[Vanity Fair] The author, who spent more than a decade covering the scandal for V.F., shares the key revelations and insights that viewers of the new HBO documentary Leaving Neverland need to know.
The Governor’s Office of Volunteer Services oversees the Governor’s Emergency Relief Fund and is now accepting donations for direct tornado relief efforts.
Cajun Navy
The Louisiana-based search-and-rescue team sent members to Alabama on Monday to help with relief efforts and search for those who remain missing. Visit the group’s Facebook page to donate.
Community Foundation of East Alabama
A long-term recovery fund has been created by the Community Foundation of East Alabama. Visit the site or donate directly using PayPal.
Convoy of Hope
The nonprofit is sending supplies and team members to Lee County to assist with relief efforts. Donate to the organization here.
Mercy Chefs
The disaster relief organization has deployed its team of professional chefs to Lee County to feed volunteers, first responders, and tornado victims. Two meals per day will be served at Lazenby Farms in Auburn. Donations can also be made on the website.
Red Cross of East Alabama
The Red Cross is offering various services to victims, including shelter at Opelika’s Providence Baptist Church and helping to locate still-unaccounted for loved ones. Donations can be made here.
Salvation Army
The Salvation Army has a full incident command team in the area assisting with recovery. The organization’s Lee County Service Center is also providing meals to first responders at six mobile feeding units. Contribute to the effort by donating online.
Samaritan’s Purse U.S. Disaster Response
Samaritan’s Purse has a team on the ground to assist with various relief efforts. Donations to the ongoing work of the organization can be made on its website.
United Way of Central Alabama
The local chapter of the national outreach organization has set up a Lee County Disaster Fund‐find ways to donate online.
If you’re in the area:
Acre and Bow & Arrow Restaurants
Chef David Bancroft’s restaurants, both in Auburn, are collecting funds to continue cooking and packing meals for first responders and those affected by the devastation. Visit either restaurant to participate, or check their Facebook pages for more information: Acre | Bow & Arrow
Airbnb
The hospitality service has launched its Open Homes Program to victims and first responders‐volunteer your lodging online.
Auburn Dream Center
The outreach center, supported by Church of the Highlands, has opened its doors to both victims and volunteers and is collecting donations of bottled water, granola bars, diapers, baby formula, baby wipes, and hygiene products.
Auburn High School
Students and staff at Auburn High School are accepting donations on campus. For updates and information, keep up with Auburn County Schools on Twitter.
Church of the Highlands
Alabama’s largest church is mobilizing volunteers in the Auburn, Opelika, and Columbus areas. To learn more, the church requests volunteers text the word "response" to 74000 for updates and service opportunities as they arise.
Cluck-It Bucket
The Smiths Station fried chicken restaurant is offering free meals to all first responders.
The Farm at Rocky Top
The Opelika farm and events venue is offering temporary housing to families whose homes were destroyed by the storms.
Goree’s Furniture
The Opelika store is accepting furniture donations to help families who lost their homes and/or belongings. Employees are available to pick up items if needed.
Lee County Association of Realtors
The LCAR is looking for spare rooms, hotel or apartment complex vacancies, or other housing for first responders working in the area. To offer a location, contact organization president Karen Turner.
Opelika Animal Hospital
The animal hospital announced that it is offering boarding services to displaced animals at no charge. It is also taking donations.
Southern Souls Animal League
The Eufaula animal clinic and shelter, damaged in the storm, is in desperate need of homes for its animals. Find more info on their Facebook page or donate to the cause via GoFundMe.
U-Haul of Central Alabama and Southern Georgia
The company’s local branches are providing temporary free self-storage and U-Box container usage to tornado victims. Learn more at the U-Haul site.
The Village Foster Care and Adoptive Ministry
In Smiths Station, The Village is collecting items to transport to affected neighborhoods. Requested donations include clothes, blankets, snacks, baby necessities, and toiletries. The organization is also in need of volunteers to help organize and distribute donations.
[National Review] At some level, you have to give House Democrats some credit for ambition. They may have just sent to the Senate the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history. It’s called the "For the People Act," and it’s a legislative buffet of bad ideas.
The alleged purpose of the bill, H.R. 1, is to "expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants." In reality, the bill represents an extraordinary federal power grab. At every turn, it grants federal regulators more power. Time and again, it renders federal election law more complex ‐ creating a chilling effect on political communication through sheer uncertainty and confusion.
The free-speech problems are so obvious that free-speech organizations on the left and right are united in opposition. Comprehensive analyses from the Institute for Free Speech and the American Civil Liberties Union are worth reading in their entirety and raise remarkably similar concerns.
At a time of extraordinary public harassment, boycotts, intimidating public shame campaigns, the act would expand financial-disclosure requirements, including in some circumstances requiring public disclosure of the names and addresses even of donors who did not know about or perhaps even support the political message of the organization they funded. Donors may give money, for example, to fund one aspect of an organization’s mission only to be involuntarily exposed as a "political donor" when the organization chooses ‐ without the donor’s knowledge or consent ‐ to mention a politician by name in a different context. As the ACLU points out, "it is unfair to hold donors responsible for every communication in which an organization engages."
