01) Progressives’ New Ranked Choice Voting Bill Could Kill the Two-Party Duopoly
“A new bill was recently introduced by Rep. Don Beyer that—if passed—would be a game changer in American politics. The bill aims to put an end to gerrymandering, institute a national ranked choice voting (RCV) system, and making representation more proportional by switching to multi-member districts (currently 100% of district in America are single-member districts, which are won with a plurality of votes). The bill—H.R. 3057—already has two cosponsors (Reps. Ro Khanna and Jamie Raskin), and should quickly galvanize grassroots support given that it could end the two-party duopoly once and for all.
01) George Romero, ‘Night Of The Living Dead’ Director, Dies At 77
He died almost a month ago…
“…Romero passed away peacefully in his sleep Sunday while listening to the score of one of his all-time favorite films, The Quiet Man. His wife, Suzanne Desrocher Romero and daughter, Tina Romero were at his side. Romero had been battling lung cancer.
[…]
Born George Andrew Romero in the Bronx, New York City on Feb. 4, 1940 to a Cuban father and a Lithuania American mother, Romero launched his filmmaking career in the early 1960s, shortly after graduation from the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.
Romero was a pioneer in the zombie-horror movie genre and early established a name for himself with such films as the satirical Night of the Living Dead, which spawned Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Crazies and Martin. He defined the modern template for bringing the scary, gruesome and dead to life on screen, inspiring a myriad of zombies in Hollywood and the more recent high-rated AMC series, The Walking Dead.
– July 16, 2017”
How did this happen, without my learning of it?
The last Romero “Dead” movie I saw that I actually liked, was “Diary of the Dead”…
…”Night of the Living Dead” was fun…”Dawn of the Dead” is great…”Day of the Dead” is great…”Land of the Dead” is terrible…”Diary of the Dead” is good…”Survival of the Dead” is highly disappointing…even more so, since it’s the final movie, and it’s so bad.
“Richard Beck is author of “WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN: Moral Panic In The 1980s” published by Public Affairs. WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN IS A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and an unfounded fear for the safety of children.”
Very late in [the last ten minutes], there is verbal confirmation of the open, legal availability of child pornography [or child erotica, if you prefer], even in Time Square.
Like most media of this type…what is presented here is a mixed bag…It centers around the McMartin Preschool case, but also touches on the Friedmans…of “Capturing the Friedmans”.
The host has some serious misconceptions…but, I think the guest does a pretty reasonable job, of steering him back around to something more truthful…Given the people, audience and setting…you really cannot expect much better.
For what it is…I’m giving this a thumbs up, for being important listening…Even though I was gritting my teeth, at a point or two.
“The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says Neil Prakash is receiving ‘standard’ Australian consular assistance while in maximum-security prison in Turkey.
It is understood this could include helping Prakash contact family members, liaising with Turkish authorities about the 26-year-old’s well-being while in custody and assisting him to find legal representation.
[…]
Also known as Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, Prakash left Australia for Syria via Malaysia in 2013. He has featured in a number of IS propaganda videos in which he calls for attacks on Australia and the United States.
[…]
Prakash has been described by the government as the most senior Australian operator in IS.”
“My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don’t reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that’s a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. The individual organism can be defined as that set of phenotypic products which have a single route of exit of the genes into the future. That’s not true of the cuckoo/reed warbler case, but it is true of ordinary animal bodies. So the organism, the individual organism, is a deeply salient unit. It’s a unit of selection in the sense that I call a “vehicle”.
There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They’re both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn’t get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it’s going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual replicator dichotomy. They’re both units of selection, but in different senses. It’s important to understand that they are different senses.”
01) Waking Up with Sam Harris #91 – The Biology of Good and Evil (with Robert Sapolsky)
“In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about his work with baboons, the opposition between reason and emotion, doubt, the evolution of the brain, the civilizing role of the frontal cortex, the illusion of free will, justice and vengeance, brain-machine interface, religion, drugs, and other topics.
Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He is the author of A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.”
Only on the internet do you find these self proclaimed “child protection champions”…who are so insane, that even the agencies set up to address child protection refuse to associate with them…let alone communicate with them.
