ancianita
ancianita's JournalOur great President Biden's complete remarks at 2023 White House Correspondents' Dinner
Worth remembering the breadth and depth of his humor and heart.
Every single day, feeling grateful to remember what we might have become without Joe, how much he will fight to the death for us, that he remains the greatest president of our lifetimes.
It's worth watching his whole speech. It's lit and so is the room.
Partial transcript of the end of his remarks:
Start 17:25
The great Ida B. Wells once said and I quote, "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of Truth upon the wrongs... that is the sacred charge of a free press and I mean that. That's what some that we still miss so much, well honored with positivity tonight -- Gwen Eiffel... she moderated my first debate for vice president, was a trusted voice for millions of Americans. Gwen understood that the louder the noise, the more it's incumbent on all of is to cut through the noise to the Truth.
The Truth matters. As I said last year at this dinner, a poison is running through out democracy and parts of the extreme press. Truth buried by lies, and lies living on as truth.
Lies told for profit and power, lies of conspiracy and malice, repeated over and over again, designed to generate a cycle of anger and hate, and even violence. A cycle that emboldens history to be buried, books to be banned, children and families to be attacked by the State, and the Rule of Law and our rights and freedoms to be stripped away. Where elected representatives of the People are expelled from statehouses for standing for the People.
I made clear that we know in our bones, and you know it, too, our democracy remains at risk. But I've also made it clear, as I've seen throughout my life, it's within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy. We can, we must, we will.
I'd like to make a toast to this inflection point in history -- let us commit:
There will be a nation that will embrace Light over Darkness, truth over lies, and finally, finally, finally, restore the soul of the nation. Hear here.
Fulton County DA Fani Willis holds press conference August 14 2023
All defendants with arrest warrants are given the opportunity to surrender by Friday, August 25
Fani Willis's indictment document
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23909553-read-trump-indictment-in-fulton-county-georgia-probe?sidebar=0
Down wid it from jump! World Change, Get Ready Pt 2: The Global Security, Geopolitical, and Digital (Dis)Order
Ian Bremmer can be off-putting, but he's worth hearing out.Overall...
Security is unipolar.
Geopolitics is shared.
Digital order is getting beyond human control.
More “optimistic” thoughts on his take on a more or less leaderless global situation...
I think Bremmer says “leaderless” when he really means primacy, as in the primacy the US had after WWII. He doesn't use the term AI, but 'leaderless' would maybe exist within that framework.
Post 9/11, we spent hundreds of billions on terrorist hunting. That 20 years gave our global competitors the time to invest their own money, enjoy the benefits of global modernizing through our stabilizing oceanic trade.
They also grew to become a larger threat than we (the general public) knew. China becoming a force projection in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean? The Russian Federation having close relationships with China, Syria, North Koreans and the Iranians?
Americans became aware slowly, then saw it all. Because in spite of our primacy since WWII, in world history we are often thought of as an adolescent country (discounting the one-off of Trump), myopic, focused only on things in front of us, lacking a longer vision. Most of us have angrily and resignedly put up with the “nothing to see here” and “need to know” media interface that presents reality as entertainment, with context-free and tabloid news that stunts national perception and maturity.
The world has watched us as a superpower do this, especially authoritarian countries that have what they believe are benefits of non-transitioning authoritarian rulers that sit in office for 15 - 30 years. One benefit is consistent focus on their enemies. Another is continuity.
Our transitional leadership is part of what makes us strong, yes; but we haven’t yet learned to have a change in leadership and still maintain a consistent focus.
We like to think our vision has been freedom and Democracy.
Yet our democracy is challenged internally and abroad, and our vision divided.
Meanwhile, changes are coming. Bremmer's framing is just one.
Big World Change, Get Ready Pt 1: How AI Could Effect the World In Three Years
Tom Bilyeu has a fascinating & scary discussion with one of the most brilliant minds at the forefront of AI advancement, Emad Mostaque.
The biggest problem for humans: danger-proofing, future-proofing, collective decisionmaking, individual collapse inward.
The biggest solution: A human AI utopia.
Quotes from the talk:
Emad cuts through the hype on human problems with perspective, regulation, and the challenge of tackling bias in artificial intelligence.
“AI is not going to replace humans, humans with AI will replace humans that don’t use AI.”
“Attention is all you need, so not all data is important. You need to pay attention to what is important in a sentence.”
My biggest problem with Mostaque -- his presumption that people are unprepared, unanchored, and that AI tech needs to take a pause, though it won't be paused, before it's allowed to be limitless on a finite planet.
RIP DJ CASPER, aka William Perry of Chicago -- Thank you for years of Cha Cha Slide Fun
Wherever families, friends, colleagues partied, you bonded diverse millions of us through the years.
