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By Catherine J. Frompovich One of the attorneys with whom I network on various issues was so incensed about a recent news ‘event’ that I... | 0 |
SEATTLE — Amazon customers will soon be able to watch live football games as part of the retailer’s growing online video service. The National Football League has reached an agreement with Amazon to allow Amazon Prime customers to stream 10 “Thursday Night Football” games in the coming season, N. F. L. and Amazon representatives said. Prime customers spend $99 a year for a membership that includes free shipping and a video service with a library of movies and TV shows. Amazon agreed to pay about $50 million for the streaming rights to the N. F. L. games, according to a person briefed on the deal who asked for anonymity because the price was confidential. The amount was about five times the roughly $10 million Twitter agreed to pay the N. F. L. last year for streaming rights to “Thursday Night Football,” this person said. The agreement represents another step in the delicate dance between tech and entertainment companies as more viewers shift their viewing habits to the internet and digital devices. Amazon and Netflix are pouring money into their video services, both licensing content and producing original programming. Some viewers of these video services are cord cutters, who forgo cable television subscriptions. Sports remain a big reason people keep their cable services. But ratings wobbled last year for many N. F. L. broadcasts, and the league has grown concerned that younger viewers are not watching football in traditional ways. Agreements with Amazon and other internet companies are an attempt by the N. F. L. to reach younger fans, even though the league risks alienating the broadcast networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees. For Amazon, the N. F. L. agreement is an attempt to fill one of the biggest holes in its lineup. Amazon will stream games produced by either CBS or NBC, which air the games on television. The Thursday night games will also air on NFL Network, the league’s cable channel. The television audience for “Thursday Night Football” dwarfed the internet audience during last season’s experiment on Twitter. The average viewership on Twitter at any given minute was 266, 000, according to the N. F. L. The figure for television, including broadcast and cable, was 15. 8 million. Analysts estimate that as many as 60 million households use Amazon Prime. | 1 |
This photo was taken from an Anti-Trump protest: When texting the phone number on the banner, United We Dream auto-texts back: United We Dream receives it’s funding from Open Societies, which is owned by Soros. Also of note, Change To Win has the same address as United We Dream:
Credit to this The_Donald thread Do you like this article? LIKE to MAGA! Follow @MagaFeed You may also like | 0 |
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Sioux Falls, IA | During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton allegedly had sexual intercourse with cattle off of Tom Brady’s family dairy farm.
The family farm which was owned by Tom Brady’s father at the time, Willow Brady Jr., was often visited by the Clinton family when they were in the area.
“My dad and Bill Clinton’s step dad were like brothers. They often visited us on the holidays when I was a kid. Bill even knew the cows names by heart. That always surprised me” recalls the 64-year-old, third-generation dairy farmer.
“ My father was a strong Democratic party supporter all his life and a big Bill Clinton fan, so I never found the strength to tell him the truth before he passed away ”
Sex, drugs and cattle
During the 1992 Iowa caucus, the Clinton campaign stopped by for a night of festivities at the Brady’s farm, a night Tom Brady says he will never forget.
“The Clinton team came by and we drank a lot and all was merry before they started indulging in hard drugs, that’s when everything went wrong” he recalls, visibly distraught by the whole affair.
“I don’t know about all those stories about him sexually assaulting women, but I sure as hell know he assaulted one of our cows because I was there and I saw him do it with my own eyes and believe me, it’s not something I’d wish my worst enemy to live to see” he told local reporters.
“I’m sorry for the Clinton family, but as a God-fearing Christian, I just had to let the truth be known” he adds.
Bill Clinton has been personally accused publicly by seventeen women of sexual misconduct between 1972 and 1997. The former US President also admitted to having had an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky while she worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996. | 0 |
Vanessa Luna arrived in New York as a from Peru, and grew up as an undocumented immigrant. While her parents worked at cleaning jobs, she hid her status in high school until a guidance counselor helped her get into the State University of New York at Binghamton to study American history. She was a junior there when, in 2012, President Obama gave Ms. Luna — and hundreds of thousands of other young people like her — temporary permission to stay and work in the United States. She could become a teacher. “For the first time, I felt like this country accepted me,” said Ms. Luna, 25, who now teaches social studies at a middle school on the Lower East Side. But now, she does not know what to think. During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump promised he would cancel the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that Mr. Obama initiated. But in comments he made to Time Magazine last week, the seemed to soften his stance. “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” Mr. Trump said, without offering specifics, though a Senate bill with bipartisan sponsorship introduced last week would continue DACA’s protections for three years. In the interview, Mr. Trump said of the young immigrants: “They’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in land because they don’t know what’s going to happen. ” On that, Ms. Luna agreed. “For someone like me, that uncertainty still looms,” she said. Across the country, more than 740, 000 young immigrants, often called Dreamers, are wondering what will happen to the work permits granted through DACA. They work in fields like education, law, medicine, finance and government. About 30, 000 live and work in New York City, officials say. At the age of 5, Chandrapaul Latchman was brought by strangers on an airplane from Guyana to reunite with his parents on Long Island. He became student body president of Valley Stream Central High School, an honors student at Baruch College and an intern at BlackRock, the investment firm, before going to work at JPMorgan Chase. Today, at 23, he is one of the bank’s 100 credit risk analysts, assessing loans to real estate developers and entertainment companies. He knows what he would feel were Mr. Trump to cancel the program, known as DACA. “It’s a feeling of rejection,” Mr. Latchman said. “Even though you tried so hard, and outworked so many people to get here, still at the end, you’re not good enough and they don’t want you,” he said. Because Mr. Obama initiated the program by executive action, Mr. Trump could still revoke it with the stroke of a pen. It does not need congressional approval. Without the right to work legally in the United States, the Dreamers could see the accouterments of life — a studio apartment in Brooklyn, a driver’s license, a biweekly paycheck with deductions for retirement, a coveted desk in a financial firm — disappear. Some viewed Mr. Trump’s latest comments as polarizing, continuing a narrative from his campaign. “We don’t want to differentiate between the good immigrants and the bad immigrants — however he chooses to qualify them,” said Hina Naveed, 26, a registered nurse on Staten Island and a of the activist group, Dream Action Coalition. “Instead of just working it out with the Dreamers, what I’d rather see is some clear policy in what he’s hoping to work out with immigrants in general. ” Otherwise, she said, the alternative is frightening: “We’ll save DACA and all their parents will be deported — who will want to stay here?” Mr. Latchman said that even before Mr. Trump was elected, his manager suggested exploring other offices around the world, like the one in Toronto. His work permit expires in the summer of 2018, about the time his contract with the bank ends. A JPMorgan Chase spokesman, Andrew Gray, said that it was too early to discuss what was still a hypothetical situation. He emphasized that Mr. Latchman was speaking personally, and not on behalf of the company. In many cases, employers, whether they are private or government entities, may not know if an employee has a work permit through DACA unless that person discloses it. And there is little any employer can do if an employee’s work authorization is canceled. But Teach for America, the national organization that trains and recruits young teachers to work in schools in communities has, since 2013, made a point of hiring and supporting teachers who are covered by the program, helping with application fees and moving. Now it has pledged to offer legal and financial support to the 146 corps teachers who could lose their work permits. Ms. Luna, who works at the Great Oaks Charter School, said she would apply for a transition grant that Teach for America offers for resettlement. In her case, she might need the money to break her lease on her $ studio and move back in with her parents, who live in Port Chester, N. Y. Antonio Vance, the executive director in New York for Great Oaks Charter School, said he had already consulted lawyers to help Ms. Luna. “She’s only been here a year, and she’s already a model teacher,” Mr. Vance said. “It would be difficult to replace her and the relationships she has formed with her students. ” Ms. Luna said that if were she to lose her work permit, she would consider going back to school for a degree in administration in hopes of one day opening her own school if the law changes. She already has a master’s in urban education and policy. “I wouldn’t lie to say it won’t devastate me. But it would ignite more of a fire inside me,” she said, referring to her ambition to remain a teacher in the United States. Others said their fallback plan might mean retreating to the underground economy. Juan Carlos Pérez, 31, a math teacher at the International High School at Union Square, said he might have to return to teaching English as a second language in Queens for a small stipend or even return to Mexico, which he left at age 11. Joe Luft, the executive director of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which operates 15 high schools in New York City that specialize in teaching new immigrants, said losing people like Mr. Pérez could adversely affect the students who had come to confide in him. “I really fear what that does to their sense of hope, which can be tenuous to students anyway,” Mr. Luft said. According to an immigration lawyer, Stephen Mr. Trump could still cancel the program immediately, or let the existing work permits simply expire. Ms. Naveed, whose family is from Pakistan, came to New York when she was 11 because her older sister needed medical treatment they came legally, but overstayed their visas. In May, Ms. Naveed was able to get a nursing license because the New York State Board of Regents allowed people covered by DACA to be eligible for 57 professional licenses. As a private home nurse, she now changes and maintains the tubes that allow a baby to breathe and eat. Ms. Naveed said it would be “a significant loss” of independence to no longer be able to work and take part in her community openly. Still, she said, “Before DACA people survived, and after DACA people will survive. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Stephen K. Bannon has read the book three times. He still keeps a copy of it — one that’s creased and copiously underlined — in a library with the rest of his favorites at his father’s house in Richmond, Va. The book, “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 work by two amateur historians, Neil Howe and William Strauss, lays out a theory that American history unfurls in predictable, cycles of prosperity and catastrophe. And it foresees catastrophe right around the corner. The book delineates history into four seasonal cycles, or “turnings”: growth, maturation, decay and destruction. It is the kind of wild, provocative idea that Mr. Bannon loves. But it is also just the kind of thinking that his opponents see as evidence that he is too Machiavellian and idiosyncratic for the job of President Trump’s chief strategist. The basis of his worldview — which has been described as everything from Leninist to an extremist fringe movement associated with white nationalism — is still shrouded in mystery and conjecture. But by his own telling, much of the foundation for his political beliefs can be found in the book, which predicts that America is hurtling toward a crisis on par with the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression. And the grim future that the book foresees helps explain the underpinnings of the president’s conservative, nationalist “America First” agenda, one that Mr. Bannon has played a large role in shaping. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the world is in the beginning state of a crisis that it can’t avoid,” Mr. Bannon said in a recent interview, before Mr. Trump removed him from the National Security Council and started contemplating a broader White House that could further marginalize him. But Mr. Bannon, choosing his words carefully, allowed that while he did not believe a cataclysm like global war was inevitable, failing to prepare as if one might happen would be foolish. “Everything President Trump is doing — all of it — is to get ahead of or stop any potential crisis,” Mr. Bannon added. But those who question Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon’s motives say the central premise of “The Fourth Turning,” with its religious subtext and dark premonitions, is a convenient excuse to sow fear and justify extreme action. Many academic historians dismiss the book as about as scientific as astrology or a Nostradamus text. And many will find reason for alarm in its conclusion that the coming crisis will demand loyalty and conformity from citizens. It also leads to unavoidable questions about war and whether Mr. Bannon, who has recommended the book to countless friends and made a film about it in 2010, is resigned to catastrophic global conflict. He says he is not. And he remains unconvinced that the United States can effectively intervene in overseas conflicts like the one unfolding in Syria. As one of the voices in the administration who expressed skepticism about a military strike in response to the Assad regime’s chemical attack on its own citizens, Mr. Bannon insists he is no warmonger. In the interview, Mr. Bannon rattled off a list of White House policies that he said fit with the larger goal of strengthening the country for whatever calamity might await just over the horizon. They included starting the process of building a wall on the southern border, barring foreigners from seven predominantly Muslim nations, and taking steps that he said were meant “to empower the secretary of defense, the C. I. A. to step up the war” against radical Islam. “I think it’s very simple: You’ve got to take care of the country,” Mr. Bannon said. Ultimately, he added, America could reclaim its position as a keeper of peace and stability throughout the world. “America has to be strong — economically strong and militarily strong. And a strong America could be ultimately a provider of Pax Americana. ” But to those who see Mr. Trump as someone who instigates crises, rather than defuses them, the knowledge that his senior strategist is an evangelist for a theory that forecasts the destruction of society as we know it is alarming. “If you frame everything as a crisis, then the right response to crisis is action, not deliberation,” said Alexander Livingston, an assistant professor of political theory at Cornell who has written critically about “The Fourth Turning” and Mr. Bannon. “It puts the people who say ‘hold on’ in a position of failing to see the crisis but also of being responsible for the crisis. ” In their book, Mr. Howe and Mr. Strauss note the roughly intervals between catalytic events in American history like the Declaration of Independence (1776) the attack on Fort Sumter (1861) and the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941). They predicted the next crisis would begin around 2005 and reach its climax sometime before 2025. “History is seasonal, and winter is coming,” they warn. Precipitating each fourth turning, the authors wrote, is a breakdown of the existing civic order and the institutions that prop it up. Mr. Bannon, who has said the Trump administration will see to the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” believes these institutions are already crumbling, and he seems more than happy to pilot the wrecking ball that demolishes them entirely. In an interview, Mr. Howe recalls getting an email about 10 years ago from Mr. Bannon, whom he had never heard of at the time, asking if he would participate in a film about the book. “We kind of blew him off,” Mr. Howe, who is now a demographer at the investment firm Hedgeye Risk Management, said recently. Mr. Howe, who eventually agreed to be interviewed for the film, said that Mr. Bannon seemed to have no qualms about the destruction part of the cycle. “There is something beneficial about the creative destruction that comes with a fourth turning,” Mr. Howe said. “There has to be a period in which we tear down everything that is no longer functional. ” Mr. Bannon’s suspicion of powerful institutions and the men and women who run them might seem at odds with his personal conservatism. He is a Catholic, a former Navy officer and a traditionalist in many ways. But Peter Schweizer, an author and frequent collaborator with Mr. Bannon on films and books, said Mr. Bannon believes the nation’s elites arrogantly underestimate their own role in creating crises and then overestimate their ability to solve them. “I do think the reason this theory is so powerful in Steve’s mind is it kind of goes to the heart of his problem with elites,” Mr. Schweizer said. “He does have a skeptical view of the limitations of human intellect. This notion that a few smart guys know how to quote unquote run a global economy is just laughable to him. ” In the 2010 film, “Generation Zero,” which was produced by Citizens United, whose films often attack favorite conservative targets like the Clintons, the screen flashes with foreboding imagery: a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb, a shark fin skimming above the water, a guillotine blade falling. The film’s thesis is that the financial collapse of 2009 was the beginning of the modern fourth turning. But Mr. Bannon sees not just a financial crisis unfolding. A deeper cultural crisis — selfishness, excessive political correctness and a lack of civic responsibility — has infected the country’s political and economic institutions, which must be purged. Today Mr. Bannon is much more prudent about tossing out predictions of imminent catastrophe and conflict. But some who spoke with him for the film said he was not always so reticent. “If we were in an international crisis that might lead to a major war, I don’t think that would frighten him at all,” said David Kaiser, a former professor at the Naval War College and a historian who subscribes to the Strauss and Howe theories. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say Bannon wants it,” Mr. Kaiser added. “But I think it’s a possibility he willingly accepts it. ” Mr. Bannon insisted that was not his view. “You’re not inexorably pulled into this,” he said. But it seemed undeniable to him that the book got a lot right about the general direction that America is headed. “In the ‘Fourth Turning’ theory you’ve got a country that believes it’s off course,” he said. “ of Americans now think we’re on the wrong track. That’s an extraordinary number. ” He added, “Certainly they feel the country is in some sort of crisis. ” | 1 |
During a phone conversation, Norm Ross spoke about the issues facing Nevada. He exhibited the ability to forward his intent with grace and intelligence. The candidate seeking election for the Assembly District 8 (AD8) seat. Ross discussed his passion for the people of Nevada and the state’s need for change.
Immigration, Refugees, and Non-English Speaking Students He believes that dealing with illegal immigration and closing the borders should be a priority. Clark County schools are impacted with a high percentage of immigrant children, and for many of them, English is not their primary language. In 2013, statistics indicated that 44 percent of the students were of Hispanic decent, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal.
One solution to the overabundance of non-English speaking students would be to have a separate school to focus on learning the language, says Ross. In fact, school officials state the situation has been identified as a problem because they have been working toward the improvement of student performance. With the number of Hispanic students increasing, “the challenges they bring to the district, according to state test results and graduation rates show them lagging behind other student groups.”
Moreover, Ross is adamantly against allowing any refugees residence in Nevada. He would not support legislation which would admit them to the state.
Voter I.D. Reform Proper voter identification is a must to keep elections honest and above board. In Nevada, there are multiple ways an eligible citizen can register to vote:
Social services agencies and the Department of Motor Vehicles provide forms. A person can go to the County Clerk or Registrar Offices and file. Nevada is one of at least 29 states that allow online registration. Ross feels that the use of the internet to register to vote should not be allowed. He says that a person should be required to the to the state’s registrar with either a birth certificate or passport. This, he adds, would prevent anyone from registering more than once using alternative names.
Veterans Services For a veteran to receive medical services they are required to use providers at the VA hospital and clinics. However, Ross would like to see this change. He supports veterans being allowed to find their own doctors, and the VA insurance should cover the bills.
An anecdote shared by Ross demonstrates the VA’s inefficiency. He said the VA facilities were closed and moved one location, which makes it difficult for the veterans. Furthermore, veterans are often assigned to a nurse practitioner rather than a physician, which they deserve.
Our veterans are heroes, and we must, as a society, begin treating them as such. They put their lives on the line to protect us and our freedoms and keeping the homeland safe.
Norm Ross Cares About Nevada On his website, Ross discusses all of the issues he intends to support and work toward a resolution. They are; repealing the Commerce Tax, keeping property taxes low, and allowing families to send their children the school they choose.
Commerce Tax – Contrary to what big government liberals claim, Nevada residents and businesses are not under-taxed, and our state government is not underfunded. The Commerce Tax passed in 2015 will only hurt businesses in Nevada and cause more job loss. Property Taxes – Increasing property taxes will only burden our seniors and families already struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. Additionally, it will have an adverse effect on new home construction causing more loss of good paying jobs. School Choice – The Education Savings Accounts (ESA) legislation passed in 2015 is a great start allowing school choice for all students. We can and should strengthen access to these accounts. Ending Civil Forfeiture – These laws, which allow law enforcement to seize and keep property without filing charges or securing criminal convictions, are an assault on the people’s due process and private property rights. Nevada must abolish this unfair practice and ensure that only convicted criminals and not innocent Nevadans, lose their assets to forfeiture. Ross proclaims that once he is elected to the Assembly on November 8, he intends to introduce legislation to rectify these issues in Nevada.
By Cathy Mine
Sources:
Interview: October 13, 2016, with Norm Ross
Elect Norm Ross: Website – Issues
Las Vegas Review-Journal: Clark County School District enrollment grows, with Hispanics leading the trend
Ballotpedia: Public Policy in Nevada
Top and Featured Image Courtesy of David Stanley’s
Inset Images Courtesy of Norm Ross – Used With Permission #CMJournalist , AD8 , ross , schools , veterans | 0 |
Thursday following President Donald Trump’s press conference to announce his pick for Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh applauded Trump’s performance on his nationally syndicated radio show. Limbaugh said while the media still won’t warm up to Trump, it was what his supporters wanted to see, which was a willingness to tout his achievements and take on some of the claims from the media. “You know it is hard to say — you get caught up in the moment,” Limbaugh said. “But this was one of the most effective press conferences I have ever seen. The press is going to hate him even more after this. Don’t misunderstand. When I say effective, I’m talking about rallying people who voted for him to stay with him. He made a point — ‘What chaos? You’re reporting chaos. We’re not in chaos. We’re a machine. We got one of the smoothest running machines in the history of machines. We got one of the best administrations in the history of administrations. ’” “And he rattled off the achievements they’ve had here that the media is not reporting because they’re so focused on whether or not Trump worked with Russia to screw Hillary out of the presidency,” he continued. “And he was reassuring the people he’s on top of everything. Nothing has changed. Everything he campaigned on, he is doing. All he is doing is fulfilling campaign promises. And of course, the Democrats don’t like him. Of course, the media don’t like him. It isn’t going to stop him. ” ( Daily Rushbo) Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
They campaigned urgently, even frantically, at airfields and arenas, on a college campus in Wisconsin and in a Philadelphia church. Hillary Clinton and Senator Tim Kaine, their prospects brightened by news that the F. B. I. had found no new troublesome emails in a review of Mrs. Clinton’s private server, pleaded with Americans on Sunday to get out and vote as if their very way of life were on the line. Scrambling across the electoral map, Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, addressed supporters in darker and even graver terms, with Mr. Trump casting the election as a moment for his brand of nationalism. Surpassing the anxious entreaties of an ordinary presidential race, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump begged voters to see the 2016 election as a choice of almost apocalyptic significance. Mr. Trump called the vote on Tuesday a final chance to turn back foreign forces menacing American identity, while Mrs. Clinton said the country’s long journey toward equality for women and minorities was at risk of being reversed in a day’s balloting. Mrs. Clinton began her day in Philadelphia, speaking at the Mount Airy Church of God in Christ with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a fellow Democrat. In a city where high black turnout could seal her grip on the presidency, Mrs. Clinton framed the campaign in the context of historic struggles for equality — from the origins of the women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls, N. Y. to the march for black civil rights in Selma, Ala. “Everything you care about, everything I care about and have worked for, is at stake,” Mrs. Clinton said, without mentioning Mr. Trump. Mrs. Clinton has delivered a broad message of national unity in the campaign’s closing days, offering herself to voters as an avatar of tolerance and reconciliation, in contrast to Mr. Trump. She campaigned on Sunday in New Hampshire with Khizr Khan, the father of an Army captain slain in Iraq, whose speech in July castigating Mr. Trump as biased against Muslims and immigrants electrified the Democratic National Convention. Mr. Khan branded Mr. Trump as a figure of exclusion and division, asking of him, rhetorically: “Would anyone who is not like you have a place in your America?” Mr. Trump, for his part, warned voters that they would never again see a candidate like him within reach of the presidency. At a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, he said repeatedly that he represented a “last chance” for voters angry about trade and immigration. “The media, Wall Street and the politicians are trying to stop us because they know we will fix the rigged system,” he said. The announcement from James B. Comey, the F. B. I. director, reaffirming his assessment that Mrs. Clinton should not be charged with a crime over her handling of classified information, came as a blow to Mr. Trump and other Republicans hoping that a bombshell would upend Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. As it stands, Mrs. Clinton appears to be entering Election Day as a solid if not overwhelming favorite, even as the race has narrowed over the past few weeks. A poll published Sunday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found her ahead of Mr. Trump by four percentage points nationally, and she maintains a clear upper hand in the Electoral College. And Mrs. Clinton appears to be benefiting from a surge in participation by Latino voters as well as unusually high enthusiasm among women. Early voting by Latinos may have already given Mrs. Clinton a decisive lead in the swing state of Nevada, as well as a meaningful edge in Florida, a state without which Mr. Trump has no path to the presidency. Mrs. Clinton and her leading surrogates have also been making a appeal asking voters to embrace the idea of a female president, seeking to increase her lead among women and to persuade some hesitant men to discard their reservations about Mrs. Clinton’s gender. Campaigning in Florida over the weekend, Mr. Kaine accused Mr. Trump of tapping into sexism as a political tactic. He reproached Mr. Trump for saying at a rally that military officers would not want to follow orders from Mrs. Clinton, and for suggesting that she did not look presidential. In Wisconsin on Sunday, Mr. Kaine hailed the historic nature of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and urged confident Democrats not to take victory for granted. “If it had been easy for there to be a woman president of the United States, there would have been a woman president of the United States,” he said. The Clinton campaign also booked national airtime during football games on Sunday night to run a pair of commercials featuring men who said they could not vote for Mr. Trump because of his treatment of women. And Mrs. Clinton campaigned this weekend with two singers, Katy Perry and Beyoncé, who have hailed her as a candidate. In some respects, the campaign of encouragement and reassurance echoes the Democrats’ successful push in 2008 to ease any hesitation about Barack Obama among white voters. That year, prominent white men in the party — including Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, now the vice president, and Richard L. Trumka, an A. F. L. . I. O. executive — made intensive efforts to bring along reluctant white voters. Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, a group that supports female Democratic candidates, said it had been important for leaders like President Obama and Mr. Kaine to speak directly to voters who “may still feel hesitant” about electing a woman. Ms. Schriock said Mr. Kaine and Mr. Obama had also helped send the message to wavering men that Mr. Trump’s treatment of women was “not normal behavior. ” Tom Bonier, a Democratic data strategist and the chief executive of the firm TargetSmart, said there was ample evidence that women were “especially motivated to vote in this election. ” He added that enthusiasm from female voters alone could push Mrs. Clinton’s final vote tally a point above where she stands in public polls. “In every single battleground state, women not only make up a clear majority of ballots cast thus far, but the female share of the electorate is larger than it was in the 2012 election,” he said. Female voters may play an especially influential role in a few states Mr. Trump is targeting late in the campaign, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota, where there are fewer nonwhite voters and Mrs. Clinton’s lead depends in part on white women in the suburbs. Mr. Trump has increasingly staked his candidacy on states in the Upper Midwest that have not voted Republican in a generation or more, in an attempt to escape the backlash against his candidacy from Latino voters in more diverse swing states. He was competing at a frenzied pace on Sunday, with events planned in five states and stretching well into the night as he fell behind schedule. But with the exception of Iowa, where he is ahead in the polls, Mr. Trump is competing on unfriendly turf, scrounging for support in unlikely areas like Minneapolis and the prosperous suburbs of Northern Virginia. While Mrs. Clinton has campaigned with an eye toward turning out specific voter groups in crucial states — firing up black voters in North Carolina and Latinos in South and Central Florida, for instance — Mr. Trump has crisscrossed a wider map of states, but he has done little to attract support beyond his mostly white, less educated political base. In Minneapolis, home to a sizable population of immigrants, Mr. Trump railed against refugees coming into the United States and singled out Minnesota’s Somali community for attack. Mr. Trump’s campaign drew criticism over the weekend for releasing a closing advertisement that cast Mr. Trump as an opponent of international financial interests, and pictured three people — Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs and George Soros, the liberal investor — as emblematic of the forces aligned against Mr. Trump. All three of those people are Jewish. In a statement, the League said the ad had — perhaps unintentionally — invoked “subjects that have used for ages. ” Jason D. Greenblatt, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said any suggestion that the ad had been was “completely false and . ” | 1 |
What we all should be doing first thing in the morning A simple, cheap and effective way to jump start your metabolism, weight loss and improve your health
What if I told you that by doing this every day, making it part of your morning routine just like brushing your teeth, would help you to lose weight, flush out toxins, hydrate your body and skin, improve brain function, give you more energy and decrease your appetite, would you do it?
Drinking water upon rising in the morning can have huge health benefits! Some people call it water therapy and has its origination in Ayurvedic medicine. It is purported to help with numerous diseases such as cancer, asthma, high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes and migraines.
To reap the benefits, drink the water upon waking (ideally 45 minutes before you eat) and make it part of your morning routine. Most us are walking around in a dehydrated state. So, start your day off the right way!
Ideally filtered water that is void of chemicals and fluoride is best. I personally like the Berkey filter system as this is affordable for many instead of a whole house system. Most water pitchers are ineffective for removing most of the chemicals in our water but there are a couple good ones out there such as the “Clearly Filtered” pitcher. But even if you don’t have a water filter system, it does not mean you should not drink up.
For most people 16 oz. of water in the morning is the right amount. Others say to drink double this amount. This may be a lot of water to consume for most people first thing in the morning. My suggestion would be to start out with 8 oz. and slowly work your way up to the higher amount and see how you feel. Moderation is key as too little or too much water is never a good thing.
The 8 glasses filled with 8 oz. of water is a myth and no science behind this reasoning. Another simple rule is to divide your body weight in half and drink this amount in ounces. But if you are a large person, this may feel like you are spending your day drinking water!
Instead focus on getting that glass of water first thing in the day and then add in water, herbal teas, fruits and vegetables during the day. If your urine is very pale yellow throughout the day, then you are hydrated. If it is a bright yellow to orange, drink up! Riboflavin, a B vitamin can make your urine a bright yellow. Benefits to drinking water first thing in the morning It can jump start your metabolism
It can increase your metabolism by 24% for the first 90 minutes after consuming that glass of water. Another study showed that it can increase your metabolic rate by 30% for the next 40 minutes after the water is consumed. Hydration This is more important that you think. When dehydrated, we may experience brain fog, lack of energy and metal clarity. Hydrating in the morning can increase the flow of oxygen which is energizing. Hydrating will also help the skin to look younger. Flushes out toxins
Support your kidneys by helping them to flush out toxins and give your body the water it needs first thing in the a.m. Speed up the detox process by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice to your morning water. This is best done prior to brushing your teeth in the morning as the film on your teeth will protect the enamel from the acidity in the lemon juice. Support brain health
Your brain tissue is 75% water. Not having enough water can make you feel tired, drained and can cause mood swings. Prevent you from overeating Just by drinking water you feel full. Studies show that those who consume water before every meal lost an average of 4.5 pounds over a three-month period. That’s with no dieting, not changing your eating habits-just adding in water. Less colds and Flu
Staying hydrated helps to maintain the health of your lymphatic system which also affects how your body fights off infection.
If you are looking for a simple, cheap and effective way to improve your health and stimulate weight loss, then this is it!
Sources
Bauman, E. & Friedlander, J. (2014) Therapeutic Nutrition. CA: Bauman College.
Carroll, A. (8/24/15) No, you do not have to drink 8 glasses of water a day. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have-to-drink-8-glasses-of-water-a-day.html | 0 |
in: General Health , Organic Market Classifieds , Organics Nothing tests your willpower like Halloween. Everything at hand is both delicious and terrible for you. And since it’s just one day, is a day-long sugar binge really all that bad? Unfortunately, yes—because it’s never just that one day. The holiday season is upon us and Halloween marks the beginning of our collective descent into the depths of seasonal, socially-acceptable gluttony. All those surreptitious snacks add up in a big way, and not just in terms of empty calories. They’re full of synthetic dyes, preservatives, artificial flavors, and inflammation-promoting refined sugar. My strongest craving is for peanut butter cups. It just doesn’t feel like Halloween without peanut butter cups, but if you’ve ever read the label, you know better than to eat the store-bought kind. You can do so much better by making your own vegan peanut butter cups instead. Homemade peanut butter cups can have healthier chocolate, and less than half the calories (that doesn’t mean you should eat twice as many!). These peanut butter cups taste great and will satisfy any craving for sweets. In this recipe, I used 60% cocoa dark chocolate and the results were incredibly rich and satisfying, especially if you’re generous with the organic natural peanut butter. Once you’ve eaten peanut butter cups made with high quality (not to mention antioxidant-rich) chocolate, you won’t even want the cheap, mass-produced faux-chocolate and peanut-butterish polyglycerol polyricinoleate products the big candy manufacturers make. The Origin and Politics of Peanut Butter Peanut butter seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon, but peanuts, which are actually a legume, are eaten throughout the world. Originating in eastern Bolivia, the plant spread throughout South America and the Caribbean well before Spanish explorers first noted the “discovery” of peanuts in 1502 on the island of Hispaniola. From here, peanuts traveled back to Spain and then on to Africa. [ 1 ] In the 1700s, peanuts were introduced to the United States by way of the African slave trade. Peanuts were even a food ration for slaves during the treacherous Middle Passage. [ 2 ] Once in the US, peanuts were still regarded as a food for slaves, the poor, and livestock. The peanut didn’t shake this reputation until the Civil War, at which point undernourished Confederate soldiers relied on the humble, fatty, high-protein food. Peanuts became an essential part of Confederate soldiers’ diets, but they did not eat peanut butter. Instead, southerners enjoyed roasted peanuts which are still a favorite southern snack. [ 3 ] We actually have John Harvey Kellogg, known for Kellogg cereal, to thank for expanding the popularity of peanut butter in the 19th century. [ 4 ] Crushed, steamed peanut paste was originally intended as a no-chew, protein-rich food for sanitarium patients. It became popular among the upper classes when wealthy former patients returned home. At this point, peanut butter still hadn’t reached the masses. [ 5 ] This changed with hydrogenation, however. In 1923, Heinz became the first food manufacturer to add hydrogenated oil to peanut butter, which improved shelf stability and solved the oil separation problem. Peanut butter was finally available to everyone, but the hydrogenated oil content kept increasing. Some brands contained as much as 25% hydrogenated oil and only 75% peanut butter. [ 6 ] For 12 years, the FDA and food manufacturers argued over the appropriate percentage of peanuts that peanut butter must contain. Ultimately, peanut butter was defined as a product that contained at least 90% peanuts, and not more than 10% optional ingredients, such as salt, oil, and sugar. As we all now know, the trans fat content in hydrogenated oil is terrible for heart health. [ 6 ] Since trans fats are on their way out of the American food supply, we’ve seen a shift back to “natural” peanut butter, which should only contain crushed peanuts and a little salt. Unfortunately, many peanut butter makers are now adding palm oil, a saturated fat , into their no-stir peanut butter. [ 7 ] I strongly recommend the old-fashioned peanut butter, the kind with oil separation—all you have to do is stir it. It has a better texture and a more peanutty taste than hydrogenated or palm oil peanut butter. Not only is palm oil ecologically unsustainable and mired in controversy, [ 8 , 9 ] it also makes peanut butter greasy and less palatable. I used natural peanut butter (just peanuts and salt) in this recipe and it worked like a dream. Read This Before Working With Chocolate First and foremost—wear an apron, you won’t regret it. Chocolate stained clothes are no joke! Try to avoid using a cloth kitchen towel. Chocolate can be very messy and once it solidifies it’s difficult to wash out; you’re better off using paper towels and lining your work surface with wax paper. Take care that you don’t get ANY water in your chocolate—water ruins chocolate. If you do make this mistake, DO NOT MIX the water into the chocolate, it will get ugly and strangely chunky. Just quickly grab a spoon and scoop out all the water and the afflicted chocolate. Vegan Peanut Butter Cups Recipe Prep time: 20 minutes Cooling time: 15-20 minutes, depending on the chocolate Total time: 35 minutes | 0 |
These days, even wear headphones, and as the holidays approach, retailers are well stocked with brands that claim to be “safe for young ears” or to deliver “100 percent safe listening. ” The devices limit the volume at which sound can be played parents rely on them to prevent children from blasting, say, Rihanna at hazardous levels that could lead to hearing loss. But a new analysis by The Wirecutter, a product recommendations website owned by The New York Times Company, has found that half of 30 sets of children’s headphones tested did not restrict volume to the promised limit. The worst headphones produced sound so loud that it could be hazardous to ears in minutes. “These are terribly important findings,” said Cory Portnuff, a pediatric audiologist at the University of Colorado Hospital who was not involved in the analysis. “Manufacturers are making claims that aren’t accurate. ” The new analysis should be a call to parents who thought technology offered adequate protection, said Dr. Blake Papsin, the chief otolaryngologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. “Headphone manufacturers aren’t interested in the health of your child’s ears,” he said. “They are interested in selling products, and some of them are not good for you. ” Half of to listen to music daily, and nearly of teenagers do, according to a 2015 report with more than 2, 600 participants. Safe listening is a function of both volume and duration: The louder a sound, the less time you should listen to it. It’s not a linear relationship. Eighty decibels is twice as loud as 70 decibels, and 90 decibels is four times louder. Exposure to 100 decibels, about the volume of noise caused by a power lawn mower, is safe for just 15 minutes noise at 108 decibels, however, is safe for less than three minutes. The workplace safety limit for adults, set by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 1998, is 85 decibels for no more than eight hours. But there is no mandatory standard that restricts the maximum sound output for listening devices or headphones sold in the United States. When cranked all the way up, modern portable devices can produce sound levels from 97 to 107 decibels, a 2011 study found. A team at The Wirecutter used two types of sound to test 30 sets of headphones and earbuds with an iPod Touch. First, they played a snippet of Major Lazer’s hit “Cold Water” as a example of the kind of thumping music children listen to all the time. Second, the testers played pink noise, usually used to test the output levels of equipment, to see whether the headphones actually limited volume to 85 decibels. Playing 21 seconds of “Cold Water” at maximum volume, half of the 30 headphones exceeded 85 decibels. The loudest headphones went to 114 decibels. With pink noise, roughly exceeded 85 decibels the loudest was recorded at 108 decibels. Complete results are available at thewirecutter. com. To pinpoint the earbuds that did reduce volume, the Wirecutter team hooked up a computer to a simulated ear with a microphone inside and a coupler that models the acoustics of an ear canal. Brian Fligor, an audiologist who is a member of the World Health Organization’s working group on safe listening devices, advised the team on how to compare its results to data on the workplace limit. (Headphones and earbuds are much closer to the ear, obviously the workplace limit was devised with open areas in mind.) Lauren Dragan, an editor at The Wirecutter, also corralled a children, 3 to 11 years old, to try on each model, choose favorites and compile a “hate list” of ones they would never use. In the end, the overall pick for the children was a Bluetooth model called the Puro BT2200 ($99. 99). The headphones were by both toddlers and tweens, had excellent sound quality, offered some noise cancellation features and adequately restricted volume as long as the cord wasn’t used. The battery lasts an impressive 18 to 22 hours, and the wired connection is used only as a backup. But that cord must be plugged in as labeled, with one particular end to the headphones and the other to the music device. If inserted the wrong way, “it’ll play really loud,” said Brent Butterworth, an audio expert who helped test all the headphones. “If they are using it in Bluetooth mode, it’s impossible to make too loud,” he added. Most of the other models relied on resistors, which impede electrical currents, inside the cord to reduce volume, but they sometimes failed to work. Both of the overall were not Bluetooth, however despite the cords, their maximum volumes did not exceed 85 decibels. Toddlers liked the fit of Onanoff Buddyphones Explore ($29. 99) but will most likely outgrow them, the analysis found, and the sound quality didn’t compare to that of the Puro. The corded pick for older children, ages 4 to 11, was JLab JBuddies Studio ($29. 99). The Wirecutter team also assessed the headphones’ ability to reduce ambient noise. Children often wear headphones in noisy places, like car back seats and planes. Without noise cancellation, the natural tendency is to pump up the volume to hear over the background noise. Only four of the 30 sets of headphones tested blocked a significant amount of low frequency sound similar to that in a car or an airplane cabin. A pair of earbuds — Etymotic ETY Kids 3 ($49) and Puro IEM200 ($29. 99) — did the best job at blocking outside sounds. (The other two were Direct Sound YourTones ($119. 95) and Nabi ($69. 99).) Dr. Papsin recommended buying headphones that both limit volume and cancel outside noise. “It’s worth the money,” he said. But the analysis based its top three on their capacity. “Unless you’re on a plane or in a car, you don’t need to worry as much about isolation,” Ms. Dragan said. Even with headphones that effectively limit maximum sound, supervision is crucial. “ decibels isn’t some magic threshold below which you’re perfectly safe and above which your ears bleed,” Dr. Fligor said. Audiologists offered some tips for listening: First, keep the volume at 60 percent. Second, encourage your child to take breaks every hour to allow the hair cells in the inner ear to rest. Nonstop listening can eventually damage them. Finally, Dr. Jim Battey, the director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, offered this practical rule: If a parent is an arm’s length away, a child wearing headphones should still be able to hear when asked a question. Let that sink in: If they can’t hear you, “that level of noise is unsafe and potentially damaging,” Dr. Battey said. Whether this generation of children suffers greater hearing loss than previous ones is the subject of scientific debate. Studies have shown mixed results. In 2010, a nationally representative study suggested that hearing loss among adolescents had increased to 19. 5 percent in from 14. 9 percent in . But those figures included both loss usually associated with noise and loss linked to ear infections or even impacted earwax. Most of the hearing loss found in that study was minor, and in one ear. In 2011, a study that used the same data but excluded more adolescents found no statistically significant increases in hearing loss overall. But there was an increase in hearing loss among girls. “Boys and men have always had worse hearing,” Dr. Fligor explained, partly because historically they have been more likely to engage in extremely loud activities. The 2011 study in Pediatrics suggested that girls were catching up. Even if there were an indisputable increase in hearing loss among adolescents, it is not at all clear that the main culprit is cranking Skrillex at full blast. Children are exposed to other hazardous noise: lawn mowers, rock concerts, firearms, sporting events and police sirens. “It may be premature to blame music players,” Dr. Portnuff said. Still, he added, “we know that a substantial segment of the population choose hearing levels that put them at risk for hearing loss. ” Dr. Papsin, a father of five, argued that it was too late to put the horse back in the barn — adults are going to let children wear headphones to watch the movie and to stay entertained in a dozen other ways. “I’m not going to get on a high horse as an old man and say, ‘Don’t do this.’ Every parent should have a flight to themselves. ” Still, he said, “you have to know your free time isn’t costing your child lifelong hearing problems. ” | 1 |
A Florida man whom deputies say entered the U. S. illegally allegedly broke into a woman’s home and almost choked her to death Sunday. [Deputies say Juan 36, faces felony charges including attempted murder and burglary in connection with the incident, WFLA reported. Polk County deputies responded to a call at a home in Davenport at around 4:06 a. m. about a suspected burglary. One of the victims told deputies that Orozco got into bed with her while she was asleep and followed her down a hallway as she yelled for help. Orozco allegedly grabbed her neck with both hands and said, “Shut up, shut up or I’m going to kill you. ” The first victim said Orozco squeezed her neck so tight that she could not breathe and felt like she would faint. She added that she was afraid he would kill her. WOFL reports that the victim told authorities that there was no sexual contact between her and the suspect. Another victim heard screaming upon entering the house, according to deputies. The second victim noticed Orozco attempting to flee and tried to capture him, but the suspect pushed the victim away and fled the home through the front door. WFTS reported that deputies found Orozco’s vehicle parked in front of the home. Deputies allege that Orozco entered the residence without permission, choked one victim with the intent to kill her, and intentionally shoved the other victim. “This is an example of an immigrant in our country illegally committing serious and violent crimes,” Sheriff Grady Judd said. “He also has a criminal history, and should have been deported after committing his earlier crimes. ” Orozco has a criminal history that includes five felony charges and two misdemeanors dating back to 2004. Orozco is being held at Polk County Jail without bond, and an ICE hold will be placed on him. | 1 |
posted by Eddie Authorities in North Dakota may be feeling the heat from the international attention the Dakota Access Pipeline is getting. They’re now saying they lack the manpower to remove the encampment of protesters located on federal land near the controversial pipeline. The announcement may signal a softening of the treatment the protesters, up until now, have been receiving. For months now, The Free Thought Project ’s spotlight has been shining on the, some might say, dark and dirty deeds of law enforcement and their treatment of largely Native American peaceful protesters. Attack dogs were unleashed on the protesters in September, injuring six, and an additional 30 protesters, including children, were sprayed with pepper spray. In all, more than 260 people have reportedly been arrested since the protests began in Morton County — over 100 this weekend alone . The sheriff’s office’s announcement comes just two days after The Free Thought Project encouraged readers to contact Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier’s office demanding him to allow for peaceful protest, even providing a link to a petition for his removal. Spokeswoman Donnell Preskey told The Associated Press the department doesn’t “have the manpower” to remove the more than 100 protesters from the property. “We can’t right now,” she said. Preskey said the land belongs to a Texas-based firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and was purchased from a local rancher for an undisclosed price. According to the AP , the Native Americans claim the land is theirs by way of an, “1851 treaty and they won’t leave until the pipeline is stopped.” “We never ceded this land,” said protester Joye Braun. “The $3.8 billion pipeline, most of which has been completed, crosses through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Opponents worry about potential effects on drinking water on the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation and farther downstream on the Missouri River, as well as destruction of cultural artifacts,” writes the AP. The disputed ranch is more than 100 years old and was the first one to be inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. According to the AP, “It is within a half-mile of a larger encampment on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ land where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and hundreds of others have gathered in protest. Protesters do not have a federal permit to be on the corps’ land, but the agency said it wouldn’t evict them due to free speech reasons. Authorities have criticized that decision, saying the site has been a launching point for protests at construction sites in the area.” While the announcement by the Morton County Sheriff’s office may signal a change in tone and the potential for more relaxed police tactics, it remains to be seen. Late Monday, Standing Rock Sioux chairman Dave Archambault II issued the following statement, calling on the Obama Administration’s U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the militant treatment of its peaceful protesters, and asked for an injunction to the pipeline’s construction. Archambault wrote; The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcements agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protestors are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement. Thousands of water protectors have joined the Tribe in solidarity against DAPL, without incident or serious injury. Yet, North Dakota law enforcement have proceeded with a disproportionate response to their nonviolent exercise of their First Amendment rights, even going as far as labeling them rioters and calling their every action illegal. We are disappointed to see that our state and congressional delegations and Gov. Jack Dalrymple have failed to ensure the safety and rights of the citizens engaged in peaceful protests who were arrested on Saturday. Their lack of leadership and commitment to creating a dialogue towards a peaceful solution reflects not only the unjust historical narrative against Native Americans, but a dangerous trend in law enforcement tactics across America. For these reasons, we believe the situation at Standing Rock deserves the immediate and full attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, the DOJ should impose an injunction to all developments at the pipeline site to keep ALL citizens – law enforcement and protestors – safe. The DOJ should be enlisted and expected to investigate the overwhelming reports and videos demonstrating clear strong-arm tactics, abuses and unlawful arrests by law enforcement. The chairman’s request seems to validate many of the reports coming from the field, that peaceful protesters are being labeled as rioters and are not being treated with the dignity they feel they deserve. As The Free Thought Project reported two days ago, many of the protesters are being thrown to the ground, squashed underfoot, strip-searched, and forced to remove sacred hair braids — all considered “strong-arm tactics, abuses, and unlawful,” by Archambault. source: | 0 |
The godfather of whistleblowers: Remembering Phillip Agee, ex-CIA By Thomas C. Mountain Posted on November 2, 2016 by Thomas C. Mountain
Before Edward Snowden and Julian Assange there lived the godfather of whistleblowers, Phillip Agee, Ex-CIA. Phil named names, exposed CIA agents and brought down whole agency operations back when he published his book “Inside the Company” in 1975.
