Elizabeth Warren

The case for Elizabeth Warren > .

Still my number 1 pick -- not that I trust Americans to choose wisely.

No doubt, the johns are NOT regarded as "immoral"

Activists in Bangladesh have welcomed the first ever Islamic funeral for a sex worker, breaking a long-standing taboo in the Muslim majority nation. Hamida Begum, who worked at one of the world's largest brothels [read, thousands of johns] in the village of Daulatdia, died of illness last week at the age of 65.

Sex work is legal in Bangladesh [convenient for all those johns], but Islamic leaders have previously refused to perform funeral prayers for workers. Instead, sex workers who die are usually buried in unmarked graves, without formal prayers, or dumped in rivers.

A number of people gathered at her grave to witness the historic moment. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51472606 .

A Failing Society

India man shot dead 'by daughter's rapist': The father of a 15-year-old Indian rape victim has been shot dead, allegedly by his daughter's rapist. The shooting happened on Monday night. Police told BBC Hindi that the accused is on the run.

The girl's family says he had threatened them and asked them to withdraw the rape case they had lodged against him in August last year. Rape victims in India often accuse police of failing to protect them or their families from reprisals.

The girl's father was taken to hospital after the shooting, but he died the next day. The crime happened in Firozabad district in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"He was constantly threatening us," the girl's uncle said. "One week ago, he threatened my brother, saying if he didn't withdraw the case, he wouldn't be alive. We complained to the police but the police ignored us."

The girl's family also says that the police had taken no action in the rape case. The case was registered months ago under India's stringent child protection laws.

You're not doing what I want! You're selfish!

Hell on Earth in China:

“Sheng nu” (“leftover women”) is a term used to describe single women who are 27 or older in China. Most of these women live in cities and lead rewarding professional lives. The term was coined in 2007 by a government organization responsible for the protection and promotion of women’s rights and policies. That same year, the Ministry of Education added “sheng nu” to the official lexicon.

In recent years, the Chinese government has been waging an aggressive campaign to pressure women into marriage. Single women are caricatured in news reports, editorials and social media. The orchestrated campaign is a byproduct of China’s one-child policy, which created a great gender imbalance in the population.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/opinion/china-marriage-leftover-women.html .

Emigrate to the West, honey! It's the 21st century here.

LIAR-in-Chief

How DUHnocchio Got Trickled Down: He [transparent CONman] pretended to be different. [Of course] He was LYING.

"The question now is whether" Crook-in-Chief "will pay any price for betraying all his promises. Democrats took the House in 2018 largely because of the popular backlash against his attempt to destroy Obamacare. But there’s a real danger that Democrats will blow the election by making it a referendum on ambitious ideas like so-called Medicare for all [read, programs such as the universal-health-care programs that Canadians enjoy without destroying the economy] that are unlikely to become reality, rather than on" Sociopath-in-Chief's "ongoing efforts to destroy programs Americans love."

All-Time LOW

Oscars 2020: Number of TV viewers falls to all-time low.
Scarcely surprising! Who wants to watch narcissism-on-parade, protest-responsive-political-correctness, music-that-begs-to-be-muted, and, worst of all, boring lists of every member of the production crew?

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51451904

Detoxing the toxic?

Jordan Peterson seeks 'emergency' drug detox treatment in Russia: 

"Jordan Peterson's family says he has sought "emergency" drug detox treatment in Russia, after several failed attempts to overcome his dependence on a potent anti-anxiety medication.

The controversial [that's putting it politely] University of Toronto psychology professor and internationally famous self-help guru is said to have been in a Moscow hospital for the past month, recovering from both the "incredibly gruelling" treatment and a severe case of pneumonia."

...

"His family says he had been taking the drug for years to mitigate lingering anxiety following a severe autoimmune reaction to food [an unlikely excuse]. His dependence reportedly started last spring after doctors increased his dosage to help him cope with stress as his wife Tammy battled kidney cancer." [Painful, but thousands upon thousands who don't promote themselves as "self-help gurus" cope with stress and loss without becoming hopelessly addicted to benzodiazepines.]

...

Russia, eh? Now why would Peterson leave a decent healthcare system to seek help in Russia of all places? Russia, haven of fleeing Puppet Presidents, enemies of the CIA, and criminals. Did he flee to Russia because of their vast experience of treating alcoholics, perhaps? Far enough from the Western press, perhaps? If so, why seek sympathy through the CBC?

Regardless, what kind of self-help-guru psychologist worth heeding needs long-term anxiolytics, not to mention becoming dangerously addicted?

