” plural.
https://twitter.com/hugolowell/status/1475621754567643140?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1475621754567643140%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicususa.com%2F2021%2F12%2F27%2Flatest-leaks-from-select-committee-show-they-are-honing-in-multiple-war-rooms-in-willard-hotel.html
“Separate Operation”? There was more than one? Or was there more than one component to one operation, each assigned a different task?
https://twitter.com/hugolowell/status/1475487051634069504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1475487051634069504%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicususa.com%2F2021%2F12%2F27%2Flatest-leaks-from-select-committee-show-they-are-honing-in-multiple-war-rooms-in-willard-hotel.html
For our purposes, it does not matter. There have been credible reports that Trump made calls to the “War Rooms” prior to the speech.

Exactly what was to be planned from the Willard Hotel? From the perspective of the United States Constitution, if one was “planning” something to somehow keep the presidency, that plan should have involved U.S. Senators, a lot of U.S. Senators, meaning it should have been run out of the Capitol.

Evidently, a portion of the “plan” for the day didn’t involve simply having Vice Presidents and Senators do as they were told and it was – likely – that portion of the “war” that was planned in those war rooms – plural.

Prior knowledge, a meeting of the minds or agreement regarding a plan, and one overt act in furtherance of the plan, the three elements that comprise a conspiracy, and it sounds like the committee is honing in on just that type of investigation.

December 27, 2021

If You Think "Don't Look Up" Is Just an Allegory About Climate Change, You're Missing Something

23 hours ago
If You Think “Don’t Look Up” Is Just an Allegory About Climate Change, You’re Missing Something
We’re woefully unprepared to deal with any existential risk at all.
Tyler Austin Harper
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It also contains spoilers for the film Don’t Look Up.

snip//

It is scenes like this that lead many critics to see Don’t Look Up as a rather on-the-nose commentary not about rogue comets, but rather America’s failure to address climate change. Writing in the Intercept, Jon Schwarz even compares Don’t Look Up to the heralded nuclear war black comedy Dr. Strangelove, going so far as to suggest that the former might galvanize climate activism in the same way that the latter supercharged the anti-nuclear movement during the Cold War. He is not alone in this view: The overwhelming consensus among critics is that McKay’s new comedy is an allegory for climate change, a film that lampoons our refusal to take sufficient action to deter an all-too-real environmental crisis that is rapidly spiraling out of control.

This interpretation of the film makes sense, and there are good reasons to endorse it. Don’t Look Up is, after all, a movie about a social media–obsessed civilization ignoring scientists as they warn the world about a threat to life on Earth, only to be undermined by politicians and business-folk who prioritize present profits over future peril. It also doesn’t hurt that DiCaprio, who plays a leading role as a bumbling astronomer, is one of the world’s foremost celebrity climate activists. However, while the critical consensus that Don’t Look Up is a climate change allegory is certainly not wrong, this interpretation is also limited.

Calling a movie (or novel) an allegory is often a way of saying that it’s smarter than it appears at first blush. When critics or academics proclaim that George Orwell’s Animal Farm isn’t really a book about talking pigs but totalitarianism, for example, they’re making the case that the novel has a subterranean, secret, and above all more serious meaning. At its most basic, reading allegorically is about digging deeper, going beyond the “surface” of a work that we might otherwise be tempted to dismiss as a fluffy blockbuster or escapist beach reading—like a comedy or science fiction movie—and revealing it as doing intellectual heavy lifting. Yet there’s a flip side to allegorical interpretations: They can also function like blinders, illuminating one viewpoint while crowding out competing ideas.

In the case of Don’t Look Up, insisting that the film is just an allegory for global warming blinds us to the fact that in addition to satirizing our climate inaction, the film draws attention to the fact that the human species is threatened with extinction on multiple fronts: climate change, yes, but also renewed tension among nuclear powers, the possibility of malevolent artificial intelligence, supervolcanoes of the sort lurking beneath Yellowstone, pandemics for which COVID may be a mere dress rehearsal, and, of course, comets.

In academic parlance, we call threats like these “existential risks”: disasters that carry with them the possibility of human extinction or global social collapse from which we could not reconstitute civilization. Yet, unlike climate change, most existential risks are understudied, underpublicized, and underfunded: Toby Ord, an Oxford ethicist and one of the leading scholars on human extinction, often notes that the Biological Weapons Convention—the international body whose job it is to prevent human extinction through biological warfare—has an annual budget of less than $2 million. As Ord likes to point out, that operating budget is smaller than that of the average American McDonald’s franchise. Like Don’t Look Up, it’s a fact so scary it might make you laugh if it doesn’t make you cry.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/12/if-you-think-dont-look-up-is-just-an-allegory-about-climate-change-youre-missing-something/

December 27, 2021

Reporter Smacks Chuck Todd For Racist Framing Of CRT

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/reporter-scolds-chuck-todd-crt-think-just

Reporter Smacks Chuck Todd For Racist Framing Of CRT
NBC host Chuck Todd was admonished by investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on Sunday for remarks that otherize parents of color.
By David — December 26, 2021
Video @ link~


NBC host Chuck Todd was admonished by investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on Sunday for remarks that otherize parents of color.

