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Now that the federal police have retreated from the front lines of Portland’s nightly demonstrations, Mayor Ted Wheeler has returned to demonizing those protesting police brutality. "This is not advocacy to reform or transform any system," said Wheeler, speaking at a Thursday news conference, where he condemned the previous night’s protest outside the Portland Police Bureau's (PPB) East Precinct, claiming that the demonstrations are no longer about racial justice and police accountability. “The conversation we are having right now is keeping us from the important work of racial justice, equity and comprehensive and thoughtful reform,” Wheeler said about the protests. Yet it was just two weeks ago that Wheeler stood among the same group of protesters, inhaling plumes of tear gas and decrying the actions of federal police outside the city’s federal courthouse. It appears that defending his citizens from police brutality is only a priority when it’s not his own police force swinging batons at nonviolent protesters. When camouflaged federal officers shot tear gas and impact munitions at Portlanders, Wheeler quickly severed PPB’s ties with federal law enforcement agencies and went on national TV shows to decry the feds’ “unconstitutional” tactics, and applaud his city’s uprising against police violence. But now that the nation’s attention has shifted away from Portland, Wheeler’s back to trusting law enforcement’s incendiary narrative about these demonstrations without considering the experiences of protesters and observers on the ground. […] Wheeler instead used his platform Thursday to elevate the voices of police officers, city staff who believe their exhaustion from working months of protests is a bigger concern than the public’s right to oppose their years of disproportionate abuse against people of color. […] “We’re protesting to defund the police and invest in the community,” said Hester, whose voice is raspy from leading nightly protest chants. “And we haven’t seen that yet. It’s pretty simple, this isn’t over until we achieve that.” […] Wheeler mentioned Trump’s campaign tactics Thursday, but he didn’t mention another re-election campaign headed to the November ballot: His own. Like Trump, Wheeler is using these protests as a way to gain political points, not an opportunity to question if the reforms he’s comfortable with are what Portlanders are actually asking for. Each morning, Wheeler receives a briefing from PPB leadership about the previous nights’ protests, which inform his understanding of a movement meant to dismantle the police force. He’d do well to start giving the same type of attention to the people calling for change.

Since 2015, The Post has created a database cataloging every fatal shooting nationwide by a police officer in the line of duty. […] Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. “A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote. The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force in 1981.

Read ‘The Giving Tree’ as usual. When the boy comes hustling for a house, switch to this.

A real solution lies not in banning TikTok or transferring its ownership to Microsoft, but in reevaluating the relationship between social media users and the platforms we create. --- The app may collect too much data about users, but that's true of every other app users are likely to have on their phones. That data may end up in government hands, but we've known since at least the earliest Snowden revelations in 2013 that data stored with major American tech companies was also vulnerable to government capture. And while it's possible that TikTok could subtly shape its users timeline to push some secret agenda, we also know that YouTube and Facebook algorithms have been doing the same, intentionally or otherwise, for years. TikTok may censor some valuable speech or cut users off without due process or a clear appeal, but so does Amazon. Ultimately, arguments that TikTok is “worse” than the major U.S.-based social media networks assume that users are at the mercy of tech firms no matter what. The only question is whether the invisible hands shaping the code you run and the content you can see are based in San Francisco or Beijing. That's too limited a view. Once you realize that TikTok suffers from the same kinds of problems as the other social media platforms (along with a dash of presidential ego-bruising and a scoop of xenophobia), it's clear that a real solution lies not in banning the software or transferring its ownership to Microsoft, but in reevaluating the relationship between social media users and the platforms we create, more broadly. […] When you strip away the vague invocations of “the Chinese” and a general distaste for Gen Z politics, the criticisms of TikTok that remain are the ones that apply to Facebook, to YouTube, to Twitter, even to Amazon and Google Search and others. The way out is not by changing the name of the service or the country of its operator, but by empowering users to avoid that kind of platform subjugation in the first place.