The difference with back then and today’s whistleblowers is that Phil Agee actually exposed CIA undercover agents, some of whom, being involved in covert wars, were killed as a result, something Snowden and Assange differ with Agee over.
From a Third World perspective, Phil Agee did us a lot of good by helping us kick the criminals working for the CIA out of our countries. The undercover agents who were killed were not the good guys Hollywood would have you believe. Kidnapping, torture, disappearances and assassinations is what the CIA does, or oversees.
If you are a political activist in the Third World, you want to know your enemy so you can protect yourself from these criminals secretly draped in the red, white and blue of Yanqui Imperialism.
Here is Africa we have learned from bitter experience that the CIA’s preferred fronts are aid workers, journalists and clergy.
Now if Snowden or Assange would publish the names of the clergy, journalists and aid workers working for the CIA, then maybe we could prevent them from committing their malicious crimes of espionage, you know, save lives and protect our loved ones and fellow countrymen and women.
If people living in the Western countries were shocked by Snowden’s exposé then they were pretty naive. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI never respected anyone’s privacy, least of all the president of the USA. And if you were deemed a threat, like over 200 Black Panthers and American Indian activists, no compunctions about gunning you down.
Exposure of US government spying doesn’t really help us here in the Third World because we are being kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and assassinated. Spying on our mobile phones is quite a way down on the list of our worries.
Hopefully the next generation of whistleblowers will remember Phillip Agee and not just expose crimes but actively prevent any future damage by naming names, exposing agents and destroying operations of the international criminal cartel known as the CIA.
Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist in Eritrea, living and reporting from here since 2006. His speeches, interviews and articles can be seen on Facebook at thomascmountain and he can best be reached at thomascmountain at g mail dot com. This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
An unnamed Obama administration official compared “f — ing weird” David Brock in the Daily Beast to Mugatu. Quite unfairly, writer Asawin Suebsaeng did not give Will Ferrell the chance to respond to the calumnious comparison. [The Media Matters founder seeks to make his Shareblue site (please click on the link — they could use the traffic) “the Breitbart of the Left. ” But as Breitbart News ranks as the 41st most read website in the United States and Shareblue comes in as the 19, 198th, the aspiration comes across more as a delusion — the kind of thing someone who insists “I invented the necktie” would say. Several of Brock’s fellow Democratic operatives wish they could trade him back to the Right. “There’s no question that his groups were the least effective of 2016,” one tells the Daily Beast. “If anything they did harm. ” The gist of the piece centers on whether a guy not in total control of himself should hold any control over the Democratic Party. “I hope Hillary truly understands now how bat$#!+ crazy David Brock is,” Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden told John Podesta in an email exposed by WikiLeaks last summer. The Daily Caller reported in 2012 of a paranoid Brock hiring armed guards to protect him from potential assassins, with this supersecret service allegedly whisking him off a Washington, D. C. roof for fear of invisible Lee Harvey Oswalds lurking in nearby windowsills. In 2002, the Drudge Report alleged that Brock “suffered a breakdown last summer and was committed to the psychiatric ward of Sibley Hospital in Northwest Washington. ” A source, alleging delusions and paranoia, told Drudge, “He spent time in the ‘The Quiet Room,’ there was just a mattress on the floor, and he had some books. He was so tired and stressed. ” Whether Brock belongs in such a place, his boys irregular, a cross between Phil Donahue’s do and Grandma Walton’s coif, certainly does. Aside from the supposed delusions and paranoia, Brock harbors an obsession: Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton once served as the focus of his fixations. But in an act similar to what psychiatrists call “transference,” Brock shifted his monomania from Hillary to the Donald, only in doing so his emotions went from positive to negative (like Mugatu’s dynamic with assistant Todd). Shareblue’s front page currently features nine articles. All nine focus on Donald Trump. A Breitbart of the Left might include sports, celebrity, and gamer stories. Shareblue reads as all Trump all the time. The Donald consumes Brock the way Derek consumes Mugatu. That’s probably why consumers avoid Shareblue the way they did Derelicte. One article wonders if administration language indicating that Trump “receives” and “participates” in his daily briefing really means he does not read it. “Now that he has taken office, it appears that Trump may even be eschewing the normal Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) process, in favor of ” Tommy Christopher writes. Another piece by Alison R. Parker covers a speech by the “demagogue” president “filled with his typical bluster and fearmongering” that announced the withholding of federal funds from sanctuary cities, a “tumultuous and troubling reality. ” Diana E. Anderson, in noting similarities between Bill O’Reilly and the president’s takes on violence in Chicago, concludes, “Fox News appears to have extraordinary power over the new president — and that should scare all of us. ” This is the “Breitbart of the Left”? Less Mugatu, more Milo. | 1 |
From Maine to Florida, Washington State to Southern California, we are featuring six islands that make for ideal escapes — into the past, into nature, into luxury. Check back each day this week for more. I grew up on an island in Maine. My father was a boat builder, and I spent much of my youth exploring rocky headlands, sounds and islets along the coast. From my bedroom window, I could see the metallic blue water of Southwest Harbor. A wharves extended from the shoreline, and a fleet of lobster boats pointed into the wind, swinging from their moorings. It was an exotic place to come of age. Fog bent the light in the morning and made the seawater appear . Wisps of mist curled through the streets in the afternoon and strafed thick stands of pine and spruce. In the winter, nor’easters made the rain gutters sing and blew the front doors in. In the summer, the Atlantic was a wide, blue basin, in constant motion and brushed by the wind. Around the edge of the island were rows of dead pines — and bleached white, their branches reaching to the sea like bones. My notion back then, and still today, is that there is no escape from an island. The borders are finite and the surrounding ocean deep. Waves, wind and flotsam drift in with the breeze and tide, somehow drawn to the island’s singular existence. The thing is, a solitary entity in the middle of a void becomes the void. The sea is everything. The island is a vanishing point on a map. It is disconnected from the outside and, when you inhabit it, it becomes your world. When I finally ventured onto the mainland in my late teens, I hit the highway with a vengeance. I headed for the mountains first, then the cities. I traveled across five continents for 20 years on trains, buses, boats and by foot. The sites and people I saw were fantastic, yet somehow it was the islands that I remembered best: the chalky streets of Naxos, Paros and Delos in the Greek Cyclades atolls that drop 2, 000 feet to the ocean floor in Fiji ridges bracing the Big Island’s volcanic peaks in Hawaii blue holes in the middle of the forest on the Bahamian island of Andros. When I finally came to a stop, it was, of course, on an island. Brooklyn, on the western tip of Long Island. Everything is different on an island: language, weather, food, tradition. There are phrases in the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas that seem to exist only there: “day clean” (dawn) “ ” (gossip) “first fowl crow” (rooster call). The rum in Barbados is special to that rocky gem, and the distinctive sweet coffee can be found in the tiled corner bars in Cuba where habaneros sip it morning and night. Bali’s vibrant batik sarongs are art you can wear, and Maldivian dhon riha tastes like seafood curry concocted in the depths of the ocean. On a globe, every landmass on the planet is an island. But it’s the little atolls that are the most magical. The island of Stromboli, north of Sicily, is shaped like an anthill and blasts white smoke from its volcano all year. Anegada, in the British Virgin Islands, is flat as a dinner plate until you get within a few hundred yards — and palms and coral heads rise from the waves. Malta and Gozo are home to what are likely the oldest standing structures in the world, and on Ibiza, the endless thumping of techno sounds like warring tribes preparing for battle. It is difficult to find hard borders these days. The wilderness has been penetrated from every angle. Airports have opened the corners of the world, and highways traverse every major landmass on the planet. In the old days, it was easy to get lost. You started walking and eventually the trappings of mankind vanished. Or you sailed away on a ship until you couldn’t see land. These days, a traveler 5, 000 miles from home has to turn off his phone, tablet and laptop to disappear. Of all of the wild places you can still escape to, islands are foremost. Many are too small for airports or ferries. Others are too remote. In the South Pacific there are islands so overgrown with mangroves, you have to steer your boat a mile inland before you hit dry land. Others in the French West Indies began as sandbars until seeds and soil morphed into an oasis. You have to walk half a day to reach some of the remote beaches on Kauai. Others, off the coast of Africa, still hold treasure from the days of the Barbary Coast pirate nations. The isolation and serenity that come with cutting a border around the land you occupy are unmatched. New York School poets in the 1950s and ’60s migrated to Eleuthera in the Bahamas to reconnect with the sea and sun. Diane von Furstenberg was on Barry Diller’s yacht, seeking shelter from a storm, when she discovered her future home on nearby Harbour Island, and Paul Gauguin famously repatriated to French Polynesia to escape European civilization and “everything that is artificial and conventional. ” When I was young, I could never find the words to describe that isolation. Maybe I left before they came. A poet named Celia Thaxter, who palled around with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Whittier on the Isles of Shoals on the Hampshire border, left the Shoals only a few times and always came back. Her descriptions and recollections capture island life better than any I’ve ever read. In her memoir, “Among the Isles of Shoals,” she writes of the people, the water, the old fishermen, the ships “ … of the sky and sea, the flitting of the coasters to and fro, the visits of the sunrise and sunset, the changing moon, the northern lights, the constellations that wheel in splendor through the winter night. ” She writes about seeds from her garden that come up a different color on the mainland of brown and swarthy fishermen the keen glance of seafarers how “all the pictures of which I dream are set in this framework of the sea. ” I discovered Thaxter’s writing on a solo sailing trip along the Maine coast a few years ago. My father had passed away and I was making a memorial journey, of sorts, in the first boat he had ever built. I hopped from island to island, finding shelter in tiny hurricane holes and exploring the shoreline of my youth. Every night I’d hunker down in the cockpit and read Thaxter’s book by flashlight. In one of my favorite passages, she recalls an elderly African woman who rowed 10 miles to the Shoals in the middle of the night to look for buried treasure, her divining rod reflecting the starlight, garments fluttering in the midnight wind. Thaxter goes on to describe a boulder that was thrown onto the shore of White Island by the waves layers of fish bones three feet deep on Star Island’s beaches the “mosaic of stone and shell and ” along the shoreline scraps of boats and masts locals gathered for firewood “drowned butterflies, beetles and birds dead boughs of ragged fir trees completely draped with the long, shining ribbon grass that grows in the brackish water near the river mouths. ” One night after reading, I put the book down and surveyed the harbor. The VHF radio crackled below. A storm was blowing in from the southwest. It would blow all night and into tomorrow, the forecaster said. I could see lightning flickering in a few clouds on the horizon. The wind got chilly and picked up a bit. A motorboat circled the harbor and headed for the mainland. I recognized its lines, the open cockpit and the tan bimini top collapsed on the bow. The cherry console and teak decking were familiar — auburn and gold. The boat was a Somes Sound 26, a replica of a Newport launch, 26 feet long with a Chrysler inboard engine. My father had built it years ago. I crawled down below, mystified by the coincidence, the timing, the magic of maritime life. I eventually drifted off to sleep, embraced by the fiberglass hull, the ocean, the harbor and the island protecting everyone in the anchorage from the sea. It was disconcerting to be offshore during a big storm, but far less so tucked in behind the rocky barrier. I dreamed all night of maps and boats and the coast I’d grown up on. By morning, the storm had passed, and I spent a few hours scanning the chart, figuring which island I’d sail to next. | 1 |
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In the wake of a string of completely extraordinary revelations starting this summer by FBI Director James Comey, Senator Warren is now demanding that the FBI release investigatory details about the 14 corporations and 11 individuals which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) referred for criminal prosecution in 2010;
“Your recent actions with regard to the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provide a clear precedent for releasing additional information about the investigation of the parties responsible for the financial crisis.
These new standards present a compelling case for public transparency around the fate of the FCIC referrals. If Secretary Clinton’s email server was of sufficient interest to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then surely the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to the same level of transparency.
As a consequence of the 2008 crash, trillions of dollars in American housing wealth was destroyed. Millions of Americans were touched personally as they lost their homes, their jobs, or both. Hundreds of pension funds were eviscerated, and millions of retirees saw their financial futures wiped out. Congress created the FCIC to examine what went wrong and to determine Whether any individuals or entities deserved law enforcement scrutiny as a result of their actions in this crisis. The FCIC followed the law and sent such referrals to the DOJ, yet not a single senior Wall Street executive has ever been criminally prosecuted.
For the uncounted millions of Americans whose lives were changed forever and for those who are still dealing with the consequences of the crash, I can think of no matter of intense public interest about which the American people deserve the details than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash.”
Until now, the FBI has never, ever released the investigatory file of anyone or any institution it has targeted. However, if the Democratic nominee herself was a bank, then she would have nothing to fear from the FBI.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is laser focused on protecting the American people from shady banks and financial scams, but the newly transparent FBI apparently doesn’t share her concern since those investigations don’t involve Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. To date, no executive has been criminally prosecuted for financial crimes by banks, Wall Street firms and lending institutions which caused the Great Bush Recession’s mass unemployment and foreclosure epidemic.
Of 25 entities named by the FCIC to be criminally investigated , only one actual person has paid a civil penalty, and another person – none other than Daniel Mudd, former CEO of mortgage giant Fannie Mae, was fined — but had his $100,000 penalty paid by the government sponsored enterprise that employed him.
FBI Director James Comey has deployed a massive double standard to protect the criminal financial institutions, handing them a free pass and complete secrecy for collapsing our national economy and wiping out $3 Trillion dollars in home equity, stock equity and savings, while dragging Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton through the mud for Comey’s partisan predilections for transparency when she’s demonstrably done absolutely nothing wrong.
The FBI Director himself admitted in July that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Democratic nominee, yet he himself cannot resist rehashing and releasing the investigatory details in public over and over. Releasing anything about an investigation, or even delivering an actual indictment, actually violates Department of Justice policy to remain silent in the 60 days before an election. It’s been described by former top Justice Department officials as the “difference between being independent and flying solo.”
Elizabeth is right. How long will the FBI wait to deliver transparency to the American people eight years after their jobs, homes and savings were attacked by irresponsible bankers?
Once the FBI completes disclosing those investigatory files, then how long will it take for them to deliver indictments and justice to the men and women who caused the Great Recession?
Neither can happen soon enough. For now, he needs to stop his partisan witch-hunt against Hillary and start going after the real crook.s | 0 |
VIDEO : Trump Surges to Tie Clinton in BLUE STATE Colorado VIDEO : Trump Surges to Tie Clinton in BLUE STATE Colorado Videos By TruthFeedNews November 3, 2016
WOW! Trump has surged to tie Clinton in the Blue State of Colorado.
Colorado is a state Hillary HAS to win and a Trump upset would be CATASTROPHIC for Clinton.
Watch the video: This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 0 |
There’s a new gadget that you can count on to soon zoom to the top of people’s wish lists: the Nintendo Switch. The Japanese game company is releasing the Switch, a $300 video game console, on Friday. For months, the device has been generating buzz because it is two gadgets in one — both a console that can sit in your living room and one that you can easily take with you on the go — making it extremely versatile. Last week, I took possession of a Switch from Nintendo to get a closer look at what the hype was all about. At home, I put the Switch on a dock to play games on my television. Over the weekend, I took the Switch off the dock for a trip to Los Angeles and used the gadget’s embedded screen and attached controllers to play games while out and about. Playing with the Switch was a blast. The hardware is well designed and capable of delivering powerful graphics. And early Switch games I tested made clever use of the included motion controllers. So what’s to lose? There won’t be many games available for the Switch on Day 1, with only 10 titles releasing alongside the device on Friday. There were also some bugs in the unit I tested, including one that made the device fail to power on for a day. The Switch also lacks some important features like compatibility with Bluetooth earphones, and is mediocre as a portable gaming device, with short battery life and an O. K. screen. And don’t forget: The Switch’s predecessor, Wii U, was also a multipurpose console that had a gamepad for portable use when it was released in 2012. That product flopped, so buying a Nintendo system today is a risk compared with buying a Sony PlayStation 4 or a Microsoft Xbox One. Still, getting the Switch is a risk worth taking. Its games offer an intimate form of gameplay unseen on rival consoles, and over all the system’s versatility makes it worth the money. What I hated about Wii U was how much space it took up. Not only was there a console box, but there was also a superfluous, bulky touch pad controller, along with all the Wiimotes, the rectangular controllers, which had to be charged between gaming sessions. In a recent purge, I packed the system and its jungle of power cables into a trash bag and gave it to a friend without even asking for a burrito in return. With the Switch, Nintendo appears to have learned as much as it could from the negative feedback about Wii U. The setup of the Switch is a breeze: You use two cables to connect a dock to your television and a power outlet. From there, you mount the Switch to the dock so the image shows up on your TV. On the sides of the Switch are strips with physical buttons, which are actually detachable wireless controllers called . Press a button to remove them, and voilà, each strip is a controller for two players. If you want to take the Switch somewhere, just reattach the and remove the device from the dock. The Switch hardware felt sturdy and well made. The controllers smoothly slide on and off the device, and docking the Switch is as easy as dropping it in and letting it snap in place. There is no better way to get acclimated to the Switch than playing the game . The game, which is generally designed for two players, asks each gamer to take a and use its motion sensors to compete in various absurd activities. There are more than two dozen minigames in including one in which players compete while milking a virtual cow. While milking the creature, the players are instructed to lock eyes. The move is not necessary to win the game, but it illustrates how much of a novelty eye contact has become in an era that has people glued to smartphone screens, reading tablets, televisions and computers. Another challenge in has a player swinging a katana blade and the other slapping the controller to catch the blade. A boxing minigame has players competing to throw straight punches, hooks and uppercuts as quickly as possible. After milking cows, swinging samurai swords and drawing guns on each other, adults who try Switch may remember the joys of the game they played in grade school. Children may learn for the first time that interaction will always beat a Snapchat video, text message or emoji. The Switch accommodates loners, too. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, takes players through a vast open world, in which our hero, Link, prepares to battle the villain Ganon, solving puzzles, riding horses and climbing mountains along the way. The graphics, music and tricky puzzles make it stunning and addictive. Naturally, there are problems that Nintendo needs to fix with the Switch. In one instance, after my Switch was put in sleep mode, it failed to turn back on, even after the device had been charging for hours. This problem persisted for an entire day, and only after the device was left unplugged overnight did it wake back up with a icon. I suspect the software froze while the gadget was asleep, making it impossible to reboot until after the battery ran down. Nintendo said that it was looking into the issue and that a software update on Friday would improve overall system stability. The Switch is also not a great portable. Measuring about 9. 5 inches wide, it is cumbersome to hold for long durations. The picture quality on the screen is unremarkable: When being used as a portable, the system displays a lower pixel resolution than when it is docked for use on a TV. It also gets lots of glare in a living room. Finally, battery life was short. I was able to play three hours of Breath of the Wild before the Switch ran out of power. That is dismal compared with a Nintendo 3DS XL, a portable gaming device, which has about six hours of juice while gaming. Most people would be better off buying a Switch after Nintendo bolsters the system with a larger library of games. But the early signs for the Switch are promising, with coming titles like Super Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2 and a new version of Minecraft coming out eventually. Gaming enthusiasts won’t want to miss out on the Switch. Though it may be an average portable gaming device, the Switch excels as a powerful and compelling home console. With Nintendo also already has a killer app that is a for gamers of all skill levels. In fact, a friend who helped me test professed that she had never won at any video games. So when we played the boxing game, I was confident I would win after years of taking professional boxing classes. Yet when the points were tallied up, I was shocked to see she had beaten me to most of the punches. The biggest deterrent to buying the Switch could be how tough it will be to get your hands on one. Nintendo said that it planned to make two million systems available worldwide this month — but if my fun experience with it is any indication, it might be hard to find one left on store shelves. | 1 |
When I was 12, my family piled into a Honda Odyssey and headed west for a summer exploring the national parks. That trip changed my life. I tasted the freedom of the open road and experienced the wonders of America’s wild places. I was hooked. Last August, I set out on an expanded version of that adventure, seeking to spend 10 months visiting all the national parks in the contiguous United States (I made it to 45 of the 47). I hoped the trip, which I chronicled on a blog, chasingcairns. com, would teach me more about wilderness, America … and myself. I knew I would learn from every moment and every mile, but only if I paid attention to what was happening around me. So I adopted a series of daily practices — I called them my “roadtripology rules” — to force myself to be as deliberate as possible about the trip. This might seem paradoxical. Aren’t road trips supposed to be as spontaneous as possible? Of course. My rules sought to enhance spontaneity by making sure I noticed it when it happened. They made a big difference for my trip, and they should work for other travelers as well. I had no room in my shoestring budget for speeding tickets. More important, I wanted to take my time. Speed limits in the national parks are notoriously conservative, often ranging from 10 to 30 m. p. h. in popular areas. Drivers racing along at 55 m. p. h. gawking at El Capitan or Half Dome endanger wildlife and people alike. By following posted speed limits, I detached myself from the compulsive urgency so often associated with road travel. I set my cruise control and avoided the passing lane. In doing so, I experienced the freedom to focus. I no longer worried about catching the taillights up ahead. Instead, I channeled my energy toward appreciating the world around me. Whether cruising through the autumn foliage of the Blue Ridge Parkway or passing beneath towering sequoias in Kings Canyon, I rarely felt the temptation to accelerate. I made peace with my pace, accepting that I would get there when I got there. The parks are full of stories. They include the early struggles to protect the sublime wonders of Yellowstone and Yosemite, and the slower recognition that the quieter beauties of the Everglades and Congaree were also worth preserving. They include controversial actions to dispossess rural farmers of their land in Shenandoah and the challenges of making Mesa Verde’s Puebloan kivas accessible to tourists in a respectful way. To find these stories, I tailored my audiobook and podcast selections to focus on the place or region through which I was traveling. In Arches, that meant listening to Edward Abbey’s tales in “Desert Solitaire” about his seasons working in the park. At Gettysburg, Michael Shaara’s “Killer Angels” honored the ultimate sacrifice of so many soldiers. (I also visited dozens of national historic sites on my trip Gettysburg was one.) I also never missed an opportunity to explore park visitor centers, talk with rangers and watch introductory films. My tour made the labyrinthine passages of Wind Cave in South Dakota tell stories I never would have heard on my own. In the Great Smoky Mountains, a little extra time in the visitor center led me to spectacular waterfalls far from the beaten path. Taking 45 minutes to do this at each park gave me a historical, cultural and ecological foundation unique to that area, and enhanced everything I did there. In the age of Google Maps, the spirit of adventure can be sidelined by blindly following the seemingly omniscient blue line on the glowing screens in front of us. When I permit myself to follow that blue line, I sometimes lose track of where I am and forget the bigger picture. I was not going to let that happen on this trip. From Day 1, my trusty National Geographic Road Atlas rode shotgun. Its colorful pages tempted me with side trips at every turn, and never led me astray. Without that atlas, I would just have headed south after leaving Death Valley for Los Angeles. Instead, the map guided me north toward Manzanar. What I found there surprised me. Formerly a World War II internment camp for this deserted landscape in the Owens Valley was a stark reminder of the stories we often choose to forget. It was one of the most memorable detours of my entire trip, but the blue line of a digital map would have ignored it. I tried to connect with someone every day: a handshake here, a hug there and conversation everywhere. These interactions helped me understand the many reasons people visit and care about the national parks — reasons often quite different from my own. At each park, I listened to personal narratives of solitude, tradition, adventure, family, spirituality. A restaurant manager from Santa Barbara, Calif. sought scenery and serenity in Yosemite. A climber in Joshua Tree came looking for a home and a challenge. No two stories were alike. Though we often think of a park visit as a solitary experience, there is so much to be gained from sharing it with other people. Groups of travelers come and go, but you can find community if you take the time to look, and you should. I never would have found the Chasm of Doom if I hadn’t introduced myself to the climbers camped among the boulders of Hidden Valley. As we squeezed beneath the rock and lowered ourselves into cracks, we experienced a different side of Joshua Tree. Gone were the wide horizons and desert heat. In the Chasm, claustrophobic shadow ruled. I knew I could take years to fully explore the national parks. I didn’t have that kind of time. Instead, I vowed to spend at least two days in every park, observing it in as many ways as I could: rain or shine, dawn to dusk. I chose to take my time, knowing that each moment I lingered would deepen my experience. I made time for the unpredictable. In Saguaro, I watched an unexpected dust storm blow in under the brutal heat of the midday sun. One night at Great Sand Dunes, I surfed dark waves of sand under the brilliant light of the Milky Way. In Glacier, I snowshoed through frosty pines while fresh snow immediately erased my tracks. I did not necessarily seek out these experiences. I just made sure I had time to take them in whenever a park offered them. So much of what we find in the national parks seems visual by default: It’s what we go to see. We’re always on the lookout for something new and sublime. But making the visual our priority can blind us to the depth of multidimensional reality. By employing each of my senses, I expanded my understanding of the world around me. I savored the unadulterated waters of Lake Superior. I felt the sweat on my palms as I gripped the chains on the precipitous hike up Angels Landing in Zion. I listened to the drone of insects in the Everglades. I sniffed the stale, earthy air inside Mammoth Cave. William Least was definitely on to something when he decided to travel the “blue highways” of America. I too found myself drawn to the local roads that take their time meandering. Interstates rush straight ahead, a kind of travel I wanted to avoid. Local roads reached the parks just as effectively, and also encouraged me to visit farm stands up and down the East Coast, to chat with a cafe owner in a small town just outside Crater Lake, and to feel tiny and alone amid the endless valleys of Nevada. Every park has its famous highlights: Mather Overlook in Grand Canyon, Cadillac Mountain in Acadia, Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns. Tourists flock to such places, and are right to do so. They are undeniably glorious. But I wanted also to explore places that don’t make it into many guidebooks. These were often where I found myself confronting what felt like the deeper realities of a park. I spent a night shivering all alone at the bottom of Black Canyon, humbled by the raw power of the Gunnison River beside me. In Grand Teton, I sat silent in the Chapel of the Transfiguration, meditating on its marriage of natural beauty and spirituality. In these moments I felt personally connected with a place. Sharing views from the rim of the Grand Canyon with thousands of other travelers leaves a powerful impression, but I will never forget my solo hike along the Tonto Platform, far below the crowds on the rim. As the shadow of the setting sun spread across the parched sea of blackbrush before me, my footsteps and breath fell into pace with the warm canyon winds. For those nine hours, I knew there was nowhere else in the universe that I should be. I spent much of the last year traveling at 55 m. p. h. and grew accustomed to life at that speed. But I also relished any opportunity to slow down. Early on, I traveled over 500 miles across most of Michigan in just one day. Later, on California’s Lost Coast, I hiked just over five miles in a day. During an extended rock climb in Arches near the end of my trip, I think I traveled a couple hundred feet in eight hours. What do I remember from each of those days? I can taste the fresh vegetables I devoured outside Traverse City, Mich. as I listened to Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire. ” I can hear the yelps of seals, the cries of hawks, and the crash of waves on rock and sand alike. I can still feel the dull pain in my knees and back as I shimmied up a tight sandstone chimney toward the top of Off Balance Rock in Arches. Road, Trail Ridge Road and Skyline Drive have been beckoning motorists to their parks since they were built in the 1930s. They form part of a network of roads that allow millions to visit and appreciate public lands. But even the most ardent motorist can benefit from unbuckling that seatbelt and getting away from the car. I found that leaving the confines of my vehicle brought me into contact with the natural forces that shape the parks, processes we need to experience if we want to understand them. The icy snowfields of Mount Rainier and the dizzying heat of Death Valley are muffled by the protections our cars offer, yet they are precisely what make these places so wild. My plan had always been that the last park on my journey would be Yellowstone — the nation’s first. I visited it on my 25th birthday. It will surely be among the most memorable of my entire life, even though no one I met that day knew it was my birthday. It also proved to be the capstone of my trip. That day, I realized that I no longer needed to actively focus on my rules. They were now ingrained in my every decision. I could move spontaneously from experience to experience, living my values with each step. At Grand Prismatic Spring, I swapped stories of the road with a traveling photographer. Near Old Faithful, I had a close call with a grizzly being chased (by a ranger) right at me. I ate lunch overlooking the multihued Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. At Mammoth Hot Springs, I followed a herd of bison as they wandered through the steaming landscape. In the Lamar Valley, I watched a wolf pack settling down after picking over a deer carcass. Before I went to bed, I lounged in the Boiling River, shifting my body to find the optimal blend of frigid and scalding water. To me, it felt like the perfect end to my — or any — adventure. My constant companion on this journey was a 2008 atomic blue Honda Element named Sam. Behind Sam’s boxy exterior, I had a palatial 75 cubic feet of living space (and an “attic” in my Yakima roof box). After combing the internet for design ideas, I settled on a system of interlocking birch boxes to create a solid bedframe. Within the boxes, I organized a wardrobe, a modular kitchen and a mess of camping gear. After my mom and I constructed the boxes, we transformed the stark birch and plastic interior into a home. A pair of plush camping mattresses with a fitted sheet finished off the bed, and blackout panels with bungee curtains added a bit of privacy. Over the next 10 months, Sam proved a stalwart companion. Together, we bounced down more than a few dirt roads, trundled up snowy mountains, slept in parking lots and saw a lot of America. He gave me a home no matter where I was. And 32, 000 miles later, we are still going strong. | 1 |
On Oct. 20, 1981, a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N. Y. Before it was over, two guards were shot and two police officers — one black and one white — were gunned down at a roadblock. The crime was one of the last spasms of ’ violence. To the militants, it was an “expropriation” for something they called the Republic of New Afrika, a place that existed mainly in their fevered dreams. Judith Clark was one of four people arrested that day for armed robbery and murder. She was 31, a veteran of the white left who traveled the radical arc from student protest to the Weathermen to the fringes beyond. A new single mother, she kissed her infant daughter goodbye that morning, promising to be home soon. No one ever accused Clark of holding or firing a gun that deadly afternoon. But she was there, a willing participant, at the wheel of a tan Honda getaway car. Over the next two years while she awaited trial in jail, Clark became a fiercer warrior than she was on the day of the robbery. During court hearings, she told the judge she was a “freedom fighter” who didn’t recognize the right of imperialist courts to try her. She called court officers “fascist dogs!” when they clashed with her supporters. Her Kathy Boudin, arrested at the scene of the shootings after having been a fugitive since a 1970 bomb blast in a Greenwich Village town house killed three of her Weather Underground comrades, sat mutely beside her. At trial, Clark and two other defendants — David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a former Black Panther — boycotted the courtroom, listening to the testimony from their basement cells. The defendants insisted on representing themselves no one witnesses on their behalf. When Clark appeared in court to make a closing argument, she merely confirmed her guilt. “Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,” she told the jury. Judge David Ritter of the Orange County Court sentenced Clark to a minimum of 75 years in prison. He saw no chance for future rehabilitation. “They hold society in contempt and have no respect for human life,” he said. Clark wore a mocking grin that day, the same one she wore when photographers snapped her picture the night of the crime. “One thing about Judith Clark I will never forget,” says John Hanchar, whose uncle, a Nyack Police sergeant named Edward O’Grady, was killed, “was her smiling face as she was led out of the police station in Nyack into the back of that car. ” On Oct. 6, 1983, clenching a fist of solidarity, Clark was sent to the prison for women at Bedford Hills in Westchester County to begin the rest of her life. Like many who knew Judy Clark before that terrible October day, I wanted nothing to do with her after the crime. I shuddered at the same photos that chilled the victims’ families. Clark was the former sweetheart of a good friend. She went to Brooklyn’s Midwood High School my friend Allan to Erasmus Hall. They met as student civil rights activists walking picket lines outside Woolworth’s in Flatbush. But after being expelled from the University of Chicago for student protests, Clark moved steadily to the left’s outer reaches. She was part of the wild tribe of radicals who smashed windows in the streets of Chicago in a 1969 antiwar demonstration called Days of Rage. Charged with riot, she went underground only to be captured by the F. B. I. while sitting in a Manhattan movie theater. She served nine months in prison. By the time I met her in the ’70s, she was a stalwart of something called the May 19th Communist Organization. A dogmatic offshoot of the Weathermen, May 19th’s members believed that a revolution in America was in the offing. The correct role for white radicals, they held, was to follow that lead, wherever it took them. Even those of us who cared about the issues the May 19th crowd trumpeted — racism, poor housing, deaths in police custody — were often suspect for not showing proper fervor. The Judy Clark I knew had two distinct sides. She was capable of warmth and joy. But her smile could vanish in a moment, replaced by an accusing finger. “How many people did you kill in Vietnam?” was her sudden jab across a Park Slope kitchen table at a friend roiled by nightmares after his return from the war. Stunned, he shook his head. “Judy, it was a war,” he said. “Yes, and you were the invading army,” she insisted. “How many did you kill?” The bright, laughing woman was someone you wanted to like. The rigid radical made it tough. Then the Brink’s robbery occurred, and there was no point in trying anymore. In the years after she disappeared behind prison gates, occasional word came from friends who visited her that Clark was different than she was during her days of rage. I had my doubts: could anyone so stubborn and unrepentant really change? Eventually I drove up to Bedford Hills to see for myself. On my first trip, in 2006, Clark strode into the sunny visitors’ room wearing a wide grin, one quickly returned by the guard overseeing the area and by inmates seated at nearby tables. Her dark hair had gone mostly gray, but otherwise she looked much the way I remembered her: she is small with brown eyes, an olive complexion, a tiny pock mark on her forehead left over from childhood chicken pox. She had been in prison for 25 years. Her voice still carried the accent of her Brooklyn youth. It was softer now, though, without the righteousness that I remembered from even the simplest exchanges. I returned several more times over the years, sitting at the same table near a playroom where inmates spent time with their children. On a recent visit in June, Clark arrived with a black Labrador on a leash trotting beside her. The Lab was the eighth dog Clark trained under a program in which the pups stay with inmates for about a year before becoming service dogs, mostly for disabled war veterans and for agencies. The dog this former terrorist trained would soon be sniffing out bombs like those her old Weathermen pals once planted. As we spoke, a pair of young girls came over to look at the dog. Clark had him raise his paw in greeting. The girls tittered. Their mothers joined them. “I told them to introduce themselves to you,” one inmate said. Clark leaned close and grasped each girl by a shoulder. “Your mothers talk about you all the time,” she said. “They talk about how much they love you and have such great stories. ” The girls smiled. Most of the women at Bedford Hills are parents. Clark knows a lot about the heartache of leaving a child behind. Her daughter, Harriet, was 11 months old at the time of her arrest. On the day of the Brink’s heist, Clark told me, she was hesitant on several counts, starting with her baby at home. A gay, single woman, Clark had decided that she wanted to have a child, and a fellow militant served as surrogate father. When Harriet was born in November 1980, Clark was “deliriously happy. ” It was, she said, an utterly personal experience, a break from the demands of her dogmabound sect. The commune welcomed children, as long as they were brought up in proper collective fashion. But the doting motherhood Clark displayed was considered a bourgeois indulgence. “I was accused of losing sight of my responsibilities,” she said. Her parents were also eager to be involved with their new granddaughter, and Clark often brought the baby to visit them — another warning sign to her associates. Clark’s parents were once revolutionaries themselves. Joe and Ruth Clark were Communists but broke with the party in the 1950s. Much of their disenchantment stemmed from three harsh years they spent in the Soviet Union when Judy and her brother, Andy, were small children and their father was foreign editor of The Daily Worker. Ruth Clark went on to become an expert in research and is one of the people credited with inventing political . Joe Clark, to Judy’s dismay, became vehemently raging at former friends. Neither had any patience for their daughter’s rabid politics. In Judy’s view, she was the keeper of the flame that flickered out in her parents’ lives. Anything less than total commitment to the cause was betrayal. “Armed struggle was happening all over the world, and we thought we had to bring it to the motherland,” she said. But Harriet’s birth rocked her convictions. “I felt myself shifting,” Clark said. “I worried that if I was going to sustain a relationship to my child, I was going to have to change my loyalties and my lifestyle. ” She was petrified of being separated from her child but even more terrified of appearing timid before her comrades, whose approval she craved. Agreeing to participate in the Brink’s robbery, she hoped, would quiet her critics enough to let her spend more time with her daughter. She had one hesitation that she was too embarrassed to admit and about which her partners never bothered to ask: Clark, who was supposed to follow the gang members in a backup car, wasn’t much of a driver. She convinced herself that it didn’t matter, that the heist would be called off, as had several earlier attempts. But she was under no illusions about what she signed on for. “I knew what I was driving a car for,” she told me. “I knew the whole situation. ” In Clark’s version of the events of that day, she donned a wig and then followed a small caravan north from New York City to Nanuet. She parked, as ordered, in a corner of a large mall. She was too far away to see the attack on the armored car and the blasts that killed one guard and left another in a pool of blood as the shooters grabbed $1. 6 million from the back of the truck. When the gang’s van tore out of the mall, she raced after it to a nearby parking lot. Six gunmen abandoned the van and climbed into the back of a piloted by Gilbert and Boudin. Someone dumped a moneybag into the trunk of Clark’s car. As she followed the her biggest fear was getting lost. When the caravan came to a crossroad leading to an entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway, she saw the police blocking traffic. An officer carrying a shotgun waved the over. Clark drove past the ramp and stopped. “I was in this terrified, frozen state,” she said. She considered just driving away. “I can’t do that,” she told herself. “I am not supposed to leave people. ” She heard gunfire behind her. Suddenly “two people jump into my car and scream at me to drive. ” She quickly drove ahead, up a curving mountain road, no idea where she was headed. When a police car pursued them, she drove faster. “I am so out of my league,” she remembers thinking. Near Nyack, she turned down a street that plunged steeply toward the Hudson. The road ended abruptly at North Broadway, where Victorian homes overlook the river. Clark tried to make a turn but crashed into a concrete wall. “I spun out of control,” she said. Clark’s shoulder popped out of its socket — a chronic ailment since childhood. She was squirming in pain, trying to bang it back into place, when she heard a policeman barking orders to come out. The shouts came from the South Nyack police chief, Alan Colsey, who had chased Clark’s car over the mountain. After Clark and her passengers were taken into custody, a pistol was found behind the front seat and a clip of bullets in Clark’s purse. Colsey thought she was reaching for the gun as she twisted in her seat. Clark said she never knew it was there. “I sort of rolled out,” she said. “I didn’t want to be shot. I was scared but also relieved it was over. ” In jail, all she could think was that she had let down her friends and had to make up for it. “I was not a good freedom fighter,” she told herself, “but I can be a good captive freedom fighter. ” Her role models were Puerto Rican radicals, linked to a group responsible for a string of deadly bombings, who declared themselves prisoners of war after being arrested. She didn’t think about the enormous sentences they had received. She also tried not to think about having left her baby. “I would just shatter,” she said, “so I turned it off. ” Clark’s father went to the Rockland County jail, where he screamed at her: “You want to talk about a black revolutionary? I’ll tell you who a black revolutionary is. It’s A. Philip Randolph, not these thugs. Not killing a black man. ” She tried to tune him out. Two weeks later, her parents brought Harriet to visit. Physical contact was forbidden, and she wasn’t allowed to touch the baby, who was just learning to walk. “Every time she started toddling toward me, the person watching would say, ‘If she touches you, this visit is terminated.’ ” Harriet cried in confusion. To Clark, the cruelty only reinforced her ideas about the oppressive system. “I avoided thinking about how I had put my daughter in this horrible situation. ” Under tight security, Clark and Boudin, who had her own baby with Gilbert, passed the time talking about their children, making small books for them and, when allowed, crocheting clothes and dolls. Eventually, Clark said, Boudin told her that she wanted to “cut her losses,” a move supported by Boudin’s father, the civil liberties lawyer Leonard Boudin. But Clark couldn’t be swayed. Her parents dispatched the prominent radical lawyer Arthur Kinoy to urge her to participate in her defense. She refused. When her trial began in the summer of 1983, Joe and Ruth Clark couldn’t bear to attend. A family friend observed, reporting back on the hopeless fiasco playing out in court. Clark’s biggest fear was that others in the group would see how fearful she was. “I was terrified of my own terror,” she said. Sitting in her basement cell, Clark harbored secret doubts about her strategy. A childlike notion kept crossing her mind: This can’t be happening. After the judge sentenced Clark along with Gilbert and Balagoon to spend their lives in prison, Boudin pleaded guilty and received 20 years to life she was paroled in 2003 and reunited with her son, who was 14 months old at the time of the crime. Clark missed that chance. Short of the death penalty, which the district attorney lamented was not available, her sentence was the harshest one possible. After Clark arrived at Bedford Hills in a convoy, she was put in solitary confinement for a month. She emerged the same stubborn, rebel she was in court. Sister Elaine Roulet, a nun who founded the prison’s children’s center and worked there for 35 years, noted how the new prisoner walked with her hands clenched in tight fists. “When Judy came, she was a very angry person,” Roulet says. Inmate 83G0313, as Clark was known, was considered a major security risk, her every step carefully tracked. There was good cause for concern. Clark’s radical crew was known for plots like the 1979 prison breakout of Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader. At one point, the prison superintendent, Elaine Lord, was assigned a guard. Twice, Lord had to leave prison grounds as a precaution. Clark’s fury seemed to ebb when she was with her daughter. On weekends, her comrades from the West Side commune where Harriet was still living would drive her the 38 miles to Bedford. During those visits, Clark played and read to her in the children’s center. She tried to convince herself that Harriet was safe and secure being brought up by her former comrades with a mix of love and proper politics. But the communal home was under siege: one by one, members were being jailed for refusing to cooperate with grand juries. Day to day, it was unclear who was caring for Harriet. During the summer of 1985, her parents sued for custody of the nearly Harriet. At one point, they picked her up at the West Side commune and went into hiding for several days. Joe Clark called the prison superintendent to tell her what they had done. “You are going to have hell on your hands,” he warned Lord. Judy was irate. Roulet urged Clark to focus on her daughter. She also understood the grandparents’ concern. “They didn’t want Harriet to grow up to be a Judy,” Roulet said. That same year, letters from Clark describing the prison’s layout and operations were discovered when a pair of fugitives were captured. For plotting escape, Clark was placed in solitary for two years, one of the longest stretches any Bedford Hills prisoner had ever received. At first, this was just another notch in the radical belt, an endurance test for a committed militant. Judy was still allowed to see Harriet during weekly visits. Clark worried that if her parents won custody, a judge might bar her from seeing her child. “I felt bereft,” she said. But her concerns turned out to be unwarranted: after they gained custody, Clark’s retired father brought his granddaughter on weekly visits to the prison. Clark wouldn’t speak to him. While she and Harriet played, the grandfather, with other reading material banned, sat in a corner rocking chair poring over the children’s books. In the summer of 1986, while Clark was in solitary, someone said something to her that finally broke through to her. Gilda Zwerman, a sociologist who was studying activists, didn’t mince words. “I understand how you did this to yourself,” she told Clark. “What I don’t understand is how you did this to your daughter. ” Clark tried to look defiant, but her lip twitched, and she began to quietly weep. Zwerman nudged her further. “You can’t cry for yourself and Harriet,” she said, “and not see that the children of the men who were killed cried the same way for their fathers. ” It was the first time Clark had broken down in front of another person since her arrest. She returned to her cell shaken but oddly relieved. “I felt like I had taken off a layer of armor,” she said. “I no longer felt like I had all the answers. ” Clark says that solitary — known as SHU for Special Housing Unit — was filled with mentally ill women. “They were howling at the moon, eating their mattresses and setting fires. ” She found herself speaking with the guards. “I would talk about my life and my daughter and the situation. ” The exchanges with people in uniform, Clark said, “made me have to get out of the fog of the rhetoric and think about those affected by this crime. ” She began keeping a journal. She had used her radicalism, she realized, much the way prisoners around her used drugs, as a means to avoid confronting her own doubts. She walled herself off in the safety of doctrine. “I was beginning to say these politics are crazy. I’ve experienced so much loss, and created so much loss, for the sake of an illusion. ” She consumed books on psychology and wrote poetry. Solitary was grueling, she said. “But as horrible as it felt, I felt more alive than I had been. It was like coming out of this cave and being able to see again and feel. ” Helping to pull her into the world was her daughter. “Harriet was the first person I fully engaged with on her terms,” Clark said, “not on what I thought was right or my agenda. ” They communicated mostly through play, especially hide and seek. The little girl enlisted everyone in the children’s center as she hid from the mother who herself had gone missing from her daily life. “I would say: ‘Where’s Harriet? I thought Harriet was coming to see me. I’m so sad.’ It was this whole drama, and then she’d burst out laughing. ” When Harriet was 6, she made an announcement during a visit: “Mommy,” she said, “Grandpa taught me about the Ten Commandments. You committed a sin. ” Clark felt her breath catch as she waited to hear her child tell of the robbery and the deaths that went with it. Instead, the girl continued, “You stole something. ” Clark exhaled. “Yes,” she answered. “I committed a terrible, terrible sin. And I feel really bad, because I sinned and I am away from you. ” The full story emerged in bits and pieces. “Why are you in jail?” Harriet would ask. “Were you scared?” And the hardest one: “Were you thinking about me?” They devised ways to overcome their separation. Mother and daughter kept copies of the same book on birds. Clark would describe those she saw from her cell window Harriet would find them in the pages. Clark spun tales of gremlins who lived in the prison walls, able to come and go as they pleased. She had them make mischief in prison locations her daughter heard about but couldn’t visit — the mess hall and living area. The children’s center also became the neutral ground where Clark began rebuilding her relationship with her father. As they ate lunch in the playroom, Clark was polite, for her daughter’s sake. But guarded conversations gradually became warm exchanges. They talked about Harriet, their health, Judy’s prison conditions. Clark’s mother rarely visited at that time. “She couldn’t handle the jail,” Clark’s brother, Andy, says. But Andy marveled at the changes in his sister. “It was like crystal shattering,” he says. “The whole facade that had been built around her just started to come apart. ” In September 1987, Clark was released from solitary. Enjoying her relative freedom, she plunged into prison activities, attending Jewish services for the first time. Then one day, without warning or explanation, she was transferred to a federal prison in Arizona. Her parents made half a dozen visits with Harriet while also lobbying for her return. After a year, she was transferred back to Bedford Hills. On her return, Judy wrote to her parents, thanking them for their help and for taking care of Harriet. A few weeks later, on Christmas Day 1988, her father died of a heart attack. “My arrest kind of broke my father’s heart,” Clark told me. When the Jewish High Holy days arrived the following year, she lighted candles and said Kaddish for him. “I was thinking of the meaning of the Day of Atonement. I spent the whole 10 days of the holidays alone, walking and thinking about the crime and about my father, about that time when he came and he yelled. ” Alone in the prison chapel, she said aloud the names of the men who died in the robbery: Peter Paige, the Brink’s guard, and the policemen Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady. She was 39 years old, grieving for her own father. “And yet,” she said, “there were nine children who were a lot younger than me grieving for their fathers. And I was responsible for that. There was the human toll. It was a terrible truth, but it was my truth. ” Slowly she began building a life behind bars. Through programs for inmates, she earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science followed by a master’s in psychology. When the government ended tuition aid for inmates, she helped persuade local colleges to offer affordable courses. As AIDS arrived in the prison, terrifying inmates and correction officers alike, she calmed things down by educating everyone. In 1994, a newsletter published one of her poems and referred to her as a political prisoner. Clark wrote to the editor disagreeing, saying that she felt no pride in what she’d done. “I feel only enormous regret, sorrow and remorse. ” Harriet Clark turned 31 in November, the same age her mother was when she was arrested. She’s a short, slim woman with dark hair, bangs and a sunny smile. Her schoolgirl’s voice belies a rush of reflections that sound wise beyond her years. For someone who has never known her parent outside of prison, she is remarkably buoyant. She grew up in New York City, attending P. S. 87 on West 78th Street and Stuyvesant High School. When she went West to Stanford University, she and her mother kept in touch via weekly phone calls and long letters. Friends marveled at the number she received. She got an M. F. A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won several writing fellowships, including a Stegner. She now teaches at Stanford. She’s working on a novel, part of which takes place in prison. But she’s tried to steer clear of caricatures about ’60s radicals. “The one character that will never appear in anything I write,” she told me, “is a stubborn, passionate, rebellious brunet woman in an army jacket and a bandanna. ” On a walk along the Brooklyn waterfront this summer when she was in town to visit her mother, she talked about her childhood and how prison was part of the natural order of things. She was 9 when a British film crew doing a documentary on Bedford Hills asked Harriet if she missed her mother. Not really, she answered. “This is how I know my mother. ” The prison’s visiting center was her second living room. “When they got a new vending machine, it felt like new furniture in my house,” Harriet said. The other children she met visiting their inmate moms fell into two groups: those who lost them to prison “within memory or before memory. ” She was puzzled when some were anguished that their mothers weren’t home for holidays and family events. Harriet had never had that experience to miss. “My mother lived in prison,” she explained. “That was always the reality going backward and going forward. ” Harriet and her mother spent hours making creations with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks. “I have no memories of not having my mother’s undivided attention,” she said. Later they moved on to Battleship and Monopoly. Her mother was such an enthusiastic playmate that other children asked to join. “I spent half my time shooing away other kids,” Harriet said. Prison also offered unique ways for a little girl to spite her mother. “I knew if I was making more noise than I should that the officers would yell at us and I’d put my mother at risk,” she said. Sometimes Harriet would dart past the line on the floor in front of the vending machines beyond which prisoners are not allowed to step. “If you get me, you’ll be in trouble,” she’d say. Once, when Judy refused Harriet candy from the machines, the daughter fired back that when she grew up she’d let her own kids eat all they wanted. “What else will you do?” her mother asked. “I’m sure as heck not going to leave them,” Harriet answered. As she grew older, Harriet became protective of her mother. She cringed at the ways inmates were the ones treated like children, denied money, keys, silverware. When her mother phoned her at home, she would always wrap up the conversation before the automated message that the call would end in 60 seconds. “I wanted to deny their control,” she said. She also walked a delicate line with her grandmother, who reared her after her grandfather died. Fiercely proud, Ruth Clark, who died in 1997, instructed Harriet not to tell people that her mother was in prison. “I wouldn’t talk about it, even to close friends,” Harriet said. She kept her two lives strictly separate, treasuring her weekly visits to Bedford as private time. In her grandmother’s apartment on West End Avenue she surrounded herself with her mother’s homemade gifts. “I slept under a blanket my mother made me, drank orange juice out of a cup she made, decorated my walls with her clay figurines, objects that made me think of her. ” Her mother’s wrenching guilt over her crime had been such a large part of her childhood, Harriet told me, that it took her a long time to recognize that the sentence Clark is serving stems less from her actual role in the deaths than her reckless conduct in court. She has often pictured her mother sitting in the basement cell during the trial: “I wonder, Were you thinking about the fact that you would never come home to me if you did this?” Yet over the years, she has realized that her relationship to her mother is closer than that of many people she knows. “The advice my mother has given me in life is the advice I live by,” she said. “The values she has instilled in me is how I move through this world. ” It’s what got her started writing fiction. “When I had frustrations with people,” she said, “my mother would ask me to imagine my way into their lives, so I would have an openness and compassion for them. ” In July 2010, one of Clark’s lawyers, Sara Bennett, delivered hundreds of letters to Gov. David A. Paterson asking for clemency. Bennett told me Clark’s name kept coming up when she talked to other clients at Bedford Hills. “They’d say, ‘There’s this woman here, Judy Clark, and she has gotten me to see how I have to live my life and take responsibility.’ ” Bennett, a former Legal Aid lawyer, was shocked that Clark was serving 75 years. “I’ve had so many clients who committed really brutal crimes — actually killed people — and got 25 to life, or 50 to life. Hers is so out of proportion. ” Among those supporting Clark’s release was Elaine Lord, who retired as Bedford Hills superintendent after 22 years at the prison. “I watched her change into one of the most perceptive, thoughtful, helpful and profound human beings that I have ever known, either inside or outside of a prison,” Lord wrote the governor. Robert Dennison, a veteran parole officer and member of the Conservative Party who served as state parole board chairman under Gov. George E. Pataki, also wrote in support. Dennison met Clark during a tense 2005 meeting with Bedford Hills inmates angry over repeated parole denials. The meeting got loud. “Judy Clark was the one person who was sort of the voice of reason,” he recalled. In his letter to Paterson, he called her “the most worthy candidate for clemency that I’ve ever seen. ” To me, he added, “if you look at what she did and all the deals the government made with other people involved, she sort of got left holding the bag. ” The rest of the Brink’s suspects were rounded up months and years after the robbery and tried in federal court. Cecil Ferguson, known as Chui, and Edward Joseph, known as Jamal, who were accused of being among the robbers, were convicted only as accessories for hiding a Brink’s fugitive and served 7½ and 5½ years, respectively. Joseph is now a successful playwright and a professor at Columbia University. Silvia Baraldini, a fellow May 19th member who went to trial with other Brink’s defendants, got 43 years for related crimes with the gang, including the Assata Shakur jailbreak. A federal inmate, she was released in 1999 under President Clinton to her native Italy, which freed her in 2006. Another May 19th leader, Susan Rosenberg, was indicted but never tried for the Brink’s shootout. She was serving a federal sentence — after being caught with a carload of explosives and weapons — when Clinton released her in 2001 as one of his last presidential acts. David Gilbert is still in prison Kuwasi Balagoon died while serving his sentence. Mutulu Shakur was described as the Brink’s mastermind. “He picked it, he planned it, he orchestrated it and he executed it,” prosecutors told his jury. Shakur got 60 years. Under federal rules, his projected release date is February 2016. He’ll be 65. Shakur’s attorneys claim that he’s likely to remain in prison much longer. He’ll still be out well before Clark. Under her state sentence of 75 years, her earliest parole date is 2056. She would be 107. For most relatives and supporters of the victims, this is as it should be. When I spoke with John Hanchar, who was in eighth grade when his uncle, Edward O’Grady, was killed, he told me that the Web site maintained by Clark’s friends is misleading. “She goes to great lengths to minimize her role in the crime,” he said. Hanchar recalled his aunt trying to keep up a brave front that night. “I remember her going down to the laundry room, and then we just heard this wail. She’d opened the dryer and pulled out his police uniforms. ” Hanchar is now a Rockland County police officer. “Where Eddie was killed is right in my patrol sector,” he said. “I see that memorial every day. ” The spot by the Thruway entrance has plaques and flags memorializing the deaths. A ceremony is held there annually. On the 30th anniversary last October, several hundred people attended. The deaths, Edwin Day, a Rockland County legislator and an told me, were “like a permanent knife in the heart of the community this never went away. ” Waverly Brown, then the only black officer on Nyack’s force, was the other policeman killed. Frank Olivier, raised in a Nyack housing project and now a corrections officer at the Rockland County jail, recalled growing up under Brown’s watch. “We were his kids,” Olivier said. “He would make sure we were doing our homework, he would come to our track meets. With Officer Brown, you knew you had a chance. ” When he and his friends heard Brown was killed, “everybody was in a rage,” he said. But Olivier now feels differently about Judith Clark. He wrote one of the letters that Bennett delivered to the governor. “I know that people change after a while. Communities heal after a while. This lady has been in there 30 years. When has she paid her debt?” In December 2010, a few days before Governor Paterson’s term ended, he met with a small delegation of Clark’s supporters led by Bennett and Dennison. He told them that his staff advised against her release and that he was in agreement. Paterson wouldn’t talk to me about it, but he recently told Jim Dwyer, a Times columnist, that he feared being “tarred and feathered” if he released Clark. Last June, I went to meet some of the people whose wrath the governor feared at a breakfast in Nyack for a scholarship fund in memory of officers Brown and O’Grady. Most were still bitter over Boudin’s release and felt that Clark deserved to remain in prison. Did they believe such criminals could be rehabilitated? “I know, they’re all wonderful,” Bill Ryan, a former New York City Police lieutenant who lives nearby, responded sarcastically. “They’re teaching little children and working with the handicapped and unwed mothers. ” His remarks brought knowing smiles around the table. It’s a skepticism shared by many. When I first started visiting Clark, I also wondered whether her transformation was a calculated effort to get out of prison. Over time I’ve come to see her differently. A dozen former inmates told me stories of how Clark helped them sort out their own troubles while they served time with her. Sheila Ryan, a former N. Y. P. D. investigator who spent 10 years at Bedford for killing the man she claimed raped her, told me that when she first met Clark in prison in the 1980s, she wanted nothing to do with her. “I thought, My God, you’re responsible for killing cops, and here you are laughing?” But she has changed her mind. “She is truly remorseful and sorry for what happened,” she said. As Elaine Lord, the former Bedford Hills superintendent told me, prisons should rehabilitate, not just warehouse. And Clark is a model for what’s possible in prison. “She is not the person who was involved in that crime,” Lord said. “She’s a different person. We have a right to be angry at them, but it doesn’t change anything. There has to be an end. ” Not long ago, Clark spoke at a Bedford Hills event. Her theme was the Book of Jonah. Like Jonah, she told the audience, she had spent years in behavior and had been cast overboard into a sea for her actions. Like Jonah, she found rescue in the belly of the whale, in her case behind bars. “In prison,” she said, “I learned who I was. ” | 1 |
The Hill newspaper has taken the rare step of removing an article mocking Hollywood celebrity Lindsay Lohan’s dalliance with Islam following a flurry of from Islamic advocates and a Washington Post reporter. [The mocking article, headlined “Lindsay Lohan May Have Made Her Worst Life Choice Yet,” mocked Lohan for her public endorsements of Islam, and warned her that multiple other converts have subsequently gotten themselves jailed or killed while trying to implement Islam’s many calls for jihad against . Lindsay Lohan has sparked widespread speculation that she has converted to Islam by deleting everything on her Instagram account except for the Arabic greeting “Alaikum salam” (upon you be peace) … So what’s not to like? Converts and prospective converts are never told about how so many converts to Islam end up as jihad terrorists, most notably including John Walker Lindh, the “Marin County Mujahid” who was discovered fighting alongside the Taliban and against American troops in Afghanistan, and Adam Gadahn, the “revolting geek of mass proportions” who, like Lindh, discovered Islam through rap music and black grievance theater (neither were black, but both wished they were) read the Qur’an and realized that one way to please Allah was to wage jihad against infidels, and set out to do just that. … Gadahn, Lindh, and numerous other converts illustrate the appeal of conversion to Islam among the psychically marginal, who find comfort in the fact that Islam has a rule (and sometimes many rules) for every imaginable human activity, relieving them of the responsibility of having to make tough moral and ethical decisions themselves. The article was penned by Robert Spencer, the prolific and author of many books about Islam, including book, Did Muhammed Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins. Spencer also runs the Jihad Watch website, and frequently asks Islamic advocates to engage in public debate. As he repeatedly says, Spencer does not argue that all Muslims are radicals or jihadis. Instead, he simply argues that the written, hegemonic doctrines of orthodox Islam encourage many Muslims to provide charity to each other, and to tolerate, support or even demonstrate hostility and aggression towards . Similarly, while not all Christians are pacifist, saintly or charitable, orthodox Christian doctrines encourage believers to promote generosity towards others and to use violence only as a last resort. In his article for The Hill, Spencer criticized Islam by referring to commandments in the Koran, which Islam says is the perfectly copied transcript of their deity’s unchangeable, commandments. Lohan has fueled this kind of speculation [about a possible conversion to Islam] in the past, saying in 2015: “My very close friends, who have been there for me a lot, in London are Saudi and they gave me the Qur’an and I brought it to New York because I was learning. It opened doors for me to experience spiritually, to find another true meaning. This is who I am. ” She didn’t say what “true meaning” she found in Qur’anic injunctions sanctioning (Qur’an 4:34) devaluing of women’s testimony (Qur’an 2:282) and inheritance rights (Qur’an 4:11) allowance for polygamy (Qur’an 4:3) or mandate of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers (Qur’an 9:29) but that’s just the beginning of the absurdity. The Hill says “The Hill stands alone in delivering solid, and objective reporting on the business of Washington, covering the of Congress, as well as the nexus between politics and business. The Hill serves to connect the players, define the issues and influence the way Washington’s decision makers view the debate. ” The Hill declined to explain its decision to Breitbart. When asked about TheHill‘s takedown, Spencer told Breitbart, “I had never been published there before. I don’t care about Lohan and never would have written about her, but they asked me to. ” Before this episode, Spencer said he has never seen one of his articles removed after publication. “No, I haven’t had an article published and then taken down before. ” Spencer pins the blame on Bob Cusack, The Hill‘s . “Sharia cowardice at @thehill,” Spencer Tweeted. Spencer also called for Cusack’s firing. “It’s time to start a pushback for truth and free speech: Fire Fascist Bob!” It’s time to start a pushback for truth and free speech: Fire Fascist Bob! @BobCusack @thehill https: . pic. twitter. — Robert Spencer (@jihadwatchRS) January 19, 2017, Spencer also scoffed at the Muslims’ complaints about his article, noting that his opponents have not mounted a criticism of his article’s facts, logic and fairness. “The Left traffics in demonization and marginalization of its foes, as it cannot meet them on an even playing field intellectually,” he told Breitbart. Among those celebrating the removal of the article was the Washington Post‘s correspondent covering Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, Liz Sly. Sly called Spencer’s article “rabidly Islamophobic. ” A phobia is defined as “an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something,” and is regarded as a mental illness. The Hill (@thehill) has removed that rabidly Islamophobic article on Lindsay Lohan from its website. Good for them https: . — Liz Sly (@LizSly) January 19, 2017, Breitbart asked Sly at the Washington Post to explain her comments, and received this Tweet in response. FYI I didn’t receive any request for comment, but I stand by my tweets. @andrewbostom @thehill @NeilMunroDC, — Liz Sly (@LizSly) January 19, 2017, Islamic advocates assailed Spencer’s s article via Twitter, without providing any rebuttals against Spencer’s statements or arguments about Islam. . @thehill — why did you ask anti Muslim hatemonger Robert Spencer to write this piece on Lindsay Lohan Islam? https: . — Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) January 18, 2017, . @thehill commissions massive Islamophobe Robert Spencer to chastise Lindsay Lohan for potentially becoming Muslim. How is this OK? pic. twitter. — Sara Yasin (@missyasin) January 18, 2017, @RubaAlHassani True and it’s also written by Robert Spencer, — آل خليفة كلاب خبيثة (@shaykhdaniel) January 19, 2017, Does @thehill just publish anything? This is total #Islamophobic garbage, very low. Robert Spencer is a know bigot: https: . — Michael K. (@MichaelD_Kaplan) January 18, 2017, Wow. @thehill lets notorious islamophobic asshole Robert Spencer go on their site. https: . — Amarnath Amarasingam (@AmarAmarasingam) January 18, 2017, What an extraordinarily bigoted piece for such a respected publication as @thehill. The mainstreaming of hate https: . — Liz Sly (@LizSly) January 18, 2017, Dean Obeidallah, a columnist at The Daily Beast who has helped raise funds for the Council on Relations (CAIR) also weighed in on the incident. CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted in a operation. Hey @bobcusack just saw Robert Spencer’s vile article on ur publication @thehill Next will u give + racists platform, — (((DeanObeidallah))) (@Deanofcomedy) January 18, 2017, The CAIR group is so closely entwined with Islamists and with jihadis that court documents and news reports show that at least five of its people — either board members, employees or former employees — have been jailed or repatriated from the United States for various financial and offenses. The record highlighted by critics also shows that CAIR was named an unindicted in a criminal effort to deliver $12 million to the HAMAS jihad group, that it was founded with $490, 000 from HAMAS, and that the FBI bans meetings with CAIR officials. Multiple translations of the Koran have been posted here, here and here on the Internet by orthodox Islamic advocates, allowing Americans to individually study Islam’ combination of religion and ideology. Spencer an 2015 art exhibition in Texas, featuring conventional cartoons of the Islamic prophet. Two armed Muslims attacked the exhibition, but were quickly killed by Spencer’s security guards before they could do more harm. Spencer hired the security guards because he expected Islam’s doctrines would push some Muslims to attack his art show. Since then, Spencer has continued his writing and debating about Islam’s jihad doctrine. Breitbart. com has published several articles by Spencer, and has quoted him numerous times. The Spencer article, and the readers’ comments, are archived here. The article has been updated with a reply from Sly at the Washington Post. | 1 |
This speech should have been made at Ft. McKinley National Cemetery outside of Manila. I'm sure the dead (both Americans and Filipinos) would have loved to hear it. | 0 |
link a reply to: ghostrager Two YouTubers I know of, I'm not mentioning who they are, have been promoting the notion he's dead. It didn't ring true for me because if he was I believe it would be known by all very quickly via the internet. He has close friends and family who I doubt would want it to be kept secret. That's my perception anyway. He really is isolated as I've mentioned before. I hope he makes it through. He's brilliant and has done a great service for regular people in a frightful world based upon lies, ugly secrets and deceptions. | 0 |
John Carney, Breitbart News finance and economics editor, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the Dow’s hitting 21, 000 for the first time after President Trump’s address to Congress. [Marlow asked what Dow 21, 000 means to the average person. Carney replied that “people’s retirement savings [and] investment portfolios, have gone up tremendously. ” “We’ve seen a tremendous rally — in fact, the fastest ever, or it tied the fastest ever gain on record. You might remember just a little while ago, we were talking about Dow 20, 000, and then in just a few weeks, we’ve hit Dow 21, 000. Huge, tremendous rally,” Carney said. Marlow asked if President Trump’s “gloating” and “braggadocio” over the stock market rally could backfire. “Yeah, look, you’ve got to be careful, right? Because if you own the rally, and it reverses, you’re going to end up owning the slump, as well,” Carney cautioned. “Stock markets don’t only go up. They’re not only going to go up during the Trump administration. So far, they have — the stock market’s actually up 15 percent since Election Day, which is gigantic. It’s up five percent just over the last few weeks. But history is very clear: stock markets go up, and they go down. You’ve got to be a little cautious about this. ” “A lot of the force behind the rally is a lot of optimism about what’s going to happen with taxes, with trade, with regulation, but all that stuff has to go through Congress, and Congress can be a very messy place,” he noted. “We don’t know a lot of the details about what’s going to happen with Trump’s tax plan. Even if we knew the details about what he wants, that’ll get changed when it goes to Congress. People could be disappointed. The Federal Reserve could raise interest rates ibn fact, they’re likely to. That could also end up putting the brakes on the rally and perhaps causing stocks to go the other way. ” “Yeah, you’ve got to be cautious when you start bragging about the stock market going up,” he advised. Marlow asked if Met Life’s “too big to fail” case would be a major test of Trump’s agenda, a subject Carney is writing about at length for Breitbart News. “Met Life is one of the three largest insurance companies in the United States. AIG and Prudential are the others,” Carney explained. “Under the Obama administration, a financial regulatory body called FSOC labeled them as ‘too big to fail.’ The official label is a SIFI, Systemically Important Financial Institution. Met Life fought it, won in court, and the court struck down that designation. ” “The Obama administration appealed that case and said, ‘Even though the court struck it down, we would like the appeals court to put that label back on them as too big to fail.’ The court hasn’t decided anything yet. The Trump administration can, if it wants to, rescind the appeal — in other words, ask the court, ‘Hey, never mind. We’re okay with the original decision’ and go forward with that,” he continued. “This will be a test. The president has said he wants to slow down the enormous growth of the regulatory state. This is an opportunity to do that, but there’s a ticking clock on it. Once the appeals court makes its decision, you can’t sort of wave it away the way you can right now, and you’ll end up having to appeal it perhaps to the Supreme Court,” he said. “There’s an opportunity to slow the growth of the regulatory state. The question is whether or not they’re going to take it now,” Carney concluded. Marlow noted that Trump has been criticized as a “champion of Wall Street,” even though he ran a populist campaign. “Look, I think that there are multiple ways of thinking about somebody as a ‘champion for Wall Street,’” Carney argued. “The Trump administration so far, at least in terms of the stock market, has been very good for a lot of these big financial institutions — but it’s also been very good for the smaller businesses. If you look at the broader index, the SP 500 or the Russell 2000, those stocks have also done very well. ” “Even though it entails putting more regulation on them, it also sort of puts a patina of protection around them and says these are the institutions that the United States thinks are so important it will never let them fail,” he said. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
October 31, 2016
Parent groups and petting zoos have been outraged by reports that the ex-Education Secretary may have abandoned Boris Johnson to his own devices in the Foreign Office. Having already acquired a reputation for leaving children unattended, Mr. Gove has shown gross negligence by allowing a Boris to play with flammable items such as matches, Brexit negotiations and the nuclear launch codes.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, age 52 ¾, is best described as ‘an awkward child’ and whose clumsy antics on zip wires and with women not his wife, are well-documented. Staff at the Foreign Office attest to seeing Mr. Johnson wandering around in his pyjamas and in a confused state, asking: ‘What’s Article 50? Where’s Nanny? And who’s up for some rumpy pumpy?’
While the law does allow for a man-child of Boris’ age to be left unattended, the Animals Act 1971 makes Mr. Gove ‘strictly liable’ for any damage caused. An NSPCC spokesman said: ‘You wouldn’t leave a dog unattended for an extended period of time and the same applies to Boris. A dog would quickly get destressed, start defecating and gnawing at his own balls…and the same applies to Boris’.
NSPCC guidelines suggest that someone unable to find a hair brush in the morning, would struggle in an emergency or with interacting someone ‘a bit ethnic’. In the meantime Mr. Johnson is being sheltered in Battersea Dogs Home until he can be properly house-trained; staff commented: ‘Boris isn’t just for Xmas or the referendum – he’s going to chewing up the furniture and UK trade agreements for years to come’. 31st, 2016 by Wrenfoe Wrenfoe Politics | 0 |
We Are Change
By Bradford Richardson – The Washington Times – Monday, October 24, 2016
Students at the University of California, Berkeley held a day of protest on Friday to demand the creation of additional “safe spaces” for transgender and nonwhite students, during which a human chain was formed on a main campus artery to prevent white students from getting to class.
The demonstrators were caught on video blocking Berkeley’s Sather Gate, holding large banners advocating the creation of physical spaces segregated by race and gender identity, including one that read “Fight 4 Spaces of Color.”
Protesters can be heard shouting “Go around!” to white students who attempt to go through the blockade, while students of color are greeted with calls of “Let him through!”
Students turned away by the mob are later shown filing through trees and ducking under branches in order to cross Strawberry Creek, which runs underneath the bridge. Protesting students went on to march through the Berkeley Student Union, chanting and disrupting students who are studying.
One student, who was not a part of the protest, tells the video-maker that the demonstrators are “being quite childish.”
“I agree with the right to protest, but disrupting the peace of others is not OK,” he says.
The group later occupies the school store, chanting “Students Over Profits!” They place an “eviction notice” on the store, which claims the university “wrongly allocated this two-story facility to third-party corporations, keeping in line with its intensifying legacy of prioritizing financial profit over student needs.”
Demonstrators finally made their way to an intersection in front of campus, where students blocked traffic and chanted, “Whose university? Our university!”
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(Before It's News)
(image credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty)
( The Real Agenda News ) More details have emerged about the never ending levels of corruption among the DNC, the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign, as a result of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas’ investigation.
Corrupt practices go from promoting seemingly harmless campaigns to have people dressed as ducks at Trump rallies to collusion between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization Americans United for Change.
In the third video put out by Project Veritas, Hillary’s cohorts confess how they managed to coordinate with her campaign and the DNC to set up what can be described at the very least as provocative moves to get the Trump campaign in trouble and to have the corrupt mainstream media cover the events while blaming Trump for violent outbursts outside his rallies.
As we learned from the previous two videos, it was the Clinton campaign itself the one using agent provocateurs to cause violence outside Trump rallies as these agents disguised themselves as Bernie Sanders’ followers.
In his second video, James O’Keefe showed how the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, hire operatives to successfully carry out commit voter fraud on a massive scale.
Scott Foval, who has since been fired, admits that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years.
In his first video, Rigging the Election – Video I: Clinton Campaign and DNC Incite Violence at Trump Rallies, O’Keefe showed how second and third parties associated with the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, were responsible for violence and attacks on Trump supporters all over the country.
As we said before, the veil of corruption that surrounds the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party continues to fall and people can easily see what is behind their fake progressive and fake liberal masks.
The post It is Time For Hillary Clinton To Duck And Go (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal . | 0 |
Oh golly , they put a fifty dollar security camera on a copy of a drone from 1970. Ain't they clever. | 0 |
RIO DE JANEIRO — An Olympic gold medal in soccer for Brazil will not undo the embarrassment of the 2014 World Cup. Perhaps nothing will. But Saturday provided a dramatic recovery, a tense rekindling of joy where before there was national shame. Maracanã Stadium filled with celebration and relief as Brazil won its first Olympic soccer title, defeating Germany, on penalty kicks after the match remained tied at through 120 minutes. The victory provided some redemption from, if not erasure of, a humiliating defeat to Die Mannschaft at home in the semifinals of the World Cup. When the Brazilian goalkeeper Weverton dived to his left to save a penalty kick by Germany’s Nils Petersen, the anxiety of the evening exploded into liberation. Neymar, the star forward, then approached the ball for the winning penalty kick. He did a stutter step then shot high and assuredly. Brazil has won five World Cups but never until that moment of release an Olympic gold medal. Neymar went to his knees, then onto his stomach, his hands covering his face, struggling to control his emotions. His teammates, who had been on their knees at midfield, as if praying, began running toward him in a jubilant sprint. “Champions!” roared the crowd of about 78, 000 at Maracanã. A Brazilian fan ran from the stands into the group hug of players. He wore a national flag like a cape, as if superhero effort had been needed to reverse the traumatic outcome against Germany two years ago. “Nothing will replace 7 to 1,” said Roberto Artiaga, 39, a Brazilian fan. “It’s impossible. But it eases the pain. We will hurt a little less. ” Saturday’s victory came with far different rosters and under far different circumstances from the 2014 World Cup. The Olympic tournament is for players under 23 years of age, with three older players allowed per team. It is a youth tournament, so that FIFA, soccer’s governing body, can protect the singularity of the World Cup, which it considers the most important international sporting event. Neymar, 24, sat out that shocking loss to Germany in 2014 with a broken vertebra in his back. Matthias Ginter, a central defender who made one of Germany’s penalty kicks Saturday, was the youngest player on Germany’s World Cup roster but did not leave the bench. “Nobody here played in that final,” Weverton, the Brazilian goalkeeper told reporters before Saturday’s match. “What happened in the past is in the past. Nothing is going to change that, even if we win by seven goals. We have a chance to create our own history. ” The Olympics might be a lesser tournament, but Saturday’s match possessed the same stressed, edgy feel of a World Cup final. “We are very excited, very scared and afraid, too,” Mariana Canuto, 33, a Brazilian fan, said beforehand. In the 27th minute, Neymar curled a free kick off the underside of the crossbar and into the upper left corner, giving Brazil a lead. But this exorcism would not come easily. In the 59th minute, Max Meyer swiveled on a crossing pass and tied the score at with a low, hard shot. Still, Brazil kept its resolve at Maracanã, a storied arena, but also the site of one of Brazil’s most heartbreaking defeats, a loss to Uruguay in the decisive game of the 1950 World Cup before a crowd reported to be 199, 854. The stadium has been downsized, along with certainty about Brazil’s superiority as a soccer nation. That World Cup loss to Germany seemed to rob Brazil of its assurance that individual skill and flair could trump collective organization by an opponent. Then, in June, Brazil bombed out of Copa America in group play and Dunga was fired as national coach. Many have begun to compare Brazilian soccer to the country’s ongoing political and economic crises, with corruption and stagnant management in the national soccer federation and a development program that exports young players overseas. Meanwhile, the longing and heartache in Brazil have been refracted through a lens of German success. Germany won the 2014 World Cup at Maracanã, defeating Lionel Messi and Argentina by in the final. The German women’s team won an Olympic gold medal there this week and the German men were seeking gold of their own Saturday. Mauro Beting, a commentator and reporter for Fox Sports Brasil, said before the tournament that Brazil’s players would start tentatively, knowing that “in every beginning of a game, every time they make a mistake, they will think, ‘It’s coming. ’” Even if Brazil won a gold medal, Beting projected, “At the same time that the team will be running the victory lap, thinking, ‘We finally won the Olympics,’ fans in Maracanã will say, ‘You’ve lost .’ Neymar, you can be the star of the Olymics, but in the World Cup you were not there. ’” Brazilian fans are like that, he said. “Soccer fans are cruel and were most cruel on the defeat to Germany,” Beting said. Before the tournament, the news media criticized Neymar, Brazil’s captain, for partying too much while on vacation during Copa America. And after Brazil failed to score a goal during its first two Olympic matches, some fans mocked him with “missing” posters. Others screamed “Marta!” as if they preferred the star of the Brazilian women’s team. But fans can be as forgiving as they are cruel. Neymar scored a goal and a penalty kick on Saturday, and kept Brazil from losing its confidence. The crowd chanted his name in appreciation, and he became the first Brazilian captain to wear an Olympic gold medal around his neck. “Brazil is five times champion of the World Cup and we had never had a gold medal before, so against any team it would have been great,” said Manoel Santos, 56, a Brazilian fan. “But, O. K. being against Germany made it that much sweeter. ” | 1 |
Because insanity is doing the same thing every four years, and expecting different results.
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Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton created Truthstream Media.com as an outlet to examine the news, place it in a broader context, uncover the deceptions, pierce through the fabric of illusions, grasp the underlying factors, know the real enemy, unshackle from the system, and begin to imagine the path towards taking back our lives, one step at a time, so that one day we might truly be free… | 0 |
Donald J. Trump’s transition team has asked federal border protection officials for guidance on where a new wall separating the United States from Mexico — a signature promise of Mr. Trump’s campaign — can be erected, according to a Democratic congressman from Texas who opposes the idea. But the officials exploring possible paths for such a barrier also appear to be considering fencing and other options short of the “big, beautiful wall” that Mr. Trump regularly vowed to erect, at Mexico’s expense, along a border of more than 1, 900 miles. The discussions with federal border officials, along with separate talks with city officials in Laredo, Tex. one of the busiest crossings, come as aides to Mr. Trump maintain that construction of a border wall will be a top priority of his administration. In an interview, Representative Henry Cuellar, whose district includes a stretch of border and reaches 150 miles north, to San Antonio, said that the chief patrol agents from two border sectors in the state had contacted him last week. They said they were doing so at the request of the incoming administration, Mr. Cuellar said, and solicited his ideas for where such a wall, or a fence, should be built. “I’m one of the few congressmen who doesn’t have a fence in his area,” Mr. Cuellar said. “They asked us to put some locations down, so we talked about areas they’d proposed and some infrastructure, whether it’s a wall or fencing. ” The chief patrol agents, whom an aide to Mr. Cuellar identified as Mario Martinez of the Laredo sector and Manuel Padilla Jr. of the Rio Grande Valley sector, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, Carlos Diaz. According to Mr. Cuellar, the agents said they had argued against the transition team’s request, and shared his view that it would be impossible to wall or fence off Laredo, a city of 255, 000 and the busiest inland port on the American side of the border. They said the transition team had insisted. “The Trump headquarters came back and said no,” Mr. Cuellar said he was told. “The Trump people wanted to see suggestions as to where a fence or wall could be put. ” A spokesman for the transition, Jason Miller, declined to comment. Mr. Cuellar was not the only Texas elected official approached by border officials about where to place a new barrier. The mayor of Laredo, Pete Saenz, said in an interview that officials from the Border Patrol’s Laredo sector had approached the city manager last week with plans for removing vegetation and installing additional fencing, lighting, roads, surveillance equipment and other security measures along portions of the border. The plan did not mention a wall, said Mr. Saenz, a Democrat, which he said was “frankly, a big relief. ” But he said it included details about fencing that would be placed for short distances along key parts of the city on the border, including a water plant. Though it could gratify Mr. Trump’s political supporters, erecting a new barrier would carry great significance in Laredo, which is across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas, Mexico. It has developed close ties with its sister city and grown into a trade hub. Walling off Laredo, Mr. Cuellar said, would damage the flow of commerce, among other things. “It’s a solution to a problem,” he said. But both he and Mr. Saenz sounded less than adamantly opposed to additional border fences. Some fencing already stands in vast portions of the border between Texas and Mexico, Mr. Saenz noted. “I would have no problem with it if it’s strategically placed and it’s well designed,” Mr. Saenz said. “In other words, if it doesn’t look too prisonlike. I think if we had a road, possibly a fence, and then lighting, I think that would help. I don’t think the folks here would be too, too upset. “But the nature of a huge wall, concrete and that sort of thing, is upsetting,” he continued. “We have a very close relationship with Mexico, especially the commerce that comes to our city, and a huge wall would obviously be offensive to Mexico and to the people that do business with Mexico here. ” Mr. Saenz recalled that the Border Patrol years ago installed steel fencing along the perimeter of a community college on the border, which he said had deterred illegal border crossers from coming onto campus. “To be honest with you, I think we were happy with it,” he said. “I think it took care of the problem. ” In the weeks since he won the presidency, Mr. Trump has dropped his vow to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, while boasting that it had been an effective campaign tactic, and he has softened his posture on whether to deport the more than 700, 000 people in the country illegally who entered the United States as children. But no promise by Mr. Trump came to symbolize his campaign more than his call for a wall with Mexico to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants, and his top aides, including Reince Priebus, who is to serve as his chief of staff, say it remains a priority — though they have offered no further information on how a wall would be financed. At the same time, border migration is shifting: Mexicans, whom Mr. Trump demonized during his campaign, are leaving the United States in greater numbers than they are arriving, according to the Pew Research Center. But Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries are pouring across the border, often welcoming arrest by the Border Patrol as a first step toward seeking asylum. “We have the lowest northbound apprehensions in modern history,” despite spending a record $19. 5 billion on border enforcement, said Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from El Paso. “Additional walls or fences, physical or virtual, are not a good use of taxpayer resources,” he said. “And they also pose the risk of taking our eyes off threats where they are known to exist or likely to be, and that happens not to be at the border with Mexico. ” | 1 |
In a highly unusual turn of events for a sitting president, a federal judge in Florida on Wednesday ordered a golf resort owned by President Trump to pay $5. 7 million for refusing to refund deposits to members who wanted to resign from the club. In his ruling, the judge said that Mr. Trump, by sending a letter in late 2012 denying access to members who wanted to resign from the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter — a process that could take years — had set off a contract clause that should have resulted in an immediate refund of their membership fees. Instead, the money was withheld. The decision is the first court judgment against a company owned by Mr. Trump since he became president last month, and underscores that while Mr. Trump has stepped away from the operations of his company, he is certain to remain dogged by legal controversies connected to his business. At his new hotel in Washington, Mr. Trump is suing two celebrity chefs for breach of contract. The two men backed out of the Trump International Hotel development in 2015 after Mr. Trump made inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants. Separately, the federal government owns the building that houses the hotel, and some legal experts have said that Mr. Trump may be in violation of his lease, which appears to prohibit federal elected officials from leasing the building. And last month, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan contending that Mr. Trump had violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other businesses to accept payments from foreign governments. Mr. Trump has not sold any of his assets, which include golf courses, commercial real estate and marketing agreements. Rather he has handed the operations of his company over to his eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, a move he hopes will reduce the appearance of conflict of interest. Wednesday’s ruling — by Judge Kenneth Marra of Federal District Court in West Palm Beach, an appointee of President George W. Bush’s — calls for the club to pay $4. 85 million in withheld fees to 65 club members involved in the lawsuit, plus an additional $925, 000 in interest and other costs. As a result, those members will receive refunds of $35, 000 to $200, 000, depending on their level of membership in the club. Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, said the company planned to appeal. “At the time Trump purchased the club, it was suffering financially, making it unlikely that these members would ever get back their deposits,” Ms. Miller said in a statement. “At trial, we presented overwhelming evidence that the plaintiffs’ memberships were never recalled and that the plaintiffs had waived this argument during the course of the litigation. ” The dispute at the Jupiter club centered on contracts signed by club members with the facility’s previous owner, . To join, members paid initiation fees as high as $210, 000, depending on the type of membership that they wanted. But under ’s rules those deposits were refundable when a member resigned. That process, however, could take years and while members on the resignation list waited for their turn to come up they could still use the club so long as they paid annual fees and other costs like food and beverage minimums. That all changed in 2012 when the Trump Organization bought the Jupiter club. Soon afterward, Mr. Trump sent a letter to members saying that those who wanted to resign were no longer welcome there. “I do not want them to utilize the club, nor do I want their dues,” the letter read. After club members sued, Mr. Trump testified in 2015 during a pretrial deposition that although he had signed the letter, it was his son, Eric Trump, who was in charge of policies at the family’s golf courses. “Eric is much more familiar with this club,” his father said. “He runs it. ” In his pretrial deposition, Eric Trump testified that nothing had changed and that club members seeking to resign had been allowed to use the club so long as they paid their dues. That claim, however, was disputed at trial last year. One member on the resignation list, Richard Slawson, testified that the club’s membership manager told him soon after the Trumps took it over that the club was . But he continued to receive $6, 000 bills for annual dues and thousands in minimum charges for food and beverages that were never consumed. “I couldn’t believe that we were charged that when we were not allowed to use the club,” Mr. Slawson, a Florida lawyer, said in a recent telephone interview. Confronted with such testimony, the younger Mr. Trump during his court testimony backed off his assertions and acknowledged he had been mistaken. “He made himself our strongest witness,” a plaintiff’s lawyer, Bradley Edwards, said about Eric Trump. “There was no way to reconcile his prior testimony with his testimony at trial. ” | 1 |
Os e-mails de Hillary Clinton e da Confraria Thierry Meyssan A investigação do FBI sobre os e-mails privados de Hillary Clinton não diz respeito a uma negligência face às regras de segurança, mas antes a um complô visando destruir qualquer traço da sua correspondência que deveria ter sido arquivada nos servidores do Estado Federal. Poderia incluir trocas de mensagens sobre financiamentos ilegais ou de corrupção, outros sobre laços do casal Clinton com os Irmãos Muçulmanos e os jiadistas.
Rede Voltaire | Damasco (Síria) | 2 de Novembro de 2016 ελληνικά English Español français Türkçe русский Deutsch italiano Hillary Clinton e a sua chefe de gabinete Huma Abedin. O relançamento da investigação do FBI sobre os e-mails privados de Hillary Clinton não visa mais as questões de segurança, mas, sim trafulhices que poderiam ir até à alta traição.
Tecnicamente, em vez de utilizar um servidor seguro do Estado Federal, a Secretária de Estado fez instalar no seu domicílio um servidor privado, de maneira a poder usar a Internet sem deixar vestígios numa máquina do Estado Federal. O técnico privado da Sra. Clinton limpara o seu servidor antes da chegada do FBI, de modo que não foi possível saber por que é que ela tinha posto em acção este dispositivo.
Inicialmente, o FBI observou que o servidor privado não possuía a segurança do servidor do Departamento de Estado. A senhora Clinton, apenas tinha, pois, cometido uma falha de segurança. Numa segunda etapa, o FBI apreendeu o computador do antigo membro do Congresso, Anthony Weiner. Este é o ex-marido de Huma Abedin, chefe de gabinete de Hillary. Nele foram encontrados e-mails provenientes da Secretária de Estado.
Anthony Weiner é um político judeu, chegado aos Clintons, que ambicionava tornar-se presidente da câmara(perfeito-br) de Nova Iorque. Ele fora forçado a demitir-se após um escândalo muito puritano: enviara mensagens de texto(SMS) eróticas a uma jovem mulher que não era a sua esposa. Huma Abedin separou-se oficialmente dele durante esta tormenta, mas na realidade não o deixou.
Huma Abedin é uma norte-americana que foi criada na Arábia Saudita. O seu pai dirige uma revista académica —da qual ela foi durante anos a secretária de redacção— que reproduzia regularmente as opiniões dos Irmãos Muçulmanos. A sua mãe preside a Associação Saudita das mulheres membros da Confraria e trabalhava com a esposa do presidente egípcio Mohamed Morsi. O seu irmão Hassan trabalha por conta do Xeque Yusuf al-Qaradawi, o pregador dos Irmãos e conselheiro espiritual da Al-Jazeera.
Por ocasião de uma visita oficial à Arábia Saudita, a Secretária de Estado visita o colégio Dar al-Hekma em companhia de Saleha Abedin (mãe da sua chefe de gabinete), presidente da Associação das Irmãs membros da Confraria. Huma Abedin é hoje uma personagem central da campanha de Clinton, ao lado do director de campanha, John Podesta, antigo secretário-geral da Casa Branca na presidência de Bill Clinton. Podesta é, além disso, o lobista contratado pelo Reino da Arábia Saudita no Congresso pela módica quantia de US $ 200.000 mensais. A 12 de Junho de 2016, Petra, a agência de notícias oficial da Jordânia, publicou uma entrevista com o príncipe herdeiro da Arábia Saudita, Mohamed Ben Salmane, pretendendo a modernidade da sua família pela mesma ter financiado, ilegalmente, por uns 20% a campanha presidencial de Hillary Clinton, apesar de se tratar de uma mulher. No dia a seguir a esta publicação, a Agência anulava este despacho e assegurava que o seu sítio internet havia sido pirateado.
Segundo a agência oficial jordana Petra, a 12 de Junho de 2016, a família real saudita financiou ilegalmente 20 % da campanha presidencial de Hillary Clinton. A Srª Abedin não é o único membro da administração Obama ligada à Irmandade. O meio-irmão do Presidente, Abon’go Malik Obama, presidente da Fundação Barack H. Obama é também o tesoureiro da Obra missionária dos Irmãos no Sudão. Ele está colocado directamente sob as ordens do Presidente sudanês, Omar al-Bashir. Um Irmão Muçulmano é membro do Conselho Nacional de Segurança —a mais alta instância executiva nos Estados Unidos— . Foi o caso de Mehdi K. Alhassani de 2009 a 2012. Ignora-se quem lhe sucedeu, mas a Casa Branca também negava que um Irmão fosse membro do Conselho até esta prova ter surgido. Rashad Hussain, é também um Irmão que é o embaixador dos E.U. junto à Conferência Islâmica. Outros Irmãos identificados ocupam funções menos importantes. Deve-se citar, no entanto, Louay M. Safi, actual membro da Coligação Nacional Síria e antigo conselheiro do Pentágono.
O Presidente Obama e o seu meio-irmão Abon’go Malik Obama no Gabinete Oval. Abon’go Malik é o tesoureiro da Obra missionária dos Irmãos Muçulmanos no Sudão. Em Abril de 2009, dois meses antes de seu discurso no Cairo, o Presidente Obama tinha secretamente recebido uma delegação da Irmandade na Sala Oval. Ele já tinha convidado, aquando da sua tomada de posse, Ingrid Mattson, a presidente da Associação das Irmãs e Irmãos Muçulmanos nos Estados Unidos.
Por seu lado, a Fundação Clinton empregou como líder do seu projecto «Clima» Gehad el-Haddad, um dos dirigentes mundiais da Irmandade, o qual tinha sido até aí responsável de um programa de emissão de televisão corânica. O seu pai tinha sido um dos co-fundadores da Irmandade, em 1951, aquando da sua recriação pela CIA e pelo MI6. Gehad deixou a Fundação em 2012, data em que se tornou, no Cairo, o porta-voz do candidato Mohammed Morsi, depois oficialmente o dos Irmãos Muçulmanos a nível mundial.
