News bits: A DJT X-mas msg; A Repub X-mas msg; The DJT msg redux; Etc.

He posted this blast of lies and hate speech on Christmas day: Trump’s Christmas Message: ‘ROT IN HELL’ 😮

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Other radical Republicans share the Christmas love in similar fashion: GOP Hopeful Blasted for Post Showing Tree Ornaments of Democrats in Nooses -- Derrick Evans—a former Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia convicted of participating in the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol—is facing backlash after posting a photo on Christmas Day featuring tree ornaments depicting Democratic leaders hanging from nooses. Evans has since deleted the post, which included figurines of leaders like President Joe Biden, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris hanging from the tree from a noose tied around their necks. Figures of former President Barack Obama, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former presidential Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci were also included in the photo.

Where does the GOP get all these haters, traitors, 

crooks, cranks, crackpots and creeps (and weirdos)?

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One source comments on the DJT X-mas day screed: Trump wishes electric car supporters 'rot in hell' in Truth Social Christmas message

Yeah! Go get those nasty electric car supporters, like Elon Musk -- rotten commies . . . . 

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From the Seriously Behind The Times Files: The Guardian just got woke: Will Trump provoke a crisis of legitimacy for the US supreme court? -- Trump shouldn’t be eligible to run again. But America’s highest court may disagree

Bwahahahahaha!! 

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From the Making Them Pull Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps Files: 'Deplorable': Iowa's GOP Governor Opts Out of Summer Food Program for Kids -- Iowa's Republican-led government sparked outrage late last week by declining to participate in a federal program that would have provided low-income residents with $40 a month in additional food assistance during the coming summer.

How it’s done

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From the That Darned Biden Files: Trump moans about Biden ruining Christmas with ‘madness and doom’ -- “It’s hard to have a truly great Christmas when you have a Crooked and Incompetent President who wants to put his Political Opponent in jail, and who has been working hard (for a change!), illegally using all of the levers of Law Enforcement, to do so,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM. MAGA 2024!!!”

Well, he’s right you know. We really are in the fight of our lives to save our Country from MADNESS & DOOM. But there appears to be some confusion about the source of the MADNESS & DOOM.

News bits: DJT incites holy war; American democracy comments; Radical leftism?

A Christmas gift from DJT to the human species is an incitement to a holy war based on lies. Newsweek reports:

Donald Trump Warns Americans of Undercover Spies Being Sent by the FBI to persecute Christians.

On Thursday night, the former president posted a video to his Truth Social account with the caption “Stopping the Persecution of Christians!” His post says the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) have adopted an anti-Christian bias and are sending agents to churches as part of that alleged “bigotry.”

“Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before,” Trump said in the video.

He went on: “Catholics, in particular, are being targeted and evangelicals are surely on the watch list as well. Over the past three years, the Biden administration has sent SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists. The FBI has been caught profiling devout Catholics as possible domestic terrorists and planning to send undercover spies into Catholic churches, just like in the old days of the Soviet Union.”

And that nicely exemplifies the corrupt, lying, treasonous monster that tens of millions of Americans are proudly supporting. He even has the arrogant, hypocritical gall to call Biden a crook. If we lose our democracy, we deserve the oppression, corruption and brutal tyranny we are definitely going to get.

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The WaPo published a gerrymandering map and commentary about changes needed for American democracy. It is interesting.

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A favorite American radical right authoritarian propaganda tactic is lying coupled with double standards and hypocrisy. The radical dictator mob falsely accuses political opposition and the left generally of doing what the radicals are doing themselves. The Hill reports about a current example:

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) joined the growing chorus of GOP critics of Colorado’s ruling disqualifying former President Trump from the state’s primary ballot, arguing “radical leftism” has “infiltrated” every institution in the U.S.

Asked on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo for his view on the Colorado ruling, Johnson said, “Well, radical leftism has infiltrated every institution in this country, our courts, our education system, government agencies. It’s a real problem.”

The Colorado Supreme Court handed down a bombshell ruling last week saying Trump engaged in an insurrection through his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack. 

Q: Is a court holding that DJT is disqualified from running for office because he engaged in an insurrection on 1/6 radical leftism, or is it within the realm of what a reasonably unbiased court could determine?

