The hospital industry has partnered with a major Democratic consulting firm in an unusual alliance against Massachusetts’s nurses and the bulk of its progressive infrastructure.
Democratic Consulting Firm Teams Up With Hospital Industry to Battle Nurses Union The Intercept
It is important to understand that, contrary to the impression created by television and online advertising, a DNA test can never provide definitive information about one’s heritage. Ancestry-testing services deal in correlations: they collect data on genetic markers on the one hand and personal narratives on the other. If all or most of the people who identify as, say, Ashkenazi Jewish have a certain genetic marker, the database will learn to recognize the marker as “Ashkenazi Jewish”; chances are, most Palestinians in this world would have this marker as well, but as long as none of them has used this particular service, the marker will be known as “Jewish.” …
Just what’s wrong with that assumption is laid out in an essay published on ThinkProgress last year by the indigenous activist Rebecca Nagle: Warren, Nagle wrote, is positioning herself as a representative of people whose experience she does not share or understand. Warren has been criticized for failing to meet with Native American leaders, and she has garnered no praise from them for her legislative work (though she has recently signed on to several bills that address indigenous issues). Her visibility as an ostensible Native American exacerbates the invisibility of people who have grown up and live as Native Americans. “As contemporary Native Americans, we live in the space between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, between the stereotypes that were created to excuse the wholesale slaughter of our people and the stereotypes that were created to excuse the wholesale appropriation of our identity and cultures,” Nagle wrote. “The Trumps and Warrens of the world leave very little space for us to exist—which, when you understand the history of the United States, makes perfect sense.”
Elizabeth Warren Falls for Trump’s Trap—and Promotes Insidious Ideas About Race and DNA The New Yorker
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi should be denounced. Professor As`ad AbuKhalil says western media’s uncritical praise of Khashoggi is unworthy, he was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus and chose the wrong side of the House of Saud
Khashoggi Picked the Wrong Prince The Real News
NEW YORK – With the value of Bitcoin having fallen by around 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin, and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.
Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defense of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history.
In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet. But it has also become the byword for a libertarian ideology that treats all governments, central banks, traditional financial institutions, and real-world currencies as evil concentrations of power that must be destroyed. Blockchain fundamentalists’ ideal world is one in which all economic activity and human interactions are subject to anarchist or libertarian decentralization. They would like the entirety of social and political life to end up on public ledgers that are supposedly “permissionless” (accessible to everyone) and “trustless” (not reliant on a credible intermediary such as a bank).
Yet far from ushering in a utopia, blockchain has given rise to a familiar form of economic hell. A few self-serving white men (there are hardly any women or minorities in the blockchain universe) pretending to be messiahs for the world’s impoverished, marginalized, and unbanked masses claim to have created billions of dollars of wealth out of nothing. But one need only consider the massive centralization of power among cryptocurrency “miners,” exchanges, developers, and wealth holders to see that blockchain is not about decentralization and democracy; it is about greed.
The Big Blockchain Lie Project Syndicate
Just to build each car battery—weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles—would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it’s made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls’ findings.
The Dirt on Clean Electric Cars Bloomberg
Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world’s climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.
The man who created bin Salman, promoted him and redirected the entire US foreign policy, military and security establishments to place their trust on his shoulders, is Trump. And it is Trump who allowed the crown prince to act with total impunity.
Trump and the boy king: Mohammed bin Salman’s reign is over before it even began Middle East Eye
Although New York Police Department officers were present at the time of the attack, none of the Proud Boys were arrested for the beatdown.
However, separately, three other protesters were arrested for attacking a person leaving the event.
Police have not yet explained why there were no arrests made in the assault on the protesters, despite multiple inquiries by BuzzFeed News on Saturday.
Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.
To the rescue comes UBI (Universial Basic Income). The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.
Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam Medium
Hundreds of thousands of people marched Saturday afternoon demonstrating against racism and calling for solidarity against the rise of the far-right across Germany and Europe.
“UnTrump the World”: Hundreds of Thousands March in Berlin Against the Far Right CommonDreams
The Old Mole 