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National groups are heralding in a new administration led by Donald Trump as he is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. [Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement, “We are pleased to see President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence sworn in today and look forward to immediately working together to advance protections for unborn children and their mothers. ” Dannenfelser continued: Already, the difference between this administration and its predecessor could not be more clear. President Trump continually surrounds himself with key advisers and personnel who share his commitment to protecting the lives of the vulnerable, as well as taxpayers. We have been impressed by the skill and experience of the team he has put in place during the transition. Together, we will advance a culture of life by fulfilling the commitments made during the campaign. With President Trump and a Congress, we have an historic opportunity to advance policy that will save lives. ” Dannenfelser served as national chairwoman of Trump’s coalition. As a candidate for the presidency, Trump outlined four policy commitments in a letter to leaders: “This is a day of hope for the movement, which has fought so tenaciously to protect unborn children and their mothers in every political climate,” Dannenfelser said. In a letter to supporters, March for Life Action president Tom McCluskey said, “Under the Obama Administration, our nation saw an unprecedented expansion of government abortion funding, and the prosecution of Americans — like the Little Sisters of the Poor and the staff at the March for Life — because of our beliefs. ” “I am hopeful about the incoming Administration,” he continued. “I am optimistic that in these next 100 days, and coming years, we can see a reversal of policies in our government. The new Congress presents the movement with many opportunities to pass legislation and advance a culture of life. ” The 44th annual March for Life will be held on Friday, January 27 on the national mall in Washington, D. C. Addressing the tens of thousands of participants expected will be President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway, a longtime advocate. “We are thrilled to have Kellyanne Conway speak at this year’s March for Life,” Jeanne Mancini, March for Life president, said. “As the first female to run a successful presidential campaign and as a steadfast advocate for life and family issues, Kellyanne beautifully embodies the 2017 March for Life’s theme, ‘The Power of One. ’” “It is our hope that this year’s March for Life will encourage each of us to seek and fulfill our unique mission to the best of our ability because only in doing so we will collectively build a culture of life in the U. S. — a culture where abortion is unthinkable,” Mancini added. The March for Life is the world’s largest demonstration. It is held each year on or around the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. | 1 |
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A source at MSNBC’s Morning Joe confirms that the newly-elected Trump has made a decision regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. Source tells @Morning_Joe @realDonaldTrump won’t pursue investigations into @HillaryClinton for private email server use/Clinton Foundation.
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) November 22, 2016
Despite all his campaign bluster, when he was calling Clinton “crooked Hillary” and promising that Clinton would “be in jail” once he was president, it seems Trump has had a change of heart. It seems like only a month ago that Donald Trump told his supporters that:
‘This is the most heinous, the most serious thing that I’ve ever seen involving justice in the United States — in the history of the United States.’
In fact, it was only a month ago. Trump promised his bloodthirsty supporters that he would “lock her up” as president, and just six weeks ago Trump promised during the second presidential debate that he would appoint a “special prosecutor” to look into Hillary Clinton’s “situation” regarding her use of a private email server.
Five days after being elected, Trump did one of the most rapid walkbacks in presidential history when asked about that “special prosecutor” to throw Hillary Clinton in prison. When asked by 60 Minutes interviewer, Lesley Stahl, about his plans for the former secretary of state, Trump balked.
‘I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt them. They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them. And I will give you a very, very good and definitive answer the next time we do 60 Minutes together.’
The same man who fanned the flames with supporters who called Clinton a “criminal” and “evil,” who exploited women who claimed that they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and laughed at as a child rape victim by Hillary Clinton, now wants the American public to know that Bill and Hillary Clinton are “good people.”
Of course, it was never in question whether or not Hillary Clinton would be convicted of a crime or sentenced to prison, since multiple investigations by GOP-led committees regarding Benghazi and two investigations by the FBI regarding the private email server that Clinton and every modern predecessor of hers used turned up no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Just like every other promise Trump made on the campaign trail to attract voters with vengeance and hatred on their minds, it was all just smoke and mirrors.
Featured image via Getty/Chip Somodevilla Share this Article! | 0 |
Former NFL tight end Todd Heap accidentally killed his daughter Friday afternoon, while moving his truck. [According to police, Heap was moving his truck forward in his driveway when the accident occurred, and the child died at a local hospital. The incident occurred in Mesa, Arizona, in a community called Las Sendas. Police report that Heap showed no signs of impairment. Heap, a draft pick of the Ravens in 2001, played ten seasons in Baltimore before playing two seasons with the Cardinals in his native Arizona, and then retiring in 2012. Both former teams released statements expressing sorrow and support for Heap and his family. The Ravens said in a statement, “We cannot imagine the heartbreak and sorrow Todd and Ashley’s family feels right now. This is news and an overwhelmingly sad tragedy. Our prayers, our thoughts and our hearts are with the Heaps, who have contributed so much to the Ravens and Baltimore community. We believe their deep faith and tremendous support from friends and family will help them through this unimaginable time. ” The Cardinals statement read, “Our hearts go out to Todd, Ashley and the Heap family. It is a grief that is beyond words and one which no family should ever experience. Hopefully the prayers, love and support of their incredible group of friends and family provide them comfort that along with their strong faith will lead them through this unspeakably difficult time. ” Heap hails from Mesa, and played his college football for Arizona State prior to getting drafted by the Ravens. Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 1 |
Nat Geo’s iconic ‘Afghan Girl’ arrested for false documents in Pakistan Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 19:10 Get short URL © Tim Chong / Reuters The woman behind National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry’s famous ‘Afghan Girl’ portrait has been arrested in Peshawar, Pakistan for possessing falsified documents.
Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency arrested Sharbat Gula at her home on Wednesday for having a forged Computerised National Identity Card.
Gula’s ID cards for both Pakistan and Afghanistan were taken from her. She faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted.
The arrests coincides with a Pakistani crackdown on undocumented immigrants. URGENT: Britain stops taking child #refugees from Calais ‘Jungle’ at request of French police https://t.co/sI3LYeEZTg pic.twitter.com/Lec9tVMGEu — RT (@RT_com) October 24, 2016
Gula swept to fame after her image appeared on a 1985 cover of National Geographic. It was taken by McCurry at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar in 1984 when she was about 12-years-old.
Gula’s striking green eyes has seen her being dubbed the Afghan Mona Lisa, and her photograph is ranked in the top 5 of National Geographic’s most iconic images. Steve McCurry's famed Afghan Girl on the cover of @NatGeo 's 1984 magazine is on a judicial remand for a fake Pak-ID with the FIA #Peshawar . pic.twitter.com/3szkw1KesG — Iftikhar Firdous (@IftikharFirdous) October 26, 2016
Gula’s identity was a mystery for 18 years, until McCurry finally tracked her down in 2002, after returning to the region more than 10 times hoping to find her.
Gula’s parents were killed in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war.
In 1992, Gula left Pakistan and returned to Afghanistan where she married a baker and had three children in a village in Eastern Afghanistan. National Geographic was able to verify Gula was the famous girl by comparing her moles and scar, as well as using iris scanning technology.
"Her eyes are as haunting now as they were then," McCurry said at the time. "She remembered me, primarily because she had never been photographed before I made the image of her in 1984, or since then." Mentally ill convict to be executed after court rules schizophrenia 'not a mental disorder' in #Pakistan https://t.co/UZZSogP6QS pic.twitter.com/UqfLREcAKM — RT (@RT_com) October 22, 2016
Last year, Pakistani media reported the National Database and Registration Authority had cancelled the cards of Gula and two men said to be her sons because they had been illegally issued. Three officials are wanted for issuing her card and have been missing since it was first reported.
Gula applied for an identity card in 2014, using the name Sharbat Bibi. It isn’t clear why Gula returned to Pakistan after living in Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s investigation into fake ID cards has found more than 60,000 cases of non-nationals holding cards. The country is home to 2.5 million Afghan refugees. | 0 |
Chia seeds are among the healthiest foods on the planet, and since they’re small and versatile, they’re easy to incorporate into tons of different beverages and meals. In just two... | 0 |
WATCH HILL, R. I. — You can’t miss High Watch, a rambling, white clapboard 1920s “cottage” that sprawls atop the bluff that gives this town its name, just before the inflection point, as Nate McBride, a local architect, put it, of the Long Island Sound as it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. It looms over East Beach and Lighthouse Road, a hulking landmark whose most notable public era, for locals of a certain age, was during the 1960s, when its owner at the time, Rebekah West Harkness, a Standard Oil heiress, became a patron of the Joffrey Ballet and then founded her own company. Dancers practiced on the lawn for more than a few summers, though when Mrs. Harkness planted a blue plastic Buckminster Fuller dome there as a practice space, the neighbors were outraged and sued to have it removed. For the last three years, however, the place has belonged to Taylor Swift, bought for $17. 75 million, reportedly in an deal. And the people frolicking on its lawns aren’t ballet dancers, but rather Ms. Swift’s famous friends from the music and fashion worlds. It has become a landmark of a different sort, familiar to Ms. Swift’s 86 million Instagram followers, for the annual Fourth of July party she holds there. With its summer colony — a cohort of multigenerational families tucked into shingled houses — and its diminutive main drag, the picturesque Bay Street, this town is a curious choice for a megawatt celebrity like Ms. Swift, 26. (Why not the potato fields of the Hamptons?) And High Watch is a peculiar spot for such a celebrity to hole up, given its fishbowl site and proximity to the public beach, with an access path that runs along its property line. When Ms. Swift first moved in, “No Trespassing” signs appeared around the property’s perimeter that were prefaced with, “I knew you were trouble when you walked in,” a coy reference to one of her own lyrics that irritated some locals, as did her shoring up, with the blessing of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council, the property’s eroding armor stone sea wall and planting a fence at its edge. You didn’t have to be one of her social media followers to see what fun Ms. Swift had there this year. The Boston Globe and Entertainment Weekly were among the many, many publications that printed photos of the star romping in the surf with her friends. There was the actor Tom Hiddleston (the man she started dating shortly after her breakup with Calvin Harris, a D. J. and musician) in an “I ♥ T. S. ” tank top embracing Ms. Swift, who wore a red swimsuit that said “America” across her chest. There were Gigi Hadid, Ruby Rose, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, among other young celebrities, who rushed into the water, posed for a group shot, and rushed out again, climbing the armor stones to the manicured lawn, upon which they tossed a football and careered down an enormous inflated red bouncy water slide. On a recent Friday, the slide was still visible, but the only dedicated Taylor tourists were four friends from West Springfield, Mass. who had come to spend a day in town. “We knew she lived here,” said Sydney Brosseau, 18, “so we came down to take some photos, too. She’s got a great view!” At the Flying Horse Carousel, which is old enough to be listed on the National Historic Register, Maya Fontaine, a staff member, said she had never had a sighting, but she remains hopeful. “I’m here working almost every day,” she said. “We’re, like, Taylor Swift fanatics in my house. Our manager told us that if we do see her, to not shout or draw attention, because that wouldn’t be polite. ” At the Olympia Tea Room, Ms. Swift’s restaurant of choice, the two young hostesses gave a practiced, “We have no comment,” to inquiries. So did a representative at the Ocean House, the enormous yellow clapboard hotel that was shuttered in 2003 and reopened in 2010 after a rebuilding project its seaside terrace offers a nice view of Ms. Swift’s house. In fact, the of the Ocean House may be a more seismic alteration to the area than Ms. Swift’s house purchase or her red bouncy slide. With rooms starting at about $1, 000 a night in the summer, and a square of sand accessorized with tented cabanas and yellow chaises, the Ocean House is a discordant display of gated excess on a beloved public beach. Despite the occasional stalker, like the guy who swam from a state beach in a wet suit early one morning to climb her rocks (odd, because why not just walk?) perhaps the strangest response to Ms. Swift’s residency here was when Gina Raimondo, the new governor of Rhode Island, proposed a tax on second homes worth more than a million dollars that was immediately labeled “the Taylor Swift tax. ” (Governor Raimondo quickly withdrew the proposal.) “She has as much right as any human being to own property,” Bill Hecker, a real estate broker, and resident since 1983, said of Ms. Swift. “She pretty much stays to herself because she has to. There are naysayers. I’m not one of them. I’ve never seen her frolicking in the waves, and I’ve never seen the paparazzi. I hope she enjoys living here as much as I do. ” Edith Eglin, a summer resident since 1938 and the president of the Watch Hill Chapel Society, said: “I consider her coming here a big surprise and a pleasant one. Did it encourage people with preteen children to come here and buy houses? I don’t think so. Has there been increased air traffic at our little airport? I doubt it. Her plane is too big to get in here. ” To Mr. McBride, the architect, “Taylor Swift is an anomaly,” he said. “So she’s like our pet celebrity. Everyone has kind of adopted her and refers to her by her first name. She’s ours now. In a community like this, you either absorb or deflect. ” Ms. Swift’s Fourth of July party this year went unnoticed as it unfurled in real time. Watch Hill residents, like the rest of the world, experienced it after the fact, as a media event. In any case, it was quickly overshadowed by the latest chapter in the feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West, as Mr. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, took a swipe at Ms. Swift on her TV show last Sunday. To briefly recap — stay with me here — Ms. Kardashian West then posted recordings of a phone call between her husband and Ms. Swift, in which it sounds as if Ms. Swift is giving her approval to the lyrics of Mr. West’s song “Famous,” an account that Ms. Swift quickly disputed in a statement on her Instagram account. (“Famous,” famously, says some nasty things about Ms. Swift.) What does all this have to do with Watch Hill? The way in which viral media works is through “generators and prompts,” like Ms. Swift’s July 4 Instagram photos, said Charlotte Cotton, curator of “Public, Private, Secret,” an exhibit at the new International Center of Photography museum in Downtown Manhattan, which examines how identity is tied to public visibility. Ms. Cotton saw a direct relation between Ms. Swift’s romping photos and Ms. Kardashian West’s leaked video, which she explained as a kind of celebrity brand smackdown. “If you compare the visual iconography,” she said, “you can see that each is expressing her brand. Kim is about the cult of the individual, and also the power couple. Taylor, she’s all about the kids and the ingénue, and you can see that because her imagery is all about being in groups and frolicking for the camera. It speaks to a quasi younger audience: The digital natives who are driving today’s celebrity culture. I think Taylor Swift’s iconography is deeply threatening to the Kimye brand. ” Back in Watch Hill, of course, it is doubtful that anyone is engaging in this sort of deep semiotic discourse. Peter Kaufman, a retired editor living in nearby Westerly, R. I. said, “Before Taylor, the only celebrities that I know of that have been attached to this area are Ruth Buzzi, who was born in Westerly Hospital, and Sergio Franchi, a tenor who used to appear on the Ed Sullivan show, who bought a compound over in Stonington. ” Mr. Kaufman said Ms. Swift’s house is a required stop on the Watch Hill tour that he gives houseguests, particularly those with any connection to a preteen girl. A few years ago, Mr. Kaufman took one guest to the terrace of the Ocean House for drinks, because the man, whose granddaughters were in elementary school, was determined to take home photographic evidence of the pop star. The man swore he had captured Ms. Swift’s silhouette framed in a window, Mr. Kaufman recalled, “But we think it was just a lamp. ” | 1 |
HONG KONG — In August, business groups around the world petitioned China to rethink a proposed cybersecurity law that they said would hurt foreign companies and further separate the country from the internet. On Monday, China passed that law — a sign that when it comes to the internet, China will go its own way. The new rules, which were approved by the country’s Parliament and will go into effect next summer, are part of a broader effort to better define how the internet is managed inside China’s borders. Officials say the rules will help stop cyberattacks and help prevent acts of terrorism, while critics say they will further erode internet freedom. Business groups worry that parts of the law — such as required security checks on companies in industries like finance and communications, and mandatory data storage — will make foreign operations more expensive or lock them out altogether. Individual users will have to register their real names to use messaging services in China. Restrictions on the flow of data across borders “provide no security benefits but will create barriers to Chinese as well as foreign companies operating in industries where data needs to be shared internationally,” James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, wrote in an emailed statement. He added that by creating such restrictions, China risked isolating itself technologically from the rest of the world. But in many ways, the regulations are not likely to have a major impact on much about how business is done. Most of the rules are already in effect, but not codified. Other parts are vague enough that the government will determine their meaning on the fly. The law, however, is an important statement from Beijing on how the internet should be run: with tighter controls over companies and better tracking of individual citizens. Calling it a “basic law,” Chen Jihong, a partner at the Zhong Lun law firm in Beijing, said the rules were set up to deal with the growing number of legal issues regarding the Chinese internet and to seek to strike a balance between privacy and security. “The law only stipulates principles it would take laws or interpretations to specify the standards,” he said. Human Rights Watch said on Monday that it was concerned about several aspects of the law, including that it calls for registration for users of Chinese instant messaging services. “The already heavily censored internet in China needs more freedom, not less,” the group’s China director, Sophie Richardson, wrote in a statement. “Despite widespread international concern from corporations and rights advocates for more than a year, Chinese authorities pressed ahead with this restrictive law without making meaningful changes. ” The final law did soften a few elements. In particular, a second draft of the law said foreign businesses did not need to keep all of their data inside China — just important business data collected within China or about Chinese consumers. For years the government has been working to ensure that people’s real names are linked to their online activities. Beijing has also long restricted many types of online content, from pornography to political discussion. Foreign companies have at times dealt with the controls detailed in the new law. For example, during the past two years, American tech companies have had products subjected to government security reviews that target encryption and data storage. Beijing also distributed a pledge to American companies last year asking them to vow to respect Chinese national security and to store data within the country. The law is also part of a broader set of policy steps to streamline regulation of the internet. Analysts say the regulations seem to indicate that the Cyberspace Administration of China, a relatively new regulatory body created during President Xi Jinping’s tenure, ultimately is in charge of setting the agenda. Last year China passed a national security law that called for technology that supports crucial sectors of the economy and government to be “secure and controllable. ” Industry groups say that language means companies can be forced to allow access to their networks, provide encryption keys or hand over source code. After the state news media announced the law’s passage, comments on Chinese news and social media sites were largely censored. On one news app run by the internet company Tencent, some users applauded the law as a way for China to crack down on internet fraudsters and the less savory parts of the web. Others wondered what the cost of that security would be. “I hope this won’t be a law that does more to limit freedom of speech,” wrote one user under the screen name Leisa Wenzhou. | 1 |
On November 1, 2016, at approximately 8:15 P.M. CDT, a shooting occurred at Zodiac Park, which left five injured and one 16-year-old girl dead. The park is located at 5226 Zodiac Road, Memphis, Tennessee. According to Fox 8;
A witness who spoke with 911 correspondents stated that they saw about six people; all believed to be white men, had their faces covered by a bandana of an unspecified color exit luxurious cars to approach a crowd of kids already at the park. About 16 shots could be heard.
The Memphis Police Department have arrived on the scene, to find one 16-year-old girl dead and five others left injured at Zodiac Park in Memphis, Tennessee, after a shooting. The of the people involved are also believed to be under the age of 18 years old.
Three victims were taken to Regional One Health Medical Center. The Memphis Police Department sent a victim, to Letonheur Children’s Hospital. Officials sent another victim, in critical condition, to Baptist Desoto Hospital.
The six suspects in the shooting at Zodiac Park are still on the run. Police officials have detained a red Ford Mustang displaying Mississippi plates from the scene. This investigation is ongoing.
Update: Commercial Appeal
*Suspects were seen driving off in a two-door tan vehicle.
*Witness report seeing several white males fleeing into high scale cars after shots went off.
Written by Jhayla D, Tyson
Edited by Cathy Milne
Sources:
Commercial Appeal: 16-year-old Girl Dead, 5 Others Injured in Shooting at Zodiac Park
Fox 8: 16-year-old Girl Killed, Others Injured in Shooting at Tennessee Park
Top & Featured Image Courtesy of Michel Ngellen’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inline Image Courtesy of Brennan Lashever’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License memphis , shooting , tennessee , Zodiac Park | 0 |
ALL IN…IN THE HOOD…for Donald Trump! Donald Trump is on track to win more of the African-American vote than any other Republican in modern memory, said John Yob, CEO of a Michigan-based polling firm, Strategic National . And that’s why Barack Hussein Obama is running around campaigning so hard against him for Hillary. While that so-called “racist” Donald Trump along with Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali, were receiving the Ellis Island Medal of Honor from the National Ethnic Coalition Organization… …Hillary Clinton was singing the praises of Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, former leader in the Ku Klux Klan before becoming a U.S. Senator. Breitbart On Friday, a poll of 506 Pennsylvania voters by Harper Polling showed Trump has the support of 18.46 percent of African-Americans. An Oct. 30 poll of 1,249 likely voters in Pennsylvania showed Trump has 19 percent support among African Americans, while another 7 percent remain undecided. That poll has a error margin of 2.77 percent. In next-door Michigan, two nights of a tracking poll conducted for Fox 2 of 1,150 likely voters showed Trump with 14 percent support and 19 percent support. That’s equivalent to a two-point shift from Clinton to Trump in the state. Trump is gaining in Michigan partly because many African-American voters — especially younger voters who backed Sen. Bernie Saunders — distrust Clinton, said W ayne Bradley, state director of African-American engagement for the Michigan Republican Party. That distrust has helped cause a sharp drop in the number of absentee ballots mailed in from Detroit, even as other part of the state send in more ballots that before, Bradley said. Faced with a low turnout, the Clinton campaign is trying to frighten African-Americans to vote, but “t hat’s not a convincing enough argument,” he said. Trump’s gain among African-American voters is happening in many states, alongside an overall reduction in African-American enthusiasm and support for Obama’s designated successor. That drop-off in support from Obama’s 93 percent level will likely reduce the turnout for Clinton. That’s a problem for Democrats, because a 7.5 percent drop in nationwide African-American turnout would be equal to a one-point drop in a nationwide vote for Clinton. Reports say the early-voting turnout by Africans Americans has dropped by up to 10 percent in North Carolina and by somewhat less in Florida . President Barack Obama and other top Democrats have hopscotched through the states to push that turnout back up by election day. But pollsters face problems when trying to gauge opinions in a high-stakes emotional competition. Some concerned people lie to pollsters. For example, roughly 7 percent of college grads hide their support for Trump when they’re ask by pollsters over the phone, perhaps out of fear of penalties if their choice was made public. So when polls show a non-answer from respondents, for example, many undecided voters, the votes may be hiding a weak or strong preference for Trump. These factor may be impacting polls of African-Americans, who are being hammered by claims from Clinton and Obama that Trump is supposedly a racist. “If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers — the Klan — and hesitate when asked about that support, then you’ll tolerate that support when you’re in office,” Obama told an African-American crowd in North Carolina on Nov. 3. (See above for Hillary’s support of the KKK) A national poll by TIPP showed Clinton at only 75 percent support among all non-whites, including Hispanics, African-Americans and Latinos. That poll showed Trump getting support from 15 percent of non-whites , leaving 5 percent undecided and 5 percent supporting other candidates. Amid the disagreement, rivalries and complexity, Bradley is confident that Trump will do well among African-Americans. His final tally as the GOP candidate “will be a higher number that it has been in the past… [because] he’s working, he’s coming to these cities to deliver the message.” The African-American vote may even be enough to help push Trump over the so-called “blue wall” of Democratic northern states that stands in his path to the White House. Some say Trump is likely to get 16-25% of Black vote. | 0 |
Walter E. Mattson, a former president and chief operating officer of The New York Times, who helped transform the newspaper with innovative labor agreements and new technologies, died on Friday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 84. The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, his wife, Geraldine Mattson, said. He had been living in a retirement home in Sarasota and died at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. A production executive, Mr. Mattson was a tough, decision maker who preferred rumbling pressrooms and clattering composing rooms to the executive suite. He had once been a printer, and while he had degrees in accounting, engineering and advanced management, he cultivated a persona, eschewing small talk, holding his dinner fork like a shovel and buying suits off the rack at Sears, Roebuck. For much of the 1970s and ’80s Mr. Mattson was a man to the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, a corporate equivalent of A. M. Rosenthal, the paper’s powerful newsroom editor. Mr. Mattson negotiated labor contracts, spearheaded automation to replace production workers, diversified company media holdings, helped to revolutionize the paper’s appearance and pushed technology to extend its circulation to readers across the nation. In their 1999 book, “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times,” Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones said that Mr. Sulzberger had long had his eye on Mr. Mattson as president of the company. “He liked Mattson’s straightforward approach to problems, his encyclopedic grasp of business and production details, his stability and dedication, and his firm, decisive manner,” the authors wrote. “He also knew that Mattson had the operational experience he considered essential to lead a company of growing complexity. ” Mr. Mattson’s first major coup as The Times’s executive vice president and general manager was to negotiate a landmark 1974 agreement with the printers’ union. It was the death knell for Linotype machines, which cast type in hot lead, and opened a new era of typesetting at the paper. In exchange, The Times guaranteed lifetime employment for 800 printers, whose jobs disappeared through attrition. The agreement, with Local 6 of the International Typographical Union — it also covered The Daily News and its 600 printers — gradually ended restrictive and wasteful union work rules that duplicated many printing tasks, and it enabled The Times to cut costs sharply at a time of stagnant circulation and advertising revenues in a national recession, which had hit New York City particularly hard. In the Mr. Mattson, working closely with Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal, introduced striking and profitable changes in the newspaper’s appearance and content, switching from eight news columns on a page to six, and expanding the weekday Times from two sections to four. The measure gave the paper an airier, more open and modern look, making it easier to read. But the changes were not just cosmetic. The paper was a radical transformation. The first part carried foreign and national news, while two sections were given to metropolitan and news. The fourth inaugurated a cornucopia of feature sections that were different for each weekday: Sports on Mondays Science on Tuesdays Living on Wednesdays a Home section on Thursdays and Weekend, an arts and entertainment section, on Fridays. The Times also introduced four Sunday regional sections aimed at New York City’s affluent suburbs in New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut. The changes spurred advertising and feature articles on suburban localities, and on food, gardening, entertaining and other topics. Some critics said pieces on penthouse deck furniture and cooking undercut the paper’s reputation for serious journalism, but defenders said they took no space away from regular news and brightened the tone of The Times. In any case, the sections proved popular with readers and advertisers, and some media historians called them collectively the most important redesign of the paper since its purchase by Adolph Ochs in 1896. In 1976, Mr. Mattson announced plans to computerize The Times’s newsroom, and over the next two years writers and editors surrendered typewriters for bulky computer terminals that sped the processing of news. The last major dispute negotiated by Mr. Mattson was an pressmen’s strike in 1978 over demands by The Times, The News and The New York Post to cut the number of workers operating their presses. It ended with smaller staff reductions than the newspapers had sought and cost $150 million in advertising and circulation revenues. But the papers won concessions that insured profitability and eventual control over their own pressroom operations. Mr. Mattson brought another project to fruition in 1980: a national edition of The Times, edited in New York and transmitted by satellite to Chicago for distribution in the Midwest. Two years later, The Times began beaming its national edition to California for distribution to major cities in 13 Western states. Two decades later, the national edition accounted for more than half the print paper’s circulation. Mr. Mattson was named president when Mr. Sulzberger gave up the title in 1979 and formally took over the chief operating officer’s duties that he had been handling for years. He went on to diversify company holdings with dozens of broadcast, newspaper and magazine properties in the 1980s. Before retiring, he was a forceful advocate of The Times’s purchase of The Boston Globe in 1993 for $1. 1 billion, a transaction much criticized in leaner years. (In 2013, The Times sold The Globe and its other New England media properties to John W. Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $70 million.) “Walt was a wonderful business partner for my father,” Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The Times’s current publisher and chairman, said in an email on Friday. “He was kind and always straightforward, which Dad greatly valued, as did I in the few years we overlapped in management at The Times. ” Walter Edward Mattson Jr. was born in Erie, Pa. on June 6, 1932, to Walter Mattson and the former Florence Anderson. As a boy, he delivered papers for an uncle’s weekly in Erie. His father worked for the National Biscuit Company and was transferred to various cities, including Portland, Me. where Walter Jr. graduated from Deering High School in 1949. After two years in the Marine Corps, he worked nights as a printer at The Portland Press Herald while attending Portland Junior College and then Portland University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business and accounting in 1955. He married Geraldine Anne Horsman in 1953. Besides his wife, he is survived by two sons, Stephen and William a daughter, Carol Heylmun a sister, Norene Hastings eight grandchildren, and one . In the Mr. Mattson was an advertising manager for a newspaper in Oakmont, Pa. and a production assistant at The Boston Herald Traveler. After earning an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University in 1959, he joined The Times in 1960 as an assistant production manager. He became a vice president in 1970, attended summer advanced management programs at Harvard Business School and within three years was general manager, in charge of all business, marketing, circulation, personnel and production operations. Mr. Mattson oversaw years of solid profit growth in the 1980s, although The Times’s financial performance weakened late in the decade. In 1992, seven months after Arthur Sulzberger Jr. succeeded his father as publisher of The Times, Mr. Mattson stepped down as president and was named vice chairman. He worked with the younger Mr. Sulzberger on strategic planning before retiring in 1993. Mr. Mattson had a home in Sarasota and had for many years lived in Stamford, Conn. Since 2013, he and his wife had lived at the Plymouth Harbor retirement community in Sarasota. He was a member of the Times company’s board of directors in the 1980s and early 1990s. | 1 |
Meryl Streep, in a fiery speech criticizing President Trump on Saturday night, pledged to stand up against “brownshirts and bots” at a time when she and others are increasingly denouncing his administration’s policies and the president himself. Ms. Streep, in New York City accepting an award from the Human Rights Campaign, referred to the backlash she received after the Golden Globes in January, when she gave a speech denouncing Mr. Trump. “It’s terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks and armies of brownshirts and bots and worse, and the only way you can do it is to feel you have to,” Ms. Streep said. “You have to. You don’t have an option. You have to. ” It was not immediately clear to whom Ms. Streep was referring in using the loaded term “brownshirts,” which was originally applied to a paramilitary group that assisted the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The speech was an even more stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump than her Golden Globes speech. She seemed to relish a new type of role: Trump provocateur. Although this time, Ms. Streep was without a national television audience. She took a moment to respond directly to Mr. Trump, who called her “overrated” in the midst of a barrage of posts on Twitter the morning after the Golden Globes. “I am the most overrated, overdecorated and, currently, overberated actress, who likes football, of my generation,” Ms. Streep said. The crowd applauded wildly. Ms. Streep was receiving the National Ally for Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Near the beginning of her acceptance speech, she addressed, initially in a lighthearted way, one of the most controversial parts of her Golden Globes speech. “I do like football,” Ms. Streep said, to a roar of laughter from the crowd at the Waldorf Astoria. At the Golden Globes, Ms. Streep said, “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. ” She received a torrent of criticism, particularly from conservatives, for disparaging the two sports, something she acknowledged in her speech and attempted to clarify what she meant. “It isn’t helpful to make it us versus them,” Ms. Streep said. Referring to the film producer and director Mike Nichols, she continued, “I was making a joke, and Mike Nichols told me, ‘If you have to explain the joke, Meryl, you’re doomed. ’” Later in the speech, she returned to criticizing Mr. Trump. “If his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for,” Ms. Streep said. “Because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is. ” At one point, Ms. Streep referred to Mr. Trump as a “” and said, “The whip of the executive can through a Twitter feed lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic irregularity and easily provoked predictability. ” | 1 |
Gültan KisanakGültan KisanakAprès l’arrestation mardi soir de Gültan Kisanak et de Firat Anli, les deux co-maires de la grande ville kurde de Diyarbakir, les représentants du HDP en Europe appellent les parlements et les institutions internationales à exprimer leur opposition aux pratiques illégales du gouvernement turc.Selon les informations recueillies par les représentants du parti kurde HDP ( Parti Démocratique des Peuples ), Firat Anli, l’un des deux maires de Diyarbakir a été interpellé à son domicile, tandis que sa collègue Gültan Kisanak, était arrêtée à l’aéroport de Diyarbakir à sa descente de l’avion qui la ramenait d’Ankara. Les domiciles des deux maires ont été fouillés, ainsi que les bâtiments du conseil minicipal.Gültan Kisanak a été en 2014 la première femme élue maire de Diyarbakir, la grande ville du sud-est de la Turquie, considérée comme la « capitale » de la région kurde. Officiellement, c’est elle qui est maire de la ville, mais la tradition kurde veut qu’il y ait toujours un homme et une femme à la tête d’une commune, pour respecter la parité.Ancienne journaliste, Gültan Lisanak est une figure très connue du mouvement pour les droits démocratiques en Turquie. Co-présidente de l’ancien parti BDP ( qui deviendra par la suite le HDP ), elle est aujourd’hui la présidente de tous les maires des villes du Sud-Est de la Turquie, qu’elle représente auprès dans les discussions auprès des instances officielles.Gültan Lisanak avait déjà été arrêtée lors du coup d’état militaire de 1980, et torturée pour avoir refusé de renoncer à son identité kurde.« Chaque jour était un combat pour survivre », a-t-elle expliqué au site de presse Al Monitor, pour décrire ses conditions de survie dans l’ancienne prison de Diyarbakir, qu’elle décrit comme un « enfer » où « les abus avaient pris des proportions barbares. »Gültan Kisanak a déjà passé en tout quatre années et demi de sa vie en prison.En l’interpellant hier, c’est donc à une figure politique majeure de la Turquie et du peuple kurde que s’en prend le gouvernement d’Erdogan. Son collègue, Firat Anli,est avocat, c’est un militant connu des Droits de l’Homme.Le HDP parle d’une volonté d’Erdogan et de son parti l’AKP, « d’anéantir la volonté politique du peuple kurde et de l’opposition démocratique dans le pays. » Au cours d’une conférence de presse qui a suivi l’arrestation des deux co-maires de Diyarbakir, le procureur a accusé, sans présenter de preuve, les deux élus de collaborer avec les combattants kurdes du PKK, accusation rituellement avancée dès qu’il s’agit d’arrêter ou de destituer des élus kurdes.26 élus locaux kurdes ont déjà été démis de leurs fonctions par les autorités turques depuis le mois de juillet.Pour le HDP, la détention des deux co-maires de Diyarbakir est « contraire aux droits de l'homme, » et « contredit de nombreuses conventions internationales dont la Turquie est signataire. »Le parti kurde appelle toutes les organisations non gouvernementales, les partis politiques, les « forces de démocratie et de paix », les institutions internationales et parlements « à ne pas rester silencieux face à cette illégalité, et à exprimer leurs réactions par la voie démocratique. »Passée en 20 ans de 250 000 à un million 600 000 habitants, la ville de Diyarbakir est une ville emblématique de l’Anatolie du sud-est. Elle a été marquée l’hiver dernier par des affrontements violents entre des jeunes habitants de la ville, soumis à un régime de couvre-feu et de contrôles permanents, et les forces spéciales de l’armée turque, qui avaient déployé des très importants moyens militaires ( véhicules blindés, barrages, militaires lourdement armés.. ) Le quartier historique de Sur, a été le lieu des affrontements les plus violents avec les forces spéciales turques. | 0 |
BEIJING — China struck $225 billion in deals to acquire companies abroad last year, a number that signaled to the world that Chinese business leaders were hot to haggle. Now, China — with a worried eye on the money leaving its borders — is telling some of its companies to cool it down. On Saturday, in the strongest public signal yet that Beijing is changing course, China’s commerce minister castigated what he called “blind and irrational investment. ” At a news briefing during the annual meeting of China’s congress, the minister, Zhong Shan, said officials planned to intensify supervision of what he called a small number of companies. “Some enterprises have already paid the price,” said Mr. Zhong, a protégé of President Xi Jinping. “Some even have had a negative impact on our national image. ” Just a day earlier, Zhou Xiaochuan, the country’s top central banker, had also questioned the wisdom of some recent Chinese overseas deals. “Some are not in line with our requirements and policies for overseas investment, such as in sports, entertainment and clubs,” he said. “This didn’t bring much benefit to China and caused some complaints overseas. ” The comments are the clearest confirmation that the government is hitting the brakes on the sometimes chaotic rush overseas by Chinese companies with a reputation for having more money than aptitude. “Are these guys in over their heads?” said Brock Silvers, a longtime investment banker in Shanghai. “The answer to me is, in some cases, they seem to be. ” A series of Chinese deals have come apart this winter — although it is not always clear whether Beijing stepped in or whether buyers themselves suddenly decided they were making a big mistake. On Friday, the owners of Dick Clark Productions, which produces the Golden Globe Awards, said a $1 billion agreement to sell the company to the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda had collapsed. Dalian Wanda, a real estate giant that has branched out into filmmaking and cinemas, had no immediate comment. Chinese families and companies have been rushing to move money out of the country for more than a year amid worries over a slowing national economy, a weakening currency and numerous other problems. The outflow has been expensive — China has spent $1 trillion over the past two and a half years to shore up the value of its currency — and threatens to damage the country’s efforts to help its rising middle class. In recent months, China has increased its efforts to stanch the flow, considerably tightening enforcement of its strict limits on how much money can move across its borders. The effort appears to be showing success: The most recent data, for February, showed a slight increase in the size of China’s huge holdings of foreign money managed by its currency administrator, one of the rough proxies for the sum of money moving out. Among its moves, Beijing secretly told banks in late November that any movement of $5 million or more out of the country required special approval. Since then, regulators have also told each bank not to move more money out of the country for clients than they take in. Some banks had been moving up to six times as much money out of the country. That rule has complicated not only mergers and acquisitions but also the way many global companies move their profits overseas, in the form of dividends. That could put into question whether China is complying with its commitments to the International Monetary Fund, which are part of a broader Chinese effort to increase the profile of the country’s currency. Foreign executives describe broad difficulties moving money out of China. “On dividend payments, European Union companies experience more tedious paperwork, extended times of processing and the issue of breaking up the dividends over several months if it is a sizable amount,” said Jörg Wuttke, the president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. Mr. Zhou, China’s central banker, said on Friday that dividends should not be subject to restrictions, but he did not go into details. China’s $225. 4 billion in announced deals for overseas properties last year amounted to more than double 2015’s total, according to Dealogic, a data firm that tracks deals. Deal makers say China is likely to continue to be active in overseas acquisitions this year, especially as it moves to add technical to its portfolio. The country’s biggest deal announced last year, for the Swiss agricultural giant Syngenta, is widely expected to close this year, although it faces regulatory hurdles. Chinese officials appear eager to portray China’s tougher stance on deals abroad as an effort to prompt more responsible investing rather than an effort to shore up the country’s financial system. Mr. Zhong, the commerce minister, said the country had not changed its policy of encouraging Chinese companies to become more global. But Chinese officials have a strong incentive not to acknowledge the administrative limits they have put on large movements of money out of the country. Such limits may make foreign investors more wary of putting money into China, at a time when Chinese leadership is trying to encourage more bond purchases by foreigners and other investments into the country to offset the money moving out. In one of the biggest Chinese deals to come apart, Anbang Insurance, a politically connected company with a murky ownership structure, abruptly pulled out of a $14 billion deal to buy Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Some of the other deals involved real estate firms or gritty industrial companies that have tried to buy their way into Hollywood — a trend that has also dismayed some in Washington, who worry that China may be acquiring too much influence over American entertainment. Anhui Xinke New Materials, a copper processing company in central China, made a deal in November to buy Voltage Pictures, an American film financing and production company, for $350 million. A month later, Anhui Xinke pulled out of the transaction before its completion. Many Chinese companies already have a lot of money overseas. More than $500 billion sluiced out of the country in the few months after the stock market plummeted in summer 2015 and before China began gradually enforcing previously dormant rules on money transfers in February 2016. Much of that money is still being allocated to investments, along with another $50 billion or more that is leaving the country each month and the accumulated earnings on previous investments made overseas. Qiang Li, a managing partner for China at the law firm DLA Piper, said that only a quarter of the many deals in which he was involved relied on transferring money out of China and might face obstacles. The rest are proceeding without difficulty because they use dollars that are already overseas, he said. “There is no question,” he said, “that investors will continue to invest overseas, by getting the proper approvals. ” | 1 |
Posted on October 30, 2016 by Baxter Dmitry in News , US // 0 Comments
A new WikiLeaks email from John Podesta’s account reveals the Clinton campaign manager was worried about internal leaks and plotted to “ make an example of a suspected leaker ” by punishing them with “ beyond internal discipline ”– whether or not there was “ any real basis for it. “
Responding to an email from John Benenson about a “ damaging ” leak, Podesta wrote, “ I generally agree with the point, but we need a strategy on this that goes beyond internal discipline. “
As well as exposing the Clinton camp as the kind of organization that punishes people based on suspicion alone, the question of what “ beyond internal discipline ” means is raised – and in light of recent events the answers may be grim. Recommended (2 weeks ago) WikiLeaks Dumps More Podesta Emails, Bringing Total To Over 11,000
Joel Benenson said, “ I think we have to make examples now of people who have violated the trust of HRC and the rest of the team .” Later in the email chain Robbie Mook replied to Podesta’s message, saying “ I would love an example being made.”
The revelation of Podesta’s plan to punish a suspected leaker with “ serious consequences ” takes on a chilling aspect considering the fate of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee employee widely suspected of blowing the whistle on his employers. Rich was murdered in July and the case remains unsolved.
Speaking on Nieuwsuur, a Dutch news channel, Julian Assange said that Rich’s murder was a cause of concern for WikiLeaks’ whistleblowers.
“There is a 27 year old who worked for the DNC who was shot in the back – murdered – just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington .”
Asked by the host if Seth Rich was a WikiLeaks source, Assange said, “ I am suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that .”
They will be more concerned after learning the Clinton campaign is the kind of organization that “ makes examples ” of people they are suspicious about – with or without having “ any real basis for it .”
The full email chain can be read here . | 0 |
Written by Justin Raimondo As Donald Trump takes the reins and we all prepare for the next four years, the need to translate rhetoric into reality comes to the fore. Trump spent the campaign repeating a phrase that horrified the elites – especially the foreign policy Establishment – even adopting it as his official campaign theme: “America first.” The elites were aghast because the phrase evokes the legacy of the biggest anti-interventionist movement in American history: the America First Committee , a coalition of conservative businessmen and progressive activists (including the socialist Norman Thomas) who not only opposed US entry into World War II, but also pointed to the authoritarian tendencies of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which they feared would be exacerbated in wartime – as indeed they were . Smeared by pro-war liberals and their Communist party allies as “Nazi sympathizers” — in the same way antiwar activists were later accused of being pro-Communist, pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-terrorist, etc. – the AFC has not fared well with historians, who, for the most part, are Roosevelt partisans, and globalists in any case. The America Firsters are the original “isolationists” the War Party warns us about, “dangerous” subversives who saw that in the quest for a “world order,” Americans would lose their old republic. Which is precisely what happened . Whether consciously or not, Trump has revived this long-disdained trend in American politics, and, what’s more, he has won. So how does –or should – he translate this kind of rhetoric into reality? What follows is the first of a series of columns on what a foreign policy that puts “America first” would look like. Today we deal with US-Russian relations. Stop the new cold war – Hillary Clinton’s unhinged accusation that Trump is a “Russian puppet” gave us a scary preview of what Russo-American relations would be like if she had won. These crazed charges were in response to Trump’s polar opposite view, exemplified when he repeatedly said “ Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia? ” Given a clear choice between a new cold war and rapprochement, voters clearly preferred the latter. Now it’s time to translate rhetoric into reality. Trump should immediately meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and begin negotiating a comprehensive accord to settle all outstanding issues, including: Unilaterally lifting US sanctions against Russia – This is the prerequisite for productive negotiations, a signal that we don’t consider the Russians our enemies, and that the vindictive policies pursued by the previous administration are a thing of the past. Renewing arms limitations – Several arms reduction treaties have been allowed to lapse , or have been nullified , increasing the danger of open conflict that could end in disaster. Of particular importance is reviving the joint anti-proliferation efforts designed to locate and secure “loose nukes” floating around the post-Soviet regions. Pulling back US troops from provocative “military exercises” – This is another prerequisite for mutually advantageous relations. The Russians rationally perceive a threat to their security as long as NATO troops are mobilizing at the gates of Moscow . Removing this provocation is essential to normalizing relations. Abjuring a “missile shield” in Eastern Europe – The rationale for a “missile shield” has always been the alleged threat of an attack on Eastern Europe by … Iran . Aside from being a lie, this is not a very convincing lie: indeed, it is nonsensical. The reality is that a) the real target is Russia, and b) Russia’s military budget – now undergoing reductions – is dwarfed by Europe’s: Russia’s GDP is the equivalent of Spain’s . The idea that they’re going to invade and conquer Europe is pure fiction. Recognizing the referendum that overwhelmingly voted to reunite Crimea with Russia – The regime change operation that overthrew the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovich and plunged that country into chaos was sponsored and succored by the US , acting in concert with Germany and other European powers. And it was a mistake, one that could have just as far reaching consequences as our disastrous policy in Iraq. Crimea was handed to Ukraine before the fall of the Berlin Wall by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 : it had been an integral part of Russia since the days of Catherine the Great. This thorn in the side of US-Russian relations must be pulled. Setting up a US-Russian working group, also involving regional stakeholders, to resolve the “frozen conflicts” in South Ossetia, Transnistria, Abhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh - These are all tripwires that, due to our membership in NATO, and other commitments,could result in open conflict between the US and Russia. Do we really want to go to war with a nuclear-armed country in order to defend Moldova’s claims to rebellious Transnistria ? Neutralizing Ukraine – Ukraine, formerly part of the old Soviet Union, is now an independent nation, and a sore point between the US and Russia. The current regime is unstable, corrupt, and dependent on US aid. We have no legitimate national interests in propping it up: we do have an interest in reducing tensions in the region. Ukraine should be “neutralized,” i.e. kept out of NATO. Furthermore, US troops currently on “training” missions there should be withdrawn in exchange for a pledge guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Resolving the Syrian conflict – The cries of the War Party to “solve” the Syrian civil war in favor of Islamist rebels have drowned out all sensible realistic solutions to the horrific conflict that has torn that nation apart. It’s time for a fresh approach. First on the agenda is abandoning the bankrupt policy of regime-change that has led to tragic consequences in Libya, Iraq, and now Syria. Funding for the rebels must be ended: as Trump has said “ We have no idea who these people are ,” and he is absolutely right. All too often we have wound up swelling the ranks of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers by trying to micro-manage the future of that country. Russian intervention on behalf of the government of Bashar al-Assad has complicated the conflict and risks involving US “advisors” in direct confrontation with both Russian and Syrian government forces. We should immediately reestablish diplomatic relations with the Syrian government, appoint an Ambassador, and begin trilateral negotiations with Russia and the Assad government about how to deal with ISIS. While the Iraq and Afghan conflicts have eaten up most of the energy and attention of US policymakers, relations with Russia have suffered — and have been allowed to dangerously degenerate under President Obama. The famous “Russian reset” consisted of a series of demands made by Washington – e.g. overflight of Russian territory to resupply US troops in Afghanistan – without any corresponding concessions except on the margins. The main issue – NATO’s relentless eastward march and the continuing US regime change campaign in Syria – were ignored in spite of Russian entreaties. The core of contention is the undefined role of NATO in the post-Soviet world. As President-elect Trump said during the campaign, the alliance is “ obsolete ” – and a financial burden on the US. An “America first” foreign policy worthy of the name must reevaluate NATO, and be prepared to abandon it if it cannot or will not be fundamentally transformed. NATO’s original mission was to protect Western Europe from a Soviet invasion that never came – and now that the Soviet Union is no more, and the nations of the former Warsaw Pact are out of the Russian orbit, it’s high time Europe began to stand on its own. We have to ask ourselves: Is defending the “territorial integrity” of, say, Estonia, really worth risking World War III with nuclear-armed Russia? Poland’s borders have changed many times over the previous decades, as have the borders of most of the states in the region. Are we committed to going to war to ensure that they remain forever immutable? This is one of the most volatile regions on earth, with obscure ethnic conflicts that go back centuries: while we have an interest in peace, we cannot guarantee the security of its governments and peoples. That’s their job. The job of our policymakers and military leaders is to put distinctly American interests first – and that cannot mean policing the world. Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com . Related | 0 |
US uses Tunisia as drone base for Libya operations - report Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 20:53 Get short URL © U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter / Reuters Washington has been secretly operating drones from a base in Tunisia since June, US officials have admitted. The unarmed US Air Force Reaper drones are said to be gathering intelligence on Islamic State targets in the neighboring Libya. Trends Arab world protests , Islamic State
Intelligence obtained by the drones flying out of the unspecified base in Tunisian territory has been used in more than 300 US airstrikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the Libyan city of Sirte. Despite the airstrikes and a push from Western-backed Libyan militias on the ground, IS militants remain entrenched in the city.
The existence of a secret drone facility in Tunisia was admitted on Wednesday by US officials speaking to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity. There are some 70 US military personnel overseeing the drone operations in Tunisia, Pentagon officials told the paper. The US government has not officially acknowledged the operation, while the Tunisian embassy declined to comment to the Post. US military now flying Predator or Reaper drones from Tunisia, Niger, Italy, Djibouti, Jordan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE — Craig Whitlock (@CraigMWhitlock) October 26, 2016
The US sought access to an air base in Tunisia to close a critical “blind spot” for US intelligence operations in North Africa. Since the Western-backed rebellion against the government of Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has become a major base of operations for IS as well as Al-Qaeda militants.
US aircraft fly actual bombing missions from the Naval Air Station in Sigonella, on the Italian island of Sicily. Surveillance drones have also been based there, but the Italian government has refused to grant permission for armed drones until earlier this year, citing concerns of an “antiwar backlash” at home, the officials said.
Tunisia was the first North African country to overthrow its government in 2011, launching the so-called “Arab Spring” that led to upheaval in Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. The Obama administration has kept the negotiations secret because of concerns for “Tunisia’s young democracy” and possible terrorist attacks, officials told the Post. Read more Tunisia: From hope to disillusion
Islamic State has already claimed a number of attacks in Tunisia, including the June 2015 massacre of almost 40 foreign tourists at the beach resort of Sousse and the November 2015 bombing of a presidential escort bus that claimed 12 lives. It was an IS attack on a town bordering Libya in March 2016 that helped the Tunisians make up their minds about the drone base, the US officials said.
