Thursday, April 6, 2017

Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk - ProPublica

Minority Neighborhoods Pay Higher Car Insurance Premiums Than White Areas With the Same Risk - ProPublica





For decades, auto insurers have been observed to charge higher average premiums to drivers living in predominantly minority urban neighborhoods than to drivers with similar safety records living in majority white neighborhoods. Insurers have long defended their pricing by saying that the risk of accidents is greater in those neighborhoods, even for motorists who have never had one.
But a first-of-its-kind analysis by ProPublica and Consumer Reports, which examined auto insurance premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri, has found that many of the disparities in auto insurance prices between minority and white neighborhoods are wider than differences in risk can explain. In some cases, insurers such as Allstate, Geico and Liberty Mutual were charging premiums that were on average 30 percent higher in zip codes where most residents are minorities than in whiter neighborhoods with similar accident costs.
Our findings document what consumer advocates have long suspected: Despite laws in almost every state banning discriminatory rate-setting, some minority neighborhoods pay higher auto insurance premiums than do white areas with similar payouts on claims. This disparity may amount to a subtler form of redlining, a term that traditionally refers to denial of services or products to minority areas. And, since minorities tend to lag behind whites in income, they may be hard-pressed to afford the higher payments.
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Sunday, March 19, 2017

These Scientists Sent a Rocket to Mars for Less Than It Cost to Make “The Martian”

These Scientists Sent a Rocket to Mars for Less Than It Cost to Make “The Martian”



the women " computers" of India
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Friday, February 3, 2017

altfacts: voting numbers in Calif

California shellackin’: Trump lost ground in Republican-leaning cities around state

http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article130410149.html



President Donald Trump has suggested that fraud caused him to lose California by almost 4.3 million votes, a major component of the Republican’s 2.8 million vote loss nationwide. He has pledged to launch a “major investigation” of voting procedures.
If so, he may want to head to the town of Atherton.
Home to Hewlett Packard CEO (and 2010 GOP candidate for California governor) Meg Whitman and other Silicon Valley elite, Atherton is a Republican-leaning outpost in the liberal San Francisco Bay Area. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney defeated Democrat Barack Obama there by almost 5 percentage points, with Romney’s share of the vote topping the city’s then-GOP registration by almost 11 percentage points.
Last November, though, Atherton strongly backed Democrat Hillary Clinton, with Trump losing by 40 percentage points. His share of the vote was almost 10 percentage points below the city’s GOP registration.
4,839,958Number of votes Republican Mitt Romney received in California on Nov. 6, 2012
4,483,810Number of voters Republican Donald Trump received in California on Nov. 8, 2016
Trump has produced no evidence to back up his claims of voter fraud. Yet detailed county statements of votes suggest that Trump’s Golden State wipeout stemmed less from Clinton running up Obama-surpassing margins in Democratic strongholds such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Ana, and more from his falling well short of Romney’s performance in Atherton, Newport Beach, and other Republican-leaning and swing cities around the state.
Trump exceeded Romney’s performance in some parts of rural California and the Central Valley, such as Needles, Willits, Oroville and Stockton. Trump’s biggest gains came in the Riverside County cities of Perris and Moreno Valley, where Trump finished slightly ahead of the cities’ Republican registration, while Romney finished well behind it.
Statewide, however, Trump received about 350,000 fewer votes than Romney did in the previous presidential election.
In dozens of cities where Republican registration exceeded the party’s 26 percent share of the electorate, Trump fell well below Romney’s performance, election data shows. Clinton’s performance, meanwhile, was about the same as Obama’s in cities where Democratic registration exceeded the party’s 44.9 percent registration share.
In Sacramento County, Romney easily won its most Republican city, Folsom, while Trump narrowly lost there.
Some of those who did not vote for Trump supported Republican candidates in other races. Republican candidates for 64 seats in the state Assembly, for example, collectively received more than 4.8 million votes. Trump received fewer than 4.5 million votes.
“Let’s be clear: There was no massive voter fraud,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who has been a Trump critic. “There’s little evidence that Trump was an out-performer in any part of the state compared to past Republican presidential candidates.”
Stutzman said Trump’s stances against trade agreements and immigration worked in places like the upper Midwest, but likely turned off some California voters who had backed Romney. “Overall this is a state that looks at NAFTA and trade and understands that it’s good for California,” he said, adding that “immigration-bashing is a generation behind us in California.”
Data Tracker is a regular feature that breaks down the numbers behind today’s news. Explore more trends at sacbee.com/datatracker.
Jim Miller: 916-326-5521, @jimmiller2

