“A hologram of a young sex worker haunts Amsterdam’s red light district. Dressed in faded denim hotpants, a leopard-print bra, with a tattoo snaking up her stomach and across her chest, the 3D computer-generated image reaches out and appears to knock on the window to attract attention. She leans forward, breathes on the glass and writes the word ‘help.’ The hologram is designed to represent Bernadette ‘Betty’ Szabo, a 19-year-old woman from Hungary who was murdered a few months after giving birth in 2009. … The murdered teenager’s image is being projected from behind a window, alongside hundreds of young women who continue to make a living in this notoriously risky industry. Investigators hope the lifelike hologram will help jog memories and draw attention to the unsolved murder.” (11/10/24)
“Daniel Lurie, a local nonprofit founder and an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, will become San Francisco’s 46th mayor. He unseated incumbent Mayor London Breed, a fellow moderate Democrat, during Tuesday’s general election in the 14th round of ranked-choice voting. He won by a wide margin, 56.2% to 43.8%, according to unofficial election results. As of Thursday afternoon, he had earned 119,440 votes to Breed’s 93,079. Breed, a former supervisor and the first Black woman to serve as San Francisco’s mayor, conceded defeat Thursday afternoon following the release of more results from Tuesday’s election. ‘Being Mayor of San Francisco has been the greatest honor of my lifetime,’ she wrote in a post on X. ‘I’m beyond grateful to our residents for the opportunity to serve the City that raised me. When I first took office in the middle of the night, back in 2017 when Mayor Ed Lee passed, I didn’t know what lay ahead.'” (11/08/24)
“Kamala Harris’[s] resounding defeat at the polls, and what both Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s Viktor Orban hailed as a historic political comeback, puts paid to any hope that the planetary ascendancy of reactionary politics is a passing phenomenon. A campaign that celebrated its unqualified continuity with the Democratic Party of the Clintons, Obama and Biden crumbled in the face of a candidate who leaned into accusations of fascism with even greater glee than in his last two campaigns …. How are we to think about the fact that democratic process has certified and emboldened what so many have diagnosed as an unparalleled threat to American democracy?” (11/08/24)
“As the dust settles over election day, it’s worth reflecting that it’s not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump’s reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare. Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war.” (11/07/24)
“In Philadelphia this past weekend, I met a number of people who’d given up on democracy. … there were the grim young men who said, hell yeah, they were going to vote for Trump. They spoke of the Republican presidential candidate as if he were Tony Montana, the gangster played by Al Pacino in the film Scarface: violent, lawless, and powerful. Trump elicited respect laced with fear. According to his supporters, he’d stand up to America’s enemies abroad and be tough on crime domestically. Several said to me (with the usual preface of ‘don’t get me wrong but’) that a woman president would be too weak or ‘mixed up by hormones’ to do those necessary things.” [editor’s note: Yet another “progressive” pundit who ignores the utter incompetence of the candidate and her campaign, and focuses on her anatomy and “sexism” – SAT] (11/06/24)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“So hey, can Democrats finally start opposing genocide now? Just kidding. They won’t. … Democrats are sitting on a mountain of hundreds of thousands of human corpses they helped kill by mass military slaughter in the last four years, weeping and lamenting that now bad things are going to start happening. … Democrats are shrieking so loud today because they know they’re wrong. They know their party ran a dogshit candidate. They know it was crazy to expect the left support the party that’s committing a live-streamed genocide. It’s not anger. It’s not fear. It’s cognitive dissonance. … I should probably repeat what I said back in July: if you’re a Trump supporter who started reading me for my criticisms of the Biden administration, you are going to hate my guts after your guy gets in.” (11/07/24)
“A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party: ‘The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,’ the New York Times reported three weeks ago. ‘For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,’ Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016. The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again. After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an ‘autopsy’ report, assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future.” (11/07/24)
“President Joe Biden addressed the nation after President-elect Donald Trump’s historic win for a second term in office. Trump is already at work on his transition, here’s a look at who could be staffing his administration this go round. With Trump about to take a second term in office, celebrities are melting down and Elon Musk’s trans daughter announced she is leaving the US. The judge in Trump’s ‘hush money’ trial is weighing tossing his felony conviction, and here’s what could happen with his other court cases once he takes office. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a special session of the state legislature to bolster the progressive state’s policies against Donald Trump’s impending presidency — telling reporters the plan is to ‘Trump-proof’ state laws.” (11/07/24)
“How will the media and Democratic pundits explain Vice President Kamala Harris'[s] stunning defeat? How will the media and Democratic pundits explain former President Donald Trump’s incredible recapture of the White House, the most improbable comeback since heavyweight champion George Foreman regained the title at age 45 having lost it 20 years earlier? How many times did the ‘experts’ count Trump out? When he won the presidency in 2016, so many described Trump as mentally unstable that he took a cognitive test and allowed the White House doctor to hold a press conference to convince the country that Trump was not ‘crazy’. Critics, who considered Trump delusional, hoped out loud his cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment over Trump’s supposed ‘incapacity’. The House impeached him twice. He was routinely called a ‘fascist’. He survived two assassination attempts.” (11/07/24)
“When a volcanic eruption buried the ancient city of Pompeii, the last desperate moments of its citizens were preserved in stone for centuries. Observers see stories in the plaster casts later made of their bodies, like a mother holding a child and two women embracing as they die. But new DNA evidence suggests things were not as they seem — and these prevailing interpretations come from looking at the ancient world through modern eyes. ‘We were able to disprove or challenge some of the previous narratives built upon how these individuals were kind of found in relation to each other,’ said Alissa Mittnik of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.” (11/07/24)