Under the terms granting the Pentagon access to the base, the US committed to help build up Tunisian intelligence collection capabilities, the Post reported. Though currently only unarmed surveillance drones are based at the facility, they could be armed in the future if the Tunisian authorities give their permission, US officials told the paper.
Washington has sought to expand the network of its drone bases across Africa. Last month, the Intercept obtained documents showing that the US has been building a $100 million drone base in the central Niger town of Agadez, from where the remotely operated craft could stage operations in Algeria, Libya, Chad, Nigeria and Mali. | 0 |
Singer Lily Allen appears to have threatened Tommy Robinson with legal action after the PEGIDA UK leader got the better of her during a heated exchange on Twitter. [The row was sparked by a tweet Allen posted, in which she accused the Daily Mail of racism for highlighting the migrant status of the man suspected to have killed 39 people during New Year celebrations in Istanbul. Robinson called her out on the tweet, saying she was more concerned with “virtue signalling about racism” than she was about those who had died. This fucking idiot virtue signalling about #racism rather than actually giving a fuck about the dead people https: . — Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) January 1, 2017, As the spat continued, Robinson asked Allen whether she felt any responsibility toward girls who have been attacked by migrants and asylum seekers in the UK, adding “after all you invited these #refugees in. ” Allen responded: “If you’re referring to my trip to Calais that was regarding the Dubs amendment and our legal responsibilities. ” But Robinson countered that the government’s responsibility is first and foremost “the safety security of OUR people, not people in the Middle East. ” Allen bizarrely responded: “where does it say that?” to which Robinson replied with a screenshot of a government national security document in which protecting “our people” both at home and overseas, was detailed as a priority. . @lilyallen @RektRolfe here https: . pic. twitter. — Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) January 2, 2017, As the skirmished progressed, Robinson asked Allen whether she had ever spoken to the victims of Muslim sexual grooming gangs in the UK, to which she responded that she had only ever personally been sexually assaulted by white men. I’ve only ever been sexually assaulted by white males so I feel slightly biased. https: . — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 1, 2017, Allen then suggested that the movements of all white men should be “restricted globally,” in response to another Twitter user who sardonically said that, as the apparent sole cause of evil, white men should be “locked up”. You know what, the police should just lock up all white males as it seems we do everything evil in this world. https: . — Bandog (@Bandoguk) January 1, 2017, That’s a bit strong, but restricting their movement on a global scale could be a good idea. https: . — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 1, 2017, Robinson proceeded to call out Allen on her claims of sexual assault, asking Allen why she hadn’t reported the crimes to the police — a question which causing the singer to suggest that he didn’t believe her, bringing more opprobrium from other Twitter users upon herself. . @TRobinsonNewEra @milly_rigby are you accusing me of lying about having been sexually Assaulted? Pls clarify. — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 3, 2017, Is @lilyallen saying that the victims of Rotherham are making it up? pic. twitter. — Lord Jesus Christ (@JesusChristNewz) January 3, 2017, Allen later linked to an article in the Independent attempting to explain what she had meant when she had claimed only to have been assaulted by white males. “Sometimes, in some conversations, it is still necessary to say: ‘Yes, white men can be rapists too (and not just in cases where the women basically made them do it by wearing short skirts or drinking alcohol or venturing outside the house at night)’,” the author of the article claimed. But the online paper’s readers too were having none of it, pointing out that Allen has chosen to live in the Cotswolds, a wealthy rural area of England where the population is almost exclusively white, while Robinson lives in the much more ethnically mixed city of Luton. “Allen is ignoring the statistical evidence which clearly indicates that white men are the safest race of men to be around, and instead, using her personal experience, which is likely to be skewed since she evidently goes to great lengths to avoid ethnic minorities,” commented one reader. Another pointed to Crown Prosecution Service evidence which shows that white sexual offenders are compared to the white population as a whole, and a higher proportion of Black, Asian, and mixed ethnicity offenders than in the general population. With the public turning on her, Allen resorted to threatening Robinson with legal action, telling him: “Get fundraising. ” . @TRobinsonNewEra you will be hearing from my legal team in the coming days. You’ll have no choice but to defend yourself. Get fundraising ! — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 3, 2017, . @Barson078 @TRobinsonNewEra we’ll debate alright. With lawyers for a few months, then mediation, then the courts. — lily allen (@lilyallen) January 3, 2017, She also blocked Robinson from following her account, claiming that he was upsetting her fans. Robinson, meanwhile, seems unperturbed by the incident: Lily Allen after her solicitors tell her we cant sue tommy just because you lost a debate with him on twitter pic. twitter. — Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) January 4, 2017, | 1 |
by Bryan William Myers | Oct 29, 2016
Back on Sept. 3, 2016, Labor Day weekend in America, protesters in North Dakota representing the Standing Rock Sioux were attacked with dogs and pepper spray while attempting to halt construction on an approximately $4 billion crude oil pipeline that would extend nearly 1,200 miles from the northern interior of the U.S. to south-central Illinois. One of the oil companies “responsible” for the pipeline is Dakota Access, LLC — a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Crude Oil Company, LLC .
Some quick facts about the pipeline, from an Energy Transfer Partners website:
The pipeline will “…transport crude oil from the Bakken/Three Forks play in North Dakota to a terminus in Illinois with additional potential points of destination along the pipeline route.”
“The pipeline will translate into millions in state and local revenues during the construction phase and an estimated $156 million in sales and income taxes.”
“The Dakota Access Pipeline Project is a $3.7 billion investment into the United States directly impacting the local and national labor force by creating 8,000–12,000 construction jobs and up to 40 permanent operating jobs.”
“The pipeline is anticipated to be fully functional by 2016.”
Ultimately, this is conjecture.
WHO ARE THE SIOUX?
About the Sioux:
“The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is situated in North and South Dakota. The people of Standing Rock, often called Sioux, are members of the Dakota and Lakota nations. ‘Dakota’ and ‘Lakota’ mean ‘friends’ or ‘allies’. The people of both these nations are often called ‘Sioux’, a term that dates back to the seventeenth century when the people were living in the Great Lakes area. The Ojibwa called the Lakota and Dakota ‘Nadouwesou’ meaning ‘adders’. This term, shortened and corrupted by French traders, resulted in retention of the last syllable as ‘Sioux.’ There are various Sioux divisions and each has important cultural, linguistic, territorial, and political distinctions.”
Where do they live?
“The Great Sioux Reservation comprised all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the sacred Black Hills and the life-giving Missouri River. Under article 11 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Great Sioux Nation retained off-reservation hunting rights to a much larger area, south to the Republican and Platte Rivers, and east to the Big Horn Mountains. Under article 12, no cession of land would be valid unless approved by three-fourths of the adult males. Nevertheless, the Congress unilaterally passed the Act of February 28, 1877, removing the Sacred Black Hills from the Great Sioux Reservation. The United States never obtained the consent of three-fourths of the Sioux, as required in article 12 of the 1868 Treaty. The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that ‘A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.'”
As the years wore on, and more of their land was claimed by the invader — the U.S. government — the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe eventually formed their own constitution in 1959 to be overseen by a Tribal Council.
“The Tribal Council consists of a Chairman, Vice-Chairman, a Secretary, and fourteen additional Councilmen which are elected by the tribal members.”
And now, once again, they are up against the sprawling U.S. empire, which will stop at nothing when natural resources are coveted for the invader’s profit machine. This time, it’s the unelected bureaucracy of oil companies and monopolistic energy partnerships in America paired with the funding from nearly 20 U.S., U.K., and other international banking institutions who are all involved in this endless destruction of Native lands.
Combined with a militarized police state — hundreds of arrests, assaults with batons and rubber bullets, armored vehicles with sound cannons, Humvees, helicopters flying overhead, and troops from the National Guard — the recent events in North Dakota resemble that of a war zone, more than a peaceful protest.
TRANSPORTING OIL OUT OF NORTH DAKOTA
Crude oil transported out of North Dakota has traditionally been shipped on rail cars to get to the east coast. Over the years, the competitive push to match domestic demand with imported crude oil pressurized the internal transport system, increasing rail-car shipping incidents.
From Pennsylvania StateImpact , “a reporting project of NPR member stations”:
“Refineries on the East Coast used to rely on crude oil from Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico shipped on large tankers. Today, trains carrying crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale travel on rail lines through Pennsylvania. The rail shipments are part of a larger nationwide boom in rail traffic resulting from the oil and gas boom and have helped keep refineries in the Philadelphia region stay in business .
However, increased traffic on the rails has resulted in a surge in accidents, including an explosive derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec that left 47 people dead in July 2013. The crude-by-rail phenomenon has come under intense scrutiny from federal agencies, as well as state and local governments across the country who worry that a derailment in more populous cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia could result in catastrophe.”
This, in tandem with crashing oil prices .
Paired with a previous announcement in May 2015 from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), for new rules to “strengthen the safe transportation of flammable liquids by rail”.
And you’ve got a perfect environment for vulture capitalist intervention.
THE BANKS SWOOP IN
Back in September, Democracy Now! did an exclusive report entitled “Who’s Investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline? Meet the Banks Financing Attacks on Protesters”.
“We continue our conversation with Hugh MacMillan (senior researcher at Food & Water Watch) on his new investigation revealing the financial institutions backing the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline project.
The investigation, published by research outlet LittleSis, names more than two dozen major banks and financial institutions helping to finance the Dakota Access pipeline. It details how Bank of America, HSBC , UBS , Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and other financial institutions have, combined, extended a $3.75 billion credit line to Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company of Dakota Access.”
In the interview, MacMillan begins:
“Dakota Access, LLC is a joint venture of Phillips 66, and a joint venture of two members of the Energy Transfer family, Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics. Enbridge (Energy Partners) and Marathon (Petroleum Corporation) oil have bought into this joint venture. Together, they now have about a 37% stake in the pipeline, the Dakota Access pipeline.”
When Amy Goodman asked how the banks were involved, MacMillan responded:
“They’re banking on this company, and banking on being able to drill and frack for the oil to [be sent] through the pipeline over the coming decades. So they’re providing the capital for the construction of this pipeline.”
MacMillan then asserts that the 17 banks in their funding of the Dakota Access pipeline through Energy Transfer Partners are also coupled together with an existing pipeline that will be converted to extend from the southern end of the Dakota Access pipeline all the way down to the Gulf Coast.
“Where there are refineries and also export infrastructure.”
Here is a picture of that proposal from the Sunoco Logistics website:
MacMillan stated the ultimate goal of the pipeline projects will be to have one pipeline that would run from “near the Canadian border on down to the Gulf Coast of Texas, over 1,800 miles.”
As to which banks, specifically, are directly involved in the Dakota Access pipeline:
“Citibank is the bank that’s been running the books on the project. And that’s the bank that ‘beat the bushes’ and got other banks to join in. So we have Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, SunTrust, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Mizuho Bank, TD Securities, ABN AMRO, DNB First bank (based in Philadelphia), ICBC London, SMBC Nikko Securities, and Societe Generale.”
Goodman then asked MacMillan about the drop in demand for oil, in the past year, with regard to a personal conversation she had with an oil trucker.
“If you ask Morgan Stanley, they said a year ago that the oil producers are getting into ‘prison shape’— without irony. So these are long term investments from the banks. They fully expect the United States to maximize its production of oil and gas through widespread fracking.”
MacMillan summarized what he believed was most crucial for people to understand about the Dakota Access Pipeline:
“Well, I think it’s important to see the forces behind this particular pipeline as the same forces behind numerous other pipelines across the country, both to support fracking for tight oil as well as fracking for shale gas, all toward maximizing production of oil and gas. When the science is clear that we need to maximize what we keep in the ground. Our current policy has not made that switch. And if you look at the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review, published a year ago, you’ll see under clean energy technologies, permeability manipulation is included along with improved understanding of well integrity and improved understanding of injections and how they’re causing earthquakes, such as [what] occurred over the weekend in Oklahoma. The Quadrennial Technology Review speaks of a future mastery of the subsurface towards maximizing production.”
OTHER HANDS IN THE POT
Most recently, it has come out that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million invested in Energy Transfer Partners , the parent company of the Dakota Access pipeline, in addition to having $500,000 – $1 million invested in Phillips 66 — a company which will also hold a 25% stake in the pipeline. Kelcy Warren, co-founder and chief executive of Energy Transfer Partners, donated more than $100,000 to Trump’s campaign, and he gave nearly $67,000 to the Republican National Committee since Trump became the party’s controversial candidate for president in the 2016 election.
According to the Guardian, Warren gave a $3,000 personal donation to Trump’s election campaign back in June. That amount exceeded $2,700 — the legal limit for individual contributions. Previously, Warren donated $550,000 to current Texas governor Greg Abbott’s 2014 campaign. After Abbott won the election, he then appointed Warren and his wife to state boards, the Guardian reported.
“Warren has worked in the energy industry for the past 25 years and has a net worth of $3.8bn, according to Forbes . The Texas-based businessman has said concerns over the Dakota Access pipeline are ‘unfounded’ and insisted there are no Native American artifacts at risk from its construction. He vowed that Energy Transfer Partners will press ahead with the project .”
RECENT RESPONSES FROM POLITICIANS ON DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE
On Thursday, Oct. 27, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a statement with regard to the Dakota Access pipeline project and the ongoing protests where hundreds have been arrested in recent weeks.
“It’s important that on the ground in North Dakota, everyone respects demonstrators’ rights to protest peacefully, and workers’ rights to do their jobs safely…”
Bernie Sanders made a much less benign statement on the issue:
“The major global crisis facing our planet today is climate change. The vast majority of scientists tell us that climate change is real, it is caused by humans and it is already causing devastating problems. They say that if we do not aggressively transition our energy system away from fossil fuels toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy, the planet we leave our children will be a much less habitable place.
Like the Keystone XL pipeline, which I opposed since day one, the Dakota Access fracked oil pipeline, will transport some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet. Regardless of the court’s decision, the Dakota Access pipeline must be stopped. As a nation, our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on oil. I join with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many tribal nations fighting this dangerous pipeline.”
Here is Sanders’ letter to U.S. President Barack Obama on this issue, from Oct. 28.
A previous letter, dated Oct. 13, was also sent to the president, regarding the halting of construction on the Dakota Access pipeline. That letter was also signed by Sanders, in addition to four other U.S. Senators.
Collectively, banks from nearly a dozen countries are involved in the funding of the Dakota Access pipeline.
And, last weekend, on Friday, Oct. 21, an oil pipeline was breached , spilling gasoline in close proximity to the Susquehanna River, in an area of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania — about 100 miles north of the state capital, Harrisburg. The spill was estimated at 1,300 barrels, or 55,000 gallons of gasoline.
The owner of that pipeline is Sunoco Logistics, which has had over 200 leaks of crude since 2010, much more than any of its competitors.
It’s the same oil company that will be operating the Dakota Access pipeline. Bryan William Myers Bryan is a freelance writer/copy editor/copywriter. He reads, researches and drinks beer. He also writes poetry, short stories, essays, and is working on various novels, some of which include private documentation of traveling and living in Philadelphia, Colorado, and New Jersey. Currently, he lives in South Philadelphia. He also paints and records his own music. Join We Are Change! | 0 |
René Préval, the former president of Haiti who led his nation out of turmoil after a coup but stumbled through the trauma of the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the Americas, the earthquake of 2010, died on Friday at his home in . He was 74. The current president, Jovenel Moïse, confirmed the death in a Twitter message on Friday. The cause was not immediately known. Mr. Préval was the first — and so far only — Haitian president to be elected, serve out his term and hand over power to an elected successor, an extraordinary accomplishment in a fragile democracy besieged by decades of turmoil. And he did it twice, serving from 1996 to 2001 and again from 2006 until 2011. A man of quiet demeanor in a country with a politically raucous history, he was best known for what did not happen to him: He was neither assassinated nor overthrown. Indeed, he was regarded as a pragmatic consensus builder. But his reputation was severely bruised after the earthquake, which killed an estimated 100, 000 to 316, 000 people. He was roundly criticized for not reassuring his stunned nation that help was on the way, either from other nations or his own battered government. “As a person, I was paralyzed,” Mr. Préval told The Los Angeles Times that year. “I was much criticized for not having spoken. ” But he added: “To say what? To the thousands of parents whose children were dead. To the hundreds of schoolchildren I was hearing scream, ‘Come help me!’ I couldn’t find the words to say to those people. ” René Garcia Préval was born on Jan. 17, 1943, in and raised in Marmelade, a town in a mountainous coffee and region of Haiti. His father, Claude Jules Préval, was an agronomist and a government official until the family was forced to scatter under the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc. Mr. Préval went to Belgium, where he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and studied agronomy at the Gembloux Agricultural University. He later studied geothermal science at the University of Pisa in Italy. In 1970, Mr. Préval moved to Brooklyn, where he worked as a waiter and messenger. He returned to Haiti in 1975. By then it was under the less openly violent, though still authoritarian, rule of Mr. Duvalier’s son, known as Baby Doc. Mr. Préval worked in government positions, including in the agency overseeing mining. In 1988, two years after Baby Doc was ousted, Mr. Préval opened a bakery that provided bread to poor children in ’s slums, including in an orphanage run by the charismatic Roman Catholic priest and political activist Aristide. The bakery would change the direction of Mr. Préval’s life. He and Father Aristide became friends, and Mr. Préval rose in prominence in Father Aristide’s Lavalas movement, which was popular with Haiti’s quickly growing urban poor and fiercely opposed by the country’s tiny ruling elite. After Mr. Aristide became president in 1990, having left the priesthood, he appointed Mr. Préval as his prime minister, placing him in charge of the government’s operations. But the Aristide government lasted only a few months before it was overthrown by the military. The two went into exile. Mr. Préval later returned and was elected president, but he did not have the charisma of his political benefactor, and Mr. Aristide was considered the true power behind his presidency. When peasants asked how they could survive under United States trade policies and soaring fuel prices, he notoriously told them to “swim their way out. ” Mr. Préval organized new elections in 2000 that returned Mr. Aristide to power. The ensuing inauguration was a Haitian milestone: Mr. Préval became the first Haitian leader to be freely elected, serve a full constitutional term and then peacefully hand power to a successor. But Mr. Aristide’s term was cut short again in a bloody 2004 coup. Mr. Préval was elected again two years later. Mr. Préval, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, is survived by his wife, Elisabeth Delatour Préval, two daughters, Patricia and Dominique, and two stepsons. It was in his second term that Mr. Préval escaped Mr. Aristide’s shadow and emerged as a force of his own. After breaking with Mr. Aristide, he used his quiet manner and diplomatic charm to encourage the soft support of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Préval was never one to stir up the masses with oratory flair, or one to bother stumping on the campaign trail. When the earthquake — 7. 0 magnitude — toppled the capital on Jan. 12, 2010, Mr. Préval did not emerge in public for hours. Reporters later learned that he had spent the night anonymously touring the devastation on the back of a motorcycle. Close associates described him as falling into a state of shock from which he never fully recovered. Jocelerme Privert, a former provisional president who was a member of Mr. Préval’s cabinet and a longtime friend, said Mr. Préval was known for daily 8 a. m. cabinet meetings that actually began on time. He patiently listened to each cabinet member and made decisions by consensus, Mr. Privert said. “He is not a demagogue, I can say that,” Mr. Privert said by telephone on Friday from . “He always believed: If you have to build a bridge, build it. Don’t announce it. ” | 1 |
Share This Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio recording , the first in almost a year, and expressed his confidence in the group’s eventual victory. Amnesty International warned that is has received reports of revenge attacks on civilians in villages near the Tigris River . Victims are accusing the Sab’wai tribal militia, which is a Sunni group, of torture and false imprisonment. There are also reports that Shi’ite militiamen are interrogating civilians on the western Mosul front. In Mosul , civilians by the hundreds were able to escape the Samah neighborhood. Security forces liberated Min Gar and four other villages near Hammam al-Alil. Khafsan, Munita and Qutba were also reported freed . Also captured were Abbasiya, Ayn Shahlub, Bazzunnah, Kharar, Khubairat, Mankar, Qahira, Rahmaniyah, Shahlub, Tal Saif al Athari, Um Izzam, and Ayn al Jahsh factory. Shi’ite militiamen reported the capture of a highway linking Mosul with Raqqa , Syria. At least 283 people were killed and 84 were wounded in recent violence: In Mosul , militants killed 150 civilians as they retreated from Gogjiali . Airstrikes left 100 militants dead and 40 wounded . Eight militants were killed during house-to-house searches in Gogjiali . East of Mosul in the direction of Tal Afar , Shi’ite militias encountered many booby-traps in villages they recaptured. At least 15 militiamen were killed and 30 were wounded . | 0 |
MADRID — The conservative Popular Party of Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s caretaker prime minister, won the most votes in Spain’s repeat national elections on Sunday, as the Socialists held off a challenge from the Podemos Party to remain the largest formation. The fragmented result, however, did not settle who will form the country’s next government. Instead, Mr. Rajoy and the leaders of Spain’s other parties face another tricky round of coalition negotiations. National elections in December were also inconclusive. The Popular Party’s advance appeared to show that conservative voters responded to Mr. Rajoy’s warning against the kind of radical overhaul demanded by Podemos at a time of political crisis in the European Union. The Spanish elections took place three days after the British voted to leave the European Union, in a referendum that sent financial markets in Spain and throughout the world tumbling on Friday. With 99. 8 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party had won 137 of 350 parliamentary seats, up from 123 seats in the December elections. The Socialists captured 85 seats, five fewer than in December. Podemos won 71 seats, effectively unchanged from December, after forming an election alliance with United Left, another radical party, which won two seats six months ago. Another emerging party, Ciudadanos, got 32 seats, down from 40 seats, according to the preliminary results. No party came close to winning a parliamentary majority on Sunday. Still, the results put Mr. Rajoy back in the driver’s seat, either to try to form a coalition or to pressure the Socialists into a broader coalition that could help preserve the dominance of Spain’s establishment parties, which Podemos would like to uproot. Addressing supporters outside his party’s headquarters just after midnight, Mr. Rajoy celebrated his victory, but did not shed light on how it might allow him to form a new government. “From tomorrow, we will have to talk with everybody, and we will do it,” he said, adding that Spain was “walking in the right direction. ” Even if Sunday’s result was the worst ever for the Socialists, it was sufficient to prevent the party from being leapfrogged by Podemos, an outcome that most polls had predicted. In December, Podemos and Ciudadanos entered Spain’s Parliament for the first time. On Sunday, both parties not only had lost the novelty factor but also disappointed some voters after six months of bruising and fruitless coalition negotiations. “Some parties promised to change the country and then showed us that they were just happy to join the shameful old game of just throwing dirt at each other,” Daniel Martín, a graphic designer, said as he prepared to vote in central Madrid earlier on Sunday. Podemos was hoping to mirror in Spain the success of Syriza, the party that took office in Greece in 2015. Formed less than two years ago, Podemos has garnered much of its support among a Spanish youth hit by high unemployment and angered by the endemic corruption among established parties, with rising economic inequality since the financial crisis of 2008. Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, said at a news conference on Sunday that the result was disappointing and surprising. He added, “The news today is unfortunately that the Popular Party has increased its support. ” Mr. Rajoy, 61, presented himself as the custodian of Spanish unity and continuity in the face of far younger opponents, as well as a challenge from secessionist politicians in Catalonia. About 70 percent of eligible voters participated in Sunday’s elections, which was in line with the turnout six months ago. Still, many of those who waited outside a polling station here expressed disillusionment at being forced back to the polls by Spain’s main parties. “I really believe that we need change and a clean, fair and transparent society, but there’s no question that people are pretty tired of our politicians and having to vote again now,” said Galia Martínez Matei, a interior designer who voted for Podemos. | 1 |
Posted on October 28, 2016 by Jay Syrmopoulos
Portland, OR – The group of men who seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge , in rural Oregon were found not guilty late Thursday, vindicating brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy after the 41-day standoff that brought nationwide focus to long-running dispute over federal control of rural land in the Western United States.
According to a report in by the Associated Press :
A jury found brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy not guilty a firearm in a federal facility and conspiring to impede federal workers from their jobs at the 300 miles southeast of Portland where the trial took place. Five co-defendants also were tried one or both of the charges. Ammon Bundy has a house in Emmett.
Despite the acquittal, the Bundys were expected to stand trial in Nevada early next year on charges stemming from another high-profile standoff with federal agents. Authorities rounding up cattle at their father Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014 because of unpaid grazing fees released the animals as they faced armed protesters.
The Bundy family initially made headlines in 2013 when the Bureau of Land Management brought armed agents in to seize rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle after his refusal to pay federal authorities a massive debt – which he claims is illegitimate.
In response to the militarized response in Nevada by the BLM, militia from across the U.S. mobilized and coordinated a response which saw hundreds of armed Americans stand up to what they perceived as vast federal overreach.
What the government thought would be an open-and-shut case was anything but. The group never denied they seized the refuge while armed or that they made demands of the government.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this case is not a whodunit,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight said in his closing argument, making the argument the group illegally commandeered a federal building.
The AP reports:
On technical grounds, the defendants said they never discussed stopping individual workers from accessing their offices but merely wanted the land and the buildings. On emotional grounds, Ammon Bundy and other defendants argued that the takeover was an act of civil disobedience against an out-of-control federal government that has crippled the rural West.
Federal prosecutors took two weeks to present their case, finishing with a display of more than 30 guns seized after the standoff. An FBI agent testified that 16,636 live rounds and nearly 1,700 spent casings were found.
Ammon Bundy spent three days testifying in his own defense, focusing on the fact that federal overreach is destroying rural Western communities that have relied on the land — for generations in many cases. Bundy made clear that the plan was to simply take control of the refuge by occupation, while eventually returning it to local control.
Originally, 26 occupiers were charged with conspiracy. Eleven pleaded guilty, while another had the charge dropped. Seven defendants have not yet been tried. Their trial is scheduled to begin February 14, according to the AP.
Shortly after the verdict was announced, an Oregon-area reporter posted to Twitter that Ammon Bundy’s attorney Marcus Mumford was tackled by U.S. Marshals after insisting that Bundy should be allowed to be released from custody, with the judge subsequently ordering the courtroom cleared.
The armed occupiers took control of the remote bird sanctuary on January 2, in response to the prison sentences given to two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, after being convicted of arson in relation to an ongoing dispute with the BLM. Upon occupying the refuge the group demanded that the father and son be freed and that federal officials cede control of publicly held lands to local control.
Ultimately, the Bundy brothers and a number of their fellow occupiers were arrested in an ambush style attack, while on the way to negotiate with a Sheriff. It ended with officers gunning down Robert “LaVoy” Finicum – a charismatic group spokesman. Currently, numerous federal SRT agents are under investigation for lying about firing at the occupiers’ vehicle during the ambush.
The majority of the remaining occupants left the refuge in the wake of Finicum’s killing , with four holdouts negotiating their surrender until February 11.
In the wake of the verdict, both the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office also expressed disappointment.
U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams said his office “respects the verdict of the jury and thanks them for their dedicated service during this long and difficult trial.”
“For many weeks, hundreds of law enforcement officers — federal, state, and local — worked around-the-clock to resolve the armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge peacefully. We believe now — as we did then — that protecting and defending this nation through rigorous obedience to the U.S. Constitution is our most important responsibility. Although we are extremely disappointed in the verdict, we respect the court and the role of the jury in the American judicial system.” – Greg Bretzing, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Oregon
Regardless of the sentiments of those in government and law enforcement, the jury carried out justice — with this verdict solidifying that the killing of LaVoy Finnicum was nothing less than criminal .
Revealing exactly why the 2nd Amendment is so important to a free people, Bundy testified that the reason occupiers chose to carry guns was because they understood that they would be immediately arrested otherwise and needed to protect themselves against possible government violence.
There is no mistaking the difference in law enforcement’s response to unarmed protestors — versus those that exercise their right to bear arms. One need look no further than the ongoing protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock – which has been met with numerous militarized and violent crackdowns on non-violent water protectors – to see exactly how differently armed protesters are treated. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this: | 0 |
After four grueling hours spent fending off a relentless adversary who refused to submit, Rafael Nadal saw the ball exactly where he wanted it, practically on a platter and ready to be plucked. It was in the tiebreaker at the end of one of the most compelling matches of this United States Open. Nadal, the No. 4 seed, had already rejected three attempts from his pesky opponent, the No. 24 seed, Lucas Pouille. Now Nadal had one of his favorite shots tantalizingly before his eyes, an approach forehand of the kind he has drilled into the other court for a winner countless times in hundreds of matches throughout the years. But this time, Nadal brushed up on it too much, and the ball hit the net. “Was a big mistake,” he said. But there was still a chance. Nadal had been destroyed in the first set, and he had come back. He lost the third set, too, and blew a break in the fifth set, and there he was in a tiebreaker. If Pouille, a Frenchman looking for the biggest win of his life, had not had the nerve to convert his other three match points, perhaps he would fail to do it here, too. But under the pressure of momentous stakes, Pouille summoned the nerve needed. He won the next two points to earn a thrilling (6) upset of Nadal in 4 hours 8 minutes. Nadal had been gaining momentum coming into the match. He had not lost a set in three matches. His quarter of the draw was wide open — except for Pouille, that is. “I lost an opportunity to have a very good event here,” Nadal said. “I am sad for that. ” In the last few draining sets, the fans at Arthur Ashe Stadium, announced at more than 23, 000, did not necessarily blow the new roof off its foundations during the match. But they left a noisy impression. “Sometimes I couldn’t even hear myself when I was saying, ‘Allez, allez, allez,’” Pouille said. “Sometimes you can’t even hear yourself. ” Pouille, who is playing in just his 11th major tournament, had never reached the third round until this year at Wimbledon, where he went to the quarterfinals. But he has long been considered a rising prospect in France, and this year, he is beginning to collect on his promise. “I think because, mentally, I’m stronger,” he said. “Physically, I’m stronger. That gave me a lot of confidence before the match. I knew if I wanted to win that, it’s not going to be like three sets, . It would be long. ” By steeling himself for the slog, Pouille was able to withstand Nadal’s comebacks and match him stroke for stroke. Indeed, in the final tally, each player won 156 points. In the fifth set, Nadal broke Pouille’s serve in the first game and was up, . It seemed as if Nadal had his opening. But anyone expecting the more experienced Nadal — with 14 Grand Slam titles on his résumé, including two Opens — to sweep Pouille away was shocked. Pouille broke back to make it . Nadal said his experience alone had not been enough to make the difference in that game. “The problem is arrive to on the tiebreak of the fifth,” he said. “I should be winning before. ” Later in the same stadium, No. 1 Novak Djokovic pounded the Kyle Edmund of Britain, to set up a meeting with No. 9 Tsonga in the quarterfinals. It was the first time in his last three matches that Djokovic was able to complete a match after his opponents withdrew in the previous two for physical reasons. Tsonga is one of three French players to reach the quarterfinal stage, but Pouille is the most surprising. For Nadal, 30, the loss capped a mixed season and ended, for now, his hope for a third Open title and a 15th Grand Slam championship. His last title came at the 2014 French Open, where he matched Pete Sampras with 14 Grand Slam titles over all. He pulled out of this year’s French Open after his match because of an injury to his left wrist. At the time, it was unclear when he would be able to return. He made it back for the Olympics, where he lost in the match to Kei Nishikori of Japan and won a gold medal in doubles. He played only two matches at the Western Southern Open, but he stormed through his first three matches at Flushing Meadows, dropping only 20 games in three victories. He had hopes of going deep. Instead, it is Pouille, and not Nadal, who will play Gaël Monfils in an quarterfinal match. Monfils brushed aside the Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis, . Monfils is not only playing well, he is one of the more entertaining players on tour, and fans love to marvel at his athletic ability. In the first week of the United States Open, he has given them a lot to see. He had a wrestling match with an clock he practiced in the midst of a downpour and he hit a jumping shot between his legs when there was no pressing need for it. Then on Sunday, he did something even more unusual. He pretended to tie his shoe in the middle of a point in his match against Baghdatis. “To be honest, I have no idea what happened,” he said. “Sometimes, those points don’t mean anything to me. I don’t know. I just lose it. ” | 1 |
Obama Lied -Wikileaks: Panic Over Clinton Emails To Pres Obama | 0 |
Ah the old pump and dump. The market should bottom righ before elections and then a big rally the next day when the rigging continues. Markets and elections. | 0 |
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Abigail Marsh almost lost her life in a car accident. She was avoiding a dog in the middle of the street, and suddenly found her own life in danger. But a complete stranger stopped, got out of his car, helped her to safety, and then drove off, never even telling her his name. advertisement - learn more Why did he do it though? That was the biggest question Marsh found herself asking, and it changed the course of her life. She has since made a career out of understanding the human capacity to care for others; where it comes from; how it develops. Marsh wondered why people do selfless things, and resolved to find out. She soon realized very little work had been done on this topic. Altruism is a voluntary, costly behaviour that benefits only the other. And Marsh wanted to know what made some people more altruistic than others:
The actions of the man who rescued me meet the most stringent definition of altruism, which is a voluntary, costly behaviour motivated by the desire to help another individual. So it’s a selfless act intended to benefit only the other. What could possibly explain an action like that? One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes, why do some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways. To really figure it out, she did the opposite of what one might expect, however. She started on the opposite end by analyzing psychopaths. People with this disorder are missing the desire to help other people. They are often cold, uncaring, and antisocial individuals. But they’re not typically insensitive to other people’s emotions, just to the signs that other people are distressed: The part of the brain that’s the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they’re profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults and children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions, psychopaths’ amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don’t react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths’ amygdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20 percent. advertisement - learn more But in her Ted Talk, Marsh brings us back to altruism. She says that her main interest isn’t about why people don’t care for others, but why they do. “ So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy?” she asks. Extraordinary altruists have done things like give a healthy kidney to a complete stranger. But why? “T he brains of these extraordinary altruists have certain special characteristics,” she says. “ They are better at recognizing other people’s fear. They’re literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress. This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions. And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found was underreactive in people who are psychopathic.” “And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well, by about eight percent,” she adds. What’s intriguing is that, when people were asked why they gave their kidney to a complete stranger, they didn’t know how to answer. They didn’t consider themselves unique or special, but normal, just like everyone else. They just did it, because that’s who they are. Even more intriguing is that the people the donors were giving their kidneys to weren’t in a close circle that somehow already connected them through other loved ones. They were totally removed human beings. And that’s pretty extraordinary:
I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness is humility, which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine makes men as angels. And why is that? It’s because if there’s no center of your circle, there can be no inner rings or outer rings, nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion than anybody else. And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists from the average person. But the main lesson of Marsh’t talk is even more fundamental than all of this. “ I also think that this is a view of the world that’s attainable by many and maybe even most people. And I think this because at the societal level, expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere,” she explains. Keep Evolving Your Consciousness Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. Marsh believes that we all have the ability to take ourselves out of the center of the circle and extend the circle of compassion outward, so it brings in even total strangers. It looks like a globe outlined with people from all over the world holding hands in unity, in support, in love. Watch Marsh’s full Ted Talk below:
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle.
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here.
"If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group." - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune | 0 |
Everyone getting hammered tonight for bad reasons 11-11-16
BRITAIN is to get hammered as usual tonight but for bad reasons, not celebratory, end-of-the-week ones.
Alcohol is selling briskly across the UK as adults prepare to get blackout drunk not because the weekend is here but because the weekend is here and Donald Trump is president and Leonard Cohen is dead.
Nikki Hollis, from Peterborough, said: “Normally I’m skipping merrily into the land of drunkenness, a carefree sense that none of it matters, but tonight I’ll be lurching there.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if I haven’t killed two bottles of wine by 10pm in my despair, as opposed to last week when I polished off two bottles before News at Ten out of sheer joie de vivre. ”
She added: “And tomorrow’s hangover will be a black cloud of gloom clearly revealing that everything in the world is shit. While last week it just seemed like that.”
Pub landlord Bill McKay said: “We’re expecting a fairly dark atmosphere in here tonight. We probably won’t do the quiz.”
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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Spain’s top diplomat said Sunday that his government is urging the European Union to side with Madrid on the future of the British territory of Gibraltar, which lies at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula and Spain has long sought to reclaim. [Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis told Spanish newspaper El Pais that Madrid insists it should get a veto over any agreements regarding the strategic enclave as Britain prepares to leave the EU. “We have spoken to our fellow (EU) members and institutions in recent weeks and have made clear Spain’s position: when the U. K. leaves the EU, the member nation of the EU is Spain, and in the case of Gibraltar the EU is therefore obligated to side with Spain,” Dastis said. Brussels suggested last week that it was prepared to give Spain such a veto, angering and upsetting people in Gibraltar. Spain has long sought to regain control of the strategic territory that it has longed to reclaim since ceding its control to Britain in 1713. British Prime Minister Theresa May on Sunday offered reassurances to Gibraltar that the UK remains steadfastly committed to the overseas territory and its 32, 000 residents. May’s Downing Street office said that she phoned the chief minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, to assure him that Britain remains “absolutely dedicated to working with Gibraltar for the best possible outcome on Brexit and will continue to involve them fully in the process. ” On Wednesday, Britain’s invocation of Article 50 of the EU’s central treaty started a period to negotiate its exit for the club. In the newspaper interview, Dastis said Spain would not close the border with Gibraltar after Britain leaves the EU. Such a move would threaten jobs on both sides, and “I don’t see how that would benefit us,” he said. Dastis said that Spain will push during Brexit negotiations for a “reciprocal principle” regarding workers’ rights and immigration. “If London takes measures that hurt the rights of Europeans, we will do that same (with British residents in the EU),” he said. “We want a balanced, reasonable and thorough deal. ” Spain also favors a “soft” Brexit that would allow the U. K. to keep at least some of its access to the lucrative common market, as opposed to its outright exclusion, he said, noting that the EU has such agreements with nations Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. But those deals include the free movement of people among EU countries, something that the British government has pledged to stop once it withdraws from the bloc. “The idea is for the UK’s status, after it leaves, to be as similar as possible to the one it has now,” Dastis said. “It can’t be based on the free movement of peoples, but we have regulations for countries that are very close to those regarding European Union citizens. ” Dastis also weighed in on another British question: the consequences of Scotland possibly holding a second referendum on independence. The “No” vote won in 2014, and now secessionists want a redo after the Scots favored remaining in the EU in last year’s Brexit vote. “In theory, I don’t see why we would have to block” the of Scotland into the EU, Dastis said. Spain is facing its own regional breakaway effort by northeastern Catalonia, making its willingness to Scotland to the EU in the case of its independence rather surprising. | 1 |
Georg Soros the good oil . http://mailstar.net/soros.html Sometimes for truth you have to sacrifice something in order to show non bias , it certainly puts the wind up the mad left raddicals paid by Soros . So the democrats dont think voting is rigged eh???? How do they explain this then ?? Clinton Eugene “Clint” Curtis is an American attorney, computer programmer and ex-employee of NASA and ExxonMobil, who also exposed election hacking. He is notable chiefly for making a series of whistleblower allegations about his former employer and about Republican Congressman Tom Feeney, including an allegation that in 2000, Feeney and Yang Enterprises requested Curtis’s assistance in a scheme to steal votes by inserting fraudulent code into touch screen voting systems. Remember this is the Democrats at the hearing . He tells the members how he was hired by Congressman Tom Feeney in 2000 to build a prototype software package that would secretly rig an election to sway the result 51/49 to a specified side. Now this shows Donald Trump is not only not bias but just wants an honest election and no vote rigging http://www.activistpost.com/2016/03/watch-computer-programmer-testifies-under-oath-he-coded-computers-to-rig-elections.html One might ask who are Yang enterprises ??? Field will like this . There was a reason they did not want to know who they were . http://www.yangenterprises.com/ YEI is a GSA Advantage member, offering Information Technology solutions (GS-35F-0896N), Professional Engineering Services (GS-10F-0107Y), Logistics Worldwide (GS-10F-0135Y), and Facilities Maintenance and Management Services (GS-21F-090AA).YEI receives the Marshall Space Flight Center Small Business Subcontractor Excellence Award.YEI awarded State of Florida IT Consulting Services contract.http://www.dms.myflorida.com/business_operations/state_purchasing/vendor_information/state_contracts_and_agreements/state_term_contracts/information_technology_it_consulting_services/contractors/t_z/contractors_yang_enterprises_inc Name: Li-Woan (Lee) Yang Title: President/CEO Looks like they are all in on it , no wonder its always 50/50 no matter how many people in every western country which is impossible given the differnt cultures . The video is the ultimate smoking gun against the liars who know full well its all rigged . And for the Democrats to be claiming its nottrue is an outrageous lie , they had the inquiry . | 0 |
It was 2005, and Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant, was back in Moscow pursuing an ambitious plan to build a Trump tower on the site of an old pencil factory along the Moscow River that would offer hotel rooms, condominiums and commercial office space. Letters of intent had been signed and square footage was being analyzed. “There was an opportunity to explore building Trump towers internationally,” said Mr. Sater, who worked for a New development company that was a partner with Donald J. Trump on a variety of deals during that decade. “And Russia was one of those countries. ” The ’s favorable comments about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the conclusion of United States intelligence officials that Moscow acted to help Mr. Trump’s campaign have focused attention on Mr. Trump’s business interests in Russia. Asked about the issue at his news conference last week, Mr. Trump was emphatic on one point: “I have no dealings with Russia. ” And he repeated, “I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away. ” The project on the old pencil factory site ultimately fizzled. And by the time Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he had failed to get any real estate development off the ground in Russia. But it was not for lack of trying. Mr. Trump repeatedly sought business in Russia as far back as 1987, when he traveled there to explore building a hotel. He applied for his trademark in the country as early as 1996. And his children and associates have appeared in Moscow over and over in search of joint ventures, meeting with developers and government officials. During a trip in 2006, Mr. Sater and two of Mr. Trump’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, stayed at the historic Hotel National Moscow opposite the Kremlin, connecting with potential partners over the course of several days. As recently as 2013, Mr. Trump himself was in Moscow. He had sold Russian real estate developers the right to host his Miss Universe pageant that year, and he used the visit as a chance to discuss development deals, writing on Twitter at the time: “TRUMP is next. ” As the Russian market opened up in the era, Mr. Trump and his partners pursued Russians who were newly flush with cash to buy apartments in Trump Towers in New York and Florida, sales that he boasted about in a 2014 interview. “I know the Russians better than anybody,” Mr. Trump told Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer who shared unpublished interview transcripts with The New York Times. Seeking deals in Russia became part of a broader strategy to expand the Trump brand worldwide. By the Mr. Trump was transitioning to mostly licensing his name to hotel, condominium and commercial towers rather than building or investing in real estate himself. He discovered that his name was especially attractive in developing countries where the rising rich aspired to the type of ritzy glamour he personified. While he nailed down ventures in the Philippines, India and elsewhere, closing deals in Russia proved challenging. In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. praised the opportunities in Russia, but also called it a “scary place” to do business because of corruption and legal complications. Mr. Sater said that American hotel chains that had moved into Russia did so with straightforward agreements to manage hotels that other partners owned. Mr. Trump, by contrast, was pursuing developments that included residential or commercial offerings in which he would take a cut of sales, terms that Russians were reluctant to embrace. Even so, Mr. Trump said his efforts put him in contact with powerful people there. “I called it my weekend in Moscow,” Mr. Trump said of his 2013 trip to Moscow during a September 2015 interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show. ” He added: “I was with the people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary. ” When asked about Mr. Trump’s claim that he had “stayed away” from Russia, Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, said it was a fair characterization given that none of the development opportunities ever materialized. Mr. Trump’s interest in Russia, he said, was no different from his attraction to other emerging markets in which he investigated possible ventures. Mr. Garten did not respond to questions about whom Mr. Trump met with in Moscow in 2013 and what was discussed. Ted Liebman, an architect based in New York, got the call in 1996. Mr. Trump and an American tobacco company that owned property in Moscow, wanted to build a residential development near an old Russian Olympic stadium. As they prepared to meet with officials in Moscow, they needed sketches of the Trump tower they envisioned. The architect scrambled to meet the request, handing over plans to Mr. Trump at his Manhattan office. “I hope we can do this,” Mr. Liebman recalled Mr. Trump telling him. Soon after, Mr. Trump was in Russia, promoting the proposal and singing the praises of the Russian market. “I’ve seen cities all over the world. Some I’ve liked, some I haven’t,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in Moscow in 1996, according to The Moscow Times. But he added that he didn’t think he had ever been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow. ” Mr. Trump had been eyeing the potential for nearly a decade, expressing interest to government officials ranging from the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (they first met in Washington in 1987) to the military figure Alexander Lebed. The 1996 project never materialized, but by then Mr. Trump was already well known in Russia. Moscow was in the midst of a construction boom, which transformed the capital from a drab, expanse into a sparkly modern city. Yuri M. Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor at the time, said in an interview that he had met with Mr. Trump and showed him plans for a massive underground shopping mall just outside the Kremlin gates. Mr. Trump suggested connecting it to the Metro, “a very important observation,” Mr. Luzhkov said. Today, visitors to the Okhotny Ryad shopping center can go straight from the Metro to the Calvin Klein store without venturing into the cold. In the following years, Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Russia was strengthened by a growing circle of partners and associates in Canada and the United States who had roots in the region. Among them were Tevfik Arif, a former commerce official originally from Kazakhstan who founded a development company called the Bayrock Group, and Mr. Sater, a partner in the firm, who had moved to New York from Russia as a child. Bayrock was in Trump Tower, two floors below the Trump Organization. While working to take towers to Arizona, Florida and New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Bayrock also began scouting for deals in Russia and other countries. “We looked at some very, very large properties in Russia,” Mr. Sater said. “Think of a large Vegas . ” When Mr. Sater traveled to Moscow with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. to meet with developers in 2006, he said their attitude could be summarized as “nice, big city, great. Let’s do a deal here. ” Mr. Trump continued to work with Mr. Sater even after his role in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals was revealed Mr. Sater pleaded guilty and served as a government informant. In 2007, Mr. Trump discussed a deal for a Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow that Bayrock had lined up with Russian investors. “It would be a nonexclusive deal, so it would not have precluded me from doing other deals in Moscow, which was very important to me,” Mr. Trump said in a deposition in an unsuccessful libel suit he brought against Tim O’Brien, a journalist. He claimed the development had fallen apart after Mr. O’Brien wrote a book saying that Mr. Trump was worth far less than he claimed. But Mr. Trump said he was close to striking another real estate deal in Moscow. “We’re going to do one fairly soon,” he said. Moscow, he insisted “will be one of the cities where we will be. ” The Trump brand did appear in Russia, but not quite as the grand edifice the real estate mogul had envisioned. Trump Super Premium Vodka, with the shine of bottles glazed with gold, was presented at the Millionaire’s Fair in Moscow in 2007, and large orders for the spirits followed. The vodka was sold in Russia as late as 2009, but eventually fizzled out. In a news release, Mr. Trump heralded it as a “tremendous achievement. ” He tried — and failed — to start a reality show in St. Petersburg in 2008 starring a Russian mixed martial arts fighter. But real estate developments remained a constant goal. From 2006 to 2008, his company applied for several trademarks in Russia, including Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home, according to a record search by Sojuzpatent, a Russian intellectual property firm. Donald Trump Jr. became a regular presence in Russia. Speaking at a 2008 Manhattan real estate conference, he confessed to fears of doing business in Russia, saying there is “an issue of ‘Will I ever see my money back out of that deal or can I actually trust the person I am doing the deal with? ’” according to coverage of his remarks in eTurboNews. But he told the Manhattan audience that “I really prefer Moscow over all cities in the world” and that he had visited Russia a times in 18 months. In 2011, he was still at it. “Heading to the airport to go to Moscow for business,” he tweeted that year. Mr. Trump himself was back in Moscow in 2013, attending the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned with NBC. Earlier that year, at the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas, he had announced that Aras and Emin Agalarov, father and son real estate developers in Russia, would host the worldwide competition. Erin Brady, that year’s Miss USA winner, who watched the announcement from backstage of the auditorium at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, said the news was a surprise. She was expecting one of the Latin American countries where beauty pageants are widely celebrated. “I was like, ‘Wow, Russia, I never thought of that,’” she said. Phil Ruffin, Mr. Trump’s partner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, said he was happy to lend him his new Global 5000 private plane for the trip. He and his wife met Mr. Trump in Moscow, also checking into the . Mr. Ruffin said he and Mr. Trump had lunch at the hotel with the Agalarovs. The Agalarovs also reportedly hosted a dinner for Mr. Trump the night of the pageant, along with Herman Gref, a former Russian economy minister who serves as chief executive of the Sberbank PJSC, according to Bloomberg News. Talk of development deals swirled around the visit, and Mr. Trump sent out his tweet, promising that Trump Tower Moscow was coming. But the tower never appeared on the skyline. | 1 |
LONDON — A partial list of the onstage casualties amassed during a mere three days of theatergoing here: attempted suicides: four successful suicides: five accidental death by reckless use of a firearm: one death by natural causes, hastened by the cruelty of a spouse: one loss of trust in others: immense and incalculable happy endings: one, and that one highly suspect. Usually, when the skies are gray and this city’s mood is bleak — that’s status quo in 2016 — a classic (or ) can be relied on to provide sentimental escapism for West End audiences. Not so in this summer of anxiety, when it feels as if every love story has a body count. The statistics cited above do not even include the latest version of the eternal tale. “Romeo and Juliet” has been staged by the Kenneth Branagh Company with a paparazzo’s eye for “La Dolce Vita” glamour and rue among the rich and famous. (That would raise the number of suicides to seven never mind the collateral murders.) Or Rufus Norris and Simon Stephens’s gleefully scurrilous reimagining of Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” at the National Theater, in which the crime lord Macheath (Rory Kinnear) is led straight to the gallows by his wayward, willful sexuality. (Murders and acts of torture: too many to itemize assault by rectal insertion of knife: one.) These grim numbers are instead gleaned entirely from five productions that I saw more or less . They are Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” at the National Theater, in which the wondrous Helen McCrory adds yet another memorable portrait to her gallery of devastatingly devastated women a engrossing marathon of early Chekhov works (also at the National) an especially bruising “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Shakespeare’s Globe and Simon Stone’s merciless and mesmerizing updating of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma,” starring a fabulous Billie Piper. For audiences who like their sex on the silly side, a longstanding and popular preference in British theater, there are jauntier accounts of erotic mayhem. They include “The Truth,” by the French dramatist du jour, Florian Zeller (“The Father”) a precisely drawn and equally predictable romantic quadrangle at Wyndham’s Theater and around the block, at the Duke of York’s Theater, a spiffing revival of “How the Other Half Loves” (1969) Alan Ayckbourn’s ingenious, bending portrait of overlapping marriages. Both these plays qualify as farces, albeit of a literate ilk. But it’s important to note their frantic plots are propelled by the increasingly improbable lies characters perpetrate in the name of adultery, forever contaminating their closest relationships. (The truth of Mr. Zeller’s title is what people do their best to conceal.) The laughter elicited here has a sting in its tail. If you believe that love is both comic and tragic, as do most sensible people who have lost their senses in its name, there’s no better place to start than the canon of Chekhov. The National’s omnibus “Young Chekhov,” which originated at the Chichester Festival Theater, assesses the shifting dichotomy in three early works by this greatest of modern playwrights: “Platonov,” “Ivanov” and “The Seagull. ” Directed by Jonathan Kent, from translations by the British dramatist David Hare, these productions show how slapstick and angst breathe the same romantic oxygen in Chekhov’s universe. It’s fascinating to watch that balance being further adjusted with each successive play and to see the multicast ensemble embody both sides of the tragicomic equation. (My favorite transformation is that of James McArdle from the hapless homme fatale Platonov into the puritanical doctor of “Ivanov. ”) Mr. Kent’s staging of the party scenes, with their clashes of classes and egos, is masterly. So is his sense of Chekhov as a social satirist, whose characters are closer to the quirky grotesques of Charles Dickens than we usually realize. Yet while I was always absorbed by “Young Chekhov,” I was seldom moved, partly because of the broadness of so much of the acting, especially in “The Seagull. ” There is one deeply affecting moment, though, that captures perfectly the pathos of a failing marriage. It comes in the first act of “Ivanov,” when Anna Petrovna (the exquisite Nina Sosanya) the ailing wife of the title character, tightly embraces her husband (Geoffrey Streatfeild) from behind. The sudden look of raw panic in Mr. Streatfeild’s eyes, and the desperate hope in Ms. Sosanya’s, say everything you need to know about why this relationship is doomed. The disjunction of love and reason is the frantic animator of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Shakespeare’s Globe. This spirited but effortful interpretation is the inaugural offering of the Globe’s new artistic director, Emma Rice, best known for her blissful stage version of Noël Coward’s “Brief Encounter” (on Broadway in 2010). Ms. Rice has said that a large part of her mandate for the Globe is to make its productions more accessible and inclusive, in terms of gender and ethnicity. So this “Dream” features a mostly female (and delightful) troupe of amateur thespians for the play within the play a punkish epicene Puck (the Welsh actress Katy Owen) and a gay relationship among the central quartet of young lovers. (Helena is now Helenus, appealingly played by Ankur Bahl.) The production is replete with sight gags, slapstick, topical references (including winking nods to Ms. Rice’s nontraditional approach) music and witty burlesque turns by the Australian cabaret performer Meow Meow as Titania. The goofy pageantry and high concepts can weigh down the humor, though, and you wish Ms. Rice had trusted more in the transporting buoyancy of the language. You can also sense this production’s distaste for the coercive erotic encounters brought about by fairy chemistry. (In an interview in the program, Ms. Rice says Titania’s infatuation with the Bottom is the result of “a date rape drug. ”) In the double role of the mortal and fairy monarchs, Theseus and Oberon, Zubin Varla is polymorphously perverse and a bit of a brute. No wonder Theseus’s bride, Hippolyta (also Meow Meow) is seen chugging whiskey to get her through her wedding night. Love turns not just sour but deeply rancid in the blistering “Yerma” at the Young Vic, the hottest incubator of revitalized classics in London. Mr. Stone, an Australian director and dramatist, has transplanted Lorca’s poetic folk tale of a provincial Spanish woman’s yearning to have a child into the London of today. The central character is Her, a successful journalist (Ms. Piper, of “Doctor Who” fame) who decides it’s time for her and her husband (the excellent Brendan Cowell) to have a baby. Their inability to conceive drives the woman into an escalating frenzy of despair that destroys her marriage. She chronicles this erosion in a blog. As befits a story of the 21st century, the lines between private grief and public exposure have blurred dizzyingly, a notion ingeniously underscored by Lizzie Clachan’s box of a set, which intersects the audience. Those walls, by the way, are of little help in keeping us at an emotional remove. How could they be, given the extraordinary, painful transparency of Ms. Piper’s performance? In “The Deep Blue Sea,” Rattigan’s 1952 play about an eminent barrister’s wife who has left her husband for a young pilot, Ms. McCrory goes out on nearly as a limb as Ms. Piper does. In Carrie Cracknell’s haunting production, Ms. McCrory conveys the ravening, cancerous feelings beneath the socially smooth, reflexively gracious surface of her character, Hester Collyer. Tom Scutt’s evocation of the shabby boardinghouse in which Hester now lives has walls, so we’re always aware of the impinging lives of the other residents. As in the Young Vic’s “Yerma,” this “Deep Blue Sea” suggests how tortured, relationships can become the stuff of voyeuristic speculation and gossip. That was true for the last character Ms. McCrory embodied at the National, Euripides’ Medea. And a simple dialogue Hester has with her estranged but still adoring husband (Peter Sullivan) captures the essence of romantic tragedies from the ancient Greeks onward. “What happened to you, Hester?” he asks. Her answer is prompt and abject: “Love, Bill, that’s all. ” | 1 |
News Bulletin ©AFP
Farewell to the old captain. Hundreds of mourners have gathered in Rio De Janeiro to pay tribute to the Brazilian football legend Carlos Alberto, who died at the age of 72, after suffering a heart attack. Former capitan of Brazil's 1970 World Cup winning team, Carlos Alberto Torres, is buried at Irajá cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on October 26, 2016. ©AFP
Alberto's coffin was carried for burial at the cemetery on Wednesday with a Brazilian flag draped over it.