…And she, along with other allies of hers, have taken aim at them…
…As if the NCMEC didn’t have solid justification, when they discovered she’s a wingnut zealot, who could only waist their time on ignorant nonsense.
Her fanciful notions that the NCMEC is responsible for policing all child porn on the internet, only attests to her ignorant, charmed life…a life that’s led to uninformed, infantile views of the world, lacking intelligent nuance.
…People are sustaining insane prison sentences all the time, over child porn…but, “nobody cares about the kids”?…
She grew up in the 80’s satanic pedophile panic…and internalized it…
Did she ever have exposure to anything else, other than what she was fed?…Because if not…that’s where these psychologically, emotionally stunted people come from…They never grow past their infantile beliefs.
…The McMartin Preschool…Yeah, that was debunked…quite thoroughly…
It’s sad how often you have to educate people about this.
She “wants everyone to be happy”…and to “help everyone she can”…But she plots to destroy this very blog…A human rights resource, and a foundation of my own life’s work…Because truth and reality offend her so.
…How does that work?…”Oh well, let’s just steal the happiness and decades running, meaning in life from Steve Diamond [a disabled vet, who has no other options to impact this world for the better], because we think he doesn’t deserve to be a human rights activist”?…
I agree about standing up for the kids…But I stand up for them as full human beings…Not as some kind of exploited tool, to advance my own totalitarian moral agenda…I stand up for kids, in the way that truly matters.
She has this sort of clueless grin…along with her shifty, crazy wide eyes…bobbing head…There’s always something about people like her, that bothers me…like they’re not all there…They’re living in this kind of fantasy delusion…And you can pick this up, even from just their mannerisms.
“Mainstream media isn’t exposing what’s going on”?…The mainstream media has spent decades, flooded with this type of thing…Do you imagine they could cover every accusation, that comes up in any given day?…How much time do you imagine any typical media production company has, to dedicate to this specific issue?…Most will give a short blip to it, and then move on to one of the many other social categories they regularly cover…
She’s taking something, and spinning it into something it honestly is not.
Even presuming they could start a channel, where nothing but “child molestation” and “child porn” are reported on…nobody in their right mind is ever going to do this, because it’s too much of a psychological drain on the audience…even if the effect is mostly derived, from their preconceived notions on those topics. Most people will eventually tune into something else, because they realize the unhealthy toll it is taking on them…Others will become obsessed, and it will literally consume them…The channel wont be profitable…and those who do watch it religiously, will become dangerously indoctrinated and radicalized.
…There is a lot to be said for not forcing this in front of everybody, all the time…While we are saturated by it…the media companies still do some type of managing of it…I’m pretty certain, there’s an intent behind the method.
Okay…I’ve had enough of this…Go watch the train wreck if you want…
…She just continues in typical form…Nothing impressive…An “interview” that isn’t merely soft…it’s silky smooth, in catering to her ego…and mythos…
With half an hour left…I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of juicy stuff, to give intelligent, sane comment on.
In reality…running circles around people like this, is quite taxing…I can’t take this level of insane stupid, for long periods of time…I’m sophisticated enough, to where I need deeply intellectual stimulation, to keep me engaged…It’s torturous being on this treadmill…endlessly correcting people like her…over such mundane, simplistic reality.
“A new report out in The Nation claims that the DNC wasn’t hacked from outside, but that an insider leaked the Podesta emails. Jeff Waldorf breaks it down.
01) Dem Establishment Trots Out Usual Smear Tactics in Kamala Harris Vs. Bernie Sanders Debate
“Over the last few weeks, the civil war on the left has continued because the Democratic Party’s donors are attempting to anoint Kamala Harris as the Party’s 2020 presidential nominee; and behind the scenes, those within Obama’s inner circle are trying to push Deval Patrick to run for president. The progressives that have dared to express skepticism with these candidates have been lambasted, once again, as racist/sexist Berniebros. However, progressives are pushing back against these baseless accusations.
01) Progressives’ New Ranked Choice Voting Bill Could Kill the Two-Party Duopoly