Sabendo que a totalidade dos líderes jiadistas do mundo têm origem quer na Irmandade quer na Ordem Sufi dos Naqshbandis –- as duas componentes da Liga Islâmica Mundial, a organização saudita anti-nacionalista árabe--- seria interessante saber mais sobre as relações da Sra. Clinton com a Arábia Saudita e os Irmãos.
Acontece que na equipa do seu adversário Donald Trump, conta-se o General Michael T. Flynn, o qual tentou opôr-se à criação do Califado pela Casa Branca e se demitiu da direção da Defense Intelligence Agency (Agência de Inteligência da Defesa-ndT) para marcar o seu protesto. Ele é acompanhado por Frank Gaffney, um «cold warrior» histórico (da guerra fria-ndT), agora qualificado como «conspiracionista» por ter denunciado a presença dos Irmãos no seio do Governo Federal.
Escusado será dizer que, do ponto de vista do FBI, todo o apoio às organizações jiadistas é um crime, independentemente da política da CIA. Em 1991, os polícias do FBI —e o Senador John Kerry— provocaram a falência do banco paquistanês (registado nas Ilhas Caimão) BCCI, que a CIA utilizava em todo o tipo de operações secretas com os Irmãos Muçulmanos, tal como com os cartéis latinoamericanos de drogas.
Thierry Meyssan Tradução
Alva | 0 |
Remy Porter Remy escaped the enterprise world and now works as a consultant. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF.
Florian ’s office has a “rule of ten”. Well, they don’t , but one of Florian’s co-workers seems to think so. This co-worker has lots of thoughts . For example, they wrote this block, which is supposed to replace certain characters with some other characters. sbyte sbCount = 0; // set value of new field content to old value sNewFieldContent = sFieldContent; while (rFieldIdentifierRegex.Match(sNewFieldContent).Success) { // for security reasons if (++sbCount > 10) break; // get identifier and name string sActFieldSymbol = rFieldIdentifierRegex.Match(sNewFieldContent).Groups[1].Value; string sActFieldName = rFieldIdentifierRegex.Match(sNewFieldContent).Groups[2].Value; string sActFieldIdentifier = sActFieldSymbol + sActFieldName; // default value for unknown fields is an empty string string sValue = ""; [... calculate actual replacement value ...] // replace value for placeholder in new field content sNewFieldContent = sNewFieldContent.Replace(sActFieldIdentifier, sValue); }
As Florian puts it:
Having more matches than 10 inside one line is obviously a security risk (it isn’t) and must be prohibited (it mustn’t) because that would cause erroneous behavior in the application (it doesn’t). [Advertisement] Infrastructure as Code built from the start with first-class Windows functionality and an intuitive, visual user interface. Download Otter today! | 0 |
A gunman killed one person and wounded five others in a rampage on Friday night in Philadelphia that began when he ambushed a police sergeant in her squad car. Other law enforcement officers responding to the shooting ran after the suspect — identified by the police as Nicholas Glenn, 25, of West Philadelphia — and cornered him in an alley, where he was shot and killed. “He was hellbent on hurting a lot of people,” Commissioner Richard Ross Jr. of the Philadelphia Police Department said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “We still aren’t absolutely clear as to why. ” The commissioner said that the authorities had discovered a “rambling” note on Mr. Glenn’s body, in which he expressed hatred for the police and mentioned a particular probation officer by name. The letter was found inside an envelope labeled “doomed,” Commissioner Ross said. “It’s more about himself than it is about who he wanted to harm or anything like that,” he said. The violence began around 11:20 p. m. the police said, when Mr. Glenn approached Sgt. Sylvia Young, 46, who was seated in her parked vehicle in West Philadelphia. Without saying anything, the man began firing into her window, Commissioner Ross told reporters at an earlier news conference on Saturday. Sergeant Young, a police veteran, survived after leaning into the passenger seat to shield herself, the commissioner said. Mr. Glenn fired 18 shots, the police said, and some of them hit Ms. Young’s left arm and a protective vest she was wearing. Two rounds struck and disabled her weapon, the police said. Commissioner Ross compared the shooting to a similar ambush in January that wounded another officer. “I’m absolutely astounded by the fact that they both survived,” he said Saturday. Mr. Glenn fled after shooting at Sergeant Young, the police said, and along the way he fired five times into the open door of a bar, where he struck a security guard in the left leg. He then grabbed a woman and used her as a shield before shooting her in the leg, the police said. Mr. Glenn continued running, firing 14 times into a car occupied by a man and a woman, the police said. The woman, who was shot seven times in the torso, died at a hospital around 2 a. m. on Saturday. Mr. Glenn ran into an alley, where he was pursued by a University of Pennsylvania police officer and two Philadelphia officers. He was fatally shot there, the police said, but not before wounding the university officer. The Philadelphia Inquirer identified the university officer as Eddie Miller, 56, a former Philadelphia police sergeant who joined Penn’s police force two years ago. All of those wounded are expected to survive, officials said. The authorities did not release the names of the civilians who were wounded or the woman who was killed. Commissioner Ross said Mr. Glenn was “well known” by the Philadelphia Police Department. The Inquirer reported that court records show Mr. Glenn had a history of convictions. He also had been arrested and charged in connection with a rape in November 2009, but those charges were later dropped, the newspaper said. | 1 |
— Kent Brockman (@_innerhostility) October 28, 2016
With the FBI’s decision to reopen their investigation into Hillary Clinton , damage control is the name of Democrats’ game. Here’s how one Dem group is opting to do it: Inbox: Dem group files DOJ complaint against FBI Director James Comey for "interfering in the presidential election". pic.twitter.com/7PWEhF5PdS
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 28, 2016
Oh.
— marcia kingsley (@marcianhgirl) October 28, 2016 @kylegriffin1 Wait! So is the system rigged or not? Pick a side, geez | 0 |
After the Chinese authorities blocked the Canadian beauty queen Anastasia Lin from attending the 65th annual Miss World pageant in China last year, the event’s British organizers offered her a consolation prize, of sorts: They promised to allow her a chance to compete in the 2016 finals, which are currently underway in suburban Washington. What they did not tell her was that she could smile but not speak out publicly during the event, which is largely sponsored by Chinese companies. Over the past three weeks, as she and her fellow contestants have rehearsed for Tuesday’s finale, Ms. Lin, 26 — an actress, classically trained pianist and outspoken critic of Chinese human rights abuses — has been barred from speaking to the news media, friends and relatives said. They said that officials with the pageant have also refused to allow Ms. Lin to attend the American premiere of a movie in which she appears. The film, “The Bleeding Edge,” has angered Beijing with its dramatization of what human rights advocates describe as programs that harvest the organs of Chinese prisoners of conscience. And last week, when a State Department official requested a meeting with Ms. Lin, to discuss the continuing harassment of her father in China, pageant executives refused to let her go, a State Department official said. They relented only after Ms. Lin agreed to be accompanied by a pageant employee, who insisted on attending the meeting. The chaperone later turned down a State Department request to post a photo of the meeting on Twitter. Jacob Wallenberg, a friend who has spoken to Ms. Lin by phone, said pageant employees warned her that she would be ejected from the competition if she spoke to reporters. “They have specifically told her not to talk about human rights during the pageant, even though that is her official platform,” he said. “She is very frustrated. ” The Miss World organization declined to answer questions about the restrictions it has placed on Ms. Lin, but friends say they have little doubt about its motivations: Pageant officials, they said, are simply doing the bidding of the Chinese government, which has spent the past year trying to silence Ms. Lin, who was born in China but emigrated to Canada at 13. Since 2003, the Miss World pageant has been held six times in Sanya, a tropical city in southern China, and Chinese companies have become the main sponsors of the competition. The local government has spent $31 million to upgrade infrastructure for the competition, according to the Chinese media. Last year, after the Chinese authorities refused to issue Ms. Lin a visa to attend the finals, she flew to Hong Kong, hoping to obtain a visa at the border. She was turned away, and her photo disappeared from the pageant’s official website. “Why is a powerful country like China so afraid of a beauty queen?” she said at the time. Beijing’s efforts to silence Ms. Lin appear to have had the opposite effect. In the year since she was barred from the competition, she has been invited to speak at Oxford University, the National Press Club in Washington and the Oslo Freedom Forum. Ms. Lin has been especially outspoken on the repression of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in mainland China. Ms. Lin is a practitioner of Falun Gong, which the Chinese government has deemed “an evil cult. ” Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, said that Beijing’s attempt to muzzle Ms. Lin highlighted its increasingly aggressive campaign to shape global public opinion about a government that takes a dim view of liberties. “Whether it’s choosing what movies you get to see or what information can be censored online, Chinese authorities are increasingly trying to insist that the restrictions they impose at home become the norm abroad,” she said. “That they deem it necessary to try to manipulate international beauty pageants would be puzzling or quirky if it weren’t indicative of a far more serious pathology. ” In Ms. Lin’s case, the attempted manipulation has taken a sinister turn. In an earlier interview, she described how public security officials harassed her father, the owner of a medical supply company in China, and forced customers to withdraw their business, pushing him into bankruptcy. Family members said Chinese officials had also refused to allow him to travel to Washington for the finals. The Miss World Organization has been aggressive in its effort to prevent reporters from speaking to Ms. Lin. Two weeks ago, pageant officials interrupted an interview she was giving to Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, at a hotel. “Two of them hustled Lin from the lobby, angrily accusing her of breaching the rules and causing trouble,” he wrote. “The third blocked me from talking to Lin, and assured me that my interview would be scheduled the next day. It wasn’t, of course. ” Such restrictions apparently do not apply to the Chinese media. Over the past few weeks, reporters from two Chinese media outlets have been given free rein to interview contestants. Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a organization that is sponsoring the premiere of Ms. Lin’s film on Wednesday, said he felt deceived by Miss World officials, who he said had assured him they were relaying messages to her about the upcoming event. “Turns out Anastasia never got any of them,” he said. Over the past year, Mr. Smith said he had become increasingly alarmed by the growing reach of the Chinese government. Cyberattacks that the F. B. I. say originated in China have repeatedly brought down the organization’s website, he said, and in June a teleconference symposium on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 was disrupted by hackers. “At this point, nothing should surprise us when it comes to China,” he said, “but the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is so threatened by a Canadian beauty queen that they would subvert the operations of an international organization supposedly dedicated to greater global understanding and the free exchange of views is very disappointing. ” | 1 |
For the last 10 years, life in the northern Bronx has largely been defined by wanton violence perpetuated by the growing reach and competing interests of rival street gangs. Drugs were openly sold near elementary schools. Playgrounds were used as hiding places for weapons. Disputes were settled with knives or guns, and the casualties, often teenagers, were left to die in the streets. In one case, a bystander, a woman, was killed in her home by a stray bullet in 2009. On Wednesday, in what the authorities said they believed was the “largest gang takedown” ever in New York, prosecutors announced charges against 120 people accused of being members of two gangs in the borough. By the afternoon, prosecutors said, close to 90 of the defendants had been taken into federal custody 30 others were still being sought. Court papers say the gangs were responsible for at least eight murders. Defendants were arrested and arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan on counts including racketeering and narcotics conspiracies. The arrests were the latest effort to crack down on gang violence in the city, where the spread of street crews has been an anomaly and a vexing challenge for law enforcement: Though crime, especially murder, has fallen over all in the last 25 years, certain precincts, especially in the Bronx and Brooklyn, have experienced upticks in acts of violence. About half of the defendants charged are associated with the 2Fly YGz street gang, according to a federal indictment. The rest, a second indictment said, were part of a rival gang, Big Money Bosses, which was responsible for the death of Sadie Mitchell, the woman killed in 2009, as well as the fatal stabbing last year of a boy near East Gun Hill Road. The leaders of Big Money Bosses, the indictment said, called themselves Big Suits, while other gang members, to signify their status, were ranked by names like Burberry Suits, Gucci Suits, Ferragamo Suits and Sean John Suits. The two gangs used social media “to promote, protect and grow their ranks,” including posting videos on YouTube “bragging about their criminal endeavors,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference where the charges were announced. Mr. Bharara said the investigation began in December 2014, as violence surged around the Eastchester Gardens public housing complex. Much of it was found to have been caused by the two gangs. During the investigation, Mr. Bharara said, the government obtained warrants for more than 100 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts linked to the gangs’ criminal activity, an investigative technique the authorities are using more often against gangs. The monitoring of social media is just one way that prosecutors and the police have been trying to stem the growth of gangs. State prosecutors in New York have begun using conspiracy statutes to charge those connected to crews with every crime that individual members are accused of, even if only some were present during the offenses in question. But even as the authorities move against one gang, others seem to fill the void. “These gangs are the epitome of organized crime today,” Angel M. Melendez, who leads the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations, said at the news conference. Nearly 700 police officers and federal agents swept through the city Tuesday night and Wednesday making arrests and conducting searches, Mr. Bharara said. The arrests and charges, he said, would essentially “dismantle” the two gangs “from top to bottom. ” Eukeysha Gregory, 48, who lives on the first floor of an brick building in the Eastchester Gardens complex, said the thumping of a police helicopter woke her at 4 a. m. Wednesday. Looking out the peephole of her door, she said, she saw police officers in helmets and protective vests charge into the building with a battering ram. Over the next hour, she watched the police arrest young people across the complex. “I’m so glad I would kiss the captain’s feet,” she said. “I’m so excited now my child can actually play in the park. ” Ms. Gregory said the sound of gunshots had become common in the six years since she moved into the apartment. Two bullets, she said, recently came through the window of a neighbor, and last weekend she heard the sound of around a shots coming from between a playground in the center of the complex and her building’s front door. Ms. Gregory said she had attended a community meeting with Eastchester Gardens residents and the police on Tuesday night. There was no mention that a raid was imminent. “It was exciting,” she said of the raid while sitting on a bench outside her building Wednesday with her daughter Jewel. “I was so glad. ” Mr. Bharara’s office said that the investigation was continuing, and that in addition to the murders attributed to the gangs in the indictments, several other killings were part of the inquiry. The officials at the news conference focused on what New York’s police commissioner, William J. Bratton, cited as the “collateral damage” caused by gang violence, and Mr. Melendez noted that 2Fly YGz members had taken over a playground at Eastchester Gardens, which it used as its “base of operations” for selling and hiding drugs and guns. Mr. Bratton said that the arrests announced Wednesday would go “a very long way toward ending the historical violence” that has plagued public housing projects in the area and that had also affected Bronx neighborhoods like Laconia, Wakefield and Williamsbridge. Mr. Bharara noted that the arrests came as his office’s Civil Division has been conducting a separate investigation, previously cited in news reports, into environmental health and safety conditions in public housing projects. He said that there were over 400, 000 public housing residents who, according to federal regulations, were entitled to housing that was “decent, safe, sanitary and in good repair. ” “And it’s clear,” he said, “that many are not getting that. ” Near the modest house at 721 East 224th Street where Ms. Mitchell, the woman, was killed in 2009, neighbors reacted with resigned satisfaction to news of the arrests. “Clean up the streets, you don’t want that happening to an old lady,” said Mike William, 30, who said he had known Ms. Mitchell. “This is the ghetto and things happen in the streets, but you don’t want your kids getting hurt, or an old lady getting hurt. ” | 1 |
Barack and Michelle Obama enjoyed a blissful excursion in their House life Friday by paying a visit to billionaire music mogul David Geffen’s $300 million yacht with a group of celebrities. [The former President and First Lady were joined on Geffen’s luxury boat by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and their wives, according to the Daily Mail. The group were reportedly seen snapping photos during the Obamas’ Tahitian vacation off the island of Mo’orea. Oprah Winfrey — a longtime friend of Geffen’s and of the Obamas — was also reported to have joined the group. The Obamas have spent some of their House days traveling and vacationing in warm weather hideaways and dining with celebrity friends. Last month, the former first couple were spotted grabbing brunch with Bono in New York City, where they were greeted with cheers and applause from a crowd of onlookers. As the Obamas and the U2 frontman exited the restaurant, People reports, “the whole restaurant stood up and applauded and cheered for them. Barack Obama waved at everyone upon leaving. ” In February, the former president was photographed kitesurfing in the Virgin Islands with British billionaire Richard Branson. Obama crashes while kitesurfing https: . pic. twitter. — Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) February 7, 2017, Despite the holiday getaways, the Obamas won’t be disappearing from the public spotlight anytime soon. After a heated bidding war earlier this year, the former First Couple inked a massive book deal in late February with publisher Penguin Random House that was reported to be worth $65 million. Under the deal, both Barack and Michelle Obama will pen memoirs of their respective experiences in the White House. Last month, Breitbart News reported that the Obama White House will be the basis of an upcoming workplace comedy film. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures and Anonymous Content are developing a “ ” comedy based on the book proposal From the Corner of the Oval by Beck a former White House stenographer. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson | 1 |
Obama’s Crazed DOJ Mandates Police Departments Must Hire Non-Citizens
In the United States citizens can be arrested by non-citizens. Little wonder the electorate is concerned about immigration.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/22/denver-sheriffs-department-fined-10k-for-hiring-only-us-citizens.html
The post Obama’s Crazed DOJ Mandates Police Departments Must Hire Non-Citizens appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org . | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Conservatives thought this Supreme Court term would be different. Still reeling from losses last year in major cases on health care and marriage, they welcomed a new docket in October studded with cases that seemed poised to move the law to the right. But then came two unexpected turns of events. Justice Antonin Scalia, the member of the court’s conservative wing, died. And Justice Anthony M. Kennedy veered left in two of the term’s biggest cases, joining the court’s liberals in significant decisions favoring affirmative action and abortion rights. For the second term in a row, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. delivered liberal decisions at a rate not seen since the famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet the court, which ended its term on Monday, remains in a period of great transition. With one vacant seat and the possibility of more to come, it is almost certainly entering a new era, the shape of which will depend on the outcome of the presidential election. For now, Justice Scalia’s absence has handed Chief Justice Roberts the difficult task of steering his colleagues toward consensus in big cases. Over the past term, when he succeeded the resulting decisions were sometimes so narrow that they barely qualified as rulings. When he failed, the court either deadlocked or left him in dissent. Before Justice Scalia died, the court had agreed to hear cases that conservative advocacy groups hoped would help business interests and Republican politicians, while dealing setbacks to public unions, colleges with racial admissions preferences and abortion providers. Just four days before his death, the court seemed to send an assertive signal, blocking the Obama administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from power plants. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s conservatives in the majority. Things soon changed. Justice Scalia’s death left the court’s eight remaining members evenly divided along ideological lines, and a case that had threatened to cripple public unions, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, No. illustrates the impact of his absence. When it was argued in January, a month before Justice Scalia died, the court’s conservatives seemed ready to say that forcing public workers to support unions they have declined to join violates the First Amendment. Soon after the argument, the publicly available evidence indicates, Chief Justice Roberts assigned the majority opinion to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. who in two earlier opinions had made clear that he was ready to overturn a 1977 decision allowing such unions to require the payments. But in March, the month after Justice Scalia died, the court announced that it had deadlocked in the case. As is the custom, the brief order gave no reasons and did not say how the justices had voted. The decision left the 1977 precedent in place. A second deadlock, in United States v. Texas, No. effectively destroyed President Obama’s plan to shield as many as five million immigrants from deportation. But it could have been worse for the president. While the tie vote left in place an appeals court decision blocking the effort, Justice Scalia, if he had been alive, would almost certainly have provided the fifth vote for a comprehensive rebuke to what Republicans say is a pattern of unconstitutional overreach by Mr. Obama. The alternative to a deadlock was sometimes a muddle. In May, the court unanimously returned a major case on access to contraception, Zubik v. Burwell, No. to the lower courts for further consideration in the hope that the two sides could somehow settle their differences. “The court expresses no view on the merits” of the case, the unsigned opinion said. If an court was deadlocked or toothless, it turned out that a court was prepared to take a major step. In Fisher v. University of Texas, No. a challenge to a admission program at the University of Texas, Austin, the court was missing both Justice Scalia and Justice Elena Kagan, who had recused herself because she worked on the case as solicitor general. The case had generally been viewed as a threat to affirmative action, particularly after the court agreed to take a second look at it last June. Instead, Justice Kennedy, abandoning his earlier hostility to programs, joined the court’s remaining liberals to endorse the Texas program by a vote. If Justice Scalia had been alive, the case would almost certainly have ended in a deadlock. Justice Scalia was a dominant presence on the court, and his influence could exceed the power of his single vote. But it is also possible that Justice Scalia played a role in pushing Justice Kennedy to the left. When the Fisher case was argued in December, Justice Scalia’s comments from the bench brought aspects of it into vivid relief. He said that some minority students may be better off at “a less advanced school, a school where they do well. ” “I don’t think it stands to reason,” Justice Scalia said, “that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible. ” Vikram Amar, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, said there had been a change in tone at the court since Justice Scalia died. “In Fisher,” Dean Amar said, “even though the dissent Justice Alito read from the bench was frank, it was not as barbed and incendiary as Justice Scalia’s likely would have been. ” Justice Kennedy also joined the court’s liberals in a decision on Monday striking down parts of a restrictive Texas abortion law and strengthening the “undue burden” standard that the court announced in 1992. The silencing of Justice Scalia’s voice seemed to help other justices find theirs. Two weeks after Justice Scalia died, Justice Clarence Thomas broke a silence by asking questions from the bench. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, already a major presence at arguments, took on an even larger role. This month, she wrote a lashing dissent, rooted in the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement, in a case on police stops. Justice Thomas remained the most conservative member of the court based on voting patterns this term, while Justice Sotomayor overtook Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the most liberal one, according to an analysis by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Kevin Quinn, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Justice Sotomayor’s votes in criminal cases also make her one of the most liberal justices since 1937, while Justice Alito is among the most conservative, to the right of even Justice Thomas. In all, though, the justices are doing what they can to find common ground, Professor Epstein said. “Without Scalia, it’s still the Kennedy court, but Kagan and Breyer had a very good term,” she said. “Both were in the majority in divided cases over 80 percent of the time, and the Democratic side of the court yet again won victories in some of the term’s biggest cases. ” There have been five versions of the Roberts court since the chief justice took charge in 2005. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor left not long after, followed by Justices David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. But the court was nonetheless ideologically stable for a decade, from the arrival of Justice Alito in 2006 to the death of Justice Scalia this year. The court’s new volatility is likely to continue for some time. Even after Justice Scalia is replaced, other openings could be on the horizon: By the time the next president is inaugurated, Justice Stephen G. Breyer will be 78, Justice Kennedy will be 80, and Justice Ginsburg will be 83. Republican senators have vowed to block Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick B. Garland, meaning that the court will remain for some time. Even if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and Democrats make gains in the Senate, it may be spring before a new justice is confirmed. “The odds are more likely than not that there will be an entire next term with eight justices,” said one leading Supreme Court advocate, Andrew J. Pincus of Mayer Brown. The term that ended on Monday included a potential blockbusters, but all of them had been put on the docket before Justice Scalia died. Since then, the court has been accepting cases in uncontroversial areas, notably intellectual property. “I don’t think it wants to take on more cases in which it’s going to be closely divided and that could end up ” Mr. Pincus said, “unless there is some very compelling reason to do that. ” | 1 |
Email
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey is again under fire, this time by supporters of Hillary Clinton for permitting the re-opening of the investigation into her use of personal servers to store and send classified material, the second round of a scandal that could prove fatal to the Democratic nominee's chance to occupy the Oval Office in January.
Republicans had their own go at Comey when he declared after the original investigation of Clinton's mishandling of classified documents and information that there was insufficient evidence to charge her with any criminal violation.
Comey, it seems, has become a punching bag being worked over by partisans on both sides of the political aisle.
Regarding the sound and fury coming out of the Clinton camp, they don't see that their candidate has fallen into a pit she dug for herself. She knew, or should have known, that there are rules governing the treatment and transmission of data that could place U.S. national security in danger.
She broke those rules, and despite what Comey claimed, whether she did so knowingly or not is irrelevant, as the requisite mental state codified into the regulation is "negligence." That is to say, in order to be in violation of the relevant statute, one need only fail to take reasonable care in the behavior in question.
It is beyond dispute that there was a duty of care, and Hillary Clinton's behavior fell well below that bar.
What is also beyond dispute is that neither the Republicans — when Clinton was exonerated — or the Democrats — when the whole affair was brought back into the light of investigation — ever questioned the authority of the FBI to carry on as a federal police force.
The larger question, the constitutional question, is why does the federal government have an armed police force with nearly unlimited authority (at home and abroad) and with the power to conduct most of its work in secret, beyond the oversight of the American people, whose interest they ostensibly serve?
Perhaps Ryan McMaken has hit upon the answer to that question in an article published on the Mises Wire blog. McMaken writes of the federal government's law enforcement agency: Of all federal police forces, the FBI is the most romanticized, and every FBI agent is assumed to be the modern embodiment of a fictionalized version of Eliot Ness: incorruptible, professional, and efficient. Decades of pop culture has driven this home with TV series and movies such as The Untouchables , The FBI Story , and This Is Your FBI have long perpetuated the idea that when local police fail, the FBI will step in to be more effective and simply better than every other law enforcement agency. Corruption cannot touch the FBI, we are told, and they apply the law equally to everyone.
According to a piece penned in 2012, "A Stasi for America," reporter James Bovard painted a darker, less egalitarian picture of the FBI's application of the law: A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This maxim was inculcated as part of FBI counterterrorism training. The exposure of the training material — sparked by a series of articles by Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman — spurred the ritual declaration by an FBI spokesman that “mistakes were made, and we are correcting those mistakes.” No FBI officials were sanctioned or fired for teaching lawmen that they were above the law.... At least the FBI has been consistent. Since its founding in 1908, the bureau has rarely let either the statute book or the Constitution impede its public service. Tim Weiner, the author of a superb exposé of the CIA ( Legacy of Ashes ) has delivered a riveting chronology of some of the FBI’s biggest crimes with his new book, Enemies .
There's no question that in its roughly 100 years of existence, the FBI has seen its reputation rise and fall.
McMaken recites a bit of recent history in support of his assertion that the creation and the continuation of the FBI as a federal secret police force is an assault on the liberty of the United States: The reality and the romance, of course, have always been two totally different things, and it's helpful to remind ourselves that it was the FBI that was in charge of the Waco massacre where 26 children were killed. It was the FBI that led the raid on Randy Weaver's house where an FBI sniper shot a woman dead while she was holding a 10-month old baby. It was the FBI that spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., and targeted peaceful anti-war organizations for political reasons during the 1960s and 70s. It was the FBI that came of age arresting opponents of the First World War. Naturally, in all of these cases, the FBI has actively covered up the facts and denied wrongdoing.
Next, the history lesson looks further back to the beginnings of the FBI to illuminate the transformation of the FBI from crime-fighting force (albeit no less unconstitutional) to powerful partner in the surveillance state: Thanks to war hysteria during World War I, the FBI rose to prominence as Woodrow Wilson's shock troops against "dissidents" (i.e., peaceful opponents of the war). Indeed, persecuting and prosecuting political enemies of the American state would become something of the forte of the FBI, with the role of the agency being expanded ever more during times of perceived national crisis. The idea of the FBI as a crime-fighting organization — the primary message of fawning treatments of the FBI such as The Untouchables and The FBI Story — for decades served as cover for the FBI's political activities. As Foreign Policy pointed out in 2014, though, the FBI quietly dropped its claims of being a crime fighting organization and began declaring itself a "national security" organization. Down the memory hole goes the FBI's original claimed raison d'etre.
This point is borne out in the FBI's own description of its purpose. On the "Questions and Answers" section of its official web page, the agency describes itself as "an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national security organization with both intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities."
Where, one wonders, does the Constitution grant the federal government or any of its associated agencies any intelligence gathering and federal law-enforcement power?
Finally, not only is the FBI's assumption of its current role as federal police force and armed branch of the federal surveillance apparatus unconstitutional and a persistent threat to freedom, but it represents yet another example of the inability of the government to perform any task on par with a privately owned entity with the same or similar objective. Again, from the Mises Wire: "The unreliability of metropolitan police, with their strong local and partisan ties, prompted major businesses and industrialists to establish the Pinkertons and other private police forces. The Pinkertons ultimately functioned as a de facto national detective and policing service until the 1920s, when the FBI finally came into its own."
As one scandal blends into the next, and as each generation sees the occurrence of some serious act of FBI abuse of power, perhaps it is time to consider the abolition of the agency and the return of its assumed duties to the private sector. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad of Quartz profile Stephen K. Bannon’s (or, to those who wish to maximize their SEO, Steve Bannon) beliefs based on his public statements — past interviews, speeches, and films. [From Quartz: The three tenets of Bannonism, Bannon’s political philosophy boils down to three things that a Western country, and America in particular, needs to be successful: Capitalism, nationalism, and “ values. ” These are all deeply related, and essential. America, says Bannon, is suffering a “crisis of capitalism. ” (He uses the word “crisis” a lot — more on that later.) Capitalism used to be all about moderation, an entrepreneurial American spirit, and respect for one’s fellow Christian man. In fact, in remarks delivered to the Vatican in 2014, Bannon says that this “enlightened capitalism” was the “underlying principle” that allowed the US to escape the “barbarism” of the 20th century. Since this enlightened era, things have gradually gotten worse. (Hence the “crisis. ”) The downward trend began with the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. “The baby boomers are the most spoiled, most most narcissistic generation the country’s ever produced,” says Bannon in a 2011 interview. He takes on this issue in more detail in Generation Zero, a 2010 documentary he wrote and directed. The film shows one interviewee after another laying out how the “capitalist system” was slowly undermined and destroyed by a generation of wealthy young kids who had their material needs taken care of by hardworking parents — whose values were shaped by the hardship of the Great Depression and World War II — only to cast off the American values that had created that wealth in the first place. This shift gave rise to socialist policies that encouraged dependency on the government, weakening capitalism. Eventually, this socialist vision succeeded in infiltrating the very highest levels of institutional power in America. “By the late 1990s, the left had taken over many of the institutions of power, meaning government, media, and academe,” says Peter Schweizer, a writer affiliated with Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, a conservative think tank, in Generation Zero. “And it was from these places and positions of power that they were able to disrupt the system and implement a strategy that was designed to ultimately undermine the capitalist system. ” (As he says “undermine the capitalist system,” the film zooms in on the word “Lucifer” in that epigraph from Saul Alinsky.) Underlying all of this is the philosophy of Edmund Burke, an influential Irish political thinker whom Bannon occasionally references. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke presents his view that the basis of a successful society should not be abstract notions like human rights, social justice, or equality. Rather, societies work best when traditions that have been shown to work are passed from generation to generation. The baby boomers, Bannon says in a lecture given to the Liberty Restoration Foundation (LRF) failed to live up to that Burkean responsibility by abandoning the values of their parents (nationalism, modesty, patriarchy, religion) in favor of new abstractions (pluralism, sexuality, egalitarianism, secularism). For both Burke and Bannon, failure to pass the torch results in social chaos. Read the rest of the story here. | 1 |
Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th?
Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.
At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…
A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.
More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.
But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…
Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.
And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June …
This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.
We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.
There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…
On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”
Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.
On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.
There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.
Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.
For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.
Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today …
“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.
Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.
Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 .
If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.
And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month …
As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.
But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome .
Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.
Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Contributed by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse .
Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream , The Truth and Economic Collapse Blog. | 0 |
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Do you wonder why Sen. Bernie Sanders and his ideas are so popular among American college students? The answer is that they, like so many other young people who think they know it all, are really uninformed and ignorant. You say, "Williams, how dare you say that?! We've mortgaged our home to send our children to college." Let's start with the 2006 geographic literacy survey of youngsters between 18 and 24 years of age by National Geographic and Roper Public Affairs.
Less than half could identify New York and Ohio on a U.S. map. Sixty percent could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East, and three-quarters could not find Iran or Israel. In fact, 44 percent could not locate even one of those four countries. Youngsters who had taken a geography class didn't fare much better. By the way, when I attended elementary school, during the 1940s, we were given blank U.S. maps, and our assignment was to write in the states. Today such an assignment might be deemed oppressive, if not racist.
According to a Philadelphia magazine article, the percentage of college grads who can read and interpret a food label has fallen from 40 to 30. They are six times likelier to know who won "American Idol" than they are to know the name of the speaker of the House. A high-school teacher in California handed out an assignment that required students to use a ruler. Not a single student knew how.
An article on News Forum for Lawyers titled "Study Finds College Students Remarkably Incompetent" cites a study done by the American Institutes for Research that revealed that over 75 percent of two-year college students and 50 percent of four-year college students were incapable of completing everyday tasks. About 20 percent of four-year college students demonstrated only basic mathematical ability, while a steeper 30 percent of two-year college students could not progress past elementary arithmetic. NBC News reported that Fortune 500 companies spend about $3 billion annually to train employees in "basic English."
Reported by Just Facts , in 2009, the Pentagon estimated that 65 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were unqualified for military service because of weak educational skills, poor physical fitness, illegal drug usage, medical conditions or criminal records. In January 2014, the commander of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command estimated this figure at 77.5 percent, and in June 2014, the Department of Defense estimated this figure at 71 percent (http://tinyurl.com/guz7pqy).
A few weeks ago, my column discussed the dishonesty of college officials. Here's more evidence: Among high-school students who graduated in 2014 and took the ACT college readiness exam, here's how various racial/ethnic groups fared when it came to meeting the ACT's college readiness benchmarks in at least three of the four subjects: Asians, 57 percent; whites, 49 percent; Hispanics, 23 percent; and blacks, 11 percent. However, the college rates of enrollment of these groups were: Asians, 80 percent; whites, 69 percent; Hispanics, 60 percent; and blacks, 57 percent. What I am labeling as dishonest, fraudulent or deceitful comes from the fact that many more students are admitted to college than are in fact college-ready. Admitting such students may satisfy the wants and financial interests of the higher education establishment, but whether it serves the interests of students, families, taxpayers and the nation is another question.
To accommodate less-college-ready students, colleges must water down their curricula, lower standards and abandon traditional tools and topics. Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein writes in his book The Dumbest Generation : Tradition "serves a crucial moral and intellectual function.... People who read Thucydides and Caesar on war, and Seneca and Ovid on love, are less inclined to construe passing fads as durable outlooks, to fall into the maelstrom of celebrity culture, to presume that the circumstances of their own life are worth a Web page."
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com .
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On Tuesday, Shaun King, the “senior justice writer” for the New York Daily News, announced his boycott of the National Football League. The former black lives matter spokesman, deposed after the discovery that he is white and not the African American he claimed to be, accused the NFL of being “bigoted” against black people because it hasn’t hired protester Colin Kaepernick. [King made his proclamation after it became clear that American anthem protester and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick would not find a team to take him on after he became a free agent at the tail of last season. Kaepernick spent the entirety of the season refusing to stand for the national anthem and spoke out against the U. S. A. our police, soldiers, and other first responders. He also repeatedly said the country was “never great. ” But after the season ended, in February the player announced both his free agency and an end to his protests. But despite his new status and his pledge to end his embarrassing protests, Kaepernick has not been able to find a team to hire him for the coming football season. His inability to find a berth has sparked numerous protests by fans and sports reporters alike. Kaepernick was even the subject of a politician’s decree when a socialist Seattle City Council member wrote an open letter demanding that the Seattle Seahawks bring him on. The demands ultimately fell on deaf ears. With Kaepernick left out in the cold, football fan Shaun King now says he can’t watch football anymore. “I can’t, in good conscience, support this league, with many of its owners, as it blacklists my friend and brother Colin Kaepernick for taking a silent, peaceful stance against injustice and police brutality in America,” King blathered in his June 6 column. “It’s disgusting and has absolutely nothing to do with football and everything to do with penalizing a brilliant young man for the principled stance he took last season. ” The white man who posed as a black man for a decade fulminated at Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll for turning his back on Kaepernick and signing white quarterback Austin Davis instead. King labeled Davis a “scrub” over the incident. King, who admitted that he lied about being black, went on to rail at the Seahawks for hiring Davis who has far fewer accomplishments in the NFL than Kaepernick. The activist insisted that there could be only one reason that the Seahawks took a pass on Kaepernick: It’s racism. It’s bigotry. It’s discrimination. Period. It’s not football. Don’t call it football. If you call the decisions by 32 teams to not sign this man a football decision, you don’t know football and probably voted for Donald Trump. Nearly 100 quarterbacks — 96, in fact — are usually signed to teams in the NFL. That Colin Kaepernick is not one of them is disgusting. Of course, he’s one of the top 96 quarterbacks in the league. Kaepernick’s longtime rival, Richard Sherman, said he believed Kaepernick was a quarterback. King went on to add that the “ridiculous fragility of the conservative white male fan base” has kept Kaepernick on the sidelines. Finally, this very white “black activist” added that his decision was sealed when ESPN announced that it had rehired country singer Hank Williams, Jr. to once again sing his iconic Monday Night Football theme song at the start of each Monday game. Williams had been fired six years ago for being a conservative. “Hank Williams, Jr. is basically Donald Trump with a guitar. He’s a bigot,” King growled. “Everybody knows it. His songs and statements have echoed bigotry for years, but now that Obama is out of office, he’s back. ” King continued, bellowing: Hank Williams, Jr. and Austin Davis are employed right now, and Colin Kaepernick isn’t. Shame on this league for following Trump’s lead in spirit, tone and now in actions. I’m appalled. As a lifelong fan, I’m deeply disappointed. What I do know is this — I can’t support this product. Warming to his closing statements, King then blamed his little son for launching the boycott with a claim that his boy told him they could no longer watch football, “After what they’ve done to Colin and with all of those owners loving Donald Trump so much. ” So, in the face of all this purported “injustice,” King has set out on his road to boycotting the NFL: Maybe if Colin Kaepernick gets a deal, it would change my mind, but deep damage is already done. As a leader in the Black Lives Matter Movement, as a voice in the resistance to Donald Trump, and as a friend of Colin Kaepernick, I cannot, in good conscience, support the NFL any longer. If I did, I’d struggle to look my own son in the eyes or look at myself in the mirror. As a reminder, King is boycotting a sports league that is almost 70 percent African American. It is a business where the average rookie salary is $365, 000 a year, a number that goes up by tens of thousands every year the player stays signed to an NFL team. It is also a league where the average player’s salary is about $1. 9 million annually. This is the same sports league that Shaun King says isn’t black enough and is unfair and discriminatory to blacks. But, this is also a man who directly equates to being “tolerant” and right thinking. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Trump upended America’s traditional, bipartisan trade policy on Monday as he formally abandoned the ambitious, Partnership brokered by his predecessor and declared an end to the era of multinational trade agreements that defined global economics for decades. With the stroke of a pen on his first full weekday in office, Mr. Trump signaled that he plans to follow through on promises to take a more aggressive stance against foreign competitors as part of his “America First” approach. In doing so, he demonstrated that he would not follow old rules, effectively discarding longstanding Republican orthodoxy that expanding global trade was good for the world and America — and that the United States should help write the rules of international commerce. Although the Partnership had not been approved by Congress, Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw not only doomed former President Barack Obama’s signature trade achievement, but also carried broad geopolitical implications in a region. The deal, which was to link a dozen nations from Canada and Chile to Australia and Japan in a complex web of trade rules, was sold as a way to permanently tie the United States to East Asia and create an economic bulwark against a rising China. Instead, Mr. Trump said American workers would be protected against competition from countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, also parties to the deal. But some in both parties worry that China will move to fill the economic vacuum as America looks inward, and will expand its sway over Asia and beyond. Monday was a busy day for the new president. In addition to abandoning the trade deal, he ordered a freeze on federal government hiring, except for the military and other security agencies. He reinstituted a ban on federal funding for overseas family planning groups that assist or counsel women seeking abortions. He met with congressional, labor and business leaders. And he promised to cut up to 75 percent of federal regulations. Mr. Trump’s decision to scrap the Partnership, or T. P. P. reversed a strategy adopted by presidents of both parties dating back to the Cold War, and aligned him more with the political left. When he told a meeting of union leaders at the White House on Monday that he had just terminated the pact, they broke into applause. “We’re going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken everybody out of our country and taken companies out of our country, and it’s going to be reversed,” Mr. Trump told them, saying that from now on, the United States would sign trade deals only with individual allies. “I think you’re going to have a lot of companies come back to our country. ” Mr. Trump may also move quickly to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is scheduling meetings with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the two main partners in that pact, which was negotiated by President George Bush and pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton. While Nafta has been a major driver of American trade for nearly two decades, it has long been divisive, with critics blaming it for lost jobs and lower wages. But advocates said that in canceling the Pacific pact, Mr. Trump lost an agreement that had already renegotiated Nafta under more modern rules governing intellectual property, internet access and agriculture, since both Mexico and Canada were signatories. He also undercut Mr. Obama’s pivot to Asia and, critics said, essentially ceded the field to China, which was not part of the agreement. “There’s no doubt that this action will be seen as a huge, huge win for China,” Michael B. Froman, the trade representative who negotiated the pact for Mr. Obama, said in an interview. “For the Trump administration, after all this talk about being tough on China, for their first action to basically hand the keys to China and say we’re withdrawing from our leadership position in this region is geostrategically damaging. ” Some Republicans agreed, but only a few would publicly challenge the president. Senator John McCain of Arizona called the decision “a serious mistake” that would hurt America. “It will send a troubling signal of American disengagement in the region at a time we can least afford it,” he said in a statement. The Obama administration negotiated the trade pact for nearly eight years. Speaker Paul D. Ryan and other congressional Republicans worked with Mr. Obama to pass legislation granting authority to negotiate it over Democratic objections. But Mr. Obama never submitted the final agreement for approval amid vocal opposition. The agreement, the largest regional trade accord ever, brought together the United States and 11 other nations in a zone for about 40 percent of the world’s economy. It was intended to lower tariffs while establishing rules for resolving trade disputes, setting patents and protecting intellectual property. Obama officials argued that it benefited the United States by opening markets while giving up very little in return. In particular, it finally brought the United States and Japan, the world’s largest and economies, together in a pact. Mr. Trump’s decision was crushing for Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent considerable political capital to get the agreement through Parliament, which ratified it Friday. Just hours before Mr. Trump dispensed with it, Mr. Abe told Parliament that Tokyo would lobby the new administration on the merits of the deal. Japan was the last to join the pact, which would give its manufacturers access to export markets in the United States and other Asian countries, but would bring its automakers into competition with countries like Mexico. Mr. Abe became a strong enthusiast after making politically painful concessions on agricultural imports that the United States had sought. China, by contrast, welcomed Mr. Trump’s move, although its leaders will probably relish the moment quietly. Given Mr. Trump’s harsh attacks on China and his appointment of a leading China critic, Peter Navarro, to the new post of trade council director, Beijing is bracing for a potentially combative relationship. Victor Shih, an expert on China’s political economy at the University of California, San Diego, said withdrawing from the T. P. P. would alter America’s image in the region. “The U. S. will be seen as an unreliable partner both economically and perhaps even in the security arena,” he said. “While some countries in Asia have no choice but to be close to the U. S. others may begin to look to China. ” China has already sought to capitalize by making a push to complete an alternative pact, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which aims to unite 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. Australia’s trade minister, Steven Ciobo, said on Monday that other members of the trade pact were exploring whether to create a “T. P. P. minus one,” without the United States. “The T. P. P. offers very material benefits for all parties that signed up for the agreement,” he said in an interview. “It would be a great shame to lose those benefits. Notwithstanding President Trump’s decision, there’s still a lot of merits to capturing those gains. ” If Mr. Trump scrambled coalitions overseas, he did so at home, too. Democrats and labor groups praised his move. James P. Hoffa, general president of the Teamsters union, said Mr. Trump had “taken the first step toward fixing 30 years of bad trade policies. ” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said it would “bury the moldering corpse” of the Pacific deal, though she expressed concern about how Nafta would be renegotiated. Some people emerging from the union meeting with Mr. Trump, who won surprising victories in Midwestern labor strongholds, expressed enthusiasm for both his trade action and his promise to build new roads, bridges and other infrastructure. “We just had probably the most incredible meeting of our careers,” Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, said. “We will work with him and his administration to help him implement his plans on infrastructure, trade and energy policy, so we really do put America back to work. ” | 1 |
Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs at the Center for Security Policy and former CIA analyst, Fred Fleitz, joined Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday to discuss the death of Otto Warmbier just days after returning from North Korea and the possibility of Loretta Lynch testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. [Fleitz said he’s still hopeful that there could be an investigation into Loretta Lynch, “I really hope so,” he said, “because that was the criminal activity of the 2016 campaign. Why was the law not enforced concerning the Clinton email server, the mishandling of classified information, the Clinton Foundation, and what I think are numerous instances of foreign governments trying to buy influence with a prospective president?” “There are clear instances of with the Clinton Foundation,” he continued. “The email server broke so many laws. If I had done a small fraction of the things connected with that incident I’d have lost my job, I’d have enormous legal bills and frankly, I think I’d be serving prison time. ” Fleitz added that he hopes Lynch and other Obama officials are questioned by the Senate. Said Fleitz of the Democrats, “If they’re going to pursue this route, this relentless series of pointless and false investigations of President Trump, let’s investigate Hillary Clinton and all the criminal activity that she is clearly responsible for. ” As regards American college student Otto Warmbier, Fleitz Said, “This is just such a terrible story. The North Korean government murdered this young man. They murdered him. And we know that North Korea is a criminal regime. But what I’m very angry about is how the Obama administration did almost nothing to get him back. ” “There were no consular visits,” Fleitz continued, “which are required under international law by the state representing us, Sweden, to check on him while he was in prison. There were none. ” Fleitz continued to blast the Obama administration for dropping the ball. “A young man who was his hotel roommate before he was arrested, he’s a British citizen, says the Obama administration never contacted him to find out the particulars of why he was arrested. The Obama administration said to the Warmbier family, stay silent, do nothing, and the Obama administration pursued their idiotic policy of strategic patience, which we now know was an utter failure. ” Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN: | 1 |
A radical black student group known as The Student Alliance ( ) which recently ended its occupation of a building on the UC Santa Cruz campus after university officials granted them every one of their demands, is threatening more civil disruption if its new demands are not met. [The College Fix, an online news source, is reporting that in spite of meeting its original demands, “the group made three other demands to the university, and it has warned UC Santa Cruz that it has four months to comply with these demands or ‘more Reclamations will result. ” The three additional demands is making of UC Santa Cruz have been added to its initial “Reclamation Statement,” and include: A reported by College Fix, this new list of demands contains a deadline and a threat at the end: “ … that if by Fall Quarter 2017 the university does not provide ‘detailed plans’ on how to fulfill its new demands, ‘there will be more Reclamations. ’” How did this start? It all started the afternoon of Tuesday, May 2, when approximately members of blockaded themselves in Kerr Hall at the university’s Stevenson College. The occupation ended a few days later after UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal met with representatives of and agreed to meet all the group’s demands, which included: The original occupation was only sparsely reported in the press, possibly because the took issue with media “trespassing” in Kerr Hall to cover the student uprising. In spite of largely shunning the press, one representative did shed some light on the group’s goals in a comment to Fox News: “Having that red, black and green house in the middle of Stevenson College, which is a predominantly college, is a matter of symbolism and visibility,” Imari Reynolds of the told Fox host Tucker Carlson. “Black students are on this campus. We do exist and we do pay to go here, just like our counterparts and we do deserve to be seen here on this campus. ” Why the term ‘Reclamation’ On the website of the Afrikan Black Coalition, a post titled, “Black Students at UC Santa Cruz Protest Hostile Campus,” contains a long list of grievances, “reparation” demands, and insight into what sparked the recent anger at UC Santa Cruz. The coalition states that studentsare simply taking back what they are owed (original emphasis): The term “occupation” is rejected in favor of “reclamation” to describe their actions, claiming: “We are pushing back against the language of ‘occupation’ in recognition of the largely and fairly recent ‘Occupy Movement.’ We are pushing back against the language of ‘occupation’ in recognition of the very real settler occupations that are hxstorical [sic] and ongoing, such as the European colonization and occupation of ‘The Americas,’ as well as the current context of occupation in Palestine. As Black people, there are things that we are owed within the context of reparations and the historical [sic] traumas we have experienced and that we continue to experience today, and we plan to claim and reclaim those things. Under the heading, “Who We Are?” the answer offers additional insight (original emphasis): The Student Alliance is an (ABC) and organization on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz … We are the descendants of forcefully enslaved Afrikan people in “The Americas” as well as the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generation immigrant and migrant children. We are capitalists, and Anarchists. We are everything because Blackness is everything. University Response, A spokesman for the university, while declining to discuss whether “there will be any disciplinary action against the students who forcibly took over Kerr Hall,” did comment to College Fix reporter Matthew Stein “that ‘safety’ is the school’s top priority. ” There has been no official response to the new demands, which could be quite costly to a university system whose President, former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, is under scrutiny of late for allegedly hiding $175 million in a secret “slush fund” while simultaneously raising tuition on students. | 1 |
Hillary Clinton: A Hawk in the Wings Hillary Clinton: A Hawk in the Wings By 46 (Photo: Flickr/CSIS)
When Barack Obama was running for office in 2008, he was determined to redirect U.S. military efforts away from the “bad war” in Iraq and toward the “good war” in Afghanistan. This commitment to extricate the U.S. military from the dismal aftermath of a botched exercise in regime change earned Obama the exaggerated designation of “peace candidate.”
