TL;DR: Exercise company releases ad promoting exercise. Feminists complain that exercise is bad and it's sexist to encourage women to exercise.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peloton-advertisement-idUSKBN1Y81VG

>(Reuters) - Exercise bike and treadmill maker Peloton Interactive Inc’s (PTON.O) latest Christmas advertisement has been widely criticized on social media as being “sexist” and “dystopian”.

>The advertisement, called “The Gift That Gives Back”, shows a woman receiving a Peloton bike as a gift from her husband following which she records her workouts over a year and shares them with him through a video blog.

>The company spokeswoman said on Wednesday it was disappointed how some people had misinterpreted the commercial, which also had other positive feedback on a campaign that was meant to celebrate fitness.

>The 30-second ad sparked a storm on Twitter, with several users pegging it as sexist. Some said the husband was “controlling” and “manipulative” as buying his wife an exercise bike suggested that the she needed to lose weight.

A Florida Satanist was forced to change her shirt praising Beelzebub on a recent flight.

Swati Runi Goyal, 49, was flying from Key West to Las Vegas the day before Halloween wearing a black shirt with the text “HAIL SATAN” in all-caps, Buzzfeed News first reported.

The shirt also included the text “Est. 666” and an upside-down cross, a picture shows.

Goyal was seated with her husband on the flight when an American Airlines crew member told her to remove the offensive shirt or get off the plane — delaying the flight until she swapped into an extra shirt her husband was wearing.

“The gentleman asked me if I understood what ‘offensive’ meant,” Goyal told The Post. “I said, ‘I’m a foreign-born minority woman. I know what my T-shirt means and my T-shirt is not offensive.’”

Goyal said she is both an atheist and a member of the Satanic Temple — and bought the shirt to support the non-theistic church.

“It’s usually met with giggles and thumbs up from people who get the irony of the T-shirt,” she said.

Goyal, who is vegan, said she became a supporter of the Satanic Temple because of its tenets — which includes showing “kindness to all creatures.”

“I’m not goth. I don’t have piercings. I wasn’t wearing a shirt that had a goat being beheaded on it,” Goyal told Buzzfeed. “ wearing L.L.Bean hiking pants and vegan sneakers.”

Goyal told The Post that she had to apologize to her goth friends for the comment.

“I didn’t mean to be offensive to the goths,” she joked.


https://nypost.com/2019/12/06/florida-woman-forced-to-change-hail-satan-shirt-on-american-airlines-flight-report/

Russia may know more about the Ukraine scandal than we do

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-spying-trump-giuliani-phone-calls-2019-12?utm_source=feedburner&amp%3Butm_medium=referral&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29

There's still a lot we don't know because of Trump's decision to stonewall congressional impeachment investigators from getting testimony from senior White House officials and, importantly, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani spearheaded Trump's pressure campaign in Ukraine, and he and the president have refused to discuss their communications on the matter, citing attorney-client privilege. But the Russian government may already know everything the two men spoke about thanks to their frequent use of unsecured devices.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the phones Trump and Giuliani use to communicate with each other were likely vulnerable to infiltration by Russian intelligence.

The House Intelligence Committee said in a report this week that Giuliani often spoke with several top Trump administration officials, and likely the president himself, on his personal cellphone. All the while, Giuliani was working with former Ukrainian officials to dig up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and his son Hunter.

Congressional investigators believe they have enough evidence to bring three articles of impeachment against Trump: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and obstruction of justice.

The first two relate to the Ukraine controversy, in which Trump repeatedly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. The third relates to Trump's efforts to stymie the former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

>“[T]he impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection.”

https://apnews.com/2aad68c64968dc6f1a450052bbadb90f

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The report from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is photographed in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019. The House released a sweeping impeachment report outlining evidence of what it calls Trump’s wrongdoing toward Ukraine. The findings will serve as the foundation for debate over whether the 45th president should be removed from office. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a sweeping impeachment report, t he House on Tuesday outlined evidence of “significant misconduct” by President Donald Trump toward Ukraine, findings that will now underscore a debate over whether the 45th president should be removed from office.

The 300-page report from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee makes the case that Trump misused the power of his office for personal political gain and, in the course of their investigation, obstructed Congress by stonewalling the proceedings like no other president in history.

The report does not render a judgment on whether Trump’s actions stemming from a July 25 phone call with Ukraine rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” warranting impeachment. That is for Congress to decide. Debate will begin Wednesday at a landmark hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

“We have a very difficult decision ahead of us to make,” said Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in releasing the findings. “This kind of conduct by a president of the United States, putting his own personal political interest above the interest of the American people, is exactly why they prescribed a remedy as extraordinary as the remedy of impeachment.”

>The greatest fear of most dating app users is that their match won't look like their photos, not that their match is a serial sexual assaulter. But according to a lengthy report, produced by BuzzFeed, Columbia Journalism Investigations and ProPublica, dating apps often allow sex offenders to sign up, sometimes repeatedly.

>With the exception of Match, which screens paying users against sex offender registries, many of the larger, often free apps -- including Match Group properties like Tinder, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and Hinge -- fail to screen, leaving the onus on customers to police for offenders. Many of those apps make these policies apparent upon signing up. For example, Tinder's terms of use reads: "You are solely responsible for your interactions with other users. You understand that Tinder does not conduct criminal background checks on its users or otherwise inquire into the background of its users. Tinder makes no representations or warranties as to the conduct of users." The result is an unknowable number of sex offenders on the app, including potential repeat rapists.

