STRAIGHT PRIDE IN ACTION

STRAIGHT PRIDE IN ACTION Shortly after arriving at the bar, however, they were allegedly approached by a heterosexual couple who verbally attacked them. “The heterosexual couple began to call the group transphobic slurs, misgendering them by calling them ‘men’ and eventually shouting and threatening to ‘come back and kill you!’” Turton wrote on Twitter. “The group of trans women remained calm and collected and tried to de-escalate the situation.” Police investigating forceful removal of trans women from L.A. bar A video circulating online shows security at Los Angeles bar Las Perlas forcefully removing several LGBTQ people from the establishment. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/police-investigating-forceful-removal-trans-women-l-bar-n1046461

A former West Virginia teacher and 2 aides were arrested after alleged abuse

WHAT THESE PEOPLE LOOK LIKE MATTERS! THEIR APPEARANCE IS NOT AN ACCIDENT A former West Virginia teacher and 2 aides were arrested after alleged abuse was caught on secret recordings The teacher and aides at the Martinsburg school threatened Adri and other children, telling them they would hit them in the face and knock their teeth out, and they threatened to withhold food, Salango said. "These arrests send a strong message — that child abuse will not be tolerated and must be reported," Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement. "We must continue working to ensure vulnerable children are protected, especially at school." https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/19/us/west-virginia-teacher-arrest-special-needs-student-abuse/

How Trump Went Bust

How Trump Went Bust and Got Rich Using Other People’s Money: A Timeline He took on unsustainable debts, dumped them on others, and borrowed lots of family money along the way. when Trump’s debts spiraled out of control in the early 1990s and nearly destroyed him for good, he figured out how to use other people’s cash again to make millions for himself and dump his debt-ridden failures on investors. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/how-donald-trump-destroyed-his-empire-and-dumped-ruins-others-timeline/

Prison officers laugh as naked inmate taken

Prison officers laugh as naked inmate taken to hospital to die from injuries WARNING - DISTRESSING IMAGES: CCTV shows death-in-custody prisoner Allan Marshall as he's dragged by guards, who have now been given immunity from prosecution following the incident in HMP Edinburgh https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/prison-officers-laugh-naked-inmate-19001521

Estimate Pi by Dropping Sticks

Estimate Pi by Dropping Sticks In mathematics, Buffon's needle problem is a question first posed in the 18th century by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon:[1] Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips? Buffon's needle was the earliest problem in geometric probability to be solved; it can be solved using integral geometry. The solution, in the case where the needle length is not greater than the width of the strips, can be used to design a Monte Carlo method for approximating the number π, although that was not the original motivation for de Buffon's question.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon%27s_needle_problem

SHAME AND SUSPICION

Who is going to do all this work?

Who is going to do all this work?’ Immigrants get the job done, employers say POSTED 2:00 A.M. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/aug/25/immigrants-get-the-job-done-employers-say/

Immigrants get the job done, employers say

Who is going to do all this work?’ Immigrants get the job done, employers say POSTED 2:00 A.M. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/aug/25/immigrants-get-the-job-done-employers-say/

Trump responds with fury over Fed chief's speech

Epstein's 'madam' made 'secret Palace visits

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jeffrey-epstein-madam-secret-palace-18995392 Paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's 'madam' made 'secret Palace visits to see Prince Andrew - and would rarely sign in' EXCLUSIVE: Ghislaine Maxwell - and other glamorous women - would visit the Prince, a royal cop has alleged

TO BE FAIR

America does not want the competition

Trickle-down theory is a monstrous lie

Column: Trickle-down theory is a monstrous lie intended to justify the rich getting richer https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-19/column-trickle-down-is-a-lie

Jewish leaders outraged

Jewish leaders outraged

"It's unclear who @POTUS is claiming Jews would be 'disloyal' to, but charges of disloyalty have long been used to attack Jews. As we've said before, it's possible to engage in the democratic process without these claims. It's long overdue to stop using Jews as a political football," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted later Tuesday. Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, called the comments "yet another example of Donald Trump continuing to weaponize and politicize anti-Semitism." "If this is about Israel, then Trump is repeating a dual loyalty claim, which is a form of anti-Semitism. If this is about Jews being 'loyal' to him, then Trump needs a reality check. We live in a democracy, and Jewish support for the Republican Party has been halved in the past four years," Soifer added. J Street, a liberal advocacy group focused on reaching a resolution between Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in a statement, "It is dangerous and shameful for President Trump to attack the large majority of the American Jewish community as unintelligent and 'disloyal.' " https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/20/politics/donald-trump-jewish-americans-democrat-disloyalty/index.html