Christmas bonus: Ambiguity in American laws

A 2023 legal research paper entitled, The Meaning and Ambiguity of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, exemplifies rich sources of ambiguity that plague many or probably most American laws. In this case the law being analyzed is the Constitutional provision that bars people from running for office if they engaged in rebellion or insurrection:

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment disqualified anyone from serving in the House or Senate, or as a presidential elector, if they had betrayed their oath of fealty to United States and joined the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Whether Section Three accomplishes anything more remains unclear as a matter of history and ambiguous as a matter of constitutional text. Section Three does not expressly (1) apply to future rebellions or insurrections, (2) apply to persons elected as President of the United States, (3) apply to persons seeking to qualify as a candidate for the Presidency, or (4) indicate whether the enforcement of Section Three requires the passage of enabling legislation.

Prior drafts of Section Three included versions that expressly named the office of the President of the United States, expressly banned presidential candidates from qualifying as a candidate, and expressly applied to both past and future rebellions. Congress omitted all of this language from the final version of Section Three. This final language led the best lawyer in the House to assume that the text did not include the office of the President. Although a single member disagreed, their exchange went unreported in the press, leaving open the possibility that less sophisticated members of the public might also read the text as excluding the office of the President. The exclusion would not have been "absurd" since the Electors Clause ensured that only properly constructed slates of electors could vote for the President.

Key framers and ratifiers also expressly insisted that Section Three would not be self-executing. As Thaddeus Stevens explained, Section Three “will not execute itself,” and at least some participants in the ratifying assemblies expressly agreed (no one claimed otherwise). As far as future rebellions were concerned, the historical record reveals both framers and ratifiers dividing over the text’s possible application to future insurrections. In sum, the historical record supports Lyman Trumbull’s explanation of the original understanding and scope of Section Three: The provision was “intended to put some sort of stigma, some sort of odium upon the leaders of this rebellion, and no other way is left to do it but by some provision of this kind.” Whether the public understood the ambiguous text as allowing for anything more remains historically unclear.

No work to date has presented a systematic investigation of the framing and ratification history of Section Three. As a result scholars (and judges) have been working in the historical dark, insufficiently informed about how the draft developed over months of debate, uninformed of the constitutional precedents against which the final draft would be understood, and without any understanding whatsoever of how ratifiers engaged the proposed text. 

For example, since some prior drafts of Section Three expressly limited the provision to the “late rebellion,” [the American Civil War] some scholars claim that the absence of such language in the final draft means Section Three applies to future rebellions. What has gone unrecognized, or undiscussed, is that there were multiple prior drafts of Section Three. Some of these drafts expressly declared that the provision would apply to future rebellions. The final draft, however omits any such reference, rendering the text ambiguous in regard to its application to future rebellions or insurrections.

In that ambiguity, one can see how DJT could avoid being barred from running for president in 2024. I believed that Sec. 3 was self-executing because its language, engaged in rebellion or insurrection, seemed to indicate that. My belief appears to have been wrong if this analysis is right.

Some legal scholars have toyed with the idea that the rule of law itself in essentially contested concept. A 2021 legal research paper, Judicial authority, legitimacy and the (international) rule of law as essentially contested and interpretive concepts: Introduction to the special issue, comments:

Beyond setting the stage, the Introduction makes three claims about the conceptual triangle of the rule of law, judicial authority and legitimacy. The first is that all three are essentially contested and interpretive concepts in the sense of Walter B. Gallie and Ronald Dworkin. In their expositions, the contested and interpretative nature of such concepts is nothing to be ‘solved’, rather the formulation of different conceptions and contestation about them are central functions of such concepts. The interpretive and essentially contested nature points us to the relevant ‘actors’ and to conflicts and trade-offs between contested competencies. Thus the second point is that arguments about the rule of law and judicial legitimacy are often a means of questioning or securing the authority of a particular actor or institution in relation to other actors and institutions. The final point is that transposing concepts from the domestic to the supranational is a constructive endeavor because it entails creating new conceptions and substituting old ones as well as legitimizing new authorities and delegitimizing old ones. Thus, this special issue also cautions against discourses that ultimately are more about legitimation than about legitimacy and more about new ways of ruling than the rule of law.