The former captain is mostly remembered for scoring the iconic fourth goal in Brazil's 4-1 victory over Italy in the 1970 World Cup Final.
Alberto won 53 caps for his national side and won domestic titles with 3 club teams.
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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents on Thursday were on the verge of overrunning the southern city of Tirin Kot, the capital of Oruzgan Province, Afghan officials and local elders said. Dost Mohammad Nayab, a spokesman for the governor of Oruzgan, said that all security posts around the city had been overrun by the Taliban and that the insurgents had started firing on the police headquarters and the governor’s compound. “The security forces are engaged with the Taliban inside the city, and fighting is ongoing,” Mr. Nayab said. By late in the afternoon, however, Mr. Nayab said the situation had improved after NATO airstrikes began targeting Taliban positions. Additionally, Gen. Abdul Raziq, the powerful police chief of neighboring Kandahar Province, had arrived with other reinforcements and the central government had tasked him with leading the clean up operation, a spokesman for General Raziq said. Marred by internal police chaos, Tirin Kot had long remained a vulnerable spot after its controversial police chief, Gen. Matiullah Khan, was gunned down in Kabul last year. General Khan had risen to power with generous support from NATO military contracts and political backing from the former president, Hamid Karzai, and although he kept the Taliban at bay, he was also accused of tribal favoritism and of using force against political rivals, which ultimately kept Oruzgan fragile. The security deterioration has occurred amid a protracted struggle over the succession to become police chief. General Khan’s brother, Raheemullah Khan, demanded that he be appointed to the post, but the central government went to pains to persuade him to accept the compromise position of deputy police chief. Nevertheless, officials in the past have accused forces under him of giving up checkpoints to signal his discontent. As Afghan forces rallied resources to counter the Taliban threat to the capital of neighboring Helmand Province, as well as the northern city of Kunduz, which the insurgents briefly overran last year, officials and elders warned that Tirin Kot was besieged. Mr. Nayab said that 200 Afghan commandos arrived late Wednesday and were trying to stop the Taliban advance, but he bemoaned the early lack of air support from NATO. “If there is no reinforcement in a few hours, the Taliban may enter the governor’s house,” he said. Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said special forces from an elite task force based in neighboring Kandahar Province had reached Tirin Kot on Thursday morning. Abdul Karim Khadimzai, who oversees the provincial council in Oruzgan, said the city was under lockdown, with only security forces visible on the streets. He said that the police chief and other officials had sought shelter at the airport, but the chief, Gen. Wais Samimi, said that he was still at the police headquarters. “The Taliban warned the citizens to stay indoors, and they are going to enter the city,” Mr. Khadimzai said. Officials in Oruzgan, including Mr. Khadimzai, pointed fingers at the police. They said more than 20 checkpoints had been abandoned overnight around Trin Kot city without a fight. Military officials in Kabul even suspected a conspiracy in the surrenders, which followed patterns that had brought the capital city of Helmand on the verge of collapse last month. “The whereabouts of the police are not known, whether they have joined the Taliban or escaped somewhere,” Mr. Nayab said about the surrendered forces. “We are busy now with making plans to defeat the enemy but will need to investigate what made them leave the posts without fighting. ” A Taliban commander in Oruzgan, Mullah Hameedi, claimed the insurgents had taken control of the central prison there, only to find that the officials had already evacuated the inmates to the airport. But Mr. Sediqqi rejected that claim, saying that a Taliban assault on the prison Wednesday night was repelled. | 1 |
Medicare Scammers Targeting the Elderly 7.0K shares by A. DeSimone / November 20, 2016 / DML REPORT /
According to NPTelegraph.com , during the months of open enrollment, scammers prey on the elderly by impersonating Medicare reps so they can obtain personal information to use for fraud.
The article, “Scammers Impersonate Medicare Employees”, is featured below and is full of pertinent information about the techniques and methods these unscrupulous criminals use to extort money from the unsuspecting elderly. This is something that needs to be read, understood, and shared with anyone who has an elderly family member.
Also, below is a short but very informative video featuring a Elderly Victim of a Medicare scam.
Sign up to get breaking news alerts from Dennis Michael Lynch. Subscribe | 0 |
Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name => Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin isn't happy. Credit: VDare.com.
St Thomas Aquinas told us that one of the pleasures enjoyed by the blessed in Heaven was to contemplate the sufferings of the damned in Hell. Apparently if you get to Heaven there is a sort of balcony you have access to where you can stand and watch the sinners down below being prodded, scorched, and flayed.
Far be it from me to bandy theology with the Angelic Doctor, but I’ve always thought that divine justice should have a bit more charity in it than that. Whatever: Down here in the terrestrial sphere, there’s no doubt that one of the pleasures of winning an election is seeing the torments of the losers.
One of the first losers out of the gate, on Wednesday morning, was the curiously named Steven Thrasher [ ] of BuzzFeed. It’s not the “Steven” that excites my curiosity, it’s the “Thrasher.” Mr. Thrasher is a homosexual ; indeed, he basks in the glory of having received the 2012 Journalist of the Year award from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. I know it’s Neanderthal of me, but I can’t help wondering whether “Thrasher” is an assumed name, meant to signal something to those in the know…but that’s idle speculation on my part.
So here was Mr. Thrasher on Wednesday morning:
This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close.
People of color, women, Muslims, queer people, the sick, immigrants: all are threatened by Donald Trump. They need your love, your warmth, your support Hold tight to the ones you love, America. Hold tight to the ones you love living in black and brown and yellow and native skin. Hold tight to us, because we will have to face white people who think we are rapists. We will have to face a nation that wants to stop-and-frisk us. Hold tight to us, because mass incarceration is actually going to get worse, and more of our brothers and sisters are going to be disappeared … This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close, Guardian , November 9, 2016
It goes on—or thrashes on—for another six hundred words in the same vein.
Homosexualists were very much to the fore in this kind of hysteria , although I can’t recall anything Donald Trump has said on the subject, and I doubt on a priori grounds that homosex bothers him in any way.
For another example, here was lesbian writer Cathy Renna [ ]at Huffington Post, November 10th. Get yer hankies out:
This election was a hate crime. Not physical but psychological, and one that may well lead to legal and physical manifestations that would very much be categorized as hate crimes.
I saw and heard about such pain and fear on social media and personally as we realized Trump would take the election. And it has not let up. I checked on several people who were expressing a level of fear that seem like it could lead to self-harm.
A Vote For Trump Was A Hate Crime , November 11, 2016
That one also continues for over 600 words.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is not homosexual, although he does have eccentric tastes: According to Wikipedia, he once dated Maureen Dowd. I’m afraid that brings to my mind a limerick the late Robert Conquest wrote about Ms. Dowd’s approximate U.K. equivalent, Brigid Brophy. The limerick is much too vulgar for a family website, so I’ll leave you to look it up for yourselves.
Mr. Sorkin unbosomed his feelings about the Trump victory in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old daughter:
The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood …) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you.
Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President ,Vanity Fair, November 9, 2016
Ms. Sorkin can of course make up her own mind about moving to Canada. It’s not actually an option for her Dad, though. He’s a convicted drug felon. [ Aaron Sorkin Says He Used Drugs , AP, August 3, 2001] And Canada doesn’t give settlement visas to felons.
Casting around for targets on which to vent their spleen, the CultMarx crowd didn’t even spare the celebrity fluff magazines. Here’s a gal named L.V. Anderson, an associate editor at Slate previously known as an expert on Ziploc bags , breaking a butterfly on the wheel, the actual butterfly in this case being People magazine . [ Amoral PEOPLE Magazine Is Already Fawning Over How “Cute” Trump’s Family Is .[November 9, 2016] ORDER IT NOW
“Amoral”! People , you see, has done what they habitually do when someone gets elected President: they’ve posted pictures of Trump’s family—actually of his daughter Ivanka Kushner and her kids—whom the magazine describes as “cute.” 22 photos of Ivanka Trump and her family that are way too cute https://t.co/AZdq7b2Gwa pic.twitter.com/e6cSxQAft1
— People Magazine (@people) November 9, 2016
That has Ms. Anderson sputtering:
Trump and Kushner both played key roles in the most hate-filled presidential campaign in modern history. They worked tirelessly to elect a demagogue …
Trump and Kushner, more than anyone else, normalized Donald’s patent unfitness for the presidency.
And now, People is normalizing their moral bankruptcy by pretending that they are just average celebrities, as harmless as the Kardashians.
End sputter. Are the Kardashians really harmless , though? Discuss among yourselves.
And then of course there was the Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler brigade. British Lefty historian Simon Schama on BBC Radio November 8th, quote: “Democracy often brings fascists to power. It did so to Germany in the 1930s. And so in my view it has done this evening.” [ Fury at BBC Radio 4 as Simon Schama compares Donald Trump election win to rise of HITLER , By Cyrus Engineer, Express.co.uk, November 9, 2016]
It’s all been wonderfully delicious to watch. In a simile that I like very much, one of my email correspondents, who lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, told me that, quote:
There are few in my zip code with whom I could share the joy of this moment. I can report that the apparatchiks are all walking around dazed and despondent, like Japanese schoolkids who have just heard the emperor announce the capitulation on the radio .
Added to the pleasure of hearing such wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left is the spectacle of establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan falling into line behind The Donald. The English language has the idiom “rats deserting a sinking ship.” I can’t think of a phrase that expresses the reverse thing, rats scampering to get back on the ship as she hoists sail and starts to pick up speed, but there really ought to be one.
If St Thomas Aquinas got it right, and Heaven is half as much fun as this, I’m going to be very good indeed from now on in hopes of getting there at last.
If you go before me, save me a space on that balcony.
To take set this in a global perspective: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow remarked to me the other day that an American election is the Greatest Show On Earth.
He’s right of course, and that’s hopeful for the human race at large.
Our election will surely have been an encouragement. In many European nations, just as here, a smug, entrenched political elite has been pushing a sentimental globalist ideology whose benefits to their own people have long since passed the point of diminishing returns.
We see this in the great crisis of illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East. We’ve been chronicling the crisis on VDARE.com: the great floods of illegals into Germany, France, Greece, and most lately Italy. [ Italy Becomes A Leading Destination For Migrants, Matching Greece , NPR, November 6, 2016]We’ve told you about the sneaky euphemisms: “refugees,” “asylum seekers,” “migrants,” and so on.
No doubt some small proportion of the numbers are genuinely fleeing from something. The great majority, though, it’s plain from the news pictures, are middle-class young men from sub-Saharan Africa and reasonably stable places like Pakistan, looking for a Western lifestyle.
It’s overwhelmingly a problem of illegal immigration. And rising numbers of Europeans are mad as hell that their governments, far from doing anything to stop it, are actively encouraging it.
There you see the commonality with Trumpism in the U.S.A. Illegal immigration has been a signature Trump issue. Trump’s success in the election this week has given heart to Europeans fighting for the sovereignty of their own countries and the integrity of their borders.
Here’s a relevant quote from one of those Europeans:
[Ronald] Reagan spoke of “Poland’s struggle to be Poland.” And today, three decades later, history is about to repeat itself in the United States and in several West European countries. Of course, I am not comparing our current political elite with the Communist dictatorships with their prison cells for dissidents, but the fight of a nation to be itself, remain itself and defend its identity, that fight is also being waged today.
We are witnessing America’s struggle to be America, and the struggle of several European nations, among them the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany and many others to preserve their identity and liberty, to remain the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany. Everywhere, patriots are on the march. We are living the Patriot Spring.
Geert Wilders: The Patriot Spring – Breitbart , January 26, 2016
That was Dutch dissident Geert Wilders. He is the leader of a political party over there, the fifth-largest in the Dutch parliament, with twelve seats in the House and nine in the Senate. That hasn’t stopped the Establishment bringing Wilders to trial for “hate speech” after he promised an election rally that there would be fewer North Africans in Holland under a government run by his party. [ Europe’s Show Trials Are Where America’s Anti-Speech Regime Is Going, By Alex Grass, The Federalist, November 6, 2016] Wilders’ trial is ongoing. ORDER IT NOW
Patriots in European nations—the counterparts to those of us who write and broadcast on websites like this one—live under real threat. It’s not just the threat of show trials, either. Wilders has 24-hour police protection and sleeps at undisclosed locations.
That’s the fate of honest patriots in societies under the soft totalitarianism of Political Correctness. This week’s election in the U.S.A. has given them new hope. Here’s Geert Wilders’ stirring statement on his hopes for the President Elect:
My hope—and expectation—is that Donald Trump will follow in Reagan’s footsteps, that he will stand firm, speak the truth, concede nothing and, in doing so, inspire Western Europe to protect its freedoms against Islamization.
America has just liberated itself from Political Correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!
Geert Wilders For Breitbart: The Second American Revolution Has Come, by Geert Wilders, November 9, 2016
The key takeaway here: Wilders’ phrase “the Patriot Spring.” I don’t know if he coined that himself or borrowed it, but it’s something to watch out for across the pond in coming months.
There are elections all over in Europe next year: Germany in February and September, the Netherlands itself in March, France in April, May, and June, Hungary in May, Norway in September, Czechia in October.
It could be that we’re looking at not just a Patriot Spring over there—but a Patriot Year.
If that comes to pass, it will have been partly under the inspiration of Donald Trump and our country, the U.S.A.— “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.”
John Derbyshire [ ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books . He’s had t w o books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013 . His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com . (Reprinted from VDare.com | 0 |
Let us have a look at the data for today
.
In silver, the total open interest ROSE by 318 contracts UP to 193,975. The open interest ROSE AS the silver price was UP 8 cents in yesterday’s trading .In ounces, the OI is still represented by just less THAN 1 BILLION oz i.e. .970 BILLION TO BE EXACT or 139% of annual global silver production (ex Russia &ex China).
In silver for October we finished with 39 notices served upon for 195,000 oz. Thus the final standings for silver in October is 555 notices served upon for 2,775,000 oz. An excellent showing for silver in a non delivery month.
In November, in silver, on first day notice filings: 875 notices were served upon for 1,690,000 oz
I
In gold, the total comex gold ROSE by 2,919 contracts WITH THE RISE in price of gold ($4.30 ON FRIDAY ) . The total gold OI stands at 510,070 contracts.
In gold for October we had 341 notices served upon for 341,000 oz. This should finalize gold as the total number of notices filed for the month totals 9,776 for 977,600 oz or 30.407 tonnes.
In gold for November: we had on first day notice filings: 875 notices served upon for 87500 oz
With respect to our two criminal funds, the GLD and the SLV :
GLD
TODAY WE HAD NO CHANGES AT THE GLD OUT OF THE GLD
Total gold inventory rests tonight at: 942.59 tonnes of gold
SLV
we had NO CHANGES at the SLV/
THE SLV Inventory rests at: 360.673 million oz
.
First, here is an outline of what will be discussed tonight:
1. Today, we had the open interest in silver ROSE by 318 contracts up to 193,975 as the price of silver rose by 8 cents with Friday’s trading.The gold open interest ROSE by 2,919 contracts UP to 510,070 as the price of gold ROSE $4.30 IN FRIDAY’S TRADING.
(report Harvey).
2.a) The Shanghai and London gold fix report
(Harvey)
2 b) Gold/silver trading overnight Europe, Goldcore
(Mark O’Byrne/zerohedge
3c FRBNY gold movement report
(Harvey) 3. ASIAN AFFAIRS
i) Late SUNDAY night/MONDAY morning: Shanghai closed DOWN 3.78 POINTS OR 0.12%/ /Hang Sang closed DOWN 20.27 OR 0.09%. The Nikkei closed DOWN 21.39 POINTS OR 0.09% Australia’s all ordinaires CLOSED UP 0.59% /Chinese yuan (ONSHORE) closed UP at 6.7728/Oil FELL to 48.43 dollars per barrel for WTI and 50.42 for Brent. Stocks in Europe: ALL IN THE MIXED Offshore yuan trades 6.7847 yuan to the dollar vs 6.7728 for onshore yuan. THE SPREAD BETWEEN ONSHORE AND OFFSHORE NARROWS A LITTLE BIT AS MORE USA DOLLARS ATTEMPT TO LEAVE CHINA’S SHORES / CHINA SENDS A MESSAGE TO THE USA TO NOT RAISE RATES IN DECEMBER. REPORT ON JAPAN SOUTH KOREA NORTH KOREA AND CHINA 3a)THAILAND/SOUTH KOREA
South Korea`s is rocked this morning by an influence peddling scandal similar to the USA charitable foundation scandal
( zero hedge) b) REPORT ON JAPAN
A preview of what to expect from Japan`s decision this week. In essence continue what they have been doing: printing money and buying assets
( zero hedge) c) REPORT ON CHINA
i)This is now alarming: China`s TED spreads are blowing out as banks are now afraid to lend to one another and a huge dollar shortage.
( zero hedge)
ii)Another alarming commentary. China`s debt this year has grown by 4.5 trillion uSA. This growth has basically kept the world`s global economy moving somewhat. When this stops all hell with break loose: a huge deflationary spiral
( zero hedge) | 0 |
According to a Politico report, President Donald Trump told advisers that he favors ending Obamacare subsidies to bring Democrats to the negotiating table for a more comprehensive deal on repeal. [Trump said that ending the Obamacare subsidies will force Democrats to negotiate on an Obamacare replacement. Some White House advisers worry that the move may backfire politically if Americans lose health insurance or if people experience spikes in insurance costs. Health insurers have pressed President Trump for months on clarity on whether the White House will provide subsidies to health insurers. Estimated at $7 billion, the Obamacare subsidies go to insurers reduce deductibles and other costs for consumers. President Trump has previously expressed his desire to end the Obamacare subsidies. In April, the president said, “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money. ” He continued, “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt … What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating. ” Health Secretary Tom Price remains cautious about eliminating the health care subsidies. Price argues that doing so would discourage insurers from participating in the Obamacare exchanges next year, and might destabilize an already crumbling Obamacare exchange market. Conservatives argue that Obama lacked the authority to dole out billions of dollars of insurance subsidies, arguing that Congress never appropriated money for that purpose. Under former Speaker John Boehner, House Republicans sued the Obama administration to prevent it from doling out the subsidies. In 2016 a federal judge ruled against the Obama administration but allowed the Obama White House to continue providing Obamacare subsidies while the administration appealed the decision. Republicans sought to delay the court case after Trump was elected president. The president will have to inform the U. S. Court of Appeals how he wants to resolve the House Republicans’ lawsuit. The White House can also ask for a hold on the lawsuit. In a statement, the White House told Congress it will continue the payments through May. However, the administration has not made any commitments beyond that. The statement read, “No final decisions have been made at this time, and all options are on the table. ” After the American Health Care Act failed to garner enough votes in the House, Trump tweeted that Democrats will come around to make a deal with him once Obamacare implodes. The Democrats will make a deal with me on healthcare as soon as ObamaCare folds — not long. Do not worry, we are in very good shape! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017, | 1 |
We Must Tell the Truth About the Iraq War Posted on Oct 30, 2016
By Jodie Evans / AlterNet Ewan McIntosh / CC BY-NC 2.0
“The only silver lining of the Brexit vote is that it will reduce medium term attention on Chilcot – though it will not stop the day of publication being uncomfortable,” former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the previous U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in a July 4th email obtained by the Intercept.
As it turns out, these words would be prescient. The Chilcot Report , a damning 12-volume, 2.6-million-word inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War, did not get much attention on either side of the pond upon its July release. The probe was overlooked at a time that the Iraq War was still raging even though everyone thought it was over, and the millennials I talked to had little idea of the lies or the costs. This summer and fall, it became increasingly clear that the tumultuous U.S. election cycle will not propel anyone with a peace platform to the presidency. I decided I needed to do something that will be useful in the face of even more wars after the election madness is over.
So we launched a People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War as a tool to bring the anti-war movement together and build what is needed for 2017. We aim to lay the lies and costs at the feet of President Barack Obama and call for a commission on Truth and Accountability. There are years’ worth of testimony in reports, lawsuits, books and articles. We have read the facts about the lies and costs over the years. But the totality has never been been pulled together to show the breadth of all effected.
According to a report released last year by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the U.S. invasion and occupation killed at least one million Iraqi people. That would be more 10 million people in the United States if we compared it in terms of percentage of the population. Imagine the effect of 10 million people dying.
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There are over 100,000 casualties on the side of the U.S. and the coalition of the willing, with a small percentage of those dead. The rest are living with permanent physical and psychological wounds, some so bad that U.S. military veterans are committing suicide at a rate of 20 a day. In 2012, suicides surpassed war as a the leading cause of death in the U.S. military.
Since 2001, U.S. wars have cost taxpayers nearly $5 trillion, according to a new report from Brown University’s Watson Institute. But few can understand what that number actually means. Nor does this amount count the cost to people in Iraq or other members of the coalition of the willing.
I have heard these reports at various tribunals over the years. But numbers and facts don’t change hearts and minds. This tribunal will be different. It will be a people’s tribunal, to be witnessed by the public, which will be presented with a large body of evidence.
The participants on the days of the tribunal will be “delivering” evidence with a five-minute statement about the meaning of that evidence. Dennis Kucinich will present the letter he wrote to Congress in October of 2002 outlining his research which showed there was no operational connection between the Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction. Jeremy Corbyn will deliver the Chilcot Report. Elizabeth Holtzman, the member of Congress in the 1970s recognized as the woman who impeached Nixon, will deliver her book calling for the Impeachment of George W. Bush.
We will be joined by people from across the United States and world. The World Tribunal on Iraq , which culminated in Istanbul, Turkey and has held sessions across the globe, will deliver all of these testimonies. The Brussels Tribunal will deliver the book and testimony that emerged from their efforts. Inder Comar will deliver the documents that make up the ongoing class action suit against six members of the George W. Bush administration alleging that the Iraq War constituted a war of aggression. There will be over 50 offers of testimony each day.
On day one, December first, we will focus on the lies that fed the drive to war. On day two, we will hear more than 50 people testify to innumerable costs of U.S. war in Iraq, which in fact goes back at least 25 years .
Yes, there is a staggering cost to U.S. taxpayers—but also the cost to the planet and the militarization of our cities and police departments. We will hear from the mother of a young black man who was killed the last week of high school by a cop who was a veteran of the Iraq War suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. We will hear from soldiers who were raped by fellow soldiers. Rabbis and priests will discuss the cost to our morality. We will hear about the costs of the U.S. use of depleted uranium to Iraqis and the children of American soldiers who served there. The event will be live streamed on The Real News, with testimony delivered in person, by live stream or by video. The combination of all the testimony will be delivered to Obama and Congress. But the real work has already begun. The coalition is using the tribunal to gather local communities to discuss the cost of war to them, encouraging them to review what they could have had instead of war. Such collective exercises demonstrate how the costs of war come home, literally.
Most of the members of our coalition are outreaching to their lists to join with a call to Obama for a Commission on Truth and Accountability. Other partners are outreaching for voices that still need to join those testifying. When the election is finally over, testifiers will begin to discuss their testimony in the media, laying a path to the tribunal of details, broken hearts, destroyed communities and devastated families. We must tell our truth as passionately and effectively as the architects of war tell their lies. We must come together and gather the stories of destruction and loss, in order to witness and remember. Join in. Make it your own. Share with your community. Raise awareness. The time to stop the next war is now. | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber is one step closer to its dream of a future — with a little help from a new partner. The company announced on Tuesday a partnership with Daimler, under which the German automaker plans to build autonomous vehicles that will operate on Uber’s transportation network. The move marks the first time a major automaker will provide its own vehicles — built entirely and without Uber’s help — specifically to operate on the company’s network. The agreement is not exclusive, and Daimler may produce autonomous cars for Uber’s competitors, while Uber can also bring other automakers onto what it calls its “open platform” for ride hailing. The two companies said they expected Daimler’s vehicles to reach Uber’s network “in the coming years. ” “Auto manufacturers like Daimler are crucial to our strategy because Uber has no experience making cars — and in fact, making cars is really hard,” Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We can combine Uber’s global network with the vehicles of companies like Daimler, so that Uber riders can have a great experience getting around their cities. ” Uber has a history of cooperating with automakers to jointly produce autonomous vehicles. The company has worked with Volvo to develop the XC90, a sport utility vehicle now being tested in Pittsburgh, near Uber’s research headquarters. Uber has also modified a fleet of Ford Fusion vehicles, outfitting them with sensors and cameras for autonomous capabilities. Lyft, Uber’s largest competitor in the United States, has also worked closely with a major automaker, General Motors, which is making its own vehicles for Lyft’s network. Google struck a deal with Fiat Chrysler last year to work on vehicles. Uber stands to benefit from the Daimler partnership in several ways. Collaborating with automakers could reduce the perception that Uber is a threat to the sales of the auto industry, for example. The company can also bolster its supply of vehicles to pick up a growing base of riders. Uber faced some setbacks with its experiments last year. It ended a pilot program in San Francisco in December after disagreeing with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles over whether it had the proper permits for the test. Uber plans to begin a similar test in Phoenix in the coming months. “Daimler aims to be a leader in autonomous driving,” Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s chairman, said in a statement. “Together with Uber, we seek to combine our strengths. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — knew it had a problem. Democrats had unexpectedly sat down in the middle of the House of Representatives chamber to demand a vote on gun control legislation, and with the body officially in recess, the cable network known for “gavel to gavel” coverage of Congress, had no means to cover it. Then it found an unlikely source: the social media feeds of House members who had turned to Periscope, a live app, and Facebook Live. “As soon as we knew it was available, we went for it,” Terry Murphy, ’s vice president for programming, said on Thursday after a short night’s sleep. “We didn’t know when we got into it that we would be doing it for 24 hours. There just wasn’t much time to debate it. ” So began what was arguably the most memorable period the network has seen in years, one that Mr. Murphy estimated had probably set a record for continuous broadcast of a social media feed and that others suggested amounted to something of a declaration of independence from congressional landlords, who control the TV cameras inside the Senate and House chambers. But it was perhaps even more momentous for Periscope, which debuted just over a year ago after being acquired by Twitter. As of 5 p. m. Wednesday, Twitter messages that one or both of the live video streams broadcast by Representatives Scott Peters and Eric Swalwell of California embedded had already been viewed more than a million times, according to the company. “We always told ourselves that if we were successful, we were building a tool to give a voice to the voiceless,” Kayvon Beykpour, and chief executive of Periscope, said in an interview. “It’s showing you the truth from different people’s perspectives. It’s a really raw way of experiencing what you watch. “In this case, it’s really ironic that the voiceless were our elected representatives. ” Twitter has long had a presence in Washington, and holds regular training sessions for politicians and media organizations on how best to use its tools. After Twitter bought Periscope, the video app was incorporated into the company’s training efforts. About a month ago, Twitter held a training session with the House Democratic caucus that focused specifically on how to use Periscope. A staff member from Mr. Peters’s office attended. On Wednesday, when lost access to cameras — which are normally shut off when the House is not in session — an aide suggested that Mr. Peters turn to Periscope as a means of broadcasting what was happening on the House floor. A Facebook spokeswoman said that broadcasts by members of the House had reached more than 2. 9 million viewers on the social media site. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, wrote in a post on Thursday morning that use of Facebook Live was “bringing more openness to the political process. ” Overnight ratings were not available for . Other networks shared brief segments from the live feeds, but it was that stuck with them, overriding other coverage and cutting away only when Speaker Paul D. Ryan and other House Republicans returned to the floor around 10 p. m. for a series of votes. is no stranger to sessions — be they for a filibuster or a contentious vote — but the impromptu which Mr. Murphy said the network had no advance knowledge of, was different. A staff of around 25 people remained overnight in the Capitol and at the network’s offices a few blocks away, and the regular morning team was called in four hours early. “It was the least scripted of the sessions we’ve had to cover,” Mr. Murphy said. The fact that does not control the cameras inside congressional chambers has been a source of disquiet for the network since it arrived on the air in 1979. Every time a new leader comes to power in either chamber, Mr. Murphy said, network executives send a letter requesting greater access, including the placement of independent media cameras inside the chamber. Thus far, they have been denied. The network employs about 270 people and has an annual budget of $70 million, according to a spokesman, Howard Mortman. It enjoys a niche following: Journalists covering the federal government treat it as a lifeline, and for those addicted to politics from coast to coast, few sources can rival its unvarnished transmission. While ’s decision to stick with the protest drew a flurry of criticism on Twitter, Mr. Mortman said there had been no serious concerns raised from Mr. Ryan’s office or outside groups. “We want to show as much of Congress as we can — that’s our mission,” he said. “This clearly is a big story, and this gives us a way to show what’s happening in an area where our own cameras are not allowed. ” | 1 |
by Yves Smith
Even though this assessment of the Trump win and the implications for American politics going forward is long, it’s also meaty and very much worth your attention. Mark Blyth was virtually the only person to call a Trump victory virtually from the get-go (a colleague who spends a lot of time outside the Acela corridor is another member of that club) but also correctly gamed out how the stock market would react.
Everything Blyth says is incisive, colorful, and on the mark. By contrast, it’s frustrating listening to Schiller because she is invested in way too much of the Dem orthodoxy, such as the Hillary scandals were manufactured by Republicans, that Sanders would have lost if he were the Democratic candidate, that Clinton was a victim of being a woman with a long political career (hello?). Similarly, towards the end, Blyth says, “There is no left left,” and explains why, and then Schiller begs to differ by trying to depict the Democrats as leftist. But she does have some random insightful remarks.
In other words, you can run the video and tune your attention in and out, although you may then want to go back and listen to just the Mark Blyth remarks a second time. There’s a lot of solid material here. 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 |
The 59th Annual Grammy Awards will feature its male and transgender “trophy girls” tasked with presenting music’s top honors onstage. [“To be honest, the idea of a ‘trophy girl’ has felt antiquated for some time now,” Neil Portnow, president of the Recording Academy, said in a statement Friday. “Who wrote that rule anyway? The ability to present a trophy has nothing to do with one’s gender. ” Viewers watching Sunday’s Grammys will see three trophy handlers, including transgender model Martina Robledo, actor Derek Marrocco, and model and actress Hollin Haley. The change is the latest move by The Recording Academy, which presents the annual event, to diversify the awards ceremony, from rap to country to jazz to classical, with Beyoncé and Adele among the top contenders this time around. Beyoncé leads all artists with nine nominations, including Album of the Year for her Black Lives album Lemonade. Singer Rihanna and rappers Drake and Kanye West each earned eight nods. British pop queen Adele was tipped in top categories, including Album of the Year for her commercial juggernaut 25. James Corden will host the ceremony, which airs live on CBS at 8 p. m. Eastern. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson. | 1 |
Vereinigtes Königreich nimmt die Dschihadisten-Ausbildung in Syrien wieder auf Voltaire Netzwerk | 1. November 2016 français Español Der britische Verteidigungsminister Michael Fallon hat angekündigt, dass sein Land die Freie Syrische Armee (FSA) wieder ausbilden werde. Seine Regierung nimmt also das Trainingsprogramm der so genannten moderaten Kämpfer wieder auf, das von Präsident Obama im Jahr 2014 gestartet wurde.
Die FSA wurde von Frankreich im Jahr 2011 rund um den libyschen Führer von al-Kaida, Abdelhakim Belhadsch, geschaffen. Die Operation wurde als Hilfe für syrische, von Oberst Riad el-Asaad kommandierte Deserteure, dargestellt. Allmählich sind die Mitglieder der FSA aber al-Kaida beigetreten. Im Jahr 2016 wurde das FSA- Etikett durch die Türkei, die es für ihre turkmenischen Milizen verwendet, wieder ins Leben gerufen.
Die Vereinigten Staaten hatten ihrerseits in der Zwischenzeit eine halbe Milliarde Dollar für die Ausbildung von neuen „Rebellen-Kämpfern“ ausgegeben. Alle diese gedrillten Leute haben sich heute jedoch al-Kaida angeschlossen.
Es ist also sehr wahrscheinlich, dass das neue britische Programm eine neue Hilfe für al-Kaida verbirgt.
Übersetzung
Horst Frohlich | 0 |
PARIS (AP) — Demonstrators in western France have tried to block buses carrying supporters of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen to a campaign rally. [The incident Sunday in the city of Nantes came after 11 police officers were injured Saturday in skirmishes with activists opposed to Le Pen’s appearance there. No injuries were reported from Sunday’s bus protest. Sebastien Chenu of Le Pen’s National Front party said on BFM television that the protesters were “trying to stop us from delivering our message. We will not back down. ” Critics allege that Le Pen’s campaign is a cover for a racist, worldview. Recent polls suggest she could win the first round of the election, but predict she would lose the ensuing runoff vote. | 1 |
Archives Michael’s Latest Video What Is Causing The Strange Noises In The Sky That Are Being Heard All Over The World? By Michael Snyder, on March 22nd, 2012
During the second half of 2011, a lot of people all over the planet started reporting hearing really strange noises coming from the sky. In some instances the noises produced a loud rumbling such as a train, a thunderstorm or the slamming of a heavy door would make. In other instances, the noises sounded more like “groaning”. In yet other instances the noises sounded almost as if a trumpet was playing. Dozens of videos went up on YouTube purporting to document this phenomenon, but the truth is that you can fake almost anything on a YouTube video and many dismissed these strange “strange sounds” as an Internet hoax. However, now entire towns in the northern part of the United States are hearing strange noises in the sky and the mainstream media is reporting on it. In fact, one U.S. town is planning to spend thousands of dollars to hire an engineering firm to investigate where these strange sounds are coming from. At this point a lot of theories about these strange noises are being floated, but so far scientists have not been able to give us a definitive explanation for the source of these strange noises. So exactly what in the world is going on?
This phenomenon made national news again this week because of what has been going on in Clintonville, Wisconsin. Hundreds of residents of Clintonville reported hearing incredibly loud noises coming from the sky for several nights in a row. Even CBS News is reporting on what is happening in Clintonville….
Since Sunday, the residents have been disturbed by “booming” noises loud enough to wake them from their sleep.
Last night, hundreds of people attended a public meeting to get to the bottom of booms. But they aren’t any closer to the truth.
One resident told CBS News, “The last few days we’ve been having (a) booming shaking noise.”
Another resident said, “(For) a lot of people the house is rattling, you can feel the ground rattling, and it’s booming all the time. It’s kind of like, what’s going on? You don’t know what’s happening.”
So what is causing these noises that are so loud that even the ground is shaking?
According to Fox News , the town has investigated every possible explanation that they can think of for these strange noises….
City officials say they have investigated every possible human cause. They checked water, sewer and gas lines, contacted the military about any exercises in the area, reviewed permits for mining explosives and inspected a dam next to City Hall. They even tested methane levels at the landfill in case the gas was spontaneously exploding.
So far no explanation has been found. So Clintonville has decided to spend $7,000 to hire an engineering firm to investigate the cause of these strange noises.
According to geologists, the town does not sit on any fault lines and the ground beneath the town is very solid. Some geologists are claiming that “ micro-quakes ” could have been responsible, but others find this explanation to be very unsatisfying.
For many town residents, solving the mystery is not as important as getting these strange noises to stop so that they can get some sleep.
The following comes from the recent Fox News article mentioned above….
“My husband thought it was cool, but I don’t think so. This is not a joke,” said Jolene Van Beek, who awoke early Sunday to a loud boom that shook her house. “I don’t know what it is, but I just want it to stop.”
But Clintonville is not the only town in Wisconsin where strange sounds are being reported.
Mysterious noises are also being reported in a town called Montello which is 80 miles away from Clintonville.
Posted below is a local news report that discusses the strange noises that are being reported in Clintonville and Montello….
These strange sounds have made the mainstream news up in Canada as well.
Recently, strange noises caused such a violent shaking that they actually brought down a barn on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
Geologists say that no earthquake occurred at the time that the barn collapsed.
So what caused the barn to collapse?
That is a very good question.
And this is not just a North American phenomenon.
If you go on to YouTube and you do a search for “strange sounds” or “strange noises” you will find dozens of videos from all over the world. Yes, there are definitely a few videos that appear to be hoaxes, but is that true with all of them?
The evidence for this phenomenon is mounting and it is getting really hard to deny that there really are large numbers people all over the globe that swear that they are hearing really strange sounds coming from the sky.
So exactly what in the world is going on?
Well, there are a lot of theories floating around on the Internet. The following are some of the most prominent theories about what is causing these strange noises: electromagnetic noise, earthquakes, “fracking”, rock bursts, venting of high-pressure gas that has been trapped underground, meteor showers, HAARP or directed energy weapons, and some believe that all of this is just a giant publicity stunt.
Perhaps the biggest reason why these strange noises have so many people alarmed is because humans generally have a great fear of the unknown.
If the cause of these strange noises is revealed, the hysteria will die down.
But if these strange noises continue (or even become more intense) and there continues to be no scientific explanation for them, then the hysteria may turn into full-blown panic.
What is clear is that our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. As I have documented previously, earthquakes are becoming more frequent and more powerful. The “ Ring of Fire ” is becoming a lot more active and we have been seeing a disturbing amount of volcanic activity lately.
So could earth changes have anything to do with these strange noises?
We just don’t know at this point.
Most of the time when I write an article I like to have some answers. But I do not know what is causing these strange sounds.
So what do you think about these strange noises?
Do you believe that you know why they are happening?
Have you heard strange sounds coming from the sky where you live?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below….
It is necessary to determine the origin of these sounds: natural or artificial. I think these sounds are artificial, for nature as it is not natural. But I admit that I could be wrong. ScoutMotto
I don’t doubt that some of the videos are valid, however I heard one from I think Hungary where amidst the groaning sounds, there was a piece of music played backward for a couple seconds. I sampled the soundtrack, played it backward in Goldwave, and it sounded like a short percussion piece. Hard to take that one seriously, which causes doubt to be cast on others of like style. But, I’m not writing it all off just yet. Guido Heraldsofthemorn
The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 is an example of the destruction of the world at the end of time, see Matthew 24 and the book The Great Controversy. Here is a paragraph from the book Great Controversy that tells of signs and wonders before the destruction.
“Signs and wonders appeared, foreboding disaster and doom. In the midst of the night an unnatural light shone over the temple and the altar. Upon the clouds at sunset were pictured chariots and men of war gathering for battle. The priests ministering by night in the sanctuary were terrified by mysterious sounds; the earth trembled, and a multitude of voices were heard crying: “Let us depart hence.” The great eastern gate, which was so heavy that it could hardly be shut by a score of men, and which was secured by immense bars of iron fastened deep in the pavement of solid stone, opened at midnight, without visible agency.”—Milman, The History of the Jews, book 13. – {GC 29.3}
Could these sounds that are being heard be part of the signs and wonders before the end? Mike Ayala
Greetings,
You have no idea how unstable the earth really is! Humanity is going to have a wake-up call one day that is going to make the movie 2012 look patheticly simplistic and relatively uneventful in comparison.
The problem stems from the release of heat as rock falls through magma: the volume of the rock decreases as it melts, and at the same time it releases enough heat energy to melt many times its original volume – some suggest enough heat to melt 88-times the original volume. (You should gasp about now.) Up to the present we have enjoyed relative stability, a sort of sliding equillibrium, but that is changing at an increasingly rapid exponential rate which can be quantified by examining the increasing rate of “Great” earthquakes (8-plus) over the last 100 years which is startling to say the least.
Some parts of the crust will be affected more than other, but all will feel the pain. The worst economic collapse ever will be remembered as the “good old days” in comparison to the run-away stage of this process. The recognition of this process gives new meaning to the prophecy, “There will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.”
The noises and shakings noted in the article probably do not have anything to do with this crust-contraction phenonenon, but there is coming a day when all who dwell on the earth will fear for the things they see and experience coming upon the earth. Hence, the most important preparation one can make is to prepare to meet God. For some it will be a time of exceeding joy; For the rest it will be the time of judgement and eternal torment and regret.
Send me an email, and I will get you more information about this topic.
God bless and protect you all.
Mike Ayala JR
So, Mike, how do we contact you, then? Or can you point us to the source of your information? Thanks! Mike Ayala
Hi JR,
The easiest way is to call and order a copy of a recent lecture given at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa at the February Creation Science Investigation conference on 20120218. They are not a lot of money. The particular lecture covering this topic was:
Earthquakes Kevin Lea 2/18/12
This one was a real eye-opener. I knew about the exponential increase in great earthquakes, but the magma details and the Pacific Ocean abberation/collapse/indentation were new to me.
Another great presentation given at the same conference was by John Sanford:
Genetic Entropy Dr. John Sanford 2/18/12
This one is about how the human gene pool is decayng at an astounding rate of conservatively 100-200 mutations per generation plus transcription errors in every cell division and what is the significance of these two factors. It does not paint a pretty picture.
The bottom line is that we have no hope in this present world: All that we take for granted and hold dear will perish. We need to have our hope firmly rooted on the Rock of Jesus Christ who will regenerate our bodies and renew our minds and make a new heaven and earth in which righteousness will dwell.
God bless and protect you and your family.
Mike Ayala Ken West
yes I would like to read more about this subject. Would appreciate what info. you have. Thanks
Hollow earth theory coming alive. Underground civilizations in which all of our gold and other PMs are transfered to are having underground wars that are heating up, similar to the quakes on the east coast in VA to NY MB92083
Just saw on Fox news (Gretta V.S.) that the mystery was solved. They said it was caused by a minor (1.something) earthquake. This only applied to the WI incident. Blustery Day
And of course you never change the channel. Fox is not reliable. They tell you what they want you to believe. PandaStar
and that is different from any other news or network? Curtis
In October of 2011, my wife and I were on our way to Lake Tahoe on highway 88 coming down the mountain toward highway 50 when we suddenly heard within our car (windows up), a sound so loud that it sounded as if a freight train was right next to our vehicle. This is an area that is pristine. There are no trains around. It was unexplainable. mondobeyondo
There is still a lot more about our planet that we don’t know, than what we do know. Just like any arrogant teenager, we think we “know it all”… mark
The only sounds that we hear on our ranch at his time of year are frogs and the creek that runs by our house. Oh yes, we can’t forget about the dogs, the coyotes, owls at night,cows,birds, a car or truck once in a while and sometimes a chain saw. Let’s not forget the sound of the wind in the trees or the rain hitting the roof. I guess we have not heard the groans of the earth yet. Gary2
All the strange sounds are coming from all the echo from Rush in conservatives empty heads.
And yet another study showing conservatives to be dumb.
Don’t Drink and Vote: New Study Says Alcohol (And General Thoughtlessness) Makes People More Conservative
Getting drunk is known to cause erratic, irrational, and, overall, thoughtless behavior — public urination, bar fights, tears in the streets. Now, go ahead and add political conservatism to that list.
A new study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, tested whether low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, and part of the study measured alcohol’s effects on political positions. Researchers found that the higher the blood alcohol content, the more conservative the views on sex, education, and political identification became.
Researchers hypothesized that drinking turns people Republican because political conservatism arises in the absence of deliberate thought. People with a lot on their minds, under time constraints, or told to respond in a cursory manner, rather than think deeply and use “recognition memory — an indicator of effortful thought — were also more conservative.
“Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought,” the study concluded.
The less you think (or more you drink), the more conservative you become? Shocker! Cheers to the right-wing. Guido
That doesn’t sound subjective at all… DownWithLibs
So, you WERE dropped on your head when you were born…only explanation!!!! Justa Guy
I don’t know about groans of the earth, but I think I’m hearing groans of the blog right about now… Drunk Gary2
In other words DRINK UP and PARTY ON DUDE!
P.S. – This explains why Berkeley and other party spots are such bastions of conservatism. Those damn conservatives are having too much fun. Its time for liberals to lighten up an tie one on. Guido
I don’t think this is inexplicable. Years ago, in the 1980s, San Francisco’s boat people all reported loud, unusual noises coming from the bay. Theories ran wild, including Soviet subs, until scientists figured out it was the toadfish mating call.
