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Anita Hill says she wants 'real accountability' from Joe Biden

A woman who accused a Supreme Court nominee of sexual harassment has rebuked White House candidate Joe Biden, who chaired the 1991 hearings.

Anita Hill said Mr Biden must show "real accountability" for his handling of her complaints during Clarence Thomas' confirmation in Congress.

Ms Hill told the New York Times the former vice-president had called her before announcing his presidential bid.

But she said his apology was not enough without "real change".

Joe Biden Declines to Directly Apologize to Anita Hill for His Handling of 1991 Hearing

In his first sit-down interview of his presidential campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday repeatedly declined to directly apologize to Anita Hill for his handling of the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, instead delivering a broad statement of remorse for how she was treated during the combative questioning she faced from an all-male Senate committee that he led.

Appearing on ABC’s “The View,” which is heavily watched by women, Mr. Biden was asked by one of its hosts, Joy Behar, about his reluctance in recent months to offer a straightforward apology to Ms. Hill for his own judgment and leadership during the hearings. Ms. Behar suggested that Mr. Biden should say, “I’m sorry for the way I treated you, not for the way you were treated.”

“I’m sorry for the way she got treated,” Mr. Biden responded. “If you go back to what I said, and didn’t say, I don’t think I treated her badly.”

Biden Gives Bumbling Apology as ‘The View’ Confronts Him on Creepy Touching, Anita Hill

Biden was initially greeted by The View hosts with a very warm welcome by the panel and extremely friendly audience. But the tone shifted halfway through the chat when co-host Sunny Hostin brought up recent accusations from multiple women that he invaded their personal space and made them feel “gross.”

“We’re in a different time now,” Hostin asked. “We’re in the #MeToo movement. Are you sorry for what you did? Are you prepared to apologize to those women?”

The former veep replied that “everybody has to be more [aware] of the private space of men and women” before awkwardly asking the all-woman panel if he can hug them, noting that he wasn’t sure what to do when he walked out.

'He gave me permission': Joe Biden jokes about touching complaints

Joe Biden has twice made joking references to complaints from women that his physical behavior made them uncomfortable.

The former vice-president’s comments on Friday came during his first public appearance since the allegations began to surface last week. Taking the stage in Washington at a gathering of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Biden was introduced by the president of the union, Lonnie Stephenson. Biden quipped: “I just want you to know – I had permission to hug Lonnie.”

The crowd, which was mostly male, erupted in laughter. Later, Biden made a similar joke after inviting a group of children onstage and putting his arm round a young boy. “By the way, he gave me permission to touch him,” the former vice-president said, again to laughter. “Everybody knows I like kids more than people,” Biden said.

Lucy Flores isn’t alone. Joe Biden has a long history of touching women inappropriately.

Democrat Lucy Flores was preparing to give one of her final stump speeches in a race for lieutenant governor in Nevada when she felt two hands on her shoulders. She froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?” Flores wondered.

Flores recounts her experience with Joe Biden in a first-person essay for New York magazine, describing an incident in 2014 when Biden came up behind her, leaned in, smelled her hair, and kissed the back of her head.

“Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world,” Flores wrote. “He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused.”

[...] Flores’s experience isn’t unique. It is no secret in Washington that Biden has touched numerous women inappropriately in public. It’s just never been treated as a serious issue by the mainstream press.

Sleepy Joe or Creepy Joe?

Year Zero (our year 2022, the year the United States is 'reborn') was (and will be?)(is?) a dystopian vision of a future in which your government worked against you.

...or... a game and technology and music...

...or a technological Easter Egg hunt...

...or ... a concept album that i would call brilliant!

September 2006, Trent Reznor (THE guy of NIN unless touring) decided to shake things up a bit. He decided that music and marketing would work brilliantly together if worked in a fun, interesting and puzzling way (not marketing, but an "artistic concept"): what he got was a thriller and marketing he couldn't have expected.

He hired a company called 42 Entertainment to help promote his coming album by giving out clues to a larger puzzle.
The first piece of the puzzle were tour t-shirts (the With Teeth tour) with highlighted letters that spelled out "I am trying to believe".
"This phrase was registered as a website URL, and soon several related websites were also discovered in the IP range, all describing a dystopian vision of the fictional "Year 0"."
---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(album)

USB keys were left in bathroom stalls at tour venues. Clues left on web-sites, clues leading to web-sites, phone numbers, email addresses, videos and mp3's.
Phone a number found from one of the clues and you are left with a message telling you "By calling this number, you and your family are implicitly pleading guilty to the consumption of anti-American media and have been flagged as potential militants."
Another clue told fans to not drink the water because the government had drugged it, but other clues led to a phone number that when called, a message said simply "I am drinking the water, so should you".

Leaked songs gave clues: The Great Destroyer, when played in mono, gave clues saying "Red Horse Vector". Was there a website for it? You betcha!

Finally at the release of the Year Zero album, fans discovered that the black CD cover when warmed, exposed a string of binary numbers that when translated into ASCII read "exterminal.net"
###
0110 010 1011 110
00011 101 00011
00101 0111001 00110110
1011 010 010
1101110011000
010 11 011 0
0 0 01 0 1 1 1 00 110
1 1100 1100 1 01 01
11 0 1
0 0
###

The Year Zero story takes place in the United States in the year 2022; or "Year 0" according to the American government, being the year that America was reborn. The United States has suffered several major terrorist attacks, and in response the government has seized absolute control on the country and reverted to a Christian fundamentalist theocracy. The government maintains control of the populace through institutions such as the Bureau of Morality and the First Evangelical Church of Plano, as well as increased surveillance and the secret drugging of tap water with a mild sedative. In response to the increasing oppression of the government, several corporate, government, and subversive websites were transported back in time to the present by a group of scientists working clandestinely against the authoritarian government. The websites-from-the-future were sent to the year 2007 to warn the American people of the impending dystopian future and to prevent it from ever forming in the first place

It's an interesting 'total package' concept, and there's 2 more years to go: but has this dystopian vision already arrived?