I'm aware that a certain type of young male finds Peterson's self-aggrandizing, misogyny-in-disguise, transphobia-in-disguise blather emotionally appealing. I'm also aware that the inadequately-educated regard his slippery verbal gymnastics convincing. However, it is a great shame that UofT was conned.

Dim LIARS don't fare well

Shamima Begum loses first stage of appeal over citizenship: Hidden baby [if she had tucked an actual baby under her robes, it was not her newborn. So whose?]; LIES, LIES, LIES; mysteriously 'appearing' and 'disappearing' babies; regret about not having her own way, but lack of moral remorse ... 

"Begum, now 20, left London in 2015, aged 15, to join Islamic State. She was found in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019."
... 

"Rejecting the 20-year-old's case that she had been left stateless, the Commission concluded that Ms Begum was "a citizen of Bangladesh by descent". Ms Begum is understood to have a claim to Bangladeshi nationality through her mother.

However, in February 2019, Bangladesh's ministry of foreign affairs said Ms Begum was not a Bangladeshi citizen and there was "no question" of her being allowed into the country." [The Bangladeshi government would say that, wouldn't they?]

...

""[Ms Begum] left the UK apparently of her own free will some years before the decision - and she was not outside the UK as a result of the decision.""

...

"The case will now move on to consider whether the government had legitimate national security grounds to bar Ms Begum from coming back to the UK." 

[Legitimate national security grounds such as the demonstrable fact that she is Bangladeshi by descent and not to be trusted in the country against which she willingly joined a hostile terrorist association?]

...

"They had three children - all of whom have since died."

[Either the three children are an invention [my suspicion], or she is the world's most unfit mother.]

Greedy Oligarchic Partisans approaching Rock Bottom

Paul Krugman, "Arguing With Zombies" > .  

How Zombies Ate the G.O.P.’s Soul: Everyone with principles has left the party.

Everyone in Washington [and around much of the educated segments of the world] understands perfectly well that Donald Trump Crook-in-Chief abused the powers of his office in an attempt to rig this year’s UNpresidential election. But Senate Republicans RepuGNicans are nonetheless about to acquit him without even pretending to look at the evidence, thereby encouraging further abuses of power [the GOP's specialty].

But how did we get to this point? Part of the answer is extreme partisanship and right-wing wrong-wing political correctness (which is far more virulent than anything on the left). But I also blame the zombies.

A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating [what pass for] people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse.

And all of the really important zombies these days are on the right wrong. Indeed, they have taken over the RepuGNican Party [aided and abetted, of course, by Americans' peculiar penchant for defiant ignorance].

...

Voodoo economics has become unchallengeable doctrine within the Republican RepuGNican Party. Even fake moderates like Susan Collins justified their support for the 2017 Trump tax cut by claiming that it would reduce the budget deficit. Predictably, the deficit actually exploded, and now exceeds $1 trillion a year.

The politics of climate change have followed a similar trajectory. Global temperature keeps setting records, while climate-related catastrophes like the Australian wildfires are proliferating. Yet a majority of RepuGNicans in Congress are climate deniers — many of them buying into the notion that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by a vast international scientific conspiracy — and even those, like Marco Rubio, who grudgingly admit that global warming is real oppose any significant action to limit emissions.

...

It’s important to realize that the zombification of the G.O.P. isn’t a recent phenomenon, something that happened only with Trump’s DUHnocchio's election rigging into office. On the contrary, zombies have been eating RepuGNican brains for decades. Voodoo economics had completely taken over the party by the early 2000s, when then-House majority leader Tom DeLay declared, “Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.” Climate deniers have ruled since at least 2009, when only eight House Republicans supported a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

What recent events make clear, however, is that zombie ideas haven’t eaten just RepuGNicans’ brains. They have also eaten the party’s soul. [And, though it is not politically correct to point out this lamentable fact, zombie LIES have eaten out the brains of the Make A-holery Grate Again nincompoops who eschew facts in favor of baseless, ill-informed, obdurately-emotional opinion.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/republican-party-trump.html .

Access + Authority ⇒ Abuse in the HOME

Children abused in the home are often "unseen and unheard", despite making up two-thirds of sex abuse cases, a report from four official watchdogs says.

"There remains a disbelief and denial about familial sexual abuses," the inspectorates for police, health, probation and children's services say. It means abusers "too often evade justice", their joint report says.

The government says it is taking urgent action that will see serious sexual offenders spending longer behind bars. The inspectors examined how child abuse within families was handled in six areas of England between September 2018 and May 2019 - and found local agencies "woefully ill equipped" to deal with it.

...

Too often professionals rely on children to verbally disclose abuse - but children are unlikely to tell someone they are being sexually abused, particularly when the abuser is close to them, the authors say.