There are also lots of stories over the years about inexplicable humming in certain towns and areas. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91912&page=1#.T2v9XdlVXTc Here’s an article on the Kokomo Hum. I don’t know if there’s any similarity, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Perhaps the region sits on a nice piece of rock that can resonate like a tuning fork when it gets the right signal. Perhaps it is geological activity-we have seen a lot of earthquake activity in recent years. Who knows? Guido
I watched one of the videos. It reminded me of the gag at the end of Red State where the kids fool the extremist church holdouts with trumpets played over an old fire department horn and convince them it’s the end of the world… Gary2wannabe
Meeshall has been farting. Kannibal
In Fresno, CA, this is a daily occurrence. The sound happens suddenly without any build up. It is extremely loud like 10 Jets, and shakes my walls and windows. Sometimes it suddenly just stops without fading away like a jet normally would. Sometimes it rumbles the sky for minutes at a time. I’ll be outside sometimes when it happens and look up in the sky but there is never anything there. Clear skies and no airplanes.
I once heard a rumble at around 2am and ran outside to see if I could spot anything. What I saw was in the sky to the southwest. It was about 14 red lights it the formation of a boomerang and you couldn’t see between them. The space they took up was about the size of a football field. It was traveling very slowly as if it were slowly descending continuing southwest. I have never seen anything like this in my life. It sent a chill down my spine and I called out for my wife. She ran out and started freaking out. I know this sounds crazy but maybe it was just our government playing with there new toys. GunRights4US
Clearly God’s pissed, and rightfully so. Sodom and Gomoarah had nothing on modern man in terms of pure evil. Man has an appointment to keep, whether he likes it or not. John
You are about the only one who is closer to the truth than anyone could ever imagine… David M
Maybe it’s an SSTO. Single Stage To Orbit spacecraft. Being run by our government making runs to orbit.
It would have powerful engines to accelerate to orbit and would leave a long thunderous noise trail. Including sonic booms, that would shake the Earth, as it got up to a minimum of several thousand miles an hour.
Someone should compare the sounds to a Shuttle launch. Ripplewind
Mother Earth is preparing for war against us. Andrew Kind
God is shaking what can be shaken before His Son returns. karen
It’s Mother Earth giving you warning signs, but of course most will say it’s all a joke. And for christains it’s the same as in the bible… And the trumpets shall sound, you are being given a warning of things to come real soon. even the goverment knows this, they just don’t want you to know, that’s why a new executive order just came into effect 16 Mar 2012 National Defence Resources Preparedness they own everything you have now right down to a chicken in your yard. There is a great video out called 5 reasons why America will have the worst riots in the world, awesome truth!!! Anna
On January 23rd I heard the noises , the deep and high trumpet/ groaning type, not the boom, but I was terrified, it was omnidirectional, not point of origin. When I compared what I heard to the sound of some of the Shofar videos , my hair stood on end. It was nearly identical, only on a much grander scale. Could be a deception, we are warned, Let no man deceive you, could be the real deal as well. Only God know and that is enough for me, He says 365 times in His Word, do not fear, so I have to trust Him. Walk with Christ and He will keep you fearless. Emily
I do not say this lightly or with humor, Mother Earth is in pain and we are hearing her sorrow. Please remember, YAHWEH brought forth all life from Earth and she cries out for her children. JR
Could it be the sound of our economy imploding under the feckless administration of Jimmy Carter Obama?
Some people are talking about a coming magnetic poleshift (nothing new, has happened before), maybe the magnetic field are making those sounds? Intresting article Michael. Sunshine
Yes, curious on magnetic shifting for possibility. Consider that one of the things said to be saturating the atmosphere through SRM, Solar Radiation Management is aluminum particles. Now, as far as I know, aluminum is NON magnetic. Disrupting the electromagnetic waves of the sunlight could be a factor in “climate change” since the sun plays a very big part in natural weather patterns. Could interfering with magnetic waves also cause strange noise? Now, why go to this great effort with such great risk? It could cause extreme weather patterns including melting the north pole.
HAARP, the Aurora spy plane, fracking, and Biblical end of age signs? jason
In january of this year i herd a noise coming out of the sky. I live in the wisconsin dells and at that time i could sweare a T-rex was going to come charging out of the woods at any moment. it was a little unsettling to see videos on youtube that show the same sound all over the world. at first i passed the sound off to be some kind of amplification to the mile away freeway but at 3 am the freeway is not that active. so what the hell is it? Newman Noggs
Auroras can cause strange sounds from a distance, but usually they crackle, not boom. I would look for evidence of electromagnetic activity: increased ground voltage, St. Elmo’s fire, etc. From what I’ve read this is not a new phenomenon. Look up Seneca Guns. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/booms.php Billy
Note to Gary2: You are indeed an idiot. MB92083
I’ll second that! He’s a nice guy, but delusional and brainwashed. Benjik
I’m thoroughly convinced Gary2 is actually an extreme right-winger dead-set at portraying liberals/progressives to be extremely foolish and misinformed. That’s the only rational explanation….. Proftel
Because only in the Northern Hemisphere?
? Jim
It is the US gov playing with thier reversed engineered alien stealth spacecraft. I have also heard (with my sister) what sounded like a large flying spacecraft right over our heads with NOTHING around but sky. It was NOT a natural phenominum as soulded “man” made.
Remember, the Gov tells us 10% of what we really should be knowing. Rosenkreuz
How do you know what a large flying spacecraft sounds like? Denali
It’s our Founding Fathers turning over in their graves. bruce smith
Be Warned.. GOD is giving everyone a chance.. Signs and wonders are to allow people that have doubted in HIM to wake up.. When HE does return soon, it will be to gather the followers of HIS SONS teachings home with HIM..After that earth will be a living hell.. laura4basics
I would never accuse people of making this up or of creating a hoax for attention. I will suggest looking up Tesla Technology GMA215
The so-called “experts” have now announced that the noises in WI are from a “swarm” of “mini-earthquakes.” Yeah. Sure they are. Saq
It’s called the government. Possibly drilling more underground tunnels??!! babygirlway
Thursday morning I woke up at around 5:00 a.m. hearing some sort of loud pounding noise coming from outside. It was repetitive. Our windows were open because it has been unusually warm for March in the Indianapolis area. So warm in fact that I had my large, remote control fan on next to my bed that I purchased last summer to help with my middle aged night sweats. LOL. Anyway, I had enough time to wake up and hear the noise above the fan, turn off the fan and still hear it going….it woke my husband up as well. It was not a construction noise. I never did figure out what it was. Did anyone else in the Indy area hear it? Benjik
Something I have wondered about for years and never received a valid explanation on is what are the effects of pumping billions of barrels of oil out of the Earth with nothing to replace it? Wouldn’t that internally effect the general mass of our planet? How does that void effect the Earths rotation, gravitational properties, points of axis, etc? Think of the old “spinning egg” science experiment. When the internal properties of an egg are altered (boiled vs. raw), it has a direct effect on how it reacts to spinning it on a hard surface. Could this may be happening on a global scale? Any feedback would be appreciated. OldManNoal
FINALLY SOMEONE IS ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS!!! you’re onto something MASSIVE Benjik Marilynn
The other night I had difficulty sleeping. I can always hear the “hum,” although it varies in volume, but I just ignore it. This time it was accompanied by an occasional groaning sound. It wasn’t very loud and I know it wasn’t a vehicle driving by or an airplane because it didn’t increase and diminish. Just a few seconds of a low “groaning,” then five to 10 seconds later it repeated about five or six times.
The next day I read about the noises in Wisconsin. My guess is that it has something to do with military testing, perhaps some sort of sound wave experiment. This much is not theoretical: The government is ALWAYS engaged in experimentation of all sorts—chemical, biological, nuclear, electro-magnetic, geo-engineering, mind control, etc.—and they have no ethical qualms about testing this crap on human populations.
yes,it is all in the new book, MAYDAY IN JOPLIN Gary2
I figured out what the noises are…Gog and Magog are tusseling over who gets to kick the beasts ass. mackie
Sounds are the results of vibrations. And vibrations can be a result from many different events. Such as ‘space quakes’, which are the magnetic field lines which do compasses our earth and out into space. When we recieve a solar flare from the sun, these magnetic field lines are push or moved, and when two of these magnetic field lines touch each other they cause what is called a space quake. A space quake is a loud vibrating sound which is from the sky, and can be felt through the air, ground, and can even rattle your house. Another thing which can influence as well our earth is a heavy object such as a dwarf star, or planet x, or even a comet. These will either pull or push our orbital cycle, or even casue the earth to real to and fro like a drunkerd. Even thirdly, the earth’s core could be heating up, just like the rest of the planets in our solar system due to the sun’s output which has changed so much and is effecting all the planets. A warmer core would cause the increase of rotation of the earth. There is also the “fluff” in space as well which is effecting the sun, and everything else. There is so many things which we are not taught, but the information is out there for the learning if one wishes to go out and research it. We are blessed to have such a great resource through the internet. In life It is always a cause and effect. A.S.
Michael, you already gave one reason, which is the most likely one: HAARP. It is the U.S. using HAARP for whatever selfish purposes, like attempting to subvert countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc, to trade between themselves with their own currencies. The U.S. did it before and they will do it again. Jes
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/what-are-the-strange-noises-in-the-sky-being-heard-all-over-the-world Booming Sounds could this be the result? – Here’s an excerpt on what really happened at the time of the Great Deluge (Noah’s Flood). It was a cataclysmic. – Geologists have recognized that these ridges are fracture lines on the earth’s crust. They have estimated some 200 million years ago the continents were joined together as one piece, and they have named this supercontinent Pangea. A model of the Pangea was presented in the section, Creation Mysteries. Since then Pangea broke up as a result of the earth’s Crust breaking up into pieces, or plates, which have since been drifting from each other or drifting towards each other. Thus the Americas are moving at a rate of an inch from Europe and Africa per year. The present separation is about 3,000 miles. The major mountain chains of the world such as the Alps and the Himalayas were formed by the collision of plates bearing these continental masses against each other. In other areas the collision caused one plate to go under the other as in the case of the Pacific plate moving under western edge of the US continent. This process is still continuing, hence the periodic earthquakes in California… Read more here… http://www.biblediscoveries.com/content/view/17/34/ Yeshua(Jesus) did say: Matityahu (Matthew) 24:37-41 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage….. The End will be cataclysmic just as was the Beginning. Tesla2011
Haha, its sad billions or millions of earthlings have no clue. Its clear, what this is and I would only say this, the earth magnetic pole shifts and the layers of earth are all being testes and purposley being manipulated by mad scientist. Ofcourse, already its sounds mad bc, you ppl can’t belive it or the science of mechaniscim. This object is the one and only worlds most dangerous weapon…
That’s High frequency Auroa Atmosphere Reasearc Program. The man, who created is the worlds genuis of all centuries. His name is Nikola Tesla and is the inventor of the electromagnetic transmitter gha would be later deveolped as a top notch weapon. Guido
I suggested earlier the noise could be large rock formations underground resonating from earth movements. Beneath Wisconsin and other states in the region is a massive granite formation called the Superior Upland Shield. The US Navy exploits the resonating qualities of the shield to transmit Extreme Low Frequency communications with submerged submarines. They’re broadcasting at about 8 watts. The ELF transmitters are slow, but they can use the planet itself to transmit their signals to subs underwater in any ocean. Perhaps this sheild, or some other piece of rock can pick up earth movements and magnify them into those peculiar sounds. One of the ELF antenna arrays is located at Clam Lake, WI, which is only 20 miles’ drive from Clintonville, WI. I have no proof, but the idea is no less plausible than other ideas I’ve heard… Bruce
The Bible says in Romans 8 that “all of nature groans ( waiting for the return of Jesus) and in Matthew 24 that ALL these things…earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, a decline in morals (and I am quite certain, even strange sounds)…when you see ALL these things beginning to happen “look up for your redemption isn’t too far off”…time to get your heart right with God. BluButterfly
I keep hearing a lot of really far out theories, and I find them all fascinating. However, the best answer is sometimes the simplest and most obvious. Has anyone ever tried correlating these strange noises to the increasing solar activity? Recently we have been seeing lots of solar flares, suspots, etc and they are definitely affecting the high incidence of Northern Lights in the past year. Some geologists (in Finnland and Germany) are saying the sun has not been this magnetically active in over 1000 years. One of the best sites to read about and track this solar activity is http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/index.html . I am trying to find out if anyone has cross referenced the dates of high solar activity, the dates of solar storms, and the areas where the magnetic flares have reached the earth. Josh
Everyone bringing religion into this is dumb. Truthfully im a christain but seriously science proves more than a bible can prove thats jsut fact. You people say the world wil lend and it doesnt why because all you have is a book backign you up. Thats incredibly outdated. Time to stop believeing in fairytail and start believeing in facts. Ducrider900
Before you call other contributors here “dumb”, it might behoove you to learn how to spell, and how to string a few cogent words together – it’s called using grammar to communicate. Too bad it’s no longer taught in the government schools…you and your pathetic attempt at communication are collectively, exdhibit one of this sad fact.. hippiekarl
What’s ‘dumb’ is calling theories that have become dogmas through nothing more than repetition ‘proofs’ or ‘facts’. ‘Science’, painted into a corner by its mutually-contradictory ‘facts’, can’t even explain such things as why sea-water is salty (the ratio on this planet of sodium to chlorine doesn’t allow the oceans’ current salinity), or why (if iron was always on the surface of the Earth) the Bronze Age preceeded the Iron Age…or why the world’s highest mountains are the youngest, and are covered–beneath their ice–with sea sediment. ‘Science’ (which gets together and VOTES on what the ‘facts’ are) is full of hubris but short on ‘the truth’, which it periodically changes, changes back, and changes again. Physics is not a democracy, and majority-belief is NOT the benchmark of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’. Max
I live in Wisconsin and the local news reports had residents claiming the booms came from the ground, not the sky. Regardless, why do these tremors occur mostly at night? We had a massive chemtrail blitz last Oct and then again late Jan (that we could see) which was very unsettling. So the idea of a sound weapon makes sense somewhat — I think the government is messing with us for not rolling over on the Union destruction plan. Chopper
Well finally someone is getting very close to the truth…. Mackie…. I think everybody should read what he is saying… Magnetic flux lines… I personally think everybody should do some reading …. Fast! Lol. JJ
Except hallucinations are generally not recordable. These sounds are recordable. JC Vaughan
I tell you, Krypton is merely shifting in its orbit. James
The Bible gives information on the end times, and if you check out Daniel and the New Testament, especially Revelations. You will see most of the things we are experiencing now, are in there with more things to come. harold hutchison
god said that in the last days he would shake the earth he said there would be signs in the earth and from beaneath the earth, also signs in the sun the moon just look around and see what is going on, it also says the whole creation groans in pain wanting to be delivered from the curse that is on it, people like to make fun of the bible but that will soon come to a end, the bible says its a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god unprepared, gods son paid a terrible price for our sins and i urge everone to make sure you are ready before its to late . h. hutch Renee
Glad I came upon this, I heard a almost deep noise, not loud from inside my house, the windows were open, my dog heard it and cocked his head at it, the next day my mom was bruching her hair and litterly, no shiz, her hair started rising, I tryed brushing it out and noticed it was litterly lifting, yesterday I also was so hyper it was crazy, like magnitized. This is a rather interesting article, our alignment with Jupiter, being maybe alittle closer causing a magnetic shift? It sounding almost like blades, its gotta be our Magnetic field, also it feels like July, we could be sliding in location perhaps? Stephanie White
Now to me that is interesting – that your dog heard it. From everything I have read, no animals appear to hear it – or react to it. jeremy archer
I went out on the night of the hurricane last August. It was 10pm and the wind had not really kicked up yet. It was raining but I did not wear a hat and I had no umbrella. It was quite warm so the rain on my head did not bother me. I walked from 99th and Broadway along 100th st to Central Park. As I entered the park I followed a path over a little bridge and down to a lake. There were a few ducks at the edge of the pond that stood and gazed at me. It was very quiet; hardly any traffic was passing down Central Park West. All I could hear was a torrent of water coming down the hill that passed under the bridge. I stood and looked at the reflection of the street lights on the lake. After some time, I walked back up the hill over the bridge and walked along 100th st. Just before I got to Manhattan Ave I started to hear a low groaning sound, like some old man breathing. I could not tell if the sound was coming from the sky or from below me. I crossed the street to see if I could still hear it, since the sound was not loud. I stood under a tree and the volume was the same. I walked over to Columbus Ave and turned south. There is an entrance there to a new building and 3 doormen were standing outside talking. I asked them if they could hear any sound. One of them ignored me but the other 2 said they could hear it. I was not sure if they really did or if they were just humoring me. We talked for a minute and one of the doormen offered to show me a book he was reading. When I entered the building, due to the absence of any exterior noise from the rain and traffic I was able to hear the sound much more clearly and at that moment I felt that the sound was coming from beneath me. The doorman made no comment on the fact that the sound was any more audible. I did not mention the sound to him again but I did wonder why he did not mention the increase in the volume. He showed me his book and I left the building and continued walking south to 97th st, where I turned and walked west for about half a block, listening intently to the sound that I felt sure now was coming from beneath my feet. Then the sound stopped, so I turned and walked back to see if I could pick it up again but I could not. I returned home to 99th st without hearing the sound again. drezdin
Mid-michigan… Heard strange sound last night which sounded most similar to a helicopter, or an uneven, overloaded washer during spin cycle. no copter in sight and sound did not at all seem to get closer nor further away, but did weaken for a few seconds at times while also intensifying for a few seconds periodically as well. lasted from at least midnight until 7am at which time my wife could still hear it several miles away upon arrival at work. we live in apt. complex and two neighbors (one next door, one downstairs) were out on their balconies and either could not hear or were ignoring (hard to imagine) the sound because their conversations didn’t even give mention of the noise from what I could tell ( which wasn’t much bcuz the noise was LOUD and ANNOYING and OMINOUS!! Thank You Jesus for CHOOSING me before I even was, and pulling me out of the wilderness after 37yrs. threescore and 3days! (Baptized 12/9/11 immersed in water in Jesus’ name for the remission of my sins, and to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, evidenced by the initial outward sign of speaking in tongues 12/20/11).
One baptism. One God. One Name. Be One..with Christ, in Christ, of Christ. Forever. Amen. Apostolic Pentecostal and rapture ready! Paladin
I’m responsible for the strange loud noises in Clinton……well, actually it was that | 0 |
Mark Ruffalo Reportedly Placed on U.S. Terrorist Watch List 11/02/2016
CBS NEWS
Actor Mark Ruffalo has reportedly been added to the government’s terrorist watch list.
The “The Kids Are All Right” and “Zodiac” star was placed on the terror advisory list by Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security earlier this year after helping to promote the documentary “Gasland” and speaking out about his concerns of natural gas drilling, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Written and directed by Josh Fox, the film, which premiered on HBO this summer, put a light on the communities that are impacted by the natural gas drilling boom in the U.S.
While Ruffalo, who will next appear as The Hulk in “The Avengers,” may now face tedious secondary screenings at airports, the 43-year-old isn’t too put off by the whole situation.
[It’s] pretty f–kin’ funny,” he tells the December issue of GQ magazine . | 0 |
International Brotherhood of Teamsters president James P. Hoffa praised President Donald J. Trump’s move to crush the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) once and for all on Monday, the second major labor union leader to do so. [Hoffa — like president Richard Trumka who also praised Trump on Monday without naming him — also praised President Trump’s efforts to work with Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well. Unline Trumka, however, Hoffa showed he’s willing to name Trump in his release. Hoffa said in a statement: Today, President Trump made good on his campaign promise to withdraw the United States from the Partnership. With this decision, the president has taken the first step toward fixing 30 years of bad trade policies that have cost working Americans millions of jobs. The Teamsters Union has been on the frontline of the fight to stop destructive trade deals like the TPP, China PNTR, CAFTA and NAFTA for decades. Millions of working men and women saw their jobs leave the country as free trade policies undermined our manufacturing industry. We hope that President Trump’s meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Jan. 31 opens a real dialogue about fixing the flawed NAFTA. We take this development as a positive sign that President Trump will continue to fulfill his campaign promises in regard to trade policy reform and instruct the USTR to negotiate future agreements that protect American workers and industry. Jonathan Swan of Axios, one of the top journalists covering the Trump administration, noted after the statement that this could be the beginning of Trump stealing a broad and crucial part of the Democrats’ electoral coalition: union workers. Swan wrote on Monday: The relationship will be one of the more interesting in American politics over the first term of the new administration. Trump and top advisers like Steve Bannon see an opportunity to destroy traditional political alliances. Their theory worked in the election: They peeled white working class voters (and many union households) away from the Democrats. Now, they believe that delivering major items for this constituency — watch also for a confrontation with Big Pharma — could further wreck the Democrats’ hold on organized labor. But, Swan offered a word of “caution” on this front as well: “If Trump pursues more traditional Republican policies — like slashing taxes and regulations and repealing and replacing ObamaCare — he could quickly undo much of his goodwill with unions. ” Sources close to the president, however, confirm to Breitbart News that the president plans to approach these issues and others not from traditional partisan perspectives but from a more pragmatic angle, something likely to keep appealing to union workers nationwide in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — all key states that Trump won in his shocker landslide 306 electoral vote victory over Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. | 1 |
At last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s annual showcase of new tech, the company announced a special texting feature coming soon to iPhones near you. “You know, sometimes you’ve typed a whole message and you realize at the end that you’re entirely lacking in emojification,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering. “So we provided the solution: When you tap on the emoji button, we’ll highlight all the emojifiable words there, and you can just tap, tap, tap, tap and emojify. ” On a screen behind Mr. Federighi, a simulated message underwent the process: The word “basketball” transformed into a little black and orange cartoon image of the ball itself. “Pizza” flipped into a glistening pepperoni slice. “Movie” turned into an film camera. A collective “Ooh” wafted up from the technorati gathered in the crowd. “Children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language,” Mr. Federighi said jokingly. But Apple’s new emoji feature seems more likely to impede a different kind of skill: creating surprising, figurative and subversive forms of individual expression out of the digital ephemera that populate our devices. In a rush to harness the power of the web’s most evocative cultural units — emoji and their hyperactive cousins, GIFs — tech companies, corporate brands and entrepreneurial social media stars could risk inadvertently flattening the creative world that’s sprung up around them. “There is a constant push and pull between people finding new ways to express themselves online, and companies trying to make money off that expression,” said Luke Stark, who studies digital communication and psychology. Emoji have emerged as cultural forces in and of themselves. The crisp, glyphs form a modern emotional palette. And it’s growing: On Tuesday, the Unicode Consortium, the body that standardizes emoji, will release 72 new ones that will soon make their way to our fingertips, including a black heart, a wilted flower and a pregnant woman. Emoji began as colorful icons loaded into Japanese pagers in the 1990s. When they first migrated to American devices several years ago, discovering emoji felt like opening a grab bag of Japanese curios: smiley faces, yes, but also a buffet of Japanese foods (a cut of sashimi, a fish cake, a bottle of sake) and a host of untranslatable images. But the emoji soon took on new meanings as they made their way to new countries and subcultures — like the information desk person emoji (recast as a sassy retort) or the eggplant emoji (which usurped the banana to become the internet’s favorite phallic symbol). In a group chat, adding emoji can feel like tacking up posters on the walls of a virtual clubhouse. A lively sequence can stoke flirtatious undertones or show off sparkling wit. One perfectly chosen emoji could suspend a mood in time, like an ’80s movie that ends on an exultant freeze frame. If emoji encourage visual puns and whimsical juxtapositions, GIFs inspire a sharp curatorial sensibility. The art lies in detecting the richest slices of popular media — film, TV or amateur video — and punctuating their greatness by setting them on infinite repeat. The best “reaction” GIFs — those chosen to inject human expression in online conversation — feel both emotionally familiar and visually surprising. But when emojis and GIFs are filtered through the interests of tech companies, they often become slickly automated. In addition to Apple’s “emojification” feature, there is Twitter’s new GIF keyboard (a partnership with the GIF company Giphy, which has been pumped with $78. 95 million worth of funding since 2013). It directs Twitter users to choose from a suite of emotional reactions, including “Agree,” “Applause,” “Aww” and “Eww,” which conjures a set of appropriate GIFs, with those featuring the internet’s most GIFable celebrities, like Beyoncé and Oprah. Searching for a delicious bite of pop culture once took on the contours of a treasure hunt. A GIF keyboard feels like a shortcut: Click “GIF,” find an emotional state (“Agree”) then filter it through your cultural lens of choice (like Jerry Seinfeld saying “riiiiiight right right right right right. ”). Tap, tap, tap: . It all feels simpatico with Facebook’s new “reactions,” released in February, which offer users a slim range of human experiences — Anger, Sad, Wow, Haha and Love — with which to react to news on their feed. Buying into these features means giving tech companies the power to shape our creative expressions in ways that further enrich the companies themselves. A limited emotional range helps collect data on users’ states of mind. Twitter advertisers can now target users based on the emoji they tweet. The commodification of digital culture has engendered more explicit corporate branding, too. On Snapchat, where users embellish their selfies with emoji, crayon scribbles, and elaborate “lenses” that cover their faces with virtual masks, marketers like McDonalds are seizing the opportunity to write their messages across people’s faces. Even celebrities have tried to encode themselves. In December, Kim released her latest pioneering app, Kimoji, which serves up an alternative emoji set (and a suite of GIFs) designed around her own image. It inspired a boomlet of celebrity emoji offerings, including Stephen Curry’s StephMoji app, Amber Rose’s MuvaMoji, Justin Bieber’s Justmoji and the actor Ansel Elgort’s Anselfie. Even Drake’s dad has emoji now. With Kimoji, and its micro images of breasts and butts, Kim Kardashian isn’t just sexy: She represents sex itself. But as more stars jump on the bandwagon, these apps begin to represent little more than a branding opportunity: Ansel Elgort sticking out his tongue Ansel Elgort pouting Ansel Elgort wearing headphones. Meanwhile, as traditional emoji expand beyond their Japanese roots, tech companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google (all are voting members of Unicode) have become responsible for making cultural, and sometimes political, choices in determining which new emoji will make the cut. Some additions to the emoji repertoire are informed by experts: Unicode has consulted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for bird emoji advice. Others are culled from “popular requests from online communities” and proposals submitted by the public. Companies have also made bids to influence the result, though Unicode says it rejects emojis “strongly associated with a particular brand. ” Last year, the ad agency Havas London started a campaign on behalf of Durex, calling for a condom emoji. Cerveza Indio wants a dark beer emoji. Ballantine’s has championed a glass of whiskey. The rice company La Fallera suggested a paella emoji. (The whiskey and paella made the cut both are coming on Tuesday.) For the Olympics, Unicode recently considered encoding a rifle emoji alongside other glyphs, but members voted it down. “When vendors looked at it, they didn’t see a lot of additional value in adding it,” said Mark Davis, a Unicode spokesman. “There’s already a firearm in Unicode. ” That decision has helped stoke concerns that modern visual language is being shaped by the political or financial priorities of gigantic tech companies. While many don’t see the advantage of emojifying another gun, others wonder whether heightened scrutiny could lead to less idiosyncratic, less interesting characters. “One of the things that make emoji fun is this quirky weird list that came about through accidents of history,” said Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of Unicode’s emoji subcommittee. “The bomb, the cigarette, the dripping syringe — it’s crazy to think that all of those would make it in today. ” | 1 |
The president of the open borders group known as La Raza is comparing President Donald Trump’s immigration orders to a number of historic atrocities, including the slave trade, in a new Washington Post . [The piece by National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguía, claims Trump’s plan to deport criminal illegal immigrants build a wall along the southern border and crack down on sanctuary cities will “similarly tarnish our nation’s character” like the slave trade did: Some of the darkest chapters in U. S. history have involved forcibly relocating minority populations: the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, Operation Wetback and the internment of citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Each was considered legal and justified in its time. Now they are condemned as assaults on the values that define our nation. President Trump’s first executive order on immigration and the draft enforcement memos signed by Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly promise to similarly tarnish our nation’s character. The memos call for expanding the nation’s deportation forces by 15, 000 to round up, detain and deport the undocumented immigrants living among us. Instead of focusing on criminals, they make all undocumented people priorities for enforcement, and through a process called “expedited removal,” they severely reduce due process protections. Murguía says Trump’s immigration orders through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are based entirely “on falsehoods” about illegal aliens, arguing that illegal immigration is down and it does not pose as much of a threat as the Trump Administration purports. The La Raza president also parroted the talking points that illegal aliens help grow the economy by paying taxes every year: And the cost of the undocumented? Their contributions to the economy far outweigh their burden. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants pay $11. 6 billion in taxes each year. According to the Social Security Administration, undocumented workers contribute $15 billion annually to the fund, but only withdraw an estimated $1 billion. This claim has been repeatedly debunked by groups like the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) which found in a comprehensive study that illegal immigration costs American taxpayers a whopping $113 billion, as Breitbart Texas reported. Murguía also claims that there is “little evidence that most undocumented immigrants pose a threat to national security. ” But, in documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest back in 2016, research found that there have been 580 individuals convicted of terrorism in the U. S. since the September 11th attacks, with 380 of those individuals being terrorists, as Breitbart News reported. Murguía refers to the recent deportation of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an illegal immigrant living in Phoenix, Arizona, with her two children for 20 years. “A woman who was a resident of Phoenix for 20 years was also deported, leaving behind her two U. S. children,” Murguía writes in the piece. “They are hardly security threats, but will be ‘enforcement priorities’ under Homeland Security’s new policy. ” Nonetheless, Murguía did not mention that Garcia de Rayos had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after she was found to be illegally using a Social Security number to work at a theme park, as Breitbart Texas reported. In 2013, a judge ordered Garcia de Rayos to return home to Mexico, but she instead was required to periodically meet with immigration officials due to lax enforcement policies under former President Obama. Murguía goes on to claim that the Trump administration has “declared war” referring to ICE’s efforts to deport criminal illegal immigrants as “stalking people leaving church or going to the movies. ” Murguía’s piece concludes with a plea for the rest of the open borders lobby and amnesty advocates to continue to try to hold up deportation processes by the Trump Administration, writing “we’re deploying every tool we’ve got to oppose this policy — in the media, in the courts and in peaceful protests in the streets. ” John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
UNITED NATIONS — Defying extraordinary pressure from Donald J. Trump and furious lobbying by Israel, the Obama administration on Friday allowed the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that condemned Israeli settlement construction. The administration’s decision not to veto the measure reflected its accumulated frustration over Israeli settlements. The American abstention on the vote also broke a longstanding policy of shielding Israel from action at the United Nations that described the settlements as illegal. While the resolution is not expected to have any practical impact on the ground, it is regarded as a major rebuff to Israel, one that could increase its isolation over the paralyzed peace process with Israel’s Palestinian neighbors, who have sought to establish their own state on territory held by Israel. Applause broke out in the Security Council’s chambers after the vote on the measure, which passed 14 to 0, with the United States ambassador, Samantha Power, raising her hand as the lone abstention. Israel’s ambassador, Danny Danon, denounced the measure, and castigated the council members who had approved it. “Would you ban the French from building in Paris?” he told them. The resolution describes the settlement building as a “major obstacle” to peace and demands that Israel stop the construction, which most the world regards as illegal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who had scrambled in recent days to stop the measure from coming to a vote, issued a blistering denunciation afterward. “Israel rejects this shameful resolution at the U. N. and will not abide by its terms,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement. “At a time when the Security Council does nothing to stop the slaughter of half a million people in Syria, it disgracefully gangs up on the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and calls the Western Wall ‘occupied territory.’ ” Mr. Netanyahu immediately retaliated against two of the countries that sponsored the resolution. He ordered Israel’s ambassadors to New Zealand and Senegal to return home for consultations, canceled a planned visit to Israel next month by Senegal’s foreign minister and cut off all aid programs to Senegal. The vote came a day after Mr. Trump personally intervened to keep the measure, which had been originally proposed by Egypt, from coming up for a vote on Thursday, as scheduled. Mr. Trump’s aides said he had spoken to Mr. Netanyahu. Both men also spoke to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah . Egypt postponed the vote under what that country’s United Nations ambassador called intense pressure. But in a show of mounting exasperation, four other countries on the Security Council — Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal and Venezuela — all of them relatively powerless temporary members with rotating seats, snatched the resolution away from Egypt and put it up for a vote Friday. The Obama administration has been highly critical of Israel’s settlement building, describing it as an impediment to a solution in the conflict that has long been the official United States position, regardless of the party in power. Mr. Trump, who had urged the administration to veto the resolution, has made clear that he will take a far more sympathetic approach to Israel when his administration assumes office on Jan. 20. Mr. Trump’s comments on the resolution amounted to his most direct intervention on United States foreign policy during his transition to power. Minutes after the Security Council vote was announced, Mr. Trump made his anger known in a Twitter posting, saying: “As to the U. N. things will be different after Jan. 20th. ” A range of senators and congressmen from both parties also denounced the resolution, a reflection of the deep loyalty to Israel shared by Democrats and Republicans. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said, “It is extremely frustrating, disappointing and confounding that the administration has failed to veto this resolution. ” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who oversees a subcommittee that oversees United Nations funding by the United States, threatened to take steps that could “suspend or significantly reduce” that financing. Reaction to the resolution also illustrated fissures among American Jews regarding Israeli policy. Some, like the World Jewish Congress and American Jewish Committee, called the resolution a measure that would not help the peace process. Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement: “It is also disconcerting and unfortunate that the United States, Israel’s greatest ally, chose to abstain rather than veto this counterproductive text. ” Other groups that have grown increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s approach to the peace process applauded the resolution and the Obama administration’s decision not to block it. J Street, a organization that advocates a solution, said the resolution “conveys the overwhelming support of the international community, including Israel’s closest friends and allies, for the solution, and their deep concern over the deteriorating status quo between Israelis and Palestinians and the lack of meaningful progress toward peace. ” Ms. Power, the United States ambassador, portrayed the abstention as consistent with the American disapproval of but she also criticized countries at the United Nations for treating Israel unfairly. She said the United States remained committed to its “steadfast support” for Israel and reminded the council that Israel received an enormous amount of American military aid. Ms. Power said the United States chose not to veto the resolution, as it had done to a similar measure under Mr. Obama in 2011, because settlement building had accelerated so much that it had put the solution in jeopardy, and because the peace process had gone nowhere. “Today the Security Council reaffirmed its established consensus that settlements have no legal validity,” she said. “The United States has been sending a message that settlements must stop privately and publicly for nearly five decades. ” She also rebuked Palestinian leaders for “too often” failing to condemn violence against Israeli civilians. But she directed a portion of her remarks to Mr. Netanyahu, whose relations with the Obama administration have never been warm. “One cannot simultaneously champion expanding Israeli settlements and champion a viable solution that would end the conflict,” she said, arguing that the settlements have undermined Israel’s security. Israel’s ambassador, Mr. Danon, who had exhorted the American delegation to block the measure, expressed his anger in a statement that looked forward to a change in policy under Mr. Trump. “It was to be expected that Israel’s greatest ally would act in accordance with the values that we share and that they would have vetoed this disgraceful resolution,” he said. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, welcomed the resolution’s adoption but tempered his approval with a warning. “In reality, today’s action may be too little too late,” he said. “After years of allowing the law to be trampled and the situation to spiral downward, today’s resolution may rightly be seen as a last attempt to preserve the solution and revive the path for peace. ” The resolution condemned Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank as a “flagrant violation under international law” that was “dangerously imperiling the viability” of a future peace settlement establishing a Palestinian state. The resolution also included a nod to Israel and its backers by condemning “all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement and destruction. ” That language is diplomatic scolding aimed at Palestinian leaders, whom Israel accuses of encouraging attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip and is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, expressed appreciation to the Security Council. “We praise the countries that voted for the resolution,” said Hazem Kassem, a spokesman for the group. “We emphasize the need to turn such a resolution into action, not only to halt settlements but to eradicate Israel’s occupation in all its forms. ” | 1 |
The center serving drivers of New York’s yellow taxis is 3, 000 square feet. The center serving the city’s Uber drivers is 30, 000 square feet. The taxi center invites cabdrivers to rest their feet in a cluttered office with utilitarian furnishings and fliers taped to the walls. They can use the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee and take advantage of free training classes and legal assistance. Opened in 2015, it is the first such center in the history of yellow cabs in New York City, industry leaders say. Just a mile away, the Uber center deploys a dozen concierges in black to sign in drivers with iPads in a gleaming, airy sanctuary tastefully outfitted with monitors, sleek couches and a print of abstract renderings of New York landmarks. There are bathrooms upstairs and downstairs, a coffee bar and plush carpeting so new it is spotless. There is also a raft of lucrative perks that are unmatched by the taxi center: signing bonuses, paying for two weeks of a driver’s car lease and free medical checkups. The Uber center — officially called a Greenlight Hub — opened in December, part of the app’s war to recruit drivers and win riders. It is the largest and fanciest of more than 200 across the country, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia and Miami. The upending of the traditional taxi business across the United States and around the world by Uber, Lyft and other services has given consumers new and sometimes cheaper options and forced cities to their transportation policies. Uber, in some places, has employed aggressive techniques to evade regulatory limits, and prompted demonstrations by taxi drivers and owners in places like Paris, London and Brasília. And it has ignited an intense competition for drivers, nowhere more so than in New York. But Uber has also had a contentious relationship with its drivers over working conditions. A series of fare cuts to attract more passengers has drawn protests from drivers who say it hurts their bottom line, and led to a recent confrontation between Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, and a driver that was captured on video. Uber drivers are considered independent contractors, and some have sued the company to try to get health insurance and other employee benefits. Despite the conflicts, Uber is a relentless competitor, and the taxi and Uber centers that have opened in different sections of the same neighborhood in Queens are a visible manifestation of how the rival industries continue to take on each other out of view of their customers. Both have introduced amenities for drivers once in a industry, but Uber’s showstopping center and incentives underscore how the newcomer has become the behemoth in a crowded field. These centers embody the growing divide on New York City’s streets between old and new, tradition and innovation, that have forced the taxi industry to embrace new ways to counter the growing reach of the apps. Just as riders can now stick out a hand for a yellow cab or tap an app for a black car, drivers have a choice, too. Do they stay with a struggling taxi industry that has been a fixture of New York life for over a century? Or do they join the ranks of the apps that are reshaping the city’s transportation landscape? Shaon Chowdhury, 39, who manages a yellow taxi garage in Queens, said he was seeing more Uber drivers pick up shifts driving yellow cabs because Uber’s “rates are low” and they cannot make enough money. “My best friend drives for Uber and cries all the time,” he said. That friend, Ben Chowdhury, 42, who is not related, said he made less money, and worked longer hours, than when he started driving for Uber two years ago. He typically earns $20 to $25 an hour, down from $30 to $35, because of the company’s fare cuts. While the Uber centers are helpful for new drivers, Mr. Chowdhury said, “It doesn’t make up for not paying us more. We are busy but we’re just not making enough money. ” But for some, the centers have made it easier to drive for Uber. Hager Krahn, 28, a mother of two young children earns up to $80 for four hours of driving at night to supplement her family’s income. “They helped with everything,” she said. “They paid for everything. Who doesn’t want something for free?” drivers are also feeling more wanted as the taxi industry tries to stave off defections and lure new workers. Donald Friedman, 63, who has been driving since 1972, said he had made money ferrying around passengers including the likes of Bette Davis and Norman Mailer. But until now, he said, he never felt that anyone had his back. “In 45 years, there’s never been anything like this,” Mr. Friedman said, sitting with fellow cabbies at the taxi center. “Nobody advocated for the driver. If you dropped dead on the road, they would charge you to tow the car back to the garage. That’s the kind of help drivers would get — nothing. ” Citywide, the number of drivers licensed by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission has climbed to 156, 413 from 145, 674 in 2015. The drivers, who are considered independent contractors under federal labor guidelines, receive a single universal license that allows them to drive a taxi, livery or black car, making it easy to switch allegiances. The epicenter for the driver wars has become Long Island City, Queens, where both Uber and the Taxi and Limousine Commission have offices in the Falchi building, a renovated warehouse with an artisanal food court. Lyft was the first to stake a claim on the fourth floor of the building in 2014 with a center where drivers are welcomed with pretzels and soft drinks while Lyft employees spin tunes on a Sonos wireless sound system. Gett, a app popular in Europe, moved in last year to the same floor, offering a technology training bar for drivers to get help using its app along with signing bonuses, free coffee and treats. Other apps have set up driver centers elsewhere in the city: Juno has a center near La Guardia Airport that serves about 150 drivers a day Via has a center in Manhattan that, among other things, offers free parking for new drivers. But leave it to Uber to open a sprawling center in the Falchi building, replacing a smaller center in the neighborhood. Uber says the new center has already drawn more than 10, 000 drivers. It is one of four Uber centers in New York City alone, Uber’s largest United States market the others are in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. “We believe we owe it to the drivers that partner with us to provide support face to face,” Josh Mohrer, a general manager for Uber, said. On a recent afternoon, over 100 drivers crowded into Uber’s Queens center. Think Apple store, only nicer. A chime sounded and a concierge materialized to escort someone when it was his or her turn to meet with experts in blue at long, communal tables in the back — the Uber version of the Genius bar. Assistance is offered in multiple languages, including Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. Medical checkups and training classes are available, as well as “Uber 101” orientations for new drivers. (The center is open even to drivers who choose not to sign up with Uber.) Against one wall, Uber’s corporate partners promote specials on cellphone plans, car leases and insurance. “It makes it simple and easy if you want to start driving for Uber,” said Sumeet Singh, 22, a college student who was visiting the center for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The Uber center is a bright spot for a company that was recently accused of trying to profit during airport protests against President Trump’s first immigration order and has been criticized over sexual harassment claims. The taxi center is also battling to retain and attract new drivers, albeit in a more modest setting. The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the owners of 5, 500 yellow cabs, opened the driver resource center. Many taxi drivers have abandoned yellow cabs for apps in recent years, leaving cars idle in garages — a sharp turn from the days when those garages kept waiting lists because they had more potential drivers than cars. “We had to do something,” said Jean Barrett, the taxi group’s executive director. “This driver community is our business. ” More than 4, 000 drivers have used the center, Ms. Barrett said, and drivers are walked through each step of the licensing and renewal process, including filing their applications online. It offers free classes in defensive driving and how to assist passengers in wheelchairs. The classes, required by the licensing process, would typically cost $150 or more. Three lawyers and two legal assistants help drivers contest parking tickets, summonses from the taxi commission and other violations — more than 3, 000 of them so far — and accompany them to hearings. Fritz Foreste, 66, was sent to the center by his garage after he received a parking ticket. With the center’s help, the ticket was dismissed after he explained that he had left his yellow cab at a taxi relief stand for 15 minutes to take a bathroom break. “They take care of us here,” he said. Ronald Gathers, 71, a taxi driver for four decades, went to the center for help last year after he was unable to renew his license because he was sick. After he recovered, the center contacted the taxi commission, and got his license renewed in one day. Even so, Mr. Gathers said he had heard so much about Uber that he could not resist checking out its new center recently. It was not for him, he said. He returned to his friends at the taxi center. “I’d be a traitor,” he said. “I came back to yellow. ” | 1 |
Teacher's Letter To Students Holds The Formula To World Change Nov 15, 2016 0 0 And we don’t have to be president to help make the world a better place either. For a very long time now, we have wanted change to be served to us on a silver platter. And I’m not just talking about “the sheeple” here; who still believe in the current political system. I’m mostly talking to us, “conscious”, “awakened” and informed “truthers” as we sometimes call ourselves. See, we might complain about others sitting on their couches, being brainwashed by the news and cheering for a next savior. Now let’s make sure we aren’t just sitting behind comput ers, waiting for “the people to wake up” before we can ourselves embody the love, compassion, kindness and healing we wish to see reflected in the world. We are “the people”, aren’t we? So why should we expect so much of “them” (whether we are talking about the government or “the people”) as if they are this separate “thing” that, once changed, will allow US to change? As Mrs. Nagy said in this beautiful letter, decision-making is far from being a job exclusive to a president. Actually, the biggest decision-making job has always been ours. All of our small choices and actions combined are what make society. Nobody is forcing us not to show compassion, help the needy or cooperate with our fellow brothers and sisters for a better community and world. Nobody is forcing us not to raise our children with wisdom, love and compassion so that they become better stewards of the Earth. Our egos may readily want to dismiss this (and I know because mine did for the longest time)… but the truth is, we change the world by HOW we live our lives , not what we intellectually understand or spend time arguing about. Our Main Project Should Be… When we understand that the world is like one big body, and each and everyone of us are a cell within it, we understand that our primary “project” isn’t so much about external doings. Our primary project is ourselves. It’s about being that one healthy cell. And as we evolve into our most authentic, kindest, wisest and most compassionate self; our actions and the way we use our gifts will not only uplift the world around us, but will have that much more power. Coming from this space, we allow life’s higher intelligence to flow through us. We let go of the countless self-limiting and fearful stories we have told ourselves. In other words, we “get out of our own way”. This is when floods of synchronicities, soul mates and opportunities to do what we came here to do (and most importantly be who we came here to be) enter our lives. And this is when we get to be the change we wish to see in the world. “These little decisions you make that you think aren’t a big deal, are the biggest deal. These things that feel lighter but we ignore, are all part of the big picture. Are all part of a sign towards what you’re really here to do. The more you listen to your calling rather than your old story, the more it’s going to guide you to an incredible amount of you impacting the world.”– Kyle Cease
Trying to “change the world” without seeing ourselves as part of that equation is as if we are one unhealthy cell trying to “fix” all surrounding cells. Biology shows us that it takes one healthy cell to trigger all nearby cells to start healing. What if our actions came from a place of inner-transformation, as opposed to us trying to transform the world while we remain unchanged? Imagine if more of us chose to be that one healthy cell… Easier Said Than Done Yes, Of course. I know, because I have preached about “world change” for years before I very recently realized that the quality of my state of being, actions and relationships did not reflect the degree of love, harmony and compassion I wished to see in the world. It is hard, because it requires a personal revolution. A personal “detox” of everything that has been holding us back from being our greatest expression here on Earth. And as we all know, detox symptoms aren’t always easy. As we open our hearts, our egos might tell us it is unsafe. As we think about being generous and giving, our egos might scream “what’s in it for me?”. As we seek to collaborate with and help one another, our egos might sense a threat to its own “success”. As we choose to be fully authentic and true to our calling, our egos might fear there won’t be anybody to catch us “on the other side”. That is because a sense of scarcity, lack and “not enoughness” has been drilled into our skulls by a culture that runs on the glamorization of superficiality and lies. A culture that pits us against ourselves and each other. But haven’t we noticed how even some of the most successful, popular, respected and validated individuals on earth end up ridden with anxiety, depression and a deep loneliness of the spirit ? Perhaps this is a cue that self-maximization — at the expense of a sense of community with our larger human family — isn’t what we truly desire. Maybe we are wired for connection. Maybe we are wired “for each other”. “We’ve adopted a toxic philosophy that shapes our society: To the winner belongs the spoils”. The idea that if you don’t win, you’re going to lose. You’re going to starve. Your kids aren’t going to eat. It’s not going to be your world, it’s going to be the winner’s world. And that’s exactly why we have the world that we have. But as parents, would we tell our children that if one of them succeeds, the other would starve? Would any parent do that to their children? No, because they are a family. At what point does the human family stop being a family?”– Tom Shadyac This all may sound fluffy, cliché or naive, but I am pretty sure that as young children— before we got indoctrinated into “toughening up” and trampling over others to get ahead and find security — we just wanted love. We just wanted to share and rejoice in the community of our own family. We just wanted to play, express ourselves, love and care for one another. We felt a deep resonance with our interconnection that got twisted and severed along the way. Obviously, the world isn’t short of dysfunctional families, challenges and influences that kick the softies, givers and lovers out of us all. But really, these influences just added layers of pretence, beliefs and defence mechanisms over what we have always been and yearned for. So who is going to be the brave one and put their mask down first? It doesn’t really matter who. It really only matters if you will. Because… well… not to add any pressure or anything, but the entire world would rejoice in your light. “Whether you accept it or not, each life is linked to all life. Your thoughts, words and actions create a ripple effect; much like a stone thrown into a pond. The quality of that ripple effect… is your legacy” – Kosta Stoyanoff If you resonate with this message, stay tuned for the beautiful work that is to come over at Uplifted Life . We are making it our mission to help bring this consciousness into the lives of many — not only through words, but through practical tools and support. | 0 |
A new web ad from Americans for Limited Government is questioning whether House Speaker Paul Ryan and his allies in key House committees will continue supporting Obamacare 2. 0, or if they will withdraw the bill and support a full repeal of Obamacare as they promised for years they will do. [The ad, from the top conservative group, opens with video of Obamacare lies from former President Barack Obama. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” Obama says in the open of the ad, one of the most infamous Obamacare lies. Then, a narrator comes on and says: “We all know Obamacare was a lie. But what are Republicans going to do about it? They voted against this law for years, using their opposition to amass power and influence in Washington. Now there’s a real leader in the White House ready to repeal Obamacare now. Will Republicans respect the will of the people?” Then the video cuts to Ryan, whose Obamacare 2. 0 bill “The American Health Care Act” does not fulfill that promise, of saying: “We will keep our promise to the people. ” The narrator comes back on, and says: “They better respect the people. Repeal Obamacare now. ” The only way for Republicans to keep their promise to the people is for Ryan to withdraw the bill and go with an actual repeal of Obamacare, says Americans for Limited Government president Rick Manning. “It is catastrophic and disappointing that House GOP Leadership along with Chairmen Brady and Walden are pretending that their proposal is an Obamacare repeal, when it fails to even reach the minimum repeal standard passed by Congress in 2015 and vetoed by then President Obama,” Manning said in statement exclusive to Breitbart News. “Congressional Republicans have been entrusted with leadership largely due to their promise to repeal Obamacare, the Ryancare bill accepts the underlying principles of the failed health care law, and attempts to fix it. The Ryan bill is indefensible both from a policy and political perspective. ” Manning told Breitbart News that this video was put forward to remind Republicans of their promise, and to show them they should not hitch their wagon to Ryan’s bill that fails to deliver on what they promised their constituents. Manning said that if Republicans fall in line behind Ryan’s bill, Nancy Pelosi — the House Democratic minority leader — will win back the majority and be Speaker again. “Americans for Limited Government produced this video to remind Republicans of their promise to repeal all of Obamacare,” Manning said. “It is crazy for the GOP to try to go back to the American people and tell them that the rules of Congress prohibited them from state based health care solutions, and instead they should be happy with a mutant national health care plan. For the first time in six years, Nancy Pelosi sees a pathway to holding the Speaker’s gavel again, ironically through the GOP’s planned failure to keep their Obamacare repeal promise that defeated her in 2010. ” Manning also called on President Trump to protect himself from the Ryan bill and all of the fallout it will cause. “President Donald Trump needs to take a step back from the Ryancare abyss and listen to those of us who supported him,” Manning, a strong supporter of the president, said. “This legislation must be retooled to rip all of Obamacare out by the roots, followed by a replacement bill that respects the American people and the Constitution by returning authority over health care to the states. ” Americans for Limited Government joins a number of other Republican groups — and medical associations and groups like the AARP — in opposition to the Obamacare 2. 0 bill from Ryan. | 1 |
Compound found in onions has anti-ovarian cancer effects
Sunday, October 30, 2016 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer Tags: cancer prevention , onions , quercetin (NaturalNews) A chemical naturally occurring in onions may be able to suppress the proliferation of ovarian cancer cells, and perhaps even initiate cancer cell death, according to a study conducted by researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan, and published in the journal Scientific Reports .These particular anticancer effects come from a chemical called onionin A (ONA). The study focused on the effects of ONA on the most common form of ovarian cancer, epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC). This type of cancer has a five-year survival rate of only 40 percent. It is the 10th most common female cancer in the United States, and the fifth most lethal form of cancer in women. As many as 80 percent of EOC patients relapse after their first course of chemotherapy. Kills cancer cells, suppresses tumor growth In a prior study, the researchers found that ONA suppressed the tumor-promoting activity of a type of white blood cells known as myeloid cells.In the new study, researchers further examined cell-based models of EOCs. Firstly, they found that the introduction of ONA caused EOC tumor growth to slow. Further examination showed that ONA was inhibiting the tumor-boosting activities of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), thereby confirming the findings of the prior study.Previous research has suggested that in the presence of cancer, MDSCs may function to suppress anti-tumor activity by the rest of the immune system.The researchers also found that when combined with anti-cancer drugs, ONA boosted the ability of the drugs to block cancer proliferation."We found that ONA reduced the extent of ovarian cancer cell proliferation induced by co-culture with human macrophages," the researchers wrote. "In addition, we found that ONA directly suppressed cancer cell proliferation."The researchers then performed an additional experiment, giving mice with EOC oral treatment with ONA and comparing them with a control group. They found that the mice given ONA lived longer, and their tumors did not grow as aggressively. No side effects were observed from the treatment.The researchers concluded that with some additional testing, ONA could be used as an oral cancer treatment."ONA is considered useful for the additional treatment of patients with ovarian cancer owing to its suppression of the pro-tumor activation of [tumor-associated macrophages] and direct cytotoxicity against cancer cells," they wrote.Studies have also linked onions to a lower risk of stomach and colorectal cancers. The overlooked superfood Scientists continue to uncover remarkable health benefits of the humble onion, which is a staple food in every culture in which it is found.The benefits of onions start simply with their nutrient profile: These vegetables are highly nutrient dense, delivering high levels of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, with relatively few calories. A single cup of chopped onions contains 10 percent or more of the daily recommended amount of vitamin B6, vitamin C and manganese, and also contains calcium, folate, iron, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium. In addition to vitamin C, onions are high in other antioxidants, particularly quercetin . Antioxidants help protect the body from free radicals that cause chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer.Researchers attribute many of onions' health benefits to quercetin, including lower blood pressure and improved cardiovascular health. Quercetin is also a potent anti-inflammatory.Other benefits of onions may stem from some of the other nutrients it contains. Studies have shown that onions can help fight depression, an effect that may come in part from their high folate content. Folate helps prevent a buildup in the body of homocysteine, which in turn can suppress the production of mood-regulating neurotransmitters. Excess homocysteine can also interfere with sleep and appetite.Onions are a versatile food. The entire plant is edible (except for the small roots), and can be eaten in nearly any form. It can be cooked into recipes, added raw on top of salads or sandwiches, or used as an ingredient in dips and sauces. Sources for this article include: | 0 |
The proposed health insurance between Anthem and Cigna heads to court on Monday, as the companies face off against a Justice Department seeking to block their $48 billion deal. It will be followed in just a few weeks by the trial for another proposed insurance between Aetna and Humana. Together, those two mergers would remake the industry, resulting in the nation’s five largest health insurers shrinking to just three, including UnitedHealth Group, which remains independent. And the Justice Department is set to argue that the consolidation would be bad for consumers. “If these mergers were to take place, the competition among insurers that has pushed them to provide lower premiums, care and better benefits would be eliminated,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said in July when she announced the government’s decision to challenge these mergers. But the election of Donald J. Trump could recalibrate how vigorously the federal government handles these two deals, as well as the many other deals now taking place in health care, according to legal experts. On Friday, Mr. Trump nominated Senator Jeff Sessions, the conservative Republican from Alabama, to replace Ms. Lynch. While it is unclear how Mr. Sessions would have the department handle antitrust cases, Mr. Trump has said that he wants less government regulation of business. In each of the two big cases headed to court, a federal judge will decide whether consumers would be worse off after the mergers take place. The companies contend people would benefit because a bigger company would be more efficient and better able to strike deals with hospitals and doctors that result in lower prices for medical care. In its pretrial brief, Anthem argues the government’s opposition threatens to “deprive American consumers of lower health care costs. ” The insurance deals were the culmination of a deal frenzy that took place in which the giant companies were desperate not to be left behind if the biggest companies got even bigger. All four companies involved in the mergers say they are committed, although the relationship between Anthem and Cigna has been fraught. The two have accused each other of breaching the merger agreement. Any fallout from the election would almost certainly not be felt immediately. Both cases are expected to be decided before Mr. Trump takes office in January. But a Trump administration could still have a major say, particularly if either the companies or the government decide to appeal the initial decision. There is little expectation that the Justice Department under the Trump administration would drop the case if the companies lost and appealed, for example, but it might be inclined to strike a settlement less onerous to the insurer. After the department under President Bill Clinton won its antitrust case against Microsoft, the officials taking over for President George W. Bush pursued a settlement that many viewed as less than one that would have been sought by their predecessors. There is also a distinct chance, antitrust experts said, that the approach to health care mergers will not pivot much from the current one. “There is a history of bipartisan support for antitrust enforcement in health care,” said Leslie C. Overton, a partner at Alston Bird and a former Justice Department official. “I don’t think we should expect a wholesale shift, based on the change from Democratic to Republican. ” The clearest sign of the new administration’s position, antitrust experts said, will come from who is appointed to crucial positions at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. Other parts of the health care industry will also be on the lookout for any shift in stance. Hospital mergers, for example, have been aggressively challenged by the F. T. C. Last week, two large health systems, Advocate Health Care and NorthShore University HealthSystem, said they would continue their legal fight after an appeals court sent the case brought by the commission back to a lower court. The F. T. C. ’s position on the health care deals may change less than the Justice Department’s. The commission, an independent agency that includes both Republicans and Democrats, is somewhat less subject to the political preferences of the White House. But priorities often do change. “The swings from administration to administration have not been as strong as they have in the Justice Department,” said Michael J. Perry, a former lawyer for the F. T. C. who is now a partner at Baker Botts. The agency has a long history of pursuing hospital mergers, he said, and “has a lot of success” in its attempts to block various deals. In any event, few expect the that has taken place in recent years to abate. Hospitals have joined with other hospitals and bought physician practices, surgery centers and the like to bulk up. Last month, two of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems, Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health, said they were in talks to join forces. Even among smaller insurers, mergers are likely to continue. This month, WellCare Health Plans announced its intention to buy Universal American, a smaller insurer, as a way to expand its presence in the private Medicare Advantage market. Although the federal health care law that was passed under President Obama, which prodded both insurers and health systems to deliver medical care, encouraged some of the merger activity, many of these entities were likely to combine anyway. “We’re in the middle of a global merger wave,” said Martin S. Gaynor, an antitrust expert at Carnegie Mellon University. The possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which many Republicans are pushing, is unlikely to change those dynamics. Hospitals may feel more pressure to join forces as a way of coping with what many people think will be a difficult environment. Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid could become less generous with their payments, and hospitals may experience an increase in the number of patients who have no insurance. What’s more, health systems need access to capital to pay for sophisticated computer systems, and insurers, hospitals and doctors prefer the negotiating clout that comes with being bigger. Hospitals are likely to see the divide between winners and losers grow, said Dr. Sanjay B. Saxena, a partner at the Boston Consulting Group, whose clients include health systems and insurers. “That ” he said, “is going to continue. ” | 1 |
Dissidents participating in what Venezuela’s opposition dubbed the “mother of all protests” Wednesday faced gang attacks, tear gas, and other repressive tactics by state police and civilian militias alike. [Dictator Nicolás Maduro announced a plan Monday to arm as many as one million chavistas seeking to join gangs on Tuesday in anticipation of the protest. Addressing a socialist rally on Monday, Maduro announced he would begin expanding the ranks of the National Bolivarian Militia, a creation of late dictator Hugo Chávez meant to arm radical socialists in a nation where legally owning firearms outside of such groups is banned. According to the Fox News report on the rally, Maduro said he was seeking to quadruple the militia’s size from its current 100, 000 membership in the short term. The Spanish newspaper El País reported that Maduro was seeking to build a militia as soon as possible but ultimately sought a army of socialists to intimidate the opposition into silence. “We will advance towards the organization and training of one million organized militiamen, trained and armed to defend peace, sovereignty, and the independence of the nation,” Maduro reportedly said. To calm the military, which the opposition has been actively courting into participating in the resistance, Maduro has also announced something he is calling the “Zamora Plan,” which Presse (AFP) describes as “a military, police and civilian operation aimed at combatting a supposed coup attempt” organized by America. Maduro has repeatedly accused the United States generally, and former Vice President Joe Biden specifically, of organizing a coup against him. He has never produced proof of such a conspiracy. Maduro has faced growing protests since the Supreme Court attempted to impose itself as the nation’s legislative body last month, nullifying the power of the National Assembly. After a wave of protests, the Supreme Court backed down on the ruling, but the government nonetheless prevented legislators from entering the assembly for some days. Following this move, the government also banned Henrique Capriles Radonski — the governor of Miranda state and opposition presidential candidate in the past two elections — from holding public office for 15 years, with little explanation. Capriles is among the leaders organizing Wednesday’s “Mother of All Protests,” meant to bring together the opposition throughout the country to demand Maduro step down. According to the AFP, the opposition plans “to march from 26 rally points toward central Caracas, a bastion and the seat of government. ” “We’re scared but we’ve got to do this,” one protester, Carmen Medina, told Reuters. “We’re marching for the freedom of our country. ” Speaking to the outlet, Capriles added that he sees the Maduro regime as being “terminal” and protests pivotal to holding “free and fair democratic elections. ” The protest appears to have taken its first victim, a student identified as Carlos José Moreno, either 17 or 19 years old. Moreno was shot in the head in the San Bernardino neighborhood of Caracas, and reports indicate he was not participating in the protest. Witnesses say he was shot in the head by colectivos, unofficial roving gangs who attack protesters on behalf of Maduro. Warning: Graphic Images, #URGENTE: Momento en que se llevan al borde de la muerte a joven de 19 años herido de bala en Plaza La Estrella en San Bernardino #Caracas pic. twitter. — Yusnaby Pérez (@Yusnaby) April 19, 2017, VIDEO FUERTE, Ejecutado Carlos José Moreno de 19 años, recibió un disparo en la cabeza en San Bernardino pic. twitter. — Venezolano en pie (@venezolanoenpie) April 19, 2017, #URGENTE: Herido de bala manifestante en la plaza La Estrella en San Bernardino #19AVzlaContraLaDictadura #Caracas pic. twitter. — Yusnaby Pérez (@Yusnaby) April 19, 2017, La mancha de nuestra bandera. .fue muerto un manifestante opositor en plaza la estrella de san bernardino.. pic. twitter. — TODOS ala CALLE (@JaimeOlarte13) April 19, 2017, In addition to colectivo attacks, police used tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters. Capriles himself posted video of a tear gas attack on himself on Twitter. Continúa la fuerte represión en la autopista https: . — Henrique Capriles R. (@hcapriles) April 19, 2017, Among the prominent dissidents protesting was also Lilian Tintori, wife of political prisoner Leopoldo López, who sported a gas mask to protect from tear gas attacks. “We want freedom for all political prisoners, and the people should decide their destiny with a vote. We want to vote,” Tintori said in a statement. “We want elections now. Presidential, gubernatorial, and mayoral elections. ” Tenemos 45 minutos resistiendo. Nos reprimen con bombas la guardia nacional. Seguimos, no nos cansamos, Vamos Venezuela! pic. twitter. — Lilian Tintori (@liliantintori) April 19, 2017, Lilian Tintori acompaña la movilización desde la avenida Paéz en El Paraíso, #19AxVIVOplay https: . pic. twitter. — VIVOplay (@vivoplaynet) April 19, 2017, | 1 |
A car plowed through a crowd of rioting “ ” on Wednesday, after they started to jump on the vehicle’s hood in protest of Breitbart Senior Editor MILO’s show at UC Berkeley. [BREAKING: Driver trying to get through rioters at UC Berkeley runs down rioter as he continues destroying his car … pic. twitter. — John Binder 👽 (@JxhnBinder) February 2, 2017, A car just ploughed through the crowd with a protestor on the bonnet. crowd chased up Durant. See headlights #MiloAtCal pic. twitter. — Lizzie Roberts (@lizrob92) February 2, 2017, The car drove through a sea of rioters, catching one of them on its hood, as it made its way down the packed street in Berkeley, California. It is currently unknown as to whether any rioters were injured. “ ” rioters assaulted numerous attendees, started fires, and smashed up shops and ATMs at Breitbart Senior Editor MILO’s UC Berkeley show on Wednesday, forcing the event to be cancelled. Several celebrities expressed support for the riot, including Hollywood director Judd Apatow, while UC Berkeley released a statement condemning the violence that took place. | 1 |
Fleeing a Trump Presidency Not an Option November 11, 2016
For many Americans, the idea of a Trump presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress is frightening, with the prospect of right-wing legislation and judicial appointments sailing through, but quitting is not an option, says Norman Solomon.
