Tracey Eaton at Al Jazeera writes

Fidel Castro, a titan of the Cold War who defied 11 American presidents and thrust Cuba onto the world stage, is dead at age 90.

Cuban state-run television said the former long-time president died at 7pm local time on Saturday. Castro's brother and current president, Raul Castro, confirmed the news.

The US government spent more than $1bn trying to kill, undermine or otherwise force Castro from power, but he endured unscathed before old age and disease finally took him.

His supporters in Havana described him as a tireless defender of the poor.

Castro was "a giant of the Third World", said Agustin Diaz Cartaya, 85, who joined Castro in the 1953 attack in eastern Cuba that launched the revolution. "No one has done more for the Third World than Fidel Castro."

Critics say Castro drove the country into economic ruin, denied basic freedoms to 11 million Cubans at home and forced more than a million others into exile.

"In 55 years, the Cuban government has not done anything to help the Cuban people in terms of human rights," said Hector Maseda, 72, a former political prisoner who lives in Havana. "I don't believe in this regime. I don't trust it."

Brandon Ellington Patterson at Mother Jones writes—Hate Crimes Are Rising But Don't Expect Them to be Prosecuted:

Last week, the FBI announced there were 5,850 hate crimes in 2015—a 7 percent increase over the year before. But that total, which is based on voluntary reports of hate crimes from local and state police departments, is likely far lower than the real number. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated about 260,000 hate crimes annually in a 2013 report looking at hate crimes between 2007 and 2011. The BJS's estimate was based on anonymous responses to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which the bureau conducts every year.

But most of those crimes are never heard by a jury. Federal prosecutors pressed forward with just 13 percent of hate crime cases referred to them between January 2010 and August 2015, according to an analysis of DOJ data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, and only 11 percent of those referrals ended in conviction. Data on hate crime prosecutions at the state level are scarce, but, in its 2013 study, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that only 4 percent of these crimes even result in an arrest.

Given the apparent extent of the problem, why do so few hate crimes end up in court?

One reason is that these crimes never get reported to law enforcement. Approximately one-third of those that do, according to the FBI, are crimes such as vandalism or destruction of property that don't involve physical contact between the alleged offender and the victim. "These people burn crosses and run away, so you don't know who did it," says Michael Lieberman, who serves as legal counsel to the Washington, DC, branch of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights organization that fights anti-Semitism. In fact, he notes, the FBI's 2015 data reflects several hundred fewer known hate crime offenders than actual incidents because officials often don't know who committed the crime. Even the 5,500 offenders counted as "known" by the FBI have not necessarily been identified by law enforcement officials. (The FBI counts offenders as "known" when it has a piece of information, such as race or gender, that can help them eventually identify the perpetrator.) [...]

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Save Coal River Mountain—Now:

Feeling a post election letdown?  Looking for another dragon to slay? Buddy, have I got a mean, scaly, ugly one for you.

Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is a beautiful forested area surrounded by communities with long experience with coal mining as been practiced for decades. How long have these folks been settled around the mountain? Many are descendants of those who moved to the area on land grants given soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Now the mountain itself is threatened by coal mining as it's been practiced under the Bush administration -- mountaintop removal.

Just yesterday, a permit to start blasting the top off the mountain was awarded to Massey Energy, headed by Don Blankenship.  Who is Don Blankenship? He's the guy who spent millions putting his own man on the West Virginia Supreme Court so he could get out of a lawsuit. Then, when he was caught vacationing in Monaco with that judge, he bought himself another. And another. He spent millions on smear campaigns so he could get his own brand of justice. He's the guy who was named the scariest person in America when it comes to the environment. This is the guy behind the death of miners in the Aracoma mine after hundreds of safety violations.

This is a guy who makes $15 million a year, and spends as much as $9 million of it reshaping West Virginia into a deep red state that supports his strong arm tactics. You think West Virginia has an "Appalachian problem?" No. It has a Don Blankenship problem.

Now Blankenship has Coal River Mountain in his grip, and if he has his way, it will soon join more than a million acres of ancient mountains, towering forests, and free-flowing streams that are turned into the acidic rubble left behind after mountaintop removal mining. And perhaps worst of all, Coal River Mountain has already been studied as a site for a wind farm. This wind farm would produce more energy than the coal that Blankenship will get from blasting down the mountain. It will employ more people.  And it will do it cleanly, preserving both the mountain and the surrounding communities.

