It is easy to buy a service dog vest on the internet. Numerous
websites offer products such as official harnesses and tags. In some
cases they are sold with a note stating that it is the owner's
responsibility to ensure their animal is properly trained, but there is
no system of enforcement.
Erin, who preferred not to give her full name, lives with her boyfriend and their dog, Bo, in Los Angeles.
She
went online to buy a service vest for her pooch, because she wanted to
avoid the fees charged by airlines for non-service animals - in the
region of $90-$150 (£60-£100) to fly, one-way. Unlike working animals,
they must be restrained in a container for the entire flight.
Erin, who is not disabled, travels everywhere with Bo because she says she can not bear to leave him home alone....
Many travellers are accompanied by their pets because they have special
permission, based on a doctors' letter and an official certificate.
Unlike service dogs, emotional support animals (ESAs) are not required
to have any formal training, but are allowed on board without an
additional fee...
Still, she says, "I know more faux emotional support dogs than real ones."
Reposted from 2015 to add this new development:
After months of deliberation, the Department of Transportation has
released formal guidance regarding animals on planes. The 28-page
document released this month makes it clear that three types of service
animals should be prioritized for travel: cats, dogs and miniature horses...
There are many reasons someone would fly with a miniature horse,
disability experts say. Although a growing number of emotional support
animals have emerged in recent years, in the case of miniature horses,
their function as service animal is primarily physical... The animals are mild-mannered and fast learners, with nearly 360-degree
vision. They may also offer balance support to individuals with physical
disabilities...
True miniature horses, which are not to be confused with ponies, are less than 34 inches in height...
Before going to the gate, Ramouni will ask someone to lead them to the
women’s restroom. “My horse has been trained to go potty in a plastic
bag,” she said. “I would just give her the command to go potty, then I
flush it down the toilet.”..
Airlines have typically put Ramouni and Cali in the bulkhead row, which
has more legroom and no seats in front. Throughout the flight Cali
stands at Ramouni’s feet.
Undercover footage showing young dairy calves being kicked, violently
thrown, having their heads stamped into the ground and suffering from
heat exposure at a US farm known as the “Disneyland of agricultural
tourism” was published this week.
Every year, more than 600,000 tourists visit the Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventure,
a working dairy farm of 15,000 cows a few hours south of Chicago,
Illinois. The farm, with its museum, restaurant and hotel – deemed the
“Disneyland of agricultural tourism” this year by Food & Wine
– sells a vision of quaint rural life: “It’s where families can view
pastures dotted with dairy cattle” and “watch as a piglet is born”
before they “top off this idyllic country day with a scoop of ice cream
or a pork chop from Fair Oaks Farms’ restaurant”.
The farm is independently owned by veterinarian Mike McCloskey, but it is an affiliate of the Coca-Cola company,
with which it produces a nutrient-dense milk product called “Fairlife”
and other popular dairy products including Core Power Protein shakes.
McCloskey, who co-founded the business with his wife, Sue, has stated
that their farm provides in-depth training on humane care of animals.
ARM’s undercover investigator got a job at Fair Oaks as a calf care
employee in 2018. The investigator reported that they received no
training other than where to put the calves’ dead bodies. Furthermore,
violence towards the animals appeared to be commonplace, typically
stemming from frustration over the calves’ unwillingness to feed from
artificial nipples.
Video footage captured between August and November of 2018 appears to
show workers beating, kicking, and throwing the bloodied and emaciated
baby animals as their mothers go hoarse calling to them from separated
barns.
Primary source material here, with an extensive photo gallery.
Sort of related:
"I AM NOT A COW. I AM PROFESSOR DUNBAR.
PLEASE DO NOT KILL ME."
The title is one of the penultimate lines from The Court of Tartary, a fantasy by T.P. Caravan
first published in 1963. In the story, a professor of English
literature "awakens" to find his mind is entrapped in the body of a cow,
and the herd seems to be destined to the slaughterhouse.
"Edward Harrison Dunbar, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D., member of the Modern
Language Association and authority on eighteenth century literature,
was not prepared for the situation in which he found himself: it had
never been mentioned by any of the writers of the Age of Reason....