Click on the code or the sidebar to see which is what.

As Trump rails against ‘far-left’ fascism, new database shows leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists. --- American white supremacists and other rightwing extremists have carried out attacks that left at least 329 victims dead, according to the database. […] Daily interpersonal violence and state violence pose a much greater threat to Americans than any kind of extremist terror attack. More than 100,000 people have been killed in gun homicides in the United States in the past decade, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. US police officers shoot nearly 1,000 Americans to death each year. Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be shot by the police as white Americans, according to analysis by the Washington Post and the Guardian.

I’ve documented the Portland protests for 50-plus nights. The feds’ tactics are nothing new.

Irena Sendler was without doubt a very courageous woman who repeatedly risked her own life to save hundreds of Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War 2 - and there is certainly nothing wrong with commemorating her heroism. However, what should immediately be obvious about this particular "tribute" is that it contains a lot of information about Sendler that is completely wrong. It also turns into an agenda-driven attack on Al Gore and Barack Obama, as well as questioning the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize (early versions of the chain letter only mentioned Gore, but Obama was thrown into the mix after he became US President).

It’s not just protesters who are getting abused by the Portland police. The Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement with the city in 2014 because of its unconstitutional policing of people with mental illness, including the beating to death in custody of James Chasse. Last year, 60 percent of the people killed by the Portland police were suffering a mental health crisis. Half of arrests and half of use-of-force incidents in the past few years are of homeless people. And Black Portlanders continue to be subject to traffic stops and searches at wildly disproportionate rates. So, when the mayor of Portland poses as the leader of the Resistance, it causes us to pause. While we do oppose federal agents in our streets, the real danger we have been facing in Portland since long before Trump’s election has been the local police.

The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, was left coughing and wincing in the middle of his own city Wednesday night after federal officers deployed tear gas into a crowd of protesters that Mr. Wheeler had joined outside the federal courthouse. Mr. Wheeler, who scrambled to put on goggles while denouncing what he called the “urban warfare” tactic of the federal agents, said he was outraged by the use of tear gas and that it was only making protesters more angry. “I’m not going to lie — it stings; it’s hard to breathe,” Mr. Wheeler said. “And I can tell you with 100 percent honesty, I saw nothing which provoked this response.” He called it an “egregious overreaction” on the part of the federal officers, and not a de-escalation strategy. “It’s got to stop now,” he declared. But the Democratic mayor, 57, has also long been the target of Portland protesters infuriated by the city police’s own use of tear gas, which was persistent until a federal judge ordered the city to use it only when there was a safety issue. As Mr. Wheeler went through the crowds on Wednesday, some threw objects in his direction, and others called for his resignation, chanting, “Tear Gas Teddy.”

Protesters have been in the streets for more than 50 consecutive days. Federal agents deployed to Portland have hardened their resolve to stay there.

Critics say the government’s slow response to requests for transparency and the national media’s focus on the most salacious moments of the city’s demonstrations prove both federal officials and national reporters care more about property damage than the physical injuries protesters sustain on the streets. Portland officials’ claims that demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism cost downtown businesses upward of $23 million and video of protesters toppling a statue of Thomas Jefferson at a high school in North Portland drew headlines across the country. But follow-up reporting of a faulty business association survey that mischaracterized sales losses due to coronavirus-related closures as protest-related or the school district’s push to rename many of its buildings in a nod to the movement that led to the statue’s toppling haven’t spread beyond local media. Neither have stories about the protesters volunteering to feed houseless Portlanders in downtown parks, a group local police removed from the parks in front of the federal courthouse ahead of Wolf’s visit.

And herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous. A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people. In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work. In 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the Black community. And I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome. --- White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.

Menstruating is painful, expensive, and… unnecessary?