By Norman Solomon
A lot of U.S citizens are now talking about leaving the country. Canada, Europe and New Zealand are popular scenarios. Moving abroad might be an individual solution. But the social solution is to stay and put up a fight.
The most right-wing U.S. government in our lifetimes will soon have its executive and legislative branches under reactionary control, with major ripple effects on the judiciary. All the fixings for a dystopian future will be on the table. President-elect Donald Trump
In a realistic light, the outlook is awfully grim. No wonder a huge number of people in the United States are struggling with mixtures of grief, anger, frustration, fear.
If Donald Trump and major forces backing him get their way, the conditions described by Frederick Douglass — still all too prevalent now — will worsen in the years ahead: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
As James Baldwin wrote, “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
Those quotes from Douglass and Baldwin are in a book of paintings by Robert Shetterly, Americans Who Tell the Truth . Another portrait in the collection appears under these words from Helen Keller: “When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.”
That statement from Keller aptly describes our current predicament and possibilities. The impending Trump presidency is a direct threat to basic human rights. To make good our claim on those rights will require that we become “strong enough,” individually and collectively.
Gaining such strength will require that we provide much more support for independent progressive institutions — the array of organizations that can serve as collective bulwarks against the momentum of systemic greed, bigotry, massive violence, economic exploitation and environmental destruction.
We’re now being flung into a new era that will intensify many of the oppressive aspects of the U.S. governmental apparatus and political economy. An ongoing imperative will be to mitigate serious-to-catastrophic damage in many realms. We need a united front — against the very real threat of severe repression that could morph into some form of fascism.
At this highly precarious time, progressives certainly don’t need the tempests of factional disputes and ideological battles. And we certainly don’t need the kind of reflexive capitulation that so often comes from the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. We’re at the start of a protracted crisis that could become cataclysmic. We need progressive unity and unrelenting determination.
Only with eyes wide open do we have a real chance to understand clearly and organize effectively against the Trump regime. Failure to put up a fight should be unthinkable.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday night struck down an Obama administration regulation on the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas on public lands, a blow to President Obama’s muscular stand on the extraction of fossil fuels on government lands. The rule, released by the Interior Department in March of last year and scheduled to take effect this Friday, was designed to increase the safety of fracking. It would have required companies to comply with federal safety standards in the construction of fracking wells, and to disclose the use of some chemicals in the fracking process. Judge Scott W. Skavdahl of Federal District Court in Wyoming ruled that the Interior Department lacked the authority from Congress to issue the regulation, and also noted that fracking was already subject to other regulations under state and federal law. The decision comes amid a heated political debate over fracking, which involves the injection of water, gravel and chemicals underground to extract oil and gas. The technology has produced an oil and gas boom in the United States, but environmentalists say fracking can contaminate groundwater and lead to the leaking of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The blocked rule would not have affected most fracking operations in the United States, since it would have applied only to fracking on federal lands. The vast majority of fracking in the United States — almost 90 percent — is done on state and private land and is governed by state and local regulations. The rule was unlikely to have stopped most new fracking on public lands, although oil and gas companies complained that it could have slowed operations by creating burdensome paperwork. And Judge Skavdahl’s ruling is not the final word. While the regulation will be temporarily halted, the federal Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit is also reviewing the rule. Obama administration officials characterized Judge Skavdahl’s ruling as a delay, and said they were waiting for the decision by the appeals court. “It’s unfortunate that implementation of the rule continues to be delayed, because it prevents regulators from using 21st century standards to ensure that oil and gas operations are conducted safely and responsibly on public and tribal lands,” the Interior Department said in a statement from the agency’s spokeswoman, Jessica Kershaw. Nonetheless, the oil and gas industry and Republicans who have opposed Mr. Obama’s environmental regulations claimed a victory. “Today’s decision demonstrates B. L. M. ’s efforts are not needed and that states are — and have for over 60 years been — in the best position to safely regulate hydraulic fracturing,” said Neal Kirby, a spokesman for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which had sued the administration over the rule. The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, said in a statement: “Hydraulic fracturing is one of the keys that has unlocked our nation’s energy resurgence in oil and natural gas, making the United States the largest energy producer in the world, creating tens of thousands of jobs, and lowering energy prices for consumers. Yet the Obama administration has sought to regulate it out of existence. This is not only harmful for the economy and consumers, it’s unlawful — as the court has just ruled. ” Mr. Ryan added: “Only Congress can write laws. Agencies acting without authority from Congress is simply illegal. ” Environmentalists say they held out hope that the rule would be upheld by an appeals court. “Our hope remains that the full 10th Circuit will continue its review of the case and uphold this rule,” said Lena Moffitt, the director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. “While there is no way to ever make fracking safe, the oil and gas industry has repeatedly proven that it needs more standards to keep the public safe from the dangers of fossil fuels, not less,” she said. | 1 |
Posted by Martin Walsh | Oct 26, 2016 | National Security New Allies Issue Bold New Warning To Obama
The world no longer respects the United States.
The leadership of Obama and Hillary Clinton has pushed us closer to World War III than ever before.
Hillary and Obama dislike Putin because he only answers to strength and toughness, which is exactly why he likes Donald Trump. As a way to project strength, Obama and Hillary continue to blame Putin for cyber attacks and the WikiLeaks releases. Putin Will No Longer Allow Obama And Hillary To Disrespect Russia
On October 21, Putin issued a global message that if Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama continue to slander Russia, he was going to shoot down U.S. jets in the Middle East and begin to prepare for World War III.
Two days after that, Putin ordered the Russian Defense Ministry to begin training and managing all local authorities, law enforcement, and state security as they are preparing for a nuclear war with the United States.
And with the United States at the eve of war, Hillary Clinton continues to prance around calling Putin a “thug puppet.”
Putin has now made his third move following Clintons comments, and he has brought Russian ally China into the fight. China is now sending a plethora of resources to the Middle East to assist Russia is pushing Obama and the United States out.
Now the country is openly declaring its support to the Syrian government, which has become the bone of contention between the United States and Russia. The United States wants the Syrian government out, while Russia wants it to stay.
The People’s Republic of China has announced that it will provide both military and humanitarian aid to the Syrian government, in order to help them fight the rebels trying to overthrow the regime. China Preparing For WWIII As Russia’s Ally
The Chinese have dispatched dozens of top military advisers to strengthen the Syrian army against Obama and the terrorist groups he continues to arm in order to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Chinese officials argue that they wanted to stay out of the Russia/U.S. conflict but Obama’s actions have given them no choice.
Chinese officials argue that in 2015, they chose not to join the efforts in the Middle East. They argued that they would give Obama the opportunity to defeat ISIS and restore democracy in the Middle East.
Since then, Obama has allowed ISIS to eclipse 50,000 fighters, they operate in more than 32 countries, a refugee crisis has sent more than 10,000,000 refugees all over the world, and now Obama wants to overthrow the Syrian regime–which would leave no one left to stop ISIS from controlling more territory.
Chinese officials argue, “Obama has done this to himself, and he better not play with fire.”
That is a direct threat from China to the United States.
Things have gotten so bad under Obama that China and Russia are now joining forces to kick the United States out of the Middle East and are promising World War III if our leaders do not stop disgracing them publicly.
Who can blame China for joining forces with Russia? If Obama’s actions are leading us down a path to war with Russia and China, imagine how bad it will get it Hillary wins this election.
A President Clinton worries Russia and China so badly that they are now preparing for nuclear war. Imagine how scared we should be as Americans. | 0 |
As late as Monday evening the Huffington Post was 98%+ certain that Hillary Clinton would win the Presidency.
Turns out they may have been off… by a lot.
With Florida leaning towards Trump and 92% of the votes already counted, what was a sure thing suddenly isn’t.
Michigan remains in play and the mainstream media reports that the Clinton campaign still thinks they have a good chance at taking the state. Pennsylvania, though only a small percentage of votes have been counted, is already being projected for Hillary.
As we noted earlier today, Trump needs to win two states out of Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan to take the electoral map.
The Huffington Post is freaking out, headlining their page with “This Is Getting Scary.”
As Matt Drudge noted earlier at his web site, the election will come down to the late evening voters, many of whom were unable to cast votes until they got out of work.
Live Election Coverage with Alex Jones:
Live Election Coverage with NBC:
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Left-wing CNN’s John Berman guest-hosted a panel of pundits who failed to articulate broad political forces that underwrote President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on November 8. Comment on this Article Via Your Facebook Account Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account Follow Us on Facebook! | 0 |
Region: Europe Obama’s final tour to Europe in the capacity of US President has been a milestone event from various points of view. He has come as the representative of the losing side that would still try to reassure its European allies that America’s polic ies toward s Europe and NATO will not undergo any significant changes d uring Trump’s term. However, against the background of the turmoil in the EU political establishment, as the declining influence of Washington is aggravating internal feud in the EU corridors of power those promises fall flat. Moreover, Greece’s public debt stands at roughly 180 percent of gross domestic product with 330 billion euro to be found somewhere by the “rescue team” of international creditors. The recent elections in Bulgaria and Moldova have stirred bitter accusations and pessimistic forecasts, as the sitting EU officials are convinced that the politicians that came to power in the above mentioned states are pro-Russian by their nature. That’s why Obama has been desperately trying to calm down local pessimists by saying that anti-Russian sanctions will be kept in place and that the Iran nuclear program nuclear deal is not going anywhere. It’s funny that Trump has already promised to do otherwise and Obama will have no say on this matter whatsoever in a short while. When Obama’s tour to Europe was announced, the White House assumed it could be launched without any prior announcements that Obama was to meet Francois Hollande and Theresa May in Berlin. The announcement would only state that US President is going to visit the cradle of democracy (Greece) and Europe’s driving economic engine (Germany). The French Le Figaro would publish a pretty bitter article, noting that France is a UN Security Council permanent members, yet its leader is being ordered around to follow Obama as if he was a courier in his entourage. It goes without saying that Italian and Spanish leaders are receiving the same treatment from America’s lame duck. It doesn’t seem that the way Washington is treating Hollande will help the latter to get reelected. It seems that US political elites are convinced that Merkel has overshadowed Hollande and now she’s the only one to be treated with respect. The Foreign Policy would note : On what is his last tour of Europe this week, and what is likely to be his last major tour abroad, outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama has reserved a full two days for Berlin. This unusually long visit to the German capital is not a coincidence. It is here that he first became a figure of «global importance» when, in July 2008, the then-candidate mesmerized a crowd of 200,000 Berliners. It is here that he developed his strongest rapport with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Most importantly, however, it is here that his foreign-policy legacy now has its strongest, if not last, line of defens e However, if Obama is such a fan of German Chancellor, how come the NSA and CIA have been tapping her phones for years. The scandal that outraged all sides of the German political spectrum was downplayed by Merkel back in 2015 in her bid to show her “unparalleled loyalty” to Washington and its masters. This position allowed the Obama administration to become the unannounced champions of law suits against German companies, that resulted in major settlements with Deutsche Bank paying 14 billion dollars to Washington, and Volkswagen parting away with 15 billion dollars. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that no genuine tears were shed when Obama was visiting Greece, even though Western corporate media sources heralded the trip as a “major political event”. However, Greeks had an opinion of their own on this matter, launching massive anti-US protests in the Greek capital to “honor” Obama. In the end, local riot police was forced to use tear gas to get the situation under their control. A similar reception awaited Obama in Germany, but here he was not the only one to be envied, since Merkel is losing public support so rapidly due to her toothless position that most local politicians would try to avoid being mentioned in one sentence with the Chancellor at all costs. During his visit Obam would urge leaders of the European Union to be more forgiving of Greece and its debts. However, as the Bloomberg says , it’s long past time for Europe’s leaders to explain to their voters that financial distress is best dealt with decisively, not dragged out in perpetuity — and that prompt debt relief is in their interests as well as Greece’s. A continued policy of extend and pretend will cripple Greece’s prospects, and if that happens, the economic and political costs won’t be confined to Greece. It’s curious that Trump’s victory has turned a trip that was originally intended to showcase Mr Obama’s foreign policy legacy into a US damage limitation exercise. Yet, bitterness is the best word to describe the reaction in Europe towards Obama’s statements during this trip. It’s being noted that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the king of drones has done nothing to make this world a better or safer place. American troops are in Afghanistan, while the prisoners are still being tortured at Guantanamo Bay, the Middle East as a region is going down in flames and the Ukraine is now governed by fascists. That’s how Obama’s presidency will be remembered by. Yes, there are tears, tears of bitterness and anger! Nobody is saddened by the fact that Obama leaves the White House, but millions of people are frustrated by the fact that Obama would still be allowed to the world of international politics! Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook. ” Popular Articles | 0 |
Baltimore — IN 1975, a San Diego woman named Marjorie Rice read in her son’s Scientific American magazine that there were only eight known pentagonal shapes that could entirely tile, or tessellate, a plane. Despite having had no math beyond high school, she resolved to find another. By 1977, she’d discovered not just one but four new tessellations — a result noteworthy enough to be published the following year in a mathematics journal. The article that turned Ms. Rice into an amateur researcher was by the legendary polymath Martin Gardner. His “Mathematical Games” series, which ran in Scientific American for more than 25 years, introduced millions worldwide to the joys of recreational mathematics. I read him in Mumbai as an undergraduate, and even dug up his original 1956 column on “hexaflexagons” (folded paper hexagons that can be flexed to reveal different flowerlike faces) to construct some myself. “Recreational math” might sound like an oxymoron to some, but the term can broadly include such immensely popular puzzles as Sudoku and KenKen, in addition to various games and brain teasers. The qualifying characteristics are that no advanced mathematical knowledge like calculus be required, and the activity engage enough of the same logical and deductive skills used in mathematics. Unlike Sudoku, which always has the same format and gets easier with practice, the disparate puzzles that Mr. Gardner favored required different, inventive techniques to crack. The solution in such puzzles usually pops up in its entirety, through a flash of insight, rather than emerging steadily via deduction as in Sudoku. An example: How can you identify a single counterfeit penny, slightly lighter than the rest, from a group of nine, in only two weighings? Mr. Gardner’s great genius lay in using such basic puzzles to lure readers into extensions requiring pattern recognition and generalization, where they were doing real math. For instance, once you solve the nine coin puzzle above, you should be able to figure it out for 27 coins, or 81, or any power of three, in fact. This is how math works, how recreational questions can quickly lead to research problems and striking, unexpected discoveries. A famous illustration of this was a riddle posed by the citizens of Konigsberg, Germany, on whether there was a loop through their town traversing each of its seven bridges only once. In solving the problem, the mathematician Leonhard Euler abstracted the city map by representing each land mass by a node and each bridge by a line segment. Not only did his method generalize to any number of bridges, but it also laid the foundation for graph theory, a subject essential to web searches and other applications. With the diversity of entertainment choices available nowadays, Mr. Gardner’s name may no longer ring a bell. The few students in my current batch who say they still do mathematical puzzles seem partial to a website called Project Euler, whose computational problems require not just mathematical insight but also programming skill. This reflects a sea change in mathematics itself, where computationally intense fields have been gaining increasing prominence in the past few decades. Also, puzzles, so addictive and easily generated by computers, have squeezed out “insight” puzzles, which are much harder to design — and solve. Yet Mr. Gardner’s work lives on, through websites that render it in the visual and animated forms favored by today’s audiences, through a constellation of his books that continue to sell, and through biannual “Gathering 4 Gardner” recreational math conferences. In his final article for Scientific American, in 1998, Mr. Gardner lamented the “glacial” progress resulting from his efforts to have recreational math introduced into school curriculums “as a way to interest young students in the wonders of mathematics. ” Indeed, a paper this year in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics points out that recreational math can be used to awaken “joy,” “satisfaction,” “excitement” and “curiosity” in students, which the educational policies of several countries (including China, India, Finland, Sweden, England, Singapore and Japan) call for in writing. In contrast, the Common Core in the United States does not explicitly mention this emotional side of the subject, regarding mathematics only as a tool. Of course, the Common Core lists only academic standards, and leaves the curriculum to individual districts — some of which are indeed incorporating recreational mathematics. For instance, math lesson plans in Baltimore County public schools now usually begin with game and puzzle suggestions that teachers can choose to adopt, to motivate their classes. The body of recreational mathematics that Mr. Gardner tended to and augmented is a valuable resource for mankind. He would have wanted no greater tribute, surely, than to have it keep nourishing future generations. | 1 |
Congressman Tells Cub Scouts He’ll Vote Trump ‘No Matter What Crazy Things He Says’ (VIDEO) By Richard Marcil on October 27, 2016
New video from a Cub Scout meeting in Kansas shows Representative Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) pledging to support his party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump – no matter what. “I’m going to be supporting the Republican nominee, no matter what crazy things he says.”
Yoder’s admission is shameful enough on its own. But the worst part is his audience – a group of Cub Scouts, aged 7-10.
The video, taken October 11, was recorded shortly after the release of the now-infamous “ Pussy Tape ” in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. Yoder even made a joke about Trump’s scandalous comments: “A-ha! Which parent put him up to that? Is there a hot mic in here? Well, I’m a Republican, so I’m going to be supporting the Republican nominee, no matter what crazy things he says.” A Lesson On ‘Spin’– For the Kids!
Yoder dishonestly suggested that the child was not curious enough to ask the question on his own. But in fact, kids are quite aware of the impending election. An informal survey of teachers found high levels of youth anxiety – especially among racial and ethnic minorities – due to Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.
His reply also dishonestly implies that he’s somehow obligated to vote along party lines. But the many Republican defections from the Donald Trump camp prove that is untrue. Yoder could have used the opportunity to teach the Scouts that they should always do the right thing, even if it means refusing to do what is easy and expected of you. Instead, he towed the party line.
Perhaps Yoder needs a reminder from the Cub Scouts about where his loyalty should lie. According to the Scout Oath , decent citizens should pledge: “On my honor I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country…” Damage Control
Yoder is running for a fourth term in a suburban Kansas City district. His team is already running damage control on the tape. Yoder spokesperson, C.J. Grover, played the remarks off as evidence of Yoder’s “quick wit.” “Anyone who knows Kevin knows that he utilizes his quick wit to connect with voters. All this video shows is Kevin continues to be out in the community taking all questions from anyone who wants to ask them, whereas his opponent has been hiding in his basement hoping his financial backers in D.C. can steal him a victory.”
Featured image: screengrab via YouTube video . About Richard Marcil
Richard Marcil is a freelance writer. Connect | 0 |
Monday 31 October 2016 by Jack Marshall UK becomes world’s leading exporter of arseholes
The economy received an unexpected boost today after the Government announced that the UK had become the world’s leading exporter of arseholes.
“Brexit reminded everyone that Britain is jam-packed with arseholes,” said Simon Williams, a Government spokesman.
“In the months since the UK decided to leave the EU, our biggest arseholes – titans like Morgan, Hopkins and Milo – have been spouting their ill-informed and profoundly stupid opinions right across the globe. They’ve done wonders for our brand on the international stage.”
Mr Williams added, “Statistically, when someone in the world asks ‘what kind of arsehole would say that?’, there’s now a 68% probability that the arsehole they’re referring to will be British.
“We can’t rest on our laurels, though; it’s a very competitive market,” warned Williams.
“Trump. Putin. Bieber. The world’s chock full of arseholes at the moment.”
To help keep the UK on top, Mr Williams announced that Nigel Farage will become the UK’s ‘Arsehole Tsar’.
This will involve Mr Farage travelling around the globe on a lavishly refurbished Royal Yacht Britannia, visiting dozens of different countries and reminding them why Britain is an international laughing stock.
Looking to the future, Mr Williams was optimistic.
“Twitter, Facebook and The Mail Online’s comments section are busy producing the UK’s next generation of opinionated morons.
“With a little luck, we’ll continue to create the kind of exceptional arsehole that can confidently retweet a racist meme or ‘like’ a Britain First article.” Have you checked the standings in the Arsehole Premier League ? Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
‘It’s for my children.’; Ammon Bundy’s testimony likely what cleared #OregonStandoff seven Posted at 10:15 am on October 28, 2016 by Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
The first seven of 24 arrested in the #OregonStandoff were cleared of all charges by a jury on Thursday. Legal experts are suggesting Ammon Bundy’s 10 hours or testimony (yes, 10) is what may have won the jurors over.
Ammon said, “Everything comes from the Earth and if [the government] can get control of the resources, they can get control of the people.” It was Ammon Bundy's 10 hours of testimony that likely won over jurors, legal expert says https://t.co/0BHO61BrAO pic.twitter.com/YiXf9UuQzg
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) October 28, 2016
Ammon, who is the father of six, also said he was doing this for his children and his grandchildren and that Americans need to “wake up.” The #oregonstandoff verdict shows that sometimes citizens get fed up with an abusive fed govt.Obviously the lesson is not to have juries.
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 28, 2016
Interestingly enough, after the verdict Bundy’s attorney was tasered … Ammon Bundy’s attorney Tased and arrested after #OregonStandoff verdict https://t.co/vUfuLnlP4O pic.twitter.com/k4fW36F8nr
— Raw Story (@RawStory) October 28, 2016
Can’t make this stuff up. Trending | 0 |
A photographer for Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, was the victim of an attack by rioters at the notorious Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. [The continued riots in the densely Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby has seen multiple cars set on fire and a photographer from Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter was attacked. The photographer said the attack occurred just after 10:00 pm at night and said, “I was met with a lot of punches and kicks on both the body and the head. I have spent the night in the hospital,” Dagens Nyheter reports. The photographer says he arrived in the troubled suburb by car and parked away from the riots. After walking to Rinkeby square where the riots were occurring, he claims he was attacked by up to fifteen men. According to the photographer, he hid his camera under his coat though the attackers discovered it and stole it from him. Journalists have been attacked in Rinkeby before in broad daylight. A television crew from Australia were attacked by several masked men last year and were even rammed by a car. After the attack, the photographer managed to escape to a nearby petrol station where he called the police. Police told the man that no patrols were available to help him and that he would have to get to the hospital on his own. “I was shocked for hours afterwards. The police eventually came and I made a complaint about the assault and aggravated theft. They said that the chances of the perpetrators or the camera is found is small. ” he said. Police have also been attacked in Rinkeby multiple times and as recently as just over a week ago. Stockholm police spokesman Eva Nilsson said that officers were beaten by a mob of between 20 and 30 people who kicked and punched them while they were doing a routine check on an individual. “Of course, it’s a serious thing when police officers who are just acting in their official capacity are attacked in this way. It is a reality which, unfortunately, exists as something which happens now and again for colleagues who work there,” Nilsson said. U. S. President Donald Trump commented on the fracturing of Swedish society due to mass migration only days before the Rinkeby riots broke out. The Swedish establishment mocked the president assuring the foreign public that Sweden was fine. | 1 |
By Vandita For decades, the pharmaceutical industry poured millions into the pockets of crony lawmakers as they lobbied to keep marijuana illegal. We understand if marijuana — a plant that can... | 0 |
On the Monday edition of Breitbart News Daily, broadcast live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 6AM to 9AM Eastern, Breitbart London Raheem Kassam will continue our discussion of the Trump administration’s agenda. [Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the deputy assistant to President Trump, will discuss the administration’s agenda following former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress. Peter Schweizer, author of the bestselling book Clinton Cash and President of the Government Accountability Institute, will discuss Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement to end the policy of donating settlements reached by the Justice Department to leftwing third party organizations. Penny Nance, the CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, will discuss her recent Breitbart on President Trump action to “put an end to part of the repugnant Obamacare contraception mandate which sought to force the Little Sisters of the Poor (LSP) to violate their religious convictions. ” We’ll also hear from Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and author of The Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Geller will weigh in on the recent rallies in California. We’ll also hear from Dan Gainor, the Vice President of Business and Culture at the Media Research Center, about the leftwing media’s smear of the protesters as an “ ” “hate group. ” Live from London, Rome, and Jerusalem, Breitbart correspondents will provide updates on the latest international news. Breitbart News Daily is the first live, conservative radio enterprise to air seven days a week. SiriusXM Vice President for news and talk Dave Gorab called the show “the conservative news show of record. ” Follow Breitbart News on Twitter for live updates during the show. Listeners may call into the show at: . | 1 |
Mitt Romney attempted to purchase a stake in the Miami Marlins a few months ago, and that effort stalled with no sign of return. Now, the Romney’s have shifted targets, and want to purchase a small share of the New York Yankees. [According to Jon Heyman at FanRag, “If the deal goes through, it is expected to be $25 million to $30 million per percentage point and thought to be interested in one or two percentage points. The Yankees are valued around $3 billion or more. “Mitt Romney, in response to an earlier version of this story about his potential involvement in a sale, denied that he’s involved in the talks in a statement, per a spokesperson. The former governor of Massachusetts, Romney is a lifelong Red Sox fan and is sensitive to being associated with the Yankees after hearing early reaction from Red Sox fans. ” Romney has apparently conquered his sensitivity towards an association with the Yankees by making the purchase through his son, Tagg, as a part of the family business. According to Heyman, “However, (Mitt Romney’s) family is in talks to buy a small stake (in the Yankees) led by his son Tagg and business partner Spencer Zwick through the family company, Solamere Capital … . Tagg is Mitt’s oldest son at 46. He previously worked in marketing with the Dodgers and Reebok before founding and selling a software company. He later became a partner in a private equity firm, Solamere Capital, before working as a senior aide on his father’s presidential campaign in 2008 and as an adviser in 2012. ” And that is apparently how you get around “sensitivity. ” There is something really gross about this whole thing. Of course, businessmen look for great business opportunities regardless of where they find them. No one becomes a billionaire by sticking to emotional fandom, or rooting interests. However, to have a “lifelong Red Sox fan” buy a piece of their archrival, is, again, gross. Not to say that Romney wouldn’t be a good owner. He’s a tremendously successful man who would no doubt have many contributions as a part of any organization. However, as a Red Sox fan, the Yankee organization is not one. After all, does this look right to you? Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 1 |
First wave of Bake Off support groups established 28-10-16
GREAT British Bake Off fans will be able to judge the Victoria sponges of strangers under new support schemes.
As the show moves to Channel 4 where it will never be heard from again, self-help groups have sprung up to deal with the loss.
Roy Hobbs said: “We’ll meet in a church hall every Thursday evening to mutter that a woman we’ve never met is a stuck-up bitch whose shortbread looks shit.
“The verger’s wife has just left him and he’s had his hair dyed and bought a motorbike to compensate so we’ve even got our own Paul Hollywood lined up.”
Psychologists say that withdrawal symptoms from the show are linked to the part of the brain that deals with mourning, grief and the desire for cake.
The support groups will raise funds to hire a writer to come up with double-entendres about sogginess and moisture by selling the cakes they make which will in turn be criticised for their sogginess or lack of moisture.
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Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 15 + 14 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom | 0 |
Guess Who Ordered Hillary To Leave Our Men To Die In Benghazi Oct 27, 2016 Previous post
This email that was recently released by WikiLeaks shows that Hillary Clinton received an order from the Saudis to leave our men to die in Benghazi. Hillary also lost 1.5 billion dollars that was sent to the country and got 4 Americans killed. This is the first U.S. ambassador to die in more than thirty years. There are thousands more people that died in Libya as it fell into chaos.
Via: LWN
The Saudi royal family then “donated” millions to the Clinton Foundation and to the Hillary campaign. The country then fell into chaos and became an ISIS stronghold. Mrs. Clinton does not want this brought up.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK | 0 |
This post was originally published on this site
A Syrian soldier is treated at a hospital in a government-held area of Aleppo on October 30, 2016, following a militant chemical attack in the city. (Photos by AFP)
The Hague-based agency responsible for eliminating chemical weapons has warned that Daesh terrorists returning from Syria could carry out chemical attacks involving mustard gas as they have been taught how to use the toxic agent.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued the warning on Wednesday amid reports of Daesh chemical raids in Syria.
“It seems that one of the dangers that we need to face and have a response for – since Daesh has learnt how to make mustard gas – is that sadly one of the people who learnt how to do it comes back to one of our countries and helps carry out an attack like this,” Philippe Denier, the director at the verification division of the OPCW, told a defense conference in Paris.
Earlier this month, Syria called for an OPCW investigation into the use of chemical agents by terrorists against civilians in the country’s battered city of Aleppo.
The request came a few days after Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said that the ministry’s experts had uncovered ordnance and fragments of munitions containing chlorine and white phosphorus in Aleppo.
The discovery proved that foreign-backed militants had used chemical weapons against civilians and Syrian army soldiers, he noted.
In a statement on Tuesday, the OPCW announced that Russia had offered to provide samples linked to chemical weapons use in Aleppo.
The samples “may be of use in the ongoing work of the OPCW fact-finding mission,” which is investigating allegations of chemical attacks in Syria, the watchdog added.
