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Election 2020 Open Thread: Joe Biden Is Fortunate in His Enemies

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In New Hampshire? I’d give 50/50 odds it was a capital-L Libertarian, willing to ratfvck the primary in favor of whichever candidate offered them personally the most entertainment.

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Open Thread: BOO LOUDER –Their Bubble Is Very, Very Thick

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… And so are the Trump-defenders inside it. Special appearance by blog chewtoy Megan McArgleBargle, aka ‘Jane Galt’:

From the AP, “Ballpark boos a rarity for shielded president”:

… Unlike some of his predecessors, Trump has made little effort to join the Washington scene, with the singular exception of his visiting his hotel, a Republican-friendly oasis a few blocks from the White House. He has not eaten at a Washington restaurant beyond those in the hotel and has passed on attending some traditional social events such as the Kennedy Center Honors and White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The White House has, at times, gone to significant lengths to keep Trump away from protesters, sometimes citing security concerns or a reluctance to snarl traffic as reasons to keep Trump away from hostile crowds.

During the presidential transition in late 2016, there was talk of Trump frequently returning to his home in Trump Tower while in office. But those plans were scrapped after it became apparent that Trump would face large, angry crowds in Manhattan.

In London this summer, Trump took repeated helicopter rides of just a few miles that kept him away from throngs of demonstrators, including a balloon that depicted the president as a baby.

And on Monday, Trump was shielded from the hundreds of protesters gathered near his speech at a police chiefs’ conference in Chicago and a fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in downtown Chicago…

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: The Tang of Terror

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(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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From the Washington Post, paper of record for the company town where the monopoly industry is natioanl politics:

House Democrats said Monday that the House will vote Thursday to formalize procedures for the next phase of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

Democrats said the move would “ensure transparency and provide a clear path forward” as the inquiry continues.

The White House responded by taking a swipe at Democrats. Press secretary Stephanie Grisham accused them of “conducting an unauthorized impeachment proceeding” and declined to comment fully until the text of the resolution is released.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), meanwhile, said that a former deputy national security adviser had “no basis in law” to skip a deposition Monday and that his failure to appear was further evidence of Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress…

Elsewhere in the Post, “‘It feels like a horror movie’: Republicans feel anxious and adrift defending Trump”:

Republican senators are lost and adrift as the impeachment inquiry enters its second month, navigating the grave threat to President Trump largely in the dark, frustrated by the absence of a credible case to defend his conduct and anxious about the historic reckoning that probably awaits them.

Recent days have delivered the most damaging testimony yet about Trump and his advisers commandeering Ukraine policy for the president’s personal political goals, which his allies on Capitol Hill sought to undermine by storming the deposition room and condemning the inquiry as secretive and corrupt.

Those theatrics belie the deepening unease many Republicans now say they feel — particularly those in the Senate who are dreading having to weigh their conscience against their political calculations in deciding whether to convict or acquit Trump should the Democratic-controlled House impeach the president.

In hushed conversations over the past week, GOP senators lamented that the fast-expanding probe is fraying their party, which remains completely in Trump’s grip. They voiced exasperation at the expectation that they defend the president against the troublesome picture that has been painted, with neither convincing arguments from the White House nor confidence that something worse won’t soon be discovered…

For Republicans, the political conundrum is a problem of their own making, argued William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution. “They normalized a president whose conduct they are now being asked to judge as so abnormal as to warrant his removal from office,” he said.

“To the extent that they quietly harbor conscientious objections to what the president is doing — or, even more spectacularly, how he’s doing it — they have to weigh the calling of conscience against political considerations,” Galston added. “There’s a reason why ‘Profiles in Courage’ is a very short book. Courage is not the norm. It’s the exception.”…

(This longish read is particularly worth a click; the details are schadenfreude-licious.)

Obvious conclusion: BOO HARDER, everybody!

(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Readership Capture

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Elsewhere:

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Excellent Read: “Nancy Pelosi, Political Grandmaster”

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There’s a famous Mark Twain quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

It always comes to mind when some Very Woke twitter analyst with a goldfish memory switches overnight from WHY WON’T PELOSI DO SOMETHING !!!RIGHT NOW!!! to WOOO SPEAKER & SHORTLY INTERIM PRESIDENT PELOSI IN!THE!HAWSE!!!. (Except, of course, those analysts usually switch right back to their first position, sometimes before I can finish reading down the thread.)

