$5.34 Ladder Defeats $2.5 Billion wall

Brilliant New $5.34 Ladder Defeats Not So Brilliant $2.5 Billion Trump Fever Dream

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist

Now, Mexicans still determined to come here despite our national mayhem have discovered a new, cheap, go-to method of scaling Dear Leader's pesky, pointless pet project. Using two lengths of light, cubed, readily available rebar called castillo - ubiquitous in Mexican construction and LOL the wall itself - they're fashioning hook-and-ladder rigs; the rebar is fitted with steps, and connected to four thinner poles bent into a U-shape to hug the top of the wall. The rust-colored rebar is naturally, fortuitously camouflaged, barely visible against the rust brown wall. And it's dirt cheap: Six meters of castillo cost 99 pesos, about $5.34, at Juárez' Hágalo - or Do It Yourself - True Value hardware store.

Last spring, the new ladders started turning up near the El Paso section of wall, where the number of single male migrants who mostly use them has nearly doubled in recent months; border agents say the level of "evading activity" has likewise soared. Last week, they found 9 ladders in one spot. Meanwhile, the whole stretch of border is littered with rusted rebar - waiting on the Mexican side, yanked down on the U.S. side, poking from dumpsters, their users long gone. Outwitted and conscripted into ludicrous service, agents say all they can do is pull abandoned ladders off the wall, cut them up, and hope they can't be used again. "It's a very powerful, very powerful wall," Trump brayed at a September rally there, "the likes of which, probably, to this extent, has not been built before."

"A wise man lets a fool build a wall before choosing the height of his ladder.” - Socrates

Think the US is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

February 14, 2020 5.23pm ESIt has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past.
As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century.
Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation literally broke apart.
More than 3 million men took up arms, and hundreds of thousands of black and white civilians in the Confederacy became refugees. Four million enslaved African Americans were freed from bondage.https://theconversation.com/think-the-us-is-more-polarized-than-ever-you-dont-know-history-131600

Facial expressions don't tell the whole story of emotion

by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University

"Some claim they can detect whether someone is guilty of a crime or not, or whether a student is paying attention in class, or whether a customer is satisfied after a purchase," he said. "What our research showed is that those claims are complete baloney. There's no way you can determine those things. And worse, it can be dangerous."...
After analyzing data about facial expressions and emotion, the research team—which included scientists from Northeastern University, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin—concluded that it takes more than expressions to correctly detect emotion.
Facial color, for example, can help provide clues.
"What we showed is that when you experience emotion, your brain releases peptides—mostly hormones—that change the blood flow and blood composition, and because the face is inundated with these peptides, it changes color," Martinez said.
The human body offers other hints, too, he said: body posture, for example. And context plays a crucial role as well.,,,,https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-facial-dont-story-emotion.html

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

February 14, 2020

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg misleadingly stated that he “cut” the police practice of stop-and-frisk — a policy that he “inherited” — by “95%” by the time he left office as mayor of New York. There were nearly twice as many stops in his last year as mayor compared with the year before he took office.

impossible to fight for socialism from within the Democratic Party

Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America say it is possible to fight for socialism from within the Democratic Party. Such a political program is not real socialism and can lead only to disaster.

...
 What the ruling class does fear, however, is that the growing opposition to capitalism will develop on an independent, revolutionary basis in the working class. Sanders serves to contain this opposition and, in his words, take discontented youth and “bring them into the Democratic Party.”
...

The Democratic Party is the oldest capitalist political party in the world. Founded in 1828, it carries in its political DNA all of the American ruling class’s great crimes.


This was the party of the southern slaveowners before the Civil War, of the forced removal and massacre of Native Americans, of Jim Crow segregation and of the anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese restrictions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is the party that jailed socialists and immigrants during World War I and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II.
The Democratic Party launched and sustained the Korean War and Vietnam War, ended “welfare as we know it,” supported the hyper-criminalization of nonviolent drug use, voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed the PATRIOT Act, kept Guantanamo Bay open, and bailed out the banks after the market crash of 2007-08.

Instead of helping Sanders save the Democratic Party, the IYSSE and SEP appeal to you: take action by supporting real socialist candidates in the 2020 elections, Joseph Kishore for president and Norissa Santa Cruz for vice president.
Our campaign recognizes that the fight for socialism means turning toward the working class, the chief progressive social force under capitalism. This class, comprised of billions of people in every country, has the power to transform the world.
Awakening the tremendous political energy of this social force requires educating workers and dispelling the lies of the corporate media. Fighting for socialism means making workers aware of their common class interests, giving them an understanding of the nature of capitalist society, and explaining the role of the state, the police, the courts and the political parties of the different factions of the capitalist class.

 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/14/lett-f14.html