Jump ahead eight years and listen to how history rhymes. Today, the Obama administration is reluctant to pour more resources into a failed regime change effort in Syria and far more intent on confronting the Islamic State in the battle for Mosul and, ultimately its capital of Raqqa. Once again, the “good” war competes for attention with the “bad” war.
Meanwhile, the candidate that challenged Obama as too naïve and peace-loving back in 2008 is poised to succeed him as president. Once again, she has staked out a more hawkish position. And this time she has a large chunk of the foreign policy elite behind her. As Greg Jaffe wrote last week in The Washington Post:
In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief.
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.
The foreign policy elite is mercurial and amnesiac. It wasn’t that long ago that this elite expressed not-so-quiet relief at George W. Bush’s departure from the White House and the return of a more conventional and dovish Barack Obama. And what of the more assertive policy of Hillary Clinton? Now that the truly apocalyptic threat of Donald Trump is receding, the lesser catastrophes of a Clinton administration beckon: perhaps Libya II or an expanded role in Yemen.
Still, as Jaffe points out, plenty of Obama’s foreign policy advisors continue to warn of the considerable risks of greater U.S. military involvement in the region. And, as Josh Rogin suggested this week in his Post column, even Clinton’s Middle East advisors are divided on this question. So, as it turns out, the foreign policy establishment has not quite established its position.
The headlines are full of the ongoing tragedy of Aleppo and the upcoming showdown in Mosul. But then there’s the battle that determines the battle. Forget the inanities of Donald Trump for a few moments to consider what’s taking place behind the scenes. The latest skirmish over the future of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is about to begin.
Is there still a chance to influence the trajectory of the hawk as she leaves behind the corpses of her challengers and wings her way to the White House?
No Good Solutions
It’s remotely possible that the United States and its allies, if they’d acted quickly and with maximum power, could have helped to dislodge Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad during the Arab Spring by funding militias on the ground and providing them with air support.
However, even if the Obama administration had embraced such a strategy, which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported, Assad and his allies might have fought back to achieve the same kind of stalemate that prevails in Syria today. Or, if Assad had fallen, Syria might have descended into the same kind of maelstrom that has enveloped Libya. The cautionary example of Iraq, a truly poisonous gift from the George W. Bush administration, no doubt helped to stay Obama’s hand.
The options on offer today are no better than in 2012. The Obama administration backed a CIA plan to arm several thousand “moderate” rebels to fight their way to power in Syria, and the CIA wants to increase the flow of weaponry. At best, these rebels have managed to achieve a punishing stalemate. At worst, as one unidentified U.S. official told The Washington Post , the units are “not doing any better on the battlefield, they’re up against a more formidable adversary, and they’re increasingly dominated by extremists.” Sending more weapons for a ground offensive wouldn’t do much, since the conflict is waged most effectively at the moment by air. Providing more sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons to the rebels would risk opposition from Turkey and escalation by Russia.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has proposed a “no-fly zone” in northern Syria that would presumably create “safe havens” for Syrians fleeing the conflict zones and facilitate humanitarian relief to those stuck in places like Aleppo. For Americans weary of a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and turned millions into refugees, such a proposal has a certain appeal. Finally the United States would be doing something robust to increase the peace.
But such a zone, as Clinton herself has admitted, is no pacifist solution. It would “kill a lot of Syrians,” she said back in 2013 , and draw both the United States and NATO more deeply into the military conflict. And then there’s the problem of World War III when U.S. planes start shooting down Russian bombers. Ben Rhodes listed the Obama administration’s reasons for opposing such a zone:
If you had an area of geography in Syria where planes couldn’t fly over it, people would still be killing each other on the ground. ISIL doesn’t have planes, so that doesn’t solve the ISIL problem. They would still be able to massacre people on the ground. And we would have to devote an enormous amount of our resources — which are currently devoted to finding ISIL and killing them wherever they are — to maintaining this no-fly zone.
A third option would be to focus less on Assad in Syria and more on the Islamic State (or ISIL), which has emerged as Obama’s preferred strategy. But that plan has its own problems. The administration has emphasized the role of Iraqi forces in liberating their own city of Mosul. But the campaign relies heavily on U.S. air strikes as well as the participation of half of the 5,000 American troops that are still on the ground in Iraq. The recapture of Mosul, even if successful, could drag on for many months, and the Islamic State is not the kind of entity that sues for peace.
There will be no “mission accomplished” moment for the Obama administration or its successor. Returning to its stateless mode if and when Raqqa falls, ISIS could prove even more dangerous for the United States and its allies as the terrorist outfit redirects its energies toward inflicting pain on its distant tormenters.
Clinton and the Meatheads
The Obama administration, for all its use of military force over the last eight years, at least has acknowledged the limited utility of that force. The president has time and again said that military intervention should not be the first tool deployed from the national security toolbox. Despite all the “just war” realism he included in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Obama has pushed back against his more gung-ho advisors, including Hillary Clinton, who have clung to the notion that the U.S. military can determine facts on the ground.
Like Donald Trump, the foreign policy elite in Washington yearns to be unshackled. After a mere eight years in which diplomacy narrowly edged out militarism, this elite has forgotten the lessons of the George W. Bush era. Historically, this is no surprise. John Kenneth Galbraith once said , “The foreign policy elite was always the world’s biggest collection of meatheads.” As an economist, Galbraith knew a meathead when he saw one. Such meatheads are doomed to repeat the history that they didn’t understand even as they were living through it.
It’s relatively easy to point out the flaws in the various options available to the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq. In order to preserve the better parts of the Obama legacy — the nuclear deal with Iran, the elevation of diplomacy, the willingness to lead from behind — what can be done short of cordoning off the entire Middle East and retreating into a fortress of solitude?
First of all, the next administration should widen its engagement with Iran beyond the narrow focus on nuclear issues. Any sustainable solution in Syria and Iraq will require the involvement of Iran — the posturing of the recent Center for American Progress report on U.S. policy in the Middle East notwithstanding. Pursuing economic and political engagement with Tehran must include a place at the table for the Rouhani administration in negotiations on Iraq and Syria. It’s time to stop complaining about Iranian “meddling” and instead take advantage of the country’s cross-border influence.
The United States also has to rebuild a working relationship with Russia. I’m no fan of Vladimir Putin, and I’ve devoted several columns to what I find objectionable in Russian policy in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere. But if the United States could negotiate important agreements with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, surely we can find a modus operandi with the current residents of the Kremlin. Finding common ground in the Middle East can have additional spillover benefits for arms control and perhaps even reducing tensions in Eastern Europe.
Regime change in Syria is a mirage at the moment. Assad is not going anywhere as long as he can count on the firm support of Russia and Iran. Yes, he’s a war criminal. But to prevent the further commission of war crimes, sometimes it’s necessary to make a deal with the devil. His punishment will come eventually — just as it did for Slobodan Milosevic six years after the Dayton Accords. In the meantime, Washington has to pursue a diplomatic deal that stops punishing ordinary Syrians every day.
The Islamic State, however, is not a force that is subject to negotiations. I don’t foresee a non-military solution to the specific problem of the would-be caliphate’s territorial ambitions. But the United States should not head up this fight. ISIS wants nothing better than a epic confrontation with America. Syrians and Iraqis must take the lead against IS, with Turkey, Iran, and even the Gulf States playing crucial roles. In the best-case scenario, admittedly a long shot, the terrorist faction inadvertently reduces the conflict between the Shia and Sunni states that cooperate in its annihilation.
The CIA plan, the no-fly zone, the military focus on the Islamic State — these are not long-term strategies. They are proposals that satisfy a bipartisan foreign policy elite that bays for “something to be done.” The true challenge for the next administration is to resist the call of the meatheads.
But that won’t happen without a counterforce that brings together a set of NGOs working for peace in the region, some sympathetic politicians and officials, and a group of foreign policy experts who have not fallen prey to the amnesia that periodically descends upon the Beltway concerning the destructive impact of U.S. military intervention.
Donald Trump is almost history. The far more complex challenge of Clinton’s Middle East policy awaits. | 0 |
There is a new Hamilton in “Hamilton,” although President Obama and Beyoncé have seen him already. On Monday, Javier Muñoz replaces Miranda, and steps into the title role of the biggest Broadway show in years, playing the nation’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. He is not exactly new to the role. Over much of the last year, Mr. Muñoz has relieved the star once a week, and on other days watched the production from a stool just offstage, waiting in case Mr. Miranda ever took a tumble. (He did not.) Already, he has a reputation and a fan base. He’s been described as the sexy Hamilton because of the swagger he brings to the role, and Mr. Miranda bestowed on him a Javilton, that has stuck. Mr. Muñoz has some obvious similarities to the man he is replacing — both have parents from Puerto Rico, graduated from New York City public schools and encountered Broadway as children, becoming passionate about theater. And their careers have been entwined for years — Mr. Muñoz was Mr. Miranda’s alternate, and then his successor, on “In the Heights,” and has been his alternate throughout the development of “Hamilton. ” But Mr. Muñoz brings his own life experience to the role. The son of a doorman, he grew up in a housing project — the Linden Houses, in East New York, Brooklyn, which he recalls as scarily violent and dangerous. “I can’t lie — I’m still afraid of it,” he says. “It was so much fear growing up there. ” He is 40, openly gay, H. I. V. positive and a cancer survivor — he had surgery and radiation last fall, missing weeks of performances in “Hamilton,” but has been back in the cast for months. He said he feels strong — the virus is undetectable, the cancer screenings negative — and is raring to go. “I had my first in March, and all green lights,” he said. “I’m good. ” Last week, as he prepared to take over the role he sat down to talk about his life and “Hamilton” at Candle 79, a vegan restaurant on the Upper East Side where he has repeatedly worked as a host between acting jobs. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. What’s it like to step into the lead role of the biggest musical in memory? I was on Facebook the other day, and Lin released that little teaser of his song with Jennifer Lopez, and I sort of sat there and went, “I’m taking over for this guy?” That just feels incredible. [But] it comes down to the work, right? I’ve been jumping in there every week, and I’ve helped build this character. So it’s like, I’m just enjoying this, man. This is just fun, and glorious. Did you ever feel as if people wished they were seeing the other guy? I felt that way with “Heights. ” It would take a lot to earn the audience — to be like: “Really, I’m good. I don’t suck. Just come with me. It’s going to be O. K. ” But with “Hamilton,” we were at the Public, and we mapped out three shows that I was going to go on, and the days varied. It was a test, and it started with such a positive impact because of the history I have with Lin. Going on when President Obama was in the audience must have helped. That’s the turning point. And it helped me feel more confident, too. To know I had their trust. I knew, but that gesture was so generous and really made me feel O. K. Why are you an actor? I decided in high school — at Edward R. Murrow in Brooklyn. I just fell in love with the idea that theater can be a mirror, theater can be a commentary, theater can be powerful and can start a conversation that needs to happen. I started working for a children’s literacy organization that used theater to teach literacy in programs, and that was another powerful thing — suddenly the kid who really had trouble reading in class, or was embarrassed to speak out loud because of their accent, was inhabiting a character, using their imagination, reading and writing. That blew my mind. Did you go to Broadway when you were growing up? I did — school trips. The first thing I saw was “Me and My Girl. ” And I loved it so much — I was singing “The Lambeth Walk” for weeks. After that, any time there was a school trip to Lincoln Center, or anything that was arts related, I was so into it. What happened with your health last fall? How did you know you had cancer? I have been living with H. I. V. since 2002, and I’m undetectable. I’m healthy, I’m strong and I’m very out about that because of the stigma still attached to it. But I’ve had a healthy fear about my health since I tested positive, and I asked how to test myself for lumps, because both my parents had cancer. And very early on in my learning how to do a I found the lump. I wasn’t immediately worried because of where it was — and I do want to keep that private because that’s the only thing that’s mine in this. But I brought it up to my doc, and that’s what led to further testing and discovery. You didn’t want to tell anyone at “Hamilton”? I was filling myself with disappointment, as if you can blame yourself for cancer. But that’s a thing, you know. I had to reveal it, and then I had to own that I needed help, and I had to ask for help, and that was the hardest thing in the world. You express a lot of gratitude on social media. I have this joke — if it’s funny or not funny, I don’t know — but the joke is that I have died several times already, and that’s how it feels. My life completely and drastically changed in 2002 when I was diagnosed with H. I. V. and then again last year with cancer. And you can’t unknow what you know. Life is not the same after that. But I’m alive, and I’m for all intents and purposes healthy and well. And I’m grateful for that. You planted a garden on the roof of Richard Rodgers, the theater where “Hamilton” is performed. There’s so much energy on the stage, there are so many things we’re doing day in and day out, and I needed something there that felt still and calm, and gardening gives me that stillness and that calmness. Also, I’m growing something. And it may sound cheesy or corny, but it’s really not. The fact that life is created in that little garden bed heals me. It just does. How many shows a week will you do? Seven. It’s the same structure. [For the eighth performance] someone else gets to be sexy — I’m going to go eat pizza. | 1 |
It’s hard to see a child unhappy. Whether a child is crying over the death of a pet or the popping of a balloon, our instinct is to make it better, fast. That’s where too many parents get it wrong, says the psychologist Susan David, author of the book “Emotional Agility. ” Helping a child feel happy again may offer immediate relief for parent and child, but it doesn’t help a child in the long term. “How children navigate their emotional world is critical to lifelong success,” she said. Research shows that when teachers help preschoolers learn to manage their feelings in the classroom, those children become better problem solvers when faced with an emotional situation, and are better able to engage in learning tasks. In teenagers, “emotional intelligence,” or the ability to recognize and manage emotions, is associated with an increased ability to cope with stressful situations and greater . Some research suggests that a lack of emotional intelligence can be used to predict symptoms of depression and anxiety. Emotional skills, said Dr. David, are the bedrock of qualities like grit and resilience. But instead of allowing a child to fully experience a negative emotion, parents often respond with what Dr. David describes as emotional helicoptering. “We step into the child’s emotional space,” she said, with our platitudes, advice and ideas. Many common parental strategies, like minimizing either the emotion or the underlying problem or rushing to the rescue, fail to help a child learn how to help herself. Dr. David offers four practical steps for helping a child go through, rather than around, a negative emotion and emerge ready to keep going — feel it, show it, label it, watch it go. Feel It. While it may seem obvious to feel emotions, many families focus on pushing away negative emotions. “When we’re saying ‘don’t be sad, don’t be angry, don’t be jealous, don’t be selfish,’ we’re not coming to the child in the reality of her emotion,” she said. “Validate and see your child as a sentient person who has her own emotional world. ” Show It. Similarly, many families have what Dr. David calls “display rules” around emotions — there are those it is acceptable to show, and those that must be hidden. “We see expressions like ‘boys don’t cry’ and ‘we don’t do anger here,’ or ‘brush it off,’” she said. “We do it with very good intentions, but we are teaching that emotions are to be feared. ” Label It. Labeling emotions, Dr. David said, is a critical skill set for children. “We need to learn to recognize stress versus anger or disappointment,” she said. Even very young children can consider whether they’re mad or sad, or angry or anxious or scared. “Labeling emotions is also at the core of our ability to empathize. Ask ‘How do you think is feeling? What does their face tell you? ’” As children get older, she adds, we can talk more about emotional complexities. “We can be simultaneously excited and anxious and frustrated, and we also need to learn to recognize that in other people,” she said. Watch It Go. Even the hardest emotions don’t last forever. Dr. David suggests helping your child to notice that. “Sadness, anger, frustration — these things have value, but they also pass. They’re transient, and we are bigger than they are. Say, ‘This is what sadness feels like. This is what it feels like after it passes. This is what I did that helped it pass. ’” We can also help children to remember that we don’t necessarily feel the same emotion every time we have a similar experience. The high dive is scariest the first time. We might feel a lot of anxiety at one party, or in one science class, but have a different experience the next time. “We’re very good, as humans, at creating these stories around emotions,” Dr. David said. “‘I’m not good at making friends. I can’t do math.’ Those are feelings and fears, not fixed states. People and things change. ” Finally, she said, help your child plan for experiencing the emotion again. “Ask, ‘Who do you want to be in this situation? ’” she said. “What’s important to you about this?” Children feel stronger as they begin to learn that it’s not how they feel, but how they respond to the feeling, that counts. | 1 |
Katheryn From My Walk & Talk 6 shares by DML DAILY / November 25, 2016 / LIFE /
On my Walk & Talk on Friday, I told the story about Katheryn. She was just 50 years old when she was informed that she was dying of colon cancer. This is the video of me taking her to the Montauk Lighthouse before she died. It was the one last place she wanted to visit.
The video clip is from 2009. Below is the Walk & Talk from today 11/15. Go towards the end, I tell the story of Katheryn.
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Bill White November 7, 2016 7 Ways To Prepare For An Economic Crisis
Using the past economic collapses as an example, we can see that people’s lifestyles changed dramatically. Even those who managed to keep their jobs and businesses have to make radical adjustments in their lies, just to be able to survive.
There is no reason for us to think that things will be any different here in the United States, than they were in Argentina; in fact, they could very well end up being worse.
The reason I say it could be worse is that there will be nobody to bail out the United States, as has been done with other countries. We know from the 2009 housing collapse that anything negative that happens in the U.S. economy has a worldwide effect.
Since other countries will end up suffering as well, there is no way that they will be able to help us.
Liberals have touted the idea of redistributing the wealth of the wealthy in order to take care of our country’s woes. I’m not going to discuss the morality or ideology of that right now; but I will say this: if you were to take all the wealth of the 100 richest people in the United States and add it together, it wouldn’t pay our federal government’s bills from January 1 st till tax day.
Of course, since their wealth isn’t really in cash, but rather in ownership of properties and companies, there’s no way of using it to pay the government’s costs or debts.
The other thing that could make the collapse worse here in the United States is that most Americans aren’t prepared to live without all of our comforts. If you go to other countries, people are more accustomed to doing things themselves, instead of expecting society to do them. They know how to do basic things like slaughter a hog and pluck a chicken ; things that the average American hasn’t had to do for generations.
Here are a number of lifestyle changes which can help your family to be ready to survive the meltdown:
Pay off Your Home
Home mortgages are dangerous in a financial crisis . If you don’t have enough income coming in to make the payment on your home, then you could very easily lose it. No matter how prepared you are, if you don’t have your home, you’re going to be in trouble.
There are a number of strategies around for paying off your home mortgage early. I won’t go into them here, because this really isn’t a book about personal finances.
You can find the necessary information on how to pay off your home early in a number of places. I highly recommend looking into Dave Ramsey’s teachings on the subject.
Another option you may want to consider is downsizing. By selling your existing home and moving into something smaller, you might be able to reduce your mortgage payments or even the length of your mortgage. That would help you to get rid of your mortgage sooner.
In the case of the financial crash coming before you manage to pay it off (which is very likely), your payments will be smaller, making it easier for you to keep making those payments.
Pay off All Other Debts
Any debt is a liability, enslaving your family’s finances to others. By paying off your outstanding debt, you eliminate the risk of lenders coming to take what you have. While other debt is not as important as your home mortgage, paying it off can make it easier to pay off your mortgage quicker.
Paying off your debt also reduces your monthly cost of living, freeing up more money for use in preparing for the pending crash or some other activity your family wants to do.
The vast majority of Americans have too much debt, which greatly limits their options and the decisions that they can make.
Learn to Do Things without Electricity
So much of our modern lifestyle depends upon electricity. We are used to using it for literally everything; from preserving our food to entertaining us. However, loss of electricity is a common problem during times of economic meltdown.
Oh, the electricity probably won’t go out and stay out, but you can count on a lot of service interruptions.
When service is lost, many of the things which we take for granted are lost as well. Our ability to store and cook food is compromised, as well as our ability to work. Lighting is gone, as well as most of our communications. For many people, the loss of electricity means the loss of being able to work as well.
For everything you use in your life that is electric powered, you need an alternative. That means having something that you can use to do the same job, should the power go out. In some cases, you might be able to do without that thing, but you need to analyze that and make that determination, not just accept it as an assumption.
Re-do Your Budget
Probably one of the best things you can do to prepare for a financial meltdown is to re-do your budget, establishing a more frugal lifestyle. Chances are, when the economic collapse happens, you’re going to have to be living that more frugal lifestyle.
By establishing it ahead of time, you not only train yourself and your family to be more careful of how you use your money, but you also save money which you can then use to buy and stockpile necessary supplies .
Many people today live from paycheck to paycheck. That doesn’t mean that they’re using their money wisely though. Their budget may include eating out three times a week, spending $400 per month on their cell phones and another $300 per month on entertainment. Yet they complain about not having enough money to buy some basic emergency supplies.
There are a lot of places where the average family spends more than they need to. Buying new cars is another one. Banks and the auto industry make a lot of money off of families who are making payments on two cars at a time. For some, their combined car payments are higher than their house payment.
While reliable vehicles are a necessity, having two car payments every month isn’t. It would be better to buy older cars and not have those high payments to make.
Eat Healthy
How can eating healthy be part of preparing for a financial meltdown? Easy; the most expensive things that most of us eat are junk food. As a nation, we spend a fortune on prepared foods, snack foods and sweets.
When the financial meltdown comes, you probably won’t be able to afford all that junk. You’ll end up eating much simpler foods, which carry more nutrition.
At the same time, eating all that junk food is not good for your health. Medical expenses can be extremely high, especially for those who have ignored eating healthy.
While it may sound a bit extreme, eating healthy can make the difference between life and death , by helping protect you from a life-threatening medical problem.
Get in Shape
This one goes hand-in-hand with eating healthy. People who are in good physical condition are much less likely to have medical problems, especially high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol; all of which can become life-threatening.
However, there’s another part to this as well. That is, preparing your body for the physical rigors of survival.
Living without all the modern conveniences requires much more physical work than living with them. That’s why so many of us are out of shape. We’ve become accustomed to allowing machines to do the things that we used to do ourselves. We’ve become softer.
Many of us can’t do the physical work necessary for surviving without all those modern machines.
Find Like-Minded People
Many experts on survival and preparedness recommend banding together with other like-minded people and forming a prepping community . The idea is that in the wake of a disaster, the community would gather in one place to live and work together. Each member of the team would have their assigned area of responsibility, based upon their unique skills.
There are many advantages of working together in a prepping community. The right community can increase your chances of survival.
However, the wrong one can cause severe problems, with people leaving the group and taking most of the supplies with them.
Be careful what group you join, investigating the morals and personalities of the people first, to make an informed decision about whether the group will stick together to help each other, or become selfish and steal from each other.
Our ancestors survived harsh times and their secrets can help you survive during the most treacherous conditions if the world is struck with a tragedy.
Bill White for Survivopedia. 155 total views, 155 views today | 0 |
Many years ago, before my family immigrated to the United States from Pakistan, we used to travel frequently by train. During a more recent trip home, instead of flying back to Karachi from Lahore, I decided to go by train again. I was interested to see what it was like traveling in economy class. I got a seat in Car No. 3, and amid thunder and rain, the train hissed out of the station. Its pace was slow. The compartment was packed. Those who had reserved seats occupied them, while others were perched on the floor, next to the seats or even by the toilets, with the result that it became difficult to move around or to use the toilet yourself. Families with little children spread quilts and pillows on the seats and on the floor. A conductor entered the car and started checking tickets. The passenger in Seat 54, a tall, man with sharp gray eyes, had only an unreserved ticket, so he was asked to vacate the seat. But he took the conductor aside and returned in a few minutes to the same place. The conductor, overlooking the mess everywhere in the car, smiled and went about his duty. If it were not for the rains in Punjab, the heat and dust would have been unbearable. I noticed that the man sitting in Seat 54 kept watching a young woman in a window seat with a little child on her lap. The woman’s eye fell on the man’s face, and she immediately looked down and adjusted her dupatta, her scarf. The night wore on, and people began to close their eyes, but the seats were so uncomfortable that only a very heavy sleeper could manage to get any rest. The train continued its slow pace, stopping every so often at another station. Because of the heat and suffocating air in the compartment, many windows were kept open. The woman with the child on her lap looked over at the man in Seat 54. He was still staring at her. I was beginning to get angry with him. Even under such filthy and uncomfortable circumstances, he couldn’t resist indulging his desire to gaze at an attractive woman. She began to look back at him with fire in her eyes. Turning her face away, she played with the child again for a while. The train was approaching a station. I could see the familiar lights of Khanewal, and as we stopped, a memory flashed through my mind. Two decades earlier, whenever we traveled this route and stopped at this station, my little daughter would urge me to take her out and buy some ceramic toys from one of the stalls. We would buy the toys, and I would enjoy a cup of tea in a clay cup at a tea stall. It was now 2 a. m. and I got down from the train to recapture this pleasant memory. I was drinking my tea when two burly men came near me and stood on either side. I could feel something probing at my right. “Take out your wallet and give it to me,” ordered one of them. I took it out and handed it to him. The other man relieved me of my wristwatch. “Have a safe journey,” one said before they both disappeared. I was shaken, and not just because I lost my wallet and watch. The watch was cheap, bought for four dollars from Kmart in Chicago, and there were only a hundred rupees in my wallet the rest of my money, my credit cards and my IDs were safely tucked inside my shoes. But it struck me that you should never try to recapture the memorable scenes of the past, because you are likely to lose those memories forever. I finished the cup of tea and returned to my seat on the train. The train started again. The child was still awake on his mother’s lap, but the woman found it difficult to keep her eyes open. She was soon lost in a short wink of sleep. Her head fell forward. A moment later, the child began to climb the open window — one leg went over it. The man in Seat 54 leapt up and grabbed the child before he fell out. The commotion woke up the woman. She seemed to be in a panic, and then reality dawned. “Here you are,” the man said as he gave the child back to her. “Your child has been looking for an opportunity to crawl out of the window,” he said. “That’s why I have been watching the whole time. ” He stretched his back and moved away. The woman was dumbfounded, and so was I. The woman had a few sips of water, then got up to thank the man, but he was nowhere to be seen. The train moved on. Early in the morning, at Drigh Road Station, the woman got up to get off the train. She searched for the man again but couldn’t find him. “Bhai,” she addressed me, calling me brother. “If you see that man, will you kindly thank him on my behalf?” I nodded. Before I got down at Karachi Cantt, I searched the whole compartment for him — but he was gone. | 1 |
Moscow culture department to offer lecture series for expats October 28, 2016 RBTH Prominent critics and scholars will teach sessions of the month-long course. Facebook moscow "Exploring Russian Culture" course will have four units. Source: Courtesy of Digital October
The Department of Culture of the city of Moscow is introducing a month-long lecture series in English aimed at foreign residents of the Russian capital. Entitled “Exploring Russian Culture,” the program is for those who want to immerse themselves in Russia’s strong tradition of cultural excellence. Each lecture will focus on one area — such as literature, theater, music, cinema and etiquette — and will be given by a top-ranking expert in the particular field.
Twelve lectures by Moscow’s most prominent creative minds will take place from Nov. 14-Dec.14. The speakers include: literary critic Konstantin Milchin, director of the Moscow Design Museum Alexandra Sankova, Academic Leader and Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics Olga Roginskaya, and many more.
The complete list of lecturers and schedule is available here .
The cost of the entire course (36 hours, 12 lectures) is 14,900 rubles ($238). The cost for all lectures on a single theme (9 hours, 3 lectures) is 4,000 rubles ($64). The cost to attend one lecture is 1,500 rubles ($24).
Applications are available here .
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At present, nuclear disarmament seems to have ground to a halt. Nine nations have a total of approximately 15,500 nuclear warheads in their arsenals, including 7,300 possessed by Russia and 7,100 possessed by the United States. A Russian-American treaty to further reduce their nuclear forces has been difficult to secure thanks to Russian disinterest and Republican resistance.
Yet nuclear disarmament remains vital, for, as long as nuclear weapons exist, it is likely that they will be used. Wars have been fought for thousands of years, with the most powerful weaponry often brought into play. Nuclear weapons were used with little hesitation by the US government in 1945 and, although they have not been employed in war since then, how long can we expect to go on without their being pressed into service again by hostile governments?
Furthermore, even if governments avoid using them for war, there remains the danger of their explosion by terrorist fanatics or simply by accident. More than a thousand accidents involving US nuclear weapons occurred between 1950 and 1968 alone. Many were trivial, but others could have been disastrous. Although none of the accidentally launched nuclear bombs, missiles, and warheads―some of which have never been found―exploded, we might not be as lucky in the future.
Also, nuclear weapons programs are enormously costly. Currently, the US government plans to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to refurbish the entire US nuclear weapons complex. Is this really affordable? Given the fact that military spending already chews up 54 percent of the federal government’s discretionary spending, an additional $1 trillion for nuclear weapons "modernization" seems likely to come out of whatever now remains of funding for public education, public health, and other domestic programs.
In addition, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional countries remains a constant danger. The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 was a compact between the non-nuclear nations and nuclear-armed nations, with the former forgoing nuclear weapons development while the latter eliminated their nuclear arsenals. But the nuclear powers’ retention of nuclear weapons is eroding the willingness of other nations to abide by the treaty.
Conversely, further nuclear disarmament would result in some very real benefits to the United States. A significant reduction in the 2,000 US nuclear weapons deployed around the world would reduce nuclear dangers and save the US government enormous amounts of money that could fund domestic programs or simply be returned to happy taxpayers. Also, with this show of respect for the bargain made under the NPT, non-nuclear nations would be less inclined to embark on nuclear weapons programs.
Unilateral US nuclear reductions would also generate pressures to follow the US lead. If the US government announced cutbacks in its nuclear arsenal, while challenging the Kremlin to do the same, that would embarrass the Russian government before world public opinion, the governments of other nations, and its own public. Eventually, with much to gain and little to lose by engaging in nuclear reductions, the Kremlin might begin making them as well.
Opponents of nuclear reductions argue that nuclear weapons must be retained, for they serve as a "deterrent." But does nuclear deterrence really work? Ronald Reagan , one of America’s most military-minded presidents, repeatedly brushed off airy claims that US nuclear weapons had deterred Soviet aggression, retorting: "Maybe other things had." Also, non-nuclear powers have fought numerous wars with the nuclear powers (including the United States and the Soviet Union) since 1945. Why weren’t they deterred?
Of course, much deterrence thinking focuses on the safety from nuclear attack that nuclear weapons allegedly provide. But, in fact, US government officials, despite their vast nuclear armada, don’t seem to feel very secure. How else can we explain their huge financial investment in a missile defense system? Also, why have they been so worried about the Iranian government obtaining nuclear weapons? After all, the US government’s possession of thousands of nuclear weapons should convince them that they needn’t worry about the acquisition of nuclear arms by Iran or any other nation.
Furthermore, even if nuclear deterrence does work, why does Washington require 2,000 deployed nuclear weapons to ensure its efficacy? A 2002 study concluded that, if only 300 US nuclear weapons were used to attack Russian targets, 90 million Russians (out of a population of 144 million) would die in the first half hour. Moreover, in the ensuing months, the enormous devastation produced by the attack would result in the deaths of the vast majority of survivors by wounds, disease, exposure, and starvation. Surely no Russian or other government would find this an acceptable outcome.
This overkill capacity probably explains why the US Joint Chiefs of Staff think that 1,000 deployed nuclear weapons are sufficient to safeguard US national security. It might also explain why none of the other seven nuclear powers (Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) bothers to maintain more than 300 nuclear weapons .
Although unilateral action to reduce nuclear dangers might sound frightening, it has been taken numerous times with no adverse consequences. The Soviet government unilaterally halted nuclear weapons testing in 1958 and, again, in 1985. Starting in 1989, it also began removing its tactical nuclear missiles from Eastern Europe. Similarly, the US government, during the administration of US president George H.W. Bush, acted unilaterally to remove all US short-range, ground-launched nuclear weapons from Europe and Asia, as well as all short-range nuclear arms from US Navy vessels around the world―an overall cut of several thousand nuclear warheads.
Obviously, negotiating an international treaty that banned and destroyed all nuclear weapons would be the best way to abolish nuclear dangers. But that need not preclude other useful action from being taken along the way.
Lawrence S. Wittner ( http://lawrenceswittner.com ) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university life, What’s Going On at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press). A longer version of this article appeared originally in The Asia-Pacific Journal . Read more by Lawrence Wittner | 0 |
Videos Clay Pigeons: How Lobbyists Secretly Woo Top Election Officials Big-money corporate lobbying has reached into one of the most obscure corners of state government: the offices of secretaries of state, the people charged with running elections impartially. Barbara Cegavske, the Nevada secretary of state, during a debate .The Republican Secretaries of State Committee, a fundraising group, invited her to participate by phone in May meetings with tobacco, restaurant and gun industry representatives to discuss ballot initiatives.
The targeting of secretaries of state with campaign donations, corporate-funded weekend outings and secret meetings with industry lobbyists reflects an intense focus on often overlooked ballot questions, which the secretaries frequently help write.
The ballot initiatives are meant to give voters a direct voice on policy issues such as the minimum wage and the environment. But corporate and other special interests are doing their best to build close ties with the secretaries because a difference of even a few words on a ballot measure can have an enormous impact on the outcome.
The influence campaign has intensified, with more citizen-driven ballot initiatives to be decided on Election Day this year than at any time in the past decade.
Secretaries of state from Washington, Ohio, Colorado and Nevada 2014 all Republicans 2014 participated in closed-door meetings in May with representatives from Reynolds American, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company ; the National Restaurant Association; and the National Rifle Association, while ballot initiative signatures in those states were still being collected, documents obtained through open records requests show .
At a weekend retreat last month at a hunting lodge in Kansas, Republican secretaries of state mingled with donors, including a representative from Koch Industries, as they shot pheasant and clay pigeons. The owners of Koch Industries 2014 Charles G. and David H. Koch 2014 have funded groups involved in several ballot initiative fights this year, including over a solar energy measure in Florida.
“The Koch brothers out with the Republican secretaries of state 2014 that’s a news story I don’t need,” Allen Richardson, a Koch lobbyist, joked, unaware that a reporter was in attendance.
Groups aligned with Democrats have also targeted secretaries of state, mobilizing during the 2014 campaign to try to elect more officials sympathetic to their causes.
“With so many important issues being decided through ballot initiatives (increases in the minimum wage, gay marriage, environmental protections, etc.), increasing our involvement in electing secretaries of state who will stand with working families is vital,” said a strategy memo co-written by Steve Rosenthal , a veteran political strategist for labor unions.
The May meetings between industry officials and the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, a fundraising group, were set up to give the industry players a chance to weigh in on ballot initiatives that the secretaries were overseeing, emails show.
In an email with the subject line “ Ballot Initiative Private Meetings in DC, ” Emily Keech, the committee’s executive director, invited Barbara Cegavske, the Nevada secretary of state, to join the sessions by phone, noting that the others were flying in.
“I know that the National Rifle Association has some concerns in NV so it would be helpful to get your insights,” Keech wrote , referring to a Nevada initiative that would more broadly require background checks for gun sales, a measure opposed by the NRA.
She assured Cegavske that the meetings would be kept confidential.
“I don’t want that listed anywhere since it is a sensitive topic for some secretaries,” Keech wrote in the email . In briefing papers she later sent, she detailed the ballot initiatives the industry groups were concerned with 2014 and just how much the groups had donated for Republican election efforts.
Some former secretaries of state said the new fundraising tactics could hurt the image of the offices as impartial referees of state elections.
“It is extremely important that the public trust their elections and have confidence they are going to be handled in a fair and impartial way,” said Sam Reed, a former Republican secretary of state in Washington. “And ballot issues in particular are very sensitive.”
Twenty-six states allow citizens to enact or repeal laws through a popular vote. The initiative process began over a century ago as a way to circumvent state legislatures, considered at the time to be dominated by powerful corporate interests.
There are 71 citizen initiatives this year, according to Ballotpedia , a nonprofit group that tracks state elections, and spending on those initiatives has reached at least $821 million .
With billions at stake, major corporations routinely hire consulting firms to help them influence ballot initiatives.
“The key to any ballot measure is the right language,” Nathan Sproul , the managing partner at Lincoln Strategy Group, whose client list has included Walmart, Philip Morris International and Wynn Resorts, told a roomful of lobbyists in September at a closed-door strategy session in Alexandria, Va. “In Arizona, you write the concept, and then the secretary of state writes the language.”
Another Lincoln executive, Ulrico Izaguirre, told attendees, as he ran through a long list of Election Day items before voters this year: “The clouds of ballot measures threaten business on a daily basis. Thunderous clouds.”
Republicans have turned to initiatives to push their agenda as a counter to liberal activists, according to an internal party memo.
“Ballot initiatives will not be the left’s mechanism for gaining power and advancing their agenda when voters have already rejected them,” said the memo, from the Republican State Leadership Committee , in February 2015 as the group prepared fundraising efforts. “It’s time for conservatives to take back that power by rejecting their efforts and promoting our own.”
The Republican organization that hosted the closed-door meetings in Washington is an arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, a political group dedicated to electing candidates to state government posts.
In a July 2015 memo, the leadership group said , “The diverse set of responsibilities held by Republican Secretaries across the country presents previously unidentified opportunities for significant growth and expansion,” and then discussed “the importance of ballot initiatives” as a fundraising tool.
And money has poured in. Reynolds American has contributed $990,000 in the past two years to the Republican State Leadership Committee, and Altria, the nation’s largest cigarette company , has given at least $540,000 2014 making them the second- and third-biggest donors to the organization, behind the United States Chamber of Commerce. The NRA has donated at least $160,000.
Ellie Hockenbury, a spokeswoman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said the meetings and other conversations with donors were simply informational.
And secretaries of state said their efforts to raise money had no impact on their actions as government officials.
“When you are trying to raise money, you try to work with people who have an interest in the subjects,” said Wayne Williams, the Colorado secretary of state. He added, “I will meet with anybody on any side of the subject at any time.”
But Christin Fernandez, a spokeswoman for the restaurant association, acknowledged that the organization, at its headquarters in Washington, had expressed concerns to the secretaries of state about the minimum-wage ballot initiatives.
“As a membership organization, the National Restaurant Association and our state partners meet with many different organizations on both sides of the aisle to voice the concerns,” she said in a statement.
Email records from Nevada show that the Republican fundraising efforts are linked to ballot initiatives. A spreadsheet obtained from Cegavske includes a “contact list” prepared by Keech, the Republican Secretaries of State Committee’s executive director.
“I would ask for $25k due to the gambling and gaming initiatives all across the country,” Keech wrote to Cegavske , referring to Wynn Resorts, along with a list of other possible donors, and their ties to ballot initiative efforts.
Another target for a solicitation was NV Energy, which is facing a proposed constitutional amendment, requiring voter approval, to end the company’s monopoly over much of the state’s electricity market.
Cegavske’s executive assistant wrote back to Keech, reporting that the effort had generated some cash return.
“Barbara has contacted NV Energy and they are good for a contribution,” the executive assistant, Jennifer Russell, wrote in April .
“What great news!!!!” Keech wrote back. “The Secretaries’ contacts are ALWAYS better than ours.”
In a statement, Cegavske said the suggestion that she had sought money from NV Energy because of the pending ballot initiative was “categorically false.”
Democrats have also attracted large donations from labor unions and activists with an intense interest in ballot agenda items. Michael R. Bloomberg donated $250,000 this year to an Oregon candidate who as a state legislator had helped push through a law on background checks for gun sales.
A spokesman for Bloomberg said the donation was not related to any effort to influence future ballot measures.
Labor union and abortion rights groups, however, were more explicit. The confidential memo drafted by veteran labor union organizers before the 2014 election 2014 published last month by WikiLeaks as part of the cache of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta 2014 said those groups were prepared to support the effort.
“The office of Secretary of State is playing an increasingly important role for progressives,” the memo said, noting its “pivotal roles in the ballot initiative process.”
The impact of these donations and private gatherings on actions by secretaries of state is difficult to gauge, given the dozens of small language changes as the ballot measures are being prepared for Election Day. But there are hints of possible benefits.
For example, a gun control initiative on the Nevada ballot next week was framed by the secretary of state as a measure that would “prohibit” firearm transfers without background checks, rather than as a required additional step before a gun sale could take place.
This is a seemingly small but important difference that gun control supporters say makes the ballot item less palatable to voters.
Cegavske said the ballot language she used fairly reflected text submitted to her office by those advocating the measure.
“There was no input from the gun industry in the writing of the ballot question,” Gail J. Anderson, the deputy secretary for Southern Nevada, said in a statement.
After a minimum-wage campaign accelerated last year in Ohio, emails show, Jon A. Husted, the secretary of state, communicated with an Ohio Chamber of Commerce affiliate as the business group discussed plans with the restaurant industry to “meet and strategize” about its opposition effort.
A spokesman for Husted said that “the amendment and referendum processes can be cumbersome” and that “the secretary is often asked to come explain precisely how it works.”
Minimum-wage advocates chastised Washington’s secretary of state, Kim Wyman , who is in the midst of a re-election campaign. She has benefited from a blitz of radio advertisements paid for by the Republican group that sponsored the May meetings with industry representatives. Wyman declined requests to comment.
At the three-day hunt 2014 where corporate donors and secretaries of state from Kansas, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas shared a one-story, wood-frame hunting lodge, with stuffed deer and elk antlers mounted on the walls 2014 there was little discussion of formal election matters.
Instead, it was an opportunity for the corporate executives to cement personal connections. Together, they set loose Labrador retrievers on acres of prime high-grass hunting grounds, flushing pheasants and quail from their hiding spots.
“I was 60 yards away,” Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, said as he showed off two prairie chickens he had shot earlier in the day.
After a dinner of shredded beef, the state officials and political contributors, some in pajamas, drank beers. The only apparent disappointment the next morning, after their first hunting outing together as a group, was that they had bagged only 58 birds, two short of their legal limit.
“The two that got away,” Kobach said.
“We’ll get ’em tomorrow,” said one of the corporate executives. This work by Pro Publica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. | 0 |
Hillary Clinton’s Private Speech From 2015 Mentioned Palestinian Rights—Until She Actually Gave It Hillary Clinton delivering a speech at the Saban Forum in 2011. ( Flickr / CC 2.0 )
The “ Podesta emails ” being released by WikiLeaks continue to illuminate concealed aspects of Hillary Clinton’s policy positions. Recent batches of the emails, originating from the server of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, include segments of speeches —and a few full transcripts —made by the Democratic presidential nominee to various organizations behind closed doors.