And even as he ran he wondered if he couldn't prove that Edward Young was the true author of the third book of
Gulliver's Travels,
because he knew that if he stopped thinking scholarly thoughts about
the eighteenth century he would have to admit that he had turned into an
animal. So as he ran he considered the evidence turned up by the
publication of the Tickell papers and the discovery of Swift's old
laundry lists and
Night Thoughts
and the graveyard poets and Gray's
Elegy
and the lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, and he had to admit that he was an animal....
There was no point in approaching his difficulty through the scientific
method: he knew no science. There was no help for him in metaphysics: he
had cleared his mind of Kant. Nor could the classics aid him: he had
read Ovid, of course, and the
Golden Ass,
but he didn't see how they bore on his problem. And
—
he hated to admit it
—
nobody in the eighteenth century seemed to have wondered what would
happen to a scholar who woke up and found himself a cow. All right. That
left only his own experience to fall back on. But, being a professor,
he had never had any experiences..."
He decides to use his hoof to draw a triangle in the dust. Then... if
I've piqued your curiosity, you can read the full story in ten minutes fulltext online at Scribd.
Palliative transport lets families move critically ill children from the
hospital intensive care unit to their home or hospice, with the
expectation they will die within minutes to days after removing life
support...
At the Mayo Clinic, palliative transport has helped culturally diverse
families carry out end-of-life wishes for their dying children. In one
case, a newborn girl rode 400 miles by ambulance to return to her Amish
community, where she was extubated and died in her parents’ arms, in the
company of her 11 siblings. In another, an 8-month-old Native American
girl traveled 600 miles by air and ground ambulance to her rural tribal
reservation, where she could participate in end-of-life rituals that
could not be done in the hospital...
These trips, which can cost thousands of dollars, are typically offered
free to families, paid for by hospitals or charities. Most children are
taken home, where they transition to receiving care from hospice staff.
Some go instead to hospice facilities...
And dying at home is not what every family wants. “We
do sometimes overly romanticize the death at home,” Thorvilson
acknowledged. Some parents would much rather have a child die in the
hospital, with familiar nurses at the bedside for medical and emotional
support. Some would rather keep this traumatic experience away from
where they live...
Mayo’s Thorvilson, who has worked closely on a half-dozen palliative
transports, said it’s possible these last-minute trips from ICU to home
could be avoided by earlier referrals to hospice, which might get kids
home sooner. But when children with complex illnesses get sick, she
said, “sometimes it’s hard to know whether this is just another bump in
the road, or whether this is the natural end of the child’s life.”
Steve Buscemi's face transferred to Jennifer Lawrence's body (with her voice). This one created probably for humorous effect, but ignore the oddity and concentrate on the quality of the imaging. This technology is being applied to fake nudes, fake pornographic videos, fake political speeches, fake everything.
About a year ago, Vice's Motherboard posted an article about artifical-intelligence-generated fake porn (includes a gif of Hitler's face convincingly transposed onto an Argentinian president's video).
This is not going away. It will be applied for nefarious purposes.
“You could argue that what’s new is the degree to which it can be done,
or the believability, we’re getting to the point where we can’t
distinguish what’s real—but then, we didn’t before,” she said. “What is
new is the fact that it’s now available to everybody, or will be... It’s
destabilizing. The whole business of trust and reliability is
undermined by this stuff.”
Here's one that was done years ago when the technology was cruder (via an outstanding Radiolab podcast):
The most powerful false-news weapon in
history is around the corner. The media industry has only a short time
to get ahead of it. If technology
continues its current advance, we may soon face totally convincing
videos showing events that never happened — created so effectively that
even experts will have trouble proving they’re fakes...
At a political level, deftly constructed video could
show a political leader advocating for the reverse of what she stands
for, or portray bloody events that never happened. It could trigger
riots, swing elections, and sow panic and despair.
At
a business and personal level, it could be equally dangerous. Fake
statements by chief executives or banking officials could throw
financial markets into turmoil. False videos could be created about
anyone’s private life, with devastating effects...
But videos are more dangerous because of the
authority this medium has taken on in society. For years, video has been
the ultimate argument-settler. Online news outlets routinely hyperlink
videos into stories to buttress the credibility of their reporting.
Dash-cam video is often the clincher in claims of police malfeasance.