During a Meet the Press special broadcast about schools and critical race theory, Todd wondered how old children should be before they are taught about race.



"Well, I think you should think just a little bit about your framing," Hannah-Jones replied. "You said 'parents' and then you said 'parents of color.'"

"White parents and parents of color," Todd interrupted. "No. Fair point."

"As a matter of fact, white parents are representing fewer than half of all public school parents," Hannah-Jones noted. "And yet, they have an outsized voice in this debate."

December 27, 2021

Crookie Award: Best One-Sentence Summation Of The Year, Jake Tapper

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/crookie-award-best-one-sentence-summation


Crookie Award: Best One-Sentence Summation Of The Year, Jake Tapper
Jake Tapper gets a 'Good Guy' Award for summing up Trump's January 6th complicity in one sentence.
23
By Frances Langum — December 26, 2021
Video @ link~


Watching this CNN clip from January 6, the CNN panel attempting to voiceover the violent attempt on our democracy, is chilling.

We've gotta hand it to Jake Tapper. He said what needed to be said, and still needs to be said, in one sentence. At the 1:29 mark of the video above.



And for that succinct statement, a moment in history that will echo in all the histories of that day that follow, we give Jake Tapper this Crookie "Good Guys" Award.

December 26, 2021

You Should Listen to CDs

https://www.wired.com/story/you-should-listen-to-cds/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Gilad Edelman
Gear
12.23.2021 07:00 AM
You Should Listen to CDs
If vinyl is for hipsters and streaming is for everyone else, maybe the forgotten format is for you.

snip//

This is not a nostalgia play. Vinyl has the nostalgia market cornered. But if you look past the visual aesthetics, you’ll admit that CDs accomplish the essential function of turntables, vis-a-vis streaming, without the hassle. That is, they allow you to build a library.

Since beginning my experiment, I find myself listening to full albums over and over and coming to appreciate tracks that I would skip if I were listening on my phone. Some of the albums I bought from the discount bin didn’t do much for me at first. I might not have given them a second listen on Spotify. But since they’re in my apartment, in a stack next to the boombox, I listen anyway. Most turn out to contain at least a few gems. The Neville Brothers album Yellow Moon, for example, includes some cringey quasi-rap and ponderous ballads, but also some absolute bangers of late-’80s funky swampy soul. Such are the unexpected joys this experiment has brought to my life.

(CDs also sound better than all but the most mint-condition records. Anyone who insists otherwise is probably rich enough to spend $45K on monoblock amplifiers and diamond-tipped styluses—or is just full of it.)

Note that I’m not predicting that CDs are poised for a comeback. To the contrary, the final pillar of my argument depends on that not being the case. Perhaps the best thing about CDs is that they have gotten ridiculously affordable. Thank you, supply and demand. At the used music stores where I live, almost all the CDs are $5 or less. Even new CDs are far cheaper than they were two decades ago. You could pay $35 to own the new Adele album on vinyl—or $9.97 to have it on CD, with money left over to buy two or three more albums.

So let the masses stay hooked on streaming while the hipsters spin their overpriced records. The CD is dead; long live the CD.

December 24, 2021

Connie Schultz: 'I'm a mess': A nurse who cares for dying COVID patients on the personal toll

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2021/12/23/covid-nurse-feeling-toll-virus-patients/8996442002/

'I'm a mess': A nurse who cares for dying COVID patients on the personal toll
Connie Schultz
USA TODAY

snip//

Outside of work, she stays home as much as possible. “The vibration of the public has changed, on social media and at the grocery store, too. Hostility, arguing, people saying, ‘You’re standing too close to me.’ Everyone seems so incredibly unhappy and stressed. I’ve turned into a bit of a hermit on my days off. I don’t want to be around that."

snip//

Today, most of Rosenberg’s patients are unvaccinated.



Her last two years of nursing have been unlike any other time in her career. So many hands have gone limp in hers.

snip//

After her last shift for the year, Rosenberg shared a rare post on Facebook about how she often cries now after a patient dies. “I felt some Forrest Gump spirit come over my soul,” she wrote. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’m gonna rest now.”

After the New Year, she will return to the COVID-19 unit, where she will continue to care for patients who refused to believe they would ever need her.

Until they did.