Moreover, in the effort to further limit "coordination" between candidates and political action committees, the bill sets forth language so broad that, as the ACLU explains, it affects communications that "merely refer to a candidate or an opponent to a candidate 120 days before an election or 60 days before a primary or a caucus." The Institute for Free Speech’s Bradley Smith argues that, with such language, "the goal seems to be to limit discussion of candidates to the candidates and parties themselves, at the expense of the public at large."
[Townhall] The only thing that should keep you from roaring in laughter as Nancy Pelosi freaks out trying to keep a lid on the freak show that is the Democratic caucus is the knowledge that the freshmen freakettes giving her fits would impose an ideology of tyranny and murder if given the chance. But you can still allow yourself a good giggle as you watch Nancy’s dreams of a Democrat majority die on the altar of anti-Semitism, taking away your health insurance, and banning cheeseburgers.
This was on display as the Democrats struggled to find a way to publicly pretend to condemn their superstar bigot’s hatred of Jews without annoying all the Democrats for whom hatred of Jews is a key component of their intersectional web of leftist prejudices. Nancy essentially tried to excuse it by explaining that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Berlin) is too stupid to know she’s anti-Semitic which, to be fair, is plausible.
She could only get her caucus to agree to condemning all prejudice, sort of, including the tsunami of prejudice against Pacific Islanders that we all see around us so much in our daily lives. Take that, people who hate Pacific Islanders.
Of course, the Democrats never named the actual bigot because the Democrat base is affirmatively pro-bigotry. They hate Jews, Christians, white people, dissident non-white people, men, women who like men, and people who blaspheme against the creepy climate cult, among others. The list of Bad People Who Are Bad goes on and on ‐ the key element of intersectionality is that it always intersects with ugly prejudices against groups that leftists see as insufficiently supportive of their sick ideology.
[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐The party of love and tolerance which is adamantly opposed to hatred in all its forms struggled mightily before finally passing a resolution that vaguely condemns hate, sources confirmed Thursday.
Only after revising the language several times and making sure the resolution didn't condemn any specific acts of hate was the Democratic Party able to pass the anti-hate resolution.
"We are opposed to hate in all its forms," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a speech Thursday afternoon, after desperately trying to get Democrats to sign onto the resolution. "And we can show how much we're against hate if we can word this resolution to condemn the specific kinds of hate we're against while not turning off any Democrats who are actually in favor of a particular brand of hate."
"Now please, would you all just vote for this thing so we can show how tolerant and anti-hate we are?" an exasperated Pelosi added.
Finally, after all forms of hate the Democrats are OK with were omitted from the bill, the party was able to pass it with flying colors. They then quickly condemned House Republicans who refused to vote for the anti-hate bill that didn't condemn anything specific.
#1
The Republicans should submit a resolution saying "Puppies are adorable and kittens are cute" to illustrate how meaningless the "anti-hate" resolution is.
[DAWN] THE country’s rejuvenated anti-militant campaign will strengthen its diplomatic and moral position in the ongoing stand-off with India.
Suuuuure it will. And with America, too.
This will help Pakistain fulfil its commitments to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). And, sustained over a longer period of time, it will certainly improve internal and border security, as well as relations with its neighbours.
In fact, it appears that the government and the military establishment have both acted in sync to make the renewed campaign look both serious and different this time.
[Ynet] Egypt's shuttle diplomacy attempts to bring a lull in the months of festivities along the Israel-Gazoo border seems to be slowly paying off, but its rival terror group is not heeding calls for quiet
Hamas, the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®, did not stage riots or confrontations along the Israel-Gazoo border on Saturday night, for the first in months of nightly incidents at the friction points along the security fence.
Earlier in the day, however, a mortar shell was fired at the Eshkol Regional Council and went kaboom! in an open area; a cluster of balloons carrying the warhead from an anti-tank missile was found in a forested area of the Negev; and a bullet fired from the northern Gazoo Strip hit a house in Netiv HaAsara in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council. There were no casualties in any of the incidents.
Continued on Page 49
[Moonbattery] Some people have a hard time finding racism against persons of politically preferred pigmentation. Others see it everywhere. Even pollen is racist. Even self-driving cars. From the Independent:
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that state-of-the-art detection systems, such as the sensors and cameras used in self-driving cars, are better at detecting people with lighter skin tones.
The researchers say this could make self-driving cars more likely to run over black people.
Tests on eight image-recognition systems found this bias held true, with their accuracy proving five per cent less accurate on average for people with darker skin.
Good thing every corner of our culture is obsessed with finding evidence that blacks really are oppressed. Otherwise, such a study might not have been undertaken.
A company that can correct its image-recognition system so that cars are more likely to run over white people might find a ready customer in Volvo, which is prone to using technology for virtue-signaling.
#2
Okay, the current method for doing AI is by doing a lot of training sets (it's why China caches all the conversations and texts of its citizens, and why Google/Alphabet keeps Alexa active, even if you tell it to shut up: doing so generates huge amounts of training sets).
If the researchers only had to use one data set to figure out there was an issue with detecting "people of darker hue", then the training sets need to be expanded.