The emails and speeches are being dumped almost daily and shine a light on many of Clinton’s positions—on the environment, foreign policy, big business, health care and more. An email released Tuesday , however, provides an interesting glimpse into the editing of one of Clinton’s many speeches and focuses on a controversial political issue: the U.S. relationship with Israel and Palestine.
The email “reveals that an extensive section on Palestinian rights was completely removed from an early draft of the speech” Clinton delivered on Dec. 6, 2015, at the Saban Forum in Washington, reporter Eli Clifton explains :
Palestinian rights and acknowledgment of their national aspirations are nearly completely lacking from the final version. The speech only made a brief reference to Israeli settlement construction, which Clinton loosely described as a “damaging action.” It also made only one passing, and indirect, acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering, saying, “Israeli children have been killed as have Palestinian children.” …
A Dec. 4, 2015, version of the speech, apparently drafted by Clinton speechwriter Dan [Schwerin], made specific references to Palestinian suffering and right to self-determination. Although holding to the position of the Democratic Party and the Clinton camp that a two-state solution cannot be imposed by outside actors like the United Nations, this earlier version of the speech explicitly mentioned settlement construction as an impediment to the peace process.
The Saban Forum “is organized by the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution” and was created and is currently chaired by billionaire Haim Saban, who has a history of pro-Israel policy . Saban is also co-owner of Univision, which recently purchased Gawker Media Group Inc.
Clifton noted that in another email , Podesta himself suggested a “cut or rework” to a section of the speech that might “evoke how people feel about how Israel is treating the Palestinians,” and Clifton added that Podesta described Saban as “not [being] with [Clinton] if she wasn’t totally committed to Israeli security.”
Podesta was probably referring to this segment of Schwerin’s draft, which was notably absent from the version Clinton ultimately delivered to the Saban Forum:
“Israelis cannot live forever in a state of siege. They must not be condemned to the constant fear that they might be stabbed in the street or attacked on a bus. Generation after generation of parents should not have to send their children off to combat. Israelis deserve security, recognition, and a peaceful, normal life. They deserve to live in a nation defined by its founding ideals—democratic, Jewish, and free.
“And Palestinians have the right to yearn for the freedom to govern themselves, in peace and dignity. For most Americans, it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine living behind checkpoints and roadblocks. Palestinians should be able to achieve their legitimate aspirations.
“So as difficult as this will be, all the parties must work to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution and create the conditions for progress by avoiding unilateral or damaging actions, whether on the ground, in settlement construction, or at the United Nations.”
Neither Clinton, Podesta or Schwerin (who is now Clinton’s director of speechwriting ) has commented on the leaked email and speech. | 0 |
Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, was accused on Wednesday of forcing out a prominent female anchor after she refused his sexual advances and complained to him about persistent harassment in the newsroom, a startling accusation against perhaps the most powerful man in television news. In a lawsuit, the anchor, Gretchen Carlson, a longtime Fox employee who left the network last month, portrays Mr. Ailes as a loutish and serial sexual harasser, accusing him of ogling her in his office, calling her “sexy,” and describes a boys’ club environment at the network. Her charges — including the accusation that Mr. Ailes explicitly asked Ms. Carlson for a sexual relationship during a meeting in his office — amounted to an almost unprecedented public attack on Mr. Ailes, a towering figure in media and Republican politics who typically enjoys absolute loyalty from his employees. Late Wednesday, the parent company of Fox News, 21st Century Fox, issued a measured statement, saying it had “full confidence’’ in Mr. Ailes, but had initiated an internal review of Ms. Carlson’s charges. “We take these matters seriously,” the company said. Mr. Ailes, in a separate statement, was far less temperate. “Gretchen Carlson’s allegations are false,” he wrote. “This is a retaliatory suit for the network’s decision not to renew her contract,” which he attributed to ratings he called “disappointingly low. ’’ He added: “This defamatory lawsuit is not only offensive, it is wholly without merit and will be defended vigorously. ” The suit arrives at a complex moment for Mr. Ailes, who is facing new challenges to the television empire that he has overseen, with control and huge success, for two decades. While he retains the support of his corporate boss, Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Ailes, 76, has sometimes clashed with Mr. Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, who have ascended to the most senior leadership roles at the company. And Fox News, while still enjoying high ratings, is facing renewed competition from CNN, which has been closing what was long an enormous gap in ratings between the networks. (In one important demographic, CNN has narrowed its deficit with Fox News to its slimmest figure in eight years.) The network has also been less of a dominant political force in this year’s presidential election, with the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, publicly clashing with the network and some of its anchors, a sharp contrast from previous election cycles. Ms. Carlson, 50, filed her lawsuit in Superior Court in New Jersey, where Mr. Ailes maintains a residence. She contends that during a meeting last fall to discuss her concerns that she was being treated unfairly, Mr. Ailes told her: “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better. ” When she rebuffed him, the lawsuit claims, Mr. Ailes retaliated by reducing Ms. Carlson’s salary, curtailing her appearances and, to her surprise, declining to renew her contract last month. Ms. Carlson’s suit, filed by the law firm Smith Mullin of Montclair, N. J. names Mr. Ailes as the sole defendant and seeks a variety of compensatory damages. Her lead lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, said in an interview that Ms. Carlson’s grievance was with Mr. Ailes personally, not the Fox network. “We were considering taking action before she was terminated,” Ms. Smith said. “The firing sort of pulled the trigger for us. ” Mr. Ailes is known as a fierce public relations warrior who can be ruthless with enemies. Ms. Carlson can be on air, but she is working with a formidable team: Ms. Smith once brought a sexual harassment suit against a former acting governor of New Jersey, and Ms. Carlson’s husband, Casey Close, is a powerful sports agent known for tenacious negotiating on behalf of clients like Derek Jeter. Ms. Smith, the lawyer, said that several women had contacted her saying they had similar experiences with Mr. Ailes, although she declined to name them. A 2014 biography of Mr. Ailes, by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, “The Loudest Voice in the Room,’’ recounted an episode in the 1980s, when Mr. Ailes was at NBC, involving a woman named Randi Harrison who said he offered her an extra $100 a week in salary in exchange for having sex with him “whenever I want. ” (Fox News denied the claim at the time Ms. Harrison corroborated the account in a phone interview on Wednesday.) Ms. Carlson joined Fox News in 2005. In her suit, Ms. Carlson, who once walked off a Fox set as her made jokes about women, portrays a culture at the network where casual sexism is tolerated, part of a broader Ailes news aesthetic of bombastic coverage and physically attractive talent. In 2009, Ms. Carlson contends, she complained to the network about her on the popular “Fox Friends” morning show, Steve Doocy, saying he belittled her on the set, openly mocked her among colleagues and once tried to shush her during a live broadcast by pulling down her arm. Mr. Ailes, the lawsuit states, responded by calling Ms. Carlson a “man hater” and saying “she needed to learn to ‘get along with the boys.’ ” Ms. Carlson claims that because of her complaints, Mr. Ailes eventually reassigned her from “Fox Friends,” in 2013, to a less prestigious slot. Until last month, Ms. Carlson was still hosting that program, “The Real Story With Gretchen Carlson,” which is broadcast at 2 p. m. on the network. The show had consistently won its time slot, averaging 1. 1 million viewers in recent months. But it was the network’s daytime program among a crucial advertising demographic, raising concerns at Fox News that it was losing ground to competition from CNN. Mr. Ailes has minted stars like Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly, who now host the two shows in cable news. And he established Fox News as a powerful force in Republican politics and a major profit center for Mr. Murdoch’s media empire. Even Ms. Carlson has had kind words for Mr. Ailes. In a book published last year, “Getting Real,” Ms. Carlson described Mr. Ailes as “the most accessible boss I’ve ever worked for,” and thanked him for encouraging her career. Shelley Ross, a longtime TV news executive, has been quoted as saying Mr. Ailes used inappropriate comments with her during a job interview. In an email on Wednesday, she played down that incident and praised Mr. Ailes. “I have had many bosses throughout my career Roger turned out to be one of my favorites,” she wrote, adding, “If you want to expose disgusting immoral behavior in network and cable news, I have much better candidates about whom you could write. ” Ms. Carlson’s announcement of her lawsuit on Wednesday was carefully coordinated. A public relations firm distributed copies of the complaint to reporters across a variety of disciplines. Shortly afterward, on Twitter, Ms. Carlson offered thanks for an “outpouring of support” and introduced a hashtag: #StandWithGretchen. By the afternoon, a link to her lawsuit was prominently posted on her personal website. The public nature of the suit was unusual, some legal experts said, since typically such suits are settled privately. “The fact that it isn’t proceeding along that trajectory suggests that Carlson had an interest in seeing these allegations brought forward in the public forum,” said Debra Katz, a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases. | 1 |
American Conservative Union President Matt Schlapp hosted a conversation with White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and White House strategist Steve Bannon on Thursday at CPAC 2017. [Priebus began by declaring that President Trump, who will also speak at CPAC, would become known as “one of the greatest presidents that ever served this country. ” Schlapp noted that Trump will also be the first president to address CPAC during his first year in office since Ronald Reagan in 1981, and he congratulated Trump for assembling “the most conservative Cabinet we’ve ever seen, according to our CPAC ratings. ” When Schlapp asked for the “biggest misconception about what’s going on in the Donald Trump White House,” Priebus replied: “In regard to us two, I think the biggest misconception is everything that you’re reading. ” Priebus and Bannon said that contrary to media reports about friction between them, they’re working very well together. “It’s actually something that you all helped build,” Priebus told the audience. “When you bring together, and what this election showed, and what President Trump showed — and let’s not kid ourselves, I mean I can talk about data and ground game, and Steve can talk about big ideas, but the truth of the matter is, Donald Trump, President Trump brought together the party and the conservative movement. ” The President’s chief of staff went on to say, prompting a burst of applause: And I’ve got to tell you, if the party and the conservative movement are together — similar to Steve and I — it can’t be stopped. And President Trump was the one guy, he was the one person — and I can say it after overseeing 16 people kill each other — it was Donald Trump that was able to bring this party and this movement together. Steve and I know that, and we live it every day. Our job is to get the agenda of President Trump through the door, and on pen and paper. Bannon, formerly a Breitbart News executive, argued that the mainstream media has been consistently wrong in how it portrayed the Trump campaign, the transition, and now the administration during its first months. “If you remember, the campaign was the most chaotic, by the media’s description, most chaotic, most disorganized, most unprofessional, had no earthly idea what they were doing — and then you saw them all crying and weeping that night on the Eighth,” he recalled. Bannon agreed with Priebus that President Trump’s ideas, energy, and vision were the key to galvanizing a broad coalition of supporters around him. “A lot of people have strong beliefs about different things, but we understand that you can come together to win, and we understood that from August 15th,” Bannon said. “We never had a doubt, and Donald Trump never had a doubt that he was going to win. ” Priebus and Bannon both emphasized how much of Trump’s agenda is clearly laid out in his speeches, going all the way back to his appearance at CPAC 2011. “What all of us were starving for the whole time, because we’re so sick of politics and politicians — in spite of the fact that we love being here, we actually hate politics — but what we were starving for was somebody real,” Priebus contended. “Somebody genuine, somebody that was actually who he said he was. ” “If you want to see the Trump agenda, it’s very simple: it was all in the speeches,” said Bannon. “He went around to these rallies with those speeches that had a tremendous amount of content in them. I happen to believe, and I think many others do, he’s probably the greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan. ” “Remember, we didn’t have any money,” Bannon pointed out. “Hillary Clinton and these guys had over $2 billion. We had a couple of hundred million dollars. It was those rallies and those speeches. All he’s doing right now is he’s laid out an agenda with those speeches, to the promises he made, and our job every day is just to execute on that, to simply get a path to how those get executed. ” Bannon testified that President Trump’s response to advice that he should deviate from his agenda for political benefit has been, “No, I promised the American people this, and this is the plan we’re going to execute on. ” “That’s why you’ve seen the executive orders, the way he’s gone through the Supreme Court, and by the way the other 102 judges that we’re eventually going to pick,” he said. “It’s just methodical, and that’s what the mainstream media won’t report. Just like they were dead wrong on the chaos of the campaign, and just like they were dead wrong on the chaos of the transition, they are absolutely dead wrong about what’s going on today, because we have a team that’s just grinding it through on what President Donald Trump promised the American people. The mainstream media had better understand something: all of those promises are going to be implemented,” Bannon promised. Priebus said the most urgent task for the administration was confirming Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He explained: Number One, we’re not talking about a change over a period. We’re talking about a change of potentially forty years of law. But more important than that, it established trust. It established that President Trump is a man of his word. We always knew that. But when he said here’s twenty names on a piece of paper back in July, remember, and he said, ‘I’m going to pick my judge out of these twenty people that are on this piece of paper,’ and he did it — that’s number one, because Neil Gorsuch represents a conservative, represents the type of judge that has the vision of Donald Trump, and it fulfills the promise that he made to all of you, and to all Americans across the country. Priebus said the second item on the president’s agenda was deregulation. He argued that Trump hasn’t been given enough credit for imposing a consistent process of deregulation by ordering that “for every regulation presented for passage, that Cabinet secretary has to identify two that that person would eliminate. ” The third priority identified by Priebus was immigration — “protecting the sovereignty of the United States, putting a wall on the southern border, making sure that criminals are not part of our process. ” “These are all things that eight percent of Americans agree with, and these are all things that President Trump is doing within thirty days,” he declared. Bannon divided the White House agenda into three categories: national security, economic nationalism, and the deconstruction of the administrative state. He said: I think one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history was his immediate withdrawal from TPP. Got us out of a trade deal and let our sovereignty come back to ourselves. The people in the mainstream media don’t get this, but we’re already working in consultation with the Hill, people are starting to think through a whole raft of amazing and innovative bilateral relationships, bilateral trading relationships with people that will reposition America in the world as a fair trading nation, and start to bring jobs — high value added manufacturing jobs — back to the United States of America. “The rule of law is going to exist, when you talk about our sovereignty and you talk about immigration,” he stated, linking the president’s trade positions with national security. He said the defense budget and Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s plan for defeating ISIS would also be part of that imperative. Bannon made the interesting point that business leaders have been telling the White House that slashing regulations is at least as important as cutting taxes to get the economy moving faster. “If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction — the way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some kind of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed, and that’s why I think this regulatory thing is so important,” he said. Schlapp brought the conversation back to media coverage of the new administration. Priebus said he thought there was hope for improvement. “I”m personally so conditioned to hearing about why President Trump isn’t going to win the election, why a controversy in the primary is going to take down President Trump I lived through it as chairman of the party,” he said, recalling his time as chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2016 election. “It really hit me because it was maybe the summer of 2015, and you remember the media was constantly pounding President Trump, and the polling kept getting better and better for President Trump. But it was when I went home and got out of this town, and I went back to Kenosha, and I talked to my neighbor. And I said, ‘Bob, what do you think?’ He goes, ‘Man, I really love that Trump.’ I said, ‘Sandy, what do you think?’ ‘We’re for Trump. ’” “You all lived through it too, because you all had different people you were for, but you kept running into your neighbors, and you kept running into people that you know, and what did they keep telling you? They kept telling you, ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,’” he said, unintentionally sparking a chant of the president’s name from the audience. He said it was clear the country was hungry for something much bigger than a single issue campaign, or a modest course correction from the previous administration. Bannon took his turn at the microphone to disagree with Priebus about whether media coverage of the Trump administration would improve. He argued that it was likely to get worse. “They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has,” Bannon argued, recalling how that message resonated everywhere from previous CPAC appearances by Trump to small town hall meetings. He predicted media coverage would therefore get worse as Trump continues to “press his agenda, and as economic conditions get better, more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. ” Bannon warned: If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day it is going to be a fight, and that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this, all the people who have come to him and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to moderate.’ Every day in the Oval Office he tells Reince and I, ‘I commited this to the American people, I promised this when I ran, and I’m going to deliver on this.’ Priebus stressed the importance of Republicans sticking together through the coming years. “I think what you’ve got is an incredible opportunity to use this victory that President Trump and all of us, and you, and everyone that made this happen put together, and work together, continue to communicate,” he said, adding: Some of the core principles of President Trump are very similar to those of Ronald Reagan. When you look at peace through strength and building up the military — I mean, how many times have you heard President Trump say, ‘I’m going to build up the military, I’m going to take care of the vets, I’m going to make sure that we don’t have a Navy that’s decimated and planes that are nowhere to be found?’ Peace through strength. Deregulation. You think about the economy and the economic boom that was created. Some of it is going to take a little time — to get the jobs back, to get more money in people’s pockets. Those things are going to happen. In the meantime, we have to stick together and make sure that we’ve got President Trump for eight years. He’s somebody that we know that we’re going to be very proud of as these things get done. But it’s going to take all of us working together to make it happen. Bannon saw a “new political order” continuing to take shape, noting that populists, conservatives, libertarians, and economic nationalists could be found in the CPAC audience. “We have wide and sometimes divergent opinions, but I think the center core of what we believe — that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being,” he said. “I think that’s what unites us, and I think that is what’s going to unite this movement going forward. ” “We’re at the top of the first inning on this. It’s going to take just as much fight, just as much focus, and just as much determination, and the one thing I’d like to leave you guys today with is that we want you to have our back … but more importantly, hold us accountable. Hold us accountable to what we promised, hold us accountable for delivering on what we promised. ” Modertor Matt Schlapp, in acknowledgment of the unique nature of their joint appearance, asked the Honorable Gentlemen what they appreciated about one another. Priebus lauded Bannon for being “very dogged in ensuring that every day, the promises that President Trump has made are the promises that we’re working on,” for being “incredibly loyal,” and for being “extremely consistent. ” “As you can imagine, there are many things hitting the president’s ear and desk every day, different things that come to the president that want to move him off his agenda, and Steve is very consistent and very loyal to the agenda, and is a presence that I think is very important to have in the White House,” he said. He added that he thought of Bannon as a dear and cherished friend. “I can run a little hot on occasions,” Bannon allowed. “And Reince is indefatigable. It’s low key, but it’s determination. The thing I respect most, and the only way this thing works, is Reince is always kind of steady … his job is by far one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever seen in my life. ” | 1 |
In a fiery reminder of its presence and its power, Mount Etna roared to life this week on the island of Sicily, sending fountains of molten rock and ash high into the air and down the slopes of Europe’s largest and most active volcano. The latest eruption, which began on Monday and is expected to last at least several more days, could be seen for miles. Mount Etna’s frequent eruptions have been watched and feared for thousands of years. An especially large one in the 17th century changed the shape of Sicily’s coastline with a huge outpouring of lava. More recent outbursts have tended to be smaller, but still dangerous enough to prompt evacuations of nearby villages and disrupt air traffic with plumes of smoke and ash. By Tuesday, Italian authorities said the latest eruption posed no further danger to the towns that dot the mountain’s slopes, and flights in and out of the closest airport in Catania were operating normally again. A big eruption in 1981 destroyed 12, 350 acres of vineyards and woods, as well as scores of rural homes and vacation villas. Lava flows cut telephone and power lines, buried railroad tracks and blocked highways. Tremors from a 2002 eruption led to the evacuation of 1, 000 people. The volcano has nurtured the island’s residents more than it has threatened them. Its eruptions have give northeastern Sicily a soil that is prized by farmers and vintners, and the mountain draws many tourists. | 1 |
Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email =>
I envy you, American citizens. I do not care about your military might, nor for your supreme currency, the US dollar. I envy your chance to deal on 11/8 a decisive blow to the rule of the Masters of Discourse. Though the Masters control the entirety of world media, and they decide what people may think and say from Canada to Hong Kong, only you, American citizens, can defeat them. This is a great chance, a unique opportunity not to be missed.
The Masters of Discourse can be defeated. They are not stronger than any ruler of past. Trump has a great quality making him fit for the task: he is impervious to labels and libels. He had been called everything in the book: anti-Semite, racist, women hater, you name it. And he still survived that flak. Such people are very rare.
We know he is against the Masters because every newspaper is against him. I never saw a similar onslaught but once, in Russia in 1996. Then President Yeltsin, an old drunkard who had brought Russia to collapse, had to run for his second term. His popularity was next to zero. Two per cent of Russians intended to vote for him. And then the oligarchs turned on their propaganda machine. Yeltsin’s competitor Gennady Zyuganov, a mild church-going post-communist, had been presented like a Hitler of his days. All the Russian media of the day belonged to oligarchs, and all of it participated in the onslaught. Zyuganov surrendered.
Perhaps he won the election, but he congratulated Yeltsin with his victory. It was said that he was threatened with assassination unless… Others say he was bribed. I do not exclude both explanations, but for sure the might of united media can crush a timid man.
In the days of the Jewish Temple, there was a Magrepha, a wind instrument able to produce diverse and frightening sounds. There is no agreement among the scholars about what sort of thing it was. Whenever it sounded, people were scared.
The media of our days is a new Magrepha. If all of its outputs are united, they produce a terrible roar.
Yes, the onslaught of the media upon Trump had been exceedingly unfair, but he survived it. What is even more important, you survived it. It does not matter what the polls say: they say what the newspapers tell them to say. Even people answer the polls according to the media prognoses: they are shy of saying they would vote for a man who … But at the moment of actual vote, they do what they know is right for them. Not for transgenders, not for Muslim brokers, not even for single mothers, but for themselves.
You have a very good chance to win, and to defeat the witch and her supporters. We learned that the British people voted for Brexit, though all the media said that proposal had no chance. But we also learned from Brexit, that nothing is over until it is over. The Masters of Discourse will try every trick to steal the elections, and only their fear of armed rising may finally force them to acknowledge their inevitable defeat.
We know that in 2015, when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was afraid of losing the elections, he revealed that the American intelligence has some superior software which allows them to falsify the elections. Perhaps, but he won despite this magical software, despite Obama’s wrath.
Even in Israel, that favorite son of the Masters, the Masters are hated. The New York Times is always speaking good about Israel, but still Israelis do not like the newspaper. Nobody likes them, nobody likes an old aunt who tries to tell us what we can say and what we can’t. If Netanyahu could win, Trump can win twice.
After the first debate of Trump and Clinton, people said: She won! But we shall vote for him. This was a very encouraging sign. Indeed every woman worth its salt would win an argument with her husband or son-in-law, let alone a pretender. That is the way we are made. The story of sirens enforces the belief that if you listen to a woman, she will bewitch you. Sirens actually ate the bewitched sailors; our womenfolk do not go to such extremes, but they can cause us a lot of trouble.
Trump seems to be almost pure of heart and deed, as even extremely prejudiced media could not find anything really incriminating about him but bragging about having his way with women. I shall not recount so many proven accusations against Hillary. All of that can be found in the emails revealed by Julian Assange and his great Wikileaks team. The media kept mum about it, but the secrets can’t be kept forever.
There are many practical things Donald Trump will be able to fix. He can return industries home, he can return American GIs home from four ends of the world, he can improve lot of working men. But he surely will set all of us free from the annoying bondage of the Masters. Just for that reason, go and vote, for yourself and for millions of us who aren’t entitled to.
Israel Shamir can be reached at | 0 |
A recent piece in The Atlantic — aimed at undermining the use of ultrasounds to convince people that infants in the womb are human — was so filled with errors that after its publication the magazine was forced to issue a slew of “we regret” addenda to the piece to apologize for the many inaccurate assertions made by the author. [Thus far no less than four corrections have been added to the January 24 article, which tends to upend the author Moira Weigel’s political stance that a fetus isn’t fully human at certain stages of development. Even at its first publication, the magazine became skittish over the author’s claims. The piece was originally entitled, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person. ” But the title was quickly changed to tone it down. It later became simply, “How Ultrasound Became Political. ” After publication, Weigel’s attack on science itself began to unravel and The Atlantic had to start adding corrections at the tail end of the article online. The point the author was trying to convey is that using ultrasound images to “convince” people that their fetus is human is somehow a “trick” or an action meant to deceive. Repeatedly Weigel seems to gasp in horror that expectant mothers and fathers proudly display their ultrasound images to celebrate the impending birth of their babies. So, to drive home the point that a fetus isn’t really a person, Weigel adds a list of scientific “facts” all meant to undermine the use of ultrasounds to assert that a fetus is a human. Her are the four corrections The Atlantic was forced to make to the piece: * This article originally stated that there is “no heart to speak of” in a fetus. By that point in a pregnancy, a heart has already begun to form. We regret the error. ** This article originally stated that the fetus was already suffering from a genetic disorder. We regret the error. *** This article originally stated that Bernard Nathanson headed the National Committee and became a Christian. Nathanson was active in but did not head the committee, and he converted to Roman Catholicism after The Silent Scream was produced. We regret the error. **** This article originally stated that the doctors claimed fetuses had no reflexive responses to medical instruments at 12 weeks. We regret the error. Many of these “corrections” completely undermine Weigel’s theory that a fetus lacks enough attributes of a living, autonomous human being to qualify as a living person. One wonders why Weigel’s “facts” weren’t checked before publication? Finally, as HotAir’s Ed Morrissey pointed out, there was yet another correction the magazine made. In the original story it asserted that Ohio Governor John Kasich vetoed an ultrasound bill in Indiana. Of course, Ohio governors can’t veto anything in another state, and current Vice President Mike Pence was the one who was wielding the veto pen in Indiana. The change was made but never added to the “we regrets” at the end of the article. @EdMorrissey @hotairblog Funnier still, @TheAtlantic’s corrections list still fails to mention fixing of this laugher from original version pic. twitter. — Lance Salyers (@lancesalyers) January 27, 2017, Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
Female physicians at some of the nation’s most prominent public medical schools earn nearly $20, 000 less a year on average than their male colleagues, according to an analysis published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Before adjusting for factors that could influence income, the researchers found that the absolute difference between the genders was more than $51, 000 a year. Several studies have found a persistent pay gap between male and female doctors. But those reports relied mostly on doctors reporting their own incomes, or focused on pay disparities in one specialty or one region, or on starting salaries. The new study draws on salary information from a much larger, objective sample. The researchers went to great lengths to account for a variety of factors that can influence income, such as the volume of patients seen by a physician and the number of publications he or she had written. Medical professionals greeted the results with exasperation. “It’s 2016, and yet in a very methodically strong, large study that covers a broad swath of the country, you’re still seeing at the very least a 10 percent difference in what men and women take home,” said Dr. Molly Cooke, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, who has studied salary disparities among physicians. Dr. Vineet M. Arora, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “This paper is going to make women academic physicians start a conversation with their institutions to promote transparency and gender equality, because at the end of the day, it’s not fair,” she said in an interview. The analysis included data on roughly 10, 000 physician faculty members at 24 medical schools, including those of the University of North Carolina and the University of Washington. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital relied on public databases of employee salaries in 12 states, and data from Doximity, a networking site for physicians, to adjust for factors that can influence income — years since residency, specialty and age, for instance. Only public medical schools, not private ones, were included, because states like Florida and Texas post employee salaries online. After adjusting for a variety of factors, the researchers found that female neurosurgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons and women in other surgical subspecialties made roughly $44, 000 less than comparable men in those fields. The average pay gap between female and male orthopedic surgeons was nearly $41, 000. The difference was about $38, 000 among oncologists and blood specialists, about $36, 000 among and $34, 000 among cardiologists. Radiology was the only specialty in which women were paid more. Their adjusted average salary exceeded that of male radiologists by roughly $2, 000. Pay differences by gender appeared across all faculty ranks. Full female professors made roughly the same income ($250, 971) as male associate professors ($247, 212) despite outranking them. The study’s limitations included a lack of information about who was on a tenure track. More important, reported incomes in some states may not include all payments to physicians, but both men and women are likely to have been affected by such an exclusion. The researchers also found stark variations in the salary gap at different medical schools, suggesting some address pay inequities more aggressively than others. “The biggest surprise is there are some schools where this doesn’t seem to be an issue,” said Dr. Anupam B. Jena, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. At two medical centers in the West, female physicians were paid roughly $54, 000 and $59, 000 less, on average, than their male counterparts. At two schools, there was little income difference. Dr. Jena declined to the identify the schools. “What policies, procedures, leadership or culture at these sites helps to counteract a gender pay gap?” Dr. Arora asked in her editorial. Dr. Cooke said her salary had been corrected twice by university administrators — once after research she helped conduct revealed pay disparities among physicians in the late 1980s. She attributes the persistent pay gap partly to the complicated and individualized nature of academic salaries, as well as a lack of transparency. A subtle bias against women often is a factor, she said, “until a periodic study comes along, where people go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s happening, again. ’” In the worst cases, the pay gap exists because of “clear discrimination by department chairs in salary settings,” Dr. Jena said. But he also suggested that two other factors mighty play a role. Men and women may negotiate differently, and “male physicians may be more aggressive in terms of obtaining outside salary offers,” he said. “Extremely helpful” research like Dr. Jena’s keeps the issue in the public eye, said Dr. Kim Templeton, the president of American Medical Women’s Association and a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Kansas, which contributed data to the study. “But just having it out there isn’t going to fix the problem. ” | 1 |
Edmondo Burr in Technology // 0 Comments An artificially intelligent machine that predicted the outcomes of the last three U.S. presidential elections says Republican candidate Donald Trump is imminent to win.
MogAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) system created in 2004 by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian startup Genic.ai correctly predicted the results of the Republican and Democratic Primaries.
“ If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years, ” Raj told CNBC.
The AI machine uses 20 million data sources from places like Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to make its decisions.
The Daily Express reports:
From analysing engagement on social media platforms and search results, the machine believes that Mr Trump has overtaken Mr Obama’s engagement numbers in 2008 – when the Democrat first came into power and his popularity was at its peak.
Mr Rai says that the AI system has shown which candidate will win an election just by looking at engagement data.
He told CNBC: “If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest.”
Despite Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton being ahead in most polls, Mr Rai says this data should remind her not to get complacent.
However, the businessman does say that there are limitations in what can be achieved by MogAI.
Mr Rai explains that just because someone engages with a tweet, for example, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they support him.
Furthermore, there are now more people on social media than in the last three elections for which MogAI was about, meaning that there could be more negative engagements which the machine would struggle to distinguish.
Mr Rai said: “If you look at the primaries, in the primaries, there were immense amount of negative conversations that happen with regards to Trump.
“However, when these conversations started picking up pace, in the final days, it meant a huge game opening for Trump and he won the Primaries with a good margin.”
Billionaire Mr Trump is now facing an uphill battle in his bid to become President of the US after a string of controversies dented his bid to beat Mrs Clinton in the race to the White House. | 0 |
Writers are different from the rest of us. Their castoff scraps can be worth money, not to mention the obsessive attentions of future scholars. Jonathan Lethem, 52, recently became the latest author to sell his personal paper trail to a major archive. The Beinecke Rare Book Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired a trove of his manuscripts, letters, notes and other artifacts, which will now sit alongside material from Walt Whitman, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson in its rich American literature collection. Mr. Lethem’s papers contain items relating to the novels that made him something of a reluctant patron saint of Brooklyn’s literary ascendance, including “Motherless Brooklyn” (1999) and “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003). But as befits a lifelong collector, music obsessive, comics geek and dedicated chronicler of underground culture, there are also cartoons, New York 1970s ephemera and what is surely the largest cache of drawings of vomiting cats in any university collection. “For an author who is so much fun as a novelist, it’s interesting to see there is so much fun in his archival documents as well,” said Melissa Barton, the curator of American prose and drama at the Beinecke. (Ms. Barton, citing library policy, declined to say what Yale paid in the sale, which was arranged by the Manhattan book dealer Glenn Horowitz.) Mr. Lethem’s archive also includes two computer hard drives, a laptop and other digital materials, especially from more recent years. “You can feel the evaporation of the physical ephemera,” Mr. Lethem, whose most recent novel, “A Gambler’s Anatomy,” appeared in October, said in an interview. But the bulk of the collection consists of artifacts, some of them charmingly weird. We asked Mr. Lethem, who left New York in 2010 to teach creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. about some of the odder items in his literary closet. The archive includes a number of comic books Mr. Lethem made as a child, featuring invented superheroes like Man, whose origin story included an attempt to start a nudist colony in Alaska. In one installment, Man (who later got a passing in “The Fortress of Solitude”) battled Ed Koch, who was no hero to Mr. Lethem’s bohemian parents. “I didn’t make multiple copies to sell or anything,” he said. “It was more like I was collecting my own weird artifacts from a pretend universe where Man was a real comic. ” Mr. Lethem swiped this sticker after stumbling on a shoot for the 1979 movie “The Warriors” in the subway station in Brooklyn, which was standing in for the Times Square station. “This was my subway stop, and the fact that they were turning it into 42nd Street seemed absurd,” Mr. Lethem recalled. “I remember thinking that no one would see or hear about this movie. Nothing that anyone was shooting in my neighborhood could possibly be important. ” The archive contains typescripts of his novels, often affixed with alternate titles. (Would “Motherless Brooklyn” have been a hit if it had been called “Jerks From Nowhere”?) The earliest is “Apes in the Plan,” an unpublished “fake Philip K. Dick novel,” as Mr. Lethem put it, named for a Devo lyric and written between ages 18 and 23. “I wrote three novels on an electric typewriter,” he said. “If I live long enough, I could end up being one of the last living humans who can say that. ” This diary tracking his writing progress, social interactions, exercise and, um, digestion comes from the when Mr. Lethem had dropped out of Bennington College and moved to Berkeley, Calif. to try to become a writer. “I had thrust myself into a kind of vacuum,” he said. “I had no visible means of support, nor was anyone expecting to hear from me. This kind of weird probably had to do with externalizing my superego and answering the question ‘Who are you and what did you actually do today? ’” About those drawings of vomiting cats … “For about 15 years, every time I had a really good dance party that went late, with people lolling around drunk and exhausted, at about 2 a. m. I would hand out paper and ask everyone to draw a vomiting cat,” Mr. Lethem said. “I ended up with an incredibly thick file of drawings, some by people who went on to be published cartoonists and writers. ” Some of the goofy character names in Mr. Lethem’s novels are drawn from lists he typed up early in his career, a habit he connects with the wordplay of “Motherless Brooklyn,” whose narrator has Tourette’s syndrome. Mr. Lethem recalled a moment of recognition sparked by an Oliver Sacks essay about a surgeon with Tourette’s who kept a list of more than 200 unusual names as “candy for the mind. ” “He was collecting real names,” Mr. Lethem said. “But when I read that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s me. ’” Names from this list showed up in “Gun, With Occasional Music” (1994) and “Chronic City” (2009). “The Fortress of Solitude,” inspired by Mr. Lethem’s Brooklyn childhood, describes a store called Samuel J. Underberg, “a site of mysterious life,” where graffiti artists came to buy ink that was specially formulated for stamping prices on slimy packages of meat and therefore ideal for tagging. While writing, Mr. Lethem acquired some random items from the real Underberg’s (now demolished) which are shown here with a 1978 Billboard Hot 100 list, an old calendar and other research materials. “I became a collector of all this tawdry used signage,” he said. “I just thought it was really weird and cool. ” The archive contains dozens of letters from fellow writers and artists, including Donna Tartt, Paul Auster, Suzanne Vega, Jennifer Egan, Thomas Berger and Ursula K. Le Guin. This missive, written on an airline safety card, is from the novelist David Bowman, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 2012. “All his letters were like mail art,” Mr. Lethem said. “David had a great, crazy brain. He never stopped covering the world in language. ” | 1 |
Foreign Policy Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a speech at a Valdai Discussion Club meeting of political scientists in Sochi, October 27, 2016. (Photo by AFP)
Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed as “hysteria” claims by US officials that Moscow is trying to influence the upcoming presidential election in America.
Speaking to foreign policy experts during a Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi, southern Russia, on Thursday, Putin said Washington was using Russia as a distraction to cover up the fact that this year’s White House contenders had nothing to offer on real issues.
“Hysteria has been whipped up in the United States about the influence of Russia over the U.S. presidential election,” Putin said, adding that so far no clear policies have been offered by the US political elite to tackle issues such as national debt and gun control.
American officials and intelligence agencies have openly accused the Kremlin of sponsoring hacking attacks against the US.
This is while Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign have gone even further, claiming that Russia was trying to rig the November election in favor of Republican nominee Donald Trump. US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (L) and Republican nominee Donald Trump
During the last presidential debate last week, Clinton accused Trump of having secret ties with Moscow, saying that Putin would love to see a “puppet” president in the White House.
“It's much simpler to distract people with so-called Russian hackers, spies, and agents of influence. Does anyone really think that Russia could influence the American people's choice in any way? Is America a banana republic or what?” Putin asked in his Thursday speech.
Baffled by the release of a series of hacked emails that have uncovered the inner mechanics of the Democratic Party’s campaign for the election, the White House has stepped up its anti-Russian rhetoric. American officials have even threatened Russia with countermeasures.
Despite the general belief, however, Trump has on many occasions called on Russia-accusers to either provide their evidence or stop making baseless assumptions about Moscow.
“I don't know if they're behind it and I think it's public relations, frankly,” the real-estate mogul said Wednesday. “Do you know what bothers me? I have nothing to do with Russia.”
“People are hacking all over the place and nobody knows. They don't know if it's Russia. They can't guarantee it's Russia, and it may be,” he added. Loading ... | 0 |
2016 was a great year for most of us — but just because we’ve gained the beachhead doesn’t mean we’re going to win the war. [With Brexit and Donald Trump, we’ve done the equivalent of capturing everywhere from Pointe Du Hoc to Pegasus Bridge. But just like with the worst of the fighting is yet to come. Our enemy is fanatical, determined, well organised. Plus, they still hold most of the key positions: the big banks, the corporations, the top law firms, the civil service, local government, the universities, the schools, the mainstream media, Hollywood … Give those bastards half the chance and they’ll drive us back into the sea — which, in contemporary terms, means nixing Brexit (or giving us “soft Brexit” which is basically the same thing) and frustrating all the things President Trump will try to do to Make America Great Again. I use the war analogy first because World War II analogies never fail, but second because this really is a war that we’re fighting. The bad news is that wars are hard, costly and ugly. The good news is that we’re on the right side and we’re going to win. Here’s how: We will never underestimate the wickedness of the enemy, The loves to portray us as the bad guys. But that’s just projection. From Mao’s China to Stalin’s Soviet Union, from Cuba to North Korea, history is littered with the wreckage of failed left wing schemes to make the world a better, fairer place. As the great, now Thomas Sowell says, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. ” Its malign influence is still with us today. Innocent boys being accused of rape on college campuses genuine rapes committed by gangs of Muslim taxi drivers in northern England and by gangs of Muslim immigrants in German cities like Cologne hundreds of thousands driven into fuel poverty, landscapes ravaged, avian fauna sliced and diced as a result of crazy renewable energy policies a scientist driven out of his job because a feminist loser misreported something he said about women at a conference generations of kids denied a rigorous, disciplined, useful education the needless violence and tension engendered by #blacklivesmatter: we should never concede the moral high ground to the kind of people who make all this sort of stuff possible, no matter how many times they tell us how evil and selfish and uncaring we are. We will always remember that we are better than them, I’ll give you an example: the dumbass lecturer at Drexel who tweeted that what he wanted for Christmas was “white genocide”. Should we be demanding that the university authorities sack him at once? Of course we shouldn’t. The man has performed an invaluable public service: he has provided the perfect example of how ingrained the values of the left are in academe he has shown prospective applicants to the Politics and Global Studies course at Drexel University in Philadelphia that unless they want to be indoctrinated with lunacy they might want to reconsider he has further shown alumni of Drexel University who believe in old fashioned stuff like free markets that maybe they shouldn’t include their alma mater in their million dollar bequests, after all. Sure, we should jeer and crow when we catch idiots like this man expressing reprehensible opinions. But the idea that someone should actually lose their job for something they said on Twitter ought to be anathema to those of us on the right side of the argument. One of the most thoroughly hateful things about the left is the way it tries to constrain free expression. If we play the same game, we are no better than they are. And face it: we just are. We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man’s Land, One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism — so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits — that elections are “won in the centre ground. ” This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U. S. that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his ( heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It’s also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, concept of “soft Brexit”.) No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally one or the notionally one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite. Of course we should always despise the because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise. I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy. ” If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation — much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so — to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for. On Brexit, for example, I’m with Her Majesty the Queen: “‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out? What’s the problem?’ We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender, See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys — and it is, invariably, men — who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful doesn’t just want humiliation — it wants total annihilation. Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile — but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification. Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender! (And if you need reminding why not, read this piece I wrote the other day, of which I am very proud) We will laugh in the face of death, Something I’ve noticed about the : they don’t have a sense of humour. This is odd, given that 99. 99 per cent of professional comedians are liberals. But it’s also unfailingly true. Go on social media and see for yourself: all the wittiest banter, all the funniest memes, all the snarkiest jibes — they all come from the right side of the argument, not the left. And this is as it should be for not only is humour a sign of intellectual superiority but it’s also entirely the right attitude for a team that wants to win. Humour requires a degree of an ability to recognise your own weaknesses (vital if you are to triumph over them) and not to take yourself too seriously. Also, it’s a sign that you are a happy warrior — in the manner of heroes like Andrew Breitbart. I always try to keep this in mind when I’m engaged in a vicious tussle with the : that witty barbs hurt them much more than anger. When your enemy takes himself so seriously, no weapon is more effective than a cutting quip. Sometimes it’s hard not be to angry because the left has given us so much to be angry about. But we must resist the temptation if we can because it just plays into the left’s caricature of us as angry, blustering conservatives. We should remember at all times that in the culture wars, we are the Greek city states and the enemy are the Persians. If you want to know the significance of this, I recommend you read Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture. Basically, free men will always fight better than serfs because they have more to lose … We will mercilessly expose their weaknesses, People on the are just like us, really, only slightly less evolved. Their brains are stuck in that stage of evolution just before ours — the stage when we were all roaming the plains and were programmed to respond in the most basic way to our most primal instincts. This is why so much of the ‘argument’ has to do with raw emotion rather than logic it’s why they’ll almost never engage with us on detail, preferring simply to use what Vox Day calls “point and shriek” tactics, or to try to belittle and demean us with emotive (but meaningless) pejoratives like “racist” “homophobe” “misogynist” “Islamophobe” “climate change denier. ” They have been using these techniques very successfully for years and in my experience there is only one effective way of dealing with this: you have to show their workings. You have to notice what they are doing and then you have to explain to other people what they are doing. This is hard: it requires patience, courage and persistence — the equivalent of maintaining discipline under fire. Again, I refer you to this piece I wrote recently because it embodies the kind of attitude and techniques required. Essentially it was a response to a mass assault by SJWs using Twitter to brand those of us on the right as heartless, uncaring, ruthless, evil people who would use a man’s recently widowed status against him. The attacks came in 140 character bursts. The response took almost 3000 words. But that’s the way it is: logic and rational argument take much longer to develop than emotive cheap shots. If we don’t use logic and rational argument though, we concede the field to the pointers and shriekers. Leave no man behind, Diversity is our strength. This is the kind shit leftists, say, I know, but hear me out. At a conservative political meeting I attended in DC, recently, a woman stood up to address the assembled members of the Vast Right Wing conspiracy. Black and dressed a bit like the lovable, wise sassy, prostitute character from a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, she did not look obviously like a Republican. But she was and she had come from California with a message: “Don’t abandon us! We know everyone in the conservative movement thinks that California is a joke. But 40 per cent of us voted for Donald Trump and we need your help!” She’s right. Unlike the left — which sees ethnic, sexual and religious minorities mainly as client victim groups to patronise and exploit for identity politics purposes — we on the right “celebrate diversity” by not giving a damn about diversity. The reason Sowell’s great and Milo’s great and Krauthammer’s great is not because they’re black and gay and disabled and therefore “helpful” to our cause, but simply because they think clearly and sensibly and have come to the right conclusions about the world. We support our own through thick and thin. We are all equal and we all have equal rights, just like the 14th amendment says. (Which means, by the way, that we don’t believe in positive discrimination — which is just another form of discrimination, as practised by the disgusting left not the sensible and just right). Always attack, This, pretty much, was the tactic of the Royal Navy throughout the Napoleonic Wars — even when outnumbered and outgunned by the French and the Spanish. Today we are similarly outgunned and outnumbered by the loathsome edifice of the liberal establishment — and if we are going to reduce it to rubble, as of course we must, then we shall have to fight as aggressively as Nelson and Cochrane did. For far, far too long, conservatives have been fighting a defensive war — spending more time apologising for being conservatives than actually taking on the enemy. But at last, in the U. S. at least, we have a leader who is not afraid of a fight. What does “always attack” mean in practice, though? Well here’s a perfect example: a recent New York Times story headed “Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News’ Conservatives take aim at mainstream media“. The author of the story appears slightly taken back that conservatives are behaving in this way. Surely we should be feeling guilty for all those fake news stories spread by evil people on the internet in order to deceive the by acting against their interests by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump? But no, far from apologising it seems that we on the right have been on the attack. If anyone is responsible for pumping out fake news these last few decades its the liberal elite and their mouthpieces in the MSM, not us. OK. We’re done. Unleash hell. | 1 |
Donald Trumps Moment: Will It Last? By Lawrence Davidson
November 11, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - On Election Day, Hillary Clinton, with all her data specialists and poll gurus, came up short. The morning after, they didnt know what hit them that is, the unexpected fact that statistical data and real life dont always coincide. People often tell pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, or what media tells them is the expected answer, while clandestinely harboring different opinions that they share only with their family, friends and drinking buddies.
Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership, as well as their Republican Party counterparts, represent a well-entrenched political system. That system is responsive to lobbies or interest groups and not disgruntled citizens. What is more, none of the countrys political bosses can see beyond this system and how it relates to their own political needs.
During the 2016 election campaign that near sightedness led to a fatal misinterpretation: that Trump represented only hooligans and deplorable people who could not themselves possibly add up to a silent majority. Thinking along these lines, Clinton and the overconfident Democratic establishment made a perhaps unconscious decision to let this apparent bozo Trump lose the election, rather than they, the Democrats, going out there and doing what was necessary to win it.