Amid renewed calls Friday for federal law enforcement agencies to stop policing Portland protests, those officers once again closed in on demonstrators and used tear gas at least twice to break up crowds downtown. The overnight force against protesters by federal police came soon after Oregon’s attorney general announced she was suing several federal agencies over the arrests of protesters. Several other state and local officials, including Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, also criticized the federal presence. Yet after Portland police declared the downtown demonstration to be unlawful early Saturday morning, federal and local officers emerged at the same time to advance on protesters.

I think Andy Ngo’s work is designed to confirm some truly ugly American instincts: that something inherent in Islam makes Muslims unassimilable, that minority groups using their status cynically is as big a problem as discrimination against them, and that a tiny pocket of the American left poses as great a threat to the freedom of Americans as a federal government careening toward permanent minority rule. I think his methods are unsafe, inimical to good journalism, and border on propagandistic. But he’s not a grifter. Calling him a grifter is a way of saying that no one clever and dedicated enough to do what he’s done might actually have the politics he does. That’s a comforting thought for some, I’m sure. I’m not even sure Ngo is a troll, except to the extent that literally the entire conservative media machine, from social media to nighttime news, is a troll on liberals. I think he’s ambitious and savvy, and he wanted to break into a right-wing media world that speaks to an enormous national audience that shares parts of his worldview. And what’s the best way to do that? What is the national story that has given a whole generation of journalists, myself included, across every stratum of media, a platform? The never-ending American culture war, online and offline, that sometimes breaks out into violence. There’s not a lot of news in what Ngo does. It’s not man bites dog that antifa is violent or that some hate crimes are made up or that college students say dumb things. But there is a demand, a big one, to showcase leftists and minorities as villains. How many freelance videographers nursing well whiskeys in the dive bars of Brooklyn would trade a few punches from a Proud Boy for a job at Vice? The media is shrinking, and to squeeze oneself in needs a leg up: a connection, an uncommon aptitude, or the willingness to do things other people simply aren’t.

With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places.

These aerial images, stunning in their abstraction, evoke a powerful sense of transcendence and tranquillity.

Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it's going to be a while till we travel again. Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while. A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.

Many of those arrested were volunteers working with Riot Ribs, a barbecue tent that has been serving up free food to anyone who asks since the Fourth of July. From the sidewalk of SW Salmon, the volunteers who avoided arrest watched the blue awning of their stand collapsed by government contractors, still within the boundaries of Lownsdale Square Park. The volunteers hadn't been able to grab anything associated with the stand, including a large stainless steel grille they'd received the night before from Pok Pok, and thousands of dollars worth of food donations that they'd planned on feeding to hungry people.

These are the official writings, videos, and more that BSA recommends all Socialists explore, regardless of skin color.

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off. The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.

Yet Wheeler has been clear—and honest—about one thing. “Portland continues to be used as a staging ground for violence night after night,” he said Sunday. “This is causing unprecedented harm to our communities, livelihoods, and Portlanders continue to fear for their safety.” But it’s time Wheeler acknowledges who is truly bringing this violence into our community: Unarmed 20-somethings in black hoodies, or heavily armed law enforcement prepared for war.

Including some centering techniques, `li::marker`, and `display: inline-flex`, `column-rule`, `background-repeat: round`. There are a lot of CSS properties that some don’t know about, or they know about them, but forget to use them when they’re needed.

91-DIVOC is home to many data-forward, high-quality, interactive, and informative visualizations made during the global pandemic created by Prof. Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider. I hope you'll spend some time and nerd out on data with me! :)

A teapot or a watering can with the spout pointing at itself. A one-inch-long ruler. A door with three doorknobs. is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani.

Great demos for mostly-CSS card flip, cube, and carousels. With the introduction of CSS transforms, elements could be shifted, rotated, slanted, squashed and stretched. Web designers were finally able to catch up to print designers. With CSS 3D transforms, web designers can move past their print counterparts and explore a new realm in graphic design.

This year's top shots delight with dazzling colors and fresh perspectives.