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article130410149.html#storylink=cpy



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Monday, January 30, 2017

moving to IngSoc 2017

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/





"Over the past generation, we have seen ominous indicators of a breakdown of the American political system: the willingness of congressional Republicans to push the United States to the brink of a default on its national obligations in 2013 in order to score a point in budget negotiations; Barack Obama’s assertion of a unilateral executive power to confer legal status upon millions of people illegally present in the United States—despite his own prior acknowledgment that no such power existed.


Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled."





Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want to enflame more of it.




t

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Sunday, January 29, 2017

Trump honors those who voted for him

Trump jawboned U.S. companies to stop exporting jobs and persuaded some to promise new jobs at home. He formally withdrew from President Obama’s 12-country trade deal with Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He reaffirmed his intention to build a wall on the border with Mexico, banned refugee admissions from Syria and ordered “extreme vetting” for would-be refugees from other countries. He instructed federal agencies to minimize any effort to make Obamacare work. He removed obstacles to the Keystone XL and Dakota access pipelines, and ordered that they be built with American steel. And next week, he plans to nominate a new Supreme Court justice whose name, he’s said, will thrill conservatives.
A Quinnipiac Poll released Thursday found Trump’s job approval among all Americans at an anemic 36%, a result far worse than any incoming president in modern history.
But inside the survey was a striking contradictory trend: Trump’s rating has actually improved among Republicans since his inauguration.
Two weeks ago, the same poll found that 76% of Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing; now that number is at 81%. Among Democrats, his rating sank from 10% to a barely measurable 4%.
Now that he’s in office, in other words, Trump is alienating yet more Democrats, but solidifying his hold on Republicans.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-trump-success-20170129-story.html

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down the memory hole: then and now: Jews trying to escape Hitler in 1939, turned away

 ".....would-be asylum-seekers redirected their pleas to the American government. They would be in vain.
“Sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge,” the Holocaust museum noted. “Roosevelt never responded.”
A State Department telegram stated, simply, that passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”
Finally, the St. Louis returned to Europe. After more than a month at sea, the passengers disembarked in Antwerp, Belgium, where they were divided between four countries that had agreed to take them: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
By the end of the Holocaust, 254 of them would be dead.
[Trump order barring refugees, migrants from Muslim countries triggers chaos, outrage]
Nearly eight decades after its doomed voyage, some drew parallels between the U.S. government’s dismissal of the St. Louis and the possible consequences of President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning immigration.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/01/29/a-ship-full-of-refugees-fleeing-the-nazis-once-begged-the-u-s-for-entry-they-were-turned-back/?utm_term=.07778d5cc1
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the obedient life of a Nazi/ orthodox party member

Brunhilde Pomsel, a secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who late in life came forward to publicly reflect on, if perhaps not fully reckon with, questions of personal and collective guilt in the face of the Holocaust, died during the night of Jan. 27 at her home in Munich. She was 106.
"Ms. Pomsel was born in Berlin on Jan. 11, 1911. She identified in herself a fundamental obedience that she traced to her father, a World War I veteran who instilled in her through beatings what she described as “this Prussian something, this sense of duty.”
“I’m not the kind of person to resist,” she said in the film. “I wouldn’t dare to. I’d say: ‘No, I can’t do that!’ I’m one of the cowards.”


www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/brunhilde-pomsel-secretary-to-nazi-propaganda-minister-joseph-goebbels-dies-at-106/2017/01/29/ab645200-dcf6-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.e77bde88dd13&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1

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Saturday, January 28, 2017

Russian election hack

".... the news from Moscow may explain how the agencies could be so certain that it was the Russians who hacked the email of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Two Russian intelligence officers who worked on cyberoperations and a Russian computer security expert have been arrested and charged with treason for providing information to the United States, according to multiple Russian news reports."