Abigail Tracy, in Vanity Fair, on “Nancy Pelosi, super Speaker, on Trump’s unfitness, the decision to impeach, and “weaving” her fractious caucus”:

Lost in the wilderness of the Trump era, Democrats looked long and hard for a champion: Robert Mueller, the media, even Michael Avenatti. But when the party retook the House in November and Nancy Pelosi began her historic second term as speaker, no one doubted the search was over. She’d been a GOP target and, some centrists thought, an electoral liability given her San Francisco roots. But now no one doubted that she was the indispensable Democrat, cheerfully jousting with AOC and “the Squad,” mediating the hoary conflict between the party’s left and its center (she describes herself as “a weaver,” which is a nice word for how she sometimes has to operate), winning with substance (her party’s focus on health care) and imagery (the famous Max Mara red coat, the donning of the sunglasses after her triumphant border wall meeting with Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer), and holding fire on impeachment until precisely the right moment. The Speaker talks to Abigail Tracy about the road to impeachment, how the Democrats won in 2018, why Trump is unique among presidents she’s known, and the work to be done after Trump is gone.

Tell me about the moment you reached the decision to go down the impeachment path.

I take a lot of guidance from the vision of our founders, and our founders fought very hard for our democracy, for our country, for our Constitution. In the dark days of revolution, Thomas Paine said, “The times have found us.” We believe that the times have found us to keep the republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that would be those who say things like, “Article II says I can do whatever I want.” That’s not a republic, that’s a monarchy. That’s not what we have…

Some members in your caucus credit excitement from the base and a desire for a check on President Trump to your victory in the midterms in 2018. Others argue it was the messaging around issues like health care. What is your diagnosis?

Oh, it was health care. We had a very disciplined campaign in terms of a purpose. “For the people” was our agenda. We were going to lower health care costs by lowering costs of prescription drugs and preserving [protections for] preexisting conditions. Two, we were going to increase paychecks by building infrastructure in a green way. Three, we were going to have cleaner government by reducing the role of big dark money in politics and ending voter suppression others inserted in the bill. And the issue of health security, it’s just very dominant. People have determined it is “the issue” and this is the difference between Democrats and Republicans…

It is hard not to notice that he has rarely used a nickname for you.

Who cares? I don’t care if he has a nickname, maybe that’s why he didn’t do it.

I treat him with respect. I respect the office he holds. Sometimes I think I respect the office he holds more than he respects the office he holds. I try not to ask him to do something that isn’t in his interest. And it is in his interest to lower the cost of health care, to protect children, to build the infrastructure of America…

Have you been at all surprised by the behavior of the broader Republican party in the Trump era?

No. I’m not surprised. I mean, their oath of office is clearly to Donald Trump and not to the Constitution of the United States. Forgetting his personal grotesqueness, there is nothing he is about, in terms of the issues, that they haven’t been there longer and worse. Name any issue— climate, a woman’s right to choose, fairness in our economy, gun safety, how we treat immigrants. Any issue you can name, they have always been there and worse than he is. He is like their JFK. He is their guy…

Much has been made about a perceived conflict between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic caucus this Congress. Has anything really changed?

No. No, it’s been the same forever. We’ve always had a big tent, we’ve always had different elements of the party. I myself am a San Francisco liberal and I’m proud of that. Republicans bought 137,000 ads describing me as such during the 2018 campaign. It didn’t work for them. We won 40 seats in the most gerrymandered, voter-suppressed districts you can name.

We’ve always had our exuberances, but we’ve always had our common ground. And as I say, “Our diversity is our strength, our unity is our power,” and that’s what President Trump fears most…

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Late Night Open Thread: Furries Prove Themselves Braver / More Ethical Than the ‘Mainstream’ GOP

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Bravo for the furries!

Didn’t take months of ‘but free speech’ equivocation for the Fur-Folk to reject blatant fascism:

… Yiannopoulos posted an email screenshot to one of the few platforms he has left—his Telegram messaging channel—on Saturday and claimed he registered for Midwest FurFest, a convention “to celebrate the furry fandom” hosted in the suburbs on Chicago this December…

Yiannopoulos also claimed on Telegram that he had submitted a form to suggest he host a panel called “The Politics of Fur.” He asked his followers who plan to attend Midwest FurFest to message him to arrange “dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.”…

In a statement later provided to Right Wing Watch, organizers wrote that they had rescinded Yiannopoulos’ registration for the event and that he would not be welcome to attend Midwest FurFest or any future event.

“Hate is not welcome at Midwest FurFest. We are dedicated to providing a safe, harassment-free convention experience for all, regardless of age, race, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, or personal beliefs,” organizers wrote. “Midwest FurFest can confirm that Mr. Yiannopoulos has registered for the event this year. While the convention generally does not comment on anyone’s registration status, Mr. Yiannopoulos has already stated as much publicly.”

