Laptop tab clearance...

Well, a browser crash cleaned out my desktop tabs for me quite some time ago, but my laptop browser is slowing down under the weight of tabs, so let's clear some out...

A reminder that white supremacists will say or do anything to strike at their enemies. They don't care about justice or law except where it serves their ends.

NBC and Weinstein: Rich white men look after their own.

A glimpse in the mind of President Used Car Salesman.

What the two previous articles have in common. Simply put, we enable abusers in America.

Another thing Trump and Weinstein have in common: organized and criminal cover-ups of their wrongdoing.

Glimpses into the minds of people who, despite all the evidence, despite everything, still support Trump. And the reaction other people have to those people.

ALL OF THIS. And more, probably. Republican policies are intended to concentrate wealth and crush the poor... and Democrats have failed to provide any serious pushback, never mind policies that would actually fix the problem. (And no, job training is NOT a solution, not when you're training people to compete with China and India and when the jobs in question will never come to the people being trained.)

And this is WHY Democrats have no answers: their leadership is filled with the same kind of people who are squeezing the rest of us.

Yet another chapter in the politicization of the bench. Electoral politics have no place in a courtroom NONE. (This judge will be on the bench until at least 2021, by the way.)

Burger King says no to bullying... sandwiches.

Fascism spreading around the world...

Yet another reminder that when a conservative says "voter fraud", what they mean is, "only wealthy white men should vote." (And incidentally, this isn't the only con game Kris Kobach is involved in.) (Not that he's the only Republican blocking people from voting...nor is this in any way a recent development...)

A reminder of how Republicans got this way.

You know how Trump just ordered his attorney general to perform selective declassification of FBI records in order to prove the Russia investigation was politically motivated? Not the first time he's declassified records for purely political ends. This is what a dictator does.

And you know how Trump is rumored to be considering pardoning war criminals? Might be because he doesn't think it's a crime to kill families of terrorists or innocent bystanders."Not white" is enough for him. And he knows his followers agree.

This is another thing dictators do: attempt to change the facts to match their beliefs.

 All part of the Big Lie Trump is employing, a tactic which his supporters embrace wholeheartedly.


 That's going to do it for this one...

Mass Link Bundle #2

Not getting better using this. Let's see how many tabs I clear from my browser this time, beginning with the oldest.

In the south, and especially in Harris County, if you have no money, you have no justice.

The next time a Republican tells you that conservatives support equal rights for women, tell him about this. Or tell him he's full of shit. Both are true. (By the way, this story is from 2015, but Strickland still holds office.)

If you live someplace in Texas with a homeowner's association, or with a deed restriction, you may find out the hard way that you don't own your home at all- and that you have no legal rights worth respecting to try to keep it. HOAs in Texas are insanely powerful- and unaccountable.

Thanks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Some of us remember.

Cutting taxes only boosts wealth for the rich. It doesn't make the economy stronger. Also, water tends to be slightly damp.

Remember, hard work does NOT equal success. If your boss can get away with paying you less than you're worth, he WILL- and he'll pat himself on the back for doing it.

The next time a conservative says, "You socialists just want stuff for free! I paid for mine!", point out that they could be getting what they're paying for for a LOT cheaper- by socializing it. That's how Scandinavia does it.

Responsible (white) gun owner pulls gun on black man because he's scared of black people.

Three victims of the CIA's torture program sued the doctors who designed the torture methods. And they won.This is the first, and so far only, victory for those seeking justice for the Bush administration's crimes.

(Paywall) Kansas gutted taxes; California hiked them sky-high. Now Kansas is sinking economically while California is soaring.

An excellent argument, with studies cited, against universal gun ownership, but my favorite bit is the simple response to the insane notion that the Second Amendment preserves the right to armed resistance against our elected government.

The Atlanta Braves got a special law passed for their new Cobb County stadium to give them a monopoly on expensive parking spaces- with no public transit option- all in the name of "safety." Riiiiight.

That's all Blogger will let me do for now...



 

I've Been Thinking This For Ages

Now I have supporting evidence: Ryan Sager reports on a study that shows that, at the least, the prevalence of pornography in American is harmless.

And, in fact, there is some associative, but not causal, evidence that suggests that the availability of porn reduces rape:

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

And I especially find interesting the line that says that the single biggest associative factor with sexual abuse or rape is not pornography... it's a sexually repressive religious upbringing.

So there's actually a scientific reason why there are so many sexual skeletons in Republican closets...

Anyway, in light of this research, I ask all of you readers to support my program to make the world a better place...