This is just one of those things that makes you wonder why you didn't think of it and be impressed all at once.

Bike-sharing programs aren’t an uncommon sight in many major cities, but renting a ride often comes without one major accessory: the helmet.

Isis Shiffer, who recently graduated with a master’s degree from the Pratt Institute of Design, had a solution for bikers who might not have their own headgear on hand — a disposable EcoHelmet, made of collapsible cardstock paper that can be reused or recycled at the end of a ride. The helmet, which relies on a waterproof and accordion-like structure to protect the rider from any impacts, won the James Dyson Award this week for its innovative design.

“We have these fantastic [bike-hire] schemes all around the world and if you want to wear a helmet you either have to bring your own or spend quite a bit of money,” Shiffer said to the Guardian. So she decided to craft a cheaper and more portable alternative, she added.

It's lightweight and as strong and as protective as traditional helmets. It's treated to repel rain for up to three hours, and when it's reached the end of its useful life, it gets recycled. See, good stuff still happens in this world. And gets recognized. Congratulations, Ms. Shiffer.

A decade ago, I helped my mother acquire her first computer. It was a generic laptop PC that we bought on sale, a machine providing a lot more power than what she planned to use it for: exchanging emails, storing family photos, reading news and health sites, playing solitaire. We brought it home and sat down together for her first tutorial. 

She watched as I did a modest amount of configuring, got her to commit to an easily remembered password and started her instruction. Right away, I knew this tutoring was going to take a while. Because when I said, “Watch what happens when I click here,” she asked, “What do you mean, ‘click’?” 

I’ve observed other older people, in and out of my family, struggle with new technology, too. Despite being an expert craftsman and artist in wood, leather and metal who knew the ins and outs of exotic power tools I could barely find the on-switch for, my stepfather wouldn’t touch that computer. “Too complicated,” he said, every time I made the attempt to get him online. He only ever viewed the internet over someone’s shoulder.

Whether it’s electronics or some other new tech, however, you don’t have to be old to be left out. If you walked into a time machine and landed in the year 2066 or 2116, would you be able to turn on a single appliance? Could you figure out how to board whatever replaces Elon Musk’s Hyperloop transport? Could you survive a single day without constant assistance? In science fiction, that never seems to be a problem, or when it is, it’s only for a couple of minutes. Just as is true with most sci-fi social relations, which, even when aliens giga-light-years from Earth are in charge, seem to be an awful lot like what we are all-too-familiar with. 

What got me to rambling around in my brain about this was recently cleaning out my late parents’ mountain house so it could sold. In it were quite a number of items that I recognized but hadn’t seen for decades. There were my grandmother’s pair of flat-irons, which she had heated up alternately on a coal-stove to make a little money pressing clothes for families who lived on the other side of the tracks from us. There were two dial telephones and a two-part stick telephone requiring you to hold the earpiece in one hand and the microphone in the other. Buried in a box was an adding machine as big as a microwave with a pull-down handle on the side like a mini-slot machine. 

Then there were the two obsolete items whose photographs I have included above. 

The first one sparked a family friend to speculate that it was perhaps something that could be found in a turn-of-the-century erotic toy store. The other item generated some some smirks as well. 

See if you can guess what they are.

Got any of your own things packed away somewhere that will puzzle readers? Please post photos of your obsolete objects in the comments. No TRS-80s, please.

You may have missed it in the overwhelming swirl of information in the month leading up to the election, but back in mid-October, I wrote a whole article highlighting a minor detail from one poll’s crosstabs (from Public Religion Research Institute) that I found very compelling. And it’s one that, in retrospect, may have had more explanatory power than any of us thought, at the time.

White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).

Now that we’ve seen the post-election map, those places where people are most likeliest to have stayed in the same place where they were raised, are also the places that seemed to trend the hardest in Trump’s direction: rural areas across the Midwest where the population is slowly falling, populated almost exclusively by white people, most of whom aren't college-educated.

Many pundits have focused on the white working-class aspect of these places. But there’s another dimension that goes beyond the racialized economic concerns of the residents of these places, that instead wonders about the larger mindset of those who grew up in and then left those places, versus the mindset of those who chose to stay. There’s, of course, a chicken-and-egg problem here, in that education plays a key role in mobility; if you seek higher education, you’re likely to need to leave your small town, and then to get a job that takes advantage of your higher education, you’re likely to end up in a metro area.