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I’ve Been To A Mountaintop…

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Mauna Kea, to be precise — several times.  I’ve shot parts of three films there, all centered on the telescopes atop the highest mountain on the Big Island of Hawai’i.  As you may have noticed, the mountain — and a new telescope — have been in the news lately:

Construction was set to begin this week on a giant telescope on the barren summit of Mauna Kea, a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, considered the best observatory site in the Northern Hemisphere.

That would be the Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT, a project that originated with the same team that built the twin ten meter Keck telescopes that were the largest optical telescopes in the world from 1993 to 2009. (They’ve since been pipped by the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), atop the Canary Islands.) Astronomers and designers from Caltech and the University of California system, later joined by other partners set out to build the TMT as one of the next generation of ‘scopes aiming to explore some of the fundamental questions of astronomy, many of which were raised by discoveries made by the current generation of ginormous light buckets. That would be stuff like deeper investigations of the large scale structure of the cosmos, maybe image of planet formation around distant stars, certainly black hole inquiry and much more.

The TMT project was launched with great confidence.  The problems its leaders anticipated were technical: how to construct an light-gathering area and/or an optical pipeline that large that holds its shape, that doesn’t mind temperature shifts, that can be morphed on demand to adjust for turbulence in the air above it and so on, through a whole host of very tricking engineering issues.

But there was never any real doubt about the right place to put this instrument, or of the project’s access to the summit of Mauna Kea, which, after all, already played host to more than a dozen other observatories.  (I know this, because I talked to those in charge of the project at the time of its inception, many of whom had appeared in one or another of my films.)

They were wrong. Last week, after years of delays, some negotiations, and, by now, mistrust and more on the Hawai’ian activist side, the state governor announced that the project had cleared its last hurdles and construction would begin.  This week, protestors blocked the one access road to the summit and the observatories brought their people off the mountain.  At first, law enforcement was on the scene, but there were no direct confrontations.  That changed yesterday:

On Wednesday, that opposition had a new face: About 30 Hawaiian elders were arrested as they blocked a road leading to Mauna Kea’s summit to halt the construction, organizers said. They described an emotional but peaceful scene as the elders, who were sitting under tents on the road, were escorted by police officers to nearby white vans while dozens of other protesters chanted and cried. Some had to be carried.

“We have come to the point in time where enough is enough,” Leilani Kaapuni, one of the elders, said in a phone interview. She said she was arrested for obstruction of a government road but later returned to the blockade. “This mountain is sacred,” she said.

If I had to guess, I’d expect this to end in a loss for the protests. There’s a lot of momentum behind the TMT, and a ton of money involved — and there’s a huge investment in cash and intellectual possibilities in the existing observatories that would probably be lost if the new instrument didn’t make it to the mountain. Money and power talk, so I’d bet the Hawai’ian state authorities will muscle this through — and likely with the support of plenty of citizens of the state (though I’d bet many fewer among those Hawai’ians of original Hawai’ian descent).

Visible protest against the telescopes will be much more difficult if/when the TMT goes in, as the almost all the action of high altitude astronomy now takes place far from its mountain tops.  The Mauna Kea observatories have the headquarters well away from the summit.  Those astronomers doing science with the telescope, if they aren’t looking at a truly remote feed back to their offices back home, get no closer than the cattle town of Waimea, miles away and more than 10,000 feet in vertical distance away from anything a mere observer could break.

Those using the TMT wouldn’t see, that is, the kinds of protests going on now.  And the question of who has power over sacred spaces of interest to the dominant culture will be answered again, in the same way it has been almost every time these conflicts come up.

I should say that I’m an astronomy lover. I find the science that the TMT could do to be fascinating and utterly beautiful.  But man-o-man, have the leaders of that project botched this dispute for years. I do not know how you now get this project i any way that acknowledges and accommodates the claims of the disempowered first residents of the island.  But I do know that failure will have consequences; human goods — which scientific discoveries certainly are — achieved by the destruction of other goods are tainted.

I’ll leave you with the text of an article I wrote for The Boston Globe on this same subject four years ago.  Looking back, I can’t say I’m surprised that the astronomical community didn’t find a way to connect to its opposition.  But I am saddened by that fact.

Images:  Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer, c. 1668

US Air Force file photo, Air Force 1 over Mt. Rushmore, 10 February 2001.