One can see in American law sufficient ambiguity and an judicial interpretative freedom to convert the US from democracy grounded in the rule of law to an authoritarian state calling itself a democracy operating under the rule of some form of authoritarianism or rule of the dictator and/or powerful elites (autocrat, plutocrats, Christian theocrats, kleptocrats).

Ambiguity in American law is why I see and call out the immorality and evil of mendacious authoritarians speaking and acting in bad faith to get the wealth and power they desperately want. The Constitution and rule of law gets in their way so they have to go, to be replaced by the rule and whims of the powerful.

🎄

Christmas bits: COVID vaccine data; Commentary about the USSC protecting DJT; Etc.

Merry Christmas!

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From the We Already Knew That Files: A cohort study of more than 1.5 million hospital admissions in Canada through the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic has quantified the benefit of vaccinations. Unvaccinated patients were found to be up to 15 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated patients. A person vaccinated with two or more doses was 12 times less likely for ICU admission and 15 times less likely to die. The authors did not consider socioeconomic status because just age and vaccination status were analyzed.

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Various sources are commenting on the unexplained USSC decision to not hear the issue of whether DJT is immune from crimes committed in office. Most normal people who believe in democracy and the rule of law would find it silly for this to even be an issue. But now America is no longer controlled mostly by normal people. Instead, corrupt, radical authoritarians wield significant power, especially the radicalized and corrupted USSC. The authoritarians are using their power to openly attack and destroy democracy and the pesky rule of law.

A NYT opinion comments (not paywalled off): The Supreme Court Helped Trump’s Delay Strategy. By How Much Remains to Be Seen. The former president’s claim that he is immune from prosecution will now be taken up by a federal appeals court — and could end up back in front of the justices within weeks. The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday not to fast-track consideration of former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he is immune to prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election was unquestionably a victory for Mr. Trump and his lawyers. The choice by the justices not to take up the issue now — rendered without explanation — gave a boost to the former president’s legal strategy of delaying the proceedings as much as possible in the hopes of running out the clock before Election Day. 

Another NYT opinion: 

The Supreme Court’s Big Trump Test Is Here 

America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush. The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes. On Friday, the court turned down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for fast-track review of Donald Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for their conduct while in office. But that critical question will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court soon: The D.C. federal appeals court is hearing the case on Jan. 9 and will probably rule shortly thereafter. 

The point is not that getting the underlying legal questions “right” is irrelevant. But when the stakes are this high and the legal questions are novel, the justices have a duty to hand down decisions that resonate across the political spectrum — or at least that avoid inciting violence in the streets. That’s not subverting the rule of law; it’s preserving it.  

A universe in which the court somehow splits the difference — for example, keeping Mr. Trump on the ballot while refusing to endorse (if not affirmatively repudiating) his conduct and spurning his kinglike claim to total immunity — could go a long way toward reducing the temperature of the coming election cycle. Such an outcome could also help restore at least some of the court’s credibility.

As usual for clueless MSM opinionators, the two yahoos who wrote the latter opinion (Steven V. Mazie and Stephen I. Vladeck) refer to the six Republicans on the bench as “conservative.” Sigh. 

These people still cannot see anti-democratic authoritarianism, even when it’s repeatedly hitting them up side the head with a 2x4. Anti-democratic authoritarianism is not pro-democracy conservative, it is anti-democracy authoritarian. As Mark Zuckerberg would comment, dumb fucks. 

The MSM might learn, but

probably not until it’s too late

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The WaPo comments that the Ukrainian military is running out of munitions:

Ukrainian forces are suffering from a shortage of artillery shells on the front line, prompting some units to cancel planned assaults, soldiers said this week, and stoking fears over how long Kyiv’s troops will be able to hold their ground against continuing Russian attacks.

“The guys are tired — very tired,” a member of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade said. “They are still motivated — many people understand that they have no other choice.”

“But you can’t win a war only on motivation,” he continued. “You should have some kind of a numerical advantage, and with the weapons and weapons systems, it only gets worse and worse. How long can we last? It’s hard to say, but it can’t be long. Everyone understands this.” 