Society now has to learn that video no longer guarantees reliability. Instead, it could be the biggest lie of all...
Finally, in publicizing the dangers, media need to avoid a tone of
hopelessness — “Soon we may never know what is real and what isn’t.”
Quality media outlets need to emphasize how carefully they vet video.
They should make sure their ethics codes and verification procedures
adequately address the dangers. Otherwise, audiences will doubt any
video — including legitimate and important footage that media outlets
gather in their own breaking-news coverage and investigative work.
Apparently totally ignorant of the U.S. Flag code, which states in article 8j:
No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic
uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military
personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations.
Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government?
..
the celebrated American economic-mobility engine is sputtering. For adults in their 30s, the chance of earning more than their parents dropped to 50% from 90% just two generations earlier. The American middle class, once an aspirational model for the world, is no longer the world’s richest...
too few basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air-traffic control system is more than 25 years behind its original schedule. The power grid, roads and rails are crumbling, pushing the U.S. far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than most other developed countries, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse globally. Among the 35 OECD countries, American children rank 30th in math proficiency and 19th in science...
...many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy...
The result is a new, divided America. On one side are the protected few – the winners – who don’t need government for much and even have a stake in sabotaging the government’s responsibility to all of its citizens. For them, the new, broken America works fine, at least in the short term. An understaffed IRS is a plus for people most likely to be the target of audits. Underfunded customer service at the Social Security Administration is irrelevant to those not living week to week, waiting for their checks...
On the other side are the unprotected many. They may be independent and hardworking, but they look to their government to preserve their way of life and maybe even improve it. The unprotected need the government to provide good public schools so that their children have a chance to advance. They need a level competitive playing field for their small businesses, a fair shake in consumer disputes and a realistic shot at justice in the courts...
The protected need few of these common goods. They don’t have to worry about underperforming public schools, dilapidated mass-transit systems or jammed Social Security hotlines. They have accountants and lawyers who can negotiate their employment contracts or deal with consumer disputes, assuming they want to bother. They see labor or consumer-protection laws, and fair tax codes, as threats to their winnings–which they have spent the last 50 years consolidating by eroding these common goods and the government that would provide them.
That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It’s the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners’ winnings...
“American meritocracy has thus become precisely what it was invented to combat,” Markovits concluded, “a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy.”
In a thoughtful Vanity Fair essay, Christopher Hitchens, who has terminal esophageal carcinoma, debunks an old maxim.
[O]ne thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar
principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I
am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In
particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that
“Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”..
In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.
In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems
probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a
century earlier...
In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an
early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual
encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of
blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it
did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and
cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger...
[re radiation therapy]: To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside.
I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I
would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain
would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in
the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed
within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought:
If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the
treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and
gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it...
I have come to know that feeling all right: the sensation and conviction
that the pain will never go away and that the wait for the next fix is
unjustly long. Then a sudden fit of breathlessness, followed by some
pointless coughing and then—if it’s a lousy day—by more expectoration
than I can handle...
So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and
to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable
decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do
in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can
dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent
billing.
Addendum: Hitchens died on the day this post was published. A brief memorial biography is available in this BBC column, or a more comprehensive bio at Wikipedia.
Reposted from 2011 in response to receiving a school alumni bulletin in which an interview offered the old maxim as a guideline for life:
Q: If you had a theme song what would it be?
A: "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger" by Kelly Clarkson. Sums up my life in a nutshell.
Like Hitchens, I'm at an age where I can do quite well without "things that don't kill me."
Members of the House and Senate committees that will question Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
about user privacy protection next week are also some of the biggest
recipients of campaign contributions from Facebook employees directly
and the political action committee funded by employees.
The congressional panel that got the most Facebook contributions is theHouse Energy and Commerce Committee, which announced Wednesday morning it would question Zuckerberg... Members
of the committee, whose jurisdiction gives it regulatory power over
Internet companies, received nearly $381,000 in contributions tied
to Facebook since 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center is a non-partisan, non-profit group that compiles and analyzes disclosures made to the Federal Election Commission.
The
second-highest total, $369,000, went to members of the Senate Commerce,
Science and Transportation Committee, which announced later that it
would have a joint hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee to
question Zuckerberg on Tuesday. Judiciary Committee members have
received $235,000 in Facebook contributions...
