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As a young boy in school, Masaki Sashima would be dragged out of his classroom and beaten by his fellow students.

Masaki, now 72, was different to the other kids. 

He was Ainu, an Indigenous people from the country's northern regions, most notably the large island of Hokkaido.

"During recess, the hallway door would open, and several guys would yell at me to come out," he said.

"I clung to my desk in the classroom and kept quiet.

"Everyone would surround me and beat me."

Japan has long portrayed itself as culturally and ethnically homogenous, something that some have even argued is a key to its success as a nation.

More than 98 per cent of Japanese people are descendants of the Yamato people. 

But the Ainu are distinct, with their own history, languages, and culture.

But, as the victims of colonialism, assimilation, and discrimination, much of that identity has been lost. 

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The bills now head to President Joe Biden's desk to be signed into law.

A midnight partial government shutdown was averted by a vote in the Senate Friday night.

The Senate voted 75-22 to pass a package of six funding bills that will keep programs governed by them funded through the end of September.

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Experts say Trump's decline may be "caused by his incapacity to manage the stress caused by multiple indictments"

It has become undeniably clear and obvious to any reasonable person that Donald Trump is experiencing increasing challenges with his speech, language, and memory during these last few weeks and months. Such a conclusion does not require a huge team of investigative journalists: a person only has to watch the corrupt ex-president’s speeches, interviews and other public behavior. For example, at a series of rallies and other events last weekend, Trump repeatedly confused one person with another. Like a broken computer in a science fiction movie, Trump appears to have moments where he cannot speak, appears lost in his thinking, and is more generally confused as he spouts nonsense words and non-sequiturs.

MediasTouch editor Ron Filipowski shared a montage online of 32 examples of Trump experiencing severe challenges during his recent speeches in Virginia and North Carolina last Saturday. 32 examples from just two speeches where the ex-president “mispronounced words, got confused, mixed up names, forgot names, and babbled insane nonsense.”

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Over the past few days, extremely cold Arctic air and severe winter weather have swept southward into much of the U.S., breaking daily low-temperature records from Montana to Texas. Tens of millions of people have been affected by dangerously cold temperatures, and heavy lake-effect snow and snow squalls have had severe effects across the Great Lakes and Northeast regions. These severe cold events occur when the polar jet stream—the familiar jet stream of winter that runs along the boundary between the Arctic and more temperate air—dips deeply southward, bringing the cold Arctic air to regions that don't often experience it.

Continue Reading.

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https://www.meidastouch.com/news/maga-convoy-confused-by-lack-of-invasion-as-they-arrive-at-border

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Saito has made a career of teasing out an eco-theory from the late, unpublished writings of Karl Marx. He earned his doctorate at Humboldt University, in Berlin, and now teaches philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His first book was an English version of his dissertation, titled “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” (2017), which tracked Marx’s study of the physical world and communal agricultural practices. (Saito is fluent in Japanese, German, and English.) In a second academic book, “Marx in the Anthropocene” (2022), Saito drew on an expanded repertoire of Marx’s unpublished notebooks to argue for a theory of “degrowth communism.” He gained a following, not only in philosophical circles but among a Japanese public facing the contradictions of tsunamis, billionaires, and same-day shipping. “Slow Down” has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and launched Saito into a rare academic celebrity. He appears regularly on Japanese television and aspires to the public-intellectual status of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who had a surprise hit in his 2013 doorstop, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.”

The key insight, or provocation, of “Slow Down” is to give the lie to we-can-have-it-all green capitalism. Saito highlights the Netherlands Fallacy, named for that country’s illusory attainment of both high living standards and low levels of pollution—a reality achieved by displacing externalities. It’s foolish to believe that “the Global North has solved its environmental problems simply through technological advancements and economic growth,” Saito writes. What the North actually did was off-load the “negative by-products of economic development—resource extraction, waste disposal, and the like” onto the Global South.

If we’re serious about surviving our planetary crisis, Saito argues, then we must abandon capitalism, with its insatiable appetites. We must reject the ever-upward logic of gross domestic product, or G.D.P. (a combination of government spending, imports and exports, investments, and personal consumption). We will not be saved by a “green” economy of electric cars or geo-engineered skies. Slowing down—to a carbon footprint on the level of Europe and the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies—would mean less work and less clutter, he writes. Our kids may not make it, otherwise.

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The myth of white superiority is a right wing house of cards.

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One question Texans pushing for secession from the union have on their minds is whether or not they would still get their Social Security payments if Texas left the country, and experts spoke with Newsweek about what they think would happen.

While not an overwhelmingly popular notion, some Texas residents have voiced their support for greater freedom and a total exit from the United States. However, a move of that nature has some asking what this would mean for benefits like Social Security that residents have been paying into their entire lives.

"If we secede, do we still get our Social Security monthly checks?" one user wrote in a Texas Patriots for Secession Facebook group.

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The MAGA projection is automatic.

Trump White House was distributing huge amounts of ambien, morphine, fentanyl & ketamine to ineligible staffers.

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A coalition of U.S. history scholars have filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, agreeing with the state of Colorado that the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist clause should bar Donald Trump from presidential candidacy this year.

The 25 historians have expertise in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the period in which the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution. They argue that upon its addition in 1866, “decision members crafted Section III to cover the President and to create an enduring check on insurrection, requiring no additional action from Congress.”

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Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine. Photo: Bill Roorbach