#6
And doesn't this issue shade nicely into the traditional lower compliance of less-beige folks with pedestrian traffic laws? Gotta be a whole lotta lawyers out there mumbling, "Shaddup, shaddup, shaddup already!"
#7
Since crossing the road can be hard
When you're careless or dark or ill-starred,
New law: Stop and ferry
Across all who carry
This high-visibility card!
#12
They are simply building the case to get rid of cars and the freedom they represent. In the future it will be trains and bicycles to get you were your socialist masters allow you to go.
[TheAtlantic] Nicholas sandmann was an ordinary 16-year-old student at Covington Catholic High School, a school for boys in northern Kentucky, when he found himself standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on January 18. He was wearing a red make america great again hat that he’d purchased as a souvenir, and standing face to face with a Native American protester named Nathan Phillips. Sandmann smiled at Phillips, who was beating a drum.
Sandmann is now suing The Washington Post for $250 million in damages in the wake of a furious national debate over alleged anti‐Donald Trump media bias that quickly became an object lesson in the perils of social media and the limits of objective truth without independent, on-the-ground reporting.
Sandmann’s suit claims that the Post’s linking to a viral video of him and Phillips, and its focus on his maga hat and a "relentless smirk," were "negligent, reckless, and malicious attacks ... which caused permanent damage to [Sandmann’s] life and reputation."
To win his lawsuit, Sandmann must demonstrate that what was written about him was false. He will face what Kristine Coratti Kelly, a spokesperson for the Post, told me would be "a vigorous defense." The newspaper has not yet filed a response to the suit, but it published an editor’s note on March 1 saying that its first story has been contradicted by subsequent reporting.
Sandmann’s case may turn on whether the "actual malice" standard established by the landmark 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan applies. The key question here for a judge to decide could be whether Sandmann is considered a public figure, with a much higher burden of proof, or a private one‐just another high-school student who, through no fault of his own, found himself in a maelstrom. The experts are divided over how that’s likely to be decided. This is a long article about the legal ins and outs of the case. I still think Bezos should have to fork over billions but, unsurprisingly, lawyers think it's complicated. RTWT
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/11/2019 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[7 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Ah, the lawyers are once more claiming journalists can commit libel and slander with impunity, because the moment they do the target becomes a "public figure".
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
03/11/2019 7:08 Comments ||
Top||
#2
If the defense is lack of actual malice, then it would seem to me that the kid's lawyers get to depose the reporters and editors (and owners) on how reporting decisions are made and what the attitudes of the reporters etc. are. We already know the answers, but buckets of popcorn there.
Posted by: Matt ||
03/11/2019 9:27 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Of course lawyers think it's complicated, that's what they get paid to do. Since the kid was not a pre-existing public figure and was essentially made one by their creation, the case would seem to hinge on the lack of appropriate due diligence in reporting. The question will then be whether that rises to the level of malice through overt negligence. Now any lawyer who would so much as contemplate summarizing a 9 figure case in a paragraph would be disbarred or shot, maybe both.
#4
The courts have spent the last 40 years expanding the equal protection before the law and due process of the 14th Amendment into a super highway of power. Now they are about to crap on themselves building a pretzel of a rationale why there are 'public' and 'private' status in libel. The first amendment is not recourse to excuse wanton and reckless behavior of corporations.
#5
The Media will have a real problem, do they cover the depositions themselves or they hope nobody pays attention as the appear on "alternative" media and reduce their all ready low influence on public opinion. Robot reporters are standing ready to uh report.
#6
So if it wasn't malice, then what was it? Overlooked incompetence and stupidity that crept into the system that transects several levels of management, fact checkers and reporting protocols which will magically be easily "corrected and implemented" in a couple of days now that is has been pointed out?
#7
Malice is not applicable unless its a public figure. The law is pretty clear about that - it only needs to be objectively untruthful and harm to the person or their reputation. Malice enters only when its a public figure. I rather doubt this kid was a public figure before the libel/slander event.
Claiming that this kid is a public figure because their actions in libeling him made him a public figure is about like the kid that murdered his parents saying he shouldn't be charged because he is now orphan.
If they are trying to shelter behind "absence of malice", they're dead meat.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[National Review] At some level, you have to give House Democrats some credit for ambition. They may have just sent to the Senate the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history. It’s called the "For the People Act," and it’s a legislative buffet of bad ideas.
[Babylon Bee] WASHINGTON, D.C.‐The party of love and tolerance which is adamantly opposed to hatred in all its forms struggled mightily before finally passing a resolution that vaguely condemns hate, sources confirmed Thursday.
[DAWN] THE country’s rejuvenated anti-militant campaign will strengthen its diplomatic and moral position in the ongoing stand-off with India. 
[Ynet] Egypt's shuttle diplomacy attempts to bring a lull in the months of 
[TheAtlantic] Nicholas sandmann was an ordinary 16-year-old student at Covington Catholic High School, a school for boys in northern Kentucky, when he found himself standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial on January 18. He was wearing a red make america great again hat that he’d purchased as a souvenir, and standing face to face with a Native American protester named Nathan Phillips. Sandmann smiled at Phillips, who was beating a drum.