But as Josh Barro pointed out, there may simply be a big personality difference between those who stay and those who leave, whether it’s optimism vs. pessimism, or openness vs. intolerance, or having some agency over one’s life instead of simply stewing in your resentments—which, if you think about it, is really what the big themes of this year's election were, more so than any specific set of policies.

History buffs! City lovers! Map geeks! Unite! Max Galka at Metrocosm has created a work of wonder and we shall give him the room to explain:

By 2030, 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. Today, about 54 percent of us do. In 1960, only 34 percent of the world lived in cities.

Urbanization didn’t begin in the 1960s. But until recently, tracking its history much further back than that was a challenging task. The most comprehensive collection of urban population data available, U.N. World Urbanization Prospects, goes back only to 1950. But thanks to a report released last week by a Yale-led team of researchers, it’s now possible to analyze the history of cities over a much longer time frame.

The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.

From all this data, Galka created the visualization video below, in which you can watch the world unfold before your eyes.

Madison Amelia (her Facebook name) was in an abusive interracial relationship. She took out her camera to record an escalation of her abusive reality; the Trump effect. Watch the video here.

Madison met Chris while with mutual friends. Madison is a 25-year-old biracial young woman. Chris is a 34-year-old young man with four kids. Madison and Chris moved in together about three years ago. Two of Chris's children, two boys, spent half the time with them and the other half with the kids' mother.

"The kids loved me," Madison said.

Chris became progressively more abusive as the relationship matured, according to Madison. But throughout the relationship she had not heard Chris use any racist remarks. That is a part of him she never knew. Madison said Chris watched Trump on TV but never went to rallies. I asked her if he made any racist comments when he watched.

"I never sat with him to watch them," Madison said. "I'm too intelligent to want to watch that kind of nonsense."

I then asked her if she believed the Trump effect had anything to do with the recent racist abuse. "I'm not sure," she replied. "I'm a Republican, but I wouldn't vote for Trump, and he hated that. But looking back I'm not sure he ever saw me as black since I'm mixed."

I was a bit taken aback by the answer, and she clarified by saying that because she grew up privileged, she just did not think about it. It was not at all hard to infer the Trump effect, and I think she ultimately agreed.

Madison has a college degree and works in marketing. She grew up privileged. She was the primary breadwinner in the home as she made substantially more than her partner. Chris had to drop out of college and work in sales. He was “saddled” with four kids.

"Now that I left he tells people that I never had a job and lived off him," Madison said. "Even though I was the breadwinner in the situation. It's odd."

An unidentified Muslim woman was accosted on Wednesday at a Smith’s grocery store in Albuquerque. The woman was in the checkout line when another unidentified woman, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, began shouting at her to leave the country and that she was a terrorist. That’s when employees of the store and some shoppers came to the Muslim woman’s defense.

One employee placed himself in the screaming woman’s path blocking her; a shopper embraced the woman. Local station KRQE reported on the story. You can view the video of their broadcast below. The screaming idiot was escorted out of the store where she stood in the parking lot, waiting on the shopper she harassed to come outside. Employees of Smith’s escorted her to her car, loading her groceries for her. Police were called to the scene, but by the time they arrived the screamer had left the premises.

The Muslim woman returned to the store later in the day to thank the employees for their actions.

Incidents such as this have been steadily increasing since the (s)election of Donald Trump as president—more than 700 at last count. The actions of the staff of Smith’s should not only be applauded, but emulated. There is hope after all.

At first glance, a big asteroid or comet strike is bad. It creates heat that cooks anything within hundreds of miles and the blast wave carried by air, water, and rock to all corners of the globe does the rest. It even kicks up huge amounts of material so high that the world endures a rain of molten rock for days afterward, clouds of steam and dust block out the sun for years. But somehow, in the hellish days of the late Hadean or early Archean, when monster strikes happened a lot, life or something like it first arose and managed to hang on. How might that happen?

Scientists don’t fully understand how organisms survived Earth’s early and violent history, when asteroids and comets regularly pummeled the planet’s surface. Chicxulub’s peak rings show that the impact deformed the peak ring rocks and made them more porous and less dense than expected, creating a nutrient-rich home for simple organisms.