“Powerful interests provide lots of money to the committees that have
jurisdiction over them, and they do it to gain influence with those
members of Congress,” Wertheimer said. “It’s a fundamental problem that
exists throughout the system and throughout the committee structure, and
it undermines public confidence that the members are going to make
decisions in the best interests of the American people.”
Overall, Facebook has contributed $1.1 million to House members, split almost evenly between the parties...
More at USA Today. We all know how this bullshit system works. If candidate A is running against candidate B, instead of giving $20,000 to candidate A, a company gives $10,000 to A and $10,000 to B. Then, whichever one wins feels beholden to the corporation for its "support," which wasn't in fact support. It stinks to high heaven.
"Plus, nearly 30 members of Congress own Facebook stock, according to a story in Roll Call,
including two Democratic members of the committee who will question
Zuckerberg next week."
The manufacturer can always fall back on the argument that the plastic cover for the hose nozzle was "made in America" even though the nozzle wasn't. Discussion thread of this shady practice here.
“Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty
to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly
necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does
right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and
servile”. - Theodore Roosevelt - editorial in The Kansas City Star, on
May 7, 1918
The BBC offers a perspective on the abuse of the term "gluten-free":
The food labelling craze coupled with banner headlines about the dangers of gluten, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and hormones are leading to increasingly absurd results.
For example, you can now buy “premium” water that’s not only free of GMOs and gluten but certified kosher and organic. Never mind that not a single drop of water anywhere contains either property or is altered in any way by those designations...
In my experience as a food economist, such “fake transparency” does nothing to inform consumers about the nature of their foods. Moreover, it can actually decrease well-being when accompanied by a higher price tag...
Since federal regulation requires that hormones not be used in pork or poultry, advertising a chicken breast as “hormone-free” doesn’t make sense – yet doing so allows a company to charge more or help its products stand out from the less-labelled competition.
In spite of the best efforts of the White House and the Pentagon, the world would come to know he had been killed in an act of fratricide that was then covered up in favor of a horrible series of official lies.
But that we know the truth at all is owed to the extraordinary determination of Tillman's family, a foulmouthed and eclectic bunch of square-jawed hippies from San Jose, California, and in particular his mother, Mary. A more compliant family, more easily bamboozled by the institutions of American power at the highest levels, might have meekly, or readily, accepted the government's vigorous effort to turn Pat Tillman into a Sergeant York fantasy that it could then exploit relentlessly for propaganda purposes.
Comments excerpted from a review at Esquire. Those not familiar with the Pat Tillman saga can review the basics of it at Wikipedia. My understanding is that the outrage by the family and by knowledgeable members of the public is not directed at the friendly-fire death per se, but on the extensive coverup that ensued.
Addendum: Those interested in this subject should read Andred O-Hehir's analysis at Salon:
The film is also meant, to some extent, as an antidote to journalist Jon Krakauer's 2009 book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," which the family strongly disliked...
He was a football star and avid outdoorsman who read Emerson; an agnostic or atheist who read the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon out of intellectual curiosity; a man who relished the high-testosterone simulated combat of sports, and excelled at it, while also maintaining an introspective personal journal he allowed no one to read. As a friend of mine recently observed, many of Tillman's characteristics would seem completely normal among the metropolitan educated classes: He never went anywhere without a book, and typically rode his bike rather than driving a car. But Tillman wasn't a bearded, chai-drinking grad student riding that bike to yoga class in Brooklyn or Silverlake or Ann Arbor. He was the starting strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals, and parked his bike next to his teammates' Porsches and tricked-out Escalades...
I'm only guessing here, but one of the things the Tillman family hated about Jon Krakauer's book was probably the author's tendency to view Pat Tillman's death as a case study in the evils of war and the limits of idealism. I might incline toward that view myself, but the Tillmans don't. Right-wing propagandists quickly learned that the Tillman family wasn't going to stick to the pious, patriotic script. (Pat's drunken younger brother, Rich, at the nationally televised funeral: "Pat isn't with God. He's fucking dead.") But the Tillmans aren't interested in starring in an antiwar morality play either. As they see it, Pat Tillman died as he lived, as an American who thought for himself, hewed to his own course and kept his word. It's the rest of us who have betrayed him.
