tingilinde

trumpism meets mccarthyism

Whipping up their sixty plus  year old red scare tactics. Completely disgusting - even from him. 

The funny thing is many Republicans including Trump were (are?) deeply in bed with Putin and his buddies.  Also true for white evangelicals. 

 

 

ah the nra

A tape secretly recorded after Columbine.

snip

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Over the next two decades, this unapologetic message would come to define the NRA's tone in the wake of mass shootings at American schools. After 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech in 2007: "This is a time for people to grieve, to mourn, and to heal. This is not a time for political discussions or public policy debates." After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." And after the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., the NRA's spokesperson said bluntly, "Many in legacy media love mass shootings.

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more vaccination lessons

This time a good thread on German Measles.

a tip of the hat to Jim

 

 

what republicans mean when they say 'socialism'

Heather Cox Richardson traces it back to the failed Confederacy as it tried (and tries) to re-assert itself and its values.

snip

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With racial discrimination now prohibited by the federal government, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, "Socialism in South Carolina."

This idea that it was dangerous for poor working men to have a say in the government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the new factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and northern men of wealth too insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars.

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an indigenous people's map

Lots to explore here.

 

a tip of the hat to Andy

 

 

heather cox richardson on what parties are trying to accomplish

She offers a historian's perspective.

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The role of the federal government in protecting the right to vote has been a mainstay of our Constitution since 1870.

But today’s Republicans are standing on the same ground former Confederates did in the post–Civil War years, insisting that only states can decide how the people within those states live, and who gets to vote on those conditions.

Today, once again, Senate Republicans have filibustered a motion to begin debate on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. That act would restore some of the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights act the Supreme Court stripped away in their 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. In 2006, when the Voting Rights Act came up for renewal, it passed the Senate unanimously. Today, the only Republican voting to advance the John Lewis bill was Alaska's Lisa Murkowski.

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spain, franco and right-wing nationalism

Why an incorrect historiography  persists in Spain and why it's an identity issue with right-wing identity elsewhere.

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I managed to mutter something apparently amelioratory enough for him to agree to sign the papers. Still, his anger served as a reminder of how much of Spain’s national historiography remained unchallenged. At the time, although two decades had passed since the death of Francisco Franco, many Spaniards were still in denial about the horrors of the Civil War and the decades of Fascism that followed it. But the lawyer’s reaction revealed a deeper, enduring nationalistic pride in the era when Spain was a world power: before the United States took the last vestiges of its empire, after its humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898; before it lost its Latin American colonies in the national liberation revolts of the nineteenth century; and before its Armada was crushed by the British, in 1588.

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No wonder controlling their version of history is such a hot-button issue with the right.

 

population growth

A nice animation of population of 200 years of population growth in the US.

 

the samson plan

Israel's doomsday option in the 1967 war.

 

the story of the tsar bomba

The Soviet Union's empire bomb - the largest bomb ever exploded.

snip

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At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. A cameraman watching from the island recalled:

A fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle! 

The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was “as if the Earth was killed.”

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