For instance, they apparently did not bother to design a message to compete for the votes of those listening to Trump. They did not take into consideration the historically observable fact that millions of Americans had, over the last 50 years, seemed to give up on politics because they saw the system as unresponsive. The Democrat establishment did not respond to this phenomenon. Indeed, they made sure Bernie Sanders, the only Democratic who was trying to respond, would fail.
A Deep Division
The truth is that the United States is a very deeply divided country, and has been since the 1960s. The division is multifaceted and involves cultural issues that touch on gender, race and lifestyle; and class issues such as job creation and trade treaties. Also, the city mouse/country mouse divide is very real and very deep.
Much of rural white America has various degrees of negative feelings toward African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and anyone else who does not look and talk like them. These are the same sort of people who once hated kids with long hair, afros, and a preference for marijuana over whiskey.
All of these disgruntled ones, like those millions of Christian Fundamentalists out there, have never gone away. They were just waiting even if some of them didnt know it. They were waiting for a hero, and when he appeared, they elected him president.
So the divisions are real and they are not new. And no one in the political establishment, Democrat or Republican, addressed them. That opened the door for Mr. Trump.
That means Trumps victory should not properly be seen as a Republican Party victory. Trump just exploited the party label. In truth, he has destroyed the Republican Party as we traditionally knew it. Its future is very uncertain.
What Can We Expect?
Donald Trump has made a fetish out of being unpredictable, which, at the very least, is bad for the stock market. Inevitably, however, there will be signs that give a hint as to what might be expected.
For instance, Trump will have to name a cabinet. Interestingly enough, most of those who will be available, be they private-sector business people or right-wing goofballs like Sarah Palin and Chris Christie, are creatures of the standing political system. They have no real interest in reforming current ways of doing things as against profiting from them which, of course, is a form of business as usual.
There will be tremendous pressure on Donald Trump to go along with and slot himself into the existing political system in Washington (as did President Obama). At every turn, in Congress and in the bureaucracies, there will be no one to deal with but systems people.
Beyond a limited number of exclusively executive functions, Trump needs standing political arrangements to operate. Thus, if he suddenly turns relatively conventional, no one should be too surprised. What about all that campaign rebel talk? Well, remember, he is unpredictable which, in his case, goes well with also being a consistent liar.
Trump promised a lot during the campaign. He was going to rebuild the inner cities, the military, all of the nations bridges, etc. And he would do so while simultaneously lowering taxes. Short of bankrupting the country, this is fiscally impossible.
He promised to remake foreign policy, which, being within the realm of executive power, may be more doable. Will he try to cancel international trade agreements? Will he pull out of NATO? Will he dump the Zionists and the Saudis? Will he ally with the Russians?
These are interesting questions. What about global warming, which he claims not to believe in? How about international law and our relationship to the United Nations? Its all up for grabs, and that worries a lot of people very few of whom voted for Trump.
Many of those who did vote for Donald Trump dont care about any of this. They voted for him because he appeared to stand against the political system they hate. They want the country ethnically cleansed of Mexicans, the government downsized and, culturally, the clock turned back to the 1950s. If he does not do this, he will appear to have become part of that hateful system, and his fans may well end up hating him too.
Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic research focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East history, the history of science and modern European intellectual history. http://www.tothepointanalyses.com | 0 |
Speaking at a press conference in New York, Donald Trump stated that the American people don’t care whether or not he releases his tax returns. [Shortly after Trump announced that he will be handing over complete control of his companies to his sons, one journalist asked whether or not he will be releasing his tax returns. “Does Russia have any leverage over you, financial or otherwise, and, if not, will you release your tax returns to prove it?” the reporter asked. “I had no dealings with Russia, I have no deals in Russia,” said Trump, “I have no deals that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away and I have no loans with Russia. As a real estate developer, I have very, very little debt. ” “I have no loans with Russia and I thought that was important, I certified that, so I have no deals, I have no loans, I have no deals. We could make deals in Russia very easily if I wanted to, I just don’t want to because I think that would be a conflict of interest. So I have no loans, no deals, and no current pending deals with Russia. ” The reporter further pressed Trump as to whether or not he would release his tax returns. The replied, “Well, I’m not releasing tax returns because you know they’re under audit,” to which the reporter retorted that the last six presidents have released their tax returns. “You know the only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters,” said Trump gesturing to the room. “You don’t think the American public is concerned about them?” asked the reporter. “No I don’t think they’re concerned, I won,” replied the . “I don’t think they care at all, I don’t think they care, I think you care,” said Trump to cheers from the crowd. “First of all, you learn very little from a tax return. What you should do is go down to the federal elections and take a look at the numbers and actually people have learned a lot about my company and now they realized my company is much bigger, much more powerful than they ever thought. We’re in many many countries and I’m very proud of it. ” Watch the full exchange from the livestream below. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart Tech covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart. com, | 1 |
You are here: Home / US / Ethan Hawk Weighs In on Election, Insults MILLIONS Of Americans Ethan Hawk Weighs In on Election, Insults MILLIONS Of Americans October 26, 2016 Pinterest
Ethan Hawke — that guy who was in that movie, or something — just claimed that it was “fascist” to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for the crimes she has committed. Oh and he also said that wanting to make American great again was racist.
The Daily Beast published an interview with Hawke, gracing us with the musings of a man who should stick to memorizing the lines that someone else wrote for him. Then again, that’s what he did, he spewed liberal talking points. This is also known as the “stuff people incapable of higher level thinking” say in interviews to get attention.
“When you see a man, if he wins, threatening to put his opponent in jail?” Hawke said in reference to Donald Trump promising that he would hold Clinton accountable for breaking the law. “That’s fascist behavior.”
Yeah, you guys (oops, I forgot that’s sexist but fortunately I also just remembered that I don’t care). Anyway, Hawke may not understand how the law works, but it’s pretty simple, even for him. If you break a law, consequences are supposed to follow.
For most of us, there are consequences, but Clinton has been held to a different set of standards than the rest of us. Just ask retired 4-star Gen. James Cartwright how that works — he’s facing jail time and a fine for doing something quite similar to Clinton yet she’s still running for president.
Let’s take a gander at the definition of Fascism from Dictionary.com :
noun
1.
( sometimes initial capital letter ) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
All you have to do is swap out “nationalism” for “globalism” and that definition fits Clinton like a glove. Complete power, suppression of free speech, control of the economy, globalism, and racism are Clinton’s platform.
Liberals like to throw the word fascism around because they think it makes them sound smart, but far more often than not the fascist label is much more befitting of the liberal candidate than the conservative, and in this case especially, it is a fine example of what a Clinton presidency would look like.
Hawke also called Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again, racist in the interview. “What ‘Make America Great Again’ means is not lost on any of us,” Hawke said. “It means ‘white’ and ‘male.'”
Is that what it meant when former President Bill Clinton used it during his wife’s 2008 presidential campaign? If so, boy, that makes things awkward, doesn’t it? Slick Willy also used the phrase back in 1992 during his own campaign. | 0 |
21st Century Wire says…
As western media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the BBC continue to hurl viral images of ‘child victims of Aleppo,’ western and gulf-backed terrorists in East Aleppo continue to fire mortars, ‘ hell cannon ‘ and use snipers to target civilians and children in government-protected West Aleppo. The level of information fraud and propaganda being perpetrated by the western mainstream media and politicians like John Kerry and Samantha Power is unprecedented – even by traditional low US standards.
RT International interviews Syrian peace campaigner Mother Agnes-Mariam and independent researcher and journalist Vanessa Beeley . Watch:
. | 0 |
TORONTO — François Deschamps stepped out of his apartment building in the Limoilou neighborhood of Quebec City recently and stopped when he saw a sticker wrapped around a light pole. “Burn Your Local Mosque,” it read, around a silhouette of a mosque against an orange flame. He snapped a cellphone photo and added it to his collection of propaganda popping up around the city. Canada is a remarkably open society, a legacy of liberal politicians who set the thinly populated country on the path of aggressive multiculturalism decades ago. Last week, Statistics Canada reported that by 2036, nearly half of all Canadians would be immigrants or the children of immigrants — most of them what the country calls “visible minorities,” which means nonwhite. That rapid transformation is stirring the most conservative elements of the white Canadian population, who see the country as their own, despite the fact that Europeans took the land from a patchwork of indigenous peoples who had long existed there. Few people believe that this stirring, which is moderate by United States standards, contributed directly the shooting Sunday inside Quebec City’s largest mosque, in which six worshipers were killed and eight injured. And no evidence yet has emerged that the accused assailant, a Québécois university student, had ties to specific groups. But the attack has put many on guard that Canada’s embrace of Muslim immigration is raising tensions. Even the most radical groups seem to sense that expressing extreme views can be dangerous. There are at least 100 extremist groups in Canada, according to two Canadian studies published last year, with most of them active in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. While their targets include gays and lesbians, Jews and other minorities, Muslims have faced a sizable amount of the hostility. In 2014, the last year for which statistics are available, Canadian police forces recorded 99 religiously motivated hate crimes against Muslims — up from 45 in 2012, according to Statistics Canada. Some critics have blamed Donald J. Trump’s nationalistic language, but extremism has long thrived in Canada among skinheads, white supremacists and others, said Barbara Perry, a global hate crime expert at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario, and the lead author of a report published last year in the journal Studies in Conflict Terrorism. “A lot of that sentiment has been there,” said Ms. Perry, who said the internet has helped spread the ideology. Canada has witnessed a flurry of nationalist groups proliferating in recent years, including the Soldiers of Odin, a white nationalist group that began in Finland. While the Canadian group has denied racist beliefs and members have participated in community foot patrols in cities like Edmonton and Vancouver, its main Canada Facebook page has screeds and derogatory references to immigrants. The Canadian authorities have recorded thousands of crimes in recent years, but Ms. Perry said Canadian law enforcement officials have played down the threat of extremists, preferring instead to focus on Islamic terrorism. “That’s where all the money and attention goes,” she said. “Law enforcement officers in communities with a fairly well known presence, they either denied they were there or that it was an issue. ” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service declined to comment on actions they have taken to monitor and stop the spread of white nationalist groups, though the intelligence service has in the past minimized the movement’s influence, telling the Canadian news media that “ extremist circles appear to be fragmented and primarily pose a threat to public order and not to national security. ” activists and others opposed to such views say the government has not done enough to protect vulnerable groups. In 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government repealed hate speech provisions in the Canadian Human Rights Act, which supporters said hindered free speech. A federal court ruled that the provisions did not violate freedom of expression, but they have not been reinstated. Daniel Gallant, a former white supremacist from Vancouver who changed his views 15 years ago and is now a social worker and a law student, said widespread Canadian denial about the prevalence of extremism was a major problem. “It’s everywhere,” he said. A 2016 telephone survey by the Canadian polling firm Forum Research found that in a random sampling of 1, 304 Canadians, Muslims were the focus of the most animosity in Quebec, where 48 percent of respondents expressed dislike of the religion. “It is clear from these findings that respondents in Quebec are the most likely to hold unfavorable feelings towards Jewish and Muslim people,” said the firm’s president, Lorne Bozinoff. Nowhere have those elements been as vocal as Quebec City. Handbills, posters and occasional demonstrations by such groups as the Fédération des Québécois de Souche (which translates roughly as “people of original Québécois stock”) have proliferated in the city. Québécois de Souche’s slogan is “I exist, so I act,” but as with fringe movements everywhere, it and other groups are most active behind the anonymity of the internet. “It’s very hard to know their numbers,” said Stéphane a sociology professor at Laval University who studies Quebec’s far right, adding that there is a small core to each group and that the followers are less active. He said the movement has fragmented and and groups have changed names for the past 20 years, although the recent surge in immigration has strengthened their cause. “It’s not a new thing,” he said. La Meute, a group that includes many Afghanistan war veterans, has gathered about 43, 000 followers since it started a closed Facebook page last year. The name means “wolf pack” in French, and its members are not politically virulent by United States standards but focus on concerns about Muslim immigration. At the other end of the scale are followers of Légitime Violence, a proudly fascist heavy metal band that announces its concerts to a vetted list of fans and performs songs like “Final Solution,” which is as subtle as it sounds. Other extremist groups in Quebec include Atalante Québec Pegida Québec, which is an offshoot of a German group and Soldiers of Odin. Calling these groups “far right” may be a misnomer. The Fédération des Québécois de Souche says its members include people with different political beliefs, including socialists and libertarians. The common denominator is an opposition to immigration, particularly by Muslims. “Our objective is not to shrink to a minority,” said Rémi Tremblay, spokesman for the Fédération des Québécois de Souche. He says groups like his have helped to start a debate about immigration and multiculturalism that was “unthinkable” when the group formed 10 years ago. “We want to free the tongues of the people so they start thinking about this without the constraints of political correctness,” he said. That conversation among largely anonymous extremists exists in the broader context of a talk radio culture in Quebec that has been critical of Muslim immigration and what it sees as a failure by Muslims to assimilate into Canadian culture. Talk radio of this stripe is rare elsewhere in Canada and is reminiscent, albeit far more mild, of the raucous shows in the United States. The radio stations Radio X and FM93 are among those cited as giving voice to activists. While their own commentary may be muted, they give a platform to voices from sites like Point de Bascule, which means Tipping Point, and Poste de Veille, which translates roughly as “Watchtower” and whose website shows a pirate ship with a jihadist flag as its sail approaching Quebec City. One popular conspiracy theory links Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that supports the application of Islamic law in Muslim communities. Even Quebec City’s mayor, Régis Labeaume, who was visibly moved at a news conference on Monday while showing support for the Muslim community, has expressed frustration with some orthodox Muslim customs. In 2014, during interviews about the appearance of the “burkini” at community pools, he recalled one extremely hot summer day seeing a man dressed in shorts and sandals while his wife was wearing a full niqab — covering including black gloves. Mayor Labeaume said his own wife had to hold him back from insulting the man and “ripping his head off. ” Many people have called for toning down the talk in the wake of Sunday’s mosque shooting in a suburb of Quebec City by a professed immigration opponent. “The tone should definitely be more respectful on all sides,” said Dominic Maurais, who hosts a show on Radio X and is a leading voice of Quebec’s conservative talk shows. Mr. Maurais noted that he was . “However, we should all be careful about letting political correctness win over crucial, frank and essential discussions about radical Islam and Islamic values in our democracies,” he said in a telephone interview. The Fédération des Québécois de Souche and Atalante Québec issued a joint statement deploring the violence and calling the gunman deranged. | 1 |
Billionaire Globalist Soros Exposed as Hidden Hand Behind Trump Protests — Provoking US ‘Color Revolution’ Billionaire globalist financier George Soros’ MoveOn.org has been revealed to be a driving force beh... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/billionaire-globalist-soros-exposed-as.html Billionaire globalist financier George Soros’ MoveOn.org has been revealed to be a driving force behind the organizing of nationwide protests against the election of Donald Trump — exposing the protests to largely be an organized, top-down operation — and not an organic movement of concerned Americans taking to the streets as reported by the mainstream media. Wednesday saw protests in the streets of at least 10 major U.S. cities. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Ore., St. Paul, Minn., Seattle, and several other cities saw protests, according to USA Today. In light of the protests and rioting that have transpired since the election of Trump, a closer analysis of the dynamic at play is warranted to gauge whether it’s an organic grassroots movement, or something much more organized, sophisticated and potentially dangerous. Soros’ affiliated organization MoveOn.org released the following press release yesterday afternoon: "Americans to Come Together in Hundreds Peaceful Gatherings of Solidarity, Resistance, and Resolve Following Election Results"Hundreds of Americans, dozens of organizations to gather peacefully outside the White House and in cities and towns nationwide to take a continued stand against misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia."Tonight, thousands of Americans will come together at hundreds of peaceful gatherings in cities and towns across the nation, including outside the White House, following the results of Tuesday’s presidential election."The gatherings – organized by MoveOn.org and allies – will affirm a continued rejection of Donald Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny and demonstrate our resolve to fight together for the America we still believe is possible."Within two hours of the call-to-action, MoveOn members had created more than 200 gatherings nationwide, with the number continuing to grow on Wednesday afternoon." Now come reports from various protest locations that reveal a substantially coordinated effort, and not the organic grassroots showing by concerned Americans, as the mainstream media is reporting. Photos from Austin, Texas reveal a line of busses the “protestors” arrived in, making their appearance seem substantially less than organic – with a direct implication of being strategically orchestrated. Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI — erictucker (@erictucker) November 10, 2016 With evidence mounting, the question must be asked; is George Soros working through his front organizations to foment an American revolution? @BeshoyBadie @desjax @erictucker Pretty evident that the signs were printed by Soros and Creamer groups. IIRC Soros linked w/ MB & Huma pic.twitter.com/KgXvIQr2b8 — MEGATRON (@MEGATRONs_SMIRK) November 10, 2016 Note that the group is actively organizing protests to a democratic election that no one is contesting the legitimacy of in terms of whether the vote was rigged, etc. Essentially, they are displeased with the results and are calling for people to rise up and not accept the results. For an organization that feigns to promote democracy, their actions speak otherwise. “This is a disaster. We fought our hearts out to avert this reality. But now it’s here,” MoveOn.org staff wrote to members on Wednesday. “The new president-elect and many of his most prominent supporters have targeted, demeaned, and threatened millions of us—and millions of our friends, family, and loved ones. Both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands. “We are entering an era of profound and unprecedented challenge, a time of danger for our communities and our country. In this moment, we have to take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends—especially those of us who are on the front lines facing hate, including Latinos, women, immigrants, refugees, Black people, Muslims, LGBT Americans, and so many others. And we need to make it clear that we will continue to stand together.” Perhaps the most absurd part of the protests is that President-elect Trump hasn’t made a single policy decision yet — and, in fact, the entire section of his website regarding banning Muslims was scrubbed shortly after his election. This denotes that anything said during the campaign was most likely simple election campaign rhetoric and subsequent framing of said rhetoric by the opposition. The left wing organization is one of a number of progressive organizations affiliated with Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Soros-affiliated organizations across the world are deeply connected to various color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and a number of other political uprisings across the globe. According to a report in New Eastern Outlook : "The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. "His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power."Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. "In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:"Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine." Anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries’ wealth, according to the New Eastern Outlook. During the 2016 presidential cycle, Soros committed $25 million dollars to the 2016 campaign of Hillary Clinton. Per the standard Clinton operating procedure, this was indicative of the symbiotic relationship of favors between the billionaire and his array of political puppets across the globe. As a testament to the power wielded by Soros, contained within WikiLeaks’ recent release of hacked DNC emails, is a message from billionaire globalist financier George Soros to Hillary Clinton while she was U.S. Secretary of State, that clearly reveals Clinton as a Soros puppet. Found within the WikiLeaks’ Hillary Clinton email archive is an email with the subject ‘ Unrest in Albania ,’ in which Soros makes clear to Clinton that “ two things need to be done urgently .” The Clinton-Podesta Email Scandal is All About SATANISM and Pedophilia: 'Sacrificing a Chicken to Moloch' He then directs the Secretary of State to “ bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha ” and “ appoint a senior European official as mediator .” Revealing the influence he wields within the corridors of power, Soros then provides Secretary of State Clinton with three names from which to choose. Unsurprisingly, Clinton acquiesced and chose one of the officials recommended by Soros — Miroslav Lajcak. Make no mistake that the events you’re seeing transpire nationwide are being orchestrated in part by a billionaire political elite class that is looking to subvert the will of the American people by attempting to foment a new American revolution. Soros’ formula has been duplicated in numerous nations, and it looks as if he now has the U.S. in his sights as the next target. Please share this critically import story in hope of waking people up to the globalist agenda at work here in America! By Jay Syrmopoulos Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue.
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When Wells Fargo announced its quarterly earnings Friday morning, it was clear that many of its customers were not exactly pleased. In recent months, the number of new consumer checking accounts had fallen sharply, which is no surprise for a bank that paid a hefty fine in September for opening accounts of all sorts without customers’ permission. Just for good measure, it’s trying to force customers who want to sue to take their disputes to mandatory arbitration. And in its earnings announcement, the company said that measurements of “loyalty” were going to take awhile longer to recover. To many consumers, Wells Fargo deserves a kind of death penalty: In the same way one might never buy a car again from the cheaters at Volkswagen, it makes little sense to do business with Wells Fargo either. But an equally good reason to steer clear might be this: Its products and services are mostly middling. The bank rarely is a leader on pricing or rewards. It specializes in ubiquity, with storefronts in all 50 states, and it hopes that we’ll be too lazy to find better deals elsewhere. The bank claims to be serious about pivoting now (despite having only shuffled the deck chairs in its executive roster, ousting its C. E. O. and elevating his top deputy). So if it wants to stand for something in the minds of consumers other than shoving unwanted products down people’s throats, it might try new approaches — like generosity, clarity, integrity and good citizenship — on for size instead. Let’s take some of those things, and the bank’s “ ” offerings, in order: GENEROSITY Consider Wells Fargo’s basic savings account offerings. Or don’t, lest you be insulted by the interest rates. How does 0. 01 percent sound to you? But if you have more than $100, 000 that you need to keep safe for a while, the bank will increase that amount tenfold, to a whopping 0. 1 percent! Is there something about being a large financial institution that makes offering a competitive interest rate impossible? Not at all. Household names like Barclays, Discover and Goldman Sachs are happy to give you at least nine times what Wells Fargo does. The news isn’t much better for credit cards. While American Express, Citi and Chase shower consumers with bonuses and perks, Wells Fargo plods along with and reward card lineups that do not make the leader board for largess. Its bankers do this because they can, because they relied for years on a pushy sales culture in the branches where even people who actually said “yes” to the pitches weren’t in a position to compare them in the moment. So the bank didn’t need to have the best products. That flair for mediocrity may no longer work. Consumer credit card applications declined by a stunning 43 percent in December, 2016, compared with the same month a year earlier. The new Wells Fargo script might go like this: Many of our bankers tried to use you in the worst possible way, so we get why you’re staying away from our cards. But now we’re going to give more things away to all of you who stay loyal to us in our moment of professed contrition. Here’s one idea for starters: Given its status as a leader in mortgage lending and servicing, the bank ought to double what it pays out on its Home Rebate Signature credit card to people who use the rewards to pay down additional principal on their loans. At least 2 percent cash back is a good benchmark. CLARITY In its acquisition of Wachovia, Wells Fargo ended up with responsibility for a number of mortgage loans from an outfit called World Savings Bank. Many of those loans put borrowers in situations where their payments did not cover all of their interest costs, and some of those borrowers did not know it. Victor Amerling, who lives in Tenafly, N. J. is one borrower who had this kind of negative amortization adjustable rate loan. He approached me for help months ago after having no luck getting Wells Fargo to explain to him how — when he explicitly signed up for a biweekly payment program designed to help him and his wife pay off their loan seven years early — he ended up in a situation where that will not happen after all. His letter from a Wells Fargo executive resolution specialist did not mention the nature of his loan Mr. Amerling learned of it only after I intervened with the company on his behalf and it disclosed that it had been in negative amortization territory for four years. Instead, the letter said that “we are unable to confirm when your loan will mature by making biweekly payments. ” According to the bank, that’s because the interest rate on his loan adjusts so often that it’s impossible to assess, though he could refinance if he wanted more certainty. In 2000, however, World Savings had given him a piece of paper showing a 2023 payoff date. “This was on an ironically termed ‘Truth in Lending’ statement,” Mr. Amerling said. “They baited me with 23 years, and nobody ever mentioned negative amortization to me. Not my lawyer, not the mortgage broker, not the bank’s lawyer, nobody. ” Wells Fargo did not cause this problem. But why hasn’t Wells Fargo been resetting his payments and those of people like him each year to keep them on track toward their goal of paying off their mortgage early? Vickee Adams, a spokeswoman, said the bank didn’t know who was in which payment plan or for what reason. Some people are in biweekly plans to pair their mortgage payment up with their biweekly paychecks, for instance. The bank still holds just under $39 billion in outstanding mortgage loans like Mr. Amerling’s. So a word of warning to anyone there or elsewhere with a mortgage that has an adjustable rate or is even remotely exotic: with your bank each and every year to make sure you are on track to pay off the loan on your intended schedule. INTEGRITY Wells Fargo would like to help you invest your life savings, and it has an army of financial professionals standing by to help. But last year, three academics issued a working paper that ranked brokerage firms by the percentage of their investment professionals who had at least one black mark on their industry disciplinary records. Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network was the third worst: 15. 3 percent of the representatives had, say, been fired from a previous job for cause, settled a consumer dispute in the past or run into a severe financial problem of their own. That’s more than double the industrywide figure, which led the researchers to assume that financial institutions with high percentages were “specializing in misconduct. ” This is not a good look for an institution that has also admitted to signing banking customers up for products that they did not need and never asked for. Wells Fargo disputes the “misconduct specialization” label, though. “We wholeheartedly disagree with that assertion,” said Helen Bow, a spokeswoman. She added that in 2015, 434 people applied for affiliation with its network. (The advisers fly the Wells Fargo flag and tap into its resources but are not employees.) Just 8. 3 percent of them had any sort of disclosure, and the bank accepted only 15 of the 434 total applicants. That represents real progress. One possibility here: a public declaration that its goal is to get that misconduct figure under, say, 4 percent for its advisers. GOOD CITIZENSHIP A bank with the size and resources of Wells Fargo should be able to innovate when it wants to, and there are signs that it can. The bank’s yourLoanTracker tool has the potential to help many mortgage applicants know exactly where they are in the process and what paperwork the bank needs, is missing or has lost. But at a moment when so many Americans are ready to turn their backs on elites and their institutions, this would be the perfect moment for a large financial services firm to say loudly and proudly that it stands for bringing many more struggling people back into the banking system. In her new book, “The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives,” Lisa Servon, who worked in the and business as part of her research, offers a laundry list of innovations that any bank could adopt. Wells Fargo executives should turn right to Chapter 8 to see them. There, she mentions KeyBank, a regional player with a checking account now known as the “ Account. ” Wells Fargo has a similar offering that it could build on called “Opportunity Checking,” but it’s harder to avoid fees with that one. Nobody wants Wells Fargo to go away. Affluent people want more choices in financial services and better service, and people urgently need them. So the bank ought not to run and hide. “That might be their instinct in the wake of their own crisis, to not take any risks and serve the same people in the same way and just try to keep their hands clean,” Ms. Servon said. “But they should take some risk with innovation. ” | 1 |
shorty Share This: Western claims that the “moderate rebels” fighting the Syrian government are totally separate and antagonistic to ISIS are disproved by the fighting in Aleppo. ALEXANDER MERCOURIS Nothing illustrates the mismatch between Western reporting of the war in Syria and the reality on the ground better than an incident which took place on 1st November 2016 south of Aleppo. The Syrian government’s main supply lines to Aleppo are the roads from the south. This has been especially so since the Jihadi capture of most of the province of Idlib together with its regional capital in the first half of 2015. As the noose tightens on the Jihadis in eastern Aleppo, with their latest counter-offensive repulsed and reports that the eastern districts of the city under Jihadi control are running out of essential fuel and other supplies as the cold weather closes in, the Jihadis attempted on 1st November 2016 to try to turn the tables on the Syrian army by cutting its road links to the south of the city. The Jihadi attempt to do this failed and was quickly repulsed, but in the process it exposed the truth of how the war in Syria is actually being fought. It has become an article of faith in the West that the Jihadi fighters in eastern Aleppo are “moderate rebels” and that Jabhat Al-Nusra (ie. Al-Qaeda) accounts for only a small fraction of them. It is also an article of faith in the West that the Jihadi fighters in eastern Aleppo – including those belonging to Jabhat Al-Nusra – are deadly enemies of ISIS, and have nothing in common with ISIS. It is also continuously claimed in the West that the Syrian army and Russia are only engaging in token fighting against ISIS, and that they are almost exclusively concerned with fighting the “moderate rebels” in Aleppo and elsewhere, who are trying to overthrow the Syrian government. Some Western commentators have gone even further, and have come close to saying that Russia, the Syrian government and ISIS are in de facto alliance with each other, as all three are collectively waging war on the “moderate rebels” who are trying to overthrow the Syrian government rather than fight each other. The Jihadi attempt to cut the Syrian army’s supply lines south of Aleppo which took place on 1st November 2016 shows how completely wrong these claims are. The attack was actually carried out by ISIS. Moreover the attack was clearly coordinated with Jabhat Al-Nusra (ie. with Al-Qaeda) which carried out a similar attack in the same area just days before. As recent events have shown, Jabhat Al-Nusra (ie. Al-Qaeda) is the dominant force in eastern Aleppo , though contrary to Western claims ISIS definitely has a presence there, as confirmed by this 10th October 2016 report by RT’s Murad Gazdiev, which shows Jabhat Al-Nusra and ISIS flags flying together in the city. As our contributor Afra’a Dagher – who is a Syrian writer actually writing for The Duran from Syria – has repeatedly warned, the alphabet soup of differently named Jihadi groups in Syria merely disguises a single continuum of violent Wahhabi Jihadis all committed to the same cause: the overthrow of the Syrian government and the establishment of a sectarian exclusivelyWahhabi Sunni state in its place. Here is how Afra’a Dagher explained the role of ISIS in the Syrian conflict “The “Islamic State” has been designed to attract Takfiri (NB: Wahhabi – AM) fighters from all over the world to join the war against Syria. That way the war to destroy Syria and break the Axis of Resistance is fought with no shortage of fanatical recruits. The war is sponsored and funded by Saudi Arabia, the true factory of Wahhabism, as well as by countries like Qatar and Turkey.” Whilst there undoubtedly are tensions between the senior Al-Qaeda and ISIS political leaderships, these have no practical relevance to the situation on the ground, where fighters from the different groups work continuously to defeat their common enemy, which is the Syrian government and Russia. About the author Alexander Mercouris is a writer on international affairs with a special interest in Russia and law. He has written extensively on the legal aspects of NSA spying and events in Ukraine in terms of human rights, constitutionality and international law. He worked for 12 years in the Royal Courts of Justice in London as a lawyer, specializing in human rights and constitutional law. His family has been prominent in Greek politics for several generations. He is a frequent commentator on television and speaker at conferences. He resides in London.
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This article was first published in 2002. The author, a longtime Times photographer, died on Saturday. I STARTED photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive. The problem is I’m not a good photographer. To be perfectly honest, I’m too shy. Not aggressive enough. Well, I’m not aggressive at all. I just loved to see wonderfully dressed women, and I still do. That’s all there is to it. As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts — you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit’s. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, “I see you outside at lunchtime watching people. ” And I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my hobby. ” She said, “If you think what they’re wearing is wrong, why don’t you redo them in your mind’s eye. ” That was really the first professional direction I received. I came to New York in 1948 at 19, after one term at Harvard. Well, Harvard wasn’t for me at all. I lived first with my aunt and uncle. I was working at Bonwit’s in the advertising department. Advertising was also my uncle’s profession. That’s why my family allowed me to come here and encouraged me to go into the business. I think they were worried I was becoming too interested in women’s dresses. But it’s been my hobby all my life. I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I’d be concentrating on women’s hats. While working at Bonwit’s, I met the women who ran Chez Ninon, the custom dress shop. Their names were Nona Parks and Sophie Shonnard. Ailsa Mellon Bruce was the silent partner. Those two women didn’t want me to get mixed up in fashion either. “Oh, God, don’t let him go near it. ” You have to understand how suspect fashion people were then. But finally, when my family put a little pressure on me about my profession, I moved out of my uncle’s apartment. This was probably in 1949. I walked the streets in the East 50’s, looking for empty windows. I couldn’t afford an apartment. I saw a place on 52nd Street between Madison and Park. There was a young woman at the door, and I said: “I see empty windows. Do you have a room to rent?” She said, “What for?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to make hats. ” She told me to tell the men who owned the house that I would clean for them in exchange for the room on the top floor. So that’s where I lived, and that’s where my hat shop was. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the artist who was painting President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he died, brought in Rebekah Harkness, Mrs. William Hale Harkness. She and the ladies from Chez Ninon sent clients over. They had to climb all those stairs, and the stairs were narrow. The place had been a speakeasy in the 1920’s. There was a garden in the back with a lovely old Spanish fountain, all derelict. That’s where I had my first fashion show. The only member of the press who came was Virginia Pope of The Times. I got to know her very well years later — saw her almost every Friday for tea. But anyway, her rule was to go herself to see any new designer. So there was this lovely, gracious lady at my first show, and the next day in The Times there was a little paragraph: “William J. ” See, I didn’t use my last name. My family would have been too embarrassed. They were very shy people. This was maybe 1950. To make money, I worked at a corner drugstore. At lunchtime, I’d stop making hats and run out and deliver lunches to people. At night, I worked as a counterman at Howard Johnson’s. Both jobs provided my meals, and the dimes and nickels of my tips paid for millinery supplies. Society women were coming to get hats. It was a good education, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t know who these people were. It didn’t mean anything to me. And then, of course, you get to realize that everybody’s the same. I made hats until I went into the Army. I was drafted during the Korean War. When I came out in 1953, I was still looking for empty windows. I found one on West 54th. John Fairchild had just come back from Paris to run Women’s Wear Daily in New York, and he knew the ladies of Chez Ninon. John said to me, “Why don’t you come and write a column for us. ” Of course, the ladies at Chez Ninon were thrilled: “Oh, good, get him away from fashion. Make him a writer. ” They didn’t realize what John was really up to. He thought, Now, I’ve got the inside track on the clients at Chez Ninon, which was every Vanderbilt and Astor that there was. Plus Jackie Kennedy. What John didn’t realize was that the people at Chez Ninon never discussed the clients. Private was private. I had never written anything, but John was like that. He wanted to turn everything upside down. He just said, “Write whatever you see. ” He was open to all kinds of ideas — until I wrote a column about Courrèges. When I saw his first show, I thought, Well, this is it. But John killed my story. He said, “No, no, Saint Laurent is the one. ” And that was it for me. When they wouldn’t publish the Courrèges article the way I saw it, I left. They wanted all the attention on Saint Laurent, who made good clothes. But I thought the revolution was Courrèges. Of course, in the end, Saint Laurent was the longer running show. So Fairchild was right in that sense. After that, I went to work for The Chicago Tribune, for Eleanor Nangle. She had been there since the 1920’s. A wonderful woman. The best of the best. The Tribune had an office in New York, in the Times building. One night, in about 1966, the illustrator Antonio Lopez took me to dinner in London with a photographer named David Montgomery. I told him I wanted to take some pictures. When David came to New York a few months later, he brought a little camera, an Olympus . It cost about $35. He said, “Here, use it like a notebook. ” And that was the real beginning. I HAD just the most marvelous time with that camera. Everybody I saw I was able to record, and that’s what it’s all about. I realized that you didn’t know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy. I realized that the street was the missing ingredient. There’s nothing new about this idea. People had been photographing the street since the camera was invented. At the turn of the 20th century, the horse races were the big thing. Lartigue was just a boy then. But the Seeberger brothers in France were taking pictures. They, and others, were commissioned by lace and fabric houses to go to the grand prix days at the Longchamp, Chantilly, Auteuil and Deauville racetracks and photograph fashionable women. The resulting albums were used as sample books by dressmakers. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar were doing a similar thing, but they photographed only name people at society events. And Women’s Wear has been photographing socialites and celebrities for years. But the difference for me is I don’t see the people I photograph. All I see are clothes. I’m only interested in people who look good. I’m looking for the stunners. I started taking pictures for The Times in the early 70’s, though my first street fashion appeared in The Daily News. Bernadine Morris, whom I had known since the 50’s, said to Abe Rosenthal: “Take a look at his work. You have all these sections to fill. ” Then I got to know Arthur Gelb, and one day I told him about this woman I had been photographing on the street. She wore a nutria coat, and I thought: “Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful. ” And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at it and think: “Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing. ” Anyway, I was taking her picture, and I saw people turn around, looking at her. She crossed the street, and I thought, Is that? Sure enough, it was Greta Garbo. All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder. Arthur was marvelous. I came in that morning in late December 1978, and no one was in the department except Mimi Sheraton, the restaurant critic. I showed her the Garbo picture. She stopped typing, got up, and away she went with the picture. Minutes later, the phone rang, and Mimi said: “Come down here, Bill. Arthur’s desk. ” Arthur looked at the picture and said, “What else do you have like this?” I had been hanging out at the corner of 57th and Fifth, and I said, “A picture of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, the king and queen of Spain, a Kennedy in a fox coat. ” I also had a picture of a woman who turned out to be Farrah Fawcett. I didn’t know. See, I never go to the movies, and I don’t own a television set. Arthur said, “Let’s run these. ” The next day, Dec. 30, there was a half page of pictures in the Metropolitan Report. I never bothered with celebrities unless they were wearing something interesting. That’s why my files wouldn’t be of value to anyone. I remember one April in Paris Ball when Joe DiMaggio came with Marilyn Monroe. But I was mesmerized by Mrs. T. Charlton Henry of Philadelphia. So chic. She’d take the train up in the morning to Penn Station and walk to Bergdorf, to be there when it opened. And when she came in, she’d say, “Good morning, Miss Ida,” “Good morning, Miss Elizabeth. ” She knew everyone’s name. Back in the 60’s, I remember that Eleanor Nangle and I were sitting at one of Oscar de la Renta’s first shows in New York when she heard antiwar protesters down in the street. She said: “Come on, Bill, we’re leaving. The action isn’t here. ” We got up and skipped out of the show. I knew from photographing people on the streets that the news was not in the showrooms. It was on the streets. At The Times, when Charlotte Curtis was covering society, she called me one Easter Sunday and said, “Bill, take your little camera and go quickly to Central Park, to the Sheep Meadow. ” That morning I had been on Fifth Avenue photographing the Easter parade. So I got on my bike and went up to the Sheep Meadow, and there before me were all the kids — the flower children. All these kids dressed in everything from their mother’s and grandmother’s trunks, lying on the grass. It was unbelievable. It was all about the fashion revolution. And it was because Charlotte Curtis had called me on the phone. MOST of my pictures are never published. I just document things I think are important. For instance, I’ve documented the gay pride parade from its first days. It was something we had never seen before. I documented every exhibition that Diana Vreeland did at the Met, but every picture is of her hand on something. I do everything, really, for myself. I suppose, in a funny way, I’m a record keeper. More than a collector. I’m very aware of things not of value but of historical knowledge. I remember when Chez Ninon was closing in the ’s. I went in one day, and the files were outside in the trash. I said to the secretary, “Well, I hope you gave all the letters from Jackie Kennedy and Mrs. Rose Kennedy to the Kennedy Library. ” And she said, “No, they kept a few, but they felt that the rest were too personal, so they threw them out. ” I rescued everything I could and still have it. I go to different places all the time. And I try to be as discreet as I can. My whole thing is to be invisible. You get more natural pictures that way, too. The only place where I really hung out was the old Le Cirque on 65th Street. My friend Suzette, who did the flowers there, has been with Sirio Maccioni since he got off the boat from Europe, when he was a captain at the old Colony restaurant. Everyone said Suzette tipped me off, but she couldn’t have cared less about who was there. Most people wouldn’t believe that anyone would be so dumb to come every day and stand for two hours without knowing whether somebody was coming out. But I like the surprise of finding someone. Most photographers couldn’t do what I do because of deadlines. You spend days, weeks, years waiting for what I call a stunner. I think fashion is as vital and as interesting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they’re horrified by what they see on the street. But fashion is doing its job. It’s mirroring exactly our times. The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don’t see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves. This was something I realized early on: If you just cover the designers in the shows, that’s only one facet. You also need the street and the evening hours. If you cover the three things, you have the full picture of what people are wearing. I go out every day. When I get depressed at the office, I go out, and as soon as I’m on the street and see people, I feel better. But I never go out with a preconceived idea. I let the street speak to me. | 1 |
November 7, 2016 at 9:55 pm
I do not own Hearts of Iron IV yet, therefore I am not experienced with the game mechanics, but could someone tell me if it is possible for a puppet state (Russia in this case) to rebel against it´s overlord? | 0 |
On the final night of the Democratic National Convention, a full slate of speakers, including state leaders, some Republicans and her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, preceded Hillary Clinton’s appearance. The highlights (and our longer analysis): • Mrs. Clinton, wearing a white suit and a wide smile, accepted the Democratic nomination for president shortly before 11:00 Eastern time. “It is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America’s promise,” she said over a roaring crowd, “that I accept your nomination for President of the United States. ” She welcomed the night’s historic nature, invoking her mother and her daughter, and tried to shed light on the motivation of her life’s work. But mostly, she used a nearly hourlong speech to lay out a vision of America in opposition to the one Mr. Trump put forth last week in Cleveland. To Mr. Trump’s promise that “I, alone, can fix it,” Mrs. Clinton countered that “none of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone. ” _____ • Chelsea Clinton, who grew up in the national spotlight, introduced her mother — “my wonderful, thoughtful, hilarious mother” — in starkly personal terms. Recounting notes left when her mother was out of town, conversations at the dinner table, and even Mrs. Clinton’s failed 1994 health care fight, Ms. Clinton said she is often asked how does her mother “keep going amid the sound and the fury of politics?” “Here’s how,” she answered: “It’s because she never, ever forgets who she’s fighting for. ” _____ • John R. Allen, the retired Marine Corps general who commanded American forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere, delivered a thundering endorsement of Mrs. Clinton because, he said, “the stakes are enormous” not to. Flanked by fellow veterans, Mr. Allen said that Mrs. Clinton would use all the “instruments of American power” to defeat ISIS, strengthen NATO, and honor its treaties. “Without any hesitation or reservation,” Hillary Clinton will be “exactly, exactly the kind of America needs,” Mr. Allen said. With Mrs. Clinton as commander in chief, “our international relations will not be reduced to a business transaction. ” _____ • “I’m Michael Jordan, and I’m here with Hillary,” Kareem the N. B. A. hall of famer, deadpanned as he appraised a perplexed convention hall. “I said that because I know that Donald Trump couldn’t tell the difference,” he clarified, with a smile. Speaking more seriously, Mr. who is Muslim, warned that Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants amounted to the kind of tyranny warned of by the country’s founders. _____ • Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio brought attention back to manufacturing and trade policy, arguing that Donald J. Trump was not the authentic champion of American workers he claimed to be. Highlighting the foreign provenance of many of Mr. Trump’s products and the clients and investors his businesses have harmed, Mr. Brown said the only thing Mr. Trump’s business record made certain was that “Donald Trump looks out only for Donald Trump. ” _____ • The night’s final speaking slot for a went to Representative Xavier Becerra of California, the son of Mexican immigrants. Reiterating many of the night’s themes, he urged those listening to walk with Mrs. Clinton as she had with them. “Now is not the time to turn back. ” _____ • Republicans for Clinton? The night featured at least two: Doug Elmets, an aide who worked in Ronald Reagan’s White House, and Jennifer Pierotti Lim, the director of health policy at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. They had a message for fellow Republicans dissatisfied with Mr. Trump: Mrs. Clinton may not be perfect but her hands are steady. “I knew Ronald Reagan. I worked for Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Elmets said. “Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan. ” _____ • Some Democratic women of the Senate took turns testifying to Mrs. Clinton’s work and character — often in highly personal terms. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri recalled calls from Mrs. Clinton this year when she was diagnosed with cancer. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York talked of how Mrs. Clinton had inspired her to enter public life. And Senator Barbara Boxer of California remembered the “workhorse, humble, steady and ready to learn” who arrived in the Senate in 2001. _____ • Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, a rising star within the Democratic Party, spoke of his grandmother, a Mexican immigrant who settled in Texas as a young girl. “She wasn’t a rapist or a murderer,” he said, referencing Donald J. Trump’s contentious remarks about why he would build a wall along the border with Mexico. “She was a orphan. ” _____ • Invoking the memory of his father and the record of his home state, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York tried to paint a picture of the party as one of “dreamers” and “doers. ” Republicans under Mr. Trump, on the other hand, he said, “fan the flames of fear and offer a scapegoat” for the country’s problems: notably, those different from themselves. “Fear is a powerful weapon. It can excite and motivate,” Mr. Cuomo said. But, “fear will never build a nation. ” | 1 |
The Bond Vigilantes Are Back----Just In Time To Stop Trumponomics By David Stockman. Posted On Friday, November 25th, 2016 Early Wednesday the yield on the 10-year US treasury note tagged 2.4o%. That means it's up 65 bps since election day and 105 bps from the post-Brexit low in July. You can call that the return of the bond vigilantes, and just in the nick of time. We have always been skeptical of the Trump economic program because it really wasn't one; it was just a collection of aspirations, quips, bromides and wrong-headed panaceas like the big infrastructure build. As we said in Trumped! You need to login to view this content.
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David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has commented on the recent win of France’s Francois Fillon in the first round of the center-right party’s presidential primary, saying that his “personal relations” with Fillon have shown the politician to be a “decent man.”
“We worked together with Francois when he headed the French government, and I chaired the [Russian] government … we had a lot of meetings, and have developed certain personal relations, very kind ones,” Putin told reporters on Wednesday.
The French presidential hopeful, whose convincing win in the Sunday primary took many by surprise, is “very much different” from world politicians, Putin said.
Having characterized Fillon as a “closed up, non-public” person “at first sight,” the Russian leader said that his possible French counterpart “can be very tough in standing up for his point of view.”
“He’s a tough negotiator,” Putin said, adding that Fillon is “certainly an ultimate professional, and a decent man.”
The Russian president also pointed out that although he had no experience of working with Fillon’s rival in the Republican party, another ex-prime minister Alain Juppe, he “welcomes” both candidates’ rhetoric with regards to Russia.
Saying that both Fillon and Juppe have mentioned their plans “to restore Russian-French relations on a full scale,” Putin said that Moscow would facilitate the process on its part.