When the vacuum cleaner bag becomes full, attach it to a leaf blower, with a filter so that only the fine dust can be evenly distributed throughout the living space. The larger vacuumed up bits and crumbs will remain in the vacuum bag. If the vacuum bag is mostly empty, it can simply be re-attached to the vacuum cleaner. If the vacuum bag is too full after blowing out all of the fine dust, then its remaining contents can be:
* added to fireplace
* used as pillow stuffing
* added to garden soil
* leaf-blower disbursed into back yard
* mixed with used chewing gum as new form of play doh
* ingredient in cigarettes
* food additive, using a suitably complex ingredient name

Pop Star’s Illicit Kiss Becomes Fodder for Government Ads in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government does not usually weigh in when the tabloids catch a pop star cheating.

But this week, after the city was riveted by the scandal of a married singer caught on video kissing an actress, some government agencies were criticized for using it as fodder for jokes in public service announcements.

Government officials expose their own lack of workload.

Original source for this seems to be NPR member station WABE but I found it via antiwar.com.

I'll excerpt a bit but do read the whole thing.

President Donald Trump called former President Jimmy Carter for the first time this weekend.

Just that initial sentence was enough to brighten my day. I'm not a big fan of living Presidents, but Carter is the exception. If anyone can give Trump some good advice it will be Carter - and the fact Trump made the call indicates he just might listen to that advice.

So what kind of advice was given? Let me skip ahead a little.

(Carter) said Trump said he is particularly concerned about how China is “getting ahead of us.”

Carter agreed that’s true.

“And do you know why? I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979 do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war,” he said.

The U.S., Carter said, has been at war for all but 16 years of its 242-year history. (China and Vietnam actually fought a brief border war in early 1979, weeks after normalization of U.S.-China relations.)

The last two sentence probably got reversed in an editorial mistake, because that reads quite awkwardly as is, but that's how my source has it.

He called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” because of a tendency to try to force others to “adopt our American principles.”

And this is where, unfortunately, many of us obey our training, cover our eyes, stuff our fingers in our ears, and start saying something like 'hates America.'

No. This has nothing to do with hating anyone or anything. It has to do with the ability to set aside tribal sentiment and look at things objectively. What are the facts? As laid out above, China has been at peace since right about 1980, and focused single-mindedly on improving their economy, on building their originally pathetic industrial base until they are now the word leader. Over the same period, we've been at war virtually every year, and our military spending, already much larger than that of any other nation (or several put together) just keeps expanding.

We have to be able to acknowledge what that means, or we live in a dream, disconnected from reality, unable to understand the context of events we're therefore unable to respond appropriately.

Carter suggested that instead of war, China has been investing in its own infrastructure, mentioning that China has 18,000 miles of high-speed railroad.

“How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?”

It's definitely worth the click. Carter knows of what he speaks.

What France Has Money For

A journalist sarcastically asked Philippe Martinez, the leader of a major labor union, whether the flood of donations was evidence of trickle-down economics. “Money doesn’t trickle down for everything,” Mr. Martinez answered, adding that the outburst of generosity from French billionaires only exposed the inequalities that divide the country.

Such gifts aren’t just a private matter; they cost the state, too. For one thing, and certainly in the eyes of some Yellow Vests, these philanthropists are offering only a small fraction of enormous fortunes they have amassed partly by avoiding taxes otherwise needed to fund basic public services. And since their proposed gifts are destined for France’s national heritage, the bulk of them could benefit from major tax exemptions — up to 90 percent if a proposed bill presented this week were to pass.

Notre-Dame’s Safety Planners Underestimated the Risk, With Devastating Results

Unlike at sensitive sites in the United States, the fire alarms in Notre-Dame did not notify fire dispatchers right away. Instead, a guard at the cathedral first had to climb a steep set of stairs to the attic — a trip Mr. Mouton said would take a “fit” person six minutes.

Only after a blaze was discovered could the fire department be notified and deployed. That means even a flawless response had a built-in delay of about 20 minutes — from the moment the alarm sounded until firefighters could arrive and climb to the attic with hundreds of pounds of hoses and equipment to begin battling a fire.

Last night Jasmine dumped me. That's two in a week, and a new personal best.

I had felt some distance between us over the last month or so. The biggest sign was slower responses to text messages I would send to her. Normally she would respond within minutes, but it started dragging out to hours, then days. She said she had some busy weeks (and I'm sure she did).

Last time I saw her, I asked her what she wanted in our relationship. I asked if she wanted me to integrate her more into my life. Things like meeting my wife and coming over for dinners every once and a while. She said she didn't know, and that she would think about it.

I guess she thought about it, and decided it was time to move on. I think that she is seeing someone else, and I'm guessing that it's going well and she wants to see where that goes. I understand that. Our relationship was never going to be permanent. I knew I was just a transition between her ex-husband and her getting another 'real' relationship.

We started dating sometime in September, so we dated for 6-7 months. She was a good person and I will miss her. I appreciate the memories we made together, and I will remember her with fondness. I hope she finds what she is looking for. She deserves someone that can offer more than I.

All in all, I would say our relationship was a success, even if the ending hurt a bit. I wish her well.

Godspeed Jasmine. Godspeed.

Chants like "Lock Her Up" look childish.

Political candidates need to learn and evolve.

Act more like adults.

Instead of each candidate promising, if elected, to lock up their opponent, they need to start labeling their opponents as terrorists and their campaign organizations as terrorist organizations. Then promise to use the full force of government against these terrorists.