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Open Thread: Report from Ground Zero

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Election 2020 Open Thread: If You Thought Trump Hated CNN Now…

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Dale’s the Toronto Star reporter who’s been relentless live-blogging and fact-checking Trump’s every rally. Lord Smallgloves is gonna have a meltdown as soon as somebody — probably on Fox News — dares to tell him about it.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Getting the Mule’s Attention

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It would greatly simplify the Media Village Idiots’ job if we could all pretend that the Oval Office Occupant actually got more votes than Hillary Clinton. But it would not be true.

Among the many delights of the day when a woman (Harris? Warren? Klobuchar? Gillibrand?) faces a (no doubt fuming) John Roberts on Inaugural Day… will be watching people like Chuck Todd and Jonathan Karl earnestly inquire of each other how ‘The American voter could possibly have made such a counterintuitive choice!’…

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Title inflation and male privilege

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This tweet below is a fairly common experience:

I have seen this behavior a lot. Right now, most of the work groups I’m on have a female Ph.D or MD as the primary investigator and team lead. It is not uncommon for them to be referred to as Ms. Doe while all the guys are referred to as Dr. Smith.

I get a massive amount of title inflation. My highest degree of training is a master’s degree and then an ungodly amount of on the job training and exploration. At this point in my life, going back for a doctorate does not make a ton of sense at this time. A doctorate might be something I do once the kids are in college but the current opportunity cost is higher than the benefit.

I talk with the press a lot. I talk with policy analysts frequently. I am a resource for Duke students, staff and faculty to talk about the arcane and obscure aspects of the Affordable Care Act (Silver Loading and Medical Loss Ratios for the win!) and more broadly insurance questions. I get a reasonable number of cold requests depending on the news, policy and semester cycles. /

If I am getting a cold e-mail from someone who is trying to set up a conversation about something I know something about, there is an even chance the greeting is Mr. Anderson. Most of the inaccuracies are for Dr. Anderson or Professor Anderson.

I get a massive amount of title inflation for something that I have not earned. I get that because I’m a white guy who writes with big words and arcane subjects. I benefit from this credential inflation. I always correct as Mr. Anderson whenever I’m referred to as Doctor or Professor as I have not earned those titles, but I don’t know how to change this situation so the table is not as inordinately tilted my way.

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2020 Election Open Thread: Stacey Abrams Is Going Places

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… Abrams has traversed the country meeting with top Democrats since her narrow loss in the Georgia governor’s race. She’s met with every leading candidate for president, and become a regular draw on the big-ticket fundraising circuit, donors and fundraisers told POLITICO. Abrams headlined major donor events for the Democratic National Committee, the progressive donor collaborative Way to Win and former Sen. Barbara Boxer in recent months, and has discussed her political future with top Democratic donors.

At the reception for Abrams hosted by Boxer, held at a five-star Beverly Hills hotel in late February, local Democratic leaders and entertainment industry donors heard her talk about her work against voter suppression and about her brother’s struggle with addiction. After the event, she was mobbed by attendees.

“We must have had several hundred people there but everyone felt she was speaking to them,” Boxer told POLITICO. “I think every single person in that room will help Stacey with whatever it is she wants to do.” …

In contrast to Beto O’Rourke, who wrote Medium posts and took a road trip after his loss, Abrams has been keenly focused on the nuts and bolts of building her political base. She’s attended dozens of events across the country, according to descriptions of her itinerary from sources close to Abrams and others who’ve spoken with her. She also drew high marks for her performance delivering Democrats’ response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech in February…

Throughout her national travels, Abrams has attempted to draw attention to her mission on voting rights and her gubernatorial race. “Wherever she goes, she shares the stories of those who faced these suppressive tactics with new audiences,” said Caitlin Highland, an Abrams spokeswoman…

And I, for one, am looking forward to seeing where she decides to go next. Great NYMag cover story by Rebecca Traister:

… She is a serious introvert, yet her work requires glad-handing extroversion; she is excruciatingly aware of the electoral challenges that face her as a black woman who grew up what she calls “genteel poor” in rural Mississippi, yet she pushes forward politically with the drive and confidence of a white man; she devours romance novels and soap operas, yet she is also a science-fiction, math, and tax-law geek; she can come off as one of the most relatable politicians out there, yet she is a total egghead who drops million-dollar vocabulary words, once sending me to the dictionary to confirm what panegyric means (I mostly got it through context!). And she is a woman who, having just run in a historic election that many of her fellow Democrats expected her to lose, is now being counted on to win, and perhaps save her party, by prevailing in an equally difficult Senate contest, or maybe the race for the presidency. The deepest irony, of course, is that what Abrams wants to do is fundamentally rebuild the electoral system that failed her, just as the system itself wants to pull her in…

Nonnormative as she may be, Abrams is an almost old-fashioned Democrat, with her ideological (and personal) roots in the civil-rights, labor, and women’s movements. Her parents, a librarian and a dockworker, both of whom would later get divinity degrees and become pastors, were civil-rights activists from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. As an undergraduate, she was trained as an organizer at the A. Philip Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO; she gave her State of the Union rebuttal in an Atlanta union hall.