Last month, a 13-month international inquiry led by the OPCW and the United Nations concluded that Daesh militants had used mustard gas in Syria. Related | 0 |
OAKLAND, Calif. — Vilified when he left and celebrated when he returned, LeBron James had spent the past two seasons lugging his city’s championship dreams like a bag of rocks. The weight had only grown more cumbersome — the weight of history, of disappointment, of missed opportunities. James could feel it all on his sturdy shoulders. On Sunday night, before a dazed and defeated crowd at Oracle Arena, James delivered on the grandest stage of his superhuman career, leading the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first championship in franchise history with a victory over the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 of the N. B. A. finals. “I came back for a reason,” James said. “I came back to bring a championship to our city. ” James collected 27 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists to punctuate one of the most remarkable individual performances in finals history. James, who was named the finals’ most valuable player, got ample help from his teammate Kyrie Irving, whose with 53 seconds remaining gave the Cavaliers the lead — and an improbable title. Improbable because the Cavaliers became the first team to rally from a series deficit to win a championship. Improbable because the Warriors, after setting an N. B. A. record with 73 victories in the regular season, had spent months making the case that they were the most dominant team since Dr. James Naismith first affixed a peach basket to a wall. And improbable, above all, because of Cleveland’s ragtag history as an . Not since 1964, when the Browns won the N. F. L. championship, had the city claimed a major sports title. James, who grew up in nearby Akron, has forever changed all of that. He stuffed the series with thunderous dunks and fadeaway jumpers, blocked shots and glowering expressions, towing his teammates along in his ferocious wake. James won two championships with the Miami Heat, but this was his first with the Cavaliers — and his first for Ohio. Not even the Warriors, who were pursuing championships in a repeat of last year’s finals matchup, could slow his march. “The game always gives back to people that are true to the game,” James said. “I’ve watched it. I know the history of the game, and I was just calm. I was calm. ” Irving finished with 26 points for the Cavaliers, who survived three elimination games. In Cleveland, fans jammed the streets around Quicken Loans Arena for a watch party from afar. Draymond Green had 32 points, 15 rebounds and 9 assists for the Warriors, and Stephen Curry scored 17 points but shot just 6 of 19 from the field. In the final minute, Curry missed a attempt that would have tied the game. James, who had made a soaring block of Andre Iguodala’s layup attempt with less than two minutes to play, then made 1 of 2 free throws with 10. 6 seconds left to seal the win. The Cavaliers formed a raucous mob at the buzzer — joy and disbelief, all at once. On the postgame dais, James clutched the championship trophy to his chest and choked back tears. At his news conference, he wore one of the nets around his neck. he said he was looking forward to the victory parade, scheduled for Wednesday. He invited everyone, including the media. “It’s going to be the biggest party that Cleveland has ever seen,” said James, who averaged 29. 7 points, 11. 3 rebounds and 8. 9 assists during the series. “If you guys still have a little money left over in your budget, you guys better make a trip to Cleveland and get a little piece of it. ” From the moment the Warriors set about stalking the Chicago Bulls for the best record in league history, they cautioned that it would mean almost nothing without a championship, too. The Warriors were greedy — they wanted all the records, all the wins and another trophy at the end. “We’re stunned,” Coach Steve Kerr said. “We thought we were going to win. ” The Warriors found their postseason journey to be more jagged than they imagined. The tenor of the team’s chase was jarred off course in the first game of the playoffs, when Curry injured his right ankle. Three games later, he slipped on a wet spot against the Houston Rockets, spraining his right knee. Though Curry eventually returned to help guide the Warriors back to the finals, thanks in part to a dramatic comeback against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals, Curry lacked his usual consistency. More trouble brewed against the Cavaliers. Green had to watch Game 5 from a baseball stadium after he was suspended for collecting too many flagrant fouls. Andrew Bogut, their starting center, injured his knee and missed the final two games of the series. Iguodala, James’s primary defender, tweaked his back in Game 6. As for Curry, his finals experience was an obstacle course of defenders (he shot 40. 3 percent from the field) spats with officials (he chucked his mouth guard after he was ejected from Game 6) and volleys from critics, who took jabs at everything from his poor shooting to his choice of sneakers. Game 7 was another slog. “It will haunt me for a while,” Curry said, “because it means a lot to me to try to lead my team and do what I need to do on the court and the big stages. Done it before. Didn’t do it tonight. ” The Cavaliers were no strangers to adversity. Sensing what he described as dysfunction, General Manager David Griffin fired the team’s head coach, David Blatt, midway through the season and replaced him with Tyronn Lue, one of Blatt’s assistants. Griffin made the move even though the Cavaliers were sitting firmly atop the Eastern Conference standings. It was championship or bust for these Cavaliers, who, make no mistake, were formed in James’s shadow. Not that his journey was without its share of hard feelings and trapdoors. Drafted by the Cavaliers in 2003, James splashily left for the Heat as a free agent in 2010. Fans who felt scorned by his departure burned replicas of his jersey in the streets of Cleveland. But James rejoined with the Cavaliers in 2014, vowing to lift the franchise to new heights, to do something that had never been done. “I don’t think people imagined it this way — the route that we’ve taken — and that’s fine,” James said Saturday. “Like I always say, every day is not a bed of roses, and you have to figure out how to get away from the thorns and the things of that nature to make the sunshine. ” Nobody seemed consumed by the pressure. Kerr arrived at the arena following his usual session of hot yoga with Luke Walton, one of his assistants. The crowd stood from the opening minutes. After James batted an attempted layup by Curry into an expensive row of courtside seats, Curry got in James’s face. An official had to separate them. Green, meanwhile, went 5 of 5 from range and scored 22 points to guide the Warriors to a halftime lead. The Cavaliers rallied in the third quarter. After Curry committed a turnover, Irving raced away for an acrobatic layup, drawing a foul for good measure. His free throw gave the Cavaliers a lead. A small subset of fans at Oracle started chanting, “Let’s go, Cavs!” But neither team could find any separation, at least not until James and Irving emerged in the closing moments — not until it mattered most. | 1 |
During an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd for “Meet the Press” on Friday, Representative John Lewis ( ) stated, “I don’t see the as a legitimate president. … I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians, and others, that helped him get elected. ” When asked if he planned to build a relationship with Donald Trump, Lewis answered that he believes in forgiveness and trying to work with people, but that “it’s going to be very difficult. I don’t see the as a legitimate president. ” He added, “I think the Russians participated in having this man get elected, and they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don’t plan to attend the Inauguration. … I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians, and others, that helped him get elected. That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not the open, democratic process. ” ( Caitlin ) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Alarms sounded on United States Air Force bases in Spain and officers began packing all the troops they could grab onto buses for a secret mission. There were cooks, grocery clerks and even musicians from the Air Force band. It was a late winter night in 1966 and a fully loaded bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol had collided with a refueling jet high over the Spanish coast, freeing four hydrogen bombs that went tumbling toward a farming village called Palomares, a patchwork of small fields and white houses in an corner of Spain’s rugged southern coast that had changed little since Roman times. It was one of the biggest nuclear accidents in history, and the United States wanted it cleaned up quickly and quietly. But if the men getting onto buses were told anything about the Air Force’s plan for them to clean up spilled radioactive material, it was usually, “Don’t worry. ” “There was no talk about radiation or plutonium or anything else,” said Frank B. Thompson, a then trombone player who spent days searching contaminated fields without protective equipment or even a change of clothes. “They told us it was safe, and we were dumb enough, I guess, to believe them. ” Mr. Thompson, 72, now has cancer in his liver, a lung and a kidney. He pays $2, 200 a month for treatment that would be free at a Veterans Affairs hospital if the Air Force recognized him as a victim of radiation. But for 50 years, the Air Force has maintained that there was no harmful radiation at the crash site. It says the danger of contamination was minimal and strict safety measures ensured that all of the 1, 600 troops who cleaned it up were protected. Interviews with dozens of men like Mr. Thompson and details from never before published declassified documents tell a different story. Radiation near the bombs was so high it sent the military’s monitoring equipment off the scales. Troops spent months shoveling toxic dust, wearing little more protection than cotton fatigues. And when tests taken during the cleanup suggested men had alarmingly high plutonium contamination, the Air Force threw out the results, calling them “clearly unrealistic. ” In the decades since, the Air Force has purposefully kept radiation test results out of the men’s medical files and resisted calls to retest them, even when the calls came from one of the Air Force’s own studies. Many men say they are suffering with the crippling effects of plutonium poisoning. Of 40 veterans who helped with the cleanup who The New York Times identified, 21 had cancer. Nine had died from it. It is impossible to connect individual cancers to a single exposure to radiation. And no formal mortality study has ever been done to determine whether there is an elevated incidence of disease. The only evidence the men have to rely on are anecdotes of friends they watched wither away. “John Young, dead of cancer . .. Dudley Easton, cancer . .. Furmanksi, cancer,” said Larry L. Slone, 76, in an interview, laboring through tremors caused by a neurological disorder. At the crash site, Mr. Slone, a military police officer at the time, said he was given a plastic bag and told to pick up radioactive fragments with his bare hands. “A couple times they checked me with a Geiger counter and it went clear off the scale,” he said. “But they never took my name, never followed up with me. ” Monitoring of the village in Spain has also been haphazard, declassified documents show. The United States promised to pay for a public health program to monitor the effects of radiation there, but for decades provided little funding. Until the 1980s, Spanish scientists often relied on broken and outdated equipment, and lacked the resources to follow up on potential ramifications, including leukemia deaths in children. Today, several areas are still contaminated, and the health effect on villagers is poorly understood. Many of the Americans who cleaned up after the bombs are trying to get full health care coverage and disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs. But the department relies on Air Force records, and since the Air Force records say no one was harmed in Palomares, the agency rejects claims again and again. The Air Force also denies any harm was done to 500 other veterans who cleaned up a nearly identical crash in Thule, Greenland, in 1968. Those veterans tried to sue the Defense Department in 1995, but the case was dismissed because federal law shields the military from negligence claims by troops. All of the named plaintiffs have since died of cancer. In a statement, the Air Force Medical Service said it had recently used modern techniques to reassess the radiation risk to veterans who cleaned up the Palomares accident and “adverse acute health effects were neither expected nor observed, and risks for increased incidence of cancer to the bone, liver and lungs were low. ” The toxic aftermath of war is often vexing to untangle. Damage is hard to quantify and all but impossible to connect to later problems. Recognizing this, Congress has passed laws in the past to give automatic benefits to veterans of a few specific exposures — Agent Orange in Vietnam or the atomic tests in Nevada, among others. But no such law exists for the men who cleaned up Palomares. If the men could prove they were harmed by radiation, they would have all costs for their associated medical care covered and would get a modest disability pension. But proof from a secret mission to clean up an invisible poison decades ago has proved elusive. So each time the men apply, the Air Force says they were not harmed and the department hands out denials. “First they denied I was even there, then they denied there was any radiation,” said Ronald R. Howell, 71, who recently had a brain tumor removed. “I submit a claim, and they deny. I submit appeal, and they deny. Now I’m all out of appeals. ” He sighed, then continued. “Pretty soon, we’ll all be dead and they will have succeeded at covering this whole thing up. ” A military police officer named John H. Garman arrived by helicopter at the crash site on Jan. 17, 1966, a few hours after the bombs blew. “It was just chaos,” Mr. Garman, now 74, said in an interview at his home in Pahrump, Nev. “Wreckage was all over the village. A big part of the bomber had crashed down in the yard of the school. ” He was one of the first on the scene, and joined a others to hunt for the four missing nuclear weapons. One bomb had thudded into a soft sandbank near the beach and crumpled but remained intact. Another had dropped into the ocean, where it was found unbroken two months later, after a frenzied hunt. The other two hit hard and exploded, leaving craters on either side of the village, according to a secret Atomic Energy Commission report that has since been declassified. safeguards prevented nuclear detonations, but explosives surrounding the radioactive cores blasted a fine dust of plutonium over a patchwork of houses and fields full of ripe, red tomatoes. A throng of residents led Mr. Garman to the craters, where they peered down at the shattered wreckage, not knowing what to do. “We didn’t have any radiation detectors yet, so we had no idea if we were in danger,” he said. “We just stood there looking down at the hole. ” Atomic Energy Commission scientists soon arrived and took Mr. Garman’s clothes because they were contaminated, he said, but told him he would be fine. Twelve years later, he got bladder cancer. Plutonium does not emit the type of penetrating radiation often associated with nuclear blasts, which causes immediately obvious health effects, such as burns. It shoots off alpha particles that travel only a few inches and cannot penetrate the skin. Outside the body, scientists say, it is relatively harmless, but specks absorbed in the body, usually through inhaling dust, shoot off a continuous shower of radioactive particles thousands of times a minute, gradually exacting damage that can cause cancer and other diseases decades later. A microgram, or a millionth of a gram, in the body is considered potentially harmful. According to declassified Atomic Energy Commission reports, the bombs at Palomares released an estimated seven pounds — more than 3 billion micrograms. The day after the crash, busloads of troops started arriving from United States bases, bringing equipment. William Jackson, a young Air Force lieutenant, helped with some of the first testing near the craters, using a alpha particle counter that could measure up to two million alpha particles per minute. “Almost everywhere we pointed the machine it pegged at the highest reading,” he said. “But we were told that type of radiation would not penetrate the skin. We were told it was safe. ” The Pentagon focused on finding the bomb lost in the ocean and largely ignored the danger of loose plutonium, the Air Force personnel at the site said. Troops traipsed needlessly through highly contaminated tomato fields with no safety gear. Many came to gawk at the shattered bombs in the first few days. “Once I went to check on the G. I. s and found them dangling their legs into the crater,” Mr. Jackson said. “Just sitting there, eating their box lunches. ” Accounts of the crash became news in Europe and the United States. American and Spanish officials immediately tried to cover up the accident and play down the risk. They blocked off the village and denied nuclear weapons or radiation were involved in the crash. When an American reporter spotted men wearing white coveralls, a military press officer told him, “Oh, they’re members of the postal detachment. ” Once existence of the bombs leaked, more than a month later, the United States admitted that one bomb, not two, had “cracked,” but had released only a “small amount of basically harmless radiation. ” Today the two exploded warheads would be known as dirty bombs, and would probably cause evacuations. At the time, in order to minimize the significance of the blast, the Air Force let villagers remain in place. Officials invited the news media to witness Spain’s minister of information, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, and United States ambassador, Angier Biddle Duke, splashing on a nearby beach to show the area was safe. Mr. Duke told reporters, “If this is radioactivity, I love it. ” Fearing that the bombs could damage the tourism industry, Spain insisted the mess be cleaned up before summer. Within days, troops were hacking down contaminated fields of tomato vines with machetes. Though scientists overseeing the cleanup knew plutonium dust posed the greatest danger, military commanders had the troops throw thousands of truckloads of vines into chipping machines, then burned much of the debris near the village. Some men doing the dustiest work were given coveralls and paper surgical masks for safety, but a later report by the Defense Nuclear Agency said, “It is doubtful that the use of the surgical mask served more than a psychological barrier. ” “If it did something for your psychology to wear one, you were privileged to wear one,” the chief scientific adviser, Dr. Wright H. Langham, told Atomic Energy colleagues in a secret briefing afterward. “It wouldn’t do you any good in the way of protection, but if you felt better, we let you wear it. ” Commenting on safety at the cleanup, Dr. Langham, who is perhaps best known now for his role in secret experiments in which hospital patients in the United States were unwittingly injected with plutonium, told colleagues, “Most of the time it would hardly meet the standards of the health physics manuals. ” The Air Force bought tons of contaminated tomatoes from local fields that the Spanish public refused to eat. To assure the public there was no danger, commanders fed the tomatoes to the troops. Though the risk from eating plutonium is much lower than the risk from inhaling it, it is still not safe. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had them until we were sick of them,” said Wayne Hugart, 74, who was a military police officer at the site. “They kept saying there was nothing wrong with them. ” In all, the Air Force cut down 600 acres of crops and plowed under the contaminated dirt. Troops scooped up 5, 300 barrels of soil from the most radioactive areas near the craters and loaded the barrels on ships to be buried in a secure nuclear waste storage site in South Carolina. Spanish and American authorities assured villagers that they had nothing to fear. The villagers, accustomed to living in a dictatorship, did little to protest. “Even if some people here might have wanted to know more, Franco was in charge, so everybody was too scared to ask anything,” said Antonio Latorre, a villager who is now 78. To assure villagers their homes were safe, the Air Force sent young airmen into local houses with radiation detectors. Peter M. Ricard, then a cook with no training on the equipment, remembers being told to perform scans of anything locals wanted, but to keep his detector turned off. “We were just supposed to feign our readings so we didn’t cause turmoil with the natives,” he said in an interview. “I often think about that now. I wasn’t too smart back then. They say do it and you just say, ‘Yes, sir. ’” During the cleanup, a medical team gathered more than 1, 500 urine samples from the cleanup crew to calculate how much plutonium they were absorbing. The higher the level in the samples, the greater the health hazard. The records of those tests remain perhaps the most prominent artifact from the cleanup. They show about only 10 of the men absorbed more than the allowed safe dose, and the rest of the 1, 500 responders were not harmed. The Air Force today relies on the results to argue that the men were never harmed by radiation. But the men who actually did the testing say the results are deeply flawed and are of little use in determining who was exposed. “Did we follow protocol? Hell, no. We had neither the time nor the equipment,” said Victor B. Skaar, now 79, who worked on the testing team. The formula for determining the contamination level required collecting urine for 12 hours, but he said he was able to get only a single sample from many men. And others, he said, were never tested at all. He sent samples to the Air Force’s chief of radiation testing, Dr. Lawrence T. Odland, who started seeing alarmingly high results. Dr. Odland decided the extreme levels did not indicate a true health threat, but were caused by plutonium loose in the camp that contaminated the men’s hands, their clothes and everything else. He threw out about 1, 000 samples — 67 percent of the results — including all samples from the first days after the blasts when exposure was probably highest. Now 94 and living in a rambling Victorian house in Hillsboro, Ohio, where a photo from the Greenland crash hangs in his hall, Dr. Odland questioned his decision. “We had no way of knowing what was from contamination and what was from inhalation,” he said. “Was the world ending or was everything fine? I just had to make a call. ” He said he never got accurate results for hundreds of men who may have been contaminated. In addition, he soon realized plutonium lodged in the lungs could not always be detected in veterans’ urine, and men with clean samples might still be contaminated. “It’s sad, sure, it’s sad,” he said. “But what can you do? You can’t take the plutonium out you can’t cure the cancer. All you can do is bow your head and say you are sorry. ” Convinced that the urine samples were inadequate, Dr. Odland persuaded the Air Force in 1966 to set up a permanent “Plutonium Deposition Registry Board” to monitor the men for life. Experts from the Air Force, Army, Navy, Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) and Atomic Energy Commission met to establish the program shortly after the cleanup. In welcoming remarks, the Air Force general in charge said the program was “essential” and following the men to their graves would provide “urgently needed data. ” The organizers proposed not notifying troops of their radiation exposure and keeping details of testing out of medical records, according to minutes of the meeting, out of concern notifying them could “set a stage for legal action. ” The plan was to have Dr. Odland’s staff follow the men. Within months, though, he had hit a wall. “He is not able to get the support from the Department of Defense to go after the remaining people or set up a real registry because of the policy,” an Atomic Energy Commission memo from 1967 noted. “The sleeping dog policy? It was to leave it alone. Let it lie. I didn’t agree. Hell no, I didn’t agree,” Dr. Odland said. “Everyone decided we should watch these guys, take care of them. And then from somewhere up high they decided it was better to get rid of it. ” Dr. Odland did not know who gave the order to terminate the program, but said since the board included all the military branches and the veterans agency, it likely came from officials. The Air Force officially dismantled the program in 1968. The “permanent” board had met just once. Troops started to get sick soon after the cleanup ended. Healthy men in their 20s were crippled by joint pain, headaches and weakness. Doctors said it was arthritis. A young military policeman was plagued by sinus swelling so acute that he would bang his head on the floor to distract himself from the pain. Doctors said it was allergies. Several men got rashes or growths. An airman named Noris N. Paul had cysts severe enough that he spent six months in the hospital in 1967 getting skin grafts. He also became infertile. “No one knew what was wrong with me,” Mr. Paul said. A grocery supply clerk named Arthur Kindler, who had been so covered in plutonium while searching the tomato fields a few days after the blast that the Air Force made him wash off in the ocean and took his clothes, got testicular cancer and a rare lung infection that nearly killed him four years after the crash. In the years since, he has had cancer of his lymph nodes three times. “It took me a long time to start to realize this maybe had to do with cleaning up the bombs,” Mr. Kindler, 74, said in an interview from his home in Tucson. “You have to understand, they told us everything was safe. We were young. We trusted them. Why would they lie?” Mr. Kindler filed twice for help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. “They always denied me,” he said. “Eventually, I just gave up. ” The United States promised to pay for monitoring of health in the village, but for decades it provided only about 15 percent of funding, with Spain paying the rest, according to a declassified Department of Energy summary. Broken stations went unfixed and equipment was often old and unreliable. In the early 1970s, an Atomic Energy Commission scientist noted, the Spanish field monitoring team consisted of a lone graduate student. Reports of two children dying of leukemia during that time went uninvestigated. The lead Spanish scientist monitoring the population told American counterparts in a 1976 memo that, in light of the leukemia cases, Palomares needed “some kind of medical surveillance of the population to keep watch for diseases or deaths. ” None was created. In the late 1990s, after years of pressure from Spain, the United States agreed to increase funding. New surveys of the village found extensive contamination that had gone undetected, including some areas where radiation was 20 times the permissible level for inhabited areas. In 2004, Spain quietly fenced off the most contaminated land near the bomb craters. Since then, Spain has urged the United States to finish cleaning the site. Because of the uneven monitoring, the effect on public health is far from clear. A small mortality study in 2005 found cancer rates had gone up in the village compared with similar villages in the region, but the author, Pedro Antonio Martínez Pinilla, an epidemiologist, cautioned that the results could be because of random error, and urged more study. At that time, a United States Department of Energy scientist, Terry Hamilton, proposed another study, noting problems in Spain’s monitoring techniques. “It was clear the uptake of plutonium was poorly understood,” he said in an interview. The department did not approve his proposal. Spanish officials say the fears may be overblown. Yolanda Benito, who heads the environmental department of Ciemat, Spain’s nuclear agency, said that medical checks showed no uptick in cancer in Palomares. “From a scientific point of view, there is nothing that allows us to draw a relationship between the cases of cancer in the local population and the accident,” she said. About a fifth of the plutonium spread in 1966 is estimated to still contaminate the area. After years of pressure, the United States agreed in 2015 to clean up the remaining plutonium, but there is no approved plan or timetable. On a recent rainy morning, Nona A. Watson, a retired science teacher in Buckhead, Ga. held open the door of a veterans medical center in Atlanta for her husband, Nolan F. Watson, who hobbled in, his shuddering hand unable to steady his cane. As a dog handler, Mr. Watson slept in the dirt just feet from one of the bomb craters the day after the blast. A year later, he was racked by blinding headaches and hips so stiff he could barely walk. At the time, he asked the Department of Veterans Affairs for help. He said he was turned away. For years he had problems with painful joints, kidney stones and localized skin cancer. In 2002, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and one of his kidneys was removed. In 2010, more cancer showed up in his remaining kidney. Recent abnormal blood tests suggested leukemia. “I think it ruined my life,” he said. “I was young, in good shape. But since that day, I’ve had problems all the time. ” Mr. Watson, now 73, had filed a claim with the veterans agency that was denied and he was in the process of appealing. Other veterans of Palomares had warned him that it was a waste of time. Only one Palomares veteran they knew of had succeeded in claiming harm from radiation, and it took 10 years, at which point he was bedridden with stomach cancer. But Mr. Watson wanted to come to the medical center to give personal testimony about his plutonium exposure. In the center’s waiting room, his nose began to bleed. A few years ago, after his first claim was denied, Mr. Watson’s wife began hunting down old government documents, hoping she might find something to prove the Air Force was covering up Palomares. Maybe, she thought, she could discover evidence that would make the authorities reconsider. She turned up reports going back 40 years that confirmed the men’s stories of high radiation levels and poor safety standards. But her most striking find was an Air Force study from 2001 that reassessed the contamination in Palomares veterans. The study determined that the old urine tests were so flawed that they were “not useful” and the Air Force should retest the men. Mrs. Watson knew no retesting had been done, so she called the Air Force Medical Service to ask why. When she could not get a clear answer, she asked her congressman at the time, Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, to send a letter to the Air Force. When the congressman could not get a clear answer, either, he proposed legislation, which the House passed in 2013, requiring the Air Force to answer to Congress. In 2013, the Air Force provided its legally required response in a letter to the House Armed Services Committee. To Mrs. Watson’s dismay, it echoed what she and the congressman had already been told: New testing recommended in the 2001 report “was not necessary” because troops had worn protective equipment, and the original urine tests showed that almost no one had been exposed to radiation. Declassified documents and witness accounts raise serious questions about the accuracy of the Air Force’s report to Congress. After issuing the letter, the Air Force Medical Service quietly took down from its website the only public copy of the 2001 report. “I had gone into this thinking it was just an old mistake, but then I found they were still trying to cover it up,” Mrs. Watson said in an interview at her home. Col. Kirk Phillips, who oversees the radiation health program for the Air Force Medical Service, said in a recent interview that the Air Force has tried its best to do right by the Palomares veterans. It took down the report because it did not want to raise the hopes of veterans and feared readers would find it “confusing. ” “We have a large number of veterans we believe were not exposed,” he said. Radiation levels at Palomares were low, he said, and men wore safety equipment. Retesting them with more precise modern techniques, as the 2001 report suggested, could reveal even lower contamination levels, making it even less likely that the veterans would get compensation from the department. “We think retesting could be a real mistake,” he said. “It could harm our veterans because we think it would find even lower levels of radiation. ” In the interest of giving Palomares veterans what he called “the benefit of the doubt,” he said, the Air Force stopped relying in 2013 on the old urine test results and instead assigned all troops who cleaned up the site a “ scenario” dose based on ambient air readings of radiation from the time. It gave them a dose of 0. 31 rem — a very small dose too low to qualify veterans for department benefits. The Greenland veterans who cleaned up a similar crash have been assigned a dose of zero. Mrs. Watson, who has studied Palomares’s test results and reports in detail, said the ambient air tests probably do not reflect what individuals working near the craters absorbed. “As far as I can tell, it’s not based on anything and won’t do anyone any good,” she said. “You wonder why they even bothered. ” As she waited at the medical center with her husband, she explained how they expected their appeal to fail. They had no proof. No matter what he said in his testimony, the department would refer to old urine samples to determine who was harmed. And Mr. Watson had never given a urine sample. He could not offer a new urine sample because cancer had taken most of his kidneys. If successful with the appeal, Mr. Watson would have all of his medical costs covered and get modest monthly disability payments. “But that’s not why I’m doing it,” he said as he dabbed at his nose. “I’m not about the money. ” He doubted he would live long enough to collect much. More than anything, he wanted the record straight. He wanted to tell the Air Force that he and the men he served with mattered enough to be told the truth. “I’m going to speak my piece, dang it. ” Mr. Watson said. “They know this whole thing is a lie. ” | 1 |
Raymond Smullyan, whose merry, agile mind led him to be a musician, a magician, a mathematician and, most cunningly, a logician, died on Monday in Hudson, N. Y. He was 97. His death was confirmed by Deborah Smullyan, a cousin. Professor Smullyan was a serious mathematician, with the publications and the doctorate to prove it. But his greatest legacy may be the devilishly clever logic puzzles that he devised, presenting them in numerous books or just in casual conversation. Sometimes they were and sometimes they were embedded in longer narratives to explain mathematical concepts, such as Boolean logic, as he did in “The Magic Garden of George B and Other Logic Puzzles” in 2015 or retrograde analysis, as he explored in the “The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights” in 1981. He was also a character. With his long white hair and beard, Professor Smullyan resembled Ian McKellen’s wizard, Gandalf, from the “Lord of the Rings” film series. He was lanky, hated exercise and loved steak and eggs. He studied Eastern religion. He told corny jokes and performed magic to anyone near him. He played the piano with passion and talent into his 90s. (A career in music had been derailed by tendinitis when he was a young man.) And he was fond of his philosophical, if silly, sayings, such as, “Why should I worry about dying? It’s not going to happen in my lifetime!” Melvin Fitting, a retired professor of mathematics, philosophy and computer science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, recalled Professor Smullyan’s demeanor as his teacher at Yeshiva University in the 1960s while Professor Fitting was pursuing his doctorate. “He’d be smiling in anticipation of the many beautiful things he was going to show you,” the professor said in an interview. Professor Smullyan saw beauty in the puzzles that he created, seemingly nonstop, over the decades, and viewed them as tools to spread the gospel of mathematics. In his 1982 book “The Lady or the Tiger? And Other Logic Puzzles,” he wrote about the greater popularity that Euclid’s “Elements” would have achieved had the Greek mathematician framed it as a puzzle book. He wrote: “Problem: Given a triangle with two equal sides, are two of the angles necessarily equal? Why, or why not?” His puzzles were so much a part of his identity that he posed one on his first date with his future wife, Blanche de Grab. What he posed to her was a statement that, in the way he framed it, could only result in a kiss from her. Reminiscing about it, he wrote that it was a “pretty sneaky way of winning a kiss, wasn’t it?” Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematics professor at James Madison University, who edited a book in 2015 celebrating Mr. Smullyan, said the clarity of his puzzles could unveil the beauty of math to those who could not previously grasp it. “It was like fooling a kid into eating his vegetables,” Professor Rosenhouse said in a telephone interview, adding, “Raymond took something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and used a string of logic puzzles as a device for presenting them. ” Martin Gardner, himself a renowned math puzzler, compared Professor Smullyan to the Oxford logician Charles Dodgson, who also was an author better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll. Professor Smullyan paid tribute to Carroll in his 1982 book “Alice in : A Carrollian Tale for Children Under Eighty. ” In one chapter, Professor Smullyan wrote, Alice thinks to herself about how confusing, yet remarkably logical, Humpty Dumpty is. “I wonder,” she says, “how he manages to be both confusing and logical?” There was, it would seem, some confusing logic in the zigzagging path of Mr. Smullyan’s life. Raymond Merrill Smullyan was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, on May 25, 1919. His father, Isidore, was a businessman his mother, the former Rosina Freeman, a homemaker. His education was peripatetic and eclectic. He attended both Pacific University and Reed College in Oregon, then studied mathematics and logic on his own. He learned magic. He created chess puzzles that were more concerned about moves that had been made than the ones that should be made. He put together a magic act, and performed under the stage name Merrill at nightclubs like the Pump Room in Chicago, where he worked for tips. He went on to get his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph. D. from Princeton. He taught at Princeton, Yeshiva, Lehman College of the City University of New York and Indiana University. His philosophy of teaching was a little puzzling. “My policy is to teach the student as much as possible and to require from him or her as little as possible,” he told Donald Albers and Gerald Alexanderson, the authors of “Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews” in 2008. But, he added, the impact of his apparent lenience was that many of his students worked harder in his course than in any other. Professor Smullyan is survived by his stepson, Jack Kotik six and 16 . His wife Blanche, a pianist and music educator, died in 2006. His first marriage ended in divorce. Mr. Kotik recalled being with his wife at the Smullyans’ house in Elka Park, N. Y. and listening to a radio report about the high salaries of professional athletes. His mother, Blanche, said they were excessive. Professor Smullyan said that to be paid so much was unfair. “I said, ‘Raymond, isn’t it true that you’re more intelligent than most people?’ ” Mr. Kotik said during a phone interview. “ ‘Yes,’ he said. So I said, ‘I think that’s unfair. We should take out part of your brain and distribute it to people who could use it.’ “He was silent for a minute, and finally he said, ‘I can’t give you any reason, but I wouldn’t do it.’ ” Puzzles were an essential part of Mr. Smullyan’s patois — a logician’s way of greeting and testing people. When he met his most recent editor, Rochelle Kronzek, he asked her to solve some problems. “It intimidated me at first, but I came up with creative answers,” Ms. Kronzek, the executive editor of World Scientific Publishing, said in an interview, “and more than once he smiled because he liked the way I was thinking. He got a lot of joy out of seeing how other people thought. ” | 1 |
Sean Brown AMERICA’S FREEDOM FIGHTERS –
Wikileaks has revealed some rather troubling things about Hillary Clinton and her staffers, but perhaps the most disturbing, a bizarre, is the fact that John Podesta is involved with satanic rituals.
No, this isn’t fiction and I’m not wearing tin foil on my head. An email released by Wikileaks reveals Podesta was invited to a “spirit cooking dinner” by performance artist Marina Abramovic, and you can rest assured that it’s not anything like it sounds.
“I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina,” an email dated June 28, 2015 read.
Shortly after, the emails, which was sent to Podesta’s brother Tony, was forwarded to john with the message, “Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner.”
Now you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, and I seriously can’t blame you. So let’s turn to Paul Joseph Watson from InfoWars for a little background on what this “spirit cooking” is really all about.
Spirit cooking refers to “a sacrament in the religion of Thelema which was founded by Aleister Crowley” and involves an occult performance during which menstrual blood, breast milk, urine and sperm are used to create a “painting”.
According to Marina Abramovic, if the ritual is performed in an art gallery, it is merely art, but if the ritual is performed privately, then it represents an intimate spiritual ceremony.
The video embedded above depicts the bizarre nature of the ceremony. Abramovic mixes together thickly congealed blood as the “recipe” for the “painting,” which is comprised of the words, “With a sharp knife cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand eat the pain.”
The ceremony is, “meant to symbolize the union between the microcosm, Man, and the macrocosm, the Divine, which is a representation of one of the prime maxims in Hermeticism “As Above, So Below.”
Below is a video of Abramovic conducting the satanic ritual:
How creepy. Even creepier is the same woman holding a bloody goat’s head – a representation of the Satanist symbol Baphomet. The Podestas'"Spirit Cooking" dinner?It's not what you think.It's blood, sperm and breastmilk.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 4, 2016
Yeah…
If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Sean Brown on Facebook , and check out his website, politicalcult.com .
God Bless. | 0 |
posted by Eddie
The most important ecological crisis of the world has ever seen has been underway since March 11th, 2011, yet there is nary a mention of it in the corporate media, and no political body in the world is championing its resolution. Widespread Denial and Willful Ignorance The media, politicians and the world at large seem to be engaging in extreme denial regarding Fukushima. A survey of mainstream media coverage of the fallout of this event reveals the trend of covering this story as a human interest affair, not as the immediate threat it truly is. The effects on nature are already being seen, yet even among the environmentalist factions of media, there is strong denial of the damage already done and of what is to come as the crisis approaches its sixth year. Some 300 tons of radioactive water are dumped into the Pacific Ocean each day , and signs are showing that this catastrophe is gravely affecting sea-life and wildlife in and around the Pacific. The FDA maintains that there is no evidence of contamination by Fukushima borne radionuclides in the American food supply, yet this opinion is contested by some independent researchers. A report by the Fairewinds Energy Education says that cancer is on the rise in areas around the failed power plant, and that millions will die in coming years as a result. “The second report received from Japan proves that the incidence of thyroid cancer is approximately 230 times higher than normal in Fukushima Prefecture… So what’s the bottom line? The cancers already occurring in Japan are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sorry to say that the worst is yet to come.” [ Source ] As election year in the U.S. approaches its dramatic climax, it has been striking to observe that neither of the major two-party candidates, or third-party candidates for that matter, have mentioned this crisis at all during the entire election run up. It is a non-issue in American politics, and if you’re listening, the silence is deafening. The 40-Year-Plan Thus far, all plans to stop radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean and the Japanese Islands have failed, the most impressive of which is the construction of a $320 million underground wall of frozen dirt to block the seepage of groundwater into surrounding areas. 1oo feet deep and over a mile long, the ‘ land-side impermeable wall ‘ is already failing as rainfall from recent typhoons has caused partial melting of sections of the ‘ice wall.’ Workers examine pipes for the wall of frozen soil at the embattled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. A previous and ongoing cleanup effort requires the on site storage of contaminated water near the Fukushima Daiichi is merely a band-aid as radioactive water continues to accumulate by the day , with no long term plan for proper disposal. “…the filtered water is still full of tritium , a radioactive version of hydrogen. (When two neutrons are added to the element, it becomes unstable, prone to emitting electrons.) Tritium bonds with oxygen just like normal hydrogen does, to produce radioactive “tritiated water.” It’s impractical—or at least extremely difficult and expensive—to separate tritiated water from normal water.” [ Source ] Storage tanks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The reality here is that this crisis is untouchable in its scope and unparalleled in its lethality, and TEPCO’s 40-year-plan to decommission the plant will be a failure. Final Thoughts No one of significant import is talking about this crisis or working to elevate it as a national and international priority. The American political scene is focused instead on the selection of the next president being chosen between two candidates who clearly have zero interest in addressing this dire issue. Is this because nothing can be done about it? Is this because the energy industry is controlling the conversation and covering up the truth? Or is this because the agenda for the U.S. at present is geared to destabilization and a push for expansion of the Orwellian Permanent War, and ecological disasters are supportive of the global depopulation scheme in play? In any case, the Fukushima meltdown is a slow-burning apocalyptic event that desperately needs our attention. For more background, please view the following video summary:
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At the direction of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Japanese government is preparing “tweetable” financial data for Abe’s upcoming meeting with President Donald Trump. [“Executives at three top Japanese companies said officials had been in touch asking for investment numbers. Public investment institutions say the prime minister is also leaning on them to pledge tens of billions of dollars to US infrastructure projects such as rail,” reports the Financial Times. Abe is scheduled to arrive in the United States for his meeting with Trump on Friday, with his foreign, finance, and trade ministers in tow. On Saturday, he’ll join Trump for a round of golf at the resort in Florida. “You get to know somebody better on a golf course than you will over lunch,” Trump explained in a radio interview on Sunday. He did not confirm or deny whether there would be any money riding on the game. There will definitely be a lot of money riding on Abe’s visit. The Financial Times has Sadayuki Sakakibara, chairman of the Nippon Keidanren business federation — saluted as the “ voice of corporate Japan” by the Japan Times and its chairman regarded as “the prime minister of the business world” — scrambling to assemble data that will help Trump see Japan in a positive light. “The most important thing is to reconfirm the importance of the relationship in politics, economics, and security,” Sakakibara said. To that end, he wants Abe to remind Trump that “we’re contributing to the expansion of U. S. exports,” along with $400 billion of direct investment and 1. 7 million jobs supported by Japanese companies in America. The Financial Times also notes that Toyota has already pledged another $10 billion in U. S. investment over the next five years, with up to 400 jobs added at its Indiana manufacturing plant. Japan’s SoftBank tech conglomerate has also pledged $50 billion in American investment over the next four years. Abe will add to this by discussing Japanese investment for Trump’s proposed infrastructure plan, possibly including a sales pitch for Japanese rail technology. In 2015, Abe proposed $5 billion in Japanese investment for a maglev train that would have offered travel from D. C. to Baltimore in 15 minutes, with a vision of similar lines connecting New York to Washington, Dallas to Houston, and Los Angeles to San Francisco. | 1 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — With Russia’s backing, the United Nations Security Council voted on Monday to send United Nations observers to monitor evacuations from the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo and to report back regularly. Russia had threatened to veto an earlier resolution proposed by France, which had sought to place the evacuations under United Nations supervision, but a compromise was reached on Sunday that would allow the monitors to observe after consultations with “interested parties. ” The resolution passed unanimously. That could, in principle, give any number of groups on the ground — including Syrian soldiers and the Shiite militias fighting alongside them — the ability to block access. Fighters from the array of rebel groups, including extremists, could also block access to areas they control. Three questions now loom: Will Russia lean on Syria to allow safe and unimpeded access, as the resolution demands? How long will it take for the monitors to start working? And would they be in place before the evacuations are complete? “Our objective is: immediately,” Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said when asked by reporters after the vote when the monitors would start. “They need to get in there and be relevant on those green buses,” the ones used to evacuate civilians and rebels. The United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, could not say on Monday how many monitors would be deployed or how quickly they could be posted. Asked whether they could be deployed within the next 24 hours, when more evacuations are expected, Mr. Dujarric said: “It’s dangerous for me to predict anything. Our colleagues on ground are trying to make this work. ” Nor was there much clarity from a statement sent by the United Nations emergency relief chief, Stephen O’Brien. “We stand ready to scale up our presence and efforts across the entire city, in line with the resolution and international humanitarian law,” the statement read. “This can be done immediately, but only if the parties live up to this resolution and their most basic legal obligations. ” Hours after the vote, the United Nations envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said he would convene political talks among Syrian government and opposition groups starting Feb. 8. Citing the Security Council deal, he said, “It is vital to build on this initial momentum. ” The United Nations says it has about 100 staff members in Aleppo, mostly Syrian citizens, and several hundred others in nearby Syrian cities. Officials with the organization have said they were denied permission to observe evacuations. As many as 50, 000 civilians may still be stuck in the area, according to humanitarian groups, although a precise figure is all but impossible to determine. “After so many delaying tactics and obstruction, this resolution should finally allow the full respect of international humanitarian law in Syria,” President François Hollande of France said in a statement. “It should also pave the way for a and negotiate a political solution that is much awaited by the Syrian people and the entire international community. ” The extent to which the Syrian government will cooperate with the monitoring is unclear, though Russia is a principal military backer of President Bashar ’s regime. After days of delays and sporadic violence, the evacuation of civilians and fighters from besieged communities in Syria resumed Sunday night, with convoys taking people out of eastern Aleppo and two nearby Shiite villages. As of Monday afternoon, 20, 000 people had been removed from the last part of Aleppo, the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said in a post on Twitter. Among those evacuated to a area west of the city was Bana a girl whose Twitter posts with her mother throughout the siege by government forces helped draw attention to the plight of civilians. Opposition activists posted videos and photographs of the girl and her mother on Monday after they arrived in territory. The evacuation of more than 2, 000 sick and wounded people from two Shiite villages that have been surrounded by Sunni insurgents for years also began Monday. The villages, Fouaa and Kfarya, were not originally part of the agreement but were added after gunmen prevented buses from removing people from eastern Aleppo last week. Ten buses carrying civilians from the villages left on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, and local journalists posted online videos of their arrival in another area. Also added to the agreement was the evacuation of two villages near the border with Lebanon, Zabadani and Madaya, that have long been surrounded by government forces. The evacuation deal, brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran, was intended to relieve one of the more crushing aspects of Syria’s war: the practice by both sides of besieging their opponents and bombarding their communities. The agreement, and an accompanying has proceeded haltingly since it began on Wednesday, with gunfire on the route repeatedly stopping convoys. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the Syrian government, said five buses that had been held up by forces for hours were allowed to leave eastern Aleppo before midnight on Sunday. The eastern part of Aleppo, the remaining area of the city, has been surrounded by government forces for months and subjected to frequent airstrikes that have killed hundreds of people and have reduced neighborhoods to rubble. If the evacuations continue without interruption, the removal of the remaining residents of eastern Aleppo will put the entire city under Mr. Assad’s control and mark a turning point in the war. Aleppo was once the largest city in Syria and was its industrial hub before the war. Its fall would leave rebels in control of only smaller towns and rural areas. The jihadists of the Islamic State, who oppose both the government and the rebels, still hold significant territory farther east, including the city of Raqqa, their de facto capital. | 1 |
MONOPOLY: Banks, Then Media, Now Voting Machine Companies Corporate consolidation allowing more information control Infowars Nightly News - October 27, 2016 Comments
We’ve all seen what happened when the banks became too big to fail and too big to jail after Bill Clinton’s administration began a wave of bank consolidations.
Now internet providers and content providers are proposing to consolidate in a way that will result in even more information control & privacy concerns.
And under the radar, the electronic voting machine companies are rapidly consolidating as well, with one company supplying over 50% of US voting machines.
And all the players pay the Clintons to play. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles | 0 |
Several years ago, I took a journey with my wife and baby daughter to my ’s childhood home, a forest village in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. As any Keralite will tell you, Kerala is the lushest, most watery corner of India, a skinny coastal strip where hundreds of tributaries merge into broad, winding rivers before finally flowing into the Arabian Sea. My ’s village is named Manimala, for the river that provides its reason for being. My wife spent her childhood summers in Manimala, and all her stories seemed to center on the river: the old stone steps that villagers descended to board a ferry or take a bath the neighbors fishing or washing elephants the flotillas of flowers that drifted downstream after monsoon gales. I’d been cultivating a fantasy that our own daughter would spend her summers on these banks. But when we arrived in Manimala, I was shocked: The great river had become a trickle. In a few places it had pooled into puddles big enough for people to wash their clothes. Otherwise it was barren, the stone steps now leading to a ravine of pale boulders baking in the sun. “What happened to the river?” I asked. “Sand mafia,” my wife’s cousin Thambichan answered. The Manimala, Thambichan explained, once had a sandy riverbed that in some places was 30 feet deep. The sand acted as an aquifer, regulating the river’s flow. But sand is also a crucial ingredient in concrete, and India is urbanizing at a speed and scale virtually unmatched by any country in history. Apartment towers, highways, bridges, skyscrapers, metros, dams: Each of them swallows unimaginable helpings of sand. It could line the rivers, or it could form the cities that were rising everywhere alongside them, but it could not do both at once. “No one listened when we warned of the dangers of sand mining,” my wife’s uncle Shaji told me. With nearly all the sand removed from the river, the water table had dropped for miles around. When the monsoons came, the water whooshed away as quickly as the rain fell. The ordinary wells ran dry, so people drilled tube wells deep into the earth now some of those were running dry, too. The local rice paddies were long gone. Along the river’s route, several major bridges faced collapse, because the loss of sand had weakened their foundations. When Indians use the term “sand mafia,” they’re talking about the whole range of people who profit from illegal sand mining: the local laborers the budding capitalists who own the trucks and earthmovers the genuine mobsters who, in some places, organize the miners and offer extra muscle the suppliers who act as middlemen between the mafias and the real estate developers the police and officials who take bribes from any or all of the above. And the politicians — sometimes, it’s rumored, even chief ministers of major states — who take their cut and maybe even run operations of their own. The McKinsey Global Institute calculated that the hundreds of millions of Indians migrating from villages to cities require up to a billion square yards of new real estate development annually. Current construction, according to one estimate, already draws more than 800 million tons of sand every year, mostly from India’s waterways. Though no reliable numbers are available, all the people I spoke to in India assumed that much of it is taken illegally. As I came to know Manimala, it became clear that the river had mostly been mined by the villagers themselves. You could see the evidence in many of the new houses nestled among the rubber trees and coconut palms. Some were made of concrete, large and sprawling and brightly colored: pink, neon yellow, red. A few had heaps of sand out front to be used for concrete or plastering for new wings and other renovations. One evening, I sat with Saji P. Thomas, a slender, energetic former sand miner with a small mustache, in front of his new house. He told me he started sand mining around 2002, to raise money for a new business. (He now runs a small cosmetics factory.) It was possible then to mine sand legally, but Thomas, like many others, didn’t bother with permits at first he mined only at night to evade the police. They worked in groups of four or more, he said. Some would pilot the rowboat and the others would dive as deep as 15 feet to fill their baskets with sand. The loads were awkward and heavy. “We’d make a staircase out of tree stumps,” he said. “But the danger was we’d slip off a step and almost choke to death underwater. ” At the river’s edge, another team would load the sand into a truck. Sometimes, Thomas said, the truck driver would get a call that the police were on their way, and they’d scramble to finish loading the truck and flee any bribes the authorities might demand could cut deep into their margins. “There are policemen who have built beautiful houses thanks to sand mining,” he said. His previous job, at a bank, paid 400 rupees a day, roughly $5. A good night’s work mining sand earned him 2, 000 rupees. So Thomas kept at it. “To distract myself, I’d fantasize that I was a businessman in a nice car. ” The work did sound terribly dangerous. But the most striking detail in Thomas’s story was not about the mining itself, but about the attitude of his neighbors who lived at the river’s edge. Back when there was plenty of sand, trucks came day and night to load up at the river. But to get access they usually had to cut across the property of the town’s riverfront homeowners, most of whom would collect a toll of 150 rupees from each truck that passed. Now that sand mining has wiped out the groundwater, those same homeowners have to hire different trucks — tankers — to bring them drinking water, at more than 1, 200 rupees a trip. The sand was gone, and gone with it were the river, the groundwater and even the tolls. All that was left was a question, one that haunts river communities all over India: Why would any village so willingly accept such paltry gains for certain catastrophe? More than half the apartments built during India’s construction boom can be found in the New Delhi metropolitan area. One of the highest concentrations of these apartments is in Greater Noida, a suburb that lies between the two most sacred rivers in Hindu lore: the Yamuna to the west, and the Ganges to the east. Both rivers are heavily mined, and it’s easy to see where all that sand goes. Greater Noida has come to embody the shiny, vertical India of the future. Amid seemingly endless colonies of newly constructed concrete apartment towers, you can enjoy one of India’s finest golf courses and the country’s only Formula One racetrack, as well as a shopping mall that tries to simulate the city of Venice, complete with gondola rides. Among all the clusters, you can still find the remnants of 124 agricultural villages, which 40 years ago were the only habitation in this place: fragmented fields of mustard and wheat, an odd absent acre picked over by a stumbling herd of goats. Greater Noida was created in 1991 and is administered not by a mayor but by a chief executive. The idea was to transform the farmland just outside booming New Delhi into an industrial hub that would attract factories. (Noida is an acronym for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority.) Instead, according to local accounts, the authority sold much of the farmland to private developers for 10 or 30 or even several hundred times what they’d paid the original landowning farmer, and Greater Noida became a reservoir for population overflow from New Delhi. The few industries that did come to Greater Noida rarely hired villagers, preferring instead to bus in workers from other northern cities. Young jobless village men and migrant laborers turned to petty theft, and Greater Noida saw a wave of muggings and carjackings. Some residents began to treat their complexes as fortresses, driving out only in the daylight. Naushad Khan, a former farmer with a boyish smile and a boxer’s physique, seized the opportunity presented by the construction boom to enter the entrepreneurial class. As a teenager, he joined and then expanded his elder brother’s digging company, excavating the foundations for new developments and selling the sand they removed. Now, capital in hand, he was starting his own development, an “ ” luxury condo tower, on the outskirts of Greater Noida. He had turned sand into money, and now he would turn that money right back into something concrete. Construction, Khan told me, was an extremely competitive business, which he counted as a blessing. “If you want to succeed, then there should be a good, strong rival against you,” he said when we met at his freshly built office. I asked him if sand mining was ever dangerous. By way of answering, he asked an assistant to fetch his pistol. He set it on the table between us as a kind of conversation piece, next to the tea and cookies. It was and . He laughed when I asked if he’d ever had to use it. “Many times,” he said. “Tens of times. Scores of times. ” He was quick to add a clarification: He’d fired it only for safety, shooting in the air to ward off suspicious people or if the atmosphere was wrong. That sort of thing. The last time I saw Khan was at an overwhelmingly well catered wedding reception he hosted for his nephew inside a tent. Parked inside the entryway was an immaculate white Audi Q5, presumably a wedding gift. Greater Noida had worked out well for him, Khan acknowledged. He always took sand legally, he said — he was quite insistent on this point — and now he could help provide a comfortable standard of living for an extended family with over 40 members. Amid the festivities, Khan seemed almost giddy with pride for all he had achieved. One afternoon I took a drive around Greater Noida with a local farmer named Vikrant Tongad, a sly young man with pointy shoes and a thick pompadour who wanted to show me what had happened to the surrounding rivers. For long stretches of our trip, the only people we saw on the roadside were hawkers waving glossy brochures, trying to lure us to open houses. Between the high rises, dust storms whipped the empty fields. Every billboard we passed was an advertisement for a condominium. One featured, alongside the usual list of perks, a flirty photograph of the Bollywood star Deepika Padukone and an unsurpassable slogan: “Nothing Left to Desire. ” Why don’t Indians just shift to other construction materials? In part it’s because concrete is cheap, strong, easy to use and highly versatile. In part it’s cultural: Building a house out of brawny concrete has come to be viewed by many as a matter of prestige. “They feel that beauty is a beast,” the architect B. R. Ajit told me ruefully. The law encourages this tendency. One environmental lawyer explained to me that the Indian building code recognizes a house as a house only if it’s made from specific heavy materials — concrete included. “If you use that criterion,” he said, “the president’s house is not a house. ” Now, as we drove past mile after mile of unfinished apartment towers, a city for ghosts, all I could think about was the tons of river sand locked within. Many of the condos in Greater Noida are bought as investments by Indians living abroad, and sometimes buildings are left empty by owners who have no intention of taking residence. In other cases the developers run out of money midconstruction or are halted by legal disputes, leaving bare concrete shells for years on end. Some buyers who actually do intend to move in are left waiting helplessly for the keys to apartments they paid for long ago. Finally we arrived at the floodplains of the Yamuna. We stopped to survey the deep pits and fresh tracks where sand miners with earthmovers had been working under cover of night. Similar pits dotted the land as far as the horizon, some large enough, I later learned, that children used them as cricket grounds. The mining has shifted the course of the Yamuna, destroyed animal habitats, damaged crops and threatened the purity of local groundwater, and it may be causing buildings to sink. But it’s especially difficult to single out the effects of sand mining on the Yamuna because the river is troubled in so many different ways. The truth is that with the exception of a couple of months during monsoon season, by the time the Yamuna River reaches Greater Noida, there is no river at all. Tongad walked me down to the banks, and we saw something that looked like a river: There was liquid in the riverbed, and it flowed in a particular direction. But it’s an illusion. Less than 150 miles north, nearly every drop of the Yamuna is rerouted to provide water for the city. The liquid that flows in the Yamuna riverbed alongside Greater Noida consists of every variety of urban waste: factory refuse, slaughterhouse runoff, sewage. If you walk right up to the water, what you’ll find are swirls of oil, clouds of white chemical foam, animal parts, floating turds. I never spent time next to the Yamuna without getting a headache for the rest of the day. And yet old traditions die hard. I saw the Hindu faithful still dipping their idols into this supposedly sacred sludge. Families still cremate their dead on the ghats along the fetid banks. Our last stop was a shop that appeared to sell cellphone chargers. In fact, the chargers were a ruse it was really an unlicensed wine shop. In the back room Tongad introduced me to a sand miner named Jagbir Nagar. He was a thin man, around 60, dressed head to toe in white, and with him were several young men from the village, all seated around a hookah. Nagar is the sarpanch, or head man, of his village in Greater Noida. He also shares an earthmover with a team of five or six others that they use to mine sand from the floodplains. Together, he said, they can take as many as 100 truckloads of sand a night, some of which is used for local projects and the rest of which is mostly picked up by truckers from the desert state of Rajasthan. (If that sounds like sending coals to Newcastle, it’s not desert sand is too fine and rounded to make strong concrete.) I asked Nagar if he was worried that the mining might adversely affect the quality of the local water. It was a question I had an immediate interest in, given that we were at that moment drinking glasses of what they’d told me was unfiltered local groundwater. Nagar grunted in the negative and looked like at me as if I were an idiot. Tongad answered for him. “They’re happy with mining,” he said. “Groundwater depletes: No problem. River is dying: No problem. ” “People are selfish,” a younger man agreed. “The miners say, We dig a hole, and the next year the river comes and fills it again,” Tongad said. “So what’s the problem?” I had often encountered this attitude in India. Everything is rigged, the argument goes. How can you expect us not to seize whatever meager leavings we can? It’s not as if we’re carjackers — we’re taking sand! From what used to be our own land! It’s difficult to convince people who for generations have taken local sand for granted that, like passenger pigeons a century ago, something they had thought of as infinite is now dangerously finite. It’s difficult to tell people who have always been able to take sand according to their needs, and who now have seen outsiders come in and derive great profit from it, that sand is in fact a critical natural resource that needs to be protected. “If the police come, do you fight them?” I asked Nagar. “If there are a lot of police and only a few men, then we run,” he said. “If the police are few and the men are many, then we get into it with them. We fire shot for shot. ” Nagendra Prasad Singh, the district magistrate in charge of enforcing the law in Greater Noida, is a serious man, built like a pillar, with a mustache and a slight twitch in his right eye. He came from a farming family but earned a graduate degree in physics before entering the Civil Service. His previous posting was in Shamli district, which also lies on the Yamuna, and it was said that he put a complete stop to sand mining there — the first I had heard of any such success anywhere in India. When he came to the New Delhi suburbs, Singh quickly began running night raids on illegal miners, seizing dozens of truckloads of sand and imposing fines of tens of millions of rupees on the violators. At his office in Noida’s Sector 27, I asked him if the raids had posed any danger for him. “Have you read the Gita?” he asked. “The soul never dies. The energy may change shape, but the soul never dies. With that kind of confidence, I don’t think anybody can shoot us. ” Singh said he had been fighting the sand mafia since 1999, when he was the city magistrate in Haridwar, a pilgrimage town that marks the spot where the Ganges emerges from the Himalayas. There he learned all about the sand trade from a tiny but stubborn community of activist Hindu monks called Matri Sadan. Their leader, a dreadlocked former chemistry teacher now called Swami Shivanand, moved to Haridwar in 1997 to devote his life to praise of the Ganges, but his prayers were disrupted by the incessant work of the sand mafia. The swami’s objections to mining in the Ganges were largely religious, but as a chemist he was also keenly attuned to the earthly costs. Together Singh and Swami Shivanand set their sights on a businessman named Ponty Chadha, who ruled the sand trade across the state of Uttar Pradesh. He was also the distributor of many Bollywood blockbusters, a real estate magnate, the state’s main liquor baron and a philanthropist focused on children and had close ties to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Singh and the monks managed to get Chadha’s license revoked, which left the trade to the motley assortment of smaller players that dominates it to this day. (Chadha died in 2012, when a real estate dispute with his brother Hardeep escalated into a gunfight.) Singh eventually realized that law enforcement alone would not be enough to stop the theft arresting the leaders of many smaller mafias may be an even greater challenge than ousting a big gangster like Chadha. Now his focus is on harm reduction. Central to his argument is an exasperating fact: There really is enough sand in the rivers and offshore to meet India’s demand for concrete and plaster, at least according to many conservationists. In some cases sand mining can even be beneficial. An oversilted river — a river with too much sand — is also prone to flooding and changing course, and strategic sand mining can help keep it on track. The catastrophes occur only when specific, vulnerable stretches of river are overmined. There’d be no problem if the construction industry mined only from river sites with a carefully identified surplus of sand. Existing laws on sand mining should be adequate to regulate the trade, but as is so often the case in India, the laws are toothless. In 2013, for example, India’s National Green Tribunal — a special court for environmental violations — issued a blanket ban on all mining without environmental clearance. But according to the environmental lawyer Rahul Choudhary, almost all of the applications are granted clearance. Rejections usually occur only because of incomplete paperwork. Singh has a different approach. The first step, he said, is to secure genuine environmental clearances, based on field studies. Next, offer leases to mine on those cleared sites by public auction, with strict parameters on the dimensions of the lease and the depth of excavation permitted. There is no honor system surveyors must map the site and then fix posts into the riverbed to physically block the leaseholders from mining beyond the designated zone. When the mining begins, the magistrate and his officials make frequent unannounced inspections of the sites and weekly video recordings to monitor the depth of sand. The magistrate must also hold regular meetings with townspeople in areas. “Most important,” Singh said, “is the awareness of the people who are living along the river, so that they may feel like a watchdog, that the river’s interest is their own interest. ” It sounded like a smart plan. But it also seemed to rely almost completely on the presence of extraordinarily vigilant magistrates. If a district was unlucky enough to be assigned a corrupt magistrate, or merely one whose interest in sand mining were less intense than Singh’s, the system would fall apart. It was going to be a difficult model to replicate. I asked Singh if he knew any other magistrates who were taking a similar approach. “I am not in contact with anybody who is doing this,” he said. Criminality and graft have come to be seen as such incontrovertible facts of life in India that, in my experience, people seldom mind discussing them openly. When I met a young real estate agent named Girish Kasana in the office of his father’s construction company, for instance, he brought a particularly perspective on the realities of how Indian cities are built. “Everything is corrupt,” he said. Construction is the business where criminals have the best opportunities to launder the most money, he explained, and a cascade of bribes go “to the topmost levels in the government. ” Kasana grabbed a copy of a construction tender on his father’s desk and started furiously scribbling numbers on the back. To get a typical government construction commission, he explained, you pay 6 percent in bribes up front. Then, after the first payment, you pay another 7 percent, half of which goes to the state’s top politicians. The development authority’s junior engineer gets 3 percent. The associate engineer gets 1. 5 percent. The senior manager gets 3 percent, and so on — until the total reached an astonishing 30 percent. “When this is given, then almost anyone can be managed,” Kasana said. “This is the system. This is India. ” “The thing to do is to get a job in the authority,” my translator joked. “This can also be done,” Kasana said. To get a job as a junior engineer, he said, requires a bribe of 10 million rupees. As I talked to developers about sand mining, I often found myself sympathetic to their explanations. The existing system practically forces anyone who wants to build something to collude in the destruction of the rivers. The sand trade is furthermore sustained by a devilishly inbuilt chain of plausible deniability. Unlike most other categories of mining, where large companies dominate the business, sand mining is executed by an endless array of small, independent, often temporary players, largely working at night and in secret. And each step of the line of production is separated from the rest: The sand moves from diggers to truckers to dealers to builders with each link in the chain knowing as little as possible about where the sand they’re buying comes from or who mines it — for obvious reasons, they don’t want to know. Nameable sand dons like Ponty Chadha are rare. The fragmentation and anonymity of the chain is exactly what allows it to continue with so much impunity. “I believe in the power of the people,” Singh told me on my last day in the New Delhi suburbs, just before we got into his pristine white Hindustan Ambassador to go talk to the villagers of Jhatta about sand mining. “To stop an illegal thing, first show your intention. If you are a man of integrity, you have to show it, because people never believe you at first. But gradually, gradually, if you succeed in showing them that you have no personal motive, that you are just trying to motivate them in the larger public interest, that you are just doing your duty, then the people become convinced. That’s my experience. ” In Jhatta, more than 100 villagers, all men, all wearing their best starched whites, gathered in a courtyard next to the village temple to hear Singh’s speech. They had covered their chairs with silky white slipcovers and presented the magistrate with a bursting bouquet of flowers. His oration on sand mining drew on every appeal at his disposal, rhapsodizing about rivers, spelling out the science, quoting scripture. When he finished, his deputy led the villagers in a chant: “Illegal mining: We won’t do it, and we won’t let it happen!” (It’s catchier in Hindi.) It was a compelling speech, and I could see how Singh might convince the villagers of Jhatta, person by person, moment by moment. But of course his adversary is not each villager one by one. It is the systems and values many of us hold in common — the competitive lure of conspicuous consumption, the insatiable engine of development, the universal corruption that fuels it — all of them obstructing any effort to reckon with environmental catastrophe, which has a confounding tendency to manifest itself long after the original gains have accrued. After the speech, a farmer named Sohan Pal Singh approached me to say that the district magistrate was making too much of sand mining. “For us, it’s a normal activity,” he said. “It’s not such a big deal. ” He wanted to show me something outside: Piled against the wall of the courtyard where the meeting was just held was a heap of sand that he himself had helped mine. I asked him if he planned to stop mining after hearing what the district magistrate had to say. He scowled. “If the district magistrate told me to stop wearing clothes,” he asked, “should I take off my shirt?” | 1 |
World Markets Rally with Glee After Hillary Email Dismissal November 07, 2016 World Markets Rally with Glee After Hillary Email Dismissal
Global equity markets surged on Monday, as did the U.S. dollar, putting them on track for their biggest gains in weeks after the FBI stood by its view that no criminal charges were warranted against Hillary Clinton. The news lifted a cloud over the Democrat's presidential campaign and gave it new momentum just two days before the U.S. election It also sent the benchmark S&P 500 index up more than 1 percent. The index was on pace to snap a nine-day losing skid, its longest in more than 35 years, and to post its best daily performance in over four months. European stocks were up 1.4 percent and many of the safe-haven assets that had performed so strongly last week when polls showed Republican candidate Donald Trump closing the gap reversed course as gold and bonds fell.
