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For years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking. Then came Pizzagate.

The post QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com appeared first on The Intercept.

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As of April 26, 2024 Donald Trump hasn’t stopped violating his Judge Merchan gag order. Until the punishments are strong enough to make him stop, we need to take steps to stop and punish his followers, who make threats on his behalf. Marcy Wheeler was on the Nicole Sandler show last week talking about Donald Trump’s systematic threatening of his critics and how normalized political violence is for anybody who comes up against Donald Trump. I’ve written about, and asked a lot of questions about, how threats online and on social media have an impact and what can be done about them. It was great to hear from Marcy about the scope of the problem, how it involves the legal system, the media, social media and learn some names of major players who make threats on social media and get away with it. “There is nobody who is on the wrong side of Donald Trump who is not stalked, who does not face mob violence, and it is systematic. There’s a group of these people, Jesse Watters, we talked about. Jack Posobiec is always involved. Mike Cernovich is always involved. These are people in Roger Stone’s world.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

After reading Kristi Noem’s sickening story bragging about shooting her puppy, I thought we needed a pure, feel good dog story today. From the Dodo: Messi, an 8-year-old Labrador retriever, has worked as a professional Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent for most of his life. Since his first day on the job at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, he’s enjoyed nothing more than screening luggage for explosives and keeping the airport safe. But after years of hard work, Messi recently became eligible for retirement — and his beloved team of agents decided to celebrate him with a special surprise.[…] The professional good boy trotted into work each day with his handler, Peter, excited for another shift of scent-tracking. As much as he loved sniffing bags for explosives, Messi’s favorite moments involved the celebratory tennis balls he’d receive whenever he did a great job. So, for his last shift ever, his doting team showered him with an avalanche of tennis balls, which surprised the unsuspecting boy.

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Is that something a young, virile alpha male would be whining about every single day? I think not. But then it is less common to hear an old man kvetching about the cold. That’s usually something that old women (like me) complain about. Where are the front page stories about how frail and wan he looks under his makeup these days. How he can’t keep his eyes open in court and how his hair loss is accelerating before our eyes? Since he’s doing very few rallies, even though he’s only in court four days a week, we don’t see his glitching every day but his commentary to the press outside the courtroom is downright weird. I know that Joe Biden’s stiff gait from arthritis is of MAJOR concern to the media. Why not this?

Doctor Who stars Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson stopped by BBC's The One Show to promote the new season and cover a wide range of topics.

Simon Rosenberg as some advice for Joe Biden’s campaign which includes ideas on youth outreach, climate change etc. It’s all interesting but I think he makes an excellent point here that I haven’t heard anyone else make: I think Joe Biden should promise to clean up the city he has so long been a part of. Among the things we can tackle are the influence of foreign money, the need to raise ethical standards at the Supreme Court, eliminating the debt ceiling and the ability to shut down the government, and the wild abuse of Senate holds on nominations. Perhaps Biden could set up a commission to make broader recommendations on how to modernize and reform a city desperately in need of it. The utter sleaze of the Trump years has never been properly addressed. These trials in New York have illuminated Trump’s personal corruption and sleaze but we have yet to see anything really penetrate what he’s done to the political culture in Washington. This level of blatant corruption is one of the greatest threats to the system of all and at some point it’s going to have to be dealt with.

As you may or may not know, Trump hates animals, especially dogs. S. Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is so desperate to be his VP pick that she is currying favor with him by telling the tale of how she hated her pet dog and shot her. I’m not kidding. “Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant. What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season. Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy. Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.

A call to women to put social needs, not just economic needs, back on the political agenda. If we want to fix that most of the world is in politically divisive macho mode, feminist women need to create new and recreate old priorities to create more equitable, survivable worlds. The macho basis of male economic Continue reading »

Strange but true. A reporter from the state-owned broadcaster in Australia was booted out by India, purportedly the biggest democracy in the world, and the Murdoch media in Australia has ignored it in toto. The fact that the ABC’s Avani Dias had been forced to leave the subcontinent was reported in The Age, a newspaper Continue reading »

Hamas is holding 132 hostages: 130 of them were taken captive on October 7 and two were taken hostage before then (one in 2014, the other in 2015). Israel holds thousands of Palestinians as de facto hostages. According to the Israel Prison Service, 3,661 of its 9,312 “security” inmates are held without charge or trial Continue reading »

In this quiet hour, I summon words, a humble man amidst shadows long, To speak of wounds not my own, to voice a plea so loud and strong. For streets that haunt with harried silence, for whispers in the dark, For the women who carry nightmares in the hollows of their hearts, I say, not Continue reading »

The so-called “cost of living” crisis is a low-wage problem of the Coalition’s making, the dangerously simplified world of central bankers, spooks and cops on the threat from social media, democracy becomes collateral damage from fear campaigns. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic Continue reading »

The complex interplay of vision, power, and governance in innovation districts, precincts, and hubs. The 21st century has been characterised by remarkable technological breakthroughs that have fundamentally altered how we interact with each other and the world. With this in mind, countries, regions, and industrial clusters create visions of a technology-driven future. Quite often, they Continue reading »

As tensions flare with Iran, the US continues to provide full support for Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. The events of early April seem to bear out the first line of T S Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, that “April is the cruellest month”. On 10 April, on Eid al-Fitr, the celebratory end of Ramadan, Israel killed three Continue reading »

I guess the Village 2.0 is circling the wagons round the NY Times and have decided to stick the shiv into Biden just to show the White House who’s boss. They’re going after the age thing again. You may wonder where this is coming from. Here it is in all its glory from Axios: President Biden has introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine. Instead of walking across the South Lawn to and from Marine One by himself, he’s now often surrounded by aides. Why it matters: With aides walking between Biden and journalists’ camera position outside the White House, the visual effect is to draw less attention to the 81-year-old’s halting and stiff gait. Actually, none of it matters. It’s 100% prime bullshit. Some Biden advisers have told Axios they’re concerned that videos of Biden walking and shuffling alone — especially across the grass — have highlighted his age. Weeks ago the president told aides that he’d prefer a less formal approach, a White House official told Axios. He suggested that they walk with him.