A graduate of Spelman College, with a master’s in public policy from the University of Texas and a law degree from Yale, Abrams worked as a tax attorney and deputy city attorney for Atlanta before being elected, in 2006, to the Georgia statehouse. She assumed the minority leadership position — becoming the first black woman to lead either party there — in 2011. In the midst of her legal and political career, Abrams has published romance novels (under the name Selena Montgomery) and founded several businesses, including one that made formula-ready bottles for babies and another that helps small companies get paid more quickly by buying their invoices.

Where Abrams is the most passionate is in her willingness to rumble over remaking electoral systems that are rigged to deny the country’s most vulnerable their only real route to civic power. It may not be as sexy as free college, but it’s definitely radical — and as Abrams likes to point out, without full enfranchisement, we’ll never get elected officials who’ll back policies that materially improve the lives of people who aren’t well off and/or white…

After a high-school friend gave her a novel by the black feminist writer Octavia E. Butler, Abrams developed a passion for science fiction. She’s a Trekkie who will authoritatively rank series — “The Next Generation and Voyager are about even; I think Voyager is mildly superior, although Picard is the quintessential captain. Then I would do Discovery, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise. I don’t understand why Enterprise was a show.” These days, she’s into Doctor Who, having grown up on the Tom Baker version. “Right before this campaign started, I was sick and ended up watching the Doctor,” she says. “Then, over New Year’s, there was a marathon. Now I’m watching all the new ones. I’ve seen seasons three, four, five, six, and I’m in the second half of seven.” Abrams watched three episodes of Doctor Who to chill out the afternoon before she gave her State of the Union response…

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Guest Post: Transgender Day of Visibility

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(This is a guest post by valued commenter Sister Golden Bear.)

As I mentioned in the comments, today is Transgender Day of Visibility, held every March 31, intended to honor and celebrate transgender and gender non-conforming people (GNC) — both those visible and those invisible.

It started a decade ago but only took off a few years ago, and is intended as a complement to the annual Nov. 20 Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the memories of that year’s victims of anti-trans violence — usually always all trans women, the vast majority of them trans women of color, in particular Black trans women. For years, TDOR was the only national/international event for trans people, and while it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, it’s also, needless to say, more than a bit depressing. Hence TDOV, which focuses on the living.

It’s all too rare that trans/GNC people have chance to celebrate who we are, and it’s also a chance to express our defiance of attempts to eradicate us from public life (the Talibaptists have a literal five-point plan to do so, and under the Trump administration, and red state governments,  they’ve made significant progress on several fronts).

But perhaps the most important aspect is being visible. These days roughly 37 percent of Americans know someone who’s trans/GNC. Think you don’t know someone trans, well you actually probably do. There’s still an unfortunately-huge number of us who never leave the closet, and for those who do, there’s can often be a desire to fly under the radar, to blend in. For those in red states, this can be a matter of literal survival. But it’s also because — unlike coming out as LGB, which tells who people who you are — coming out as trans, invariably puts the focus on who you were. At least for a binary trans woman like me, i.e. I’m someone who prefers to be seen as a woman who’s trans.

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Meanwhile, in China

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The Telegraph has interviewed eight former detainees from China’s Muslim concentration camps, where roughly one million Uighurs and Kazakhs are detained. This is one of the least-horrifying things described:

In order to receive a small portion of rice at noon and 6pm he, like all the others, must praise the Chinese president and shout “Long live Xi Jinping!”

Those who refuse are electrocuted with a cattle prod that causes their limbs to spasm uncontrollably.

For some reason this detail leapt out at me:

One detainee the Telegraph interviewed[…] received a receipt after being required to pay for her meals in detention – 10 yuan a day, totalling 1,800 yuan (£202.50).

The concentration camps are only the tip of the iceberg in Xinjiang, where more than a million mostly-Han Chinese have simply moved into Uighur households to spy on them. A database of facial-recognition information, GPS tracking data, and further information on more than 2.5 million Xinjiang residents was recently discovered on the open internet. Something very, very bad is happening in northern China.

You have to register with the Telegraph to read the article, so I’m going to provide some excerpts. I’m also going to put them below the fold. They are very disturbing. We should not let such evil go unnoticed, but I’m not going to subject you to it randomly.

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Meanwhile, in New Zealand…

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(Warning – wrenching video below the fold)

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