More at the link.
Reposted in 2011 because I just this week finally got an opportunity to view the film. It is excellent (confirmed by a 93% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes).
Reposted in 2017 because Donald Trump, for whatever reason, chose to retweet Pat Tillman in support of his criticism of professional football players. Pat Tillman's widow is justifiably pushing back:
"The very action of self-expression and the freedom to speak from one's
heart — no matter those views — is what Pat and so many other Americans
have given their lives for," Marie Tillman said. "Even if they didn't
always agree with those views."
• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a
lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15–$20 an hour. Lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.
The cynic in me thinks that the lobbyists pay the line-standing companies $15-20 an hour, but the line-standing companies hire the homeless at $2 an hour plus a free meal.
"Montana’s new terms for small solar
projects might have been knowingly set to discourage development, based
on a conversation caught last week on a hot mic.
Speaking
with staff during a mid-session break, Public Service Commissioner Bob
Lake acknowledged that cuts made that morning to rates and contracts
offered to small renewable energy projects are likely deep enough to
kill future development. By federal law, the commission’s actions were
supposed to promote renewable energy...
It’s the contract talk that piqued the interest of attorney Jenny
Harbine, who represents Vote Solar and the Montana Environmental
Information Center. Setting a contract that’s unworkable for the small
renewable energy projects violates PURPA, Harbine said on Monday.
Harbine plans to file a motion to get the PSC to reconsider."
Details at the Billings Gazette source. In the discussion thread at the Futurology subreddit, this act is described as "corruption, pure and simple."
The regal emblem, used at President Trump’s golf courses across the
United States, sports three lions and two chevrons on a shield, below a
gloved hand gripping an arrow...
The British are known to take matters of heraldry seriously,
and Mr. Trump’s American coat of arms belongs to another family. It was
granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies, the
third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite who built the
Mar-a-Lago resort that is now Mr. Trump’s cherished getaway...
In the United States, the Trump Organization took Mr. Davies’s coat of
arms for its own, making one small adjustment — replacing the word
“Integritas,” Latin for integrity, with “Trump.”...
“It
couldn’t be a clearer-cut case, actually,” said Clive Cheesman, one of
the college’s heralds, who oversee coats of arms, their design and their
use.
“A
coat of arms that was originally granted to Joseph Edward Davies in
1939 by the English heraldic authority ended up being used 10 or 15
years ago by the Trump Organization as part of its branding for its golf
clubs,” said Mr. Cheesman, a lawyer by training.
More on the kerfuffle at the link.
With a tip of the blogging hat to the elves at QI for alerting me to this interesting item.
In Louisville, a defendant was brought before the court not wearing any pants, and not having received any feminine hygiene products during her three-day incarceration. This Reddit comment is appropriate:
That judge was amazing.
A good judge would have done what she did in terms of sentencing her to time served and releasing her.
This judge apologized on behalf of the correction system, and
reprimanded the superiors of the people responsible, in front of the
defendant.
When I think of what a judge should be, this woman is exactly that. An
autonomous, unbiased, upholder of justice. Someone who after seeing
thousands and thousands of real criminals, can still be outraged by
injustice coming from the other side.
Much has been made of Trump's assertion that he would give favorable consideration to Christians from Muslim countries. This point deserves emphasis:
The executive action, "Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist
Entry Into The United States," targets seven nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Trump has no business interests in those countries.
And this:
One other thing they have in common, as NPR's Greg Myre writes: "No Muslim extremist from any of these places has carried out a fatal attack in the U.S. in more than two decades."
The 19 terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, Myre points out. They are
among the Muslim-majority countries not affected by Trump's immigration
freeze, but where Trump does business.
He has significant
commercial interests in Turkey and Azerbaijan, is developing properties
in Indonesia and Dubai, and has formed companies in Egypt and Saudi
Arabia. His daughter Ivanka said in 2015 that the company was looking at
"multiple opportunities in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia — the
four areas where we are seeing the most interest."
