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reACTIONary

reACTIONary's Journal
reACTIONary's Journal
June 29, 2021

Judge Throws Out 2 Antitrust Cases Against Facebook

Source: New York Times

The decisions were a major blow to attempts to rein in Big Tech. The judge said one of the complaints, from the Federal Trade Commission, lacked facts and gave the agency 30 days to refile it.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/technology/facebook-ftc-lawsuit.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

June 23, 2021

India Walton, a socialist candidate, stuns longtime incumbent in Buffalo mayor's race.

Source: New York Times

A progressive challenger running her first campaign was poised on Tuesday to beat Buffalo’s four-term Democratic mayor in a primary upset that would upend the political landscape in New York’s second-biggest city and signal the strength of the party’s left wing.

The challenger, India B. Walton, is a former nurse and community activist who ran with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. She was leading Byron Brown, a longtime member of the Democratic establishment, by 7 percentage points, or about 1,500 votes, as of midnight with all of the in-person ballots counted, according to unofficial results.

Should Ms. Walton, 38, win the primary and then triumph in the general election November — a likely result in heavily Democratic Buffalo — she would be the first socialist mayor of a major American city since 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. She would also be the first female mayor in Buffalo’s history.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/nyregion/india-walton-buffalo-mayor-socialist.html

June 21, 2021

Unmasking the far right: An extremist paid a price when his identity was exposed online

Unmasking the far right: An extremist paid a price when his identity was exposed online

Source: Washington Post, June 21, 2021 at 8:28 a.m. EDT

Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.

Reaction was swift.

The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/doxing-far-right-violent-extremists/2021/06/20/35f730e2-ba68-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html

June 21, 2021

Unmasking the far right: An extremist paid a price when his identity was exposed online after a viol

Source: Washington Post

Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.

Reaction was swift.

The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/doxing-far-right-violent-extremists/2021/06/20/35f730e2-ba68-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html

June 12, 2021

The SBC has bad, sexist theology. Of course bad culture follows.

"I mention [the Rev. Fleming Rutledge] as a way of introducing the the latest controversy inside the Southern Baptist Convention. Internal letters and secret recordings leaked in recent days suggest that the nation’s largest (though dwindling) Protestant denomination has not come to grips with the problem of sexually predatory pastors.

That failing cannot be separated, it seems to me, from the theological sexism at the top of the SBC. When the convention holds its annual meeting this week, a key bit of business will be the reaffirmation of a doctrine euphemistically called complementarianism. It holds that even so great a preacher as Fleming Rutledge is an abomination on account of the fact that Fleming Rutledge is a woman."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/11/sbc-has-bad-sexist-theology-course-bad-culture-follows/

June 10, 2021

He brought a sawed-off rifle to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Then he plotted to bomb Amazon data centers.

Source: Washington Post

He brought a sawed-off rifle to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Then he plotted to bomb Amazon data centers.

For weeks this spring, 28-year-old Seth Aaron Pendley had plotted an attack on Amazon data centers in Virginia. He’d already taken a sawed-off rifle to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he hoped to cripple much of the Internet and take down government networks.

Last April, he finally arranged a meeting with a man promising to provide the C4 explosive devices. When they met in Fort Worth, Tex., the man showed Pendley how to arm and detonate the powerful bombs.

But just as Pendley placed the devices into his Pontiac, federal agents swarmed in and arrested him. The bomb seller was actually an FBI plant who had helped unravel a plan Pendley believed could “kill off about 70 percent of the internet.”

On Wednesday, Pendley pleaded guilty to planning to bomb Amazon facilities in an attempt to undermine the U.S. government and to spark a rebellion against the “oligarchy” he believed to be running the country.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/10/seth-pendley-amazon-bomb-guilty/

June 5, 2021

White House Disavows Knowledge of Gag Order on Times Leaders in Leak Inquiry

Source: New York Times

The Biden administration said on Saturday that no one at the White House had been aware that the Justice Department was seeking to seize the email data of four New York Times reporters and had obtained a gag order in March barring a handful of newspaper executives who knew about the fight from discussing it.

“As appropriate given the independence of the Justice Department in specific criminal cases, no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night,” Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/us/politics/biden-gag-order-new-york-times-leak.html

May 30, 2021

This concert ticket costs $18 -- or $1,000 if you're not vaccinated

Source: Washington Post

This concert ticket costs $18 — or $1,000 if you’re not vaccinated

The promoter says he’s offering a discount. The governor’s office says he’s violating Florida rules.

“I didn’t know that caring about my community would make me Hitler,” he said in an interview Saturday, declining to give his age out of concern for his privacy. He said he and the band are flagging the threatening email to law enforcement.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/29/florida-concert-price-vaccinated/

May 26, 2021

Is Wokeness 'Kryponite for Democrats'?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/opinion/democrats-republicans-wokeness-cancel-culture.html

In much gentler terms, Barack Obama has voiced analogous concerns. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” Obama famously declared in October 2019:

The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.

James Carville, the top strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, was succinct in his assessment. He recently told Sean Illing, a writer at Vox,

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.

“Why not?” Illing asked.

“Because they’ll get clobbered.”
May 23, 2021

"Grandpa Ye, have a good journey!" Scientist Yuan Longping (Obituary)

Scientist Yuan Longping, whose rice research helped feed people in many countries, dies at 91

It was in the 1970s when Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him a household name. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties — meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year... His work helped transform China from “food deficiency to food security” within three decades...

.... known by the nickname “Father of Hybrid Rice" ... large crowds honored the scientist by marching past the hospital in Hunan province where he died, local media reported, calling out phrases such as: “Grandpa Ye, have a good journey!”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-yuan-longping-father-of-hybrid-rice-dies-at-91/2021/05/22/ed13a29c-baf9-11eb-bc4a-62849cf6cca9_story.html

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