“The European Union has slashed its forecasts for economic growth in the 27-nation bloc amid the prospect of a drawn-out Russian war in Ukraine and disruptions to energy supplies. The EU’s gross domestic product will expand 2.7% this year and 2.3% in 2023, the bloc’s executive arm said Monday — its first economic predictions since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The European Commission’s previous outlook expected growth of 4% this year and 2.8% in 2023.” (05/16/22)
“Facial recognition surveillance is a growing threat to constitutionally protected free speech, privacy, racial justice, and information security. We need strict federal, state, and local laws to ban law enforcement’s use of it. Companies like Clearview AI provide facial recognition services to police with little to no public oversight. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of more than 20 billion images by scraping millions of websites, including news media and sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo, without ever seeking users’ consent. The company can even scan for faces in videos on social media sites, not just static photos. Using Clearview’s services, police can identify people in photographs and videos and learn significant, highly personal information about them. Police abuse of this technology is not just theoretical: it’s already happening.” (05/15/22)
“All ideologies spawn psychopaths who kill innocents in its name. Yet only some are blamed for their violent adherents: by opportunists cravenly exploiting corpses while they still lie on the ground.” (05/15/22)
“Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has delayed by three years the September execution of a death row inmate sentenced to die for killing two men in a robbery that netted $40. The governor’s action was one of several reprieves he’s issued in recent years as the state struggles to find an adequate supply of drugs for lethal injection. The announcement Friday moved the Sept. 15 execution date of Kareem Jackson to Dec. 10, 2025.” (05/16/22)
“Roughly a quarter of Republican voters in the United States believe that ‘elitists’ in government, the media, and Hollywood are a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-trafficking pedophiles who murder children for their adrenochrome. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans believe that it’s ‘definitely true’ or ‘probably true’ that the coronavirus pandemic was ‘planned.’ More than a third of self-identified conservative Republicans are in this camp, as are nearly one-in-five Democrats. These are not garden-variety conspiracy theories. … If you believe these plots are real, you are not the target audience for historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in the 1950s and 1960s.” (05/15/22)
“It could have been a beautiful nightmare. The most terrifyingly colossal empire in human history done in not by another rival empire but by another rival century. After the long bloody American Century, a century defined by world wars, cold wars, forever wars, and the constant looming threat of nuclear war and after centuries of unipolar white Anglo-Saxon global supremacy, the Eurasian Century was going to be different. A multipolar order of the yellow people we raped in the South and their pale faced cousins who we’ve long manipulated into submission in the West. An unlikely partnership of the formerly colonized and former colonizers that remained too diverse to form a singular empire but too vital for the current empire to suppress indefinitely, no matter how many stupid fucking color wars and humanitarian interventions they chucked at it.” (05/15/22)