>Dating apps don't have a legal obligation to conduct background checks, so they generally don't. The 1996 Communications Decency Act "protect websites from being held liable for their users' speech," according to the article, allowing companies to avoid liability for screening, even in situations where a user reports sexual assault.

>"There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products," a Match Group rep told CJI, arguing that the company is prevented from scrutinizing because the company's free apps don't collect enough information from its users to accurately screen its users.

>Clearly the current mechanisms don't protect users sufficiently -- but extending those screenings against sex offender registers to all apps, including the free ones, doesn't seem very hard.

https://jezebel.com/dating-apps-dont-screen-for-sex-offenders-because-they-1840144830

https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-attacker-at-florida-military-base-was-member-of-saudi-military-was-an-act-of-terrorism-congressman-says

On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.

Four years earlier, Jones — wanting to expand his website, Infowars, into a full-blown guerrilla news operation and hoping to scout new hires from his growing fan base — held an online contest. At 23, I was vulnerable, angry and searching for direction, so I decided to give it a shot. Out of what Infowars said were hundreds of submissions, my video — a half-witted, conspiratorial glance at the creation and function of the Federal Reserve — made it to the final round.

Unconvinced I could cut it as a reporter, Jones offered me a full-time position as a video editor. I quit film school and moved nearly a thousand miles to Austin, Tex., fully invested in propagating his worldview. By the time I found myself seated next to Jones speeding down the highway, I had seen enough of the inner workings of Infowars to know better.

Before we left the office, Jones instructed me to title the video “Alex Jones Denied Right to Vote” when uploading to YouTube. He knew before we left that they wouldn’t let us walk into a polling location with our cameras rolling. I don’t think Jones even intended to vote. Rather, he hoped to turn this into a spectacle, an insult to him personally, another opportunity to play the self-aggrandizing victim.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/magazine/alex-jones-infowars.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/andrew-yang-just-said-what-other-democrats-dont-want-to-say-about-impeachment
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/03/andrew-yang-impeachment-2020-democrats-064803
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/5/andrew-yang-on-impeachment-this-is-going-to-be-a-l/

From the examiner:

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang predicted Wednesday that the impeachment push against President Trump is going to be a “loser” for the Democratic Party.

“I’m pro-impeachment, but this is going to be a loser,” the Venture for America founder told Rolling Stone in a new interview.

“Not a single Republican has given any indication that they’re in fact-finding mode. They’re all in defend-the-president mode,” he continued. “You need literally dozens of Republican senators to switch sides when the trial starts, which we’ve gotten zero indication is going to happen.”

Mr. Yang said he feared that Mr. Trump could wind up being “totally exonerated” if the inquiry drags on for too long. That, or the Democrats could end up wasting so much “precious” time attacking the president that they neglect trying to sway voters ahead of the 2020 election.

“If all that happens is all of the Democrats are talking about impeachment that fails, then it seems like there is no vision,” he said. “It seems like all we can do is throw ineffective rocks at Donald Trump, and then it ends up leading unfortunately toward his re-election.

“He’s a creature that thrives on attention, and so the more attention he gets, the better for him, the worst [sic] for Democrats,” he added.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming?utm_campaign=news_daily_2019-12-04&et_rid=330717169&et_cid=3110212

Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn’t accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models—some half a century old—shows most of them were indeed accurate.

“How much warming we are having today is pretty much right on where models have predicted,” says the study’s lead author, Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Climate scientists first began to use computers to predict future global temperatures in the early 1970s. That’s when newfound computing power coincided with a growing realization that rising carbon dioxide levels could boost global temperatures. As the issue gained public attention, critics questioned the reliability of rudimentary model predictions. Even a 1989news articleinScienceradiated skepticism, stating that “climatologists may have a gut feeling that the greenhouse effect is heating up the Earth, but they have not been close to proving it.”

Today, the models are much more sophisticated. Mainframe computers driven by paper punch cards have given way to supercomputers running trillions of calculations in 1 second. Modern models account for myriad interactions, including ice and snow, changes in forest coverage, and cloud formation—things that early modelers could only dream of doing. But Hausfather and his colleagues still wanted to see how accurate those bygone models really were.

>>511272
>Private payrolls increased by just 67,000 in November, according to ADP and Moody’s Analytics
Dept of labor says this is fake news!
>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/06/us-nonfarm-payrolls-november-2019.html
Jobs growth soars in November as payrolls surge by 266,000
* Nonfarm payrolls surged by 266,000 in November, better than the 187,000 expected by economists polled by Dow Jones.
* The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5% from 3.6%, back to the 2019 low and matching the lowest jobless rate since 1969.
* Average hourly earnings rose by 3.1% from a year ago, slightly above the 3% expected by economists polled by Dow Jones.

The jobs market turned in a stellar performance in November, with nonfarm payrolls surging by 266,000 and the unemployment rate falling to 3.5%, according to Labor Department numbers released Friday.

Those totals easily beat the Wall Street consensus. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for solid job growth of 187,000 and saw the unemployment rate holding steady from October's 3.6%. The decline in November's jobless rate came amid a corresponding 0.1 percentage point drop in the labor force participation rate, to 63.2%.

Stocks opened sharply higher in reaction to the better-than-expected report. Bond yields also surged.

"Bottom line, America is working," Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "These are very strong numbers. These are happy numbers, these are sunny Friday numbers."

The jobs growth was the best since January's 312,000 and well clear of the November 2018 total of 196,000. While hopes already were up, much of that was based on the return of General Motors workers following a lengthy strike. That dynamic indeed boosted employment in motor vehicles and parts by 41,300, part of an overall 54,000 gain in manufacturing. The vehicles and parts sector had fallen by 42,800 in October.