 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/world/europe/russia-hacking-us-election.html?emc=edit_th_20170128&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27037260&_r=0
..." one current and one former United States official, speaking about the classified recruitments on condition of anonymity, confirmed that human sources in Russia did play a crucial role in proving who was responsible for the hacking.
The former official said the agencies were initially reluctant to disclose their certainty about the Russian role for fear of setting off a mole hunt in Moscow.
The public disclosure of the arrests, and the severity of the treason charge, come at a delicate moment for President Trump.
He has been loath to accept the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help him win, which he sees as part of an effort to delegitimize his election.
The Russian role will loom over the conversation with Mr. Putin that Mr. Trump is scheduled to have on Saturday since it was the Russian president who James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, told Congress ordered the hacking and leaking..."
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factcheck.org ( is that a fact or an altfact?)

http://www.factcheck.org/




Trump, ISIS and Iraqi Oil

  • January 27, 2017

President Trump claimed ISIS would not exist if the U.S. “kept the oil when we got out” of Iraq. In fact, ISIS largely has been funded through extortion, robbery, taxes and Syrian oil, according to government reports and terrorism financing experts.

Trump on Torture, Again

  • January 27, 2017

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that waterboarding “works.” But scientists say otherwise. Research has shown that the stress and pain caused by techniques like waterboarding can hinder a person from recalling information.

Video: Voter Fraud Claims

  • January 27, 2017

Our fact-checking collaboration with CNN’s Jake Tapper resumes this week with a video looking at bogus claims about voter fraud made by President Donald Trump and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Trump on the ACA and the Uninsured

  • January 26, 2017

President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that “nobody ever deducts all the people that have already lost their health insurance” from estimates on how many have gained insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or stand to lose it if the law is repealed.

Phony Prayer Rug Story

  • January 24, 2017

Q: Did the Obama White House hold Islamic prayer five times a day, and provide prayer rugs for Muslim employees and visitors?
A: No. This is a hoax perpetuated by a satirical news website.

The Facts on Crowd Size

  • January 23, 2017

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway claimed that “alternative facts” were employed by Press Secretary Sean Spicer when he tried to make the case that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”
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Friday, January 27, 2017

1984 in 2017

"And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power."

 http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/orwells-1984-and-trumps-america?wpisrc=nl_daily202&wpmm=1
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2 minutes of hate ( actually about 20 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yQGr75xn5A



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minitrue and minijustice: Emmett Till's murder

“[I]n 2007, at age 72…[Carolyn] confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. 'That part’s not true,' she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her. As for the rest of what happened that evening in the country store, she said she couldn’t remember. (Carolyn is now 82, and her current whereabouts have been kept secret by her family.)...Carolyn became reflective in Timothy Tyson’s presence, wistfully volunteering, 'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.' She also admitted she 'felt tender sorrow,' Tyson would note, 'for Mamie Till-Mobley'—Emmett Till’s mother, who died in 2003 after a lifetime spent crusading for civil rights

 http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/she-lied-emmett-tills-accuser-admits-she-made-story?akid=15156.55372.zJesL-&rd=1&src=newsletter1071261&t=4
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symbolic value of protest

http://time.com/4643037/protests-matter-even-when-theyre-mostly-symbolic/?xid=homepage


Why You Should Protest Even If the Effect Is Mostly Symbolic

Susanna Schrobsdorff
Jan 23, 2017


The truth is, most of us aren't sure if what we're fighting for will ever come to pass. But there are those who back the underdoggiest of causes or candidates long before the mainstream lines up, or even when it's clear that the mainstream never will line up. Sometimes it takes decades for anything to change. The motivators need bolstering, and the triumphs are precarious. And so the faith of the faithful is our best resource.


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