After Francois Fillon, who served as prime minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government from 2007 until 2012, won the first primary, French media labeled the unexpected presidential hopeful as “Vladimir Putin’s friend.” Citing the two politicians’ meetings on previous occasions, the media said the French politician “advocated a conciliatory position towards the Russia of Vladimir Putin” and compared his victory to the outcome of the recent presidential elections in the US.
After France’s ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy was thrown out of the race to be the French conservative nominee, he said he would back Fillon in the runoff. On November 27, Francois Fillon will face Alain Juppe in the Republicans’ second primary, which is widely believed to produce France’s next president in May elections. Related | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Working from an office suite behind a Burger King in southern Virginia, operatives used a web of shadowy cigarette sales to funnel tens of millions of dollars into a secret bank account. They weren’t known smugglers, but rather agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The operation, not authorized under Justice Department rules, gave agents an way to finance undercover investigations and pay informants without the usual cumbersome paperwork and close oversight, according to court records and people close to the operation. The secret account is at the heart of a federal racketeering lawsuit brought by a collective of tobacco farmers who say they were swindled out of $24 million. A pair of A. T. F. informants received at least $1 million each from that sum, records show. The scheme relied on phony shipments of snack food disguised as tobacco. The agents were experts: Their job was to catch cigarette smugglers, so they knew exactly how it was done. Government records and interviews with people involved reveal an operation that existed on a murky frontier — between investigating smuggling and being complicit in it. After The New York Times began asking about the operation last summer, the Justice Department disclosed it to the department’s inspector general’s office, which is investigating. The inspector general “expressed serious concerns,” court records show. It is unclear how broadly the A. T. F. adopted this practice, at what level it was approved, and whether it continues. Nearly all references to the A. T. F. have been blacked out of public court records, and most documents are entirely sealed. The investigation and the looming racketeering trial will bring renewed scrutiny to the A. T. F. which has been buffeted in recent years by the botched operation known as Fast and Furious and its mismanagement of undercover investigations. Representative Jason Chaffetz, whose House oversight committee investigated Fast and Furious, asked the A. T. F. on Wednesday for reams of documents related to the secret tobacco account. Members of Congress, particularly Republicans, have heaped criticism on the agency for decades, and the National Rifle Association has lobbied to limit the agency’s authority and funding. While government auditors have previously cited problems with A. T. F. ’s tobacco investigations, this operation went beyond what was identified in that audit, released in 2013. The A. T. F. and the Justice Department declined to comment. Documents in the racketeering lawsuit outline the A. T. F. operation. The tobacco cooperative is suing a former employee and a consultant who, according to court documents, both worked as A. T. F. informants. The informants have denied all wrongdoing. Part of their defense, records show, is that they acted on behalf of the government. In response, a judge recently added the United States government as a defendant. Since last summer, The Times has fought to make all the documents public, but the Justice Department has argued successfully in court to keep them secret. Crucial details, however, have been revealed through poor redaction, documents that were filed publicly by mistake and the sheer difficulty of keeping so much a secret for so long. In spring 2011, U. S. Tobacco Cooperative was looking to expand its distribution network. The is made up of about 700 tobacco farmers — from Virginia to Florida — who pool their crops and share the profits. Based in Raleigh, N. C. the company is a major exporter to China and produces cigarettes including Wildhorse, Traffic and 1839. “These are really, really good people,” said Stuart D. Thompson, the cooperative’s chief executive. “Every year, they take all their chips. They put them on the table, and they hope they get them all back. ” The company began negotiating to buy a tobacco distributor in Bristol, Va. Big South Wholesale. Big South’s owners, Jason Carpenter and Christopher Small, had a network of customers and owned a warehouse. They also had an existing secret relationship with the A. T. F. records show. The two men have filed court documents acknowledging “participation in undercover law enforcement activities. ” And a judge’s sealed order, which is publicly available online, revealed that the two men worked “on behalf of various government agencies, primarily the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ” The basics of cigarette smuggling are simple. Each state sets its tobacco taxes. Buying cigarettes in states, like Virginia, and secretly selling them in states, like New York, generates large profits. More complicated schemes have shipped cigarettes to Indian reservations, where they are not taxed, then rerouted them for sale on the black market. A. T. F. agents try to disrupt these networks. Often that means working with informants to buy and sell tobacco on the black market, much the way agents pose as drug dealers to investigate cartels. Because so much of the case remains sealed, Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small are prohibited from answering questions about nearly every aspect of the case. “Everything we did that is being attacked now in litigation, we did in good faith,” they said in a statement. Exactly who at U. S. Tobacco knew about their A. T. F. ties and what they knew are a matter of dispute. But there were signs that Big South was not a simple tobacco distributor. Its assets included more than two dozen vehicles, including expensive S. U. V.s and a fleet of Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Lexus and Jaguar sports cars. Early 2011 was a time of intense pressure inside the A. T. F. The agency was under fire from Congress over the Fast and Furious operation, in which agents allowed gun traffickers to buy weapons and ship them to Mexico, hoping the shipments could lead them to major weapons dealers. Justice Department auditors began scrutinizing how A. T. F. agents managed their tobacco smuggling investigations. With that audit continuing, the A. T. F. issued new rules to tightly monitor undercover investigations. Soon after those rules went into effect, U. S. Tobacco completed its purchase of Big South for $5. 5 million, a deal that gave Big South the authority to buy and sell cigarettes on behalf of the cooperative. Almost immediately, the farmers say, Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small began defrauding them. It worked like this: An export company working with the A. T. F. placed an order for cigarettes to be shipped internationally — thus not subject to American taxes. Big South would instead ship bottled water and potato chips, making it look as if cigarettes had been exported. Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small would then buy the tobacco at a slight markup through a private bank account. Lastly, they would sell the tobacco to Big South, again at a markup. Because they had the authority to buy on behalf of the tobacco cooperative, “Carpenter and Small simply sold products to themselves,” the farmers wrote in court documents. All of these transactions occurred on paper. The cigarettes never left the Virginia warehouse. “It’s what I saw with my own eyes,” said Brandon Moore, the warehouse manager and one of the people who discussed the transactions in the case. Their accounts fit with descriptions in court records. Mr. Moore said he was aware of the A. T. F. operation but became troubled by it as he learned more. “It shouldn’t be going on, even if it is the A. T. F. ,” he said. In one deal described in the lawsuit, the informants bought tobacco at $15 a carton and sold it to U. S. Tobacco at $17. 50. The profit, about $519, 000, went into what was known as a “management account. ” That account, while controlled by Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small, helped pay for A. T. F. investigations. Mr. Moore, the warehouse manager, said agents often told him what to buy on the company’s credit card. For instance, he recalled spending tens of thousands of dollars at Best Buy on iPads, televisions and other gifts to curry favor with potential criminal targets. Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small have also acknowledged in court documents receiving more than $1 million each, though it is not clear from public documents whether that was profit or reimbursement for expenses paid on behalf of the government. How that arrangement began is unclear. Ryan Kaye, an A. T. F. supervisor, testified that the management account was created “as a result of verbal directives from the A. T. F. program office and other headquarters officials. ” Mr. Kaye’s full statement is sealed, but excerpts are cited in one publicly available document. The defendants in the lawsuit contend that U. S. Tobacco got a good deal on the cigarettes, even at the prices they paid. The farmers tell a different story, saying they never would have purchased Big South if they understood that Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Small had a side arrangement that involved selling them tobacco at inflated values. Thomas Lesnak, a retired A. T. F. agent who was involved in the operation, dismissed suggestions that anything was done improperly. He said he could not discuss Big South because the Justice Department was still conducting investigations based on information developed during operations based at the warehouse. The arrangement began to break down in late 2012, when Mr. Thompson joined U. S. Tobacco as the chief financial officer. He was curious why his warehouse was placing so many orders for a brand of cigarette that competes against U. S. Tobacco. He could not get a straight answer, the company said in court documents. In March 2013, Mr. Moore picked up the phone, called Mr. Thompson and explained what was happening. “I did what I did because of the ethics of it,” Mr. Moore said recently. “What was happening there was wrong. ” Once U. S. Tobacco discovered the bookkeeping irregularities, it reported them to the Justice Department, which investigates crime and government misconduct. Records show that the Justice Department, which includes the A. T. F. investigated some aspects of the case but no charges were filed. “We voted unanimously to give everything we had to the government,” said Charlie Batten, a U. S. Tobacco board member whose family has worked the same North Carolina soil for generations. “We thought they would take it and run with it. What happened was, they’ve fought us tooth and nail. ” Because of the sealing order, Mr. Thompson, Mr. Batten and others are prohibited from discussing what happened to the money — even with their own farmers. Three years into its lawsuit, U. S. Tobacco still cannot disentangle itself from the government. The cooperative recently told a judge that it was under investigation by the Treasury Department. All those secret tobacco sales, it turns out, should have been taxed. And the government wants its money. | 1 |
Monday 7 November 2016 by Davywavy UK’s largest worm to get Viking funeral
The earthworm is expected to join Harambe in Valhalla where they will toast their valour for all eternity.
Dave the giant worm died in battle against scientists trying to measure him and is to receive a fiery, viking funeral in a longship specially constructed for the occasion.
Thor, God of Thunder, has expressed disappointment that he did not defeat Dave himself as he had hoped to practice on the worm in preparation for battle against Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent, at the end of all things.
“We’re building a longship that might be as long as fifteen or twenty inches long. When complete we shall lay him on a rich bed of loam with a beetle at his feet”, said Earthworm expert Simon Williams.
“Okay, not feet. Whatever it is that Earthworms have. Cloaca? You tell me.
“Then we shall cast the ship adrift in the still, wine-dark sea before sending him aloft with the wormy Valkyrie by firing burning arrows at him until he is utterly consumed by flames and the waves, God rest him.”
Simon was then interrupted by an announcement that there is no budget for an elaborate funeral and the earthworm will just be put in the bin. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? | 0 |
Posted on October 31, 2016 by DavidSwanson
Imagine if a local business in your town invented a brand new tool that was intended to have an almost magical effect thousands of miles away. However, where the tool was kept and used locally became an area unsafe for children. Children who got near this tool tended to have increased blood pressure and increased stress hormones, lower reading skills, poorer memories, impaired auditory and speech perception, and impaired academic performance.
Most of us would find this situation at least a little concerning, unless the new invention was designed to murder lots of people. Then it’d be just fine.
Now, imagine if this same new tool ruined neighborhoods because people couldn’t safely live near it. Imagine if the government had to compensate people but kick them out of living near the location of this tool. Again, I think, we might find that troubling if mass murder were not the mission.
Imagine also that this tool fairly frequently explodes, emitting highly toxic chemicals, particles, and fibers unsafe to breathe into the air for miles around. Normally, that’d be a problem. But if this tool is needed for killing lots of people, we’ll work with its flaws, won’t we?
Now, what if this new gadget was expected to cost at least $1,400,000,000,000 over 50 years? And what if that money had to be taken away from numerous other expenses more beneficial for the economy and the world? What if the $1.4 trillion was drained out of the economy causing a loss of jobs and a radical diminuition of resources for education, healthcare, housing, environmental protection, or humanitarian aid? Wouldn’t that be a worry in some cases, I mean in those cases where the ability to kill tons of human beings wasn’t at stake?
What if this product, even when working perfectly, was a leading destroyer of the earth’s natural environment?
What if this high-tech toy wasn’t even designed to do what was expected of it and wasn’t even able to do what it was designed for?
Amazingly, even those shortcomings do not matter as long as the intention is massive murder and destruction. Then, all is forgiven.
The tool I’m describing is called the F-35. At RootsAction.org you can find a new petition launched by locally-minded people acting globally in places where the F-35 is intended to be based. Also at that link you’ll find explanations of how the tool I’ve been decribing is the F-35.
The petition is directed to the United States Congress and the governments of Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan and South Korea from the world and from the people of Burlington, Vermont, and Fairbanks, Alaska, where the F-35 is to be based. This effort is being initiated by Vermont Stop the F35 Coalition, Save Our Skies Vermont, Western Maine Matters, Alaska Peace Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Peace Club, North Star Chapter 146 Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, RootsAction.org, Code Pink, and Ben Cohen.
The petition reads:
The F-35 is a weapon of offensive war, serving no defensive purpose. It is planned to cost the U.S. $1.4 trillion over 50 years. Because starvation on earth could be ended for $30 billion and the lack of clean drinking water for $11 billion per year, it is first and foremost through the wasting of resources that this airplane will kill. Military spending, contrary to popular misconception, also hurts the U.S. economy ( see here ) and other economies. The F-35 causes negative health impacts and cognitive impairment in children living near its bases. It renders housing near airports unsuitable for residential use. It has a high crash rate and horrible consequences to those living in the area of its crashes. Its emissions are a major environmental polluter.
Wars are endangering the United States and other participating nations rather than protecting them. Nonviolent tools of law, diplomacy, aid, crisis prevention, and verifiable nuclear disarmament should be substituted for continuing counterproductive wars. Therefore, we, the undersigned, call for the immediate cancellation of the F-35 program as a whole, and the immediate cancellation of plans to base any such dangerous and noisy jets near populated areas. We oppose replacing the F-35 with any other weapon or basing the F-35 in any other locations. We further demand redirection of the money for the F-35 back into taxpayers’ pockets, and into environmental and human needs in the U.S., other F-35 customer nations, and around the world, including to fight climate change, pay off student debt, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and improve education, healthcare, and housing. | 0 |
is now using their growing power to threaten and extort immigrants and their businesses in America. [The hyperviolent gang is known for beheadings, machete attacks, scalping, and gang rapes. Now they are extorting businesses by threatening immigrants’ families in their native countries if they do not give money. “The homicides related to it’s just because we can, and we will and because of the fear that instills,” Montgomery County Maryland Chief Thomas Manger was also reported by The Washington Times to say. The information came during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday. The committee probed “The Rise of and Other Transnational Criminal Organizations. ” The gang’s extortion system in their native El Salvador is a police detective in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Scott Michael Conley, told the committee. Moreover, while their foundation is entrenched on the west coast, they are progressing on the east coast. “Once they establish that leadership base you’ll start to see a more sophisticated gang,” Detective Conley said. The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Senator Ron Johnson ( ) said to those at the hearing: “During the Committee’s examination of America’s unsecure borders we have learned how transnational criminal organizations and drug cartels exploit American policies and our lack of border security to advance their criminal agenda. Today we continue that important work by discussing how the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as and other Central American gangs affect communities throughout the United States. ” According to Suffolk County New York Police Commissioner Timothy D. Sini, “They are recruiting young people in our communities. They are recruiting recent immigrants because oftentimes, they pray on people’s fears. ” The police commissioner told the committee examining the gang, “Recent immigrants may not feel comfortable in coming to law enforcement. ” Police Comm. Timothy Sini on MS13 recruiting immigrants — > pic. twitter. — Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) May 24, 2017, Sini added, “They are recruiting also very young. ” He said there was one instance in Suffolk County where gang members recruited a . Police Chief Manger told the committee, “The gangs surf the internet, building dossiers on potential recruits,” the Times also reported. Chairman Johnson said that out of this flood of almost 200, 000 unaccompanied children (UACs) taken into custody during 2012 to 2016 — 68 percent were males between the ages of 15 — 17. Breitbart Texas obtained leaked images of UACs in June 2014 which showed not only the conditions of U. S. Border Patrol’s processing centers but also the deluge border patrol agents were facing. President Obama called the wave of unaccompanied children an “urgent humanitarian situation” and his administration officials pictured these children as fleeing violence and poor economies reported The Washington Post at the time. Breitbart Texas covered the press conference on April 11 of this year in Houston when Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced the expansion of the Texas Task Force (TAG) and the creation of a technical operations center. Houston is one of the five cities that the FBI has identified to have a large presence. In March, two gang members appeared in a Harris County courtroom laughing and waving at news cameras after being charged with the kidnapping and rape of one girl, and the kidnapping, rape, and murder of another young girl in Jersey Village, a city within the Houston metropolitan area. The murdered girl was allegedly killed as part of a satanic ritual. In late April, U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said while visiting Long Island, “The motto is kill, rape, and control. ” “I have a message to the gangs that are targeting our young people: We are targeting you. We are coming after you. ” Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 1 |
Go to Article The left is shameful in their latest effort to create a false narrative that Donald Trump is supportive of racist groups. A full-court-press has been going on all day after a neo-Nazi/alt-right group held a celebration of Trump’s victory. The left grabbed onto the news and attached it to Donald Trump and his supporters. There’s a big difference between a president like Obama who actually marched with the racist New Black Panthers and sat in a racist church for 20years and Trump who DOES NOT support racist groups and has said so! He can’t help who supports him. These people are sickening… | 0 |
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, may be on track to win more votes than any candidate in 20 years, if current polling holds up. Who are his supporters? Mr. Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, is relying heavily on the backing of young people and independent voters disillusioned with the two major parties’ nominees. More than 70 percent of his backers are younger than 50, and over are political independents, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Over all, Mr. Johnson, who will be on the ballot in all 50 states, has the backing of 10 percent of registered voters, the Pew poll found. Mr. Johnson’s coalition is relatively diverse, particularly compared with that of Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. Thirteen percent of Mr. Johnson’s backers are black or Latino, compared with just 6 percent for Mr. Trump. And while just 42 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women, the Pew center found that Mr. Johnson’s are evenly divided — 51 percent women, 49 percent men. Republican strategists have long said that their party must do more to appeal to voters who are younger, nonwhite and women. Mr. Trump trails Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, by almost 20 points among women, and by far more among minority voters, Pew found. “Something is happening where the coalition is no longer able to appeal beyond its disparate and shrinking constituencies,” said Michael Madrid, a principal at GrassrootsLab, a Republican consulting firm. “That’s the main problem facing Republicans. ” As Mr. Trump departs from Republican orthodoxy on issues including free trade and entitlement reform, he remains burdened by the thing that may be most unpopular about the party: its own brand. More than six in 10 Americans view the Republican Party unfavorably, according to a New York News poll from July. Originally an entrepreneur, Mr. Johnson has cast himself as an alternative to Mr. Trump by focusing on reducing the size of the government while embracing a approach to social issues. He advocates abolishing the income tax, removing regulations on internet companies and moving aggressively to balance the federal budget. But much of Mr. Johnson’s message has focused on social policy. His support for abortion rights and legalized marijuana appeals to many young people, while putting him out of step with his former party. “When you get past the rhetoric and past the primary politics that Republicans and Democrats each have to play, the real majority of Americans are essentially fiscally responsible and socially inclusive,” said Joe Hunter, a spokesman for Mr. Johnson. “Right now, neither of the two major parties — particularly the Republican Party — is representing that view,” Mr. Hunter said. Mr. Johnson has strongly opposed Mr. Trump’s proposal for a wall along the border with Mexico, saying instead that the government should make it easier for immigrants to enter the United States legally. The ascent of Mr. Johnson — who garnered less than 1 percent of the vote as the Libertarian candidate in 2012 — owes partly to dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, who both receive negative ratings from most voters. It also reflects the fact that a plurality of Americans today identify as independents. A Washington News poll from August put Mr. Johnson’s overall support at 8 percent, but showed him earning 14 percent among independents. He is drawing support about equally from voters who would otherwise lean toward Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Johnson is pushing to reach 15 percent in the major national polls, which would qualify him to participate in nationally televised presidential debates. The business mogul Ross Perot ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1992, earning 19 percent of the popular vote with a platform of socially moderate and fiscally conservative policies not unlike those of Mr. Johnson. He, too, drew most of his support from younger voters. Mr. Perot ran again in 1996 and got 8 percent of the vote. Mr. Johnson is currently nowhere near where Mr. Perot was in 1992, when he briefly led both Bill Clinton and George Bush in the polls. And there are distinct vulnerabilities in Mr. Johnson’s appeal. He leans heavily on the Western states, drawing about a third of his support from there, according to two recent Washington News polls. And the Pew survey shows Mr. Johnson polling at just 4 percent among voters 65 and older. He is doing equally poorly among those who describe themselves as very conservative. For now, older voters and the conservative base remain crucial to the Republican Party. Despite its troubles in presidential elections over the past 25 years, the party controls both houses of Congress and most state legislatures. But Mr. Trump faces an uphill battle, and if he loses, the Republicans will once again have to rethink how they pick their presidential nominee and how to widen their appeal to a changing electorate. “This is likely to be the sixth election out of the last seven when Republicans lose the popular vote,” said Richard Born, a political scientist at Vassar College who studies political polarization. “They’re going to have to moderate, and immigration rights will be one place they have to moderate. ” If Mr. Trump loses in November, he added, the Republican Party’s 2020 nominee could be “somewhere in between a Gary Johnson and a Mitt Romney. ” | 1 |
OSLO — A gate bearing a notorious Nazi slogan and believed to have been stolen from the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany has been found in a suburb of Bergen, Norway, police officials in the two countries said on Friday. The gate, a replica of the original bearing the phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Sets You Free,” is one of the most photographed symbols of the camp. It was stolen in November 2014 in what the German authorities believed was an organized crime. An anonymous tipster alerted the Norwegian police to the presence of the gate. Margrethe Myrmehl Gudbrandsen, a police spokeswoman in Norway, said the tip had come in this week, but she declined to give further information. She did not provide any details about the exact location of the discovery. The Bavarian police, who investigated the theft, said they were working with their Norwegian counterparts to determine whether the gate that was found was, indeed, the one from Dachau. The Norwegian authorities had left the announcement of the discovery to the Germans out of deference for its symbolism, Ms. Gudbrandsen said. “We understand this gate is an important monument for Germany,” she said. The original gate was made by prisoners in a workshop of the Dachau camp shortly after it opened. Prisoners who entered the camp passed through it, and it served as a barrier between their internment and the outside world. Immediately after the camp was liberated in May 1945, the original gate was removed. The replica was put in its place in 1965, when the camp reopened as a memorial site, and hung there until it was stolen two years ago. Survivors of the camp, where the Nazis imprisoned about 200, 000 people over 12 years, welcomed the discovery. Thomas, president of the Comité International de Dachau, an organization of former camp prisoners, described the theft as a “desecration of this important memorial site. ” An estimated 41, 500 people met their deaths at Dachau before it was liberated by American troops in the final days of World War II in Europe. Gabriele Hammermann, director of the memorial site, said she expected that the gate would be returned once the authorities had completed their investigation. “Of course, after being restored, it will again be presented to the public,” she said. A sign bearing the same slogan that hung over the entry to Auschwitz was stolen in 2009. It was recovered after just a few days, and in December 2010, a Swedish and two Polish accomplices were jailed for their part in the theft. Dachau is the former concentration camp in Germany, with an estimated 800, 000 visitors a year. | 1 |
Share on Facebook Do you remember jumping on your parents bed when you were really young? They probably told you that it was very dangerous and warned you not to ever do it, so you did it anyways! When things were off-limits because mom and dad said so, they became even more fun than they already were. It's not just kids who have a super awesome, fun time jumping around on the bed, dogs also love to mess around! The little Dachshund puppy featured in this video is named Pepper and he's normally not allowed to go on his owner's bed. However, this time his human set up a hidden camera and captured his hilarious antics. The little cutie is a furry ball of energy as he zips around in circles across the bed. He gets completely carried away and the look on his face is priceless, you just have to see it for yourself! About halfway through the clip Pepper's fellow doggy friend Margo makes an appearance. She jumps up and joins him on the bed for some fun, taking her plushy raccoon along with her. The pair are sweet as can be and by the end of it all they're both completely tuckered out. Check them out and prepare to smile and say awww because that's the normal reaction to these adorable types of videos! Related: | 0 |
By Rixon Stewart on November 5, 2016 Rixon Stewart — Nov 3, 2016 Migrants and refugees run to a refugee center after crossing the Croatian-Slovenian border near Rigonce on October 24, 2015. Slovenia says it is considering building a border fence to help stem a record influx of migrants and refugees, as thousands more people arrived from Croatia on October 23. AFP PHOTO / JURE MAKOVEC (Photo credit should read Jure Makovec/AFP/Getty Images) Over one hundred years ago General Albert Pike wrote a letter to Giuseppi Mazzini, the founder of modern Italy. The letter turned out to be grimly prophetic and to this day its content are still highly controversial. In the letter Pike foretold the coming of three world wars. The first would see a clash between the “ British and Germanic Empires”, Pike wrote, and it would result in the overthrow of the Russian Czar. Thereafter, Pike continued: “The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. “During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm.” ( Quote source ) Of course there have been claims that Pike’s letter is a forgery . Just as there have been similar allegations about the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. However, that doesn’t change the fact that many of the events we see unfolding before us today were outlined in Pike’s letter, which first became more widely known in the 1950s through the writings of Willaim Guy Carr , a former Canadian intelligence officer. That was well before the current migrant crisis and the so-called ‘War on Terror’, both of which can be seen alluded to in Pike’s 1871 letter to Mazzini. So regardless of the letter’s provenance, it still foreshadows much of what we see unfolding in the world today. Pike continues: “The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. ( Ibid ) Readers will note that mention is made of “political Zionism”. This effectively neutralises arguments to dismiss Pike’s letter as an “anti-Semitic forgery, as has been attempted with the Protocols. Because Pike doesn’t mention “Zionism” in way that suggests its complicity in the plot. He simply refers to it as a another element in the overall equation. Just as he mentions “communism”, it’s another means to manipulate the uninitiated. Moreover, according to Pike, the conflict will spread beyond the confines of the Middle East: Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion… ( Ibid ) How will other nations “be divided on this issue”? Through the mass influx of migrants from the “Muslim Arabic World”, ostensibly fleeing conflicts that the West has helped initiate. How will they be “constrained to fight”? On the basis of “humanitarian concerns”; that conveniently provide a false justification for military interventions: as happened in Iraq, in Libya and now Syria. Nor is it a coincidence that there are so few women and children among the migrants currently streaming into Europe. Most are able bodied men of military service age and four out of five are not even Syrian . Moreover, most are not even refugees, in the strict sense of the term. They are economic migrants in search of better prospects, which explains why there are so few woman and children among them. What’s more the majority are not devout Muslims. The ‘Muslim’ angle is being peddled by the corporate media in order to promote the idea of a wider conflict; a notion first proposed by Illuminati strategist Samual Huntington under the label the Clash of Civilisations . The idea being that out of the chaos spawned by wars a “new order” would arise. The need to provide the migrants with “humanitarian” aid is a pretext promoted by the likes of billionaire George Soros to get European nations to open their borders. At the last count over one million migrants had entered Germany and from there spread out to the rest of Europe. Given their demographic make-up — able-bodied men of military service age with little education and few job prospects — it’s a potential time bomb. It will only take renewed strife in the Middle East for the conflict there to spread among Europe’s newly arrived immigrants, and manifest in bombings, shootings, suicide attacks etc. All of which sets the scene for what Pike described as: …a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. ( Ibid ) Gangs of migrants armed with clubs and staves prowl the streets of the 10th Arrondissement, Paris, at night. Click to enlarge Recent reports from Paris demonstrate how this scenario is beginning to unfold on the streets of the French capital . This is no accident. It is exactly as foreseen by Albert Pike over a century ago and it is now being brought to fruition with the help of what Pike called “agentur” of the “Illuminati” . Who can probably be more readily identified today in the likes of George Soros and Angela Merkel The ultimate objective is to destroy the old existing order and establish a new world order in its place. To this end the likes of Soros and Merkel are working toward establishing a new global feudalism. A fiefdom presided over by themselves, the bankers, their security personnel and their technocrats. While beneath them a huge global underclass, made up of a mix of various races and tongues, toils in their global plantation. However, there is one major obstacle to the fulfilment of this plan — and that is Putin’s Russia. It’s no mere accident that the Soros’s supposed charity Foundation has been banned in Russia . Nor is it a coincidence that NATO is steadily encircling Russia with military bases and encroaching ever closer to its borders. The stakes couldn’t be higher. What happens in the next few years will be critical to the development of the human race. Will future generations grow up in a global slave state, where political correctness is paramount? Or will they find themselves in a world where individuality and personnel freedom are more highly prized? | 0 |
Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ Crush your bottles and cans before you recycle them, so no birds make any homes in them before they’re melted down. ” —Lupita Nyong’o On recycling tips “ For my latest role I play a banker, so I’ve been preparing by going to the bank every morning and asking if I can be the boss of the bank. When they say yes, I will consider myself ready. ” —Daniel Day-Lewis On acting “ If they ever make another Indiana Jones video game, there should be a level where the whip develops a mind of its own and you have to hack it into little pieces as it bounces around, whipping people. ” —Harrison Ford | 0 |
Jennifer Diaz first stepped onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House at 11, as an extra in “I Pagliacci” and “La Bohème. ” For the next three years, it became her second home, as she regularly visited her father, who is still the Met’s night crew manager after more than three decades. At 19, she began working there as a stagehand, typically the only female member in a crew. Now, at 34, she has made history, becoming the first female head carpenter of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The local’s 3, 351 members work in spaces from the Met to Carnegie Hall, at Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, and in every Broadway theater — including the Walter Kerr, which is where she was one morning in September, overseeing the for the musical “Falsettos. ” With a head of thick dark curls and a ready smile, Ms. Diaz is a tomboy, a blend of authority and quiet confidence. “My name has a lot of clout in this business,” she said. “I have people on my side and in my pocket I can turn to. ” She works in a shirt, shorts and sturdy sneakers, a delicate silver necklace barely visible. Married to a fellow Local 1 stagehand, she sports a tattooed wedding ring in place of a traditional metal band, the of her ring finger worn clean from years of ungloved manual labor. Standing on the shallow stage of the Kerr, she kept a close eye on the crew of stagehands, all of them men. As heavy objects thumped and banged, it was her job to keep everyone safe — while not alienating those who work for her. And with her many close ties within Local 1, it’s a balancing act. “See those two guys?” she said, pointing to a burly pair wrangling a chain motor. “They’re brothers — and one of them is married to one of my cousins. ” No longer working for an hourly rate, typical of positions, Ms. Diaz is now a staff employee of Jujamcyn Theaters. (Before her promotion, she would often work a schedule at the Cort Theater on Broadway, then head uptown for the night shift at the opera house, a total of at least 72 hours each week.) Despite breaking the glass ceiling, Ms. Diaz is typical of backstage workers at prominent New York theaters in other regards. As David Grindle, executive director of the United States Institute for Theater Technology, a national trade group, pointed out, “Everything in this industry is based on relationships. ” Her new job title is somewhat misleading, as she no longer wields a hammer or saw her role is now more administrative and managerial. “I point and do payroll,” she joked. Still, even as an industry veteran, she said she was “totally surprised” when asked to compete with 12 others in applying for the job, and “terrified” of a formal interview. Ms. Diaz brought specific technical skills to the position, having worked with a similar rigging system at the Cort. She now acts as the intermediary between her employers and the mostly male stagehands she hires. “I have to make sure that all things in the house are safe,” she explained. “If wood gets chipped or a curtain gets torn, it’s my job to make sure we restore it. I’m responsible to make sure the Walter Kerr stays intact, that everyone working here is happy and healthy. ” Local 1, with only 189 female members, is widely considered the most prestigious local in the country and, industry veterans agree, one of the most difficult to join. There are three ways in: earning $35, 000 a year for three consecutive years in a qualifying union job unionizing your own workplace or taking a skills assessment test to qualify for an apprentice position lasting two to three years. The work, while not always steady, can be lucrative, paying up to $80, 000 a year, plus benefits. Ms. Diaz’s network is typical of the union, where many members are married to one another or related by blood. “It makes a huge difference having family in the business,” said Kristina Miller, a veteran stagehand and Local 1 member who has known Ms. Diaz for more than a decade. When stagehands are being hired, a familiar last name makes a big difference. “It’s nepotism,” Ms. Miller said. “You’re ’s kid, not just some Joe Smith. Absolutely, I’ll give you work. ” Besides her father, John Diaz, Ms. Diaz’s older brother, Michael Diaz, is also in the business, as head carpenter of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “Backstage is a occupation,” Michael Diaz explained by email. “The head carpenter is the head of the heads, and when 90 percent of the people you’re overseeing are men, and probably much older then Jen, one has to look them in the eye and say ‘Do your work’ in a way that inspires them and not complain about how they were spoken to. ” Accustomed to being “the only girl in the building,” Ms. Diaz said she’s used to it: “I can honestly say I have no friends who are girls. ” Ms. Diaz changed colleges three times before graduating from Rutgers University with a degree in psychology. She’d hoped to become a music teacher “because it gave me such joy,” she said. “I wanted to share that. ” But understanding psychology “has come in handy more times than I count,” she said. “When someone’s acting a certain way, at least I know it’s not me. ” Keeping a cool head is essential, fellow stagehands agree. Ms. Miller said that being “stubborn” and “pigheaded” has helped her thrive in workplaces where foul language is standard. Acquiring the technical and mathematical knowledge for Ms. Diaz’s current job required years of hard physical labor and demands a sensitive managerial style and the ability to juggle the sometimes competing needs — for speed and safety — of her employers and her hired hands. Stagehands and flymen wrestle enormous pieces of metal and steel, with each show’s costly, carefully designed sets usually shipping in from studios in Connecticut and upstate New York. Nine of Broadway’s theaters, those built between 1903 and 1927, are “hemp houses,” using manila ropes to set the stage. A hemp fly system is the simplest type, and stage rigging techniques draw largely from ship rigging. Backstage in a hemp house sounds like a ship the stage is referred to as a deck, and words used include batten, belay, block, bo’sun, hitch and lanyard. “The ability to rig in a hemp house is a dying art,” Ms. Diaz said. “I call it ‘art’ because there’s nothing in the air when you start the . The first day, it’s a complete blank slate to put whatever you want wherever you want. You have the most versatility, but also the most work. ” Safety is her primary concern. “One short cut or misstep can lead to you loosening a pipe and really hurting people. ” “My first accident was when a house ran over my foot,” she said. The house, a prop for “Madama Butterfly” at the Met Opera, left a huge contusion. “I was out for the rest of the season,” she recalled. In her downtime, she listens to music (the Cure is a favorite) but she’s had little of that. Having worked two jobs last year, she admitted that she gained weight from a lack of sleep and exercise. And what of the romance of the theater, the hush of anticipation as the lights dim, the orchestra begins to play and the curtain rises? “I saw ‘Cats’ in 1989 I vaguely remember that,” Ms. Diaz said. “But I haven’t been to a show in a long time. I’m here enough!” | 1 |
He did not mock. He did not scold. He did not blunder. Instead when Donald J. Trump showed up for a hastily assembled statelike visit at the presidential palace in Mexico City on Wednesday, he managed to accomplish something that he had failed to do throughout the campaign: communicate his provocative political ideas with something resembling diplomacy. Standing beneath a Mexican flag, Mr. Trump lamented the crimes committed by immigrants, but without his usually harsh, insulting and alarmist language. He described undocumented Mexican immigrants, but not in the ugly, racially charged ways he has in the past. And he talked about building a wall on America’s southern border, but in newly measured, less belligerent terms. “We recognize and respect the right of either country to build a physical barrier,” he said, before adding, almost sheepishly, “a wall. ” It was Trumpism in an unfamiliar but somehow still recognizable form: shorn of its most offensive elements but faithful to its essential message. In many ways, it was Mr. Trump’s most successful performance of the summer, after weeks of agonizing gaffes, missed opportunities and flagging poll numbers. Of course, as with so much surrounding Mr. Trump, the day was immediately dogged by questions of candor. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, claimed that in their meeting he had told Mr. Trump his country would never pay for the wall, while Mr. Trump declared that the two men had never touched on who would shoulder the cost of its construction. It was not clear whether the discrepancy was the result of the language barrier or Mr. Trump’s tendency to spin the facts in his favor. Still, by the end of Mr. Trump’s news conference beside Mr. Peña Nieto, it was clear that despite his struggling campaign, the Republican nominee retains a showman’s instincts. Breaking protocol, Mr. Trump, a guest in the home of a foreign president, called on reporters himself, seemingly ignoring the head of state standing a few feet to his right. “Say it!” Mr. Trump declared as he pointed at reporters he knew from the United States. “Yes?” he called to another journalist. When an ABC reporter asked both men about the hurtful words that Mr. Trump had used in the past to describe Mexico, the candidate did not bother to wait for the president to speak first. It might have been Mexican soil, but the stage was still Mr. Trump’s. “We’ll, I’ll start,” he said. He leaned in and offered his reply. Still, at times, especially during the starch exchange of formal statements, Mr. Trump seemed out of his element. As Mr. Peña Nieto spoke at length, Mr. Trump appeared uncomfortable and almost sullen, swiveling slightly side to side, crossing his arms and looking down, rather than at the president. He seemed incapable of maintaining the polite expression of interest that is customary for such occasions. Mr. Trump occasionally nodded as his translator whispered in his ear as Mr. Peña Nieto delivered his prepared remarks in Spanish. (Mr. Trump does not speak Spanish.) The tableau itself was startling: Mr. Trump, who has mercilessly maligned Mexico, standing inside the Mexican’s president’s home surrounded by the pomp and ceremony of a formal summit meeting. The grand house sits amid open fields, trees, foliage and a large complex of buildings that drown out noise from the surrounding city. An air of improbability hovered over Mr. Trump’s entire trip to Mexico. Much of the country was astonished that the New York developer had pounced on a seemingly perfunctory invitation from its president. “I think it’s unlikely that the Mexican government really expected Donald Trump to take them up on this invitation,” said Christopher Wilson, the deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. But take up the invitation Mr. Trump did. It is the kind of dramatic, development and plot twist that Mr. Trump relishes. It was Mr. Trump, after all, who theatrically boycotted an all but mandatory Republican presidential debate in Iowa in January, commandeering an auditorium a few blocks away to put on a show taunting his rivals. “Where’s Trump?” he asked, mischievously imitating the rest of the Republican presidential field across town. Despite predictions that his absence would prove disastrous, he finished second in the state’s caucuses and continued to roll up big victories. In the hours before Mr. Trump landed in Mexico, there were similar predictions of doom. And with reason. This was the same man who, after Britain voted to leave the European Union, bragged on his golf course in Scotland that the rupture would be good for business there. In Mexico, his rougher edges seemed sanded down as he offered flattery and solicitousness in place of crudeness and brickbats. The he knew, he said, “were beyond reproach. ” He described generations of their families as “amazing people. ” Even as Mr. Peña Nieto seemed to subtly criticize him — by reminding Mr. Trump that illegal immigration had fallen significantly over the past decade and vigorously defending the North American Free Trade Agreement — Mr. Trump suppressed any urge to trade fire. Instead, he looked over at the president of a country he has denounced for over a year and told him what an honor it was to meet him. “I call you a friend,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Peña Nieto. | 1 |
Home › SOCIETY › CLOWN PORN SEARCHES UP 213% CLOWN PORN SEARCHES UP 213% 0 SHARES
[11/1/16] As the clown sighting epidemic became more prevalent over recent months in America, so did searches for clown pornography.
Pornhub, one of the go-to X-rated websites, released data showing a huge uptick in clown searches on their salacious website, including a 213-percent increase at its highest point.
“Clown fetish porn has been around for some time, so searches on Pornhub are not uncommon,” the sites’ official blog post from mid-October reads. But in “the last 30 days there have been over 100,000 clown related searches.”
Company statisticians also found that women are 33 percent more likely to search for clown porn than men.
Popular search terms related to the costumed entertainers were “clown porn,” “clown girl,” “clown gangbang,” “clown orgy,” “midget clown,” “crazy clown,” “killer clown,” “lesbian clown,” “clown fart,” and “clown feet.” Post navigation | 0 |
MADRID (AP) — Spain’s Interior Ministry said two separate arrests have been made in connection with Islamic extremism, bringing to 188 the number of people accused of jihadi links in Spain since 2015. [advertisement | 1 |
LONDON — Swedes reacted with confusion, anger and ridicule on Sunday to a vague remark by President Trump that suggested that something terrible had occurred in their country. During a rally on Saturday in Florida, Mr. Trump issued a sharp if discursive attack on refugee policies in Europe, ticking off a list of places that have been hit by terrorists. “You look at what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” Not the Swedes. Nothing particularly nefarious happened in Sweden on Friday — or Saturday, for that matter — and Swedes were left baffled. “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister, wrote on Twitter. As the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet noted, Twitter users were quick to ridicule Mr. Trump’s remark, with joking references to the Swedish Chef, the “Muppets” character Swedish meatballs and Ikea, the furniture giant. Mr. Trump did not state, per se, that a terrorist attack had taken place in Sweden. But the context of his remarks — he mentioned Sweden right after he chastised Germany, a destination for refugees and asylum seekers fleeing war and deprivation — suggested that he thought it might have. “Sweden,” Mr. Trump said. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. ” He then invoked the terrorist attacks that took place in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels and Nice, France, last year, to make an argument for tightening scrutiny of travelers and asylum seekers. “We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country, and there was no way to vet those people,” he said. “There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe. ” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, tried to clarify the president’s remarks Sunday, saying Mr. Trump did not mean to suggest that a particular attack had happened the night before, but rather was talking about crime in general in Sweden. On Sunday, Mr. Trump offered his own clarification, writing on Twitter, “My statement as to what’s happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants Sweden. ” In that story, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Ami Horowitz, a filmmaker who asserts that migrants in Sweden have been associated with a crime wave. “They oftentimes try to cover up some of these crimes,” Mr. Horowitz said, arguing that those who try to tell the truth about the situation are shouted down as racists and xenophobes. (Mr. Carlson interjected, “The masochism of the West knows no bounds at all. ”) Mr. Horowitz said, “Sweden had its first terrorist Islamic attack not that long ago, so they’re now getting a taste of what we’ve been seeing across Europe already. ” It was not clear what he was referring to. In 2010, a suicide bomber struck central Stockholm, injuring two people. The bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab 28, was an Swede who had developed an affinity for Al Qaeda. But that attack occurred long before the current wave of migrants. Sweden has a long history of welcoming refugees — Jews, Iranians, Eritreans, Somalis, Kurds and people from the former Yugoslavia, among others — but even some of the most tolerant and idealistic Swedes have raised questions about whether the country can absorb so many newcomers so quickly. Henrik Selin, a political scientist and deputy director of the Swedish Institute, a state agency dedicated to promoting Sweden globally, said he was puzzled by Mr. Trump’s remarks. “I do not have a clue what he was referring to,” he said in a telephone interview. “Obviously, this could be connected to the fact that there has been a lot of negative reporting about Sweden, since Sweden has taken in a lot of refugees. ” The country processed 81, 000 asylum seekers in 2014, 163, 000 in 2015 and 29, 000 last year, with another 25, 000 to 45, 000 expected this year, according to the Swedish Migration Agency. Mr. Selin completed a study recently focusing on negative news reports about Sweden’s acceptance of refugees. It found numerous exaggerations and distortions, including false reports that Shariah law was predominant in parts of the country and that some neighborhoods were considered “ zones” by the police. Breitbart News, the website once led by Stephen K. Bannon, now Mr. Trump’s senior strategist, has published numerous stories alleging that migrants have been responsible for a surge in crime and for a wave of sexual assaults. Swedish officials have said that their statistics do not justify such sweeping assertions, and that the country has a high number of sexual assault reports relative to other European countries because more victims come forward, not because there is more violence. Mr. Selin said the news reports “were highly exaggerated and not based in facts,” adding, “Some of the stories were very popular to spread in social media by people who have the same kind of agenda — that countries should not receive so many refugees. ” As for the alleged by Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Selin said: “That kind of claim has been in the political debate for 15 years now. But nobody has been able to prove there is a . On the contrary, the fact is that crime rates are going down. ” He added: “Swedish authorities have nothing to gain from hiding the truth. We are quite keen to ensure that the debate and the story about our country is and nuanced. We are more than happy to talk about the challenges our country faces as well as the things that are going well. ” Asked about Mr. Trump’s comment, Anna Kinberg Batra, the leader of the opposition Moderate Party, said in a statement, “President Trump has to answer himself for his statements, why he makes them and based on what facts. ” Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom declined to comment because, her press secretary, Erik Wirkensjo, said, “it’s hard to say what Trump is talking about. ” In an essay in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the journalist Martin Gelin speculated that “Trump might have gotten his news from the countless media in the United States that have long been reporting that Sweden is heading for total collapse. ” He added, “Among Trump supporters, there are common myths that Sweden is in a state of chaos after taking in refugees from the Middle East. ” | 1 |
A Navy sailor whose many decorations included the Bronze Star has been identified as the first member of the American armed forces to be killed in combat in Syria, the Defense Department said on Friday. The sailor, Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott C. Dayton, lived in Woodbridge, Va. and was assigned to a unit based in Virginia Beach, the Pentagon said in a news release. He was killed by an improvised bomb on Thursday in northern Syria, where the Americans have been helping to organize an offensive against the Islamic State. American warplanes have been bombing targets inside Syria to help tens of thousands of militia fighters try to oust the Islamic State from Raqqa, the extremist group’s stronghold in the country. More than 300 members of the United States Special Operations Forces are also in Syria to help recruit, train and advise the Kurdish and Arab fighters who are trying to encircle the Islamic State in Raqqa and ultimately retake the city. Chief Dayton was serving with Combined Joint Task Inherent Resolve and was assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Two. “We offer our deepest condolences and sympathies to the family and friends of Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott Dayton, who made the ultimate sacrifice on a day we set aside time to give thanks for our freedom and to recognize the men and women who defend that right,” Rear Adm. Brian Brakke, commander of the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, said in a news release. Chief Dayton enlisted in the Navy on Feb. 17, 1993, and received 19 awards, including the Bronze Star, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, and seven Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, officials said. He was killed in Ayn Issa, a town halfway between Raqqa and the Turkish border. Several factions have been active there, including the Syrian Kurds, the Islamic State and most recently local tribal fighters who oppose the Kurds, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist websites. Though the Obama administration has sought to limit the number of Americans involved in the fight against the Islamic State, the death on Thursday showed how volatile and deadly the campaign against the militant group is. American service members have been killed in Iraq as well, and this month the United States acknowledged killing 119 civilians in Iraq and Syria since it began military operations against the group in 2014. | 1 |
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