We can thank America's authoritarian, radical right Republican Party for the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian military. Once again, American moral cowardice and untrustworthiness is out in the open for everyone to see and enjoy. Lest we forget, the US promised in 1994 to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity in return for it turning over Russian nuclear weapons. We broke that promise.

Regarding that 1994 promise:

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. When Ukrainian-Russian negotiations on removing these weapons from Ukraine appeared to break down in September 1993, the U.S. government engaged in a trilateral process with Ukraine and Russia. The result was the Trilateral Statement, signed in January 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to transfer the nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination. In return, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia and Britain; compensation for the economic value of the highly-enriched uranium in the warheads (which could be blended down and converted into fuel for nuclear reactors); and assistance from the United States in dismantling the missiles, missile silos, bombers and nuclear infrastructure on its territory.

American assurances aren’t worth spit.

Various bits: Climate timeline; How the Irish see the US; New anti-aggression technology

A great timeline of Earth’s temperature from 20,000 BC until now shows natural climate variations and what happened once humans started influencing the climate in the early 1900s. These screenshots show the timeline from ~20,000 BC - ~19,300 BC, ~9700 BC - ~8600 BC,  and ~2500 BC until today. Notice that at ~20,000 BC, the climate was a heck of a lot cooler than it is now. Temperature change was natural until ~1920, which was after the industrial revolution had been underway for about 80 years. Thanks to Raven for bringing this chart to my attention.

 

This should give people some feel for how temperature variation influences climate. A 2ᵒ C increase is going to be a big deal. If we stay on the current path, things will start to get real ugly late this century.

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This is an opinion by Lara Marlow at the The Irish Times: 

Americans are sleepwalking into a dictatorship. 

Why aren’t they more afraid?

Worldview: A second Trump presidency could spell the disintegration of the Nato alliance, and would have far-reaching consequences for the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East

Trump leads all other Republican candidates by double-digit figures in opinion polls. “Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president,” Robert Kagan, a prominent neo-conservative commentator, predicted in the Washington Post. “When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favour… There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

The sense of alarm is shared in Paris and London. “Is American democracy entering its last year?” Piotr Smolar, Le Monde’s Washington correspondent, asked rhetorically.

“There is no point in pretending that a man who believes that any election he loses is rigged, that the judicial system is rotten and corrupt, and that his political enemies belong in jail, is a believer in democracy,” Edward Luce wrote in the Financial Times.  

It is one of the mysteries of the American soul that, as David Remnick writes in the New Yorker, “Tens of millions of Americans seem undeterred by the prospect of absolutism, cruelty and corruption on the horizon.”  

The majority of respondents to a YouGov poll in August, and four out of five Republicans, believe the Biden administration has manipulated the justice system to undermine Trump. They would find it perfectly logical for Trump to appoint special prosecutors to pursue his enemies.

The answer in the sleepwalking question is in the question itself. Enough Americans aren't afraid either because they are sleepwalking, or because they want to live their miserable lives under the iron fisted rule of a kleptocratic dictator.

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Our good friends at PLOS Biology have published an Earth-shattering discovery about how to lower human male aggression. An article, A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males, comments:

Rodent tears contain social chemosignals with diverse effects, including blocking male aggression. Human tears also contain a chemosignal that lowers male testosterone, but its behavioral significance was unclear. Because reduced testosterone is associated with reduced aggression, we tested the hypothesis that human tears act like rodent tears to block male aggression. Using a standard behavioral paradigm, we found that sniffing emotional tears with no odor percept reduced human male aggression by 43.7%. To probe the peripheral brain substrates of this effect, we applied tears to 62 human olfactory receptors in vitro. We identified 4 receptors that responded in a dose-dependent manner to this stimulus. Finally, to probe the central brain substrates of this effect, we repeated the experiment concurrent with functional brain imaging. We found that sniffing tears increased functional connectivity between the neural substrates of olfaction and aggression, reducing overall levels of neural activity in the latter.