Regarding "politics without principle", Gandhi said
having politics without truth(s) to justly dictate the action creates
chaos, which ultimately leads to violence. Gandhi called these missteps
"passive violence," ‘which fuels the active violence of crime,
rebellion, and war.’ He said, "We could work 'til doomsday to achieve
peace and would get nowhere as long as we ignore passive violence in our
world."
Politics
is literally defined as, "The struggle in any group for power that will
give one or more persons the ability to make decisions for the larger
group."
I have probably never before reposted anything from another source in toto here. My policy is to excerpt and refer the reader to the source material. I'll make an exception today in order to transcribe the totality of an item in the January 22 issue of Harper's Magazine. The information presented is not new - all of it has been published in readily available sources and most of it is well-known to the American (and world) public. But the compact and comprehensive presentation here is just overwhelming.
Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. During Trump’s primary campaign, he told his supporters that he knew “all about crazies,” loved “Wall Street guys” who are “brutal,” planned to “use the word ‘anchor baby,’ ” and preferred to pronounce “Qatar” incorrectly. Trump, who in 1999 cut his sick infant grandnephew off the Trump Organization’s health-care plan and in 2011 compared being gay to switching to a long-handled golf putter, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and said he’d consider trying to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. Trump said that his book The Art of the Deal was second in quality only to the Bible and that he never explicitly asked God for forgiveness. At a church in Iowa, he placed a few dollar bills into a bowl filled with sacramental bread, which he has referred to as “my little cracker.” Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump, who once hosted a radio show in which he discussed the development of hair-cloning technology, the creation of a vaccine for obesity, the number of men a gay man thinks about having sex with on his morning commute, and the dangers of giving free Viagra to rapists. Trump denied being the voice of John Miller, one of several fictional assistants he had previously admitted pretending to be, in a recording of himself telling a reporter that he had “zero interest” in dating Madonna; that he had three other girlfriends in addition to Marla Maples, with whom he had been cheating on his wife; and that he had an affair with Carla Bruni, who later responded by describing Trump as “obviously a lunatic.” Trump, who once offered the city of New York vacant apartments in his building to house homeless people in hopes they would drive away rent-controlled tenants, sent a bumper sticker to a group of homeless veterans whom he had previously declined to help and asked them to campaign for him. Trump, whose companies have been cited 24 times since 2005 for failing to pay workers overtime or minimum wage, said the federal minimum wage should go up, and then said it should not. Trump referred to 9/11 as “7-Eleven,” and called Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “the Indian” and “Pocahontas.” Trump, who had previously labeled a deaf contestant on his reality-TV show The Apprentice “retarded,” and had described poor Americans as “morons,” said the country was on course for a “very massive recession,” one resembling the U.S. recession of 2007 to 2009, which Trump once said Americans could “opt out of” by joining Trump Network, a multilevel-marketing company that sold a monthly supply of multivitamins purportedly tailored to customers based on a test of their urine. Trump submitted his financial-disclosure form to the Federal Election Commission, on which he swore under oath that his golf course in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which was being sued by the town for causing flooding, was worth $50 million, despite having sworn in a previous property-tax appeal that it was worth $1.4 million; and swore that his golf course in Palos Verdes, California, which he was suing for five times its annual revenue, was worth more than $50 million, despite previously having filed papers with Los Angeles County stating it was worth $10 million. Trump claimed he made $1.9 million from his modeling agency, which a foreign-born former model accused of “modern-day slavery,” alleging that the agency forced her to lie about her age, work without a U.S. visa, and live in a crowded apartment for which she paid the agency as much as $1,600 a month to sleep in a bed beneath a window through which a homeless man once urinated on her. Trump sought to exclude a recording of himself telling the nephew of former president George W. Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” from a fraud suit filed against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars taught by salespeople with no real-estate experience, which was housed in a Trump-owned building that the Securities and Exchange Commission said also housed the country’s most complained-about unregistered brokerages, and whose curriculum investigators in Texas described as “inapplicable.” Trump announced that he would win the Latino vote, and tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl from Trump Grill in Trump Tower with the message “I love Hispanics!” Trump referred to a black man at one of his rallies as “my African American,” and pledged his support for black people at a gathering of mostly white people in Wisconsin, whom he often referred to as “the forgotten people.” “I am the least racist person,” said Trump, who was sued twice by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, whose Trump Plaza Hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1992 for removing black dealers from card tables, who allegedly told a former employee that he hated “black guys counting my money,” who in 2005 floated the idea of pitting an all-black Apprentice team against an all-white one to reflect “our very vicious world,” and who was endorsed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom said, “What he believes, we believe.” Trump tweeted statistics credited to a fictional government agency falsely claiming that the majority of white murder victims in the United States are killed by black people. Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who Trump had said “had blood coming out of her wherever,” standing next to a Saudi prince, who tweeted back that he had “financially rescued” Trump twice, including once in 1990, when the prince purchased Trump’s 281-foot yacht, which was formerly owned by a Saudi arms dealer with whom Trump often partied in Atlantic City, and with whom Trump was implicated in a tax-evasion scheme involving a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. Trump disputed former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s claim that Trump magazine is defunct, showing as proof an annual circular for his clubs that was not Trump magazine, which folded in 2009. Trump republished his book Crippled America with the title Great Again. Trump told and retold an apocryphal story about a U.S. general who executed Muslim soldiers with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and proposed that Muslims be banned from entering the country. At the first primary debate, Trump praised his companies’ bankruptcies, including that of Trump Entertainment Resorts, in which lenders lost more than $1 billion and 1,100 employees lost their jobs, and that of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded company that Trump used to purchase two casinos for almost $1 billion, and from which he resigned after the company went bankrupt for the first time, but before it went bankrupt for the second time. “I made a lot of money,” said Trump. At the fifth primary debate, Trump defended the idea of retaliating against America’s foreign aggressors by killing non-combatant members of their families, saying it would “make people think.” At the eleventh primary debate, Trump told the crowd there was “no problem” with the size of his penis. Trump said that he knew more about the Islamic State than “the generals,” and that he would “rely on the generals” to defeat the Islamic State. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding and torture because “we have to beat the savages.” Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies, denied making the offer, then made the offer again after a 78-year-old white supporter in North Carolina punched a 26-year-old black protester in the eye and said, “Next time we see him we might have to kill him.” Trump, who in 1999 called Republicans too “crazy right” and in 2000 ran on a Reform Party platform that included creating a lottery to fund U.S. spy training, said that the 2016 primaries were “rigged,” then clinched the Republican nomination for president, receiving more votes than any Republican in history. “I was the one who really broke the glass ceiling,” said Trump when his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, became the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the editor of the white-nationalist website Breitbart, to replace his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran a firm that once lobbied for the military dictator of Zaire, and who himself replaced Corey Lewandowski, who resigned from the campaign not long after he was filmed grabbing a Breitbart reporter by the arm to prevent her from asking Trump any questions. Trump selected as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who previously backed a bill that would allow hospitals to deny care to critically ill pregnant women, and who once criticized the Disney character Mulan as a “mischievous liberal” created to persuade Americans that women should be allowed to hold combat positions in the military. In his general-election campaign, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and called on Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account. Trump said that he doesn’t pay employees who don’t “do a good job,” after a review of the more than 3,500 lawsuits filed against Trump found that he has been accused of stiffing a painter and a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, dozens of hourly hospitality workers, and some of the lawyers who represented him. “I’m a fighter,” said Trump, who body-slammed the WWE chairman at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, and who attended WrestleMania IV with Robert LiButti, an Atlantic City gambler with alleged mafia ties, who told Trump he’d “fucking pull your balls from your legs” if Trump didn’t stop trying to seduce his daughter. Trump, whose first wife, Ivana, accused him in divorce filings of rape, and whose special counsel later said rape within a marriage was not possible, said “no one respects women more than I do.” Trump threatened to sue 12 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who recalled Trump trying “like an octopus” to put his hand up her skirt on an airplane 35 years ago; four former Miss Teen USA contestants, who alleged that Trump entered their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing and said, “I’ve seen it all before”; the winner of Miss Utah USA in 1997, who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her on the lips and then told her, “Twenty-one is too old”; an adult-film star, who alleged that at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006 Trump offered her $10,000 and the private use of his jet to spend the night with him; and a People magazine reporter, who alleged that while she was writing a story on Trump and his current wife, Melania, on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, Trump pushed her against