“in Texas, you can commit murder without suffering the legal consequences of that crime, so long as your victim’s politics are loathed by the right and your case is championed by conservative media. Or at least, this is the message sent by Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardoning of Daniel Perry.
“In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the proliferation of Black Lives Matter protests had filled Perry with apparent bloodlust. Then an active-duty Army officer, Perry texted and messaged friends, among other things:
“I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
“I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex … No protesters go near me or my car.”
“I wonder if they will let [me] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.”
When a friend of Perry asked him if he could “catch me a negro daddy,” Perry replied, “That is what I am hoping.”
Weeks later, Perry was driving an Uber in Austin, Texas, when he came upon a Black Lives Matter march. According to prosecutors, Perry ran a red light and drove his vehicle into the crowd, almost hitting several protesters. Activists gathered angrily around Perry’s car. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, approached Perry’s window.
Perry then shot Foster dead.
At trial, Perry’s defense team alleged that Foster had pointed his rifle at the defendant. But witnesses testified that Foster never brandished his weapon, only carried it, which is legal in Texas. And Perry corroborated that account in his initial statement to the police, saying, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” A jury convicted Perry of murder last year.
But..the governor of Texas used his pardoning power to release Perry from prison.
In a statement, Abbott said, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” He noted that in the Lone Star State, a person is justified in using deadly force against another if they “reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary” for averting one’s own violent death. The Texas governor argued that it was reasonable for Perry to believe his life was at stake since Foster had held his gun in the “low-ready firing position.”
Yet this claim is inconsistent with Perry’s own remarks to the police, which indicated that Foster did not aim a rifle at his killer, but merely carried it. Needless to say, seeing a person lawfully carrying a firearm cannot give one a legal right to kill them.
But pesky realities like this carry less weight than conservative media’s delusional grievances. Shortly after Perry’s conviction in April 2023, then-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson aired a segment portraying Perry as a helpless victim of “a mob of rioters” and a “Soros-funded” district attorney. Carlson decried the jury’s verdict as a “legal atrocity” and lambasted Abbott for standing idly by while his state invalidated conservatives’ right to defend themselves. “So that is Greg Abbott’s position,” he said. “There is no right of self-defense in Texas.”
The next day, Abbott pledged to work “as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.””
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/5/17/24159084/daniel-perry-pardon-greg-abbott-samuel-alito-flag
The Campus Protesters Explain Themselves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apPFuGce2kM
“Early in his column, Powell writes that since 2019, America’s working-class has “weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power.”
This is simply false. You cannot measure a trend in workers’ purchasing power over time by looking exclusively at changes in their costs. Since 1947, the consumer price index has risen by roughly 1,400 percent. If we applied Powell’s logic to that data point, we would conclude that Americans’ purchasing power had apocalyptically collapsed since the Truman administration. But of course, Americans are not poorer today than they were in 1947 — because since that year, the median US household income has increased by roughly 2,400 percent.
Similarly, although consumer prices have risen 20 percent since 2019, the average hourly wage among nonmanagerial workers in the US has grown by 25 percent over the same period. Put differently, at least for Americans who don’t debt-finance their expenditures, purchasing power is higher today than it was in 2019.”
https://www.vox.com/24134257/biden-economy-inflation-wages-interest-rate
Trump’s team keeps promising to increase inflation
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/24137666/trump-agenda-inflation-prices-dollar-devaluation-tariffs
America’s misunderstood border crisis, in 8 charts
https://www.vox.com/politics/24153132/us-border-crisis-mexico-migrant-immigration-asylum
The 9 worst court decisions since Trump remade the federal judiciary
https://www.vox.com/scotus/24151144/supreme-court-worst-decisions-donald-trump
“Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.”
…
“There are more than enough human beings walking around with spare kidneys who could donate them to strangers in need. They simply choose not to.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24117935/pig-kidney-transplant-mass-general-donation
“Even with biological, technological, and logistical hurdles surpassed, the decision around vaccination seems to be a monetary one. Beyond the cost of vaccination, there’s the potential of losing key trade partners. Trade agreements, especially for meat, are notoriously delicate, in part because of the risk of introducing infectious diseases and pests into a country’s food chain but more so because governments need to protect the agricultural industry from foreign competition. The National Chicken Council is opposed to vaccination efforts. The National Turkey Federation says unilateral vaccination “would have a severe impact on exports” but that it has urged — and continues to urge — the federal government to “move as rapidly as possible to try to develop new agreements” with trading partners.
“Meat is a highly politically sensitive issue for many countries, and the entire livestock industry is protected in many countries for various reasons,” said Aratchilage. Introducing bird flu vaccines is not going to be easy, he added. “It’s a political decision more than a scientific decision.””
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24155545/bird-flu-vaccines-h5n1-avian-flu-cows
“Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that racial segregation in the country’s 100 biggest school districts, which serve the most students of color, has increased by 64 percent since 1988. Economic segregation, or the division between students who receive free or reduced lunch and those who do not, increased by 50 percent since 1991.
The study primarily focused on white-Black segregation, the groups that the Brown decision addressed, but found that white-Hispanic and white-Asian segregation both also more than doubled since the late 1980s in the large school districts.”
…
““When we switched from a commitment to integration and equity to school choice, it’s not terribly surprising that we see rising school segregation,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology and public policy at USC and one of the report’s authors. “We’ve abdicated our responsibility to integration, and unfettered choice does not magically lead to integration.”
And now, the steady increase means that Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be concentrated in higher-poverty schools with fewer resources, a trend that worsens academic and life outcomes.”
…
“The study supports the idea that parents, particularly white parents, have enrolled their children in charter schools that are majority white. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, white parents have opted out of big urban district schools. There’s generally more segregation both within the charter sector and between charter and traditional public schools.”
…
“The new research shows that within five to eight years of districts being released from mandates, segregation increased. Since 1991, about two-thirds of school districts that were required to meet court desegregation mandates were removed from court oversight.”
https://www.vox.com/24156492/school-segregation-increasing-brown-board-of-education
“Blueprint surveyed 943 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 30, recruited from an online panel from April 27 to April 29. The margin of error is 5.8 percentage points. Those participants were asked how important a variety of issues were to them, and able to choose multiple priorities.
Across every kind of young voter asked — Democratic, independent, or Republican; Black or Latino or white; college-educated or not — some variation of an economic concern was a top electoral issue. As a whole, inflation and the economy were the most frequently prioritized issues, chosen by 73 percent and 70 percent of young voters, respectively.
Health care was the only rival issue — cited frequently by Democrats, Black and white voters, women, and those making more than $75,000 a year — and chosen 71 percent of the time by all young voters as a top priority.”
…
“Among the lowest-priority issues in this survey are LGBTQ issues, student loans (both chosen 38 percent of the time), while climate change, Israel and Palestine, democracy, and race relations were chosen just about half the time. And they don’t necessarily want Biden to make a major change on some of these topics.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/24157594/young-voters-are-just-normies-poll-biden-economy