Research is now focusing on the chemical identity of the signal factor(s) responsible for reducing male aggression. Human female tears were collected like this:

We conducted a long-term screen for women who can cry with ease, ultimately identifying 6 regular donor women. First, we harvested emotional tears from human female donors (6 regular donor women, age range 22 to 25 years) using methods previously described. Donors completed .... specific questionnaires with each donation, on questions such as .... the nature of emotions during donation. Because tears that trickled down the cheek and into the collection device may have collected skin-bound signaling molecules not originating from tear fluid, as a control substance, we trickled saline down the cheeks of the very same donors and collected it in a similar manner. .... To obtain tears, the donor women watched sad film clips in isolation and used a mirror to place a vial and capture the tears trickling down their cheeks. A typical donation used in this study contained approximately 1.6 ml of tears.

One can imagine that the US government working feverishly on tear bombs that will calm things down in international situations of insufficient calm. Police could use tear grenades (not tear gas grenades) to de-escalate unduly chaotic local situations. 

Fig 4. Tears reduced activation in the 

brain substrates of reactive aggression   

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From the Violent, Ignorant Dictator Supporter Files: The HuffPo writes:

Colorado Secretary Of State ‘Extremely Concerned’ 

About Pro-Trump Violence

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold received 64 death threats and more than 900 threats of abuse within three weeks of the case being filed to keep Trump off the state ballot

“I’ve been concerned about violence and threats of violence since Donald Trump incited the insurrection,” Griswold, who has been Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state since 2019, said in an interview. “I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of threats at this point.”

Jena Griswold - she gets lots of threats by thugs 

“I did not file this case. I’m part of this case because I’m the secretary of state,” Griswold said. “Within three weeks of it being filed, I received 64 death threats and over 900 non-lethal threats of abuse. I stopped counting after that.”

“So yes, I’m extremely concerned,” she added. “It just underlines that Donald Trump is a major threat to American democracy, elections and stability. He uses threats and intimidation against his political opponents. When he doesn’t win elections, he tries to steal them. He is a dangerous leader for this country.”

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Huge win for DJT at the USSC: The Hill reports:

The Supreme Court declined to take up whether President Trump can be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, punting for now the question on the limits of presidential immunity as the former president seeks to toss the case.

The refusal, which had no noted dissents, comes as an appeals court weighs a motion from Trump to dismiss the case; he argues he has absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s gambit to skip over an intermediate appeals court and bring the issue directly before the Supreme Court was aimed at keeping the schedule of the trial — the first of Trump’s four criminal proceedings — on track.

It looks like the USSC supports DJT’s tactic to delay until after the election. If the three Dems on the bench agreed with this, they should be impeached along along with all six corrupt, radical Repub authoritarians. IMO, whoever on the court agreed with this is a traitor.

Once again, we clearly see the grievous damage that waiting too long to prosecute traitors causes to democracy and the rule of law. This could be the death knell of American democracy, civil liberties and whatever is left of the rule of law.

News chunk 'n bits: Democracy vs autocrcacy; The Gaza body count; Etc.

Even the editorial Board at the WaPo has figured it out (article not paywalled off). This is about how pro-democracy forces are loosening the grip of dictators on the free flow of honest information. Essentially all dictators now realize that that is it critically important to control the internet and flood it with disinformation, lies, slanders, hate, bigotry, etc. Putin learned that lesson from his murdering war of aggression against Ukraine. The pro-dictatorship FTZWS (flood the zone with shit) propaganda tactic that Steve Bannon put a catchy name to has gone global. The WaPo Editors write:

ANNALS OF AUTOCRACY

Opinion | How the battle for democracy will be fought — and won

For more than a decade and a half, autocracy has been steadily advancing around the globe. Dictators routinely arrest their foes, including those demanding basic rights such as freedom of expression. But they have modernized their methods, taking control of the internet and using it to broadcast disinformation while censoring the truth. They have forced independent media to close and aimed surveillance at social media and the people who use it. They have created firewalls and imposed internet shutdowns. Freedom House found in its latest annual survey of political rights and civil liberties that democracy has been in decline for 17 years — and one of the biggest drivers has been attacks on freedom of expression.

But there are ways to confront the forces of authoritarianism, especially on the information battlefield, where the future of democracy may be decided for millions of people. The stakes are enormous: Will open societies thrive and grow, or will more of the globe fall under the sway of dictatorships such as the one in China, where information manipulation is the norm and surveillance technology watches over everyone, all the time?