US high school students appear to give Nazi salute at sports ceremony

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/19/nazi-salute-high-school-students-video-california High school students in southern California appeared to give the Nazi salute in disturbing video footage taken at a sports team awards ceremony. A video purportedly shows around 10 members of the boys’ water polo team at Pacifica high school in Garden Grove giving the salute while facing a figure at a lectern who is saluting and singing. According to the Daily Beast, which published the video, the incident occurred before an awards ceremony late last year. The website reported that the song is an obscure Nazi marching song from the second world war. The video was reportedly shared on Instagram by a student, who allegedly also posted lyrics to the song in his bio on the social network which he later removed. It is the second incident involving Nazi depictions and high school students in the region to come to national attention this year. In March, pupils from nearby Orange county appeared to do the Nazi salute while surrounding cups arranged in the shape of a swastika.

facebook blocks posts critical of 3rd reich

Move over, Illuminati. The conspiracy against Trump’s economy is massive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/move-over-illuminati-the-conspiracy-against-trumps-economy-is-massive/2019/08/19/5e3bd05a-c2ba-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html By Catherine Rampell Columnist August 19 at 6:48 PM When Barack Obama was president and the economic statistics were good, then-candidate Donald Trump said they were fake. When Trump became president and inherited the exact same stats, they suddenly became real. Now that they’re turning south, they’re apparently fake once more. Trump, aided by his economic brain trust of cranks and sycophants, believes any indicator showing the U.S. economy could be in trouble must be fabricated. It’s all part of an anti-Trump conspiracy, he rants, according to reports in The Post, the Associated Press and the New York Times. And move over, Illuminati, because this particular conspiracy is massive. It’s led by the Federal Reserve, Democrats and the media, of course, or so say Trump and his Fox News minions. But it also includes the entire U.S. bond market, which flashed a warning sign last week when the Treasury yield curve inverted (meaning long-term bonds had lower interest rates than short-term ones, which usually predates a downturn).

A Potato Battery Can Light Up a Room For Over a Month

A couple years ago, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem released their finding that a potato boiled for eight minutes can make for a battery that produces ten times the power of a raw one. Using small units comprised of a quarter-slice of potato sandwiched between a copper cathode and a zinc anode that's connected by a wire, agricultural science professor Haim Rabinowitch and his team wanted to prove that a system that can be used to provide rooms with LED-powered lighting for as long as 40 days. At around one-tenth the cost of a typical AA battery, a potato could supply power for cell phone and other personal electronics in poor, underdeveloped and remote regions without access to a power grid. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-potato-battery-can-light-up-a-room-for-over-a-month-180948260/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=socialmedia A Potato Battery Can Light Up a Room For Over a Month

Google’s Artificial Intelligence Hate Speech Detector Has a ‘Black Tweet’ Problem

https://observer.com/2019/08/google-ai-hate-speech-detector-black-racial-bias-twitter-study/ As large social media companies face the rising challenge of moderating the billions of words posted on their platforms every day and blocking hate speech as well as other types of harmful content before it sees the light of day, they are hoping this huge workload can someday be taken on by robots. Google, for one, released an API called Perspective in 2017 that claimed to be able to detect “toxic” text-based content with artificial intelligence. Perspec­tive defines “toxic” as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreason­able comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.” The neural network used to flag such content was trained using a large set of text-based data rated by people on a scale from “very healthy” to “very toxic.” Based on that information, the algorithm then evaluates new content by assigning it a likelihood of being toxic. SEE ALSO: A Complete Timeline of Google’s Path to World Domination But a new study by a group of AI researchers at the University of Washington found that this tool has a racial bias against African Americans, meaning that it has a high tendency to flag content posted by black Americans as toxic when it is actually harmless. The study, led by University of Washington PhD student Maarten Sap, tested Google’s Perspective with a few widely used sets of Twitter posts (in the U.S.) and found that tweets written by black people are twice as likely than those written by white people to be labeled as toxic tweets—and that more black tweets than white tweets are mistaken for offensive content. For example, a Twitter post that reads “Wassup, nigga” has a 87% likelihood of being flagged as toxic, while a differently worded post reading “Wassup, bro” only has a 4% likelihood of being labeled as toxic. But if the first message was posted by a black person, its intent most likely would be harmless given the cultural context of the African American community.

mastodon.social

Find your perfect community Mastodon isn’t just a website, it is a federation—think Star Trek. Thousands of independent communities running Mastodon form a coherent network, where while every planet is different, being part of one is being part of the whole. Browse the communities Safer social media experience Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network's spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct. https://mastodon.social/@mbspringer

Hate speech algorithms biased against blacks, researchers find

As tech companies have repeatedly noted, hate speech is a thorny problem because context matters -- and varies dramatically -- depending on the speaker, the country, the culture and so on. Some words that are considered slurs in most settings, such as the N-word, may not be in others. As of now, most machine learning systems can't parse this type of nuance. Activist groups such as Color of Change have long said that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are policing the speech of black people more rigidly than that of white people. In one example, Reveal reported the story of a black woman who was banned from Facebook for posting the same "Dear White People" note that her white friends had posted without consequence. https://www.foxnews.com/tech/hate-speech-algorithms-biased-against-blacks-researchers-find#

pericles as a kitten