the wall and forcibly kissed her before telling her, “We’re going to have an affair.” “What I say is what I say,” said Trump, who previously told a pair of 14-year-old girls that he would date them in a couple of years, said of a 10-year-old girl that he would date her in 10 years, told a journalist that he wasn’t sure whether his infant daughter Tiffany would have nice breasts, told the cast of The View that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her,” told radio host Howard Stern that it was okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass” and that he could have “nailed” Princess Diana, and tweeted that a former winner of his Miss Universe pageant, whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy,” was disgusting. “Check out sex tape,” tweeted Trump, who once appeared in a soft-core pornographic film breaking a bottle of wine over a limousine. Trump did not comment on reports that he used over $200,000 in charitable contributions to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his businesses, $20,000 in contributions to the Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, and $10,000 in contributions to buy a smaller painting of himself, which he hung on the wall of his restaurant Champions Bar and Grill. “I’m the cleanest guy there is,” said Trump, who once granted the rights to explore building Trump-branded towers in Moscow to a mobster convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of margarita glass, who was mentored by the former lead counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Gambino and Genovese crime families, who once purchased a nightclub in Atlantic City from a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family, who once worked with a soldier in the Colombo crime family to outfit Trump Golden and Executive Series limousines with a fax machine and a liquor dispenser, and who once purchased helicopter services from a cigarette-boat racer named Joseph Weichselbaum, who was charged with drug trafficking in Ohio before being moved to Trump’s sister’s courtroom in New Jersey, where the case was handed off to a different judge, who gave Weichselbaum a three-year prison sentence, of which he served 18 months before moving into Trump Tower. Trump told journalists he “made a lot of money” when he leased his house in Westchester to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “I screwed him,” said Trump. Trump, who in 2013 said that he did “have a relationship” with Vladimir Putin, said in 2016, “I don’t know Putin.” Trump, who wrote in 1997 that concern over asbestos was a mob conspiracy, who in the 1990s spent $1 million in ads to bolster the theory that a Native American tribe in upstate New York had been infiltrated by the mafia and drug traffickers, who once implied that Barack Obama’s real name is Barry Soetoro and that he won reelection by making a secret deal with Saudi Arabia, and who in 2012 tweeted that global warming was a “hoax” created by “the Chinese” to weaken U.S. manufacturing, suggested to his supporters that the Islamic State paid the phone bills of Syrian refugees, that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban father was involved in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have been suffocated with a pillow. During the first debate of the general election, Trump said that Rosie O’Donnell had deserved it when he called her “disgusting both inside and out,” “basically a disaster,” a “slob,” and a “loser,” someone who “looks bad,” “sounds bad,” has a “fat, ugly face,” and “talks like a truck driver.” At the second general-election debate, Trump invited three women who have accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misconduct to sit in the front row; claimed that Clinton had once laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old girl, which audio showed not to be true; claimed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had endorsed him, which it had not; and afterward suggested that his opponent had been on drugs during the debate. Trump, who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, told his supporters that Clinton could shoot one of them and not be prosecuted. Trump told the audience at a Catholic charity dinner that Clinton “hates Catholics,” and told his supporters that she is “the devil” and that Mexico was “getting ready to attack.” Trump, who once kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, told his supporters that the election was “rigged” against him, won the election despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million, claimed that he had in fact won the popular vote, and then announced that he would be staying on as executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, which a year earlier had fired him because he called Mexicans “rapists.” “Our country,” said Trump at a victory rally, “is in trouble.”
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If you have purchased a milk product in [any of the states highlighted above] since 2003, you are
eligible to share in a $52 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit
that accused milk cooperatives of conspiring to raise prices.
Applications can be filed online at www.boughtmilk.com. You don't have to give details of your purchases. You have until the end of January to file your claim. More information at the Wisconsin State Journal.
The lawsuit administrator estimates that consumers could get between $45 and $70, but it could be a just few cents - depending on how
many people apply
On the other hand... attorneys will receive $17.3 million of the settlement.
In another class-action lawsuit, a Johns Hopkins physician was found guilty of secretly taking sexually explicit photographs of his female patients. In the settlement of that case, "each woman is set to receive between $1,750 and $26,048. A judge ordered
that $32 million of the total settlement would go to attorneys..."