Investors had been unnerved in recent days by signs of a tightening presidential race, preferring what is seen as a known quantity in Clinton, over the politcal wild card, Trump. | 0 |
Swaminomics writes for URT on Demonetization, US elections and other things Posted on
In this guest post for The UnReal Times, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar gives his views about the US elections and demonetization: (Image via youtube.com)
Many people are asking me about my past predictions. Let me clarify that first. I agree that I had predicted that Modi will never become PM because he will find it difficult to get allies. The entire country reads my articles and when they read this article of mine, all of them became convinced that Modi cannot lead a coalition. So they voted massively in his favor to give him a majority on his own.
I had also predicted that “Trump will not just lose, he’ll be thrashed” and also that “Women are saving US from Prez Trump”. However shockingly, he won. I am still looking for the reasons but in the meantime just read my article “Donald Trump no solution to civilization crisis facing the West” where I sum up the crudity, misogyny and contempt for civic values and political correctness that has propelled Donald Trump into the White House. And just look at the first line in this article to see how lost I still am.
Now, let’s come back to Narendra Modi and his demonetization. Modi is known to hold grudges and can go to any length for them. We all know how he holds grudges against India’s first family and dropped their name from many schemes.
Poor Raghuram Rajan met the same fate. First Modi denied Raghuram Rajan another term. Secondly, as soon as Rajan left, Modi demonetized the currency notes which had Rajan’s signature thereby trying to obliterate his legacy.
I know for a fact that Raghuram Rajan keeps several 1000 rupee notes with him. This is not to hoard money but because his signature on the bank notes brings him fond memories and he wants to charm his grandchildren and great grandchildren by showing him notes with his signature. Imagine how grandkids would feel if grandpa gave them a note signed by him and said “Take this, go buy anything you want. I have authorized it.” But Modi does not want Rajan to even enjoy the small joys of life. The entire country has to pay the price for Modi’s vendetta.
But all is not lost. Here is my advice to Raghuram Rajan and Narendra Modi. Guys, bury the past, come together and work for the future of India. After the US elections, America is without doubt more intolerant than India and Rajan will be delighted to work with Modi for the betterment of India.
I remember that I had predicted that “If Rajan is asked to leave, India will suffer a mass exodus of foreign portfolio investment. Tens of billions of dollars will flow out, maybe as much as 100 billion (if this coincides with some other bad news like a further Chinese slowdown or British exit from the European Union).”
But both Rajan and Britain left and the market kept going up. This shows the resilience of the Indian economy. Imagine what Modi and Rajan can together do.
Of course the global markets have crashed after Trump became president and so I was not completely wrong. Actually I knew that global markets would crash if Trump became president but I never predicted it because the possibility of Trump becoming President never occurred to me.
Finally, I would also like to give the Tatas some advice. Close down Tata Steel UK. The British are brave people. Anyone who tries to colonize them bleeds financially. | 0 |
Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “ . ” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent. ” The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine. NO. 1: NO. 2: Even to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No. 2 was the output of an automaton. Their closeness was a source of wonder to Rekimoto, who was well acquainted with the capabilities of the previous service. Only 24 hours earlier, Google would have translated the same Japanese passage as follows: Rekimoto promoted his discovery to his hundred thousand or so followers on Twitter, and over the next few hours thousands of people broadcast their own experiments with the service. Some were successful, others meant mostly for comic effect. As dawn broke over Tokyo, Google Translate was the No. 1 trend on Japanese Twitter, just above some cult anime series and the new single from a supergroup. Everybody wondered: How had Google Translate become so uncannily artful? Four days later, a couple of hundred journalists, entrepreneurs and advertisers from all over the world gathered in Google’s London engineering office for a special announcement. Guests were greeted with fortune cookies. Their paper slips had a foreign phrase on one side — mine was in Norwegian — and on the other, an invitation to download the Translate app. Tables were set with trays of doughnuts and smoothies, each labeled with a placard that advertised its flavor in German (zitrone) Portuguese (baunilha) or Spanish (manzana). After a while, everyone was ushered into a plush, dark theater. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, stood to make a few opening remarks. A friend, he began, had recently told him he reminded him of Google. “Why, because I know all the answers?” the mayor asked. “No,” the friend replied, “because you’re always trying to finish my sentences. ” The crowd tittered politely. Khan concluded by introducing Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, who took the stage. Pichai was in London in part to inaugurate Google’s new building there, the cornerstone of a new “knowledge quarter” under construction at King’s Cross, and in part to unveil the completion of the initial phase of a company transformation he announced last year. The Google of the future, Pichai had said on several occasions, was going to be “A. I. first. ” What that meant in theory was complicated and had welcomed much speculation. What it meant in practice, with any luck, was that soon the company’s products would no longer represent the fruits of traditional computer programming, exactly, but “machine learning. ” A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility. This notion is not new — a version of it dates to the earliest stages of modern computing, in the 1940s — but for much of its history most computer scientists saw it as vaguely disreputable, even mystical. Since 2011, though, Google Brain has demonstrated that this approach to artificial intelligence could solve many problems that confounded decades of conventional efforts. Speech recognition didn’t work very well until Brain undertook an effort to revamp it the application of machine learning made its performance on Google’s mobile platform, Android, almost as good as human transcription. The same was true of image recognition. Less than a year ago, Brain for the first time commenced with the gut renovation of an entire consumer product, and its momentous results were being celebrated tonight. Translate made its debut in 2006 and since then has become one of Google’s most reliable and popular assets it serves more than 500 million monthly users in need of 140 billion words per day in a different language. It exists not only as its own app but also as an integrated feature within Gmail, Chrome and many other Google offerings, where we take it as a given — a frictionless, natural part of our digital commerce. It was only with the refugee crisis, Pichai explained from the lectern, that the company came to reckon with Translate’s geopolitical importance: On the screen behind him appeared a graph whose steep curve indicated a recent fivefold increase in translations between Arabic and German. (It was also close to Pichai’s own heart. He grew up in India, a land divided by dozens of languages.) The team had been steadily adding new languages and features, but gains in quality over the last four years had slowed considerably. Until today. As of the previous weekend, Translate had been converted to an A. I. system for much of its traffic, not just in the United States but in Europe and Asia as well: The rollout included translations between English and Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. The rest of Translate’s languages were to come, with the aim of eight per month, by the end of next year. The new incarnation, to the pleasant surprise of Google’s own engineers, had been completed in only nine months. The A. I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime. Pichai has an affection for the obscure literary reference he told me a month earlier, in his office in Mountain View, Calif. that Translate in part exists because not everyone can be like the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who learned Sanskrit to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. In London, the slide on the monitors behind him flicked to a Borges quote: “Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído. ” Grinning, Pichai read aloud an awkward English version of the sentence that had been rendered by the old Translate system: “One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read. ” To the right of that was a new A. I. version: “You are not what you write, but what you have read. ” It was a fitting remark: The new Google Translate was run on the first machines that had, in a sense, ever learned to read anything at all. Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A. I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A. I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not . Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence. The phrase “artificial intelligence” is invoked as if its meaning were but it has always been a source of confusion and controversy. Imagine if you went back to the 1970s, stopped someone on the street, pulled out a smartphone and showed her Google Maps. Once you managed to convince her you weren’t some oddly dressed wizard, and that what you withdrew from your pocket wasn’t a amulet but merely a tiny computer more powerful than the one that guided Apollo missions, Google Maps would almost certainly seem to her a persuasive example of “artificial intelligence. ” In a very real sense, it is. It can do things any human can manage, like get you from your hotel to the airport — though it can do so much more quickly and reliably. It can also do things that humans simply and obviously cannot: It can evaluate the traffic, plan the best route and reorient itself when you take the wrong exit. Practically nobody today, however, would bestow upon Google Maps the honorific “A. I.,” so sentimental and sparing are we in our use of the word “intelligence. ” Artificial intelligence, we believe, must be something that distinguishes HAL from whatever it is a loom or wheelbarrow can do. The minute we can automate a task, we downgrade the relevant skill involved to one of mere mechanism. Today Google Maps seems, in the pejorative sense of the term, robotic: It simply accepts an explicit demand (the need to get from one place to another) and tries to satisfy that demand as efficiently as possible. The goal posts for “artificial intelligence” are thus constantly receding. When he has an opportunity to make careful distinctions, Pichai differentiates between the current applications of A. I. and the ultimate goal of “artificial general intelligence. ” Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, but instead will demonstrate a facility with the implicit, the interpretive. It will be a general tool, designed for general purposes in a general context. Pichai believes his company’s future depends on something like this. Imagine if you could tell Google Maps, “I’d like to go to the airport, but I need to stop off on the way to buy a present for my nephew. ” A more generally intelligent version of that service — a ubiquitous assistant, of the sort that Scarlett Johansson memorably disembodied three years ago in the Spike Jonze film “Her” — would know all sorts of things that, say, a close friend or an earnest intern might know: your nephew’s age, and how much you ordinarily like to spend on gifts for children, and where to find an open store. But a truly intelligent Maps could also conceivably know all sorts of things a close friend wouldn’t, like what has only recently come into fashion among preschoolers in your nephew’s school — or more important, what its users actually want. If an intelligent machine were able to discern some intricate if murky regularity in data about what we have done in the past, it might be able to extrapolate about our subsequent desires, even if we don’t entirely know them ourselves. The new wave of A. I. assistants — Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M, Amazon’s Echo — are all creatures of machine learning, built with similar intentions. The corporate dreams for machine learning, however, aren’t exhausted by the goal of consumer clairvoyance. A subsidiary of Samsung announced this year that its new ultrasound devices could detect breast cancer. Management consultants are falling all over themselves to prep executives for the widening industrial applications of computers that program themselves. DeepMind, a 2014 Google acquisition, defeated the reigning human grandmaster of the ancient board game Go, despite predictions that such an achievement would take another 10 years. In a famous 1950 essay, Alan Turing proposed a test for an artificial general intelligence: a computer that could, over the course of five minutes of text exchange, successfully deceive a real human interlocutor. Once a machine can translate fluently between two natural languages, the foundation has been laid for a machine that might one day “understand” human language well enough to engage in plausible conversation. Google Brain’s members, who pushed and helped oversee the Translate project, believe that such a machine would be on its way to serving as a generally intelligent personal digital assistant. What follows here is the story of how a team of Google researchers and engineers — at first one or two, then three or four, and finally more than a hundred — made considerable progress in that direction. It’s an uncommon story in many ways, not least of all because it defies many of the Silicon Valley stereotypes we’ve grown accustomed to. It does not feature people who think that everything will be unrecognizably different tomorrow or the next day because of some restless tinkerer in his garage. It is neither a story about people who think technology will solve all our problems nor one about people who think technology is ineluctably bound to create apocalyptic new ones. It is not about disruption, at least not in the way that word tends to be used. It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A. I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about one team on one product at one company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected. The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself. The first story, the story of Google Translate, takes place in Mountain View over nine months, and it explains the transformation of machine translation. The second story, the story of Google Brain and its many competitors, takes place in Silicon Valley over five years, and it explains the transformation of that entire community. The third story, the story of deep learning, takes place in a variety of laboratories — in Scotland, Switzerland, Japan and most of all Canada — over seven decades, and it might very well contribute to the revision of our as first and foremost beings who think. All three are stories about artificial intelligence. The story is about what we might conceivably expect or want from it. The story is about what it might do in the near future. The story is about what it can do right this minute. These three stories are themselves just proof of concept. All of this is only the beginning. Jeff Dean, though his title is senior fellow, is the de facto head of Google Brain. Dean is a sinewy, man with a long, narrow face, eyes and an earnest, sort of enthusiasm. The son of a medical anthropologist and a epidemiologist, Dean grew up all over the world — Minnesota, Hawaii, Boston, Arkansas, Geneva, Uganda, Somalia, Atlanta — and, while in high school and college, wrote software used by the World Health Organization. He has been with Google since 1999, as employee 25ish, and has had a hand in the core software systems beneath nearly every significant undertaking since then. A beloved artifact of company culture is Jeff Dean Facts, written in the style of the Chuck Norris Facts meme: “Jeff Dean’s PIN is the last four digits of pi. ” “When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean. ” “Jeff Dean got promoted to Level 11 in a system where the maximum level is 10. ” (This last one is, in fact, true.) One day in early 2011, Dean walked into one of the Google campus’s “microkitchens” — the “Googley” word for the shared break spaces on most floors of the Mountain View complex’s buildings — and ran into Andrew Ng, a young Stanford professor who was working for the company as a consultant. Ng told him about Project Marvin, an internal effort (named after the celebrated A. I. pioneer Marvin Minsky) he had recently helped establish to experiment with “neural networks,” pliant digital lattices based loosely on the architecture of the brain. Dean himself had worked on a primitive version of the technology as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in 1990, during one of the method’s brief windows of mainstream acceptability. Now, over the previous five years, the number of academics working on neural networks had begun to grow again, from a handful to a few dozen. Ng told Dean that Project Marvin, which was being underwritten by Google’s secretive X lab, had already achieved some promising results. Dean was intrigued enough to lend his “20 percent” — the portion of work hours every Google employee is expected to contribute to programs outside his or her core job — to the project. Pretty soon, he suggested to Ng that they bring in another colleague with a neuroscience background, Greg Corrado. (In graduate school, Corrado was taught briefly about the technology, but strictly as a historical curiosity. “It was good I was paying attention in class that day,” he joked to me.) In late spring they brought in one of Ng’s best graduate students, Quoc Le, as the project’s first intern. By then, a number of the Google engineers had taken to referring to Project Marvin by another name: Google Brain. Since the term “artificial intelligence” was first coined, at a kind of constitutional convention of the mind at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, a majority of researchers have long thought the best approach to creating A. I. would be to write a very big, comprehensive program that laid out both the rules of logical reasoning and sufficient knowledge of the world. If you wanted to translate from English to Japanese, for example, you would program into the computer all of the grammatical rules of English, and then the entirety of definitions contained in the Oxford English Dictionary, and then all of the grammatical rules of Japanese, as well as all of the words in the Japanese dictionary, and only after all of that feed it a sentence in a source language and ask it to tabulate a corresponding sentence in the target language. You would give the machine a language map that was, as Borges would have had it, the size of the territory. This perspective is usually called “symbolic A. I. ” — because its definition of cognition is based on symbolic logic — or, disparagingly, “good A. I. ” There are two main problems with the approach. The first is that it’s awfully on the human end. The second is that it only really works in domains where rules and definitions are very clear: in mathematics, for example, or chess. Translation, however, is an example of a field where this approach fails horribly, because words cannot be reduced to their dictionary definitions, and because languages tend to have as many exceptions as they have rules. More often than not, a system like this is liable to translate “minister of agriculture” as “priest of farming. ” Still, for math and chess it worked great, and the proponents of symbolic A. I. took it for granted that no activities signaled “general intelligence” better than math and chess. There were, however, limits to what this system could do. In the 1980s, a robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon pointed out that it was easy to get computers to do adult things but nearly impossible to get them to do things a could do, like hold a ball or identify a cat. By the 1990s, despite punishing advancements in computer chess, we still weren’t remotely close to artificial general intelligence. There has always been another vision for A. I. — a dissenting view — in which the computers would learn from the ground up (from data) rather than from the top down (from rules). This notion dates to the early 1940s, when it occurred to researchers that the best model for flexible automated intelligence was the brain itself. A brain, after all, is just a bunch of widgets, called neurons, that either pass along an electrical charge to their neighbors or don’t. What’s important are less the individual neurons themselves than the manifold connections among them. This structure, in its simplicity, has afforded the brain a wealth of adaptive advantages. The brain can operate in circumstances in which information is poor or missing it can withstand significant damage without total loss of control it can store a huge amount of knowledge in a very efficient way it can isolate distinct patterns but retain the messiness necessary to handle ambiguity. There was no reason you couldn’t try to mimic this structure in electronic form, and in 1943 it was shown that arrangements of simple artificial neurons could carry out basic logical functions. They could also, at least in theory, learn the way we do. With life experience, depending on a particular person’s trials and errors, the synaptic connections among pairs of neurons get stronger or weaker. An artificial neural network could do something similar, by gradually altering, on a guided basis, the numerical relationships among artificial neurons. It wouldn’t need to be preprogrammed with fixed rules. It would, instead, rewire itself to reflect patterns in the data it absorbed. This attitude toward artificial intelligence was evolutionary rather than creationist. If you wanted a flexible mechanism, you wanted one that could adapt to its environment. If you wanted something that could adapt, you didn’t want to begin with the indoctrination of the rules of chess. You wanted to begin with very basic abilities — sensory perception and motor control — in the hope that advanced skills would emerge organically. Humans don’t learn to understand language by memorizing dictionaries and grammar books, so why should we possibly expect our computers to do so? Google Brain was the first major commercial institution to invest in the possibilities embodied by this way of thinking about A. I. Dean, Corrado and Ng began their work as a collaborative experiment, but they made immediate progress. They took architectural inspiration for their models from recent theoretical outlines — as well as ideas that had been on the shelf since the 1980s and 1990s — and drew upon both the company’s peerless reserves of data and its massive computing infrastructure. They instructed the networks on enormous banks of “labeled” data — speech files with correct transcriptions, for example — and the computers improved their responses to better match reality. “The portion of evolution in which animals developed eyes was a big development,” Dean told me one day, with customary understatement. We were sitting, as usual, in a whiteboarded meeting room, on which he had drawn a crowded, snaking timeline of Google Brain and its relation to inflection points in the recent history of neural networks. “Now computers have eyes. We can build them around the capabilities that now exist to understand photos. Robots will be drastically transformed. They’ll be able to operate in an unknown environment, on much different problems. ” These capacities they were building may have seemed primitive, but their implications were profound. In its first year or so of existence, Brain’s experiments in the development of a machine with the talents of a had, as Dean said, worked to great effect. Its team swapped out part of their old system for a neural network and encountered, in pretty much one fell swoop, the best quality improvements anyone had seen in 20 years. Their system’s abilities improved by an order of magnitude. This was not because Brain’s personnel had generated a sheaf of outrageous new ideas in just a year. It was because Google had finally devoted the resources — in computers and, increasingly, personnel — to fill in outlines that had been around for a long time. A great preponderance of these extant and neglected notions had been proposed or refined by a peripatetic English polymath named Geoffrey Hinton. In the second year of Brain’s existence, Hinton was recruited to Brain as Andrew Ng left. (Ng now leads the A. I. team at Baidu.) Hinton wanted to leave his post at the University of Toronto for only three months, so for arcane contractual reasons he had to be hired as an intern. At intern training, the orientation leader would say something like, “Type in your LDAP” — a user login — and he would flag a helper to ask, “What’s an LDAP?” All the smart in attendance, who had only ever known deep learning as the sine qua non of artificial intelligence, snickered: “Who is that old guy? Why doesn’t he get it?” “At lunchtime,” Hinton said, “someone in the queue yelled: ‘Professor Hinton! I took your course! What are you doing here?’ After that, it was all right. ” A few months later, Hinton and two of his students demonstrated truly astonishing gains in a big contest, run by an collective called ImageNet, that asks computers not only to identify a monkey but also to distinguish between spider monkeys and howler monkeys, and among God knows how many different breeds of cat. Google soon approached Hinton and his students with an offer. They accepted. “I thought they were interested in our I. P.,” he said. “Turns out they were interested in us. ” Hinton comes from one of those old British families emblazoned like the Darwins at eccentric angles across the intellectual landscape, where regardless of titular preoccupation a person is expected to make sideline contributions to minor problems in astronomy or fluid dynamics. His was George Boole, whose foundational work in symbolic logic underpins the computer another was a celebrated surgeon, his father a venturesome entomologist, his father’s cousin a Los Alamos researcher the list goes on. He trained at Cambridge and Edinburgh, then taught at Carnegie Mellon before he ended up at Toronto, where he still spends half his time. (His work has long been supported by the largess of the Canadian government.) I visited him in his office at Google there. He has tousled hair combed forward in a mature Noel Gallagher style and wore a baggy striped dress shirt that persisted in coming untucked, and oval eyeglasses that slid down to the tip of a prominent nose. He speaks with a driving if shambolic wit, and says things like, “Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do. ” Hinton had been working on neural networks since his undergraduate days at Cambridge in the late 1960s, and he is seen as the intellectual primogenitor of the contemporary field. For most of that time, whenever he spoke about machine learning, people looked at him as though he were talking about the Ptolemaic spheres or bloodletting by leeches. Neural networks were taken as a disproven folly, largely on the basis of one overhyped project: the Perceptron, an artificial neural network that Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist, developed in the late 1950s. The New York Times reported that the machine’s sponsor, the United States Navy, expected it would “be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. ” It went on to do approximately none of those things. Marvin Minsky, the dean of artificial intelligence in America, had worked on neural networks for his 1954 Princeton thesis, but he’d since grown tired of the inflated claims that Rosenblatt — who was a contemporary at Bronx Science — made for the neural paradigm. (He was also competing for Defense Department funding.) Along with an M. I. T. colleague, Minsky published a book that proved that there were painfully simple problems the Perceptron could never solve. Minsky’s criticism of the Perceptron extended only to networks of one “layer,” i. e. one layer of artificial neurons between what’s fed to the machine and what you expect from it — and later in life, he expounded ideas very similar to contemporary deep learning. But Hinton already knew at the time that complex tasks could be carried out if you had recourse to multiple layers. The simplest description of a neural network is that it’s a machine that makes classifications or predictions based on its ability to discover patterns in data. With one layer, you could find only simple patterns with more than one, you could look for patterns of patterns. Take the case of image recognition, which tends to rely on a contraption called a “convolutional neural net. ” (These were elaborated in a seminal 1998 paper whose lead author, a Frenchman named Yann LeCun, did his postdoctoral research in Toronto under Hinton and now directs a huge A. I. endeavor at Facebook.) The first layer of the network learns to identify the very basic visual trope of an “edge,” meaning a nothing (an ) followed by a something (an ) or vice versa. Each successive layer of the network looks for a pattern in the previous layer. A pattern of edges might be a circle or a rectangle. A pattern of circles or rectangles might be a face. And so on. This more or less parallels the way information is put together in increasingly abstract ways as it travels from the photoreceptors in the retina back and up through the visual cortex. At each conceptual step, detail that isn’t immediately relevant is thrown away. If several edges and circles come together to make a face, you don’t care exactly where the face is found in the visual field you just care that it’s a face. The issue with multilayered, “deep” neural networks was that the part got extraordinarily complicated. In a single layer, it’s easy. Imagine that you’re playing with a child. You tell the child, “Pick up the green ball and put it into Box A. ” The child picks up a green ball and puts it into Box B. You say, “Try again to put the green ball in Box A. ” The child tries Box A. Bravo. Now imagine you tell the child, “Pick up a green ball, go through the door marked 3 and put the green ball into Box A. ” The child takes a red ball, goes through the door marked 2 and puts the red ball into Box B. How do you begin to correct the child? You cannot just repeat your initial instructions, because the child does not know at which point he went wrong. In real life, you might start by holding up the red ball and the green ball and saying, “Red ball, green ball. ” The whole point of machine learning, however, is to avoid that kind of explicit mentoring. Hinton and a few others went on to invent a solution (or rather, reinvent an older one) to this problem, over the halting course of the late 1970s and 1980s, and interest among computer scientists in neural networks was briefly revived. “People got very excited about it,” he said. “But we oversold it. ” Computer scientists quickly went back to thinking that people like Hinton were weirdos and mystics. These ideas remained popular, however, among philosophers and psychologists, who called it “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing. ” “This idea,” Hinton told me, “of a few people keeping a torch burning, it’s a nice myth. It was true within artificial intelligence. But within psychology lots of people believed in the approach but just couldn’t do it. ” Neither could Hinton, despite the generosity of the Canadian government. “There just wasn’t enough computer power or enough data. People on our side kept saying, ‘Yeah, but if I had a really big one, it would work. ’’u2009It wasn’t a very persuasive argument. ” When Pichai said that Google would henceforth be “A. I. first,” he was not just making a claim about his company’s business strategy he was throwing in his company’s lot with this idea. Pichai’s allocation of resources ensured that people like Dean could ensure that people like Hinton would have, at long last, enough computers and enough data to make a persuasive argument. An average brain has something on the order of 100 billion neurons. Each neuron is connected to up to 10, 000 other neurons, which means that the number of synapses is between 100 trillion and 1, 000 trillion. For a simple artificial neural network of the sort proposed in the 1940s, the attempt to even try to replicate this was unimaginable. We’re still far from the construction of a network of that size, but Google Brain’s investment allowed for the creation of artificial neural networks comparable to the brains of mice. To understand why scale is so important, however, you have to start to understand some of the more technical details of what, exactly, machine intelligences are doing with the data they consume. A lot of our ambient fears about A. I. rest on the idea that they’re just vacuuming up knowledge like a sociopathic prodigy in a library, and that an artificial intelligence constructed to make paper clips might someday decide to treat humans like ants or lettuce. This just isn’t how they work. All they’re doing is shuffling information around in search of commonalities — basic patterns, at first, and then more complex ones — and for the moment, at least, the greatest danger is that the information we’re feeding them is biased in the first place. If that brief explanation seems sufficiently reassuring, the reassured nontechnical reader is invited to skip forward to the next section, which is about cats. If not, then read on. (This section is also, luckily, about cats.) Imagine you want to program a on the old . I. model. You stay up for days preloading the machine with an exhaustive, explicit definition of “cat. ” You tell it that a cat has four legs and pointy ears and whiskers and a tail, and so on. All this information is stored in a special place in memory called Cat. Now you show it a picture. First, the machine has to separate out the various distinct elements of the image. Then it has to take these elements and apply the rules stored in its memory. If( legs=4) and if( ears=pointy) and if( whiskers=yes) and if( tail=yes) and if( expression=supercilious) then( cat=yes). But what if you showed this a Scottish Fold, a breed with a prized genetic defect that leads to droopy ears? Our symbolic A. I. gets to (ears=pointy) and shakes its head solemnly, “Not cat. ” It is hyperliteral, or “brittle. ” Even the thickest toddler shows much greater inferential acuity. Now imagine that instead of the machine with a set of rules for classification stored in one location of the computer’s memory, you try the same thing on a neural network. There is no special place that can hold the definition of “cat. ” There is just a giant blob of interconnected switches, like forks in a path. On one side of the blob, you present the inputs (the pictures) on the other side, you present the corresponding outputs (the labels). Then you just tell it to work out for itself, via the individual calibration of all of these interconnected switches, whatever path the data should take so that the inputs are mapped to the correct outputs. The training is the process by which a labyrinthine series of elaborate tunnels are excavated through the blob, tunnels that connect any given input to its proper output. The more training data you have, the greater the number and intricacy of the tunnels that can be dug. Once the training is complete, the middle of the blob has enough tunnels that it can make reliable predictions about how to handle data it has never seen before. This is called “supervised learning. ” The reason that the network requires so many neurons and so much data is that it functions, in a way, like a sort of giant machine democracy. Imagine you want to train a computer to differentiate among five different items. Your network is made up of millions and millions of neuronal “voters,” each of whom has been given five different cards: one for cat, one for dog, one for spider monkey, one for spoon and one for defibrillator. You show your electorate a photo and ask, “Is this a cat, a dog, a spider monkey, a spoon or a defibrillator?” All the neurons that voted the same way collect in groups, and the network foreman peers down from above and identifies the majority classification: “A dog?” You say: “No, maestro, it’s a cat. Try again. ” Now the network foreman goes back to identify which voters threw their weight behind “cat” and which didn’t. The ones that got “cat” right get their votes counted double next time — at least when they’re voting for “cat. ” They have to prove independently whether they’re also good at picking out dogs and defibrillators, but one thing that makes a neural network so flexible is that each individual unit can contribute differently to different desired outcomes. What’s important is not the individual vote, exactly, but the pattern of votes. If Joe, Frank and Mary all vote together, it’s a dog but if Joe, Kate and Jessica vote together, it’s a cat and if Kate, Jessica and Frank vote together, it’s a defibrillator. The neural network just needs to register enough of a regularly discernible signal somewhere to say, “Odds are, this particular arrangement of pixels represents something these humans keep calling ‘cats. ’’u2009” The more “voters” you have, and the more times you make them vote, the more keenly the network can register even very weak signals. If you have only Joe, Frank and Mary, you can maybe use them only to differentiate among a cat, a dog and a defibrillator. If you have millions of different voters that can associate in billions of different ways, you can learn to classify data with incredible granularity. Your trained voter assembly will be able to look at an unlabeled picture and identify it more or less accurately. Part of the reason there was so much resistance to these ideas in departments is that because the output is just a prediction based on patterns of patterns, it’s not going to be perfect, and the machine will never be able to define for you what, exactly, a cat is. It just knows them when it sees them. This wooliness, however, is the point. The neuronal “voters” will recognize a happy cat dozing in the sun and an angry cat glaring out from the shadows of an untidy litter box, as long as they have been exposed to millions of diverse cat scenes. You just need lots and lots of the voters — in order to make sure that some part of your network picks up on even very weak regularities, on Scottish Folds with droopy ears, for example — and enough labeled data to make sure your network has seen the widest possible variance in phenomena. It is important to note, however, that the fact that neural networks are probabilistic in nature means that they’re not suitable for all tasks. It’s no great tragedy if they mislabel 1 percent of cats as dogs, or send you to the wrong movie on occasion, but in something like a car we all want greater assurances. This isn’t the only caveat. Supervised learning is a process based on labeled data. The machines might be doing the learning, but there remains a strong human element in the initial categorization of the inputs. If your data had a picture of a man and a woman in suits that someone had labeled “woman with her boss,” that relationship would be encoded into all future pattern recognition. Labeled data is thus fallible the way that human labelers are fallible. If a machine was asked to identify creditworthy candidates for loans, it might use data like felony convictions, but if felony convictions were unfair in the first place — if they were based on, say, discriminatory drug laws — then the loan recommendations would perforce also be fallible. networks like our are only one of many varieties of deep learning, but they are disproportionately invoked as teaching examples because each layer does something at least vaguely recognizable to humans — picking out edges first, then circles, then faces. This means there’s a safeguard against error. For instance, an early oddity in Google’s software meant that it could not always identify a barbell in isolation, even though the team had trained it on an image set that included a lot of exercise categories. A visualization tool showed them the machine had learned not the concept of “dumbbell” but the concept of “dumbbell+arm,” because all the dumbbells in the training set were attached to arms. They threw into the training mix some photos of solo barbells. The problem was solved. Not everything is so easy. Over the course of its first year or two, Brain’s efforts to cultivate in machines the skills of a were auspicious enough that the team was graduated out of the X lab and into the broader research organization. (The head of Google X once noted that Brain had paid for the entirety of X’s costs.) They still had fewer than 10 people and only a vague sense for what might ultimately come of it all. But even then they were thinking ahead to what ought to happen next. First a human mind learns to recognize a ball and rests easily with the accomplishment for a moment, but sooner or later, it wants to ask for the ball. And then it wades into language. The first step in that direction was the cat paper, which made Brain famous. What the cat paper demonstrated was that a neural network with more than a billion “synaptic” connections — a hundred times larger than any publicized neural network to that point, yet still many orders of magnitude smaller than our brains — could observe raw, unlabeled data and pick out for itself a human concept. The Brain researchers had shown the network millions of still frames from YouTube videos, and out of the welter of the pure sensorium the network had isolated a stable pattern any toddler or chipmunk would recognize without a moment’s hesitation as the face of a cat. The machine had not been programmed with the foreknowledge of a cat it reached directly into the world and seized the idea for itself. (The researchers discovered this with the equivalent of something like an M. R. I. which showed them that a ghostly cat face caused the artificial neurons to “vote” with the greatest collective enthusiasm.) Most machine learning to that point had been limited by the quantities of labeled data. The cat paper showed that machines could also deal with raw unlabeled data, perhaps even data of which humans had no established foreknowledge. This seemed like a major advance not only in studies but also in overall artificial intelligence. The lead author on the cat paper was Quoc Le. Le is short and willowy and with a quick, enigmatic smile and shiny black penny loafers. He grew up outside Hue, Vietnam. His parents were rice farmers, and he did not have electricity at home. His mathematical abilities were obvious from an early age, and he was sent to study at a magnet school for science. In the late 1990s, while still in school, he tried to build a chatbot to talk to. He thought, How hard could this be? “But actually,” he told me in a whispery deadpan, “it’s very hard. ” He left the rice paddies on a scholarship to a university in Canberra, Australia, where he worked on A. I. tasks like computer vision. The dominant method of the time, which involved feeding the machine definitions for things like edges, felt to him like cheating. Le didn’t know then, or knew only dimly, that there were at least a few dozen computer scientists elsewhere in the world who couldn’t help imagining, as he did, that machines could learn from scratch. In 2006, Le took a position at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in the medieval German university town of Tübingen. In a reading group there, he encountered two new papers by Geoffrey Hinton. People who entered the discipline during the long diaspora all have conversion stories, and when Le read those papers, he felt the scales fall away from his eyes. “There was a big debate,” he told me. “A very big debate. ” We were in a small interior conference room, a narrow, space outfitted with only a small table and two whiteboards. He looked to the curve he’d drawn on the whiteboard behind him and back again, then softly confided, “I’ve never seen such a big debate. ” He remembers standing up at the reading group and saying, “This is the future. ” It was, he said, an “unpopular decision at the time. ” A former adviser from Australia, with whom he had stayed close, couldn’t quite understand Le’s decision. “Why are you doing this?” he asked Le in an email. “I didn’t have a good answer back then,” Le said. “I was just curious. There was a successful paradigm, but to be honest I was just curious about the new paradigm. In 2006, there was very little activity. ” He went to join Ng at Stanford and began to pursue Hinton’s ideas. “By the end of 2010, I was pretty convinced something was going to happen. ” What happened, soon afterward, was that Le went to Brain as its first intern, where he carried on with his dissertation work — an extension of which ultimately became the cat paper. On a simple level, Le wanted to see if the computer could be trained to identify on its own the information that was absolutely essential to a given image. He fed the neural network a still he had taken from YouTube. He then told the neural network to throw away some of the information contained in the image, though he didn’t specify what it should or shouldn’t throw away. The machine threw away some of the information, initially at random. Then he said: “Just kidding! Now recreate the initial image you were shown based only on the information you retained. ” It was as if he were asking the machine to find a way to “summarize” the image, and then expand back to the original from the summary. If the summary was based on irrelevant data — like the color of the sky rather than the presence of whiskers — the machine couldn’t perform a competent reconstruction. Its reaction would be akin to that of a distant ancestor whose takeaway from his brief exposure to tigers was that they made a restful swooshing sound when they moved. Le’s neural network, unlike that ancestor, got to try again, and again and again and again. Each time it mathematically “chose” to prioritize different pieces of information and performed incrementally better. A neural network, however, was a black box. It divined patterns, but the patterns it identified didn’t always make intuitive sense to a human observer. The same network that hit on our concept of cat also became enthusiastic about a pattern that looked like some sort of compound, like a cross between an ottoman and a goat. Le didn’t see himself in those heady cat years as a language guy, but he felt an urge to connect the dots to his early chatbot. After the cat paper, he realized that if you could ask a network to summarize a photo, you could perhaps also ask it to summarize a sentence. This problem preoccupied Le, along with a Brain colleague named Tomas Mikolov, for the next two years. In that time, the Brain team outgrew several offices around him. For a while they were on a floor they shared with executives. They got an email at one point from the administrator asking that they please stop allowing people to sleep on the couch in front of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s suite. It unsettled incoming V. I. P. s. They were then allocated part of a research building across the street, where their exchanges in the microkitchen wouldn’t be squandered on polite chitchat with the suits. That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant. Le had never seemed so solemn. I finally couldn’t help myself and began to ask, “Is he . .. ?” Le nodded. “At Facebook,” he replied.) They spent this period trying to come up with architectures that could accommodate not only simple photo classifications, which were static, but also complex structures that unfolded over time, like language or music. Many of these were first proposed in the 1990s, and Le and his colleagues went back to those contributions to see what they could glean. They knew that once you established a facility with basic linguistic prediction, you could then go on to do all sorts of other intelligent things — like predict a suitable reply to an email, for example, or predict the flow of a sensible conversation. You could sidle up to the sort of prowess that would, from the outside at least, look a lot like thinking. The hundred or so current members of Brain — it often feels less like a department within a colossal corporate hierarchy than it does a club or a scholastic society or an intergalactic cantina — came in the intervening years to count among the freest and most widely admired employees in the entire Google organization. They are now quartered in a tiered eggshell building, with large windows tinted a menacing charcoal gray, on the leafy northwestern fringe of the company’s main Mountain View campus. Their microkitchen has a foosball table I never saw used a Rock Band setup I never saw used and a Go kit I saw used on a few occasions. (I did once see a young Brain research associate introducing his colleagues to ripe jackfruit, carving up the enormous spiky orb like a turkey.) When I began spending time at Brain’s offices, in June, there were some rows of empty desks, but most of them were labeled with notes that said things like “Jesse, . ” Now those are all occupied. When I first visited, parking was not an issue. The closest spaces were those reserved for expectant mothers or Teslas, but there was ample space in the rest of the lot. By October, if I showed up later than 9:30, I had to find a spot across the street. Brain’s growth made Dean slightly nervous about how the company was going to handle the demand. He wanted to avoid what at Google is known as a “success disaster” — a situation in which the company’s capabilities in theory outpaced its ability to implement a product in practice. At a certain point he did some calculations, which he presented to the executives one day in a presentation. “If everyone in the future speaks to their Android phone for three minutes a day,” he told them, “this is how many machines we’ll need. ” They would need to double or triple their global computational footprint. “That,” he observed with a little theatrical gulp and widened eyes, “sounded scary. You’d have to” — he hesitated to imagine the consequences — “build new buildings. ” There was, however, another option: just design, and install in dispersed data centers a new kind of chip to make everything faster. These chips would be called T. P. U. s, or “tensor processing units,” and their value proposition — counterintuitively — is that they are deliberately less precise than normal chips. Rather than compute 12. 246 times 54. 392, they will give you the perfunctory answer to 12 times 54. On a mathematical level, rather than a metaphorical one, a neural network is just a structured series of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of matrix multiplications carried out in succession, and it’s much more important that these processes be fast than that they be exact. “Normally,” Dean said, “ hardware is a bad idea. It usually works to speed up one thing. But because of the generality of neural networks, you can leverage this hardware for a lot of other things. ” Just as the process was nearly complete, Le and two colleagues finally demonstrated that neural networks might be configured to handle the structure of language. He drew upon an idea, called “word embeddings,” that had been around for more than 10 years. When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map. In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize vectors in space. ” Still, certain dimensions in the space, it turned out, did seem to represent legible human categories, like gender or relative size. If you took the thousand numbers that meant “king” and literally just subtracted the thousand numbers that meant “queen,” you got the same numerical result as if you subtracted the numbers for “woman” from the numbers for “man. ” And if you took the entire space of the English language and the entire space of French, you could, at least in theory, train a network to learn how to take a sentence in one space and propose an equivalent in the other. You just had to give it millions and millions of English sentences as inputs on one side and their desired French outputs on the other, and over time it would recognize the relevant patterns in words the way that an image classifier recognized the relevant patterns in pixels. You could then give it a sentence in English and ask it to predict the best French analogue. The major difference between words and pixels, however, is that all of the pixels in an image are there at once, whereas words appear in a progression over time. You needed a way for the network to “hold in mind” the progression of a chronological sequence — the complete pathway from the first word to the last. In a period of about a week, in September 2014, three papers came out — one by Le and two others by academics in Canada and Germany — that at last provided all the theoretical tools necessary to do this sort of thing. That research allowed for projects like Brain’s Magenta, an investigation into how machines might generate art and music. It also cleared the way toward an instrumental task like machine translation. Hinton told me he thought at the time that this work would take at least five more years. Le’s paper showed that neural translation was plausible, but he had used only a relatively small public data set. (Small for Google, that is — it was actually the biggest public data set in the world. A decade of the old Translate had gathered production data that was between a hundred and a thousand times bigger.) More important, Le’s model didn’t work very well for sentences longer than about seven words. Mike Schuster, who then was a staff research scientist at Brain, picked up the baton. He knew that if Google didn’t find a way to scale these theoretical insights up to a production level, someone else would. The project took him the next two years. “You think,” Schuster says, “to translate something, you just get the data, run the experiments and you’re done, but it doesn’t work like that. ” Schuster is a taut, focused, ageless being with a tanned, head, narrow shoulders, long camo cargo shorts tied below the knee and Nike Flyknits. He looks as if he woke up in the lotus position, reached for his small, rimless, elliptical glasses, accepted calories in the form of a modest portion of preserved acorn and completed a relaxed desert decathlon on the way to the office in reality, he told me, it’s only an bike ride each way. Schuster grew up in Duisburg, in the former West Germany’s district, and studied electrical engineering before moving to Kyoto to work on early neural networks. In the 1990s, he ran experiments with a machine as big as a conference room it cost millions of dollars and had to be trained for weeks to do something you could now do on your desktop in less than an hour. He published a paper in 1997 that was barely cited for a decade and a half this year it has been cited around 150 times. He is not humorless, but he does often wear an expression of some asperity, which I took as his signature combination of German restraint and Japanese restraint. The issues Schuster had to deal with were tangled. For one thing, Le’s code was and it wasn’t compatible with the new platform Google was then developing, TensorFlow. Dean directed to Schuster two other engineers, Yonghui Wu and Zhifeng Chen, in the fall of 2015. It took them two months just to replicate Le’s results on the new system. Le was around, but even he couldn’t always make heads or tails of what they had done. As Schuster put it, “Some of the stuff was not done in full consciousness. They didn’t know themselves why they worked. ” This February, Google’s research organization — the loose division of the company, roughly a thousand employees in all, dedicated to the and the unclassifiable — convened their leads at an offsite retreat at the Westin St. Francis, on Union Square, a luxury hotel slightly less splendid than Google’s own San Francisco shop a mile or so to the east. The morning was reserved for rounds of “lightning talks,” quick updates to cover the research waterfront, and the afternoon was idled away in “facilitated discussions. ” The hope was that the retreat might provide an occasion for the unpredictable, oblique, Bell exchanges that kept a mature company prolific. At lunchtime, Corrado and Dean paired up in search of Macduff Hughes, director of Google Translate. Hughes was eating alone, and the two Brain members took positions at either side. As Corrado put it, “We ambushed him. ” “O. K.,” Corrado said to the wary Hughes, holding his breath for effect. “We have something to tell you. ” They told Hughes that 2016 seemed like a good time to consider an overhaul of Google Translate — the code of hundreds of engineers over 10 years — with a neural network. The old system worked the way all machine translation has worked for about 30 years: It sequestered each successive sentence fragment, looked up those words in a large statistically derived vocabulary table, then applied a battery of rules to affix proper endings and rearrange it all to make sense. The approach is called “ statistical machine translation,” because by the time the system gets to the next phrase, it doesn’t know what the last one was. This is why Translate’s output sometimes looked like a shaken bag of fridge magnets. Brain’s replacement would, if it came together, read and render entire sentences at one draft. It would capture context — and something akin to meaning. The stakes may have seemed low: Translate generates minimal revenue, and it probably always will. For most Anglophone users, even a radical upgrade in the service’s performance would hardly be hailed as anything more than an expected incremental bump. But there was a case to be made that machine translation is not only a necessity but also a development very likely, in the long term, to prove transformational. In the immediate future, it’s vital to the company’s business strategy. Google estimates that 50 percent of the internet is in English, which perhaps 20 percent of the world’s population speaks. If Google was going to compete in China — where a majority of market share in traffic belonged to its competitor Baidu — or India, decent machine translation would be an indispensable part of the infrastructure. Baidu itself had published a pathbreaking paper about the possibility of neural machine translation in July 2015. And in the more distant, speculative future, machine translation was perhaps the first step toward a general computational facility with human language. This would represent a major inflection point — perhaps the major inflection point — in the development of something that felt like true artificial intelligence. Most people in Silicon Valley were aware of machine learning as a horizon, so Hughes had seen this ambush coming. He remained skeptical. A modest, sturdily built man of early middle age with mussed auburn hair graying at the temples, Hughes is a classic line engineer, the sort of craftsman who wouldn’t have been out of place at a drafting table at 1970s Boeing. His jeans pockets often look burdened with curious tools of ungainly dimension, as if he were porting around measuring tapes or thermocouples, and unlike many of the younger people who work for him, he has a wardrobe unreliant on company gear. He knew that various people in various places at Google and elsewhere had been trying to make neural translation work — not in a lab but at production scale — for years, to little avail. Hughes listened to their case and, at the end, said cautiously that it sounded to him as if maybe they could pull it off in three years. Dean thought otherwise. “We can do it by the end of the year, if we put our minds to it. ” One reason people liked and admired Dean so much was that he had a long record of successfully putting his mind to it. Another was that he wasn’t at all embarrassed to say sincere things like “if we put our minds to it. ” Hughes was sure the conversion wasn’t going to happen any time soon, but he didn’t personally care to be the reason. “Let’s prepare for 2016,” he went back and told his team. “I’m not going to be the one to say Jeff Dean can’t deliver speed. ” A month later, they were finally able to run a experiment to compare Schuster’s new system with Hughes’s old one. Schuster wanted to run it for but Hughes advised him to try something else. “” he said, “is so good that the improvement won’t be obvious. ” It was a challenge Schuster couldn’t resist. The benchmark metric to evaluate machine translation is called a BLEU score, which compares a machine translation with an average of many reliable human translations. At the time, the best BLEU scores for were in the high 20s. An improvement of one point was considered very good an improvement of two was considered outstanding. The neural system, on the language pair, showed an improvement over the old system of seven points. Hughes told Schuster’s team they hadn’t had even half as strong an improvement in their own system in the last four years. To be sure this wasn’t some fluke in the metric, they also turned to their pool of human contractors to do a comparison. The scores, in which sample sentences were graded from zero to six, showed an average improvement of 0. 