[In response to the Iranian dictatorship shutting down the internet in sensitive areas in rebellion during a period of social unrest] a little-known channel helped millions of Iranians stay in the know. A nongovernmental organization in Los Angeles, NetFreedom Pioneers, had created a method to bypass the internet entirely and broadcast files — text, audio or video — from commercial satellites to anyone with a receiver dish. It is called Toosheh, or Knapsack. The group collected photos and news reports from social media platforms and elsewhere, uploaded them to a satellite and then down to homes in blacked-out Iran. The news was easily shareable on a flash drive.

Toosheh, founded by an Iranian émigré, brought fresh and uncensored information into a censored country, offering a ray of hope in the struggle between forces of dictatorship and democracy.

This opinion piece highlights the centrality and power of information and disinformation in the war between democracy and dictatorships, which are usually kleptocratic or at least deeply corrupt, like Russia.

For years, I have been arguing that about the most powerful weapon that modern dictator-kleptocrats have is control and suppression of inconvenient fact and truth and replacing that void via the FTZWS dark free speech tactic. This exemplifies why I see lying, slandering, irrational emotional manipulation (fomenting unwarranted fear, hate, bigotry, racism, etc.) and crackpottery as not just deplorable. It is literally evil (not just immoral) because harm to democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law are all intended. Innocent people will get killed, harmed or oppressed.

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From the endless Israel-Palestine misery and war horror story: More than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll -- The Gaza Health Ministry said early Friday that 20,057 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since Oct. 7.

Dec. 6, outskirts of Gaza City

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From the Dictators getting their collective act together files: In Russia, parents are having gay children abducted to be ‘cured’ -- In Russia, where the entire LGBTQ+ community has been banned as “extremist,” some parents are paying thugs to abduct their queer sons and daughters, forcing them into secure private centers to “cure” them with so-called conversion therapy. Former residents say conditions behind high concrete walls are like small unregulated prisons, designed for alcoholics, drug addicts, or people whose families see them as problems. Many were tricked or abducted, then held for months. They recounted being beaten, humiliated or forced to read out confessions that they were destructive and selfish because of their “addiction” to their sexual or gender identity — mimicking rigid programs designed to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Does that sound familiar? It should. 

Flogging the non-heterosexual community is a fun and popular anti-democracy, pro-dictator tactic. It is used effectively to foment social bigotry and irrational fear and hate of the LGBTQ+ community, just like the corrupt, bigoted Christian nationalism wealth and power movement is doing here in the US. Dictators everywhere are catching on to this wonderful wealth and power TFZWS propaganda tactic.

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From the rampaging GOP authoritarianism files: Seattle hospital sues Texas AG who sought records of trans minors:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) tried to compel a Seattle hospital to hand over information about gender-affirming treatment Texas youths may have received across state lines, according to court filings, signaling an escalation of his office’s attempts to crack down on Texans’ ability to access such health care.

The Seattle Children’s Hospital requested a Texas judge nullify, or at least rein in, Paxton’s demands, arguing that his office lacks the jurisdiction over the Washington state hospital. In filings this month, the hospital said Paxton’s queries — made under the guise of an investigation by the AG’s consumer protection division — were “sham requests.”

If memory serves, states passing laws (mostly slave-related, I think) that other states refused to honor was a significant factor in splitting the country, paving the way to civil war. Now it’s happening again.

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Rudy Giuliani files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York after defamation case -- Rudy Giuliani has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York, one day after a federal judge ruled that he must immediately pay the $148 million he owes two Georgia women he falsely accused of helping to steal the 2020 election. In paperwork filed Thursday to seek protection from creditors, Giuliani listed up to $500 million in debts, including the $148 million he owes former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. .... He listed his assets between $1 million and $10 million.

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More Israel-Palestine horror: A Times Investigation Tracked Israel’s Use of One of Its Most Destructive Bombs in South Gaza -- .... according to an analysis of visual evidence by The New York Times. The video investigation focuses on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety. While bombs of that size are used by several Western militaries, munitions experts say they are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore.