Monday, April 01, 2019

Stay Alert Today!


              CLICK HERE -->  https://www.k-international.com/blog/april-fools-day-around-the-world/

16 comments:

  1. Guardian on the asteroid crash fossils [Click]
    “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions – they’re not crushed,” said co-author David Burnham. “It’s like an avalanche that collapses almost like a liquid, then sets like concrete. They were killed pretty suddenly because of the violence of that water. We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.”

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  2. Anybody else think two people complaining that Joe Biden breathed on them is really the DNC inner circle weeding out the field? I'll go back into my cave now. Disgusted.

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    1. No, he's always been a grabber and there are plenty of pictures to prove it. I don't think he meant anything sexual by it, he's just completely inappropriate. Plus he's' a super-neoliberal and he destroyed Anita Hill so I don't have one ounce of sympathy for him. I hope he doesn't run, and if he does I hope he doesn't win the primary. Oh, and he's also big on "tough on crime" for black people.

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    2. Susan, I don't agree with Biden on politics; I'm for Bernie. But I also don't think Biden has done anything worth all this fussing. He is a compassionate person, and tends to give hugs. I know there has been far too much abuse in the world, but have we really come to the point where no one can touch anyone else? Does that pendulum really have to swing all the way over, to right the ship? It makes me sad.

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    3. I think you are too suspicious, listener. Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is the most likely. Simplest explanation is that he simply doesn't know what is socially acceptable.

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  3. Pete's preliminary first (less than) quarter fundraising report:
    Total something over seven megabucks
    158,550 donors
    Average $36.35
    64% of total in donations less than $200

    Pretty good for a dark horse; I don't yet know how the others did.

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  4. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) raised $12 million for her 2020 presidential campaign in the first quarter, the Daily Beast reports.
    That haul came from more than 218,000 individual contributions.

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  5. “Ohioans could vote this fall on a measure to award the presidency to the candidate who wins the national popular vote — regardless of which candidate wins the Buckeye State,” the Columbus Dispatch reports.

    “The proposed constitutional amendment would bypass the electoral college by authorizing Ohio’s membership in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.”
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    The House of Commons rejected all 4 alternatives to British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal for the second time, the BBC reports.

    Wiggling buttocks enliven existential hell of Brexit debate [Click]

    Guy Verhofstadt says Wednesday’s final indicative vote offers last hope of avoiding ‘abyss’ [Click]

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  6. I respectfully disagree, as I am not suspicious by nature. It’s also a fairly simple idea that our culture is weighted heavily in Me Too. Mind you! I am all for scuzzbuckets like DT being called onto the carpet for their abuses! But these accusations against Biden sure pale by comparison, don’t they? Let’s take someone who has given his life to public service and throw him out with the trash for imperfectly expressing compassion? I have had appropriate conduct education workshops, and I am aware that if an action makes someone uncomfortable it is deemed inappropriate. Yet to wait until a person who wasn’t intending harm is about to announce a candidacy to bring the subject up sure smacks of political motivation. I stand by what I said.

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  7. Replies
    1. My point isn’t whether one should or should not vote for him, but whether his candidacy should be squelched for such minor concerns.

      And I’m not alone.

      Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe wrote yesterday:

      ‘I believe Lucy Flores and her account of Joe Biden putting his hands on her shoulders and kissing the back of her head.

      “But that’s a kiss of death for 2020? That makes Biden unfit to be president?

      ‘If true, what a crazy world we live in. Donald Trump can win the White House after bragging about grabbing women by the genitals and paying off a porn actress with whom he had extramarital sex. Biden, meanwhile, is deemed too “creepy” to run for president because of a “crisis of touching” that’s not about sexual assault or workplace harassment, or sex with an intern.’

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    2. You are not "hearing" me, listener. It is his past history of poor judgment and oppression of blacks that means I don't support him. He *is* out of touch and, honestly, he always has been. I don't care how many shoulders he grabbed personally - that's not the sticking point.

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    3. I do hear you, Susan, that you feel Biden's past history with Anita Hill and blacks means he should not run. I think those are absolutely rock solid points.

      However, that wasn't the discussion topic I started. So I feel unheard too. I wasn't talking about whether or not Biden should run based on those reasons. I was talking about whether or not he should be forced to not run because he thought he was being supportive of a person running for office and she felt creeped out by him touching her shoulders and kissing the back of her head.

      I only discovered this evening when I showed my husband Joan Vennochi's article that there was a LOT more to the article than I saw this morning.

      For what it's worth, here's the whole of it:

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    4. PART ONE:

      JOAN VENNOCHI: A KISS ON THE BACK OF THE HEAD SHOULDN’T BE A KISS OF DEATH FOR BIDEN – THE BOSTON GLOBE
      Global News Archive | April 1, 2019

      I believe Lucy Flores and her account of Joe Biden putting his hands on her shoulders and kissing the back of her head.

      But that’s a kiss of death for 2020? That makes Biden unfit to be president?

      If true, what a crazy world we live in. Donald Trump can win the White House after bragging about grabbing women by the genitals and paying off a porn actress with whom he had extramarital sex. Biden, meanwhile, is deemed too “creepy” to run for president because of a “crisis of touching” that’s not about sexual assault or workplace harassment, or sex with an intern.

      It’s about unwanted invasion of personal space. It rises to the level of political crime because it puts the 76-year-old former vice president out of step with another cause that speaks to progressive voters in a very rigid way: the #MeToo movement. Biden’s already apologizing for white male privilege and how he mishandled the Anita Hill hearings when he headed the Senate committee that questioned her. Now he has to apologize for all the times he touched a woman’s shoulders, held her hand too long, or rubbed noses — as a Connecticut woman told the Hartford Courant that he did during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich.

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    5. PART TWO:

      I’m not saying I would welcome such behavior coming from Biden or any other man approaching me in a professional situation. It’s why women perfect the art of quickly putting out their hand and turning their face away in business settings. But if someone manages to get past an outstretched arm, I don’t equate it with an outrageous attack that renders the offender dead to me forever. Yet, after a year-plus of #MeToo sagas, I know this also puts me on the other side of a divide that is often generational. There’s a world of women who make no distinction between the switch under Matt Lauer’s desk that allegedly allowed him to trap women in his office, and a comment from a male colleague about what they’re wearing.

      The former vice president said Sunday he doesn’t believe he ever acted inappropriately toward women but will “listen respectfully” to suggestions he did.

      Not everyone on the other end of Biden’s behavior defines it as inappropriate. Stephanie Carter, the wife of former defense secretary Ashton Carter, said that Biden’s holding of her shoulders in a much circulated photo was an effort by the vice president to make her feel better during a stressful moment. “But a still shot taken from a video — misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friends — sent out in a snarky tweet — came to be the lasting image of that day,” she wrote on Medium.

      At the same time, I don’t discount Flores’s discomfort with Biden’s behavior, even if she waited five years to complain about it. At a 2014 event at which the then vice president came to endorse her, when she was running for lieutenant governor in Nevada, she said Biden put two hands on her shoulders, “inhaled” her hair, “and proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.” That, she wrote in New York magazine’s “The Cut,” made her feel “uneasy, gross, and confused” as well as “powerless to do anything about it.” She could have enlightened him then. Instead, just as Biden is deciding whether to launch a presidential campaign, she’s empowered enough to tell the world about it.

      If Biden wants to run, this shouldn’t stop him. Primary voters should pick the next Democratic party nominee — not Democratic rivals who are trying to winnow an enormous field. Flores says she’s not supporting any candidate at the moment. But in 2016, she endorsed Bernie Sanders, and according to The New York Times, she attended former US representative Beto O’Rourke’s campaign kickoff in El Paso.

      Biden should apologize to Flores and say that he has gotten the message: no more shoulder or nose-rubbing, hair-sniffing, or back-of-the-head kissing. If any more women come forward to complain, it will be the kiss of death for him. At what point does it also become the kiss of death for old-fashioned human contact in political campaigns?

      Joan Vennochi can be reached at vennochi@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Joan_Vennochi.

      Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2019/04/01/kiss-back-head-shouldn-kiss-death-for-biden/Ae4W9bBZYui0gTDM1ybNaK/story.html

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