After the song grew in popularity as an aerobic exercise at fitness clubs and PE in schools, Casper created a second song in 2000, titled "Casper Slide Pt. 2", which was picked up by Elroy Smith at Chicago's radio station, WGCI-FM.
The song became a hit in Chicago in 2004, when the city's M.O.B. Records record label became involved as well, helping Perry create a whole compilation album with other Chicago-based artists to promote the dance. "Cha Cha Slide" was later picked up by Universal Records.
Perry made an appearance as a DJ in a season 6 episode of Orange Is the New Black, in Crazy Eyes' hallucination of the prisoners and guards line dancing to the Cha Cha Slide.
DEF CON 31 Opens Today!
background: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218119922
Dist Judge Starr, nephew of Kenneth Starr, sends Southwest Airlines to right-wing reeducation camp
by Ruth Marcus, Assoc. Editor
Another day, another extremist ruling by another extremist Trump judge, and this decision — from Texas, no surprise — is straight out of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The judge held lawyers for Southwest Airlines in contempt of court for their actions in a religious-discrimination case brought by a former flight attendant and ordered them to undergo “religious liberty training.” And not just any instruction, but training conducted by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative group that litigates against same-sex marriage, transgender rights and abortion rights.
... Charlene Carter, a flight attendant for more than 20 years and a longtime antagonist of the Southwest flight attendants union. In 2017, after union members attended the Women’s March under a “Southwest Airlines Flight Attendants” banner, Carter sent Facebook messages to the union president containing graphic antiabortion messages.
“This is what you supported during your Paid Leave with others at the Women’s MARCH in DC …. You truly are Despicable in so many ways,” Carter wrote in one message accompanying a video of an aborted fetus. After the union president complained, Southwest fired Carter, saying her conduct “crossed the boundaries of acceptable behavior,” was “inappropriate, harassing, and offensive,” and “did not adhere to Southwest policies and guidelines.” An arbitrator found that Southwest had just cause for the firing.
Carter, represented by the National Right to Work Committee, sued, claiming Southwest and the union violated her rights under federal labor laws and Title VII. The federal job-bias law bars employers from discriminating on the basis of religion, and Carter claimed she was dismissed because of her sincerely held religious beliefs against abortion. A jury found in her favor, whoppingly so. It awarded her $5.1 million, though U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr reduced the amount to about $800,000. The case is being appealed.
...“Southwest’s speech and actions toward employees demonstrate a chronic failure to understand the role of federal protections for religious freedom,” Starr decreed.
He proceeded to order three Southwest lawyers to undergo eight hours of religious-liberty training — a move he described as “the least restrictive means of achieving compliance with the Court’s order.” Luckily, Starr observed, “there are esteemed nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to preserving free speech and religious freedom.”
And at that point in his opinion, Starr added a footnote citing the ADF’s litigation of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the 2018 Supreme Court case involving the baker who refused to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
... The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the ADF a “hate group,” and while I think that goes too far, this group is no neutral arbiter of constitutional values — it is an advocacy organization that takes zealous, extreme and, in my view, offensive positions. It has argued that allowing “practicing homosexuals” to serve in the military or adopt children constitutes “attacks on family values” that “will ultimately destroy our society.” In a friend-of-the-court brief in Lawrence v. Texas, the case in which the Supreme Court struck down laws criminalizing homosexual conduct, the ADF argued that they should be upheld because “same-sex sodomy is a distinct public health problem.”
The ADF’s former president co-wrote a book, “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today,” in which he linked homosexuality and pedophilia: “Despite ever-present denials by homosexual activists, the link to child sex (adults promoting sex with young boys) and homosexual behavior is alarming.” Its website proclaimed: “Redefining marriage is ultimately part of a larger effort to redesign society in order to give social approval of homosexual behavior, and to empower social acceptance of a forgery of gender and sexual practice at odds with natural law and the faith of millions.”
These aren’t random examples; they embody the ADF’s core convictions, beliefs to which members are fully entitled under the First Amendment and that they have every right to promote. But that is a far cry from decreeing this “esteemed” group “particularly well-suited to train Southwest’s employees.”
This is the alarming legacy that former president Donald Trump has left us — a skewed bench that he would augment if reelected. The Trump judges seem to be competing among themselves for who can engage in the greatest overreach.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch echoed this point at oral argument last year in the case of ADF client Lorie Smith, a website designer and Christian who said she did not want to create sites for same-sex couples. Gorsuch insistently questioned Colorado’s lawyer about what Gorsuch termed the state’s “reeducation training program.”
When the lawyer disagreed, saying it was “a process to make sure [the individual] was familiar with Colorado law, Gorsuch persisted: “Someone might be excused for calling that a reeducation program.”....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/09/southwest-lawyers-contempt-starr-religious-liberty/
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,132