A big strike would certainly fracture the underlying bedrock for miles around, incandescent gas cooking out of the congealing magma left behind might further riddle it with frothy air pockets. All those things would make that rock way more porous to water while still providing some protection from the violence outside the rocky walls, and where water goes, we believe life often follows.

Whatever the reason, the hit marking the demise of most dinosaurs much later, at the end of the Cretaceous, certainly did hairy mammals like us a big favor. We sure wouldn’t be dining on stuffed and roasted dinosaur this holiday season had it missed. In fact, some Jurassic turkey’s feathered progeny would probably be eating small primate-like mammals to this day, without the big one that struck 66 million years ago.

Jill Stein and the Green Party have been able to fundraise more than twice as much money as they originally asked for in their pursuit of an election day audit of votes in “swing” states.

Her campaign team said it would formally file in Wisconsin before the 5 pm ET deadline to do so; the recount motion deadlines for the other two states are next week. Less than half an hour before the deadline, the Wisconsin elections commission confirmed it had received the recount petition.

There has been a lot of discussion concerning all of this. Everything from the merits of a recount to the merits of Jill Stein’s motivations in all of this. I like the idea of Donald Trump getting sweaty and annoyed, so i’m all for a recount. Considering that Hillary Clinton is on track to have at least two and half million more popular votes than the Donald, it makes sense to recount and analyze the results in the hopes of making our election process more democratic.

Judd Legum at Think Progress writes

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Eisen explained that “the founders did not want any foreign payments to the president. Period.” This principle is enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars office holders from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”

This provision was specifically created to prevent the President, most of all, from being corrupted by foreign influences. 

Eisen said that the Electors should insist that Trump set up a blind trust for all his enterprises as a condition for getting their votes. 

The only other solution is one Legum takes note of from the debate over the Constitution while it was still be ratified by the states. Virginia Governor Edmund Jennings Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate said:

There is another provision against the danger mentioned by the honorable member, of the president receiving emoluments from foreign powers. If discovered he may be impeached. If he be not impeached he may be displaced at the end of the four years. By the ninth section, of the first article, “No person holding an office of profit or trust, shall accept of any present or emolument whatever, from any foreign power, without the consent of the representatives of the people” … I consider, therefore, that he is restrained from receiving any present or emoluments whatever. It is impossible to guard better against corruption.”

But Trump is already pushing for those emoluments—by “urging” representatives of foreign governments to stay at his D.C. hotel. And he has made clear he has zero intentions of separating his private businesses from the public office into which he will soon step. Rather the contrary. As grifter in chief he’ll be able to put heavy pressure on foreign governments even though his children will actually be in charge of the operations he continues to own. 

Eisen says that if the majority of Electors choose to put Trump into the Oval Office without getting a commitment from him on setting up a blind trust before he takes office, the nation will get a “wholesale oligarchic kleptocracy of a kind that we have never seen before in our history.” 

Ten years ago, Stephen Colbert made his stamp on political discourse. He coined the term "truthiness," and made it Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on "The Word" segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

Fast forward a decade and we've reached the point Colbert was hinting at back then. We're now living in "post-truth," if Oxford Dictionaries choice of it as word of the year is indication.

Oxford defines "post-truth" as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Often used in a political context, it is easy to see why post-truth became a defining word of the year, with emotional appeals fueling a surge of right-wing movements across the world. In England, where Oxford Dictionaries is based, appeals to emotion made Brexit the law of the land. In the United States, President-elect Donald Trump's upset victory was driven by emotional appeals, even as critics of the candidate pointed to various objective inconsistencies, factual errors, and outright falsehoods made by Mr. Trump as a way to disqualify him from the presidency.

When you think about the ten years that we've all lived through together, it almost seems inevitable that truthiness would eventually devolve to this, post-truth. Truthiness was absurd and, because it came from Colbert, funny. We could point and laugh and believe that we were living in an aberration, that the George W. Bush years would be the worse we would have to endure. And we could believe that through eight years of an Obama administration in which good things got done, in spite of an opposition party spiraling deeper into the abyss of racism, know-nothingism, and hatred.

So we end up at post-truth. Where we'll look fondly back at the unprecedented overreach of executive powers by the Bush/Cheney regime because it still had the ability to shock and dismay.