4 — roughly equivalent to the aggregate gains of the old system over its entire lifetime of development. In Hughes sent his team an email. All projects on the old system were to be suspended immediately. Until then, the team had been only three people — Schuster, Wu and Chen — but with Hughes’s support, the broader team began to coalesce. They met under Schuster’s command on Wednesdays at 2 p. m. in a corner room of the Brain building called Quartz Lake. The meeting was generally attended by a rotating cast of more than a dozen people. When Hughes or Corrado were there, they were usually the only native English speakers. The engineers spoke Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Russian, Arabic, German and Japanese, though they mostly spoke in their own efficient pidgin and in math. It is not always totally clear, at Google, who is running a meeting, but in Schuster’s case there was no ambiguity. The steps they needed to take, even then, were not wholly clear. “This story is a lot about uncertainty — uncertainty throughout the whole process,” Schuster told me at one point. “The software, the data, the hardware, the people. It was like” — he extended his long, gracile arms, slightly bent at the elbows, from his narrow shoulders — “swimming in a big sea of mud, and you can only see this far. ” He held out his hand eight inches in front of his chest. “There’s a goal somewhere, and maybe it’s there. ” Most of Google’s conference rooms have videochat monitors, which when idle display extremely oversaturated public Google+ photos of a sylvan dreamscape or the northern lights or the Reichstag. Schuster gestured toward one of the panels, which showed a crystalline still of the Washington Monument at night. “The view from outside is that everyone has binoculars and can see ahead so far. ” The theoretical work to get them to this point had already been painstaking and but the attempt to turn it into a viable product — the part that academic scientists might dismiss as “mere” engineering — was no less difficult. For one thing, they needed to make sure that they were training on good data. Google’s billions of words of training “reading” were mostly made up of complete sentences of moderate complexity, like the sort of thing you might find in Hemingway. Some of this is in the public domain: The original Rosetta Stone of statistical machine translation was millions of pages of the complete bilingual records of the Canadian Parliament. Much of it, however, was culled from 10 years of collected data, including human translations that were crowdsourced from enthusiastic respondents. The team had in their storehouse about 97 million unique English “words. ” But once they removed the emoticons, and the misspellings, and the redundancies, they had a working vocabulary of only around 160, 000. Then you had to refocus on what users actually wanted to translate, which frequently had very little to do with reasonable language as it is employed. Many people, Google had found, don’t look to the service to translate full, complex sentences they translate weird little shards of language. If you wanted the network to be able to handle the stream of user queries, you had to be sure to orient it in that direction. The network was very sensitive to the data it was trained on. As Hughes put it to me at one point: “The system is learning everything it can. It’s like a toddler. ‘Oh, Daddy says that word when he’s mad! ’’u2009” He laughed. “You have to be careful. ” More than anything, though, they needed to make sure that the whole thing was fast and reliable enough that their users wouldn’t notice. In February, the translation of a sentence took 10 seconds. They could never introduce anything that slow. The Translate team began to conduct latency experiments on a small percentage of users, in the form of faked delays, to identify tolerance. They found that a translation that took twice as long, or even five times as long, wouldn’t be registered. An eightfold slowdown would. They didn’t need to make sure this was true across all languages. In the case of a language, like French or Chinese, they could countenance virtually no slowdown. For something more obscure, they knew that users wouldn’t be so scared off by a slight delay if they were getting better quality. They just wanted to prevent people from giving up and switching over to some competitor’s service. Schuster, for his part, admitted he just didn’t know if they ever could make it fast enough. He remembers a conversation in the microkitchen during which he turned to Chen and said, “There must be something we don’t know to make it fast enough, but I don’t know what it could be. ” He did know, though, that they needed more computers — “G. P. U. s,” graphics processors reconfigured for neural networks — for training. Hughes went to Schuster to ask what he thought. “Should we ask for a thousand G. P. U. s?” Schuster said, “Why not 2, 000?” Ten days later, they had the additional 2, 000 processors. By April, the original lineup of three had become more than 30 people — some of them, like Le, on the Brain side, and many from Translate. In May, Hughes assigned a kind of provisional owner to each language pair, and they all checked their results into a big shared spreadsheet of performance evaluations. At any given time, at least 20 people were running their own independent weeklong experiments and dealing with whatever unexpected problems came up. One day a model, for no apparent reason, started taking all the numbers it came across in a sentence and discarding them. There were months when it was all touch and go. “People were almost yelling,” Schuster said. By late spring, the various pieces were coming together. The team introduced something called a “ model,” a “coverage penalty,” “length normalization. ” Each part improved the results, Schuster says, by maybe a few percentage points, but in aggregate they had significant effects. Once the model was standardized, it would be only a single multilingual model that would improve over time, rather than the 150 different models that Translate currently used. Still, the paradox — that a tool built to further generalize, via learning machines, the process of automation required such an extraordinary amount of concerted human ingenuity and effort — was not lost on them. So much of what they did was just gut. How many neurons per layer did you use? 1, 024 or 512? How many layers? How many sentences did you run through at a time? How long did you train for? “We did hundreds of experiments,” Schuster told me, “until we knew that we could stop the training after one week. You’re always saying: When do we stop? How do I know I’m done? You never know you’re done. The mechanism is never perfect. You need to train, and at some point you have to stop. That’s the very painful nature of this whole system. It’s hard for some people. It’s a little bit an art — where you put your brush to make it nice. It comes from just doing it. Some people are better, some worse. ” By May, the Brain team understood that the only way they were ever going to make the system fast enough to implement as a product was if they could run it on T. P. U. s, the chips that Dean had called for. As Chen put it: “We did not even know if the code would work. But we did know that without T. P. U. s, it definitely wasn’t going to work. ” He remembers going to Dean one on one to plead, “Please reserve something for us. ” Dean had reserved them. The T. P. U. s, however, didn’t work right out of the box. Wu spent two months sitting next to someone from the hardware team in an attempt to figure out why. They weren’t just debugging the model they were debugging the chip. The project would be proof of concept for the whole infrastructural investment. One Wednesday in June, the meeting in Quartz Lake began with murmurs about a Baidu paper that had recently appeared on the discipline’s chief online forum. Schuster brought the room to order. “Yes, Baidu came out with a paper. It feels like someone looking through our shoulder — similar architecture, similar results. ” The company’s BLEU scores were essentially what Google achieved in its internal tests in February and March. Le didn’t seem ruffled his conclusion seemed to be that it was a sign Google was on the right track. “It is very similar to our system,” he said with quiet approval. The Google team knew that they could have published their results earlier and perhaps beaten their competitors, but as Schuster put it: “Launching is more important than publishing. People say, ‘Oh, I did something first,’ but who cares, in the end?” This did, however, make it imperative that they get their own service out first and better. Hughes had a fantasy that they wouldn’t even inform their users of the switch. They would just wait and see if social media lit up with suspicions about the vast improvements. “We don’t want to say it’s a new system yet,” he told me at 5:36 p. m. two days after Labor Day, one minute before they rolled out to 10 percent of their users, without telling anyone. “We want to make sure it works. The ideal is that it’s exploding on Twitter: ‘Have you seen how awesome Google Translate got? ’’u2009” The only two reliable measures of time in the seasonless Silicon Valley are the rotations of seasonal fruit in the microkitchens — from the pluots of midsummer to the Asian pears and Fuyu persimmons of early fall — and the zigzag of technological progress. On an almost uncomfortably warm Monday afternoon in late September, the team’s paper was at last released. It had an almost comical 31 authors. The next day, the members of Brain and Translate gathered to throw themselves a little celebratory reception in the Translate microkitchen. The rooms in the Brain building, perhaps in homage to the long winters of their diaspora, are named after Alaskan locales the Translate building’s theme is Hawaiian. The Hawaiian microkitchen has a slightly grainy beach photograph on one wall, a small service counter with a stuffed parrot at the center and ceiling fixtures fitted to resemble paper lanterns. Two sparse histograms of bamboo poles line the sides, like the posts of an tropical fort. Beyond the bamboo poles, glass walls and doors open onto rows of identical gray desks on either side. That morning had seen the arrival of new hooded sweatshirts to honor 10 years of Translate, and many team members went over to the party from their desks in their new gear. They were in part celebrating the fact that their decade of collective work was, as of that day, en route to retirement. At another institution, these new hoodies might thus have become a costume of bereavement, but the engineers and computer scientists from both teams all seemed pleased. Google’s neural translation was at last working. By the time of the party, the company’s test had already processed 18 million queries. One engineer on the Translate team was running around with his phone out, trying to translate entire sentences from Chinese to English using Baidu’s alternative. He crowed with glee to anybody who would listen. “If you put in more than two characters at once, it times out!” (Baidu says this problem has never been reported by users.) When word began to spread, over the following weeks, that Google had introduced neural translation for Chinese to English, some people speculated that it was because that was the only language pair for which the company had decent results. Everybody at the party knew that the reality of their achievement would be clear in November. By then, however, many of them would be on to other projects. Hughes cleared his throat and stepped in front of the tiki bar. He wore a faded green polo with a rumpled collar, lightly patterned across the midsection with dark bands of drying sweat. There had been problems, and then problems, including a very big measurement error in the paper and a weird bug in the system. But everything was resolved — or at least sufficiently resolved for the moment. The guests quieted. Hughes ran efficient and productive meetings, with a low tolerance for maundering or side conversation, but he was given pause by the gravity of the occasion. He acknowledged that he was, perhaps, stretching a metaphor, but it was important to him to underline the fact, he began, that the neural translation project itself represented a “collaboration between groups that spoke different languages. ” Their project, he continued, represented a “step function forward” — that is, a discontinuous advance, a vertical leap rather than a smooth curve. The relevant translation had been not just between the two teams but from theory into reality. He raised a plastic of Champagne. “To communication,” he said, “and cooperation!” The engineers assembled looked around at one another and gave themselves over to little circumspect whoops and applause. Jeff Dean stood near the center of the microkitchen, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched slightly inward, with Corrado and Schuster. Dean saw that there was some diffuse preference that he contribute to the observance of the occasion, and he did so in a characteristically understated manner, with a light, rapid, concise addendum. What they had shown, Dean said, was that they could do two major things at once: “Do the research and get it in front of, I dunno, half a billion people. ” Everyone laughed, not because it was an exaggeration but because it wasn’t. Perhaps the most famous historic critique of artificial intelligence, or the claims made on its behalf, implicates the question of translation. The Chinese Room argument was proposed in 1980 by the Berkeley philosopher John Searle. In Searle’s thought experiment, a monolingual English speaker sits alone in a cell. An unseen jailer passes him, through a slot in the door, slips of paper marked with Chinese characters. The prisoner has been given a set of tables and rules in English for the composition of replies. He becomes so adept with these instructions that his answers are soon “absolutely indistinguishable from those of Chinese speakers. ” Should the unlucky prisoner be said to “understand” Chinese? Searle thought the answer was obviously not. This metaphor for a computer, Searle later wrote, exploded the claim that “the appropriately programmed digital computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the sense that human beings have minds. ” For the Google Brain team, though, or for nearly everyone else who works in machine learning in Silicon Valley, that view is entirely beside the point. This doesn’t mean they’re just ignoring the philosophical question. It means they have a fundamentally different view of the mind. Unlike Searle, they don’t assume that “consciousness” is some special, numinously glowing mental attribute — what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called the “ghost in the machine. ” They just believe instead that the complex assortment of skills we call “consciousness” has randomly emerged from the coordinated activity of many different simple mechanisms. The implication is that our facility with what we consider the higher registers of thought are no different in kind from what we’re tempted to perceive as the lower registers. Logical reasoning, on this account, is seen as a lucky adaptation so is the ability to throw and catch a ball. Artificial intelligence is not about building a mind it’s about the improvement of tools to solve problems. As Corrado said to me on my very first day at Google, “It’s not about what a machine ‘knows’ or ‘understands’ but what it ‘does,’ and — more importantly — what it doesn’t do yet. ” Where you come down on “knowing” versus “doing” has real cultural and social implications. At the party, Schuster came over to me to express his frustration with the paper’s media reception. “Did you see the first press?” he asked me. He paraphrased a headline from that morning, blocking it word by word with his hand as he recited it: GOOGLE SAYS A. I. TRANSLATION IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM HUMANS’. Over the final weeks of the paper’s composition, the team had struggled with this Schuster often repeated that the message of the paper was “It’s much better than it was before, but not as good as humans. ” He had hoped it would be clear that their efforts weren’t about replacing people but helping them. And yet the rise of machine learning makes it more difficult for us to carve out a special place for us. If you believe, with Searle, that there is something special about human “insight,” you can draw a clear line that separates the human from the automated. If you agree with Searle’s antagonists, you can’t. It is understandable why so many people cling fast to the former view. At a 2015 M. I. T. conference about the roots of artificial intelligence, Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought of machine learning. He the whole enterprise as mere statistical prediction, a glorified weather forecast. Even if neural translation attained perfect functionality, it would reveal nothing profound about the underlying nature of language. It could never tell you if a pronoun took the dative or the accusative case. This kind of prediction makes for a good tool to accomplish our ends, but it doesn’t succeed by the standards of furthering our understanding of why things happen the way they do. A machine can already detect tumors in medical scans better than human radiologists, but the machine can’t tell you what’s causing the cancer. Then again, can the radiologist? Medical diagnosis is one field most immediately, and perhaps unpredictably, threatened by machine learning. Radiologists are extensively trained and extremely well paid, and we think of their skill as one of professional insight — the highest register of thought. In the past year alone, researchers have shown not only that neural networks can find tumors in medical images much earlier than their human counterparts but also that machines can even make such diagnoses from the texts of pathology reports. What radiologists do turns out to be something much closer to predictive than logical analysis. They’re not telling you what caused the cancer they’re just telling you it’s there. Once you’ve built a robust apparatus for one purpose, it can be tweaked in the service of others. One Translate engineer took a network he put together to judge artwork and used it to drive an autonomous car. A network built to recognize a cat can be turned around and trained on CT scans — and on infinitely more examples than even the best doctor could ever review. A neural network built to translate could work through millions of pages of documents of legal discovery in the tiniest fraction of the time it would take the most expensively credentialed lawyer. The kinds of jobs taken by automatons will no longer be just repetitive tasks that were once — unfairly, it ought to be emphasized — associated with the supposed lower intelligence of the uneducated classes. We’re not only talking about three and a half million truck drivers who may soon lack careers. We’re talking about inventory managers, economists, financial advisers, real estate agents. What Brain did over nine months is just one example of how quickly a small group at a large company can automate a task nobody ever would have associated with machines. The most important thing happening in Silicon Valley right now is not disruption. Rather, it’s — and the consolidation of power — on a scale and at a pace that are both probably unprecedented in human history. Brain has interns it has residents it has “ninja” classes to train people in other departments. Everywhere there are bins of free bike helmets, and free green umbrellas for the two days a year it rains, and little fruit salads, and nap pods, and shared treadmill desks, and massage chairs, and random cartons of pastries, and places for donations, and climbing walls with scheduled instructors, and reading groups and policy talks and variegated support networks. The recipients of these major investments in human cultivation — for they’re far more than perks for proles in some digital salt mine — have at hand the power of complexly coordinated servers distributed across 13 data centers on four continents, data centers that draw enough electricity to light up large cities. But even enormous institutions like Google will be subject to this wave of automation once machines can learn from human speech, even the comfortable job of the programmer is threatened. As the party in the tiki bar was winding down, a Translate engineer brought over his laptop to show Hughes something. The screen swirled and pulsed with a vivid, kaleidoscopic animation of brightly colored spheres in long looping orbits that periodically collapsed into nebulae before dispersing once more. Hughes recognized what it was right away, but I had to look closely before I saw all the names — of people and files. It was an animation of the history of 10 years of changes to the Translate code base, every single buzzing and blooming contribution by every last team member. Hughes reached over gently to skip forward, from 2006 to 2008 to 2015, stopping every once in a while to pause and remember some distant campaign, some ancient triumph or catastrophe that now hurried by to be absorbed elsewhere or to burst on its own. Hughes pointed out how often Jeff Dean’s name expanded here and there in glowing spheres. Hughes called over Corrado, and they stood transfixed. To break the spell of melancholic nostalgia, Corrado, looking a little wounded, looked up and said, “So when do we get to delete it?” “Don’t worry about it,” Hughes said. “The new code base is going to grow. Everything grows. ” | 1 |
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 4, 2016
Moscow’s decision to send a fleet of warships, led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, to the eastern Mediterranean may have saved the Syrian military from getting bombed by the US, according to military expert Vladimir Evseev. Speaking at a press conference at the Rossiya Segodnya news agency press center in Moscow, Evseev, the deputy director of Russia’s CIS Institute, pointed out that Washington had only recently considered the possibility of attacking Syrian government forces, using the pretext of a UN report which alleged that Damascus had used chemical weapons.
“We recently lived through a very important milestone which many people did not even notice,” the analyst suggested. “Why was the question raised of the Syrian Army’s alleged use of chemical weapons? The stage was being set for [US] ship-based cruise missile strikes. According to some reports, such a decision was in play…[Western] public opinion was actively being prepared for it.”
As Russian Ships Complete Passage to Med, Moscow is ‘Surprised’ by Western Buzz But the entry of a major Russian flotilla, led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, into the Mediterranean may been the essential element needed to cool the Pentagon’s appetites, Evseev added.
“The presence of our ships [between Algeria and Italy] excludes the possible deployment of a similar NATO naval group in the area. Factually, our ships have closed Syria off. The Russian ships did not appear where they are by accident, and eliminated the possibility of launching cruise missiles from that direction.”
The analyst also recalled that earlier, S-300 systems “were deployed in Tartus” with similar goals in mind, given that they are “capable of addressing not only air-based threats, but ballistic targets as well.” Last week, the contents of a leaked report submitted to the UN Security Council blamed the Syrian government for a chemical attack in Idlib in 2015. Damascus vehemently denied the charges, citing the terrorists’ own regular use of poison gas.
Moscow, meanwhile, stressed that more serious evidence would need to be presented before such serious accusations could be leveled. Why Does Media Cover Up War Crimes of ‘Rebels’ in Aleppo? The US and NATO allies, already engaged in a campaign to demonize Syria and Russia over the fight for Aleppo, used the report to pile on to other charges that Damascus and Moscow were responsible for ‘war crimes’ in their operation to liberate Syria from armed militants and jihadists.
Commenting on the military situation in Syria, Evseev suggested that together with the liberation of Aleppo, the Syrian military and their Russian allies must make it a priority to surround Nusra Front terrorists in Idlib. “The terrorists must be destroyed, but most likely a process of squeezing them out will take place,” he admitted. If forced to leave Idlib, “the only place for them to go will be Turkey. And here, I would recommend that our Western partners, who currently advise us how to fight in Aleppo, take a moment to think about what will happen to the Idlib militants who end up in Turkey,” the expert noted.
“From here, it’s likely that they can then be expected to pay a visit to Europe. This is what Western nations should be thinking about, instead of putting a spoke in the wheel and doing everything possible to interfere in the operation to liberate Aleppo and other Syrian territories.” As far as the situation in the city of Aleppo is concerned, Evseev stressed that “if we continue to wait and prolong humanitarian pauses, there will be no people left in Aleppo. Without air support, losses are too high. It’s necessary to free the city quickly, and to think less about the West thinks about it.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 4, 2016, With 51 Reads Filed under Investigations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments
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It really is a jungle out there, Blanche, that same cruel, world described by Darwin. And while it’s noble of you to plead with your sister not to “hang back with the brutes” — to choose the aesthetes over the animals — you surely know it’s a waste of breath. The New Orleans neighborhood where Blanche DuBois comes calling so disastrously in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” has never seemed quite as atavistic as it does in Benedict Andrews’s compellingly harsh revival, which opened on Sunday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. This production pits a fully adrenalized Gillian Anderson, as Blanche, against Ben Foster, as her adversarial Stanley Kowalski, in a riveting study of the survival of the fittest. Even if you are unfamiliar with the plot, you shouldn’t have trouble predicting its outcome. Mr. Foster’s slyly commanding Stanley — a performance that makes the specter of Marlon Brando, who created the part, temporarily retreat into the dusk — is obviously the younger, stronger and more confident of the two. But Ms. Anderson’s Blanche has her own arsenal of weapons, and though they may be outdated, she puts up a vigorous defense. This fading feline beauty is clearly fated to lose, but she’s also going down fighting, tooth and manicured nail. This brave new “Streetcar,” which originated at the Young Vic in London, takes a lot of presumptuous risks, yet most of them pay off, at least for as long as you’re watching it. Mr. Andrews, whose wild and divisive production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” was in New York two summers ago, has dared to reset Williams’s masterpiece in the 21st century. That means no picturesque French Quarter squalor. Magda Willi’s revolving set — which gives us a drone’ of every angle of the two rooms shared by Blanche’s younger sister, Stella (a terrific Vanessa Kirby) and her husband, Stanley — has the generic starkness of an starter apartment for newlyweds. Blanche’s tight, short, flashy wardrobe (Victoria Behr is the costume designer) wouldn’t look out of place in a television pilot for “Real Housewives of New Orleans. ” And electronic music is blasted between scenes. Yet in bringing us into the present, Mr. Andrews is also leading us into a timelessly primeval world, observed with an anthropological clarity. The New Orleans glimpsed beyond the walls of the Kowalskis’ home is inhabited by men and women who scrap, prowl, bloody one another’s noses and mate like alley cats. There is little conjuring of the illusions that Blanche says she lives by, and she registers more as a pragmatist in mode than the usual windblown butterfly. Even when Jon Clark’s lighting plunges us into darkness, the show always seems to be happening beneath the glare of the bright, naked bulbs that are anathema to our heroine. Such an interpretation largely strips “Streetcar” of its poetry. And there were certainly moments when I missed that poetry. But I was also willing to trade the delicate lyricism of Mr. Williams and Blanche for genuinely original insights into a play I’ve seen many times. In particular, you become conscious of a prescient feminist streak in “Streetcar,” a piercing awareness of a society that values its women according to youth and attractiveness. In this context, Blanche’s obsession with looking pretty acquires a sad emotional weight that tips into existential panic. “People don’t see you — men don’t — don’t even admit your existence unless they’re making love to you,” she says to Stella. “And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone. ” That’s a pretty realistic appraisal, coming as it does from a woman who has always relied on the kindness — and interest — of the male sex. And as Ms. Anderson says these lines, and others like them, a sense of Blanche as a desperately plotting strategist comes to the fore. Best known for her television appearances as the coolly intelligent detectives on “The Fall” and “The ” Ms. Anderson endows Blanche with a skepticism that is starting to lose its edge and a calculatedly feminine, shrilly Southern persona that feels thoroughly of the moment. This is the first Blanche I’ve encountered who specifically evokes women of my generation, like those former popular girls you come across at high school reunions, teetering on stilettos between husbands and highballs. This Blanche is forever positioning herself as an object of masculine desire. (Watch her undulating behind a semitransparent curtain while Stanley and his pals play poker.) Her sense of sex as a weapon, on the one hand, and a necessity, on the other, is beautifully conveyed in her defensive scenes with Mitch (the excellent Corey Johnson) her diffident suitor, and her aggressive encounter with the delivery boy (Otto Farrant) who summons the ghost of the young man to whom she was briefly and ruinously married. And though she may be forever trying to convince her sister to leave the barbaric Stanley, you also feel she’s competing with Stella for his attention. In vain. As embodied by Ms. Kirby, the pregnant Stella glows with the confidence conferred both by new life and her sexually charged relationship with her husband. The physical interdependence between this pair has seldom felt so thick, and when Mr. Foster cries out the immortal mating call, “ ! ,” with a mix of childlike anguish and longing, you know why Ms. Kirby comes running. Mr. Foster, seen on Broadway in “Orphans” in 2013, provides an effortlessly natural Stanley, unencumbered by the usual preening . He also manages to evoke a type of man we’ve seen a lot of in recent months — the guy who says he’s voting for Donald Trump because he wants America to be strong and virile again. Contemporary parallels recede, though, as the struggle between Stanley and Blanche acquires momentum. Mr. Andrews has done a masterly job of arranging the play’s central antagonists, so as the set revolves, we’re always aware of their positions in relation to one another, as they take stock of their respective strengths and weaknesses. It’s not easy to keep your balance on a moving stage, or in a changing world. Ms. Anderson’s Blanche becomes increasingly unsteady on the perilously high heels she wears. Mostly, this unusually dynamic “Streetcar” plays more on our nervous system than with our hearts. But when Blanche finally goes down for the count, it’s impossible not to feel a choking rush of compassion for a valiant, misguided fighter who never stood a chance. | 1 |
— Justin Green (@JGreenDC) October 27, 2016
If you get the feeling that President Obama doesn’t really understand what it’s like to have to live under Obamacare … then this probably won’t make that feeling go away.
On a conference call this afternoon, Obama tried to give enrollment staff a pep talk: . @POTUS tells ObamaCare enrollment staff they have to overcome the skeptics and prove to next Administration, the program is working well.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 27, 2016 Despite rising health insurance premiums, @POTUS says tax credits will help eligible 7 in 10 find a plan for less than $75/month.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 27, 2016
That pep talk included this little gem: "Have to clear the bugs off the windshield to see the road ahead," says Pres Obama on conference call with ObamaCare enrollment personnel.
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 27, 2016
Beg your pardon?
— Jimmy (@JimmyPrinceton) October 27, 2016
So, if we’re understanding you correctly, Mr. President, Obamacare’s countless glitches and inadequacies and broken promises are just … pesky? Lost your plan? Lost your doctor? Higher premiums co-pays and deductibles? You're just a bug on the windshield! https://t.co/WhgW3MAHbA
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) October 27, 2016
This friggin’ guy … This guy lied repeatedly to the public and this is how he refers to the problems his law created. https://t.co/Ve8SHvMDz2
— Jason C. (@CounterMoonbat) October 27, 2016
Nice, huh? @JimmyPrincetoni I guess those of us that are paying +50-60% more for health ins are dead bugs on a windshield. Nice. @markknoller
— Kris Kinder (@kris_kinder) October 27, 2016 @markknoller The bugs on the windshield are the American people that are getting killed by Obamacare premiums and deductibles.
— Matt Moyer (@mrmattmoyer) October 27, 2016 . @markknoller people being forced to pay thousands more for a shitty law we didn't want and he shrugs it off as bugs on a window? Smug POS
— Dupes & Knaves (@DupesKnaves) October 27, 2016 "I lost my doctor & I'm paying a lot more for insurance now."
POTUS: Hey, we gotta clear the bugs off the windshield to see the road ahead.
— Jason C. (@CounterMoonbat) October 27, 2016 @markknoller concerns me more when hearing the likening of a nation's failed healthcare system to an everyday inconvenience
— mark mark mark (@RevJimJonesInc) October 27, 2016 What about the big ones that just stick and smear everywhere? https://t.co/puTOzrb0Mi
— Bigly Shoe (@TheOneSoleShoe) October 27, 2016 @markknoller If there are that many bugs, doesn't that indicate trouble? Blocks your view?
— Kris Murphy (@KrisinAL) October 27, 2016 @markknoller I think it is more than bugs on this windshield.This Pres drove us right into it
— Jean Tuttle (@waffle721) October 27, 2016 Except the bugs are huge. And angry. And still coming. And stole the windshield. And your car fell apart around you. https://t.co/JDx9Z3vYyW
— Sunny (Mat) (@sunnyright) October 27, 2016 @CounterMoonbat @markknoller does he realize the car's totaled on the side of the road? | 0 |
November 2015 Ads Hillary visits voters early polling stations, thus BREAKING THE LAW on camera – yet again nothing happens to her Oct 26, 2016 Previous post
N.C.G.S. §163-166.4(a) No person or group of persons shall hinder access, harass others, distribute campaign literature, place political advertising, solicit votes, or otherwise engage in election-related activity in the voting place or in a buffer zone.
The buffer zone will be 50 feet from the entrance to the polling place except where deemed by the Wake County Board of Elections to be necessarily closer, but no less than 25 feet from the entrance to the polling place. There will be publication of information regarding the entrance location and distance of the buffer zone no later
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The eurosceptic, immigration Sweden Democrats have surged to first place in the polls, as theSwedish voting public apparently become increasingly concerned by the growth of ethnic ghettoisation, rising crime rates and Islamic radicalisation. [According to the latest YouGov poll to come out of the Scandinavian country, the party could expect to secure almost a quarter of the vote if elections were held tomorrow — almost double its level of support in 2014 — making it the single largest political force in the country. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which drives Sweden’s current minority coalition government, is down by nine points. Other polls reported by the Express suggest a somewhat less dramatic but still significant rise in support for the populists, which would appear to suggest a trend. The country’s next elections will be held on September 9th 2018, unless a change in the political situation prompts a snap election. YouGov poll — Sweden. Populists lead: 23. 9% Sweden Democrats (=)22. 0% Social Democrats ( . 5) 15. 4% Moderates ( . 6) 12. 5% Centre (+0. 7) — Robert Kimbell (@RedHotSquirrel) March 25, 2017, In February 2017, party leaders Jimmie Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal defending U. S. president Donald Trump’s recent comments on the deterioration of social cohesion and public order in Sweden. “Mr Trump did not exaggerate Sweden’s current problems” they wrote. “If anything, he understated them. ” The pair highlighted the fact that “An estimated 300 Swedish citizens with immigrant backgrounds have travelled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State” — despite Sweden having avoided any involvement in interventions in the Islamic world. “Many are now returning to Sweden and are being welcomed back with open arms by our socialist government [and in] December 2010 we had our first suicide attack on Swedish soil, when an Islamic terrorist tried to blow up hundreds of civilians in central Stockholm while they were shopping for Christmas presents” they continued. “Riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life. Police officers, firefighters and ambulance personnel are regularly attacked. Serious riots in 2013, involving many suburbs with large immigrant populations, lasted for almost a week. Gang violence is booming. ” | 1 |
Crossing the Acheron: Back to Vietnam By Luciana Bohne Posted on October 31, 2016 by Luciana Bohne
In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman, Charon, ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness.
From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent the absurdity of their lot. Down there on a visit, they return from the shadow land strengthened. They recognize that the business of living is not oblivion but action.
John Marciano’s recently published book, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration ? functions as such a Charon in reverse. It ferries readers back to the realm of remembering. This slim volume could not have come at a more opportune moment. American political culture is punch-drunk with the pursuit of war. The altered state is reaching the point of delirium tremens. Thwarted in the neocolonial scheme of annexing Syria by Russia’s legal intervention, the American elite are pushing for confrontation. Though it is hard to think the unthinkable, the nuclear holocaust may happen if not by intention then by spontaneous combustion from over-intoxication with the fumes of war.
This reckless confrontation results from decades of accumulated unaccountable power. Its boldness reflects a cumulative experience of impunity for aggressive behavior by soft and hard neocolonial postures since the end of WW II. The war in Vietnam, as Marciano suggests, should have functioned as the lesson that checked the nation’s historical thrust for conquest, but the turning point would have required a national effort to relinquish the myth of the Noble Cause, the delusion that America is vested with a divine mandate to assimilate the people of the world to the American image—for the people’s own good. Britain had its White Man’s Burden; France its mission civilatrise ; America its Manifest Destiny.
This timely volume traces the war to the apocalyptic finale of the most powerful military in the world defeated by the determination, courage, and self-sacrifice of a peasant people unwilling to be enslaved. But this is as much a book about the past as it is about the present. It reminds us, with Tolstoy, “The reality of war is in the killing,” a realization officialdom would like to block. In fact, they have prepared a falsifying celebration of that moral and military debacle.
As Marciano writes in his introduction, “In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict’s end. Among the Commemoration’s objectives, three stand out: ‘to thank and honor’ veterans and their families . . . ‘to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during’ the war; and to ‘recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by the allies.’”
President Obama claimed in the commemoration announcement speech that the war had been “an honorable cause.” Marciano challenges this notion. America’s historic ideology of the Noble Cause, he writes, rests on the belief that the United States is “A unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.”
This is the mystical bigotry of a messianic faith typical of empires. Imperial militarism seeks in a Noble Cause the justification for subjugating large chunks of humanity. In the distant past, the Noble Cause may have received the sword directly from a god—as it did in postcolonial America when it sought to exterminate the native inhabitants. By the anointment of the sword, the divinity also endowed, supposedly, the conquering “race” with moral superiority. Thus, imperialism, in the perverse arrogance of its twisted psyche, contains the germ of genocide. As a result, the superstition of a superior “race” has been endured by most of the “races” on the planet as a most Ignoble Cause. In Vietnam alone, the Big Lie of the Noble Cause sent four million Vietnamese to their death.
Marciano leaves us in no doubt that the White House and the Pentagon are commemorating a crime. They are falsifying history in order to shape the future, which will be and is the reenactment of the war against Vietnam on a global scale. They want to establish the altar for a “sacred union,” the nation united behind the Noble Cause of war. On the altar will sit the fetish of the export of the “miracle of democracy, ” in reality the imposition of regimes of terror such as the Vietnam War planners established in Saigon. We see today in Ukraine that the “miracle of democracy,” brought to Kiev by the US in 2014 to the tune of five billion dollars, amounts to a handful of dry dust, collected from the WW II graveyard of European Nazism, inciting a lot of blind, anti-democratic and noxious nationalism.
As through a glass darkly, Marciano shows us that in the war crime against Vietnam we can see reflected the crimes perpetrated today from Afghanistan to Yemen, from Iraq to Syria, from Yugoslavia to Libya and across the African continent. As in Vietnam (the fakery of the Gulf of Tonkin incident), today’s war are based on fabricated pretexts; as in Vietnam (napalm and agent orange), today’s wars are chemical wars (depleted uranium for Yugoslavia and Iraq; white phosphorus for Falluja); as in Vietnam (Hanoi and Haiphong) the bombings destroy urban life, vital infrastructure, schools and hospitals; as in Vietnam (Laos, Cambodia) the bombings spreads out (today to Yemen); as in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh) the leaders who resist US penetration are demonized (Milosevic, Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad) as enemies of humanity. As in Vietnam, all the wars of today are fought mostly to prevent or reverse independence and self-determination of former colonial places.
Finally, as in Vietnam the USSR, today’s Russia is emerging as the displacement of all the guilt that weighs on the shoulders of the Noble Cause. The Washington Post recently wrote “the Kremlin annexed Ukraine.” I read it twice—not “annexed Crimea,” the standard disinformation, but the whole of Ukraine! Does one laugh or weep? Does one have to take a hallucinogenic to see Russian flags and images of Putin blanketing Kiev instead of neo-Nazi emblems and images of Bandera?
The next president will certainly be Hillary Clinton, whom I call “the centripetal president.” From Republicans to Democrats to neocons, all converge on endorsing the war candidate. In her consensus war regime, the elite will decide everything. We will not be consulted. This is why The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? is a vital read. It calls for our re-democratization to question our leaders, to be skeptical of the media, to avert our eyes from the petrifying stare of the Medusa decked with the aegis of the Noble Cause; to challenge—even ridicule–the vaunted humanitarianism of an elite of bloodhounds baying for war; to refuse to commemorate war crimes and to work to stop them.
Above all, we need to remember that the crimes of other governments are the responsibility of the people of those governments—not of our bombs. Though our elite have given to themselves the power and the right to remake the map of the world by force, we need to reassert the legal principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign states if we are serious about peace. We, citizens, do not have the right (or the power, unless we line up behind the power of the militarist state) to change the practices of other states, but we do have the right to demand change for those of our own. Let’s start exercising that right. We did for Vietnam; we can do it again. Commemorate the people who protested the war in Vietnam, not the crime the governing elite committed there in our name, as Marciano’s book amply documents.
The US government is now engaged in waging eight wars. We better get busy.
Luciana Bohne is an Intrepid Report Associate Editor. She is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and taught at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
Donald Trump’s incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday “there is no truth” to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report that the is working with top advisers to restructure the nation’s top spy agency. [“These reports are false. All transition activities are for participation, gathering purposes, and all discussions are tentative. The ’s top priority will be to ensure the safety of the American people and the security of the nation. He’s committed to finding the best and most effective way to do it,” declared Spicer during a transition daily call with reporters. “But — I want to reiterate — there is not truth to this idea of restructuring the intelligence community infrastructure. It is 100 percent false. ” Citing unnamed individuals reportedly familiar with the plans on Wednesday, WSJ reported that Trump’s belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has grown “bloated and politicized” under President Barack Obama prompted the incoming to work with top advisors on a plan to revamp America’s top spy agency. “The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,” an individual who is close to the Trump transition told WSJ. “They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact. ” Trump has not kept secret his disdain towards what he believes the U. S. intelligence agencies have become under Obama. Last year, a congressional task force confirmed allegations that senior U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM) leaders manipulated intelligence assessments in 2014 and 2015 to make it appear that President Obama’s strategies were winning the war against the Islamic State ( ). Referring to the alleged plans by Trump to revamp the top U. S. spy agency, WSJ reports: The planning comes as Mr. Trump has leveled a series of attacks in recent months and the past few days against U. S. intelligence agencies, dismissing and mocking their assessment that Russia stole emails from Democratic groups and individuals and then provided them to WikiLeaks for publication in an effort to help Mr. Trump win the White House. One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment. For commending Russian President Vladimir Putin, criticizing U. S. spy agencies, and accepting an explanation by WikiLeaks Julian Assange of the hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) the incoming has drawn the ire of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Trump has also drawn criticism from intelligence and officials for the same reasons. “Mr. Trump’s advisers say he has long been skeptical of the CIA’s accuracy, and the often mentions faulty intelligence in 2002 and 2003 concerning Iraq’s weapons programs,” notes WSJ. “But his public skepticism about the Russia assessments has jarred analysts accustomed to more cohesion with the White House. ” “Top officials at U. S. intelligence agencies, as well as Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, have said Russia orchestrated the computer attacks on the Democratic Party last year,” also reports the Journal. “President Barack Obama ordered the intelligence agencies to produce a report on the hacking operation, and he is expected to be presented with the findings on Thursday. ” On Friday, Trump is expected to meet with the heads of the CIA, FBI, and DNI James Clapper to discuss the findings of the alleged Russian hacking. | 1 |
In Hillary's America, email server scrubs you
Obama transfers his Nobel Peace Prize to anti-Trump rioters
Democrats blame Hillary's criminal e-mail server for her loss, demand it face prison
Afraid of "dangerous" Trump presidency, protesters pre-emptively burn America down to the ground
Clinton Foundation in foreclosure as foreign donors demand refunds
Hillary Clinton blames YouTube video for unexpected and spontaneous voter uprising that prevented her inevitable move into the White House
Sudden rise in sea levels explained by disproportionately large tears shed by climate scientists in the aftermath of Trump's electoral victory
FBI director Comey delighted after receiving Nobel Prize for Speed Reading (650,000 emails in one week)
U.N. deploys troops to American college campuses in order to combat staggeringly low rape rates
Responding to Trump's surging poll numbers, Obama preemptively pardons himself for treason
Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually
Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida
Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote
The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush
Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food
Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI
Obama captures rare Pokémon while visiting Hiroshima
Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say "It's creepy"
Barack Obama: "If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"
White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party
President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism'
Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman'
Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber
Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend
Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line
As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards
John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom
Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right'
News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: "My work here is done"
Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign
Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009
National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman
National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement
Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response
Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican
Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check
Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing
Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first
Susan Sarandon: "I don't vote with my vagina." Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer
Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote
New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to "Live FOR Free or Die"
Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president
Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two
Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence
Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men
In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas
TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons
Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats'
Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with "This is for Paris" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with "Return to sender"
University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities
Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island
Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a "safe space," changing Missouri motto to "The don't show me state"
Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy
State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery
NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget
College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action
ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios
Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic
'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break
ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood
Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans
Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people
Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's "unfettered capitalism," demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need
John Kerry accepts Iran's "Golden Taquiyya" award, requests jalapenos on the side
Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone
John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons
Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend
Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles
State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider
Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons
Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations
Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals
US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?'
NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy
China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: "The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"
Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be'
Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1%
America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith
Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine
Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET
Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths
Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do'
Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State
President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise
Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males
NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record
People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services
Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba
White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet'
CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate
Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson'
Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city'
Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers'
Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first
The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office
White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders
Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time
Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy
Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents
Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences
Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity
Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow
African countries to ban all flights from the United States because "Obama is incompetent, it scares us"
Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it
Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses'
BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama
Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free
Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness
President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser
Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members
White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos
Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency
Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole
Harry Reid: "Sometimes I say the wong thing"
Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids
Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution
Obama draws "blue line" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon
"Hard Choices," a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original
Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts
Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks
100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, "the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"
Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news
"Anarchy Now!" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence
Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours
Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues
"Free Speech Zones" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes
Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed
Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account
Joe Biden to Russia: "We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"
In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea
Al Sharpton: "Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"
Mardi Gras in North Korea: " Throw me some food! "
Obama's foreign policy works: "War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"
US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: "We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"
Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help
The 1980s: "Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."
In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook
MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine
Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants
Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America
North Korean voters unanimous: "We are the 100%"
Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout
Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss
Feminist author slams gay marriage: "a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"
Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district
Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend
Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle
North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party
White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare
Kim Jong Un executes own " crazy uncle " to keep him from ruining another family Christmas
OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea
President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy
Obama to Iran: "If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"
Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC
Obama: "I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"
Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week
Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message
NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: "Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"
Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough
The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: "I didn't build that"
Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare
Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation
Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans
Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy
GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords
Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare
Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria
Sharpton: "British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"
DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women
Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees
Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left
Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel'
FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp
Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies
GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election'
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!'
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent'
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence'
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good'
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners'
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps'
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects
World ends; S&P soars
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt'
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years
Obama attends church service, worships self
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending
Historical revisionists: "Hey, you never know"
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: "don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse'
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: "Too few words"
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity "Religion of Peace," praises "moderate Christians," promises to send one into space
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book "The Road to Smurfdom"
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: "When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!'
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration'
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, "only 1% allowed to reach Israel"
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel "50 Shades of Hay"
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its "President for Life"
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named "Fat And Furious"
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed
White House: "Let them eat statistics"
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama | 0 |
While working on an article on civilian massacres by the Nigerian military, the photographer Ashley Gilbertson and I heard reports that soldiers were burning villages. The militant group Boko Haram, too, has been accused of setting fire to homes, but residents told us the military had now adopted the tactic as a way to clear the countryside so it could freely carry out operations against the insurgents. We saw the charred remains of villages when we flew over the area, but it was unclear who was responsible. In some places like this one, patches of farmland were burned. The military not long ago opened several main highways from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, leading to the rest of northeastern Nigeria, saying the area was now cleared of insurgents. Farmers who are living in squalid camps for displaced people in Maiduguri are anxious about the state of their fields. Because they have not been allowed back for years, they have no idea what awaits them on their farms. From the sky, Borno State, the region where Boko Haram is most active, is a patchwork of fallow farmland, swaths of desert and a few swampy areas. conditions are raging in the area, a region with a rich history of agriculture. Boko Haram has chased off all the farmers, and the militants themselves have fallen victim to food shortages. We spotted only a handful of vehicles on the roads as we passed overhead. The area is mostly a ghost town. Every shade of beige is visible in this part of Nigeria. We think these are animal tracks, probably from cattle. Boko Haram is notorious for stealing cows to feed their group and to trade as a means of financial support. Most farmers who have livestock have cleared out, but nomadic herders pass through this part of Nigeria. Maybe the tracks are from motorbikes, which officials in Maiduguri banned after insurgents used them to begin attacks and carry out suicide bombings. Now, anyone spotted riding a motorbike is presumed to be a member of Boko Haram. This is part of a camp for displaced people in a community called Monguno. The town itself was once destroyed by Boko Haram, but military advances helped clear out insurgents, and now tens of thousands of people have poured in, looking for a safe place to wait out the yearslong insurgency. They live in ragged huts in a camp that is low on food supplies. More people arrive daily — 350 villagers came the day before we visited. Several recent arrivals told us the military had ordered them to leave their homes. One woman sent an envoy back to check on her house and received word that it had been burned to the ground. Lake Chad is not far from this area of Nigeria, and swamps emerge in a few spots, right next to farms. Besides farmers, fishermen have also fallen on hard times during the crisis. The military has largely banned the fish trade, fearing Boko Haram was profiting from it. We met one fisherman in the Monguno camp who had been sneaking back to a small lake to fish, then stuffing his catch in his pants in hopes of passing undetected on his way home. The military has a big garrison in Monguno, and soldiers keep watch in their vehicles on the outskirts of town. A berm has been constructed around the edges of the camp, which houses about 26, 000 displaced people. Mobile phone networks in Monguno have been cut and fuel stations are closed. Most farms are inoperable around here. Famine was declared in pockets of Borno State last year. Many communities are sealed off from safety as insurgents scatter from in the forest, pushed out by recent military operations. Humanitarian groups face huge logistical challenges getting food and other supplies to people in need. Even roads the military says are safe now have been attacked by insurgents. | 1 |
Source: Infowars
Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines
October 31, 2016
Watch elections expert Bev Harris discuss the smoking gun behind voting fraud LIVE: Infowars.com/show
Smoking Gun In Massive Election Fraud Discovered By Investigators
Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, performs nonpartisan investigative reporting on elections in an attempt to stop vote rigging.
You may be wondering what the term "black box" means. A "black box" system is non-transparent; its functions are hidden from the public. Elections, of course, should not be black box systems.
Here is a link to a free copy of the book, Black Box Voting HERE.
Author Bev Harris became known for groundbreaking work on electronic voting machines, which can remove transparency of the vote count.
Please go to Infowars to read the entire article and view the video clips. | 0 |
On January 3 — the first day of the 115th Congress — Representative Richard Hudson ( ) introduced national concealed carry reciprocity legislation. [Hudson’s office published this summary of the legislation: Rep. Hudson’s bill, which is supported by major Amendment groups, would allow people with a concealed carry license or permit to conceal a handgun in any other state that allows concealed carry, as long as the permit holder follows the laws of that state. It also allows residents of Constitutional carry states the ability to carry in other states that recognize their own resident’s right to concealed carry. Note: Hudson’s legislation not only establishes national reciprocity for concealed permit holders but also national reciprocity for residents who live in states that require no permit for concealed carry. In the former situation the concealed carry permit of any state would be valid in every state and the “identification document” in possession of a resident of a constitutional carry state would serve as a permit to carry without a license in other states. The bill states: Notwithstanding any provision of the law of any State or political subdivision thereof (except as provided in subsection (b)) and subject only to the requirements of this section, a person who is not prohibited by Federal law from possessing, transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm, who is carrying a valid identification document containing a photograph of the person, and who is carrying a valid license or permit which is issued pursuant to the law of a State and which permits the person to carry a concealed firearm or is entitled to carry a concealed firearm in the State in which the person resides, may possess or carry a concealed handgun (other than a machinegun or destructive device) that has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, in any State that — ‘‘(1) has a statute under which residents of the State may apply for a license or permit to carry a concealed firearm or ‘‘(2) does not prohibit the carrying of concealed firearms by residents of the State for lawful purposes, Representative Hudson was a guest on Breitbart News’ podcast, “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” on December 13 and he assured us at that time that he would be introducing national reciprocity at the first opportunity. He certainly kept his word. During the podcast, Hudson explained why he includes constitutional carry states in his legislation: I believe the plain language of the constitution is real simple where it says there should be no infringement on our right to keep and bear arms. So I personally believe you shouldn’t have to get a permit from the government to carry a concealed weapon. I think that’s a right, an inalienable right. But, there are some states that don’t agree with that. But there are some states around the country — like Montana, Vermont, and others — that do not require you to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. And if you happen to live in one of those states, with my legislation you ought to be able to carry in any state that recognizes concealed carry. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
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